People often ask me, do you believe in God?
Which I don't like that question.
I don't like that question..
I don't like that question...
Yeah, I don't like the question...
People have asked me whether or not I believe in God.
And I've answered various ways...
The traditions bind the community together.
Now I'm saying that... And I don't go to Church.
And the reason I don't go to Church is
because, well, it drives me crazy, to speak frankly.
I haven't been able to sit in a situation like that, ever since I was...
Well, ever. Really.
That's really the truth of it, ever.
I'm not convinced that that's a good thing, because I do believe and I've had
good conversations about this with Jonathan Pageu.
I do believe that communal return
to the source of the community's ethics is actually a necessary thing.
And maybe I'm atoning for my past sins by doing these biblical lectures
at the moment, which is something that's communal.
And then because there's also something
about going where a bunch of other people are, to reaffirm your commitment
to the good that you're all aiming at, that's got some power in it.
And I don't think that that's something that we should forego.
I think it's dangerous. I mean, look, even if you're cynical about Church,
and I guess I would put myself in that category.
It's certainly the case that communal Church going in the 1950s, say,
provided the average person with at least an hour a week where they were
contemplating, no matter how poorly, the purpose of ethics in life,
and the idea of a higher purpose and a higher meaning in life.
You got to think that spending an hour
a week thinking about that is better than never doing it at all.
I don't know how that tradition can be revivified in a meaningful way,
but I really do think it's a catastrophe that we've lost it because we don't have a
ethical center that holds our community together.
And the consequence of that is that we're fragmenting quite badly.
But what you see there is, if you view someone with love,
then it's incumbent upon you to treat them as if they're valuable.
And then the more you treat other people as if they're valuable,
the better person you are... that just comes along for the ride, in some sense.
So none of that seems questionable to me.
That seems solid.
And so then maybe the more love you view other people with,
the higher the moral demand that's placed on you.
And then I would say too, well, then,
that's another reason why
it's so important to be truthful and in some sense to be good,
because it isn't obvious to me that you can withstand that moral load.
If you're compromised by too much sin,
it's too much.
And that's another thing that we're not very good at teaching young people about.
"You shouldn't do that!"
There's a sanctimonious authority that goes along with that
that's the wrong tone.
It's more like...
I don't know how you lay it out properly, but you tell people that you love
how to avoid the road to hell, and you don't do that because you're
shaking your finger at them or because you're a moral authority.
You do it because you don't want them to burn.
I think there's too much of the moral authority still in the Church and
not enough of the love that...
Helps people avoid... the fire.
Tammy, my wife, has always taken the idea of truth very seriously.
Her recent brush with death has deepened her religious sense and
impelled her towards a life that's more consciously focused on service to others,
her family in particular, but not only her family, people beyond the family.
And I also think that's a function to some degree of our stage of life.
She's a grandmother now, and her children are grown and able
to take care of themselves, and so she can turn her attention to other
people, maybe farther afield from the immediate family.
I'm watching what she's doing and listening to her,
and watching her practical application of her faith.
And that affects me, just as everything she does affects me
because I watch what she does and take it seriously.
Her recent actions have indicated she's helped a number of people,
quite substantially, the group that she's been communicating with.
And all of that's very interesting to me.
She's showing me... I've taken the idea of God seriously for a very long time,
and I've said on multiple occasions that I try to act as though God exists,
and that that's essentially my definition of belief.
When people say, do you believe in God?
Belief is a multidimensional word,
and one question is, well, what do you mean by belief?
And for me, the proof of belief is to be found in action.
And I decided that I would act as if God existed a long while back.
And of course, I'm imperfect in that.
Inevitably... Now she's doing that more explicitly as well.
Not she wasn't doing it quite well
to begin with, but she's doing it more explicitly and also more within
the confines of traditional religious conceptions.
Although she's not attending Church,
she's associating with a number of people who are formally religious,
and all of that is informing the way that she conducts herself.
Watching her do that has also highlighted
for me the missing praxis in Western Christianity.
If you want to be a Christian, let's say if you think that's necessary,
it's not exactly obvious what you should do.
You should go to Church.
But that's not enough. I don't think.
I find it useful
to contemplate the highest good on a continual basis.
I'm trying to keep myself oriented in that direction.
It's a religious orientation, fundamentally.
It's an overwhelming orientation, but there's no escaping
the questions of the ultimate meaning of life.
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.
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 are made out of meaning.
Who would have the audacity
to claim
that they believed in God
if they examined the way they lived?
Who would dare say that?
To believe in a Christian sense, to actually... This is why Nietzsche said
there was only ever one Christian, and that was Christ.
To have the audacity, to claim that means that you live it out fully.
That's an unbearable task, in some sense, to be able to accept
the structure of existence, the suffering that goes along with it
and the disappointment and the betrayal, and the... nonetheless act properly,
to aim at the good with all your heart, to dispense with the malevolence and your
desire for destruction and revenge and all of that,
and to face things courageously and to tell the truth,
to speak the truth and to act it out.
That's what it means to believe.
That's what it means.
It doesn't mean to state it.
It means to act it out.
And unless you act it out, you should be very careful about claiming it.
And so I've never been comfortable
saying anything other than I try to act as if God exists, because
God only knows what you'd be if you truly believed.
If you think about it in some sense,
that's the central idea in Christianity is that if you were capable of believing,
it would be a transfiguring event, a truly transfiguring event.
And I know people experience that to one
degree or another, but we have no idea what the limit of that is.
And we have no idea what the possibility is within each person if they lived a life
that was maximally courageous and maximally truthful.
Because maybe you're running at 60% or 70% or 20% and at cross purposes to yourself.
God only knows what you'd be if you believed.
I try to act like I believe, but I'd never claim that I manage it.
Okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective.
And...
This particular critic that I've been reading...
Said, well, that doesn't differentiate
Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods.
And of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion.
Joseph Campbell did that,
and young to a lesser degree, I would say, but Campbell did that.
But the difference and CS Lewis pointed this out as well.
The difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that
there's a historical representation of his existence as well.
Now you can debate whether or not that's genuine.
You can debate about whether or not he
actually lived and whether there's credible, objective evidence for that,
but it doesn't matter in some sense because it does but there's a sense
in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story and so what you
have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth
and in some sense Christ is the Union of those two things.
The problem is I probably believe that...
But I don't know... I'm amazed at my own...
Belief And I don't understand it because I've seen...
Sometimes...
The objective world and the narrative world touch
That's Union synchronicity.
And I've seen that many times in my own life,
and so, in some sense I believe it's undeniable.
We have a narrative sense of the world
for me that's been the world of morality that's the world that tells us how to act.
It's real.
We treat it like it's real.
It's not the objective world but the narrative and the objective world
touch and the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be Christ...
But I don't know what to that seems to me oddly plausible
but I still don't know what to make of it, partly because it's too terrifying a reality to...
Fully believe... I don't even know what would happen to you
if you fully believed it...
But are you a Prophet?
See to say yes or no
I have to think about how I might be conceptualized...
How what I'm doing might be conceptualized no.
I think I see myself as a psychologist and fundamentally, I am a psychologist.
I'm a behavioral psychologist and I'm very interested in... I got very interested
in psychoanalytic thinking, especially the Jungian variants,
and I'm a professor and I'm doing that on a much larger stage, let's say.
But that's really what I'm doing, and so...
It's a combination of those two things and there's a... I mean,
I speak about religious matters but I don't see myself as a religious leader.
I don't want to make...