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Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 3: I know I had sociologists and secular studies professor doctor
Phil Zuckerman on the show I think a couple of
months ago, but I wanted to return to this. I
was recently part of the Western Canadian Reason Conference in
Calgary we can reason dot com and Phil Zuckerman gave
the first presentation, and it was about this common accusation
against non religious people that we are less moral or
not at all moral. And Phil brought receipts and he
laid it out in such a great way that I
was happy that I was shooting video of the speech.
So there is a video link in the description boxing
go and watch Phil in action from the podium in Calgary,
but this is the audio from that. The first section
he's going to give kind of a precursor into set up.
The middle section is all about the statistics morality in
the religious and morality in the seculars, and then after
that it's actually one of the more interesting parts of
today's show is just the Q and A where people
are asking questions and Phil is filling in the blanks
and it was just really good. So I wanted to
bring that to you this week, and here we go,
doctor Phil Zuckerman. Are the religious more moral than secular people?
Speaker 2: Thank you? Thank you so much. A couple things before
I start. I am from the United States, forgive me,
but my wife is a Canadian citizen, and I'm sorry
if a lot of my references will be I don't know.
Is it okay to say American? I never know? Or
do I say like USA? And is okay I'm allowed
to say? Okay? Awesome? All right, Well, let's get into it.
I'm going to tell some stories. I have two arguments
I'm gonna try to make, and it may be a
little disjointed, but hopefully they'll come together nicely at the end,
I hope. So the first one I just random stuff.
You know, books get recommended. I put them on my
list and they come in the mail or from the library.
So I just happened to be reading a book on
US history called These Truths. It was a New York
Times bestseller about fifteen years ago, amazing history of the US.
And I'm just really enjoying it, and I'm learning a
lot that I hadn't learned. For example, I always knew
that George Washington had bad teeth and dentures. What I
didn't know was that his dentures were made from the
pulled out teeth of his enslaved Africans, that they took
their teeth to make histy things like that nifty trivia.
I also learned something that was really relevant for this talk,
and it goes like this. You had the Thirteen Colonies
and they wanted to be independent from England. They formed
the United you know, the early United States. They declared
their independence, they won that war, and now they had
to sit down and create a constitution. So these individuals
met to crank out a blueprint for this new republic,
and they do not include any reference to God in it.
They do not include any reference to Jesus in it.
They do not include any reference to the Bible in it.
There is no reference at all to Christianity, the Bible,
or anything of that nature. In fact, over the years,
in the first one hundred years or so of this
new republic, there were often groups who wanted to assert
the Christianity of the US. They wanted to say, wait,
we need to add a clause to this saying, you know,
we're a christiannation. And that was always defeated in every attempt.
It never got any steam. Fast forward to the eighteen sixties,
the US goes to war over the issue of enslaving
other human beings. The Southern States secede and they form
the Confederate States of America the Confederacy. What I learned
in this book, and it's really relevant for this talk,
is that they draft their own constitution. And what do
they feature or highlight in the wording of their constitution, God, Christianity,
the Bible, Jesus. I think that illustrates a lot of
what I'm going to get into today. The North not perfect,
but at least was fighting to end the enslavement of
other human beings kept religion out, kept Christianity out of
their founding legislative documents the South, which was created simply
to ensure the continued enslavement of other human beings forefronts
their Christianness. Interesting stuff going on here. It leads me
to something a little bit more recent. Like a close
relative of mine. I won't say who, because this is
being recorded. This relative of mine loves Trump and loves Jesus.
I don't know how that works. Your free to love Jesus,
your free to love Trump. How you can love both
of them together? Talk about ambiguity anyway, This relative of mine
is a modern incarnation of this tendency throughout US history.
And just to give you a sense of how this
relative thinks. And I'm going to say some pretty nasty
stuff here, but it's reality, and we're all adults. I
think I remember this relative talking to my daughter, and
my daughter was confused as to how this relative could
like Trump. Didn't seem to metch with my daughter's experience
of this loving relative. And I heard from the down
the hall the loving relative said, well, honey, can you
imagine if you had to go to the hospital, And
when we got there, there were a bunch of Mexicans
there in line ahead of you. Would that be okay?
Trump is trying to stop that from happening. Breakfast time, okay,
dinner's ready, okay? Can you imagine that? Think about what
that's happening there, The other ring, the not seeing fellow
humans as fellow humans, healthcare as a re source that
we have to fight each other over thanks to the USA,
But I mean the idea. And this person again sees
themselves as Christian, and that means something else. They also
see themselves as moral right. They seem to go hand
in hand. This person doesn't care about black lives, Palestinian lives,
brown lives, and so on and so forth. And to me,
this captures so much about the divide south of the
border here among issues of empathy, compassion, human rights, and justice.
And I want to unpack that a bit from the
Civil War to my own home in southern California. What
I have found. I'm a trained social scientist. I'm not
a trained philosopher, per se. I read as much of
it as I can now. But what prompted me was
I was studying secular cultures, secular people, secular societies and
The question that I always got from critics and religious
people was about morality. They'd say, fine, Phil, that's all fine,
but if you don't have God, how can you be moral.
