Speaker 1: But only in I think only in Divinity School are
Speaker 1: they least approaching the text by saying, I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to destroy it. I need to love it, and I
Speaker 1: don't know how to love it.
Speaker 2: Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask
Speaker 2: what you can do for your country.
Speaker 3: Mister Gorbucha, tear down this wall.
Speaker 4: It's the Ricansirat Podcast with Stephen Hayward, who myself, James Flllingx,
Speaker 4: and Rob Long is back because we're going to talk
Speaker 4: to Ross Doubtfuit about his new book, Why You Should
Speaker 4: Be Religious. So let's say reselves a podcast.
Speaker 5: The threat to democracy, Indeed, the existential threat to democracy
Speaker 5: is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who
Speaker 5: believe the answer to no one, who believe they can
Speaker 5: do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can
Speaker 5: set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.
Speaker 5: Federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement
Speaker 5: his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole
Speaker 5: American people.
Speaker 4: Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven and twenty nine.
Speaker 4: I'm James Lylyx here in CRISP Bright Minneapolis, Stephen Hayward
Speaker 4: probably somewhere out there on the West coast, and Rob
Speaker 4: Long is back with us, not to say yeah Stephen, right, okay,
Speaker 4: but Rob James, how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. How are yourself? How are you James?
Speaker 1: It's the most important question, how are you well?
Speaker 4: That is a fraud question at the moment, with many
Speaker 4: facets glinting dully in the dark cave of night.
Speaker 1: But you are the same basically from that's actually where
Speaker 1: where I, uh, where I left, and.
Speaker 4: You are in You are in New York right now,
Speaker 4: and you are where the last time we met you.
Speaker 1: Of course I am not in New York. You're not Princeton,
Speaker 1: New Jersey.
Speaker 4: Oh right?
Speaker 1: Is that where you were conducting your your Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: where I'm conducting my certain my studies.
Speaker 4: I don't know how to quite a describe How would
Speaker 4: I describe it exactly? Your your studies, your theological studies, James,
Speaker 4: so that you can call that anything you want. An
Speaker 4: m D.
Speaker 1: Mastered Divinity, which I have always secretly been, but now
Speaker 1: I really am gonna I'm going to have the license.
Speaker 4: What is the step below master of Divinity? Because Master
Speaker 4: of Divinity really does sound like a commanding position from
Speaker 4: which you can do all sorts of things. You've been invested,
Speaker 4: You've been imbued that you are a master of divinity, mastery.
Speaker 4: What's below that, acolyte of divinity?
Speaker 1: I don't think there is. I think you're either a
Speaker 1: master or you're just nothing.
Speaker 4: Okay, so we're all just here, journeyman of light, Stephen,
Speaker 4: how are you today?
Speaker 3: I'm just fine, James Good and Dandi.
Speaker 4: Well, we have a world to discuss. We could take
Speaker 4: a couple of angles about it. We could talk foreign affairs, ivault.
Speaker 4: But I would almost like to reserve Ukraine for another
Speaker 4: day because it's big and thorny, and I want to
Speaker 4: see how it all shakes out. And I'm reading all
Speaker 4: sorts of things, and I understand, of course, why the
Speaker 4: president would want some mineral rights, because Ukraine provides seventy
Speaker 4: percent of the neon gas to the world, and if
Speaker 4: we're going to make America great, that means a lot
Speaker 4: of neon signs over you know, main streets and Hambiger
Speaker 4: shops and the rest of it. But the rest of it,
Speaker 4: I'm still trying to figure out what is going on
Speaker 4: beyond the obvious talk about Israel, if we want to
Speaker 4: put our heart in the gutter because it seems to
Speaker 4: be an extraordinarily unfathomably amoral situation on the part of Mamas,
Speaker 4: or we could find something that gladdens the heart of all,
Speaker 4: and that is the complete and total realignment of the
Speaker 4: deep state, the swamp, and the federal government. I don't
Speaker 4: know if you guys saw this yesterday. In the flurry
Speaker 4: of executive orders that came out, there was one implementing
Speaker 4: the President's Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative. Sounds good,
Speaker 4: DC ish, Are either you guys familiar with this latest
Speaker 4: EO about how they're going to completely completely transform the
Speaker 4: federal government.
Speaker 2: No, I've completely missed this, although it fits into the
Speaker 2: larger piece. I think that what the Trump administration is
Speaker 2: determined to do is restore presidential control over the entire
Speaker 2: executive branch, meaning the ability of the president of fire
Speaker 2: essentially anyone. And this will evolve over earning at least
Speaker 2: one old Supreme Court case, the you know, famous Humphreys
Speaker 2: executor from the nineteen thirties, and won't get off into
Speaker 2: the legal swamp there. But I think they have a
Speaker 2: grand strategy involved here, and I think they're likely to
Speaker 2: win many of these battles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the administration, you mean, yes, yeah, yes, I think so, Toru.
Speaker 1: And I actually I think it's I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: as you know, I'm a I have a feelings, but
Speaker 1: it is in fact a good idea for the executive
Speaker 1: branch to be allowed to execute and for the legislative
Speaker 1: branch to be allowed to appropriate and legislate. I mean
Speaker 1: that that's kind of how it's set up. And we've
Speaker 1: you know, the most interesting about DOGE has been not
Speaker 1: the waste in the fraud of debut. I mean the
Speaker 1: waste of the fraud. Maybe I don't know. I've been
Speaker 1: hearing that story forevery now right. It's fine, if that
Speaker 1: floats your boat, fine, go ahead. But what's been amazing
Speaker 1: to me is just how much it's been, how much
Speaker 1: the federal government's doing, how huge that Leviathan has become.
Speaker 1: And I mean I was just driving here, as you know,
Speaker 1: I was driving around and I was listening to NPRS
Speaker 1: is my want during the day, and it's a big
Speaker 1: SOB story on NBR about people complaining about the scientific research,
Speaker 1: scientific research, and you know, they're going to cut the
Speaker 1: scientificgure in Columbia and at Coloya University, I mean not
Speaker 1: the country. And I came home and I didn't quite
Speaker 1: get it yet, but I'm going to get it because
Speaker 1: I thought, Okay, Columbia, big university. What is the endowment
Speaker 1: for Columbia University? And the endowment it's popping up right
Speaker 1: now is going to be as of June thirtieth, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, so as of you know, six months ago,
Speaker 1: basically fourteen billion dollars.
Speaker 4: That's a rainy day fund though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's actually small, right, I mean, Harvard's bigger,
Speaker 1: at Yale's bigger. Universities are bigger. So there is there
Speaker 1: is this giant, vast pool of money that you used
Speaker 1: to be used by in universities to engage in research.
Speaker 1: Uh and all the things that they think are very important,
Speaker 1: all the all the great scientific discoveries that we have
Speaker 1: that we're you know, people have been talking about, certainly
Speaker 1: on the NPR uh uh show I was listening to
Speaker 1: happened outside the realm of the federal government and federal
Speaker 1: ar jests. So there is an argument to be made
Speaker 1: that you know, a little bit of you know, breaking
Speaker 1: some glass and shaking things up may not be a
Speaker 1: bad idea, and and and that, and that the and
Speaker 1: that the fact that the American people, although not the
Speaker 1: majority of them, but the huge plurality of them, seemed
Speaker 1: to be supporting This suggests that the problem has been
Speaker 1: lying in the universities and the research organizations and the
Speaker 1: medical and scientific establishment, which have been telling us all
Speaker 1: sorts of things for years and years and years and years,
Speaker 1: like we're all going to die in climate change, or
Speaker 1: we're all going to die if you don't wear the mask,
Speaker 1: and schools that we call all that stuff. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's credibility they lost. They can't come crying now about it.
Speaker 2: Well, so here's here's an odd bit of trivia that
Speaker 2: is unknown to just about everybody. Is that for decades,
Speaker 2: science funding from the federal government has actually risen faster
Speaker 2: under Republican administrations than democratic administrations. Lots of reasons why
Speaker 2: that turns out to be true, and there's lots of problems.
Speaker 3: But two things right now jump out of me.
