‘Making Sense With Sam Harris’ and Ross Douthat

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Making Sense with Sam Harris" & Ross Douthat

Aired: January 1, 2026
Podcast: Interesting Times with Ross Douthat x Making Sense with Sam Harris (NYT Opinion)
Guests: Ross Douthat (New York Times columnist, author of Believe) and Sam Harris (author, podcaster)

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode brings together two of the most prominent public intellectuals on opposite sides of the religion/atheism divide: Ross Douthat, a religious (Catholic) conservative, and Sam Harris, a well-known atheist and secular rationalist. Their freewheeling, candid conversation explores:

• The existential threats to human culture, meaning, and politics in the 21st century (especially technology and AI)
• Whether religion is a cure or cause of our civilizational ills
• The nature of tribalism and dogmatism—inside and outside religion
• The justifications for faith and secular ethics
• The enduring consequences of religious history, and the prospects for a more rational or humane future
• The limits of scripture, the definition of moral progress, and what it means to be truly good

Their debate is intellectually robust, sometimes playful, and always unflinchingly direct.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Squeeze on Human Culture & AI (03:50–21:22)

Douthat's Core Worry:

• Concerned about "human obsolescence"—the danger that technology will erode basic social structures (marriage, family, community) and exacerbate anxiety and mental distress.

  "I'm worried about a kind of sense of human obsolescence in the 21st century... visible in unhappiness, anxiety, mental illness... not getting married, not having kids, not perpetuating human culture." (04:00)

AI and Dissolution of Purpose:

• Sam Harris suggests even the most utopian AI scenario, where drudgery is abolished and wealth is abundant, threatens human meaning and solidarity.

  "Even in perfect success, many people are still worried that this could be... an extinction level event for human purpose, human solidarity, human culture." (06:16)

• Harris is less concerned, envisioning a world where leisure, not labor, is prized, pointing out the aristocracy as a historical example.

Douthat’s Rebuttal:

• Even leisure societies (aristocracy, UBI future) face “debasing” temptations and decadence. People require purpose, and “making a Montesquieu-style aristocratic reverie” would be historically unprecedented at scale.

  "It would be incredibly hard and require constant reinvention, constant effort in ways that we've never seen in a human society." (12:16)

Work as Meaning:

• Douthat emphasizes that work offers community, dignity, and shared mission.

  "People are working creatures, they're communal creatures, they like doing things together, they like having a sense of mission." (17:09)

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2. Religious Conservatism, the Right, and Theocracy (23:37–30:20)

Douthat on the Right:

• Identifies as a "religious conservative," socially conservative but economically moderate.
• Skeptical of efforts by self-styled theocrats (e.g., Doug Wilson) to establish a theocracy, noting history shows these projects lead to "fragile" faith and eventual collapse.

  "I don't think that a kind of stringent doctrinaire form of either Protestant or Catholic Christianity can govern the United States... it's likely to fail practically and lead to inquisitorial temptations." (26:30)

Religion & Power:

• Argues that Christianity’s positive political influence is found not by imposing doctrinal purity, but by balancing faith with freedom and rejecting tyranny and corruption.

  "A politics that balances Christianity... with a recognition of the importance of human freedom, the importance of avoiding tyranny, and the importance of avoiding the corruptions of power." (29:00)

Public Christianity as Optics:

• Criticizes public figures for using Christianity symbolically while neglecting substantive Christian moral arguments (e.g., just war tradition).

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3. The Inquisition, Faith, and the Limits of Religious Dogmatism (33:41–44:42)

Sam Harris’s Challenge:

• Asks why the "inquisitorial" logic is not baked into intense religious belief, if one's neighbors’ souls truly hang in the balance.

Douthat’s Historical Answer:

• Points to Christian (especially Catholic) history: forced conversion and state-enforced faith ultimately backfire, leading to hypocrisy, violence, and secularization.

  "They did not ultimately yield more virtuous and Christian societies in the long run. They turned Christians against each other... and in the end, societies secularized and churches were disestablished." (35:27)

Divine Mandate & Religious Liberty:

• Scripture itself is ambiguous: Jesus upholds "my kingdom is not of this world," and argues for rendering unto Caesar — an origin for separation of church and state.
• "Any hyper inquisitorial form of Christian politics is going to be in some degree of tension with the New Testament." (40:37)

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4. Tribalism, Dogmatism, and the Structure of Religion (44:50–54:47)

Harris’s Atheist Premise:

• Asserts that the greatest social ills—wokeness, culture wars, populism—stem from "tribalism and dogmatism," and "religion is the only part of culture where... tribalism and dogmatism are not pejorative." (47:10)

Douthat’s Response:

• Religion has often been the greatest force against tribalism, creating universal ethical communities. The notion of "the brotherhood of man" arose from religions, and world religions historically scaled up solidarity beyond blood or tribe.

  "Historically the major world religions have been some of the most powerful anti-tribalist forces in human history." (48:10)

The Limits of Universalism:

• Harris cautions that universal religions often just create a different kind of tribalism—solidarity with co-religionists against others, which can still motivate violence and illiberalism.

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5. On Dogma, Progress & Moral Anchors (56:06–61:48)

Universal Secular Ethics:

• Harris suggests that the “software” of ethical progress is now a global, open conversation, not the property of any faith.

  "We have access to all of human ideas... we can establish some, you might say, universal dogmas." (57:40)

Douthat counters:

• Every worldview (even Sam’s) ultimately rests on some dogmas or non-negotiable axioms (e.g., “don’t kill”)—and secular dogmas have given rise to secular inquisitions (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.).

  "That temptation to impose dogma is a universal temptation and it doesn't go away if you get rid of a belief in God." (60:10)

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6. Religion, Moral Progress, and the Limits of Revelation (62:20–79:43)

Harris on Religious Canon:

• Criticizes the premise that we must organize our moral lives around the totality of scripture ("hostage to the contents of that book").
• Points out scripture’s silence on slavery and condemnation of homosexuality as “progress” away from literal reading.

Douthat responds:

• Christian societies have generated a "dynamic process of moral argumentation and development," leading to such innovations as abolition, often by expanding the meaning of scriptural ideas.

