Transcript

(376) What Is Religion? - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFRPA7P1L8

Transcript:

(00:01) greetings and welcome to our center place history theology and philosophy lecture series if you um are new to this channel and you like this video invite you to press like on the video and also subscribe to the channel we regularly explore a wide variety of topics in the field of history theology philosophy including christianity paganism world religions uh history the middle ages all kinds of different topics you can view our complete library of lectures at centerplace.

(00:42) ca lectures and there's now over 100 lectures that are actually on there we do mention our last our lectures are listener supported if you would like to make a contribution uh in support of these so that we can continue to emphasize this and do more of them those are actually tax adjustable in the united states and canada and you can make if you make your donation at centerplace.

(01:11) ca donate you can also donate by facebook or or youtube but it doesn't work the same way so in that case it's not a tax deductible donation um we do have a whole bunch of lectures that are upcoming we've published our calendar all the way out through the end of the first quarter and so on thursday at this time we're having a companion lecture this is actually one that was given a couple years ago when we were able to hold in-person lectures here at center place and that's on the topic what is spirituality in some ways that's going to dovetail

(01:46) very nicely with our theme tonight our question what is religion next week our next live lecture is going to be kind of a follow-up on um lecture we gave a month ago on the historical jesus we're going to focus specifically on what we can say about jesus jewish roots so the context of judaism of the second temple period in galilee at the time when jesus of nazareth would have been active and so hopefully that will also be pretty interesting for everyone so we're not have able to have in-person events because of uh covet 19 and as we're still working to stop the spread of of

(02:32) infections and so forth nevertheless tonight is we're doing this live and it is an interactive presentation so if you post your comments and questions uh in the youtube and facebook chats um leandro is monitoring both of those it's actually a lot that the chats have been very active and so it's not the easiest thing for him to do but he's trying to keep track and uh and he'll send those on to me and we'll respond at the end of the main lecture uh to those and have we've been having some pretty good dialogue at the end of these and so i look forward to your comments and your

(03:05) questions and so forth our topic tonight is what is religion so it's pretty pretty broad topic not a small topic and in some ways maybe we think well this is kind of a maybe an obvious question we maybe already have an idea of what religion is and so on and can point to some religions and say we know what this what what this is so what could this uh lecture be about i can say the question may seem self-evident both to people who understand themselves to be followers or adherents of a religion as well as people who imagine that they

(03:44) are not religious or who define themselves as not religious but we want to look at what this word means or what this where this word comes from and what is actually meant when we talk about religion as a in a much more general sense by analogy as another thing that hasn't always been easy to identify or define but as easy to identify but not defined on the topic of pornography when the u.

(04:14) s supreme court justice pyre stewart was judging an obscenity case in 1964 he sort of famously declared quote i shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material that i understand to be embraced within that shorthand description in other words pornography and perhaps i could never succeed in intelligibly doing so so in other words i'm not going to be able to define this better but he says i know it when i see it and the motion picture involved in this case is not that so in other words he has a kind of a idiosyncratic

(04:51) definition of of this concept he knows it when he sees it and so maybe many of us may also feel we know religion when we see it so knowing religion without defining it um it may well be that we have an idea of what religion is without actually in our own for our own selves defining the term with any kind of precision so for example when we're thinking about what constitutes a religion and so one of the apparent characteristics we probably would go to right away is let's say sharing beliefs especially some kind of belief in either a god or a gods group of gods or at least maybe

(05:33) some kind of supernatural beings angels spirits forces of nature or something like that in other words sharing kind of a beliefs in the transcendent or supernatural or something like that we probably can point on the landscape to religions as building sacred spaces whether they called churches or mosques or synagogues or temples or whatever they might be called depending on the religion we might be thinking well okay religions perform various kinds of rituals doing things like prayer or meditation or giving sermons

(06:12) having big festivals together maybe doing things like performing ritual sacrifices also life events so things like marriages funerals baby blessings coming of age uh types of rituals we probably would point to the idea of like a reverence for holy books especially often ancient texts uh where where that religion depending on how old the religion is as their text where individuals who are adherents to that religion get meaning about how to live a moral life and maybe also ideas about the meaning of life that informs them those texts

(06:54) and so in addition to those kind of like a shorthand of maybe characteristics that we think of offhand when we're thinking about religions we also can probably list a large number of things that we also identify as religions so it's the other other way of finding out the definition but rather a set and the different subsets your units within that set so for example the abrahamic religions judaism christianity and islam are of course the most familiar in the west but beyond those abrahamic religions even if you live in the west here like in canada you'd be very aware of

(07:33) religions from india like hinduism and sikhism um also also from india originally is buddhism but of course that has also traveled all around the world especially the east and other eastern religions like taoism we're also familiar here in canada that first nations people indigenous peoples have traditions that fall into the category of religion so first nation spirituality first nations religious traditions and we're probably aware that there are some like new religions that have been founded in the relatively recent past even within people's life's time still depending on

(08:16) how old you are and those nevertheless fill that kind of category when we think of what religions are we're also perhaps aware of religions from the past and in this particularly here in the western tradition we're aware of religions in the western past that are now extinct albeit there are modern revivals of all of these um all of these religions so for example the old religions of the gods of ancient greece and rome we now call this paganism but it wasn't called paganism at the time likewise the religion of ancient egypt

(08:58) the religion of the vikings norse gods and so forth and we may be fairly aware even of uh greek roman egyptian and viking norse uh pantheons as they continue to have informed like popular characters in our culture today like thor and odin and and and so far hercules and so forth um we have a whole lecture actually on untangling uh greek and roman paganism and it's and especially greek and roman mythology and that's kind of i point you to that as an interesting topic okay so we have that we have this kind of general sense of what a religion is and we have this list of things we

(09:43) consider to be religions and so what's the problem you know why is it when we say what is religion why is it that there is actually no scholarly consensus on a definition for that term that seems like pretty crazy in fact that that would be the case it's not that there's no definition of the word religion there's too many definitions of the word religion and depending on uh anyway not all these definitions are they're not all mutually inclusive they're exclusive of each other and so i'm going to say and i suggest and what we're going to kind of cover in this lecture

(10:21) that the reason why we have this problem is that the very idea of religion as a broad category is itself a modern construct and in fact it's a construct that was formulated by thinkers in the west in the early modern time periods of 16 1700s and so forth when they were far less aware of all of the other religions of the world and were mostly in fact when they were defining religion they were thinking in terms of christianity especially but also christianity's near neighbor judaism and islam and and so they were kind of you know anyway less aware of those two the people who

(11:03) are defining this and so the construct is especially based on this context and it's less meaningful when we get anywhere outside of the immediate context of abrahamic religions in the modern era okay so as religious studies has emerged as an academic discipline scholars have concluded in fact that most of the world's religions present and past don't neatly fit into this kind of construct this thumbnail that i drew painted with you at the beginning of the lecture here so for example it's completely possible we decided as our first thing believing in god or gods or the divine