Speaker 2: One is you mentioned the discrediting of the scientific establishment
Speaker 2: from COVID and whatnot. And I have a headline I
Speaker 2: found this morning from inside Higher Ed and I'll just
Speaker 2: give you the headline Voodoo doll study explores why scientists
Speaker 2: get harassed? So that was probably for it by a
Speaker 2: federal grant.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I'm in favor of that. We need more
Speaker 1: research on voodoo, you know, right well, or voodoo economics, right,
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 6: Of course that's the subject for a study. Who you
Speaker 6: do doll study? As much as I love to say it,
Speaker 6: I want to know where this was conducted. Was there
Speaker 6: somehow a USA idea.
Speaker 4: Creation to the Vanderbilt University, which then gave two million
Speaker 4: dollars to Tides Foundation, which then gave on twenty thousand
Speaker 4: dollars to a Haiti group which I went out and
Speaker 4: asked a bunch of people about which kinds of knives
Speaker 4: and pins they particularly use. Who who did the voodoo study?
Speaker 1: That voodoo study you do? So well, yeah, I'll have
Speaker 1: to pull.
Speaker 3: It up again because I don't have it handy.
Speaker 2: But it was some university where they actually had they
Speaker 2: actually had people in a room saying, you know, pok
Speaker 2: a voodoo doll to give in response to questions about
Speaker 2: scientists and science. I mean, it sounds perfectly preposterous, but
Speaker 2: beyond the sort of the frivolous things you can point
Speaker 2: to which you know we can.
Speaker 3: We've done that forever, right.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: The other thing going on is the Trump administration saying
Speaker 2: we're going to cap overhead on federal funding for science
Speaker 2: at I think fifteen percent fift The great scandal here
Speaker 2: is most universities take forty percent. Some take as much
Speaker 2: as fifty percent. I've seen sixty Yeah, I know one
Speaker 2: university where it's fifty six percent. And and the point
Speaker 2: is is that this has become a slush fund to
Speaker 2: cross subsidize universities. The universities say, oh, we need that
Speaker 2: to provide the labs and equipment and administer the grants. Well,
Speaker 2: the labs are mostly built and any new lab equipment
Speaker 2: would be part of the grant that goes to the researcher.
Speaker 3: So I love this.
Speaker 2: I think that this is an absolutely solitary development by
Speaker 2: the government to say, no, you can't you have universities,
Speaker 2: We're not going to cross subsidize your bloated administrations.
Speaker 4: But before I toss it to Rob again, I have
Speaker 4: to note that one of the things that this administrator,
Speaker 4: this executive order says is that there is dose is
Speaker 4: going to go through Rooten branch and look at all
Speaker 4: of the regulations and they have to I mean the
Speaker 4: man hours required to look at that as extraordinary that
Speaker 4: have been promulgated by agencies outside of their specific congressional mandate.
Speaker 4: In other words, you guys don't get to make that
Speaker 4: rule up. That's the job of the legislature. And the
Speaker 4: number of encumbrances that have been placed upon innovation and
Speaker 4: business and the rest of these things, because the guys
Speaker 4: are just throwing these rigs out everywhere that if they
Speaker 4: have no statutory basis, they've got to go. And I
Speaker 4: seem to remember that there was a reason Supreme Court
Speaker 4: kurd fluffle about this. So this when people talk about
Speaker 4: the intractability of the deep state, I mean they're essentially
Speaker 4: referring to a civil service that regarded itself as being
Speaker 4: a permanent overclass that you know, does the work of
Speaker 4: governance no matter who's in the White House. Well, this
Speaker 4: changes that, and if they move fast and swift enough,
Speaker 4: we may see the most consequential change actually to American
Speaker 4: governance since I don't know, since FDR started, like you know,
Speaker 4: draping this stuff and doing what he did back in
Speaker 4: the thirties, Rob, what's the.
Speaker 1: Use well maybe. I mean the problem is that everybody
Speaker 1: thinks that the government spending stupid money on everybody else,
Speaker 1: but everybody thinks the government spending really good money on them.
Speaker 4: I don't.
Speaker 1: And so there's a lot of this, Like you know,
Speaker 1: you can go back and forth on all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: but you know where the money is is in entitlements
Speaker 1: and we're not going to touch those. And you know,
Speaker 1: Republicans have been flinty and mean about this for years
Speaker 1: and we get nowhere with it. But if you're under forty,
Speaker 1: your social security is going to be different from mine.
Speaker 1: And if you're under thirty, it's going to be vastly
Speaker 1: different from if you're under forty, and your retirement age
Speaker 1: is going to be seventy or seventy five, it's not
Speaker 1: going to be sixty whatever. And that is just the truth.
Speaker 1: And nobody wants to tell anybody that, but just hoping
Speaker 1: it kind of seeps into the groundwater so that everybody
Speaker 1: under thirty, which I think is kind of true. Any
Speaker 1: smart person under thirty, if you ask them, they know
Speaker 1: it's not going to be there. But nothing's going to
Speaker 1: change until that happens, until we accept that, and really
Speaker 1: sort of internalize that and stop lying to people about
Speaker 1: how if you're on a left, if you're a Democrat,
Speaker 1: how it's all going to be fined. All we have
Speaker 1: to do is raise the text on the ridge, or
Speaker 1: if you're a Republican this current present, lying to people
Speaker 1: saying no, we don't have to touch it. I'm never
Speaker 1: going to touch it, because that's just simply a lie.
Speaker 1: And as long as we're not doing that, we're just
Speaker 1: going to be firing some scientists and listening to outrageous
Speaker 1: but basically financially economically trivial story on talk radio and
Speaker 1: on Twitter. But we're not actually going to be changing
Speaker 1: the future direction of this country in a way we
Speaker 1: deploy resources because we're still going to be spend a
Speaker 1: lot of money on entitlements. And then the second thing is,
Speaker 1: I mean, the other big giant pot when Stevie chime
Speaker 1: in here is is defense. And we on the one hand,
Speaker 1: we have an America First policy right now, which is
Speaker 1: we agree with the disagree with it, is a policy
Speaker 1: that argues for a much much much smaller armed forces.
Speaker 1: If we're America First, we don't have to go overseas.
Speaker 1: We just have to protect our borders. So we should
Speaker 1: be shrinking. If we're going to be America first, we
Speaker 1: should shrink. If we're not going to be America first,
Speaker 1: we should stop saying because the worst thing in the
Speaker 1: world to be is America first. But except for some
Speaker 1: foreign and tendments, that is, that's a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 1: So we have to as a country and as a policy,
Speaker 1: we have to sort of unify those two things.
Speaker 3: Well at two quick points.
Speaker 2: One, Rob, I take your point about the waste, fraud
Speaker 2: and abuse theme has been overdone over the years. You know,
Speaker 2: the Reagan people made a big deal of that, and
Speaker 2: they found there wasn't very much in nineteen eighty one,
Speaker 2: and that's why seriously cutting spending then involved changing eligibility formulas.
Speaker 3: However, I do think that that is less true today.
Speaker 2: I mean even the Biden administration GAO found what last
Speaker 2: year sometimes that potential fraud in Medicare and Medicaid was
Speaker 2: between two hundred and fifty and five hundred billion dollars,
Speaker 2: I mean real money now, So I think there is
Speaker 2: more going on. And I have a theory on this
Speaker 2: that if we do a full scale forensic examination of
Speaker 2: the last fifteen years, I think we're going to find
Speaker 2: that the kind of things that just have dripped out
Speaker 2: now from doges about USAID and so forth, We're going
Speaker 2: to find that that kind of you know, frivolous spending
Speaker 2: and subsidies for liberal client groups and all kinds of
Speaker 2: crazy things. But that exploded under Obama and especially you
Speaker 2: know that that eight hundred billion dollar package, and it's
Speaker 2: only grown bigger during uh, the Biden administration. I don't
Speaker 2: think the first Trump administration was looking hard at this, uh,
Speaker 2: and so I think that they're actually, if this works,
Speaker 2: that's a big if. I think we're going to find
Speaker 2: substantial savings that then might make possible the conversation about entitlements,
Speaker 2: because you're right that it won't get us close to
Speaker 2: where we need to be.