  "The entirety of Christian history includes many, many examples and case studies... in which Christians started... with a book written 2000 years ago, and then developed from those premises, arguments about new situations." (67:53)

Moral Confidence Without God?

• Douthat challenges Harris to explain why he is so confident in moral progress without any transcendent anchor:

  "Whence comes your confidence that we are capable of this sort of progress?" (81:30)

Harris’s Philosophy of Well-being:

• Argues that we have a navigation problem as conscious beings: we can empirically recognize the difference between good and bad lives, and moral conversation, like science, is a means of correcting error and improving understanding. (85:23–90:33)

  "We know that we now have a navigation problem, right? How to move toward the good life and away from the bad..." (87:00)

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7. Consciousness, God, and the Epistemology of Experience (90:33–96:47)

Harris:

• Insists consciousness is the bedrock of human inquiry and value, but that doesn’t license metaphysical claims about God.
• Is open, in principle, to the idea of "greater minds," but sees no evidence for a compassionate, omniscient mind in the contents or effects of scripture.

Douthat:

• Argues the foundational status of consciousness is itself suggestive of a higher consciousness—a rational basis for religious inquiry.

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8. The "God of the Gaps" & The Limits of Scripture (97:16–105:22)

Harris:

• If an omniscient, loving God had written the scriptures, “one page of mathematics” could have anticipated science and been recognizably divine forever.

  "If you want to hold that possible truth in view... what kind of book would this compassionate, omniscient mathematician have written us?" (97:16)

Douthat:

• Concedes God could have written a less ambiguous revelation but notes Christianity claims “divine inspiration, not divine dictation.”
• Argues the New Testament’s focus on moral formation is itself an indicator of where God’s priorities lie.

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9. Demons, Supernatural Claims & Final Thoughts (105:22–108:05)

Douthat on Demonology:

• Remains sheepishly agnostic about supernatural “demonic” experiences (e.g., Tucker Carlson’s claim), but defends the concept as not irrational.

  "It’s perfectly reasonable to believe in the existence of consciousnesses that are different from ours and that are morally... very dangerous." (106:40)

Closing:

• The episode ends with both men expressing mutual respect and appreciation for the depth and earnestness of the discussion.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Human Purpose in AI Abundance:
  "I'm worried about a kind of sense of human obsolescence in the 21st century... not perpetuating human culture." —Douthat, (03:50)

• On the Leisure Society:
  "It would be incredibly hard and require... constant reinvention, constant effort in ways that we've never seen in a human society." —Douthat, (12:16)

• On Religion & Tribalism:
  "Historically the major world religions have been some of the most powerful anti-tribalist forces in human history." —Douthat, (48:10)

• On Scripture’s Shortcomings:
  "If you want to hold that possible truth in view... what kind of book would this compassionate, omniscient mathematician have written us?" —Harris, (97:16)

• On Moral Confidence Without God:
  "Whence comes your confidence that we are capable of this kind of progress?" —Douthat, (81:30)

• On Human Progress:
  "We know that we now have a navigation problem, right? How to move toward the good life and away from the bad..." —Harris, (87:00)

• On Dogma:
  "That temptation to impose dogma is a universal temptation and it doesn't go away if you get rid of a belief in God." —Douthat, (60:10)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 04:00 Ross Douthat’s concern about “human obsolescence”
• 06:16 Harris on AI and potential loss of meaning
• 12:16 The difficulty of sustaining a “leisure society”
• 23:54 Douthat’s political positioning; the limits of right-wing religious politics
• 26:30 On why theocracy fails
• 35:27 Why inquisitorial Christianity doesn’t yield a more virtuous society
• 47:10 Harris: “Religion is the only part of culture where tribalism and dogmatism are not pejorative”
• 48:10 Douthat: religion as universalizing, anti-tribalist force
• 60:10 Douthat: Dogmatism as a universal temptation
• 67:53 Douthat on Christian progress and moral development
• 81:30 Douthat: “Whence comes your confidence that we are capable of this sort of progress?”
• 85:23–90:33 Harris explains his philosophical framework for the good life
• 97:16 Harris: “What kind of book would this compassionate, omniscient mathematician have written us?”
• 106:40 Douthat on demonology and openness to supernatural consciousnesses

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Final Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is earnest, intellectually generous, and at times playful. Both guests acknowledge shared worries about modernity—especially regarding meaning, mental health, and technological change—while sharply disagreeing about the roots and remedies of our “ratcheting” crises. Douthat defends a thoughtful, historically literate religious conservatism that is wary of both zealotry and left-wing overreach; Harris makes the case for ongoing, rigorous secular moral inquiry, free of uncriticized dogma.

Both demonstrate respect for honest disagreement and model good-faith debate at the highest level.

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For further listening or reading:
Find more episodes at NYT Opinion’s Interesting Times, Making Sense with Sam Harris, or Ross Douthat’s published work including Believe (2025).

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hey, listeners, and happy 2026. I hope you're enjoying your holiday break. And while you are, I wanted to give you a little gift. The author and podcaster and controversialist Sam Harris recently invited me on his show Making Sense. I was there, I think, officially, to talk about religion and politics, but we ended up debating a lot more. Pretty much all of human history. The future, the nature of consciousness, the rationality of faith, the Spanish Inquisition, and even the existence of demons. Sam and I come from pretty different perspectives, but I like to think that we pretty much wrapped up all the big questions of human life in two hours together. So enjoy this episode of Sam Harris Making Sense podcast, and we'll be back with a new episode of Interesting Times right here next week. Sam.

[A]

I am here with Ross Douthet. Ross, thanks for joining me.

[B]

Sam, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

[A]

So we've never met. Am I right in thinking that, or.

[B]

We have never met?

[A]

Okay.

[B]

No. This is the closest I've come to your physically embodied presence.

[A]

All right, well, let's see if the Internet keeps us together here for the requisite hour or hour or two. Well, so I've been reading your book this week, believe, which. When did this come out? It's pretty recent, right?

[B]

Yeah, it came out, I think February of this year of 2025. Yep.

