I'm not an atheist anymore because
I don't look at the world that way anymore
I'm not a materialist anymore. I don't
think the world's made out of matter
I think it's made out of what matters. It's made out of meaning.
Look at it from a... from the perspective of modern brain science
What we orient towards unconsciously,
which means what captures our attention, is meaning
and it captures our attention before we know what it is
The brain acts as if the world's made out of information or made out of meaning
Heidegger, for example, German philosopher,
was convinced that the world was made out of meaning essentially
And that people's primary interaction
with being was interaction with meaning
And that isn't what modern people think because
they're deeply materialistic
If you go back 400 years or 500 years
and you look at what people meant when they said matter
which is what things are made out of. What they thought matter was
isn't like what we think it is. It wasn't like
this material stuff sort of like dirt
that everything was made out of it. It was...
It was much more complicated than that
The problem with the standard view of matter is that it doesn't really deal with the fact
that matter comes in arrays and in patterns
and the patterns and the arrays, which is sort of
lost when you think about atoms. That's where all the action is
that's where the reality is.
'In the beggining'
God creates Adam and Eve explicitly in his own image
There's a variety of interpretations about the first
being that God created
So there's a tradition in medieval Christianity
and Judaism as well, that the first man was
hermaphroditic. Male and female together
And then separated into two separate entities
Which then were forever looking to be rejoined
And there's a very profound psychological idea there which is that
the union of masculine and feminine
produces a kind of perfect wholeness
and you can think about that as being expressed biologically
given that males need females
and masculine needs feminine. But you can also think about it as
different aspects of the psyche
or between people or different aspects of the psyche
within people. So whatever consciousness is
it comes in masculine and feminine embodiments
The masculine and the feminine embodiment are equally
representations of God. Which I think is quite remarkable
Because there´s a whole line of feminist criticism of the Western tradition
That makes the presumption that the whole structure is patriarchal
And I don't think that's true. If it was
patriarchal, it would have been man that was created
in the image of God. And it is explicitly not that.
What feminine and masculine
as well as being markers for gender behavior are
also symbolic categories and the
feminine symbolic category is the
Genetrix of things, the matrix. Because
the female is associated with the act of...
with the most fundamental aspects
of the act of reproduction. So it's out
of the feminine that new forms spring
For example, new forms come out of what
you don't understand. That's the matrix
of being and new biological forms come
come out of a feminine substrate
that's female creatures and so the masculine
aspect is more seminal in the symbolic
sense of that. The seminal idea is the
instigator, so to speak, and it's also...
it also stands in mythology for a kind of
logical clarity and cutting.
Whereas the feminine stands for more like
something that's whole and undifferentiated
There's some suggestion in the story of Adam and
Eve that the woman is the primary food sharer
And I think that's associated in some
way with her ability to make Adam self-conscious,
which is exactly what she does
she offers him something that makes him
self-conscious and she becomes self-conscious
also as a consequence.
Women make men self-conscious.
You can't think of a truth
that's truer than that and the reason
they do it is because they're very
selective and most men they reject
'Adam's shame'
So God comes up and he's looking
for Adam because he's used to wandering around
with him and Adam's hiding
behind a bush, which says something about Adams level of intelligence
first, because, you know, God can see
through bushes. But it also says
something about his level of
self-consciousness because what it means
is that when Adam becomes self-conscious
he no longer believes that the fact that
he was made in the image of God is
sufficient to give him stature and so
God says well who told you were naked
and this is where this is really Adam's
fall, I think. He says it was the woman
He blames her which is really pathological
the woman you gave me it was
her fault. Yeah, she made you self-conscious
Well, hooray. You know you woke up there's
something to be said for that
Now women torture men into being awake
And I don't suppose that's always received with gratitude
'Paradise Lost'
John Milton, he wrote Paradise Lost
for two reasons. One was to justify the ways
of God to man. And the second rationale
for his writing was to codify
mythologies, stories that were
in some ways peripheral
to canonical Christianity, into a single coherent
narrative. Here's a question he tried
to answer, which was: Well if God was
all-knowing why would he set Adam
and Eve up to fall. And Milton has a very
sophisticated answer to that and it is
that people truly have free will and
even if God knew that they were
going to fall, there was nothing he could do
to stop that
except deny them free will and
free will is so valuable that that denial
was not going to happen
Dostoyevsky points out that freedom
happens to be very important to people
and even arbitrary freedom. Like
people want the freedom to go to hell
in a hand basket, even. They don't want
constraints they're willing to put up
with a lot to have their freedom and
God's judgment is something like freedom
is better than safety
'Why the snake'
The snake in the Garden of Eden is a really interesting
character. Human beings and their closest
biological relative chimpanzees
are innately afraid of and attracted to
reptiles. They automatically trigger off
responses in a part of the brain called
the amygdala that's associated with anxiety
And I think the evolutionary
reason for this is that mammals and
reptiles have been at war in a sense
over ecological turf for something
between 60 million and 200 million years
Reptilian features, which are
cold-blooded, piercing eyed, toothed
lurking, nocturnal. Out there, out and unknown
out where chaos is.