I don't know if Canadians get that as much as
we do, but maybe in Alberta. And I was always
a bit taken aback by that. So what I found is,
obviously that's a pretty common thing. I mean, no one
asks anymore. I never got someone saying to me, well, Phil,
if there's no God, where DoD rainbows come from? I mean,
that would have happened, you know that way back when.
That would have been a pretty legitimate thing to say.
You know, well, if there's no God, then how are
you thinking right now? I mean, you know, if you know, all,
God's job has gotten a lot smaller over the centuries, right,
Like nobody says, well, who's raising the sun in the
morning or you know, but now it's like, ah, morality,
that seems to be the last trump card. And so
I had to start thinking about that. And what I
found was a lot of the social psychological research out there.
Some of my colleagues are happy to say any of this,
you just let me know, is that the number one
stereotype that people have of atheists, agnostics and seculary humans
is that we're immoral. It's not that we, you know,
don't know how to dance, or we are bad cooks,
or we pick our noses too much, you know. It's like,
that's the thing, and that's kind of intriguing to me.
Doesn't really track with my experience of life and all
my non religious relatives and grandparents and parents and neighbors
and friends. But it really stood out for me, and
I had to ask myself, what's going on here? I
think I have an answer, and I'll hold off on it. Well,
maybe not. Let's just cut to the chase. I know
Freud is not the most popular thinker anymore. I think
he said a lot of crazy things and wacky things,
and even some dangerous things, and some non falsifiable things
and so on and so forth. But I do think
he had a few nice gems in the mix, and
one of them is his notion about projection in a nutshell.
Freud argued that we have have different things going on
and are subconscious, and they're not always nice and sweet
and lovely. Sometimes they're nasty and vicious and hostile and hateful,
but we live in a society where those things are
not okay, and in fact, we've internalized that so much
that we even feel badly sometimes about those subconscious things.
And we do what we need to do, or our
mind does what it needs to do to keep those
things either repressed or checked or sublimated into something else,
but it doesn't always work. To the best of our abilities,
we try to keep those urges, those antisocial, unpleasant parts
of ourselves, you know, we try to keep the lid
on it, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't,
and when they start to ooze out despite our best efforts,
our mind does things that play tricks on us in
a sense, and one of those tricks it plays is
called projection, and simply that is things about ourselves, urges, tendencies, traits,
characteristics that are not eaten and sugary and that we
don't like. We can't own it about ourselves. That would
be too painful and too disruptive to our sense of self.
But they're there, so we start to see them in others.
It's almost like we project them like an old movie
projector from when we were kids on a rainy day.
We see it in others. It's really stemming from ourselves,
but we see it in others, right. So classic examples
would be you are in a loving relationship, but you're unhappy.
You actually find yourself attracted to someone else. That makes
you feel bad about yourself, so you start to obsessively
think your spouse or your partner wants to cheat on you,
and you become hyper sensitive to them not wanting to
be with you, and in fact, deep inside, it's you
that doesn't want to be with them, but that's a
little bit too painful to acknowledge and own, right, So
you start to become hyper obsessed about are they cheating
on you? Are they attracted to someone else? Is something
going on? When really it's you projecting that onto them.
I tried to come up with a Canadian example. Somebody
on the hockey team really really dislikes someone else and
is a little bit threatened by them because they're a
little bit better, but they start to believe that that
teammate hates them and wants them off the team. Right.
I hope that worked, okay. Or someone has an urge
to steal things and that gets projected on others, so
they're always scared someone's trying to steal from them, right,
You get the idea projection seeing in others what's actually
going on in yourself. That theory for Freud was an individual,
personal thing, but I feel like it can be expanded
as a sociologist, and sometimes it plays out at the
societal level. What I've noticed is that the stereotypes that
are often put on minority groups are often projections. So
let me give some unpleasant examples. I don't know how
it is in Canada, but in the United States, as
the white Europeans were conquering and stealing and taking over
and pillaging the land and the cultures here, the stereotype
of Native Americans that was not again, oh, they like cats,
or they can't cook, or they you know, they have
a weird sense of time, or no. It was that
they were savages. They were uncivilized, They didn't know how
to act morally. They could they weren't full humans that
could be civilized and live according to rules and laws.
They were just savages. Why that? Why was that the stereotype?
It could have been anything, but it was that, Well,
that's exactly what the European conquerors were doing, irrespective of laws,
human rights justice. They were stealing, taking, prilaging, murdering, plundering,
sexually assaulting, and that was their agenda. But to own
that about themselves, to be like, here we are, we
are from England. We are the rapists of England. You know,
we are the No, that's not gonna work. It's going on,
but you projected onto your victim. Throughout US history, the
number one, particularly leading up to the Civil War and
after the Civil War, the number one stereotype that haunted
African American communities, particularly African American men, was that they're
sexual predators. They're out to rape our lily white women.