[A]

And this is where you make your case for the rationality and even necessity of religion, which I think we're going to get to because I think you and I have a. We share a sense that our culture is ailing, but I think we probably diverge, at least on several key points as to whether religion is part of the cure or part of the disease. But we don't. You know, I don't think. I mean, I think our core concerns are so held in common, so fully that I think we. I Don't know. I'm interested to see where this conversation goes because it's not. I don't want to have, and I don't think we will produce a conventional debate about between an atheist and a believer about the rationality of faith, although I think some of those points are going to be unavoidable.

[B]

Yeah, we'll have a dynamic interaction that ends with your conversion, I think.

[A]

Yeah. Well, that's what this to me on both, if you're right. We're both hoping for that.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Okay. So I think we should probably start with a problem. What most worries you at this moment when you look at you, because you spend a lot of time thinking about politics as I do, you probably spend more. You're over at the New York Times commenting on culture regularly. What most concerns you at this moment.

[B]

I guess, big picture, a little bit separate from the turbulence of politics right now, is I'm worried about a kind of sense of human obsolescence in the 21st century that I think has been partially forged by the experience of digital culture and disembodied ways of living and is visible in a lot of different trends, including political polarization, but especially in sort of general unhappiness, anxiety, issues of mental illness and so on that are in turn connected to people not getting married, not having kids, and effectively not perpetuating human culture. And I think we're in the shadow right now of trends in artificial intelligence that, however far they go, are likely to kind of ramp up the pressure on human beings as human beings. And I wrote an essay, I think, around the time actually, that my book on religion came out, where I suggested that we were in this kind of bottleneck, almost this kind of evolutionary bottleneck, which is maybe more a cultural evolutionary bottleneck, but where there was just going to be all this pressure on human nations, human cultures, human families, human individuals to sort of figure out how to live under this, you know, very, very novel technological dispensation, and that a lot of institutions, people, whole countries might not make it through that. You know, with extreme examples being, you know, nations in East Asia like South Korea and Taiwan that have incredibly low birth rates, to the point where it's unclear how these nations will survive the next 50 or 60 years. And, yeah, so I think that's maybe that's a slightly unusual way of putting it, but I think this is a. A widely shared concern that. That shadows a lot of, again, a lot of more immediate political debates, like in. In a lot of the kind of new polarization of our era, the, you know, reactionary and far left politics and so on. I think you can see people sort of searching for a form of politics that's adequate to the 21st century challenge. And I don't think people have found it at all. And I think our politics is a mess because of that. But I think people are sensing that we're in a pretty unique squeeze on human cultures as we've known them and we need to figure out how to get through.

[A]

Yeah, it's interesting. Just take the AI piece as a first facet of this ghastly object. It's interesting that even in success, I mean, even in perfect success, if AI amounts to exactly the drudgery canceling all purpose technology that we hope for, without any of the terrifying downsides, many people are still worried that this could be something like an extinction level event for human purpose, human solidarity, human culture. I mean, just people are terrified that without the necessity of work to take just one piece here, not all of us certainly, but most people will find life much harder to live. I actually don't share that concern. If you do, maybe you can prop up that fear because I think there are reasons to think that's actually a mirage.

[B]

I mean, I think it depends on the human being and the human culture. Do I think that the human race will be able to survive and find ways to flourish and thrive and do amazing new things under optimal AI conditions, even if that means that lots of jobs go away in the long run? Yes, I'm in that sense a long range optimist about the future of the human species. I think anything short of, you know, the total dystopian AI scenarios are scenarios in which human beings are going to be able to survive and thrive. But I think there's going to be a lot of turbulence, angst, difficulty and sort of disappearance along the way. That there are going to be all these forms of life and ways of, of living that are just not adapted to. Again, even the few, even the world we live in now with kind of this level of digital existence, sort of people separated from physical reality, from meeting other people in reality, like there's, there's already a lot of strain on very basic things like having friends, getting married, having kids, and when you add in let's say, lots and lots of jobs disappearing and a kind of, you know, existential metaphysical anxiety about AI being able to sort of substitute for things that we thought of as human distinctives, plus, you know, whatever, whatever other weirder forces come in. Yeah, I think it is a A very difficult situation that people need to be prepared for, I guess is how I would put it. Doesn't mean that we're doomed at all, but some things are going to be doomed, some places and, and people are going to be doomed. And you want to start thinking now, really, you wanted to start thinking, you know, 25 years ago about how you. Right, like you as a, you know, a person with relationships and friendships and you as someone who's involved in culture and politics, what you're doing that is sort of making your humanity resilient, I think, against these forces.

[A]

Yeah. So if you take the job piece, which is really the first point of concern for people, imagine a world where something like UBI was the necessary response to all of the abundance that AI has created so people don't have to work. Everything has become like chess, which is to say the computers are better at everything or virtually everything that humans have used to do to work. Clearly we need to figure out some new ethic and economics and politics around the non necessity of human labor and figure out how to spread the wealth around. And so in that point it would be true to say that something like ubi. I don't know if UBI is the actual right framing, but let's say that was the case. Many people, certainly most people commenting on this issue, seem to think that most of their neighbors, if not themselves, need to spend eight hours a day doing something they might not want to do in order to feel like they have a purpose in life. But it seems to me we have a kind of ready sample of people, got a fairly large population, if you look at it historically, who haven't had to work and figured out how to live reasonably or at least recognizably happy lives under those conditions. And those are, we call them rich people, right, or aristocracies of one flavor or another. People who really didn't have to figure out what to do that others would pay them for, or if they did that early in lives, in their lives, they got to a point where they didn't have to do it any longer, and then they had to figure out what to do with leisure. And it would seem very surprising to me if in the presence of unlimited leisure, we as a species and as a culture couldn't figure out how to enjoy it. I mean, there might be some painful bottleneck where, you know, all the people who, who were totally dependent on drudgery to find some structure in their lives spin out of control, but it just seems like this would be a problem of education and culture and a new kind of ethical and political conversation rather than some kind of insuperable obstacle that we couldn't clear?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I'll be more pessimistic a little bit first. I would say that in my optimistic scenario for AI is a kind of middle ground scenario where, which I also think is fairly likely in terms of the capacities of AI to just sort of replace human labor. I think the people who think it's more likely to be a compliment to various kinds of human labor, that you'll still have lots of people, you know, working jobs and doing things in the world that earn money. I'm hopeful that that is still the most likely pathway in the pathway, even in the limit.