Speaker 3: Uh. But okay, that's point one. Point two.
Speaker 1: I have sorry about Medicare before we talk about defense.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Medicare is true, but the Medicare rises
Speaker 1: in Medicare costs and waste, broaden, use, all those things.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, they accelerated under a bomb obviously,
Speaker 1: but they always go up because price controls do not work,
Speaker 1: and Medicare is a price control program. So every time
Speaker 1: by the you know, it takes five years for this
Speaker 1: big Medicare review because obviously the health care business is
Speaker 1: really be huge. So we have this five year review
Speaker 1: on procedures and what will pay for a procedure. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the procedures become redefined and one procedure is now three
Speaker 1: small procedures or six procedures. And then the costs always, always,
Speaker 1: always go up because Medicare is a is a single
Speaker 1: payer program, whether you like it or not. It's socialized medicine,
Speaker 1: whether you like it or not. And we have a
Speaker 1: federal government, a behemoth trying to control prices and that
Speaker 1: it's only one system in the world that ever accurately
Speaker 1: and efficiently controls prices, and that is a market. And
Speaker 1: if you don't have a market, it doesn't matter. You
Speaker 1: can have you can give Elon Musk the keys to
Speaker 1: the kingdom, and dose could be given, you know, app
Speaker 1: carte blanche. It's never going to happen, and because people
Speaker 1: don't want it to have. Look a lot of elderly
Speaker 1: people who work walking around with maga hats, driving around
Speaker 1: in their golf carts. The villages are going to get really,
Speaker 1: really a pissed when they discover that medicare is going
Speaker 1: to cover this or that procedure that they think they want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh, I mean he did agreement with you about that,
Speaker 3: just quickly.
Speaker 2: On defense, a lot to be said there, But one
Speaker 2: place where I think we need to think hard is
Speaker 2: whether we have in America first posture or not. Is
Speaker 2: I wonder if we can continue to afford having a
Speaker 2: gold plated military. By that, I mean, we seem to
Speaker 2: build the most expensive fighter planes, the most expensive ships.
Speaker 2: And we've always thought and this goes back to the
Speaker 2: Cold War years when we countered the superior numbers of
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union in terms of troops with better technology,
Speaker 2: and you know, I, you know, I don't really have
Speaker 2: a firm grasp on that, but I know there's lots
Speaker 2: of intelligent criticisms of things like the F thirty five
Speaker 2: fighter plane. It's unbelievably expensive, and you know, I don't know,
Speaker 2: maybe drones are better, but I think there needs to
Speaker 2: be a top to bottom review. And by the way
Speaker 2: heg sathas seemingly indicating that he's open to some of
Speaker 2: that inquiry.
Speaker 1: You know, I was actually, I mean, I disagree with
Speaker 1: the policy, but I believe that the policy itself has ramifications,
Speaker 1: and I think that it is one thing to be
Speaker 1: America first, and that is a completely legitimate policy. You
Speaker 1: can't be America first unless that is your that's the
Speaker 1: primary h P, a foundational point. As you're gonna if
Speaker 1: you're going to rebuild or remodel the US military, we
Speaker 1: are not going to be protecting You're not going to
Speaker 1: be protecting Ukraine. We are not going to be in Taiwan.
Speaker 1: We're not going to be doing any of that. That's
Speaker 1: that's not America first, America versus the opposite of that.
Speaker 1: All that's fine, but that means that we don't need
Speaker 1: a lot of things. What do we really need? We
Speaker 1: need to protect our shipping lanes. I guess we need
Speaker 1: to protect our borders and then we're done. And if
Speaker 1: you if the waiver on that, then you gotta then
Speaker 1: you're on a very slippery slope. The one thing about
Speaker 1: Reagan said is that we are there to protect the world,
Speaker 1: So we're going to build, build, build. If we're not
Speaker 1: there to protect the world, we're just here to protect
Speaker 1: our borders in our country, then we don't need half
Speaker 1: the things that we buy. We just don't need them.
Speaker 1: And that you can't have it both ways. The worst
Speaker 1: thing for us to be is have an interventionist, even
Speaker 1: a quasi interventionist posture in the world, and also so
Speaker 1: have a military that can't handle that. That's just having
Speaker 1: a big mouth with no follow through, And unfortunately, I
Speaker 1: believe that describes our current president. But it's a very
Speaker 1: dangerous position to be in. It's one thing to say, world,
Speaker 1: you're on your own. It's something to say, world, you're
Speaker 1: kind of on your own. And we're going to reduce
Speaker 1: our military, but we're also going to when we want to,
Speaker 1: we want to get involved in something, We're going to
Speaker 1: get involved in something. I mean, what do we care
Speaker 1: if Russia takes over Ukraine? What do we care if
Speaker 1: China takes over Taiwan. If we care, then we need
Speaker 1: to prepare and spend. If we don't care, then we
Speaker 1: don't have to prepare or spend.
Speaker 4: Well, it's remarkable it took six minutes to go from
Speaker 4: my original point, which was how this is going to
Speaker 4: impact the housing values in McLean, Virginia to a projection
Speaker 4: of power and Rob, You're absolutely right. My point put
Speaker 4: a boa and the whole thing is that not that
Speaker 4: I expect any of what is DOJA is doing or
Speaker 4: the executive orders in reshaping the bureaucracy is going to
Speaker 4: necessarily get us out of the spending problems that I mean,
Speaker 4: the deficit is what it is, and you're right, entitlements are.
Speaker 3: What they are.
Speaker 4: But it will, in the future, I think, result in
Speaker 4: a leaner government that has less control and less intervention
Speaker 4: and less invasive tentacles into the body politic and body,
Speaker 4: economic and social and whatnot. And that's a good thing,
Speaker 4: and it's going to be hard to rebuild if they
Speaker 4: want to do it well the next time they get
Speaker 4: their hands on the levers of power. But maybe perhaps
Speaker 4: there is but one lever of power, and it is
Speaker 4: in the grasp of things way beyond our ken and
Speaker 4: we small little ants here struggling in the muck trying
Speaker 4: to comprehend our place in the universe, oftentimes turn to
Speaker 4: things that can't be necessarily empirically quantified. And that is
Speaker 4: why we're going to talk to Ross Ross Dout, the
Speaker 4: columnists from The New York Times, host of Matter of
Speaker 4: Opinion podcast, author of many books, and most recently, as
Speaker 4: of just last week, believe why everyone should be religious.
Speaker 4: Russ Welcome back.
Speaker 7: It's great to be back, and I'm here. I'm here
Speaker 7: to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
Speaker 4: Good. Good, it took you so long. Rob is going
Speaker 4: to grapple because Rob is a grappler of these We're
Speaker 4: all grapplers of these things here, and so I know
Speaker 4: that I'm going to you don't have to defer to him,
Speaker 4: almost immediately. But let me ask you this why everyone
Speaker 4: should be religious. It matters what the religion is, doesn't it.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you're, you know, the devotee of some
Speaker 4: some Pithy and Death cult, that's not the same as
Speaker 4: being somebody who's a shaker in Iowa.
Speaker 7: I mean it depends. You know, what does the Pithy
Speaker 7: and Death Cult really ask of you? You know, how
Speaker 7: does it? Does it help your marriage? It's good for
Speaker 7: American politics? Is there a Tokvillian defense of the Pithy
Speaker 7: and Death Cult? I mean, I think, you know, I
Speaker 7: think we have to be open minded. But yes, obviously
Speaker 7: it matters. It matters what religion you are. What I'm
Speaker 7: trying to do in the book, though, is two things. First,
Speaker 7: I do think that there is a general religious personspective
Speaker 7: on the world that is shared by most, if not all,
Speaker 7: of the entities and institutions that we call religions. And
Speaker 7: it's not a complete perspective. It, you know, doesn't get
Speaker 7: to all the details about who God is and what
Speaker 7: God wants of you and so on. But the major
Speaker 7: world religions tend to agree that, you know, the world
Speaker 7: exists for a reason, humans exist in some kind of
Speaker 7: relationship with a higher power. You should probably be preparing
Speaker 7: for whatever judgment or transformation awaits you after death, these
Speaker 7: kind of things. Right, So there is I think there
Speaker 7: is something called religion, even if it is a very
Speaker 7: general category. And then part of what I'm doing in
Speaker 7: the book is essentially taking people to the threshold of
Speaker 7: what I would consider the sort of more specific questions
Speaker 7: that you ask when you're deciding which religion to join.