This was the cause of justice, you know, this was
you know, birth of a nation. D W. Griffith, was
that his name. That's a film that showed in the
White House of how the KKK is defending the honor
of our white women against these black sexual predators. Why
that stereotype, of all of all the things you could
lay it, you know, put on a people, of all
the awful stigmas you could label a person. Why that
the sexual assault was happening systematically, day after day, night
after night. It was white men sexually assaulting Black women
from Thomas Jefferson on down. But to own that about themselves. Again,
that doesn't comport with white You know, here we are
the good white rapists of America. Like, no, that's not
gonna work. It's there, so you projected onto your victim.
And there's so many more. Right, Germans said that the
Jews were out to take over the world, that there
was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to dominate the planet. Of course,
that was the Nazis' agenda. Growing up in southern California
where I lived, Mexicans were taught to we were told
were lazy. That was their problem. You never mind that
they were doing all the labor, they were building, all
the buildings, raising all the children, working three jobs as
bus boys in the back. But the white people had
to see themselves, the wealthy white people, I should say,
as hardworking, while these people who they're employing must be lazy.
On one last one. When I was living in Oregon
where the first modern anti gay rights bill was developed
in the nineteen eighties by the Oregon Citizens Alliance. They
drafted legislation to stop civil rights protections for gays and
lesbians in the state of Oregon, and their signed their
lawn sign said protect the children. That was their in
Why that could it be that ninety eight percent of
people arrested for child abuse are straight white men.
Speaker 3: After the break is the section of Phil's speech that
talks statistics. We have been studied in contrast to religious people.
What do the numbers say about ethical behavior and non
religious people? Next, continuing with the audio from doctor Phil Zuckerman,
sociologist and Secular Studies professor on morality and non religious people.
Speaker 2: Okay, we could go on and on. Now let's get
back to secularism and morality. We're supposed to be immoral.
Why that? Well, I think you can see where I'm going.
I think this isn't This isn't another. I mean, maybe
one thing. If they said, like those atheists, man, they're
like cats too much, I'd kind of be like, maybe
maybe that's true.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: If they were like, yeah, those atheists, man, they wear
too many members only jackets, you know, I'm okay with that.
But moral, so, I think this is a clear cut
case of projection. If you base your morality on a magical,
invisible deity who tortures people in hell, that's no basis
for morality. If your morality is simply about obedience to authority,
that's moral abdication. If your morality rests on saving your
own ass, that's moral obscenity. We as secular humanists know
on morality is based on empathy, compassion, intentions, and consequences.
We seek reasons for our morality that are rational, contextual, pragmatic, humane,
And the evidence is abundant. And now I'm going to
walk you through that before we get started. Though, maybe
you're thinking, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you keep using
that word thank you. Sorry, I should have done this
in the beginning. What do I mean by moral? Anytime
someone brings this up to me or to you. Start
there the minute said, when at that dinner party says
to you, well, how do you get How can you
be moral if you don't believe in God? Stop them
say moral is an adjective. If I say Tom is
such a moral person, or Tanya is so moral, it's
a describer the same thing as if I would say
that Tanya's so intelligent. Well, what does that mean? Tanya
is so intelligent? Does that mean Tanya knows how to
do a rubikscube really fast? Does that mean Tanya does
really well? On an IQ test. Does that mean Tanya
knows how to find the best coffee in Calgary or
could survive in the rainforest. I mean, what does you
know we have. We only know what intelligent means through context.
This is what I mean by intelligence. I mean, yeah,
it does really well in algebra, or is an amazing
analyst of data or whatever it is. Right, same thing
with moral. If I say to you you need to
act morally, like, unless I give you a context, what
does that mean? So it's going to be different to
different people. And I don't think there's an objective just
like there's no objective definition of intelligent or an objective
definition of beautiful. I don't think there's an active definition
of moral, just how we employ it, how we use
it in our in our lives, in our culture, in
our society, in our day to day. So you have
to define it for me, and you don't have to.
I'm not saying this is the definition. This is just
what I mean when I use the word moral or
define someone is moral, I say someone who actively seeks
to decrease unwanted suffering and injustice, or on the other hand,
seeks to increase justice, fairness, and well being. That's what
I mean by So if I describe someone as moral,
like man, they're actively trying to decrease unwanted suffering in
the world, or they're trying to increase fairness and justice
and well being in the world or in their relationships.
So I don't mean like they don't masturbate. Okay. So
if that's what you mean by moral, okay. So to me,
nobody likes crime, not even criminals. No one likes to
be the victim of violent crime, not even violent criminals.
So I think violent crime is the ultimate example, or
forget even the word of crime, like you know, perpetuating
violence on others. To me, unwarranted, unnecessary violence is a
perfect example of the most immoral behavior out there. Let's
talk about violent crime then, and we can talk about
other things too. So the first thing I like to
do is I like to say, well, okay, your thesis
is that without God we can't be moral, or without
if there's no religion, then society becomes immoral. That's kind
of an interesting thesis. It's got an independent variable and
a dependent variable. We can go out and look and check.