[A]

I mean, do you actually think you're hopeful that even in with a hundred years of progress, that's likely to be how we organize ourselves?

[B]

Again, one of the striking things about AI, as a journalist who tries to write about it and like you interview people about it, is that, you know, even the people who see deeply into the technology struggle to sort of form any kind of consensus predictions about just how far it would go. My basic view tends to be that I'm skeptical of true superintelligence theories. I'm skeptical that you get to a point where they're embodied in the world in ways that are completely substitutionary for what human beings can do. Some of that probably does have to do with some views I have about the human mind that are connected to religious ideas and assumptions. Maybe. But just for the sake of the conversation, let's say that you're right or not that you're right per se, but that this world is, is the one we head into where there is some kind of guaranteed basic income derived from the productivity of robots and so on. I think you have to work very hard, very hard, given human nature as we have it, to prevent that from being a world where lots and lots of people lead fundamentally debased lives. I think you said enjoyment or pleasure and so on, right? Like, yes, leisure, leisure people with leisure seeking pleasure. It's very easy. And we see this again right now in I think, societies around the world. It's very easy to default to a kind of round the clock entertainment cycle. This is before you even get into issues related to, you know, drug use and so on. It's just like there are, you know, the experiments we have with ubi, while not entirely depressing or not super optimism inducing. And just to take your example of the aristocracy, so the historical aristocracy in the western world, one, lots of aristocrats did have to work because they were managing large estates or engaged in politics to protect those large estates. Lots of them fought in wars and got killed in large numbers and found purpose and meaning in that, in that form. And then there was also just this constant struggle within aristocratic groups to prevent decadence and debasement. You know, if you think about the stereotypes of the third generation, Rockefeller or Vanderbilt as opposed to the first one, it's not like, oh, you know, these people are all sitting in an English garden reading Plutarch's lives and, you know, painting watercolors. They're out sort of wasting their inheritance and squandering it and being, you know. Yeah, being sort of debased and, and decadent. And I, I think, I think such a society, the society you're envisioning, it could create you. I'm not going to say you can't create a world where the mass of human beings gets to have like a Montesquieu style aristocratic reverie experience, but it would be incredibly hard and require constant fork, a constant, constant reinvention, constant effort in ways that we have never seen in a human society to date. So you just have to be, I think you just have to be aware of the magnitude of the challenge if you're talking about a purely leisure based society. You know, one interesting model is the vision of something like Star Trek, right, where you have this kind of utopian vision where apparently some form of, you know, AI and things related to AI have relieved scarcity and want and so on. And that's a show, a story that's all about human daring and, and mastery and accomplishment. But it does focus on people who are choosing to be explorers who have set up a system where they're still in charge of the ship even if the computer could make better decisions. Right. There's never a moment where Kirk or Picard says to the computer, okay, you decide how to handle the Romulans, right. And then you also don't know like what, what is actually going on on Earth? Are people just, you know, people are just sort of hanging out like everyone isn't doing space exploration. I think the question of what the average citizen of the Federation is doing with their life under Star Trek conditions is sort of the question that sci fi speculative thought needs to reckon with in the sort of AI abundance scenario.

[A]

Well, I didn't think we were going to talk about AI Ross, but I think it's an interesting window onto some of these concerns because. Well, first let me just add a little fine print so that you understand the abundance, I'm, I think is conceivable. I'm not by nature an optimist and I'm not optimistic really that we're going to escape some of the real downsides of AI but if we were, I think it would be surprising to find that the only thing keeping us sane was that most people spend most of their lives doing fairly arbitrary things to earn a living that at least they imagine they'd rather not do, and only to get to the weekend where they're free to debauch themselves and the, and, and there's. Yeah. And that, that just basically having that kind of the, the opportunity costs thrown up against a life of pure leisure was the thing keeping us relatively sane. I think we just have the same problem.

[B]

Do you, but do you, do you think that. I don't know if that's a fair description exactly of how, how the way human beings think about what work historically, yes, it obviously does have elements of, you know, arbitrary force, productivity and toil. I think of the, the broad achievement of modern civilization, though, as one that has partially, not completely, but partially liberated people from the purely arbitrary and punitive nature of work that's allowed lots and lots of people, not just a narrow elite, to have jobs that they take some kind of genuine satisfaction in, that are themselves sources of community. I think one of the lessons of the COVID era and the Work from Home era is that not everyone, but lots and lots of people did find a form of sort of community and solidarity and so on in the workplace, in those kind of collect, in collective action that employment offers, even when it's not the most exciting thing in the world. And then it's also. Yeah, I mean, it's not like historically people who are working, I mean a historical model in the United States of America, right, for long periods of time has been communities and situations that are oriented around family, where you are working for your family, you're working to support them. In agrarian societies, you're working collectively with your family. And again, I don't want to say from a 21st century perspective, like, you know, ah, the dignity of the toiling serf for something like, obviously there's incredible impositions involved in work and child rearing and all these things in most of human history. But I think it's too dismissive to say, you know, oh, we're just liberating people from something that is inherently forced upon them that they don't really want. I think people are working creatures, they're communal creatures, they like doing things together, they like having a sense of mission. They like doing things to help the people closest to them. So you are taking something away if you're saying, oh, no, here's your, you know, here's your UBI and just, well, no matter what to do with yourself.

[A]

But Ross, any part of a job that, that maps on to what people actually like doing that they would do for free, well, then that's the precisely the kind of thing they would, presumably they would do if they could do anything they wanted, right? If they were given 24 hours in the day to spend however they wanted with their friends and family and with other collaborators they meet, all of this highly potentiated by access to unlimited intelligence and wealth. And again, this is the utopian version of AI we're talking about. Then if they want to become Christian contemplatives or build houses that are bespoke for people who want their houses built by human, human artisans or, I mean, what, whatever the it would be. It could be Burning man for half the people and, you know, Meister Eckhart for the other half. There would just be no impediment to just using your attention the way you, you, you want to use it. And that's, it's just, we're living in that condition anyway. Except it's just framed by periods of time where most people have to do things. They, at least within their own minds, they think, well, I wish I were free to do less of this and more of the thing I really want to do. And I think you and I both fear that most people are capable of wanting to do the wrong things, right? I mean, our attention gets captured by mere entertainment, say more than in retrospect, seems good for us. And so I think you're worried, and I'm also worried. But we're already in that culture now. It's just people just don't have unlimited time to explore it. We're worried about a kind of a digital entanglement with things not worth paying attention to on some level.