(11:47) or something like that is really central to the idea of religion maybe but there are religions for which belief in god or gods is essentially irrelevant and so that's true in most of buddhism there are forms of buddhism where they do or do pay attention to gods and so forth but the gods in kind of mainline and early buddhism are understood to be subject to the same cycle of samsara which is to say birth and reincarnation and being kind of trapped in this uh recurring wheel of uh of suffering until you finally achieve enlightenment and get break free of it the gods maybe are in a little better place or so forth on that cycle

(12:29) but um and nevertheless are not in charge of that cycle so it's not the god that is one of the gods that is the creator or something like that the system uh exists you know and their gods are just simply in it and subject to it so even though though buddhism is considered you know is not theistic or not worried about theism it's still nevertheless considered to be the world's fourth largest religion with some you know 520 million adherents so seven percent of the global population so some people have commented including um on uh on the channel in the comments here

(13:06) they'll say well wait a second buddhism that that's be as a result of that that means buddhism isn't a religion it's a philosophy so they don't have any interest in god or gods and so that causes some western people to argue wait a second that doesn't fit my definition of what religion is and so now i'm thinking well maybe buddhism is not a religion maybe it's a philosophy although by the way you don't have to a philosophy doesn't have to not you know be non-theistic philosophies can also be theistic too but anyway it

(13:36) doesn't that's not necessarily where the breakdown is between religion and philosophy in buddhist majority countries i'm going to suggest buddhism fills an environmental niche that overlaps significantly with the role of christianity in christian countries and so in other words regular everyday people are busy focusing on you know living rituals within their uh their traditional societies and so forth that are all infused with and informed by buddhism and they are doing that regardless of whether or not they you know have any particular philosophical training the same way that in

(14:12) you know christian you know like a christian village somewhere um in the developing world people wouldn't uh you know aren't necessarily uh philosophically trained either in other words they are they're doing um you know lived components of of this religion okay i'm going to point out actually that in addition um there's like a lot of confusion over chinese religion so chinese religion defies easy categorization at all so on the mainland china um there they've been 70 years of communism which is is nominally atheists and so people makes people wonder well does that mean that uh chinese the chinese people are simply

(14:55) non-religious and so i pulled this as a map of um of the world's religions our majority of majority religion each place or plurality lit religion in each place and you kind of see green there for islam and yellow for hinduism and pink for protestants and red for catholics and kind of brown red for orthodox and so forth and then there's this huge big swash here of gray which is um labeled here no religion and that's covering you know most of china there's some little parts of china that are being uh you

(15:28) know being listed here as different kinds of buddhism and so forth but here's another map that i also pulled off the internet you know it's a simpler map but anyway it's doing the same kind of things and so in this case instead of having a big gray area for no religion china has its own color and it's being called here chinese religion um you know whether or not anyway this isn't necessarily a good map i'm not speaking for and about of any of these maps so but the question here is are chinese people not religious or are they have their own kind of folk religion or popular

(16:03) religion that includes traditional chinese folk practices and so forth with elements of confucianism taoism buddhism etc so just if we do a little bit of a look into it there was a study by purdue university in 2010 that found that 56 percent of adults on the mainland china practice some kind of ancestor religion so um you know reverence for the ancestors you know going to uh grades and things like this uh or where there's memorials and in china itself peking university in 2012 found that only six percent of chinese people identify as atheists and that some 80 percent practice some kind of

(16:47) chinese folk or popular religion including you know worship of various gods and or veneration of forces so pretty widespread um practices that don't necessarily seem like they're not religious or no religion anyway so the question on this first map is should this area here all be the same kind of color gray so in other words is what people doing or people are doing in the countryside of china um kind of the same as the sort of post um this eastern european so it's like czech and east german uh post-communist

(17:28) uh post-religion post-christian uh system that must be that might be happening there that might actually be be described as no religion so is that all all the same in that way so um i want to talk a little bit about um you know the kind of study of world religions and how we compare world religions comparative religions for over 20 years here in toronto um center place the congregation and also our denomination have sponsored a charity called the encounter world religions center uh where people come to toronto to learn about and study about uh world religions academically

(18:09) and then um when they during the discovery week that we go on and go to the various places of worship and meet the local adherents in that place of worship so excuse me for example here uh you know people from the encounter discovery week group uh meeting with the leader of the local krishna temple so when we did this a few years ago one of the places we went was to a first nations lodge uh spiritual sp center uh in downtown toronto where we got to talk to um this particular elder uh first nations elder and and in him telling us about native spirituality

(18:57) he told about his own personal story about trying to his own efforts and his own work at trying to recover the religion of his ancestors and he told of how he had gone to all of the elders of his own nation and then also to elders of other first nations and each time he asked them what was a word for religion in their own language how do they how do they say religion in you know uh ojibwe or whatever the different languages all of the different languages with he's asking each elder and again and again he would be told you know our our language doesn't have a word for religion there's no such word

(19:40) uh as for as religion in our tongue but he went on to say that that doesn't mean that that's because uh first nations people uh were not religious that the first nations people were not spiritual uh the fact that they didn't have a word for it you know is not the same as saying that they weren't religious rather it meant that the peoples did not have a conceptually separate i'm sorry they did not conceptually separate religion from the rest of their lives so everything um the people would do from when they went fishing to when they were

(20:18) planting to weaving to any social practice was always intertwined with traditional spiritual practices and they've tried to go back to doing things like that where they're doing everyday life practices very intentionally and accompanied by recovered rituals and so forth so the conclusion here was that it was only after european colonization that natives had their own kind of holistic traditions conceptually separated so european settlers drew a circle around things that they privileged so things um that they considered to be what religion was which is to say native beliefs

(21:06) especially native ideas about spirits and the supernatural those especially counted as religion the natives oral traditions kind of storytelling that they had about the origin of the world or origin of the tribe and so forth that were that uh europeans categorized as mythology in other words they saw that as religious so different rituals that were done those seem to be religious those all as far as the settlers were concerned those all counted as religion and got lumped together and divided off from other practices like farming or whatever that

(21:38) didn't seem religious that just seemed like what people do right and so those other some components were labeled as from the native tradition were labeled as religious when contact happened first language nations languages are not alone what the uh the elder who went around and asked all of the uh elders in uh in native tongues for a word for religion they would have found actually if he went further afield um prior to the modern times uh there were very few words that you know are directly equivalent probably nothing