The snake is representative of the unknown in a sense
and it's an ambivalent feature
And you see that even it's
use in mythology because for example
the dragon in Western culture
is a negative feature but in Chinese culture
it's positive feature and so the unknown
is like that, it's positive and negative
The snake in the Garden of Eden is
representative of all those things that
lurk when you think you know what you're doing.
And when you think you know what you're doing
you've carved out
this little Eden, this little paradise
in which you operates. But there's
always something that's lurking and
that's all the things you're not paying
attention to. Well that's the snake and
when that snake pops up people are... We're
wired. If a little snake pops out we
might want to run away from it but, like,
we're curious about that. We're
going to go over there and investigate it right away
Now, when chimps come across a Python in
the forest they have a specific cry. It's
called a snake wrath. And the chimps,
who don't like snakes, they don't run from it
they back off. And then they watch the thing
They cannot tear their eyes away from it
And some of them will stand
there and look at it for 10 minutes
Other individuals will stand there
for hours watching the snake
The unknown is fascinating, we can't look
away from it. We have to encounter it even
if it's terrifying. It's partly why
you know, teenagers like horror movies.
They're driven to look at the snake
They're driven to interact with the snake
In Genesis, of course, interacting with the
snake means the end of paradise
just like it does in life. There are
ideas that the serpent in the Garden of
Eden was Satan and trying
to destroy God's handiwork.
People often look back in their lives and they say: Well, you know
I got knocked out of
my little paradise by, you know, this particular
event. But looking back, it really made me grow up
it really made me mature
Whatever it is, that's the serpent
in the Garden of Eden, it certainly plays that
role. It's a catalyst. Much of what's
unknown is redemptive, much of what's
unknown gives life savor. It provides
the kind of excitement
that justifies suffering. The injunction
behind religious thought, fundamentally, is that
you should live your life in such a way
that the suffering it has to contain
because you're confined and
vulnerable, is justified.
'Profane world'
A profane world exists because paradise always falls apart
And that's a catastrophe. That's the
human catastrophe and maybe that's
the original sin. And profane life is
characterized by suffering, intense
suffering and that's a terrible thing
I mean it's so terrible that the first
two people to really inhabit the profane
world, Cain and Abel. Cain is
so disturbed by the nature of the world
that he turns into a revengeful
homicidal, resentful, fascist
authoritarian. And the father of war
Well that's how bad
profane existence can be
But if you keep going in the same direction you can get so conscious
that the profane conditions of
being are no longer tragic
They're acceptable. But you have to live well enough
so that the suffering is worth it
If you took advantage of every
opportunity you had, if you crawl through
every window that was open to you. If you
lived as perfectly as you could
your life would be justifiable on its own terms
despite its suffering.
And despite the tragedy in the world
That's why Kierkegaard said that
people are redeemed one by one
and not in groups. You know it's an
individual project
'What's evil?'
I would say human beings are built to take tragedy but they're not
built to take evil. The most unsettling
thing isn't that a close relative dies
of cancer, unsettling as that is.
The most unsettling thing is to be
treated casually in a brutal manner
for no other reason than the brutality itself
That's what undermines your sense, your belief
in human existence and in the value of
human existence. That's what demoralizes
and kills. Many social scientists
in particular I would say, feel that the idea
of evil is anachronistic
The reason that evil is obliterated
out of consciousness is because we don't have a
theory to account for it
We don´t have a framework within which
it fits. Our religious ideations certainly
provides that kind of framework
I also think that we dismiss evil because it's
such a terrifying phenomena and whenever
it crops up its head everybody runs
around saying: Well who could have
predicted this? Who could have predicted this?
But all you have to do is look
and you can predict it. And the people
who perpetrate it often say exactly
what they're doing and why
so the Columbine kids, for example
they said something very much like:
Well we've taken a close look at existence and
it isn't worthy. It's not worthy because
people are limited and vulnerable and
there's way too much suffering and
suffering, vulnerable things are kind of
despicable and it would be better if
they were just all wiped out plus I'm
the guy to do it. And that's exactly, fundamentally, that's
exactly what they claimed. You might say
Well, why would someone come to that conclusion?
It's like: That's not a good
answer. Everyone comes to that
conclusion from time to time. When they're
disappointed or frustrated or when
you know, their dreams have fallen apart or
when someone near them suffers or...
They doubt the utility, not only of their own
existence, but of existence itself
If it's taken far enough... Taken far enough
that attitude engenders atrocity
It's evil. And I think you can define it
no problem, because people say well
you can´t define evil. That's wrong
Evil is the production of suffering for
its own sake. That's simple
And if you think people don't do that
regularly, well you know, you just haven't been looking