There's many ways to do it, and I won't go
through all of it, but I'll go through some of
the biggies, the highlights. So the first thing I like
to do is I say, well, let's look, let's compare countries,
and we have to differentiate dictatorships from democracies, because right
away we know that those are not going to work. Dictatorships,
whether they're secular or religious, you can't do unfettered social science.
In fact, I just reviewed a manuscript yesterday that was
submitted to my book series at NYU Press on secularism
in Iran. Side note, they compared to sources of data
the World Values Survey data in Iran, where people went
door to door and asked people what their religion was.
Ninety eight percent said Muslim because they're in Iran. This
same person who's writing this book, who is Persian, who
is from Iran, found other sources of data where people
where it was anonymous, and up to forty five percent
of Iranians are secular, atheist, humanists, or none of the above,
right when they're not in danger of you know, someone
knocking on their door two in the morning. So I
like to just look at democracies for the sake of
it's just too hard to you can't. Really, we don't
know what people are really thinking or feeling or even
doing in dictatorships. So if we look at democracies, right,
the least religious democracies on earth compared to the most
religious democracies are how do I mean by religious rates
of belief, rates of behavior, rates of belonging, you name it,
belief in God, strength and belief in God, church attendance,
baptism rates, prayer frequency, whatever, how people identify you name it.
What we find is that the least religious or the
most secular democracies have the lowest rates of violent crime
and everything else too, by the way, not just violent crime,
but poverty rates, elder care, child cares the best, you
name it. And the first thing people will say to
me is, ah, well, phil, that's not because of God
or religion. That's because of a whole bunch of other factors.
And I say exactly, And with that, I would like
to think the na okay, yeah. And it's interesting because
if you're really you know, if you're thinking about this,
you know, if you're engaged with someone, you say, don't
you think God is so super powerful like the most
powerful thing? Yes? Do you think God is more powerful
than I don't know, racism. Yes, do you think God
is more powerful than near human economics? Yes? Do you
think God is more powerful than politics? Yes? And yet
as soon as you explain to them that, well, those
societies that are the most religious have the most violent
crime and other social pathologies, they say, well, those are
for other reasons. You say, like what, well, economics, Wait,
I thought god trump, those things, politics, race, you know,
whatever they want to throw out, you cure. They're admitting
that God sort of becomes less and less and less
and less important than all these other this worldly reasons
and factors, whether they be economic, political, historical, cultural, you
name it. And then sometimes they s mean, well, well you
can't really compare you know, Canada to the United States.
They're just too different. Okay, you know you can't compare
Japan to El salvad Or. They're just too different. Okay,
So how about if you could compare I don't know,
maybe is there a big country with hundreds of millions
of people that is divided up into these little principalities
I don't know, like fifty states. We can do the
same correlations for the fifty states, and what do we
find the least religious states with the lowest rates of
turch attendants, the lowest rates of believing God, the highest
rates of people identifying as secular humanist IDIO, and so
have the lowest violent crime rates and the lowest social pathologies.
With There is one exception, and that's Utah. Correlations are
always that way, it's averages. But then the states that
are the most religious, right from infant mortality to life
expectancy to you name it, domestic abuse rates, whatever the
social pathology, the secular states do a lot better than
the most religious states. And again people will say that's
still too weird because there's this history of slavery. I'm like, yeah,
do you know about that? How about counties? Just compare counties.
We divide up our states into counties in the United States,
and we have county level data and you can find
the state. Even if you just take the state of Louisiana,
look at the counties in Louisiana, or just take the
state of Oregon and look at the counties in Oregon,
the correlation stays the same, and it's quite robust and
it's quite strong. Another possibility is forget comparison. Just take
a single country and look at it over the last
two hundred and fifty years. We don't have really strong
data beyond that for these questions. But you can look
at city states like what Amsterdam used to be. You
can look at London, you can look at Boston. You
can look at and just compare religiosity rates to violent
crime rates. And what do we find even in the
same societies, as religiosity has gone down, so too has
violent crime and other social pathologies. Now that may be correlation,
it's not causation. They may both be caused by something else,
like an influx of tea drinking. But that's again the point,
it's something else. Religion is not the issue here. But
someone will say to me, Phil, you keep talking about
these societal comparisons at the country level, or the state level,
or the county level. What really matters is at the
individual level. Okay's a good point. Let's get even more
granule granular. Are strongly religious Americans any more or less
likely to be the victims of violent crime than secular Americans?
Data says no. But here's the big question. Do secular
Americans commit more violent crimes than religious Americans? Data says no.
I'm teach in a prison sometime one night a week,
a prison, murderers, assaulters, you name it. Do you think
atheism is the point of the realm there? Now? The
vast majority of incarcerated individuals in the United States are
quite religious and come from religious homes. Again, there's a
lot going on there, but I just throw that out there,
so then we can also just look at on the current.