(22:14) that was directly equivalent to the word religion so for example if we go to biblical hebrew the old testament there's no word that means religion per se nor in the quran the arabic of the quran is there such a word even english lacked a word that means religion prior to the 16th and 17th centuries so english had the word religious and religion those are both words that came to english via latin and french but it had a different meaning prior to modern times so in ancient and there's no ancient english but anyway in medieval english the word would have meant uh the word

(22:56) religious would have meant to somebody uh belonging to a religious order so if you say you were religious that would mean you or you had religion that would mean that you have taken a vow and become a monk or a friar or a nun or something like that so that's what's the word initially meant this new meaning that we have for it when we say religion now this is a new concept or a new definition that got attached to the word in modern times okay but if we look back at the source word religio from latin the romans used the latin word religio broadly to mean

(23:33) duty conscientiousness your obligations all of the things you had to do and you were expected of you by by society by community by your family and and yes also by the gods it's all intermixed together but it wasn't used for example to refer to what we let me say doctrines so as if let's say paganism had a bunch of creeds that you had to memorize or something like that it wasn't used to refer to pouring over sacred texts and it wasn't used to um talk about you know needing to believe in the gods or your belief in the gods and so forth it's more about again your whole

(24:14) duty and obligation and so forth uh moral consciousness that kind of thing that are that were that would have how the term would have originally been met and traditional roman religion like i say what we now call paganism was all-encompassing and it involved everything from your house so you would have your own household gods that refer you know again uh veneration of ancestors and this sort of thing uh your house would have had um you know when you had a threshold and a lintel there's a lintel god as you cross

(24:46) when you cross a door frame that's when there's potential harm can always happen and so you have to be mindful of that your job so whether you were a farmer or a sailor or a merchant they would all have again patrons patron gods and also uh rituals of how you have to perform every part of your job and even everything to do with recreation also follows into religion and so it's even though we are maybe aware of greek and roman temples greek and roman religion was certainly not contained and confined with just those temples it was everywhere

(25:24) the old religions also were not focused on for example belief in jupiter and the other gods nor on studying religious texts about the god's activities or their teachings a lot of times maybe as a teenager you might have read greek and roman mythology and the gods are doing all these embarrassing things you wonder how could anybody ever believe in this stuff and this kind of a thing and that simply was not uh the focus of the religion and that's not um how the the stories that not how the stories were met they're not meant i mean they

(25:56) did understand them as being about people and uh in other words beings that actually existed and things that they likely did but that wasn't the point of the story so it wasn't historicity focused or literal focused in that way i keep saying paganism so so pagan um the word was not a word that was used in ant you know in ancient times it began to acquire its meanings after the mid-fourth century after christianity had taken over and won and become the state religion of the roman empire so either the word there's two different

(26:29) possibilities of what the word pagan which originally means paganis which is to say a town out in the hinterland so or or a person from the countryside and so initially so the word could mean that it's a disparaging word that could mean a hick you know somebody who hasn't caught up with um uh the way civilization now is being done in the cities where everybody's become a christian or it's alternatively because the people were outside the bounds or the paganis of the christian community but it's probably the other one but anyway like i say pagan isn't a word

(27:02) that pagans chose for themselves it's just our modern word and our modern alternative like we might sometimes say poly atheists which is to say people who believe in multiple gods they still wouldn't have said that back then because they didn't think of the polytheism is only a term in opposition to monotheism you know and so it's only when monotheists define that as what religion is that that polytheists get defined in opposition in other words to monotheism so um christianity spread largely as an urban phenomenon like i say and so um when

(27:40) christianity became the uh religion of the roman empire in the fourth century temples in the cities were destroyed they were repurposed as churches the old religion was increasingly relegated to that rural peasantry the pagani in latin this is a picture of the temple of athena in syracuse and sicily and you can see the columns are still there from the old greek temple and then it's inter-built with walls and it's now become a christian cathedral it actually also became a mosque when it was taken over and then it went back to being a uh

(28:13) what went to being a latin cathedral at that point after that so so like i say the classical literature survived and so much of our exposure in modern times is to greek mythology even roman mythology and so we're probably aware of the systematized pantheons so we think of zeus who is jupiter athena's minerva etc and we have like i say a lecture on that topic literature survives unlike the unlived ex i'm sorry the lived experience of the non-literate masses and so we tend to focus on the mythology and also because

(28:52) christians and jews and muslims focus on texts scripture and on correct teaching that's one of the reasons why i think we continue to think of paganism through the through the mythology and through the text nevertheless lived paganism was much more than the mythology or worrying about the creek the pantheon the gods and so forth um syncretism allowed pagans to get along with a shared worldview but actually the individual practices were highly localized and so um anyway so romans would have seen their god jupiter as being the same as the uh the greek god zeus but um he's worshipped as jupiter

(29:34) on uh the capitoline hill in rome in a very specific way so jupiter may have been understood to be zeus talking to when talking to the greeks but like i say his worship in rome was particular roman paganism was primarily about ritual observances not doctrine it was performed very legalistically as a contract between the divine forces and humans so the roman formula uh to describe this is do it days i give in order that you might give in other words so the romans do something in order to propitiate the gods and get something

(30:08) back from the gods and so for example in an animal sacrifice but it also would refer to just all the comprehensive rituals that accompany lived activity so also back then romans had no concept of the separation of church and state so the state was intimately connected with religious ritual activity the republic its assemblies officers they were all sacred the politicians filled the public priesthoods and so for example uh julius caesar in addition to being you know later the dictator and so on he was elected pontifex maximus which is to say chief priest of the college of pontiffs

(30:45) prior to when he became consul all time and space the calendar the sacred boundaries of rome everything were governed by pagan religious observance we can have here um if emperor augustus he's wearing a toga and that's what you would have as your as your civic clothes but then if you put the thing up over your head like this then suddenly you're a priest and so that's how that's how intertwined uh uh religion and the state totally were and everything else in in roman paganism um just as an example of how all

(31:23) encompassing this is i have a couple quotes that i have from uh pliny the elder who was um roman noble nobleman gentleman scientist uh who got himself killed while he was uh observing the eruption of vesuvius anyway he writes before that time he wrote when we are at table it is the universal practice we see to take the ring uh from off ring from off the finger in other words you don't want to sit down and wear rings at the table you got to take your ring off another person again will take some spittle from his mouth and place it with his finger behind his ear to propitiate

(32:01) and modify the disquiet to disquiet of mine when we mind when we wish to signify applause we have a proverb even which tells us that we should press the thumbs to salute summer lightning with the clapping of hands is the universal practice with all nations he asserts if when eating we happen to make mention of a fire that has happened we avert the inauspicious omen by pouring water beneath the table so you're talking about like uh throwing salt over your shoulder and so forth if you accidentally if you mentioned that there's been a fire somewhere you have to pour a little