[B]

Yes, and I agree with you. I think we are in some version of that culture now. And so far the results are that large numbers of people given a profound degree of freedom, but also confronted with incredibly addictive devices, substances and entertainments to varying degrees, lose themselves in those things. And don't do, don't you don't do Burning man or Meister Eckhart. Don't again, don't get married, don't have sex. Which is sort of, you know, the interesting endpoint for now of the liberated 21st century society is not more sex, but less sexual. These, again, you, I think you need. It's not that you can't imagine a society that has perfect abundance and also does not fall prey to these kind of snares, but you have to imagine entirely novel forms of essentially communal and political self restraint imposed on those human tendencies. Or maybe, I mean, look, I, you know, maybe there are people who would say, well, no, what you need are pharmaceutical interventions, right. Instead of Soma from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to sort of, you know, take the edge off everything. You need, you know, a perfected Ozempic that removes, you know, that, that cures original sin. Right? Cure, cures, cures certain kinds of temptations. I mean, I think there's a lot of different narratives you could offer. All I would say is I think you need a pretty dramatic, pretty substantial change in either human nature or human societies to prevent the perfect abundance future from looking like brave new world. Looking like the, you know, sort of the spacecraft in Wall E. Like where, you know, or a world, a world that has a kind of, a kind, maybe a kind of, you know, digital age aristocracy that does seem to be doing pretty well, but that doesn't have a large, large share of human beings. Again, sort of debased by the experience of addictive conditions under. And plenty.

[A]

Well, it seems like we need some radical changes even in our current situation with respect to our culture. What's your view of what's happening right of center? I mean, I know you consider yourself right of center and I don't know how far right, but depends. Yeah, perhaps, perhaps you can.

[B]

Depends on the month.

[A]

Give me the potted, the potted version of your political persuasion. But then let's talk about what's happening in the Republican Party in America.

[B]

The potted bio is that I'm some kind of religious conservative who generally, like in the past I have been more focused on religious and cultural issues and focused on economic issues, but not from like a hardcore libertarian perspective. You know, the cliche of the person who's socially liberal and economically conservative. I've a little bit been the reverse. Socially conservative and economically moderate.

[A]

Yeah, actually, let's start here. You and I both interviewed Doug Wilson. You know, I think there was some daylight between you and him, certainly. And perhaps.

[B]

Was there any daylight between you and him?

[A]

Yeah, there was, I think a little bit more, maybe slightly more mind counter. But why would. I mean, I got the sense from your interview that you're not eager to live in an America that is a Doug Wilson style theocracy. No, but why not? Does it come down to differences of scriptural interpretation or does he just want more religion than you think is good for us?

[B]

I definitely would not phrase it as he wants more religion than is good for us. And Wilson, at least in my conversation with him, I think this happens a lot when you interview sort of self styled radical figures. He sort of tiptoes back and forth between saying really extreme sounding things and then trying to sort of say things that sound reasonable that are maybe closer to what I actually believe. But you know, my, my basic view is I am a social conservative in the sense that I think that I'm pro life on abortion. I think, you know, in some way abortion should be restricted. I think, you know, just to tie into what we were just arguing about, I tend to be fairly socially conservative on issues related to things like drugs. And you know, I, I have a kind of, I think there's a kind of public moralism that's valuable in public policy. And I also think that a society like the United States that has a kind of broadly liberal constitutional framework also benefits from having some kind of broad moral consensus or moral center that people use to litigate and debate controversial questions. I think for most of American history this was a form of Protestant Christianity. I think Wilson and I would broadly agree about that, though I think he would go much further in arguing how potent this Protestant Christianity was. And I think since the 1960s we've had sort of competing forces that have fought over the kind of moral center of America without successfully claiming it. And I think you can see religious conservatism in that light, especially George W. Bush era religious conservatism. I think you can see wokeness and sort of woke progressivism as an attempt to sort of create a moral consensus for the United States. I think most of these projects have failed because America is so pluralistic and diverse and it's hard to, to generate consensus under those conditions. I don't think that a kind of stringent doctrinaire form of either Protestant or Catholic Christianity can govern the United States in the way that Wilson wants it to be governed. I think it is likely to fail practically and lead to sort of in inquisitorial temptations.

[A]

Right. Well, he seems to agree with you that there's a, there's a kind of incrementalism required in getting to the city on the Hill that he envisions. But.

[B]

Well, he's more of a, he's more of a certain kind of utopian. I would say, in the sense that he's. He, he and I might agree on some incremental steps. And then he would say, okay, and now we're going to go further and have religious tests for office or.

[A]

Right. So, so. But that's what I meant when I said more too much religion, you. And then you demurred, saying, no, it's not a matter of too much religion.

[B]

I guess. I don't think that's too much religion. I think that that is too strong an attempt to use politics to enforce religious belief. I think those are different things. And in fact, I think there's a, you know, a fair amount of evidence from modern history that trying to maintain a religious culture through those kinds of hard impositions leads to less actual religion. So, you know, the Islamic Republic of Iran today is arguably less religious than it was when the ayatollahs took over. You can see something similar in Erdogan's Turkey. You can see case studies. Again, as a Catholic, I, you know, look back on Ireland and Quebec from the mid 20th century as these sort of attempts to kind of build a model Catholic polity. And they were just very fragile, and they, they. There was a lot of people pretending to believe for political reasons, and then they sort of collapsed as soon as they were touched by modern forces. So as a religious believer and someone who thinks that people should be religious, I want to live in a society where religion has influence, indeed profound influence in the culture and influences politics and shapes politics. But I think the reasonable believer, given what the historical record indicates about, frankly, God's intentions, right, like if God wanted us all to live under a Catholic theocracy, he wouldn't have let the Reformation happen. I think that should lead believers to look around and say, okay, what is a politics that balances Christianity, Christian moral convictions with a recognition of the importance of human freedom, the importance of avoiding tyranny, and the importance of avoiding the corruptions of power and how you strike that balance, it's a challenging thing to figure out, but that's broadly the position I take.