Speaker 7: But a bunch of the book is arguing for why
Speaker 7: it makes sense. You know, people talk about being spiritual
Speaker 7: but not religious. Right, that's a pretty broad, a pretty
Speaker 7: broad category in American life right now. And part of
Speaker 7: the book is a lecture to atheists on why they
Speaker 7: should be spiritual, and then having persuaded them to be spiritual,
Speaker 7: I proceed to the lecture on how the spiritual person
Speaker 7: should really join an institutional religion, ideally a big and
Speaker 7: old one. And then you know, at the very end
Speaker 7: I talk about my own Christianity. But I do think
Speaker 7: that there is a valuable case to be made before
Speaker 7: you get to the specifics of religious doctrine, before you
Speaker 7: try and solve the problem of evil or litigate the
Speaker 7: incarnation of Jesus, just about you know, does it make
Speaker 7: sense to believe in God? Is the universe made for
Speaker 7: a reason? Are we an accident? What are we doing here?
Speaker 7: Those kind of things? And I think you can get
Speaker 7: some distance on those questions, further than a lot of
Speaker 7: people nowadays tend to think.
Speaker 4: And you answer all those questions in your book a
Speaker 4: chapter for each.
Speaker 7: I do believe a chapter that's right every question, every
Speaker 7: question answered. No, I mean, I don't answer every question,
Speaker 7: but I do think that it is you know, there's
Speaker 7: a slightly apocryphal, maybe not quote from the polymath scientist
Speaker 7: John von Neuman something to the effect of, there probably
Speaker 7: is a God. A lot of things make more sense
Speaker 7: if there is one, And that's a pretty good summary
Speaker 7: of the first few chapters of the book. There's a
Speaker 7: lot of things about the universe about our consciousness about
Speaker 7: religious experience. That just make a lot more sense if
Speaker 7: you assume that there is some form of God or
Speaker 7: Divinity out there.
Speaker 1: Hey, Ross, I'm sitting here in Prince, New Jersey, or
Speaker 1: I'm a student at the Prince of Theological Seminary getting
Speaker 1: an MDiv on my way to ordination. I hope in
Speaker 1: the Episcopal Church. So I totally disagree. Obviously, they write
Speaker 1: the joke, right.
Speaker 7: The joke is that, you know, at Harvard Divinity School
Speaker 7: they are shocked if you believe in God and Prince,
Speaker 7: but Princeton is actually known for, you know, for its
Speaker 7: relative robustness.
Speaker 1: So that's one of those weird things about divinity schools
Speaker 1: that you stand out if you kind of believe in God.
Speaker 1: Mostly the default setting is I'm not so sure. But
Speaker 1: I mean the upside is I get to spend all
Speaker 1: day thinking about these things. The downside is I have
Speaker 1: to spend all day reading the Elogians, which is incredibly
Speaker 1: difficult for me because it's incredibly hard writing and it's
Speaker 1: very boring except for the really great ones like Augustine.
Speaker 1: But there's a French one named Julia Christeva, and she's
Speaker 1: a psychoanalyst and she's only a French person could be
Speaker 1: a psychoanalyst and a theologian. And she says that the
Speaker 1: atheists are people who believe that they do not believe.
Speaker 1: Do you buy that.
Speaker 7: I think there's a lot of different types of atheist.
Speaker 7: I certainly think that there are there are atheists who
Speaker 7: are in a posture of functional rebellion. I think where
Speaker 7: atheism is chosen sort of the way you know, in
Speaker 7: The Brothers Caramelzov, the brother says, you know, even if
Speaker 7: even if God reconciles everything, I still have a moral
Speaker 7: objection right to his creation. And there's there's certainly versions
Speaker 7: of that style of atheism. I think if you read,
Speaker 7: you know, someone like Christopher Hitchins at his peak, at
Speaker 7: the peak of his powers, he's really rebelling against God,
Speaker 7: not proving his non existence. He's really saying God is
Speaker 7: a dictator and I, you know, I reject his authoritarian rule.
Speaker 7: So that's one category of atheist that partially fits. I
Speaker 7: used to say that Chris hit wasn't wasn't an atheist.
Speaker 1: He was a Testament Jew right right, he was.
Speaker 7: He had a long list of complaints, not only the
Speaker 7: Old Testament Jews, right the long list of complaints. But
Speaker 7: then you know, then there are other types. There are
Speaker 7: people who you know, believe in something else right as
Speaker 7: a substitute for God. There's that style of atheism that
Speaker 7: I think we're very familiar with. I do think, though,
Speaker 7: that there is a category of atheists who who sincerely
Speaker 7: sort of has you know, if there is a if
Speaker 7: you're reading theology right, you're hitting the people who argue
Speaker 7: for a census divinitas right, the idea that all human
Speaker 7: beings said have a sense of God's presence. I do
Speaker 7: think that there are people who have found a way
Speaker 7: to turn that off, whether it was always off, whether
Speaker 7: they've made certain choices and gone down certain paths that
Speaker 7: have taken them pretty far. But you know, I wouldn't
Speaker 7: say to every atheist, oh, at some level, you really
Speaker 7: believe in God, and you know, and you're just sort
Speaker 7: of you've sort of constructed. I think there are people
Speaker 7: who go pretty far, I guess in their in their
Speaker 7: not in their non belief, in the non belief. I
Speaker 7: know Steve wants to jump in. I just wanted to
Speaker 7: read one more quotation to you, because I'm letting you
Speaker 7: push your seminary education to good. Yeah, from my reading
Speaker 7: this week. So how many thoughts you just send them?
Speaker 1: Just jot them down and all of Uh a slav
Speaker 1: Zizek sort of very interesting theologian, but he's a great
Speaker 1: it's a great, great pithyphrase. If once upon a time
Speaker 1: we publicly pretended to believe while privately we were skeptics
Speaker 1: or even engaged in obscene mocking of our public beliefs.
Speaker 1: Today we publicly tend to profess our skeptical, skeptical, hedonistic,
Speaker 1: relaxed attitude, while privately we remain haunted by beliefs and
Speaker 1: severe prohibitions. Do you think there was a switch there
Speaker 1: at some point where we went from being sort of
Speaker 1: publicly observant now the public face that many of us
Speaker 1: have as well. I don't believe that. That's just I'm
Speaker 1: a rationalist. I don't believe this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there was a switch. It seemed to sort of
Speaker 7: it seemed to somewhat happen in stages, right you get,
Speaker 7: you know, one stage at the end of the Wars
Speaker 7: of religion, maybe a second stage with the Enlightenment and
Speaker 7: sort of the peak of Voltaire, another stage somewhere with
Speaker 7: the Victorians. When Matthew Arnold starts writing about the see
Speaker 7: of faith receding, and then maybe a final turn of
Speaker 7: the dial somewhere after the nineteen sixties. So it's not
Speaker 7: an all at once process. But yes, that the language
Speaker 7: of haunting is appropriate, right, because I'm definitely a disbeliever
Speaker 7: in true disenchantment, true secularization, in the sense that I
Speaker 7: think that all of the events that people described as
Speaker 7: enchanted in the Middle Ages or you know, the Roman
Speaker 7: Empire and so on, a lot of that stuff just
Speaker 7: keeps on happening.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: The modern world is filled with people, many people I know,
Speaker 7: who have religious experiences that would by no means be
Speaker 7: out of place in the enchanted cosmos of thirteenth century
Speaker 7: France or wherever else. What has changed is not disenchantment
Speaker 7: of experience, but disenchantment of official knowledge.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: If you go on Wikipedia and read Wikipedia pages on
Speaker 7: miracles and alleged miracles, you don't get to write a
Speaker 7: Wikipedia entry unless you have a materialist default.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: And you know, if you hang out I live in
Speaker 7: New Haven, you're in Princeton, right. You go hang out
Speaker 7: at the law school or the business school, you know,
Speaker 7: hang out with the people who are not professionally anti religious,
Speaker 7: but take themselves there seriously. Their view is the rational
Speaker 7: person's default is atheism. Whatever may happen to you in
Speaker 7: perfect personal experience, and that is you know, I think
Speaker 7: that religion. I think there's a limit to how far
Speaker 7: any religious revival can go unless you, at some point
Speaker 7: deconstruct that sensibility. I think every pendulum swinging back towards
Speaker 7: religion in the modern age is limited by the inability
Speaker 7: to persuade let's say, the typical reader of the New
Speaker 7: York Times, that religion, you know, might be well and
Speaker 7: fully true as a description of reality, which is you
Speaker 7: know why I've written this book, right, you know I'm
Speaker 7: going to I'm going to solve.