(32:37) water to prevent there from being a fire here too right or or in other words a bad omen these usages have been established by persons who entertained a belief that the gods are ever present in our affairs and at all hours and who have therefore found the means of appeasing them even uh by our vices even so this is the kind of thing where you can actually kind of see what um living paganism was like there's a lot of these things that we think of and they go across your fingers and so forth the kind of things that are still maintained a little bit but um

(33:09) were omnipresent in the past um it was also really important for roman paganism anyway uh to get things legalistically and done exactly right so in terms of a correct ritual pliny said is a general belief that without a certain form of prayer it would be useless to immolate a sacrificial victim so if you're going to go do a sacrifice and you don't do a precise prayer that's just useless that you're even doing it and that with such an informality the gods would be consulted to little purpose and then besides there are different forms of address to the deities one form for

(33:47) entreating another form for averting their ire another for commendation we see too how our supreme magistrates use certain formula for their prayers that not a single word may be omitted or pronounced out of place so very everything has to be done in exactly a way in such in such a way in roman paganism we are told he says that king told us hostilius while attempting in accordance with the books of pneuma to summon jupiter from heaven by means of a sacrifice similar to that employed by pneuma that hostilius was struck by lightning in consequence of his admission to

(34:25) follow certain forms with due exactness so it's a dangerous thing to not do this exactly right as far as the pagans were concerned pagan religion okay so as irreligious as gladiator battles for example may seem to us today all roman games and sports and so forth were conducted as part of religious festivals as were chariot races even plays dramas including comedy and so forth these were all done as part of religious festivals and so forth so just in some in terms of roman paganism um we've said this before we

(35:03) did a lecture on on paganism but there are um a huge number of components of it that don't easily fit with what we now think of when we draw a circle around religion so there's these personal rituals like saying you know goes in tight so forth uh there's living dutifully to your family there's reverence for your ancestors obedience to sacred civic law expiation for ill omens offering sacrifices to the gods consulting auspices or oracles about what's going to happen in the future praying to the gods reverence for cult objects like statues

(35:39) civic rights having assemblies parades and so forth initiation into uh cult shrines so if you are part of let's say um a local um like a local bar association where you go to drink that's also like a it's like your elks club but it's also a local shrine to a certain god and so forth military confraternity membership participation in civic festivals hearing myths and poetry concern for things like astrology participation in markets so when you go to market and so forth that's also the market as a religious place

(36:18) and it can only be done on religious certain religious days and it can't be done on non-religious days and so forth watching the games or holding games watching or throwing and performing plays studying philosophy ethics in terms of dealing with others and also your personal morality and austerity and so forth so it is a vast um you know like i say all-encompassing holistic thing uh roman religion of which now when we talk about what religion is you'd only draw around to some of those things we don't right now usually think of

(36:53) you know watching sports necessarily as being religious because that's not what we now how we define it now so the modern construct of religion so since ancient religions and non-western practices from china to indigenous peoples those all are or were all encompassing things we know where did we get the idea that you could draw a circle around a subset of those activities and call it religion while labeling everything else outside of that circle as secular or non-religious and so forth and and as is almost always the case you

(37:30) know when you have an idea where does the idea come from the idea come from the immediate historical context of when the idea arose and so we'll look at that and where that came from so um just as a you know brief way of background to get from roman paganism to that time period when the idea of religion modern idea of religion emerges so christianity as i mentioned became rome's state religion in the fourth century and when that happened though um the religion continued to be fully intertwined with the state so constantine the emperor constantine is

(38:05) the first christian emperor he uh calls a council of all the bishops he presides over that council uh the emperors who follow him generations later emperor theodosius who makes it the state religion the emperor is a point uh often the popes they appoint certainly the patriarch of constantinople where the new capital is the new christian rome uh and the state especially in the east where the emperors are you know the church is fully subordinated to and uh and uh church bishops become um roman imperial officers and so forth

(38:43) um in the west so when the western empire falls and there ceases to be a western emperor hanging out in rome with the bishop of rome and the popes the institutions of the church began to diverge a little bit from the institutions of the state because germanic tribes replaced the roman military and german nobles and leaders uh set up kingdoms and became kind of the secular leaders or let's say the state leaders while meanwhile the roman nobles and bishops and language and learning in schools and so forth retreated into the monasteries and also the schools and the institutions of the

(39:27) church and so in some sense in the west one of the things happens is that there starts to be institutions of state and church while still working very very closely together nevertheless being slightly autonomous of each other because of this moment in history with the barbarian invasions which again separates kind of the the roman institutions that survive which become the church as opposed to the military institutions which are the uh the german state all right so fast forward to the end of the middle age or through the middle ages so in the central middle ages uh reformers like for example the

(40:08) gregorian reform papacy uh in the middle ages fought with some success to free church institutions um whether they be monasteries or the bishoprics or the papacy itself from secular control so one of the big fights in the middle ages was whether or not um kings and emperors got to pick who was bishop or not or whether um the the local chapters of the local monks or whoever could pick who the bishop was the kings didn't like it that to happen because then the bishop would be very independent as opposed to if the

(40:42) if you got to pick and reward the person who had been like say your your favorite clerk your favorite um priest who was the court priest if you could say oh well now you're going to get to be archbishop of canterbury and you can support me that was obviously something that the kings wanted to have so like i say there was a an idea that the church had the church wanted to be free of secular control but never really achieved that in the middle ages um but nevertheless it was kind of on the table and those uh the idea of a

(41:14) separation of church and state had started to emerge but it's only with the split of the church when the church itself splits apart during the protestant reformation in the 1500s that we really start to get this new idea of what we now have as this concept of religion when that started to get to be framed by the protestants specifically so so protestants as they emerged and as they were trying to define who they were and what it meant to be a protestant christian and as a distinction from uh the christians that they were that

(41:50) were not protestant that were not reformed um they started to come up with an idea of also then what religion is in general or define that too so it's first framed in order to create this protestant identity and to cut that identity off from the west the rest of western latin christian identity which in the counter reformation we started saying it is now going to be called catholic i mean it always been everybody had always been catholic in latin and so forth before that now catholic means specifically the

(42:23) non-protestants and uh thus was also in when they in coming up with the idea of religion though in order to create their own identity the idea of religion was of course inclusive of all the things that protestants considered important to religion so above all protestants are focused on text so sacred text the bible that is obviously the most important thing about a religion and so um and so even for example when when protestants in england in the imperial age came to india and started colonizing india they went and looked at um what we now call hindus that word had never been applied to hinduism as a

(43:01) religion or anything like that hadn't it's just people in india and they looked at hinduism and went and privileged texts because these early texts and sacred texts that must be the basis for hinduism as the imperials now named it because that's how they understood what their religion is uh it doesn't matter if maybe hinduism wasn't as focused on text as protestants had been and so forth okay so text also correct teaching and above all preaching so protestants were very interested in having a religion about the head instead of so much about the heart initially