You know, most people don't commit violent crimes, so it's
hard to get really robust data there. I thought, like,
I can, you know, assemble all the people in America
that commit violent crimes and correlate their strength and believe
in God or whatnot, But I can't ask them questions
about morality. And what do we find at the individual level,
controlling for things like educational tainment, socioeconomic status, race, gender, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
what do we find Trump the Great Menace? Again, this
is for the United States. The more secular Americans are
the most opposed to trump Ism, and the more religious
Americans are the most supportive of trump Ism. Relatives of
mine included. This even holds again among people of color
far and away. African Americans do not like Donald Trump.
The ones that do strongly religious, more religious than their
black brothers and sisters. Among Jews, the most consistent democratic
voting block after African Americans, there are a few Jews
that like Trump. They're the most religious of Jews. So
we see this correlation throughout the climate crisis. I'll spare
you all the percentages, suffice it to say that I
can predict the more secular an American is, the more
likely they are to accept the science behind the climate crisis,
and the more likely the art to support policies to
address that climate crisis, and the more religious just the opposite.
They deny it's happening and they don't want to do
anything about it. The Gaza killing fields, same correlation. The
more religious the Americans are, the more supportive they are
of the bombs dropping, and the more secular they are,
the most opposed they are. I'd like to use that
conflict also as an illustration. In the Israeli Palestinian conflict,
you see the same correlation. It is the strong religious
on both sides who are the most rabidly violent. The
most religious Palestinians and the most religious Israelis are the
most violent and wanting to exterminate the other. And it's
the most secular Israelis and the most secular Palestinians who
both want to find some kind of solution to states
solutions so on and so forth that want to stop
the killing right American racism on every attempt to measure
that among white people, the more religious you are, the
higher your rates of racism tend to show up, and
the more secular you are, the less. Again, this isn't
to say there aren't racist secular Americans and there aren't
non racist religious Americans, but the correlations are quite strong.
The way the averages, Okay, the COVID crisis in the
United States, the more religious you were, the more likely
you were denied that COVID was a reality, the more
likely you were to not get inoculated, and the more
secular you were. Just the opposite. Women's bodily autonomy, who's
the reports women's reproductive rights control over their own bodies.
The more religious you are, the more you want women
to be captive to the whims of men, And the
more secular you are, the more likely you are to
support women's bodily autonomy, LGBTQ rights in all their manifestations.
The more secular you are, the more you feel like
LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as any citizens. And
the more religious you are, the less likely guns. You know,
Americans love their guns, but the real Christians love them
the most, which is interesting, and the secular among the
least cruelty to animals. You see the same correlation support
for universal health care in the United States. You see
the same correlations taking care for refugees and immigrants people suffering.
You see the exact same correlations. Should we invade Canada.
I have to say my wife's dad was from Canada.
She didn't have her Canadian citizenship when Trump was first elected.
We worked so hard to get her Canadian citizenship and
it worked and I got a lawyer in Toronto. Yes,
thank you. Yeah, I was so proud, and I thought,
oh who, okay, we're good. We're safe. I hate to
say it, but that's how we juice out think we're like,
where do we got to go when the ship gets
back there? And then Trump got reelected and I thought,
oh shit, man, not you know, like my aunt left
the Czech Republic or what was then Bohemia to Amsterdam
thinking you know, and she still ended up in Auschwitz.
So I'm like, this is Canada far enough. Now, who
supports the invasion of an occupation of Canada? The more religious,
the more likely, the more secular, the least likely. The
taking of Greenland man oh Man, oh Man. So again,
I could be wrong. This is subjective. Maybe it is
moral to invade Canada, Maybe it is moral to take
over at Greenland. Maybe it is moral to deny LGBTQ
people they're human rights. I mean, we can have that argument.
But given my definition of morality, you can see why
I'm making and the whole host of other issues, from
prisoner reform, capital punishment, national drug legislation a rational I
should say drug legislation, you name it. So why the difference.
Secular people tend to base their morality on being empathetic
and compassionate. Secular people tend to be more rational and scientific.
Secular people tend to be less tribalistic and ethnocentric. Again,
these are just tendencies. I'm not saying we're perfect. Secular
people tend to be less authoritarian. We thus tend to
be more attuned to the suffering of others and wanting
to make the world a more just place and those
who call us immoral a clear cut case of projection.
Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: When I come back, I'm going to play for you
a pretty substantive section of Phil's speech where people in
the audience offer up some really good questions, and i'll
play it next. Thank you so much to my patrons
or your support if you're not a patron, makes a
huge difference, makes a huge difference and helps to support
what I do. And the website is patreon dot com
slash Seth Andrews with my thanks. Okay, the Q and
a portion of Phil Zuckerman's speech. Now, the questions came
from the audience. They were not miked directly. They're hard
to hear. To make sure everybody knows what the questions are,
I restate them in the final segments of the show.
Speaker 2: First of all, before to these questions, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 3: You said that Utah was the exception. Yeah, So does
that mean that the Mormons have been writing all more? Okay,
just in case you could not hear that. The question
which was being read out by Jenie Morris, she had
like people texting questions. The question was when it comes
to violent crime and other statistics, if the Mormons are
an exception, does this validate the Mormons.