[A]

So when you hear prominent influencers, right of center, assert their Christian conviction as kind of the moral center of narrative gravity for their politics and these people, I mean, I'm including people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. I mean, people who are, I think, doing a tremendous amount of harm to our culture politically and otherwise, what does their, the Christian, explicitly Christian framing of all of that do for you? I mean, how does that land for you? Let me take any one of these.

[B]

I mean, it varies. Well, let me take people who are someone who's actually in the Trump administration as an example. Right. So the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, attends or has attended a church associated with Douglas Wilson. He obviously talks about Christianity a lot, talks about the Bible a lot, and so has become a kind of poster boy for progressive and secular fears about Christian theocracy. Right. My critique of Hegseth though would be that in certain key ways he's not Christian enough. That if you look at the way he's approaching foreign policy issues and especially issues related to our war against drug dealers in and around, in and around Venezuela. Right. Christianity has this, not all of Christianity, but certainly important parts of it have this developed long argued over idea about just war and what the preconditions are for a just war. How, you know, a religion, this has obviously always been a tough question for Christianity. How a religion that preaches peace and turning the other cheek can allow for war and military conflict. And as far as I can tell, Hegseth is untroubled by any of those issues. And it's very hard to see all that much Christianity actually infusing his policy making. Right. So there's, there's a form of public Christianity that I think you see it on the left as well as the right, but you see it more on the right because the right is more religious. That is all about sort of trying to grab the symbols and optics of religious faith, but ultimately making it subordinate to fundamentally secular or nationalist or in the case of the left, certain kinds of utopian schemes that aren't actually what the religion itself is all about. Now I don't, not sure that that applies to all the different right wing influencers. I don't know. I don't even really know where Christianity per se figures into Candace Owens run of conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's death. It sort of seems sort of, kind of irrelevant. Like the fact that she converted to Catholicism and talks about Christianity. I don't know if that's even that relevant to understanding, understanding her kind of particular kind of paranoia. But I do think that right now, like there, there are situations in which religion and power can be yoked together in a way that are inquisitorial or you know, where you, where you have this kind of imposition of specific religious doctrines on unwilling people. I think what you see more of on the right right now is the, the temptation here is much more the subjection of Christianity to causes and issues that aren't particularly Christian at all. And I mean Just to take, to take the example of abortion, which has been the center of a lot of religious conservative activism. Trump administration, while it contains many people who are avowedly pro life, has not pursued any substantially pro life politics. Josh Hawley recently tried to, you know, started some organization to lobby for new laws or new policies on abortion. And the Trump administration, off the record sources were all like, why is he doing this? This is bad politics. I think there's a bunch of case studies here where the things that animate religious conservatism just aren't really the things that animate the Trump administration.

[A]

I mean, that's another question. How is it that the Christian community has embraced Trump as their tribune? Perhaps it's very hard to think of a worse candidate for the virtuous side of Christianity to be pulled from popular culture. But let's leave that aside. I actually have a, I just want to follow up on the claim that there's a kind of natural stopping point here before Inquisition. I mean, isn't the inquisitorial vibe of true belief kind of baked in? I mean, if the stakes are really as high as Christians imagine, I mean, this is true of Islam too. But let's stick with Christianity, which is to say that the eternal souls of my children are in peril if they're misled by the atheist next door. Why wouldn't, I mean, if the atheist next door actually poses a greater threat to the well being of the people I love most in this world than the pedophile next door, why wouldn't I be disposed to come down even harder on his unbelief than on the misbehavior of the pedophile.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think one reason here, as I suggested before, is just historical experience. Right. That, you know, we now have 2000 years of Christian history in which quite a few Christian societies sort of took a version of the argument that you just made pretty seriously. And you know, some of centuries you would have, you would, there's a lot of variation here. But you would have Christian cultures that would tolerate, for instance, non Christian religions but would be unable to tolerate heretics. Right. Because heretics were, you know, they, they weren't just sort of wrong, they were corrupting the, the truth of Christianity. That, that would be an argument that was commonplace in the Middle Ages and into the Reformation and inspired wars of religion and so on. Right. But again, I think, and this is, this is my own perspective, but it is also the explicit perspective of the Roman Catholic Church at this point and many Christian bodies as well, is that, you know, what you can learn from the history of those experiments is that they did not ultimately yield more virtuous and Christian societies in the long run. They turned Christians against each other. They led to wars of religion fought between people who shared the same baptism and key elements of the faith and nonetheless were killing one another. And then in the, in the end, you know, the, the sort of final up till now act of the story is that in the aftermath of those conflicts, societies secularized and churches were disestablished. And in some sense, I think this is, again, if you believe in a providential God who is some kind of steward of history, you would say that Christians were justly punished for overreading their mandate to sort of perfect the world. And then, of course, if you go back to the New Testament and the original sources of the faith, and if you look at, again, sources and arguments that also run through all of Christian history, there's also been a perfectly sound Christian argument that says versions of number one, human freedom is essential. It's, you know, it's obviously like God created us to have freedom. And you're supposed to come to God freely. You can't be coerced into belief. And the message of Jesus Christ is a free gift that has to be freely received, that Jesus says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and God what is God's. That's the origin for a lot of Western thinking about the separation of church and state. And then all the way down, you know, the story of Christian cultures in history is a story of constant internal arguments about exactly some of the issues you raised. Like, if you look at the, you know, what happens when Spain discovers the New World, right? And you get a period of conquest and forced conversion. But in the same period, you also have these stringent Christian critiques of what the conquistadors are doing that start very early on in the 1500s. And you have Spanish theologians and philosophers who basically develop what becomes modern theories about, about human rights. And if you're a Christian, I think you can look at that history and say, well, you know, I think we have enough evidence to say that even if part of my mind thinks, you know, the atheist next door seems very dangerous, that, yeah, we have enough evidence to say the side of Christianity that emphasizes freedom, and out of freedom, toleration has more historical and divine vindication behind it than the inquisitorial side. And so I should take the, the side that says, no, we're not trying to set up a absolutist Christian theocracy to somehow force everybody's soul into paradise.