(43:37) especially so doctrine sermons and so forth and that included beliefs and especially belief in and also your personal relationship with god those are all part of religion because that's part of protestantism but of course as the protestants were also framing what religion is they also used that framework to include the qualities of their rivals the other and the rather became obviously the catholics and so these are all the things that protestants then consider to be kind of bad parts of religion and just to say you know excessive viewing of like

(44:10) rituals as having sacred importance um venerating things like relics so if a saint has left um bones or or some like somebody's some important some saint mary's scarf or something like that whatever it is uh venerating that relic as a way of being close to the saint and then also maybe praying to a deceased saint who is in heaven for intercession with god or something like that those are all part of religion for protestants but not part of good religion these are things that would define you as being catholic and therefore not good according to again

(44:46) like i say this protestant framework um you know spending a bunch of time on things like religious festivals which protestants saw as just holdovers from paganism and also focuses on um monasticism asceticism so um clergy that is a priesthood that is very removed by doing things like um you know celibacy and so on in other words removing yourself from uh from the regular lay people and so forth so that's also religion but not good religion according to the protestants so this original framing then that comes out of this idea that religion and a dotted line

(45:26) and a model that's dividing it off from not religion it didn't begin really merely to divide religion from non-religion it was created kind of as a protestant lens to divide good religion from bad religion and then inadvertently divide all religion from non-religion and so catholics and then protestants were also aware of jews and muslims and so obviously those are the other as well and they are also not right from the crop perspective so they can all be lumped together uh with the people who don't get it

(45:58) right so um like i say this framework of having good religion bad religion and then everything that's left out that incidentally and pretty much accidentally cleaved many traditional cultural activities away from religion in the west so you know because there had been this very obvious institution of the church which is reformed now and split into two pieces protestant and catholic things like your job things like the government things like entertainment playing sp going to plays sports you know the storytellers even things like

(46:39) calendar and holidays because again like the protestants are anti-festival and they they don't even let you celebrate christmas initially and this kind of thing um holidays and things like that also you know enter into this kind of not religion area become secular and so forth so um what kind of is the next logical step that grews out of protestantism and grows actually directly out of protestant thought is if you think that um you know rituals and and so on and festivals and and and uh sacraments and

(47:12) things like that are all all need to be deleted because they're all too close to pagan you can just keep deleting until you delete your way out of the whole list so sermons god and so forth and then you get to a logical conclusion that in fact it's actually there's not good and bad religions but in fact everything inside that circle is is bad religion because all religion is bad religion and then what ends up being good is not religion and so that's certainly um a conclusion that many have taken and

(47:42) has been a next logical step that has come out of that original protestant thought and indeed um just in a social historical sense i'd say modern atheism has really grown out of a kind of protestantism and the protestant ideas although obviously atheism is now in a place where anyway atheists certainly don't consider themselves to have a religion they they define their their religion as being not religion if in other words so it's not a religion as far as uh the self-definition so there's some potential dangers uh for

(48:18) that truism so although many westerners today i think the idea that religion is inherently bad i think that that's true there's a lot of people take that as an unexamined truism but i think that what they don't realize is how much that that is based on what to say is a undefined and rather arbitrary concept of what religion is in the first place so not knowing necessarily what religion is in that broad sense this undefinable thing this thing that uh there's no scholarly consensus of what it even means

(48:53) um there could be couple some traps that can fall in so for example nominally secular people in the west can sometimes easily fall into what we might think of as even religious like beliefs or religious like behaviors and maybe some that are even especially naive and potentially harmful so i don't know there's all kinds of memes like this you know about uh you know trust the signs i you know here's that's quoted from the universe so the universe is telling you something so it was potentially nominally non-religious but in a way is it non-religious i don't know so

(49:32) there's a funny um skit that bill nye the science guy has on um amy schumer's show uh where um there are some young women that are in a coffee shop and one of them is essentially telling the other um you know i i was texting while driving and so i took a wrong turn and i went right past this vitamin shop and i feel like the universe is telling me that i should be you know taking a vitamin d supplement and so and so you know again so bill nye's kind of sarcastic um you know quote here that the universe here is essentially a force sending

(50:09) cosmic guidance to white women in their 20s and he then goes on to say how he thinks you know obviously that this is preposterous this kind of um this way you know one of the one of the things that it could be just is effective advertising so you know you're going past vitamin shop ads all the time we're exposed to those multiple times the way advertising works if you see a message you have to see it a dozen times for you to internalize it and you only become aware of it after a certain number of times that you've seen it that's why you get ads again and again and again and that's how it works right so

(50:42) another popular nominally secular idea uh you know that's running around these days is something like manifesting and so for example we had somebody when we had uh um we were doing in-person lectures and in-person meditation here at center place uh we had a guy who was here from he'd come here for i think from alberta saskatchewan and uh alberta so he's here from alberta and um and he was here for like it was going to be for like seven weeks and because he had manifested uh that he was going to um he was gonna make seven million

(51:19) dollars in seven weeks or something like that and so and so he had no no plan there was no money after after uh seven weeks but he manifested it and so he was here in toronto because he was gonna have that seven million dollars you know and so um anyway so people think that that you can have something happen simply by thinking it i think there's there's of course all kinds of real power to ideas there's power in positive thinking you can train something in yourself to be your second nature by by developing good habits and so forth there's all kinds of different ways to um you know do things that are

(51:55) mind over matter style things or or use you know effective philosophical tools or these kind of things but manifesting and having a belief in like this kind of thing that's going to supernaturally happen you get a million dollars or whatever it is um is i would say not not responsible spiritual practice uh it's a way that um nominally non-religious people can actually be kind of superstitious now so um so another sense i would also point out so what is religion another sense is that in some sense that things like the

(52:29) super bowl which about to happen are uh could be considered religion in a way so historically sports were religious as i say the games were um the olympics and so on were religious festivals um and modern sports are still followed religiously there's probably um more people are definitely aware that this game is going to happen than than you know lots of other things that uh that are either going on and they also can include like a lot of superstitions and so there's a lot of people uh right now who i don't know aren't shaving or are wearing certain jerseys or not wearing certain jerseys or they're doing

(53:06) different things because this game is coming or they'll be doing it when the game arrives and then people also continue to do things like even though again this is nominally secular they do things like um practice uh sympathetic magic so for example if there's a a field goal then everybody in the audience will go like this like to make it kind of like you want it you almost by you moving like this is going to make it go into through the whatever the goals and so anyway that's sympathetic magic because your emotion

(53:36) affects the other emotion you think so or whatever you're doing it anyway whether you believe in it or not okay so my diagram here is that there's not necessarily not this is a good religion bad religion but what i would say is that in this area of nominal non-religion then uh these little blocks of superstition and things like that are very much alive and well whether you're nominally not religious or secular or not there's lots of those in fundamentalist religion and even in what i consider to be rational religions lots of people still have unexamined superstitions uh that you