Speaker 2: So in social science we always deal with averages and
percentages and correlations. That's why we're a soft science. So
there are exceptions. I didn't mention, for example, that African
Americans tend to be quite religious and also hate Trump
and actually also line up on the more progressive side
of these things. Forgive me for not mentioning that other exception.
Not always, but it's very strong in the case of Utah,
low crime rates, low poverty rates, low homelessness rates. So
I think the Mormons are extremely wrong about Joseph Smith's claims.
But they do do a good job of keeping their
cities clean, their children cared for. They donate ten percent
of their income to the church, which makes the church
extremely wealthy. But they are there for each other when
there's a catastrophe. They're even there for others. My friend
Brian's house was messed up by a mud slide and
the Mormons came and cleaned up his house for him.
So they are right about their attention to charity. The
difference is in the United States. I don't know how
this plays out in Canada, but the United States is,
do you want individuals digging into their pockets and donating
in a charitable context, or do you want a structured
institutional approach to solving these issues? In other words, do
you want tax subsidized, bureaucratic, structured ways of dealing with homelessness, hunger,
health care, and so forth. The more progressive would prefer
a more scan the Navian model where the government does
an excellent job of tending to these social maladies. The
more religious want it to be about through their church
giving donations. So in the case of the Mormons, they
do do that, but it's their own deal and it's
uh and yeah, it's also kind of boring in Utah.
But they also, I don't know, they also have the
highest rates of paying for internet porn, not that there's
anything wrong with that, And they also have a high rates,
very high rates of antidepressants, not that there's anything wrong
with that. You got to do what you gotta do.
But yes, Utah is the one exception on the on
the social pathologies, and Trump is all officially diagnosed as
a reliant narcissist.
Speaker 3: I feel that description can be expanded to America.
Speaker 1: Purchase of society inward focused transactional when you's thinking other
ing of everyone else's Do you have thoughts?
Speaker 3: Again restating the question for you, I've got these in
caption form on the video version of Phil's speech. When
it comes to Trump and the United States, the culture
seems to be inward focused, myopic, transactional. Is Trump and
perhaps by association, the United States guilty of malignant narcissism.
Speaker 2: I think that's an accurate description. I think Americans worship,
you know, money above all else. I think it's the
supreme American value. It doesn't matter how you got it.
If you got it, you are a winner. I think
the United States has always had that spirit. In many ways,
it has the US in that it has propelled people
to be more inventive and more competitive, which creates all
kinds of dynamic inventions and technologies. On the other hand,
it's a vacuous, empty, unethical way to live, and the
consequences will destroy the planet. So yeah, I always felt
like Trump was the ultimate embodiment of the American ideal.
You know, people like how could they Electroump. I'm like,
he's everything Americans aspired to. You know, he's fat, he's wealthy,
he has a zillion wives he marries, you know, model
like it's this, he's a celebrity, he's I mean, he's
I remember, I'll give you an anecdote. Another relative, who
shall I won't say, which wanted. I remember Bill Clinton
was president, this is way back when, and a general,
a conservative general, said something like, well, if he flies
down here to South Carolina, someone's going to take him out.
A general said this, and Bill Clinton fired that general
because you're not allowed to threaten the life of a president.
So at the dinner gathering of this relative, I said,
can you believe that? And this this individual said, I
think Clinton should be shot And I said, what, why
do you hate him so much? And he said, because
he thinks he's smarter than me. And my wife said,
don't you want your president to be smarter than you?
And he said, I didn't say that, said he thinks.
So there's a there's there's a hostility towards intellectualism, there's
a hostility towards expertise. So the fact that Trump is
this bumbling draft dodging, you know, the University of Pennsylvania cheating,
it kind of speaks to a lot of people's inner
child and they like it. That's the best I can say,
and then you just sugarcoat it with this veneer of
Christianity and you're golden. It's astonishing the pretty much everyone
in the room seas to agree on so many issues.
Speaker 3: Was there any topic where.
Speaker 2: The correlation went the other way?
Speaker 1: So where the religious we're on average more quote unquote moral.
Speaker 3: Again, the question, is there an example of a reverse
correlation where the religious were more moral than seculars ooh.
Speaker 2: That's a good one. Okay. I didn't mention guns, but
that's probably the weakest. Actually, it's not as strong as
the others. So in the United States, a lot of
secular Americans like their guns too. The one I saw
last week thanks to Ryan Burge who's at Washington University.
There's one area where religious and secular and Democrat and
Republicans completely agree on, and that is do you consider
your pet a part of your family? Seventy eight percent
in all say yes to that, so we do agree
on that. I'd like to know what they feed their dogs?