[A]

Well, I do think you could draw the opposite lesson from that painful history of religious persecution and just imagine that it hadn't been done right, you know, that there were simply too many sinners in the world at every point along the way. And of course it was messy, but.

[B]

This time, if these doctrines.

[A]

There has to be a way to get this right and God demands it. And I mean, because basically what you're sketching is a picture of some sort of very unhappy equilibrium where you relax the standards of adherence to the one true faith enough so as to get along as best you can with your neighbor in this world and not have a completely crazy society that's burning witches on every street corner. And with, you know, conquistadors dashing out the brains of infants after baptizing them, thinking they go straight to heaven that way.

[B]

That sounds a little like the black legend there, Sam. I'm not, I'm not the black legend.

[A]

I don't know that phrase.

[B]

That is black legend refers to essentially.

[A]

This, the blood libel against stories about.

[B]

The stories about the Spanish empire that were concocted in mostly Protestant countries. Again, I'm not, I'm not going to tell you that.

[A]

You don't think that never. You don't think that happened?

[B]

I don't, I don't know if that specific thing happened. I'm just saying you should not believe every narrative about things conquistadors did. But stipulate Google black, Google black legend for a sense of what I'm talking about. Stipulate that though. I mean, look, I think that if you read, you know, this is, this is my sort of liberal Christian side, I guess, in a sense. Right. But if you read the New Testament and if you read the four gospels and encounter the character of Jesus of Nazareth and encounter sort of the way that he moved through the world, he certainly could. He issued a lot more condemnations than more liberal minded Christians sometimes want to argue. But he also spent like he very explicitly said things like, my kingdom is not of this world. You know, don't use your swords to defend me from unjust authority. Turn the other cheek. Like this stuff is foundational to Christianity. And so there's a sense in which any hyper inquisitorial form of Christian politics is going to be in some tension with that. And you know, you've pro. I'm sure you've read the Dostoevsky scene story piece of the Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, where Jesus comes to 16th century Spain. And the Inquisitor says, go away, please. You're messing things up. We're perfecting things. We don't need you anymore. And that is a, it's a memorable story because it captures that tension that every, any Christian politics that is trying to sort of shape souls by force is going to be in some degree of tension with the New Testament. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't have a Christian politics or that you shouldn't be thinking to some degree about soul shaping when you're thinking about politics. But I mean, the other thing is like, we live in the United States of America. The history of the United States of America is one in which some kind of religious toleration has been there from the beginning of our Constitution, not from the, you know, not from the Puritan beginnings, but certainly from the 18th century beginnings. America has always been a mixed bag of Christians, heretics, atheists, non believers, mystical meditators with podcasts. I mean, this is all, you know, this is the American story, right? And it's also been a place in which Christianity has done really well relative to nations in Western Europe that have established churches and whether they're Lutheran or Anglican or Catholic. And again, this doesn't tell you that America is perfectly loved by God and we're getting everything right. We obviously aren't, but it is suggestive, if you are a Christian reader of history, that the church writ large has done pretty well under these conditions. And again, I think it gives you a concrete reason not to say, ah, now we've, I mean, I'll, I'll link, I'll bring our streams together. Now we've got the AI that can run everything and will just, you know, upload Thomas Aquinas and the Summa Theologica, add in, you know, add in a dash of the Holy Roman Empire, and.

[A]

We'Re, if I'm not mistaken, Aquinas still thought we should torture heretics or kill them. Augustine thought that we should torture them. Aquinas thought we should kill them, or vice versa.

[B]

So it's no this, but this, this is what I, I'm, I'm saying that it would be a mistake for Christians to look around and say, ah, the AI would enable us to enact certain medieval ideas about Christian politics more successfully. And so we should do it. I'm, I'm saying we shouldn't. And I don't think most Christians, looking at the historical experience, certainly most American Christians would wish to. Even Wilson, who is interesting again precisely because he is an outlier who's willing to go further and say, yeah, I'm. Yeah, I'm. I'm a theocrat and so on. Even Wilson, when you push him on, you know, the witch trial is a good idea, these kind of things, does not want to go all the way to that kind of Christian politics. I think, I don't know. I don't know how far. I don't, I don't know how far you pushed him on the way.

[A]

I pushed him a little harder than that. And I think he. So what he admits is that you can't go all the way now or next week. But once the pure Christian kingdom was established, then those aberrations, like, you know, gathering sticks on the Sabbath would be so egregious that then you could impose the sanction from Leviticus.

[B]

I mean, one reason, one thing that sets Wilson, that makes Wilson distinctive, right, is that he belongs to a tradition within Christianity that basically assumes that you get a kind of almost heavenly utopia on earth before the end of time, before the return of Christ. And so there is something woven into his theology that is kind of perfectionist, I think, in terms of, from his, from his Christian perspective, that that's not where I think a lot of. I mean, there's a lot of Christian traditions that just assume, you know, things are just going to get worse and worse until, until, until the worse things.

[A]

Get, the better, better things get.

[B]

And then there's, and then there's, you know, people who just say, well, you should be agnostic because, you know, not the day nor the hour.

[A]

So a few propositions have been on my heart to say, as I've heard you speak, to put this in a Christian frame.

[B]

Yep. You've received a word.

[A]

Yes, these are. I don't know where this is coming from, the center of the galaxy or just from my own brain. But let me make two claims which will, with respect to their vibe, will sound very atheistic, and they are, but I just would like you to react to them. So the first claim is that so much of what ails us as a species, as a civilization at this moment is a matter of there being too much tribalism and too much dogmatism, right? When if you look at what's wrong with the craziness on the far left, say, right, the wokeness, intersectional politics, the moral panics around all of these issues that shouldn't even be issues, the dishonesty, the moral incoherence, the blasphemy tests, the reputational destruction of good people, you know, the people being canceled for racism when everyone knows they weren't racist, but you got to break some eggs to make this equity, omelet, et cetera. All of that awfulness that happened left of center, to which everyone in the center and right of center began to react to and to some degree gave us Trumpism, all of that can be distilled down to, in my view, tribalism and dogmatism. Right? People are believing things that can't be justified and they're just accepting these propositions dogmatically. And people are anchored to a sense of tribal solidarity that is by definition not universalizable and pits them against other people. And it enshrines a kind of dishonesty and bad faith because all you want to do is win under those conditions. You don't care that you're coherent. You don't care that you've contradicted yourself. You don't care that you're changing the rules or moving the goalposts. You're just trying to slime the other guy to see what sticks. And it explains what's happened to our politics. So if we could pull out tribalism and dogmatism from our culture and from our thinking, if we had a cure for that, if we had the ozempic for that, I think we would want to apply it liberally and I would bet things would only get better from there.