Speaker 4: That problem, right, and everyone should buy the book, of course,
Speaker 4: to say again believe while everyone should be religious, for us,
Speaker 4: I just want to get back to something you said
Speaker 4: about the last the last turn of the knob being
Speaker 4: somewhere in the sixties. It's so true. I spent a
Speaker 4: lot of time looking at old newspapers, and in the
Speaker 4: fifties ther early sixties, Easter would be a big event
Speaker 4: for a small town newspaper because they would get everybody
Speaker 4: to buy an ad. The gas station, the dry cleaners,
Speaker 4: the shoe guy, and they would all use clip art,
Speaker 4: which there was an abundance of a happy family going
Speaker 4: to a church with a very tall steeple, and so
Speaker 4: the newspapers would be crammed with this imagery of specific
Speaker 4: religious activities and obligations and duties and Eastern itself. It's
Speaker 4: gone by about nineteen eighty or so, it's just gone.
Speaker 4: And everybody who grew up in that era, if you,
Speaker 4: even if your family did not go to church, ours did,
Speaker 4: and then if you fell away from it. Even now,
Speaker 4: all these decades later, Easter and the few commercial trappings
Speaker 4: that we get still strike a tuning fork inside of you.
Speaker 4: Now you can say that's cultural, that's Memori's sociological, or
Speaker 4: that is that sense of divine awareness that you're talking about,
Speaker 4: but you're absolutely right on. It was a distinct decision
Speaker 4: to get rid of this old kind of weird stuff
Speaker 4: because it was our parents. And I'm convinced that so
Speaker 4: much if this just is simply a base rejection of
Speaker 4: what our parents happened to believe in, until we abashedly
Speaker 4: crawl back to it and say, you know, maybe those
Speaker 4: folks did a point.
Speaker 1: And you can see this.
Speaker 7: You can see this at that point in data in
Speaker 7: the places where secularization went fastest. It happened faster in
Speaker 7: Western Europe than here, right, And so there was you
Speaker 7: knowata data from Ryan Burge, who's one of the best
Speaker 7: sort of data analysts of American religion and recently on
Speaker 7: you know, spiritual and religious belief in Great Britain, and
Speaker 7: it's very clear that the Baby Boomers are the most
Speaker 7: secular generation in Britain. Now that isn't fully true here.
Speaker 7: I think the Millennials are the most secular generation in
Speaker 7: the US, But in Britain, secularization goes all the way
Speaker 7: with the Baby Boomers, and then subsequent generations culminating in
Speaker 7: gen Z get progressively a bit more interested in spirituality
Speaker 7: and there. What's interesting is that some of the turns
Speaker 7: of the dial had to do with you know, sort
Speaker 7: of scientific argument and debate. So Victorian atheism was shaped
Speaker 7: by Darwin in a profound way. I think the sixties
Speaker 7: turn had, Yeah, it had a lot more to do
Speaker 7: with a cultural rebellion based primarily around changing sexual behavior
Speaker 7: against you know, against the old the old order. It
Speaker 7: wasn't about discovering a new philosophical argument against the existence
Speaker 7: of God. It was that, you know, traditional religion strictures
Speaker 7: no longer seem to make sense, and it was time
Speaker 7: to let it go.
Speaker 1: As they say in Arundel.
Speaker 2: Ross, it's Steve Hayward out in California, where as Walker
Speaker 2: person used to say, has its own peculiar sunshine version
Speaker 2: of Christianity.
Speaker 1: Right, and and other faiths as well. Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker 3: Right, right.
Speaker 2: So look, I have to gush about your book and
Speaker 2: give you dust Jack a blurb. It is rightly being
Speaker 2: compared favorably to C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. That was
Speaker 2: my friend Frank review, which I yes, well, but I think,
Speaker 2: but I mean, what I'd add to it is, uh,
Speaker 2: it brought back a whole lot of things I haven't
Speaker 2: thought about for a long time. You know, about problems
Speaker 2: of cosmology, the limitations of Darwinism, the riddle of consciousness,
Speaker 2: the whole domain of what we call natural theology. And
Speaker 2: the writing is I'll put it, this has meant his praise.
Speaker 2: The writing is so gentle. I would have, especially in
Speaker 2: criticisms of scientists, I would have written a lot of
Speaker 2: things that would make them mad. But your book on
Speaker 2: every page invites the skeptical reader to keep going. You
Speaker 2: have a nice respect and generosity towards them, which I
Speaker 2: think is a remarkable writing achievement. I just really have
Speaker 2: two I could talk all day or hours for you
Speaker 2: about this, but I have two questions of curiosity and
Speaker 2: maybe just one. I do think there's a dog that
Speaker 2: doesn't bark in the book. And here I'm going back
Speaker 2: to when I was a young man finding my way
Speaker 2: in Christian faith, and one of the big things going
Speaker 2: on in the world was, for lack of a better term,
Speaker 2: was existentialist Christianity. It was, you know, people like Rudolph
Speaker 2: Boltmann and Paul Tillick and Harvey Cox and process theology.
Speaker 2: Hopefully things rob is not having to suffer through. And
Speaker 2: we all remember if you ever finding do have it,
Speaker 2: And we all remember the famous Time magazine cover is
Speaker 2: God Dead from nineteen sixty six, and all this I
Speaker 2: thought was just an attempt to try and reform religion,
Speaker 2: and specifically Christian religion to modern scientism as opposed to science,
Speaker 2: and I think an unsuccessful and defective attempt. And so
Speaker 2: I'm kind of interested if that ever came on your
Speaker 2: radar screen or am I right, that that has receded
Speaker 2: because of its sheer implausibility.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think a lot of that material has receded.
Speaker 7: I wrote about that. I wrote a book, you know,
Speaker 7: ten or fifteen years ago about sort of about the
Speaker 7: decline of American Christianity, and that particular moment featured as
Speaker 7: a cautionary tale on how Christianity can think that it's adapting, right,
Speaker 7: that it's sort of adapting successfully to a new world.
Speaker 7: And then suddenly, you know, that style of spirituality is
Speaker 7: sort of like you know, high modernist architecture or even
Speaker 7: brutalist architecture, that was the architecture of the future, and
Speaker 7: now we're in the future and nobody likes it anymore, right,
Speaker 7: And it was an attempt to sort of in a way,
Speaker 7: to evade some fundamental questions.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: So one of the things I do in the book
Speaker 7: that you know, goes a bit beyond some of the
Speaker 7: usual arguments for design and so on, is I make
Speaker 7: a real defense of supernatural experience as a you know,
Speaker 7: real part of human life that has to be reckoned
Speaker 7: with as an evidence for God.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: And if you go back to Boltman and Tillek and
Speaker 7: a lot of those guys. You know, they had sort
Speaker 7: of an ineffable concept of like some encounter with the divine,
Speaker 7: but they really wanted to move away from questions like
Speaker 7: you know, I mean obviously the most basic one being okay,
Speaker 7: you're a Christian, you know, was the too empty? Did
Speaker 7: Jesus actually for you know, did Thomas actually put his.
Speaker 1: Finger in a wound?
Speaker 4: And so on?
Speaker 7: And in a way, my book is is actually quite
Speaker 7: liberal in a certain sense. Like I am, I think
Speaker 7: you described it well. I am trying to be very gentle,
Speaker 7: and I'm not telling people to become Latin Mass Catholics tomorrow.