Was that last night? Okay? Okay, yeah, I would say
I mentioned this earlier, and a lot of secular people
don't like a lot of second Americans get up said
about this, but there's no question that religiously involved individuals,
So it's not about belief, it's about belonging donate more
to charity. In the United States in terms of time
and money. They just do. Now, there's a lot of
reasons for that, like more opportunities, the social connections, And
what we find, by the way, is that strong believers
who are not embedded in religious communities do not, and
secular Americans who are embedded in humanist communities donate time
and money just at the same level. So it's really
the it's the congregating and being embedded in community that
is the secret sauce. But on that level, person by person,
religious Americans are more likely to give to charities. Again,
the secular are more likely to say tax me for that.
I would rather be taxed, But on a day to
day basis, Yeah, that's the one that comes to mind. Also,
religious people, I don't know if you can see there's
more or not, but their marriages tend to last longer
than second on average. It's not that extreme, but it's
pretty strong. Conversely, secular women are far more likely to
receive oral sex than religious women. Swelling at balances out. Okay,
next question, it's true.
Speaker 3: Can you speak to their connection between education levels in
religion and crime and morality? The question, is there a
connection in religion between education levels and crime and morality?
Speaker 2: Ooh yeah. Education is a big factor there, And it
also depends who you're studying and who you're measuring, because
in the United States, there's a difference between none of
the aboves who are a growing, growing portion. They simply
don't identify with religion, and because their numbers are swelling
so much, they're starting to look like the general population
at large, compared to secular Americans who self identify as atheist, agnostic, secular,
or humanist. Those are a different population there. They have
higher educational levels and so on and so forth. But
the sort of none of the aboves tend to average
out just like rest of Americans. I would say overall,
educational attainment tends to be a secularizing influence throughout history
and throughout society. If I had to ask how have
these democracies become so secular? Educational attainment literacy has been
a huge factor over the last three century, is no
question about that. But specifically, if you're asking me how
education impacts those others. I haven't had enough coffee to
tease that out, but that's the best I can do.
Right now, Do the religious donate more to charity if
you don't.
Speaker 3: Count to the church. Okay, I think you got that one.
But for the record, do the religious give more to
charity if you take church and the organizations of church
giving out of the equation?
Speaker 2: Oh right, and that's a good one too. People will say, well,
just so you can, we can tease that out, the
egendogamous or exogamous charity giving. So yes, most people in
religions tend to give to their own church. But even
when you can control for that, so and again, all
it works like this. The church simply says, hey, everybody,
you know, if you're going to church on a regular basis,
you're gonna hear things like this on a regular basis.
Hey don't forget we have that soup kitchen this Sunday,
Please donate. Hey don't forget we're doing a blood drive
next week. Please don't forget to show up. It's those
so there's just more opportunities, and those are I mean,
if someone's going down to a blood bank, we don't
consider that donating just to the church. So it is
true they give more to their own organization, as do
most people. But even when you can control for that,
they do tend to open their wallets more when ask
because again they're presented with the opportunity more. And too,
they're embedded in a social community that rewards that kind
of behavior, and it's increased social capital. Oh that's another one.
We are more individualistic secular. I don't know about Canadians,
but in the US we tend to be more individualistic.
We tend to have we don't value being in groups
of like minded people, whereas religious people do value that
and tend to have high rates of social capital. Meaning
in a US context, religious people can have more people
they can rely on when their wife gets cancer or
when their child's in a car accident than secular Americans.
So there's another one where we don't do as well
hurting cats. But did I mention oral sex? Okay? Do
secular people condmit fewer crimes or are they better at
not getting caught in picted?
Speaker 3: Okay? The question do secular people commit fewer crimes or
are we just better at not getting caught?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, that's a really good question, actually, because a
lot of the data we have on crime is based
on who is convicted and who you know, and are
they in the system and are they noted. So if
you if you, if you don't ever get arrested at all,
that doesn't mean you're not committing crimes. If you can
get arrested and not get charged, you can get charged
and make a plea deal. So it is true that
there's problems by looking at those who ended up charged
and convicted, and they are often more likely to be
from poor backgrounds, they're more likely to be people of color.
There's all these factors at play. What I would argue is,
I don't know, don't I don't know if secular people
are just really good at stealing shit and they're just
better at covering it up, or they're just really good at,
you know, whacking old people on the head and stealing
their stuff, and I just don't know. It's possible. I
doubt it, but yeah, that would be my best answer there.
I think poverty is a much more strongly determinant of
whether you're going to get convicted than anything else, religious
or secular. Can you afford a good lawyer?
Speaker 1: Is there enough data say about homeschooled individuals.
Speaker 3: To make incurs Okay, the question about data on homeschooled individuals.
Speaker 2: Ooh, not that I know of that is knowable. That's
an empirical question that we could find out how homeschooling
correlates with all these outcomes. All I know is that
in the United States, homeschooled children are overwhelmingly going to
be coming from strongly religious homes whose parents think that
the local school is too secularized. There are some secular
folks that It's interesting. One of my research I contacted
secular humanists in the Bible Belt who homeschooled their kids
because the school, the public school, was too religious. Fascinating
stuff that say it again? Families, yeah, oh exactly. There
were quite a few, and they had organized thanks to
the Internet. They found each other and actually they schooled
their children together, you know, because the stories were always
the same. They sent their kids to public school and
their children were shamed for not being church members. Their children.