(54:14) know are ongoing and alive and well and so forth that is not a um those are not what the religion is that's not what religion is those are incidental to the religions or not religion one of the things that's another potential danger i think in deconstructing our own western traditional practices and religions um we still have these longings to have meaning people still obviously love the idea of physical magic and so as a result of that not having our own traditions or having gotten rid of our own traditions there's a rise in popularity of various eastern traditional practices eastern religions

(54:57) and so forth and um you know we're more aware these days i think of appropriation you know when people take things something out of context that is meant from somebody else and they're using it uh you know without enough knowledge and to be responsible with it on the one hand um but on the other hand it's also just it even if you do want to use it responsibly with an alien tradition you have to do a lot of study in order to really understand um the context of something going on you know outside of you know you have to really be grounded and so forth so there's nothing inherently wrong with it

(55:32) but you um uh you have anything to do responsibly you have to um put a lot into doing something like that you can do the same kind of cherry picking with our traditions and go back into western tradition and find uh find different practices that you could also exercise responsibly here so one last thing uh danger of the truism that all religion is bad let's say for me anyway is maybe the belief that an important conclusion has been reached as a result of deciding that and that the thinking is done it's the same as thinking that you're done worrying about

(56:11) i don't know life and meaning if you just decide well i don't believe in god and so that's the last i had to think about it well actually that's not though i mean you there's all kinds of other things to think about a lot of other people do certainly lots of atheists are very thoughtful and are our philosophers and are really busily thinking about uh how to live the good life and so on but in some cases when people are coming out of for example a fundamentalist religion they just get to that point where they reject

(56:40) religion whatever that means reject their idea of what god is and then and then the thinking is sometimes done so what i've kind of been asking is where is the forum outside of religion where we in the west can question for example all of the obligations that we sort of are forced to buy into as the default of our nominally post-religious society so we you know go to school we go to we go to colleges we learn all these things we integrate into the economy we become uh great great worker bees for amazon

(57:18) and so forth you know where where do we um where do we question all of these you know where's the forum you know we have our work lives we have our family life where is the quest where's the forum where we're able to um you know challenge all of these kinds of social conventions that we're inheriting and so forth where are we examining those so so i'm going to argue anyway and as i'm talking about religion so we've talked about what is religion and finding that to be you know sort of indefinable nevertheless if we talk about organized religion in

(57:52) the west there is a meaning for that because our idea of religion in some ways has come out of a very specific cultural tradition of organized religions that continue to have a real if declining role in existence in the west so like all human ideas in my view and like all human institutions organized religions don't have to be you know aren't necessarily inherently evil or inherently good but they could be vehicles for good or ill i'm going to use an example here historically black churches in the united states have just been an amazing source for

(58:32) leaders in the civil rights movement and for building black-owned institutions up from the ground because this is a place where historically the community has had control over their own institutions so obviously there's lots of organized religion that is clearly bad so this guy is a televangelist who he's got a bunch of jets and he has to have a bigger jetties telling all of his for-ish followers and so they need to send money and if we need a 45 million jet these jets are too tiny so so organizations i'd say that exists solely for the enrichment uh of leaders those

(59:09) are harmful obviously to the people who are out their own money and who are giving away the what little money they have in order to support these kind of lifestyles and so forth likewise organizations i think that promote kind of like anti-science understandings uh if you're doing that all the time you're young earth creationists and and so forth and you're telling people anyway that i don't know you can also be telling people that blood transfusions are are harmful or any number of these things that can be become a religious doctrine that can um that could be very dangerous

(59:42) for the person's health it could also leave them very ill-equipped for when they encounter a reality-based problem because their worldview is not describing reality as well as a one that is understand within the scientific context and finally organizations that use god's name um to really discriminate against groups so to put down women or to other other minorities lgbt and even racial minorities and so forth those obviously cause direct and indirect harm too it doesn't have to be bad though so i'm going to argue so organized religions are an established form forum for

(1:00:25) charity and community activism you know the little group that we have here at center place it's amazing if you look back over the past half century the kinds of things that a very small group of people have helped launch and take place we talked about that encounter world religion center program which is just you know doing just amazing good work in terms of educating people promoting peace by breaking down barriers of ignorance and misunderstanding and bias we also have founded social housing charity we already operate uh three uh three uh towers that or

(1:01:01) three buildings that um you know help you know with the the basic homelessness problem as it prevents uh some people who would be at risk do mental health issues and other others of of perhaps being homeless who are able to have you know um housing justice the dignity of their own housing and so forth and we're right now about to break ground on a brand new just large new tower that is also going to be a model as being an entirely um uh a green building with cloud and solar cells and so forth it actually it's not only carbon neutral but it actually the concrete is absorbing carbon so we're

(1:01:39) very happy about you know being able to do something with even a small group so we've also shown hopefully with a lecture our lecture series that churches can be a forum for lifelong learning exploring meaningful ideas in an intentional community that is different from your family or workplace network so that's our case for what why we're doing what we're doing and so as we get now to the end of the formal lecture um i want to leave you again with some discussion questions for you to mull over while leandro sends me um some of the questions you've already

(1:02:13) been sending in comments i think we'll probably have a bunch we'll lot of see but i'm not seeing any i mean there's just a few questions okay lots of comments just a few questions so you can add questions um he's going to start sending those to me and my phone uh i'm going to begin by taking a glass of water here and then we're also going to ask these questions so do you have family traditions that some members of your family take almost religiously you know uh i'm sure that might we do in my family so what are some superstitions

(1:02:50) that you've observed outside of organized religion do you have personal individual habits that you always follow but for no particular reason other than that that's what you always do and then finally where do you find meeting in free in life outside of organized religion and who do you share your ideas with so those are just some of the things that i thought of in talking about this topic and we'll talk about some of the other comments you have okay ron wagner asks how many of these pagan rituals were incorporated into christianity um i wonder if some pagan rituals were

(1:03:49) also incorporated into islam and judaism yes absolutely so um almost everything uh almost everything about history is uh you know continuity and in event in innovation and so and almost every time there's something new you also retain what what before and so lots and lots of things that would have been you know roman pagan uh traditions and so forth were taken directly into um into christianity and so um uh well you know we so for example the calendar so the calendar was uh that we have even to this day i mean we still have um you know the names of the gods and

(1:04:32) the days of the week but we also have the names of the gods in the months and the calendar is almost exactly the same calendar as as julius caesar made um so we've done the lecture before on the calendar uh festivals holidays you know so there's so many of the um so many of the uh christian holidays are are kind of pasted on top of um on top of existing pagan holidays and so we've done a bunch of lectures where we talked about that but you know the idea is you know like valentine's day is around the same time as lupercalia christmas is around the same time as saturnalia the um