Speaker 7: I'm saying, you know, if you're if you're drawn to
Speaker 7: your local Unitarian church, if that's all you can do,
Speaker 7: you should do that.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So I am.
Speaker 7: I'm not unsympathetic to a certain kind of mode of
Speaker 7: liberal faith, but I do think the mode that trying
Speaker 7: to just sort of efface like or obscure fundamental questions
Speaker 7: in order to preserve some kind of you know, modern
Speaker 7: friendly Christianity clearly just failed. It just failed, and we're
Speaker 7: living in the aftermath.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So one more question that maybe is too broad,
Speaker 2: but you'll know how to sort it out. James mentioned
Speaker 2: a moment ago that you know, some of what we
Speaker 2: saw the last couple generations was youth will revolt against
Speaker 2: their parents' generation. And I think, of course that's always
Speaker 2: a social factor to be pondered with. But I also
Speaker 2: wonder if, especially the decline of mainline Protestant churches is
Speaker 2: connected in a deeper way with the whole problem of
Speaker 2: the effects of the liberal tradition, which is the emphasis
Speaker 2: on individual autonomy. And I mean, you've written about that previously,
Speaker 2: but I've often want and you do see by the
Speaker 2: way that some of the growth in churches right now,
Speaker 2: especially young man is for things like Eastern Orthodoxy, really
Speaker 2: traditional faiths, And so I don't know, I keep thinking
Speaker 2: that the traveils of the Protestant church is at some
Speaker 2: level connected with the problems of liberalism.
Speaker 7: I think I think that it is, and I don't
Speaker 7: think it's a coincidence. Like right now, like I'm trying
Speaker 7: to write the book into a moment where I think
Speaker 7: generally the culture is more interested in religion right now
Speaker 7: than it was ten or fifteen years ago at you know,
Speaker 7: in the heyday of Dawkins and so on. And I
Speaker 7: don't think it's a surprise that there's this sort of
Speaker 7: interest in religion at a moment when liberalism itself seems
Speaker 7: to have either sort of run, you know, run into
Speaker 7: a wall or been ensnared by its own contradictions, you know,
Speaker 7: whatever metaphor you want to use. Right, that sort of
Speaker 7: whatever lies beyond liberalism, it might be some kind of
Speaker 7: return to religion. With that said, it's really hard to
Speaker 7: get away from the individualism of modern life, right. So, yes,
Speaker 7: the mainline churches did end up becoming too individualistic and
Speaker 7: sort of you know, individualizing themselves out of existence. But
Speaker 7: you know, the most successful forms of Christianity in the
Speaker 7: US today are non denominational forms of Evangelical Protestantism, which
Speaker 7: are conservative in some way, but really, you know, compared
Speaker 7: to like the sturdy Presbyterians of your quite seeker sensitive
Speaker 7: and personalized. My own book, as you said, is very
Speaker 7: seeker sensitive in spite of my own traditional commitments. And
Speaker 7: even something like you know, the vogue for Eastern Orthodoxy
Speaker 7: or Latin mas Catholicism. Right, It's like, Okay, you have
Speaker 7: people embracing tradition, but are they embracing you know, a
Speaker 7: fully existent, high hierarchical institution that they're submitting to. Not
Speaker 7: exactly right, They're like Latin mask Catholicism is kind of
Speaker 7: in rebellion against the pope right now, Right, Eastern Orthodoxy
Speaker 7: you're joining. Eastern Orthodoxy is great because you can join
Speaker 7: this really deep, rich tradition and no one can even
Speaker 7: agree on who's in charge of it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: So even even in it's like, oh, I'm a you
Speaker 7: know the right right, well, right, it's like, but I'm
Speaker 7: in the Ruthenian branch of the Moldovan Orthodox You're a
Speaker 7: heretic then, right, So, like, there is this I just
Speaker 7: think there is as much as we like to critique individualism,
Speaker 7: or at least I do, right, there is this way
Speaker 7: in which any religion that succeeds in this dispensation has
Speaker 7: to be adapted to some degree to pluralism and individual
Speaker 7: agency in a way that was never true in you know,
Speaker 7: the antique or medieval past.
Speaker 1: And also I just I know I got to wrap
Speaker 1: it up, but I wanted to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about the mystery, right. I mean, we say the mystery
Speaker 1: of faith, but also there's a myst tree to the
Speaker 1: Latin mass, there's a mystery to the if you're not
Speaker 1: Eastern Orthodox. To Eastern Orthodox Church, I went. I sat
Speaker 1: in a lot of them when I was in Jerusalem
Speaker 1: a few years ago, and and there was way. I
Speaker 1: had one experience, which is sort of about the mystery,
Speaker 1: is that I was somewhere outside and there's this Korean
Speaker 1: group turned out their Korean Pentecostals. They're kind of wandering around,
Speaker 1: and then that at some point they really got overcome
Speaker 1: with the spirit and they started to speak in tongues.
Speaker 1: And I turned to our guide and I said, does
Speaker 1: this happen a lot? He says, does what happen a lot?
Speaker 1: I said, does people? Do people come and start speaking
Speaker 1: in tongues? And he said, is that what that is?
Speaker 1: It just sounds Korean to me? He said, of course,
Speaker 1: you know, anybody else's language sounds like tongues, right, because
Speaker 1: you don't understand it anyway. And I just feel and
Speaker 1: when I tell people that I am I'm doing what
Speaker 1: I'm doing, they're they're the what I was prepared for
Speaker 1: were people to say to me like, really, I mean,
Speaker 1: you ran TV shows, really, And instead what most people
Speaker 1: have said is, oh, man, of course, yeah, let me know,
Speaker 1: let me know what you find out, right, so the
Speaker 1: longing that we have, I think, uh is just no
Speaker 1: longer filled by a culture that has told us that
Speaker 1: all the longings we have can be satisfied by, you know,
Speaker 1: a million of different things. There's still this empty longing
Speaker 1: that we have that brings us back to this mystery
Speaker 1: that isn't really going to give us an answer, but
Speaker 1: at least it's going to address the part of us
Speaker 1: that is desperately wondering what it is that we're missing
Speaker 1: and how we can behole again.
Speaker 7: Is that I feel like that's that's such a powerful statement.
Speaker 1: How can I possibly add at anything we don't?
Speaker 3: That's me?
Speaker 1: I think, I think that's I think that's right.
Speaker 7: I think there is a way in which things do
Speaker 7: move in cycles, and you get you know, a culture,
Speaker 7: sort of religion can only decline so far before people
Speaker 7: start to have exactly the feelings you've described and turn
Speaker 7: back towards it. But in a way, the turning back
Speaker 7: towards it is easier because of the decline. Right, It's like, oh,
Speaker 7: you're not threatened by the big institutional religions anymore.
Speaker 1: I mean some people are. You can watch the Handmaid's Tale.
Speaker 7: Obviously those fears have not gone away, but a lot
Speaker 7: of people I think regarded like Roman Catholicism as a
Speaker 7: much more intimidating thing in even in like nineteen ninety
Speaker 7: seven than today. So there's there's a way you turn back.
Speaker 7: The last thing I'll say, though, is just about mystery. Yes,
Speaker 7: we're now we turn back to mystery, and the old
Speaker 7: religions especially are steeped in mystery, and you're never going
Speaker 7: to get definite, you know, definite, perfect answers out of
Speaker 7: that mystery. But I do want to insist that like
Speaker 7: the point of turning back is to find some kind
Speaker 7: of answer.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: It's like you know, in in in the Mist, like
Speaker 7: you're trying to decide how to live your life. Right,
Speaker 7: I'm trying to decide how to live my life, and
Speaker 7: in the mystery, maybe we don't get the perfect answer
Speaker 7: to you know, why is there suffering in the world?
Speaker 7: Or why did God make the cosmos this particular way?
Speaker 7: But I do think for religion to make good on
Speaker 7: its promises, it does need to provide people with a
Speaker 7: sense of again that individualism again, right, but in some
Speaker 7: sense of like what do I do next? Am I
Speaker 7: on the right path? Should I get married to this woman.