The principals told the parents, get your kid in church.
If they're getting bullied on the schoolyard, the best solution
is to get right with God. I mean, they just
had horror story after horror story. One woman's mom was
dying at the old age home and the school wouldn't
release the children because they knew that they were secular
and decided to just make an example. I mean, it's
really crazy, but they are the exceptions. The vast majority
of homeschooling in the United States is by ultra strongly
religious people. But that's all I know. I don't know
then what the outcomes are. There is there a concertain
secular reminded be able to become biased against religious people
and dismiss their views as tokwards or privative.
Speaker 3: This question about seculars being biased against religious people because
we perceive them as primitive and backward, that never happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think one of the one of the dangerous
even of this talk is that it's very easy for
us to puff off our chefs and think, wow, look
how great we are, and look how backward those those
religious people are. That is a bias we have to
be conscious of. I suffer from it, as my kids
constantly remind me. The way I deal with it is
I just try to think of the people I know
in my life who I really like and respect and
think are moral and many religious people immediately pop up.
I mean I know, so I would say the vast
majority of people I know are good, I mean most humans.
Because of our evolutionary history. We don't like to see
others suffer. We don't like violence, we like to see
others doing well. We like to treat people the way
we want to be treated. I mean, these are This
is hardwired into us through our social evolution. So secular
or religious, most of us most of the time want
to get along and treat you other people well. So
we do need to counter that. But what I would
say is, as long as we are constantly being bombarded
with your immoral trope, we have to fight back. And
so every time there's a school shooting in the United States,
so basically every week, the leading politicians say it's because
we've abandoned God. I mean that to me, this is
an atrocity. To blame school shootings on a lack of
religious faith is not only just a grave lie, but
it's a lie that has real consequences. So we have
to stand up and say, hey, we're not the ones
that are immoral. You know you are. But that said, yes,
we mustn't be just as bigoted against our religious brothers
and sisters, especially those who we share so much in
common with. There's so many religious people, progressive religious people
who agree with us on all these issues because they've
become quite secularized in their religiosity. Okay, how do you
account for those who might lie about the religious identification
in prisons? For example, plating religion often gets access to programs.
Speaker 3: Rule this question about the stats on prison inmates, incarcerated
people who might lie about their faith, their Christianity or
whatever because they're trying to get favor from the system,
including the parole board.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's that's always the case. Yeah, when I
go into the prisons, it's me and the Jehovah's witnesses
and the Muslim clerics and the Pentecostals. Like I'm the
only secular person. By the way, I've been sneaking in
food too. Oh but I brought McDonald's. Weren't checking my
bag and I finally said enough, it is enough. And
there was a McDonald's across the highway and I had
nine guys this semester, who I shouldn't be saying this
because it's being recorded, but well anyway, but I got
nine double cheeseburgers, and I wrapped them in a Trader
Joe's bag. I put them in my backpack, I mean,
my briefcase, and I got past the guard and I
got through the gate. And when I got to class,
these guys had meeting McDonald's in like twelve years, some
of these guys fourteen years. One guy's been in for
eighteen years. It was a really joyous time. So I
felt like, well, I contributed to global warming, but I
made these nine guys really happy. Okay, what was the question? Yes? Oh, yes,
so in prison. Absolutely, There's all kinds of ways you
can lower your you know, get reduction in days and
weeks and months, and being religious is certainly one of them.
So yes, there is an incentive to feign religiosity, there's
no question about that. On the other hand, the guys
that I know don't seem to be faking it. Again,
a small sample, Well, you know, you usually have nine
or ten in a class. I've been teaching for a
few years there, so does it happen, probably, But uh
can I do I have time for one anecdote? They
also didn't check what I was assigning for reading at
this prison, so I brought in some pretty interesting stuff.
I brought in the trial of Galileo, who you know,
understood about our universe. And then the Catholic Church said
if you don't recan't you know, we're gonna kill you.
So you can read the transcripts of that trial. So
we were all reading this and here, you know, we're
reading about Galileo and how awful the Catholic Church is
and what a shame this is. And it gets to
the point where they're like, do you renounce this is
not true? You know the worth does it revolve around
the sun? And Galileo was thinking like, well, do I
want to die or not? So Galileo says, yes, I
renounced that I was mistaken. And one of my inmates says,
what a pussy And I'm like what And he's like
what the hell. I'm like, what do you mean he
was gonna be killed? He's like, dude, if you're right,
you're right, you stand up for what you believe. And
I was like, uh, Galileo, He's like, I wouldn't recount that.
This is my wife. Someone comes up to me and says,
you know, recount all sh shoot me. Then I'm like, oh, man,
Galileo the Pussy. I never thought of that. Are we good?
All right? Whenast one which says thanks Phil, will you
please run for president? Oh Man, thank you, thank you,
I'd love you.
Speaker 3: And that is the audio of Phil's speech. The video
so good as well. It is linked in the description box.
Thank you so much for listening, and I will see
you back here next time.
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