(1:05:08) easter is the same time in the uh spring equinox of of of any number of um pagan rituals about uh you know rebirth and so again with the resurrection and so on this is the rebirth of the year that happens and i mean you know we the reason we have easter eggs and things like that is it's uh eggs are a sign of renewal and rebirth and so on fertility symbol so um so it's plentiful i don't know how these things were how we're incorporated and just more than that even um so bob garrison says so the separation of church and state is basically uh an american idea so

(1:05:47) it's it actually um actually gets going really seriously in america maybe it's one of the first times and so very early on the um the people on rhode island especially we talked about how for example the people in massachusetts when they came across they did not believe in the separation of church and state and they did not believe in freedom of religion they believed in making everybody be a puritan and if you weren't a puritan you got kicked out and you had to go live in rhode island well rhode island took it pretty seriously the other way about the idea of a kind of a separation of church

(1:06:21) and state which is freedom of religion freedom of religion means separation of church and state a lot of people now in the us don't understand that anymore and they think that freedom of religion is making their kind of evangelical christianity a state religion that is privileged above all other religions that's not freedom of religion that's state religion so anyway it's not it's so anyway freedom of religion is is toleration and so as a result of that um there was even early jewish settlements in the um americas because of uh there's a lot of persecution of of

(1:06:52) jews all the way up into obviously the holocaust and so forth and and beyond uh and and so uh that's one of the reasons why um the new world became you know one of the two centers of judaism um in terms of it being an american idea so what ends up happening is after the wars of religion in europe um there is a uh an understanding that they are not going to be able to make everybody either protestant or catholic the two sides are too um too equal to um to conquer one or the other and so eventually that allows for

(1:07:30) um the idea of religious pluralism uh which is an is which is to say you're allowed to be a different religion than what you the country you live in so so it takes a long time but um but it eventually evolved so it's not only in the us but that's where kind of the idea comes from so um daryl scott i find it kind of horrifying how many people are okay with the destruction of the self most religions and philosophies see this as a good thing though they differ in exactly how it happens so yeah it depends on how we're looking at that so

(1:08:07) so if that's um so in a lot of cases um it depends on what you mean by destruction of the self or or um maybe which means to say here is um if it depends on how your so if you have a very strong sense of what individual self should be then you're especially for example not going to uh you know want to be muslim which the whole idea means person who is who is subject to god right somebody who is acknowledging a higher power that has is really the force behind everything um and so um and so in that sense um

(1:08:47) you know religion in a sense of like our church community of christ is the idea of of community is that that in other words our you know itself um as a group of selves we we exist and our self is actually created in community we are our uh community-based beings and um uh social animals political animals as aristotle would say and that we only really ourself is only really informed and actually created in in concert and in community with others and we feel that we have obligation to those communities and to try to make those communities um better than rather than lesser

(1:09:29) and but if that's if that idea that you have to be part of a community is a destruction of self that's not as self-focused maybe an idea of self and community as as others um center place in the book strange writes about the rise of the nuns uh this is daryl still again saying uh the author says that movements like social justice wellness and culture and the alt-right are emerging thought religions um so yeah so there is so depends on again what we think of religion as being and so certainly uh so certainly if we think of like say a religion as being let's say an organized religion and an orga an organizing idea

(1:10:12) set and so forth uh that um attracts uh like followers proponents and things like that um there can be a pretty good case made for um in the last century uh and and and before that too of marxism as kind of emerging as a as a religion and and indeed um the way even though it's very um nominally or very um aggressively says it's not a religion but but that but that there are so many things about let's say soviet communism that had all of the earmarks of what you might call a religion including um uh heretics and and uh persecution and all these other

(1:10:54) kinds of things um right right orthodox behavior and so forth right orthodox thought so in some ways that could be you know a negative religion uh even though it's very aggressively not a religion um same thing um you know like this alt-right thing you're talking about so this um q and on business you know there's our these are people where there's this you know kind of obscure anonymous prophet who is sending out all these puzzles and and predictions all the predictions are false everything's gone you know false

(1:11:26) but that just causes um you know it causes some people to leave the maybe emerging religion uh but other people you know it's the same as what happens when when any prophecy or prediction uh in a in a more normal or where regular religion happens um people explain away the the failed prophecy they reinterpret it they uh they double down and now are even more committed to the the prophet even though the prophet you know clearly has a bad track record here um so yeah i would say in some ways um you know some of these are all organic

(1:11:59) are all functioning uh in religious ways but again it's it depends on how which definition or what you're actually coming to and when we're thinking about what a religion is but yeah that's interesting fastball flake says regarding my comments about activism and community it reminds me of the previous lecture about pious frauds the activism doesn't make the doctrine true so what point does one draw the line between so um or it gives us a sense yeah the line between a goal to build community and a limited status ring reverses

(1:12:33) knowledge that some of the doctrine is a tad suspect well so um so we don't ha we're not a doctrine based uh religion and so in terms of uh and i think we're not operating when pious fraud either because in fact so we're not creedal and so we are um continuously exploring all of these ideas just like we do on this so hopefully um as we find uh problems and uh you know there are in fact if we have conception of things this church very famously um used to believe that uh its founder joseph smith um as a you know did not originate he was not the source or the

(1:13:16) originator of mormon polygamy that it was his followers like brigham young that had actually started it he and he was opposed that turns out to be very false so that that was a view that people believed because they didn't know any better in terms of the historical evidence uh but now the evidence is very clear we have that and so um i can say as a historian of the church and as a pastor of the church we were wrong when we said that before and in fact he is the guy who founded that so hopefully we're doing that whenever we're

(1:13:44) challenged and come up with with that same kind of information and so and so therefore we don't have to it doesn't have to be a pious fraud in order to do those good community things that's what i would say so monica taylor says in a conversation i recently had with a co-worker i made a comment that god exists outside of space and time and that i don't believe in the supernatural and she said a belief in something that exists outside of space and time is a belief about something supernatural so so we're confused um here about what we

(1:14:19) mean by supernatural so uh you're both right so so see one other thing the one of the ways that people define supernatural is is a it's a physical magic thing that is happening in time and space and that and that it's happening in an unexplained way and that the cause is therefore a supernatural cause that's happening within the natural world whereas um so whereas if you're saying like you're saying that god exists outside of time and space your conception here of god as being um you know is being not not material right

(1:15:05) in other words god is um god is in this realm of the spirit the idea and so forth that's different from um uh saying that a super you know that there's some kind of a supernatural intervention that is happening uh you know like like zeus hitting you with a lightning bolt or something like that so there's those are two different two different things so so um but we're very unclear about it because we um we tend to be very clear unclear about it because people are very focused on um on the material world and so we we're even now aware that um