Speaker 7: Should I join you know, should I join the you know?
Speaker 7: Should I become an episcopal priest? Right? Like, if God
Speaker 7: is real, it's okay to say I need a little
Speaker 7: help here, I need a little concrete guidance.
Speaker 1: I just culturally, though, it might be wise for us
Speaker 1: to sit in, to sit in confusion in mystery for
Speaker 1: a while. We're so used to reaching for the solution
Speaker 1: and so used to googling the answer that these are
Speaker 1: sort of answers and questions that are sort of bigger
Speaker 1: than we have AI algorithms for. It's a good that's
Speaker 1: a nice feelings. It's actually a nice feeling to know
Speaker 1: that there are no ready answers here, that that your
Speaker 1: question is deep enough that the answers are going to
Speaker 1: be satisfying if and when they come. Just for some reason,
Speaker 1: I feel culturally that's very important for me, And then
Speaker 1: ultimately too, I think it's harder, especially in a seminary,
Speaker 1: especially in culture in general, to understand that the message
Speaker 1: of Christianity is fundamentally different in many ways from the
Speaker 1: message of everything else, which is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why this strange, weird sect has lasted, which is that
Speaker 1: you are important, right he will leave the flock to
Speaker 1: get you, and that gives you a lot of grace.
Speaker 1: It also gives you a lot of responsibility, and it
Speaker 1: gives you a lot of I think autonomy in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, and a lot of expectation. That it's
Speaker 1: not about fitting into the tribe. It's not about fitting
Speaker 1: into the darma, it's not about fitting into the sort
Speaker 1: of big sweep in history. It's about something really personal
Speaker 1: which may never you know, I'm sixty years old. I
Speaker 1: don't know the answer. So that's my that's my Friday
Speaker 1: sermon for you. It's not very satisfying, but please give
Speaker 1: that's right. By the time you're in the pulpit, you'll
Speaker 1: have honed it to perfection.
Speaker 4: Speaking of that pulpit, I'll leave you with an extremely
Speaker 4: petty question that I have here, a petty complaint. Perhaps
Speaker 4: somebody mentioned before, and I think it was Stephen, the
Speaker 4: word cosmology. And one of the things that just absolutely
Speaker 4: fascinates me is the depth and the breadth and the
Speaker 4: variety and the glory and the beauty of the universe.
Speaker 4: And when I behold these great, deep astronomical photos and
Speaker 4: generally I say, yeah, well, you know, of course God exists.
Speaker 4: This stuff is proved positive to me, and I want
Speaker 4: this is the mystery to me, and I want to
Speaker 4: look at it more. I wanted the fascinating aspect that
Speaker 4: if you look at a very close a picture of
Speaker 4: the human retina, it is almost indistinguishable from a picture
Speaker 4: of a great galactic wall. Everything scales, and you sense
Speaker 4: this design and you sense this purpose. And of course
Speaker 4: the rationally atheist will say, no, that's just simply how
Speaker 4: it arises because of certain laws applying, because of the
Speaker 4: Big Bang, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: I get it.
Speaker 4: But if your heart and your spirit and your mind
Speaker 4: are open to you know the contemplation of the Cosmo says,
Speaker 4: I know that sounds spiritual, not religious. But what I'm
Speaker 4: saying is getting into a small building build in nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty five that smells of old candles and a stained
Speaker 4: glass window seems a constraining thing. And when you add
Speaker 4: the liturgy and all the other wrote things, it seems
Speaker 4: like something that's an impediment to contemplating the great beyond above.
Speaker 4: What do you say to people who have basically the
Speaker 4: Homer Simpson critique of going to church on Sunday because
Speaker 4: you have to wear itchy church pants and a tight shirt.
Speaker 1: And you mean you mean my nine year old son
Speaker 1: that complaint.
Speaker 4: Or your sixty six year old friends.
Speaker 7: Yes, it's funny because you know, the last at a
Speaker 7: book signing, someone came up to me and in a
Speaker 7: friendly way, gave me a long lecture on exactly the
Speaker 7: terms you've you've given about how there can't possibly be
Speaker 7: a god because the universe is so big, right, he
Speaker 7: was like, you know, he was all mystery and wonder.
Speaker 1: But in the service of.
Speaker 4: That's that's like saying it can't there can't be a
Speaker 4: cook because Orison Wells is too fat. I don't get
Speaker 4: that one at all.
Speaker 3: No, I don't.
Speaker 7: I don't get that argument either, But I'm going to
Speaker 7: just to to steal from it to to try and
Speaker 7: answer your reasonable question, which is to say that, like
Speaker 7: there has to be there are different scales of things, right,
Speaker 7: And yes, of course it's appropriate to contemplate the majesty
Speaker 7: and mystery and wonder of Almighty God in a sunset,
Speaker 7: a rainbow, you know, the hubble hubble telescope photos, all
Speaker 7: of these things, right, And but what is asked of
Speaker 7: you in church is not you know, spending your whole
Speaker 7: life sort of in a small building saying prayers.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: I mean, if you're Catholic, you're expected to go to
Speaker 7: Mass once a week plus on on Holy days of
Speaker 7: obligation more you know, maybe more you should go more, right,
Speaker 7: But that's the basic ask. And if God is present
Speaker 7: in the fullness of the cosmost part of the point
Speaker 7: of going to church is to say, okay, there's a
Speaker 7: correlation there, right, that these things, these things scale in
Speaker 7: just the way you talked about with the retina, right,
Speaker 7: And that's why it's nice to go to a church
Speaker 7: I think that has nice architecture, right, that has good music,
Speaker 7: that captures some form of that scaling, that seems itself
Speaker 7: to be participating in the heights and depth that you describe.
Speaker 7: But I think what the low church Protestant who has
Speaker 7: skepticism about fancy Catholic architecture would say is that actually,
Speaker 7: you're so supposed to see that scaling in your neighbor
Speaker 7: next to you and to hear it in the word
Speaker 7: of God preached by you know, Father rob Long from
Speaker 7: the public.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: But like that, you shouldn't even need the stained glass
Speaker 7: windows and the saints and so on you should be
Speaker 7: able to get that scaling from your neighbor next to
Speaker 7: you and the Bible read to you. And that's what
Speaker 7: church is for. And I think that's certainly enough. It
Speaker 7: should be enough to get you there. You know, once
Speaker 7: a week, I think once a week. This is what
Speaker 7: I literally what I say to my nine year old son.
Speaker 7: I'm like God, in all his majesty created the entire
Speaker 7: universe for you to in habit, and all he asks
Speaker 7: you to do is wear on comfortable pants for fifty
Speaker 7: seven minutes this Sunday.
Speaker 1: Can you do it?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 1: Sometimes is? You know, come on, Dad, you're to have
Speaker 1: to say that. Homer Simpson goes nonetheless the only family
Speaker 1: on television that goes to church regularly.
Speaker 4: Well, God speaks to him in that episode. And one
Speaker 4: of the great things about it, when God is actually revealed,
Speaker 4: we see that he has five fingers. Well, as we
Speaker 4: like to say around here, a mighty fortress is our
Speaker 4: rob And we will look forward to the next time
Speaker 4: we talk to you about the next book, or even
Speaker 4: this one, because it's the topic of our lives. Ross
Speaker 4: douth that's the new book is Believe Why everyone should
Speaker 4: be religious? And we thank you so much for showing.
Speaker 1: Up, guys, I really appreciate It's great book. Thank you Ross.
Speaker 1: Take care.
Speaker 4: You know I mentioned the church, you know, built in
Speaker 4: the twenties. The church that I grew up in elm
Speaker 4: Lutheran Fargo, North Dakota, is an old, classic nineteen twenties
Speaker 4: church with the off the shelf stained glass picture of
Speaker 4: Martin Luther looking varied about and Jesus in the garden
Speaker 4: and the arrest of it. But at some point in
Speaker 4: the nineteen fifties they decided, hey, if we want to
Speaker 4: really be with the times, we've got to modernize a
Speaker 4: little bit. So they slapped the sort of Perry Mason
Speaker 4: era swank, cool blonde wood stuff all over the place
Speaker 4: in the pulpit and some of the railings. And so
Speaker 4: I grew up with a syncredic combination of these things
Speaker 4: which just made perfect sense to me. Streamlined pulpit, I mean,
Speaker 4: from which the pastor would thunder and I mean thunder
Speaker 4: at everybody. And it was wonderful. It was one.