(1:15:44) that matter and physical energy are the same thing so uh you know u equals m c squared right and so matter and energy can be converted and back and forth and yet a lot of times people like to use the words especially spiritual people like to use the words about energy and so what they mean is non-material energy non-physical energy spiritual energy in other words as opposed to electricity or something like that which would be a material energy so it's i think that's why it's confusing so uh rohn has actually given us a couple answers to the question on the

(1:16:20) screen and so that first question what are some of the things that some of your family members take religiously so holiday dinners family birthdays and that's of course we do that too certainly the way my family opens christmas presents is pretty amazing and so there's multiple trees there's all the family stockings there's santa presents there's the the gift exchange i mean it's just a matter of moving from house to house and and which one is done where and so forth so exactly like you're talking about um he's also saying what are some of the superstations you've observed

(1:16:55) outside he says he's probably more than aware that he's aware of and same thing with his individual habits and where does he find meeting outside of organized religion he finds it everywhere but he doesn't have many people that he's sharing ideas with j.

(1:17:17) r orlando tells us i've worked in theater all my life i wouldn't ever say good luck in a theater uh whistle in a dressing room or name the scottish play mainly because if anything goes wrong then it's your fault so yeah those are wonderful um like you say wonderful theater superstitions that are are pretty pretty universal right um john booker's full spectrum is there a reason to believe that communis i'm sorry that communion might have connections with kin cannibalism eating your own deceased relatives in ancient roman religion um no i don't think so so so i think that um i think that um that early romans were very you know where accuse christians of being cannibals so

(1:18:00) christians are are talking about um consuming the blood blood and body of christ uh when and so that's going back to the beginning and so it does sound when you start saying you're doing that it for anybody who hasn't who isn't really aware of how um you know entirely um well so entirely symbolic but in you know but also let's say metaphysical in their understanding of it as opposed to physical their understanding of it is led to a notion that you know again accusations that christians were cannibals and so on

(1:18:40) but i don't think that i think that this is a um independently created you know just a sacred sacred meal and also a sharing of um the purpose of of christ as the community so the community is understanding itself to become the body of christ as they're um consuming and and symbolically partaking of the body of christ and so the idea here is um is more related to i think uh greco-roman philosophical ideas of of substance and so we call it like trans substantiation is the way the the catholic doctrine works it doesn't mean trans materialization it's not matter

(1:19:27) the matter is not being transformed like a transporter beam or something like that that is actually making it that way the substance is being transformed and the substance is the purpose and so in the same way that christ and the church the body of christ which is to say the church when everybody is actually at their best in and god are all you know of one purpose that means they all share the same the same substance because purpose and substance are the same gracious greek is science becoming a religion what are the dangers of science being treated as such hopefully not

(1:20:07) i would say so science so science has there are a bunch of qualities to science well there's a bunch of qualities to science that work like any other human thing and so one of those is is that we um we used to tell use stories and we tell stories and narrative how to make things so and so there's a lot of there's a lot of like the way science is told and the way science is understood uh where where what i call like the history of science narrative which actually comes out of um in some cases again this protestant

(1:20:47) anti-catholic narrative and so we're gonna have a lecture in a couple months on um revisiting the galileo story uh about um because this happens as much so i've had uh you know when i've made this charge i made what maybe wasn't as it wasn't as alarming a charge to some of you but maybe for some of you it was when i said here in the tonight i said not all religion has to be bad you know for some people that's that's uh they definitely want to contest that um and so i i've talked about that before to um to friends of mine who were you know you know kind of having a public interview

(1:21:26) and discussion and and their response was well what about galileo why you know the church burned galileo at the stake for teaching science and i'm like no they didn't actually that didn't eat cali didn't get burned at the stake or anything like that but anyway but the story gets made better because we we tell stories in order to you know in order to um uh explain a kind of a narrative of how things work but science um so science in an individual um human time peripheral an individual scientist might get very enamored with a theory and hold on to it

(1:22:05) longer than than maybe they should but there are new scientists that are going to constantly be coming up and eventually challenging a theory that isn't going to be well grounded and so we've seen for example in especially in my lifetime the realm of of cosmology you know there's been just crazy advances in our understanding of how you know how big the universe is how much is in the universe um the idea that you know there was it was still theoretical whether the universe was um was steady state where it was expanding it was going to come back and was doing that back and forth and now it's pretty clear that it's only expanding and it's

(1:22:42) just going to keep expanding and so forth and so in other words there's lots of new um uh new you know there's a brand new telescope that's been launched so there's lots of new new data new findings new theories and that's continuously overturning what would have been let's say old theories and dogmas and so it doesn't seem to be in a lot of danger and be turning into a religion right now bob garrison asks how did the religion of joseph smith become the religion of war and jeffs can we use the same term for both these two expressions so

(1:23:18) um so you know a lot of things that joseph smith did uh you know there's some seeds planted and some precedents that um that have ended up having bad results and bad fruit so in some cases there's a very wide spectrum of of the different latter-day saint tradition churches that have emerged from that original foundation of the church from 1830 to 1844 and so um one of those expressions is um the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter-day saints the flds church that warren jeffs was the leader of um you know down in the in hilldale colorado city

(1:24:02) and and warren jeff's you know was able to use um a lot of precedence to show that uh to assert a doctrine of of one-man rule and one one man being god's own representative on the face of the earth and everything that he's saying is effectively speaking for god and and it turned out that that particular guy was did not have a very um balanced grounding in reality once he had total power and did sociopathic things uh and horrible abuses and things like that and so so unfortunately one of the things that can happen with like i say you when you do things good or ill one things that

(1:24:46) can happen especially in little high high maintenance you know small group very high high maintenance where you have to really do everything within the church a church that a group that's more let's say cult-like in the sense that you you can't have ex you can't have communication with the people outside that the church owns all your property that everything you know is controlling who gets to marry who and so forth um these are these are um uh unfortunately uh the kind of religion that can very quickly uh lead to very serious abuse and often does unfortunately

(1:25:26) and so i would say there's some precedence though it's not that joseph smith and warren jeffs are cut from the same cloth but you can see why um warren jeffs is able to build on some of the bad precedents that joseph smith said in the 1840s is there any more i miss a few all right well that's quite all right well thank you so very much this was a wonderful discussion hopefully you found it interesting i want to remind everybody that thursday we're having a companion lecture what is spirituality um i think that goes right along with the same question and we'll also see

(1:26:10) where some of our western modern ideas about spirituality came from everyone wants once you're on metaphysics and we want to do and there's a question and a request for lectures on metaphysics so we will put that in the queue for everybody yeah we want to talk about metaphysics and meaning so that's a great thing to do in the future all right thanks everybody you