Speaker 1: So you're a Lutheran, Yeah, yeah, I knew everybody.
Speaker 3: I was, but I was.
Speaker 4: I was an ultra boy too. I was ideal that too,
Speaker 4: And so I put on these robes and the robe
Speaker 4: and I would have these wands, these wonderful ones with
Speaker 4: a wax tip at the end. You'd light it and
Speaker 4: then you'd play it out a little bit. You'd light
Speaker 4: all the candles, and then you'd sit there, and the
Speaker 4: soft fabric of these of these robes was just absolutely wonderful,
Speaker 4: and you just feel you, why don't we wear this
Speaker 4: all the time? I wish I had sheets like that.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing, folks, with spring right around the corner,
Speaker 4: the bitter cold of winter hangs stubbornly.
Speaker 1: Literally the greatest transition I've heard. I'm so overwhelmed with
Speaker 1: the fractal perfection of this transition that I it's almost mystical.
Speaker 3: Mystical.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm just I'm just saying. We have a we
Speaker 4: have a seminary student here, a man studying the divinity,
Speaker 4: studying the resurrection, and and just said that was the
Speaker 4: greatest transit transition. I think there are other bigger ones
Speaker 4: on history. Robin maybe become a configuration.
Speaker 1: I just said transition. Anyway, put it that way.
Speaker 4: Oh good lord, reset record, scratch, starting again. We are
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Speaker 4: I hate to say this, but Rob, you have been
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Speaker 4: a post purchase survey, let him know where you came from.
Speaker 4: Cozy the Earth. We thank Cozy Earth responsing this the
Speaker 4: Ricochet podcast a few minutes before we got a role here. Gentlemen,
Speaker 4: I have to have to have my lunch and then
Speaker 4: I have ten thousand errands to do. Sounds like good
Speaker 4: proclaimer song. But so we have upcoming German parliamentary elections
Speaker 4: and according to Reddit, we got Nazis. The Nazis might win,
Speaker 4: the Nazis to the Nazis might come in second.
Speaker 1: Well well yeah, I mean it's always been the fear right.
Speaker 1: I mean it's very strange that the country itself has
Speaker 1: been what it's been since nineteen forty six, right most
Speaker 1: of Europe. Frankly, let's be honest, when whenever the conservative
Speaker 1: wins in a European election, every one in the United
Speaker 1: States reminds everybody, well, when they say conservative, they still
Speaker 1: mean socialist. It is about time. I mean, there is
Speaker 1: this probably an idea. I don't know whether it's going
Speaker 1: to turn out okay. It has never turned out okay
Speaker 1: up till now, so maybe you know, nineteenth time is
Speaker 1: the charm. But a certain amount of sort of from
Speaker 1: from that big center part of Central Europe national identity
Speaker 1: and national pride, which you're very very very very ginger
Speaker 1: things to think about when it comes to the German Republic.
Speaker 1: But it does seem to me that it is time
Speaker 1: for European nations to think of what it is, what
Speaker 1: it means to be a European, what it means to
Speaker 1: be a nation, and those are two different things. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the changes. Yeah, the vast changes culturally in that
Speaker 1: part of Europe from immigration really more than any thing else.
Speaker 1: They were never going to go easily. And what you
Speaker 1: what you don't want to do is is ignore it
Speaker 1: and then it leaps out inappropriately, or it leaps out
Speaker 1: in the historical historical president. So I suspect that there'll
Speaker 1: be a lot of screaming and yelling at Henry in
Speaker 1: certain the obvious places about the outcome of the German election.
Speaker 1: But I suspect that we were in Germany the people
Speaker 1: who voted in that if they do in fact vote
Speaker 1: in that, you know they do vote for that, that
Speaker 1: party will won't won't sound like Nazis to us. They'll
Speaker 1: sound like dudes from Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: Look, I mean, I I think we should not be
Speaker 2: trusting the same people who called Trump a Nazi to
Speaker 2: say that AfD is purely a Nazi party.
Speaker 3: I think they do have a few bad.
Speaker 2: Actors, and that friends of mine in Europe say, look,
Speaker 2: they do have some problems that could clean house more
Speaker 2: than they have so far. However, I have thought that
Speaker 2: the party was probably underpolling, and I was predicting here
Speaker 2: the last few weeks that AfD might well win the
Speaker 2: most votes, which will cause a political crisis in Germany
Speaker 2: that they richly deserve. For reasons you just stated, Rob,
Speaker 2: I do I'm now equivocating a bit because I think
Speaker 2: it's possible that Vance's speech a week ago, which I loved,
Speaker 2: by the way, but I could see it backfiring. I
Speaker 2: could see a certain amount of undecided Germans who might
Speaker 2: be fed up with all the violence to keep getting
Speaker 2: from their immigrants. Their migrants would have voted for AfD,
Speaker 2: but now may vote against them because of their latent
Speaker 2: anti Americanism. So it's possible that speech may have backfired
Speaker 2: at least for this election.
Speaker 3: But I think I'm with you, Rob.
Speaker 2: I think the continual exclusion of you know this is
Speaker 2: a fifth of the country or more is going to
Speaker 2: say we are fed up with this, and for all
Speaker 2: the other parties to say no, we won't talk to
Speaker 2: you is just simply unacceptable.
Speaker 1: I agree, And I'll also feel like the rule of
Speaker 1: thumb is in general, and it isn't just Jade Vance,
Speaker 1: it isn't just the current administration. American politicians should stay
Speaker 1: out of European policyolitics and shut up because there's always
Speaker 1: that European contrarianism which comes from being a client state,
Speaker 1: essentially that you know this, you you can't tell me nothing,
Speaker 1: and it's better that we just let them discover on
Speaker 1: their own that it's a good thing to it. It's
Speaker 1: not necessarily a good thing for all of Germany to
Speaker 1: suddenly speak Turkish.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, they will not discover it on their own
Speaker 4: because they have an entire overclass that's designed to keeping
Speaker 4: that information and that revelation from being enshrined in the
Speaker 4: general in general wisdom. They won't. I mean, when you
Speaker 4: said before they need to start thinking of themselves as Europeans,
Speaker 4: and then you add a nationalist, I mean, that's the problem,
Speaker 4: that's the division. There is no we know, we all
Speaker 4: see where nationalism got us. So let's have this pan
Speaker 4: European transnational identity. And it ain't going to work because
Speaker 4: people still like to have their folk ways and their
Speaker 4: culture and their language and the rest of it. And
Speaker 4: then within that national quality to hate the people on
Speaker 4: the other side of the country for different reasons, you know,
Speaker 4: and so forth, down to the sub atomic level. We
Speaker 4: are done. Ross's book was great. We want you to
Speaker 4: buy it. We want you ricochet dot com and discuss it.
Speaker 4: And if you're thinking, wait a minute, isn't that some
Speaker 4: kind of just civil cyvile center right political thing. No,
Speaker 4: it's the place where people will have an animalst comment
Speaker 4: thread discussing theology in interesting ways. So yes, Ricochet is
Speaker 4: all things under the sun, and you really got to
Speaker 4: go there. You can read it for free, but the
Speaker 4: membership where the friendship's form and the interesting conversations happened
Speaker 4: a couple of shekels a month, So go there. Rob
Speaker 4: has been great to have you back, Steven and WELLI
Speaker 4: we would like everybody, of course to buy Cozzy Earth
Speaker 4: sheets because that thanks them and you get great sheets
Speaker 4: and find some place to leave us A review couldn't hurt.
Speaker 4: What's stopping you?
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: All I know is this has been the Ricochet podcast.
Speaker 4: We got another coming up right next week. But until
Speaker 4: then we'll see everybody in the comments, said Ricochet four point.
Speaker 1: Zero sells Ricochet. Ye join the conversation.