[B]

Why is that? Why do you think that's an atheistic statement?

[A]

Because in my view, religion is the only part of culture where tribalism and dogmatism are not really in any sense pejorative. Right? So, I mean, dogma is actually not even a. Is not even a bad word in Catholicism. It's just a. It's just a word, which is to say that in religion is the only place in culture where the style of discourse, the style of thinking, the moral and intellectual norms are anchored to tribalism and dogmatism. You know, I believe things strongly without evidence, and in some sense, my capacity to believe those things without evidence is even redounds to my credit. Right? And these are non negotiable, these, these articles of faith, et cetera. I mean, you see where I've gone there. And so it is with tribalism. And so that, that's one reason why religion is so, in so many of its guises, pernicious, is that it makes tribalism and dogmatism harder to criticize and uproot. And conversely, when you see a style of politics that seems totally pathological, it is pathological, I would say, in virtually every case, because of how much it resembles religion. When you look at what's so wrong with the cult of Trumpism, it's because it's a cult. And why do we use the word culture is because we're signaling an awareness of the tribalism and dogmatism, the irrationality, the bad faith, et cetera that is being leveraged there. So anyway, that's just one of the points I wanted to make.

[B]

But all right, well, let me, let me argue, let me try and talk you out of that, that framework. I'll see how far I get. So tribalism first, dogmatism is the harder one because as you say, religions have dogmas at least. Certainly Roman Catholicism has dogmas. Something, some kind of dogmatism is baked into the Western religious tradition at the very least and to some degree the Eastern tradition as well. Tribalism, I think not at all. Right. I think human beings are naturally tribalist and religion can certainly be used for tribalist ends. But historically the major world religions have been some of the most powerful anti tribalist forces in human history. And most of what we think of as universalist and cosmopolitan ethical systems and worldviews emerge initially from the Axial age religions and are spread around the world, honestly primarily with the spread of Christianity, but with the spread of other, I think other religious traditions as well. And by the time you get down to the modern era in the 19th and 20th century, most of the figures, certainly prior to the late 20th century, who are held up as kind of anti tribalist models of sort of universalist ethics from, you know, William Wilberforce and the people who abolished slavery down to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, are motivated very explicitly by religious conceptions of the universal brotherhood of man. The idea that human beings are universally made in God's image, that the most important thing about human beings is a transcendent and metaphysical quality that we possess that is not a simple matter of who our parents were and where we were born, what kind of political situation we're in. And again, this doesn't mean that religions don't become tribal. But you know, even in the Middle Ages, right, this sort of, you know, peak of kind of the, you know, the sort of church state entanglement that you're, you were deploring. The church in Western Europe was the primary source of anti tribalism, trying constantly trying to make peace between feudal kings and warring barons and different nations because it had a, it had a kind of universalist intention. So I, I think religion isn't always a cure for tribalism. Worried about, if you're worried about, people.

[A]

Are talking About Christianity only there. Right. You wouldn't say this of Islam. I mean, I guess, I mean the.

[B]

One thing you could say, I, I think, I think the issues with Islam, your issues especially have to do with claims about the use of politics to convert people by force. Right. Which you would say is inherent. But I don't know if the problem there is tribalism. Exactly. Right. Islam too is.

[A]

Well, let me double click on that.

[B]

In its best, is an anti, it aspires to be universalist.

[A]

I have to clarify the concept because I think so, yes, you could say that the missionary zeal of Christianity or Islam cuts against tribalism because everyone is a potential member of the faith. They're both in the business of winning souls. Right. So that's kind of an anti tribal tendency. So fine, you take that as far as it goes, but.

[B]

Well, it goes pretty far relative to most of human history.

[A]

Well no it doesn't. No it doesn't, because this is the other face of tribalism that worries me. Take Islam because I think it's going to go down easier. So much of what is wrong with our world now with respect to the variable of jihadism and Islamism is that, I mean obviously the terrorism and destruction in 100 countries, the ambient level of all that is awful and lots of people suffer, most of them are Muslim. But the greater problem in my view is that we have 2 billion Muslims on earth who, I mean certainly there's some of them will protest the atrocities of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and Hamas maybe. I mean we haven't seen any significant protests really on that front. But what you see far too often is, is a reflexive solidarity with Muslims the world over simply because they're also Muslims. Such that you can't actually rationally create real opposition to Islamism and jihadism within the Muslim community. I mean so far we haven't managed to do it because there's this tribal circling of the wagons. This is the only thing that explains the fact that you can have a British born Muslim who is willing to sacrifice his life on account of foreign policy concerns that involve the Middle east or the Balkans to take a previous conflict and it's that reflexive solidarity with other co religionists no matter how psychopathic their behavior.

[B]

Right, but here your complaint is that the major world religions have scaled up solidarity to frankly heretofore unimaginable levels. The idea that someone could have solidarity with 2 billion other people from the point of view of like the 10th century or the 5th century BC is just very difficult to imagine. So we've scaled it up and your complaint is. Well, but they're still tribal about. About their religion, about the 2 billion. And we. That. That's still too much tribalism. Okay, that's. That's fair. I agree. It would be good if Muslims who don't want to condemn jihadis were less tribal. But I think you're just waving. You're waving away the achievements of world religions in creating solidarity at an unprecedented scale. Right. Like take away Islam, Islam goes away. There's no Islam. Right.

[A]

You don't want that kind of tribalism.

[B]

But Islam goes away, Sam. Tomorrow it's gone. You've. You have. You have eliminated Islam.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Suddenly people are. That link between the people of Iran and the people of Malaysia and the people of Egypt goes away.

[A]

Well, no, because they can have the same link that I have. Right. I mean, they can have the link of real humanism and real secularism and re. And a real sense of an emerging global civilization that has founded on what.

[B]

What premise?

[A]

Founded on all of the intellectual tools we've gathered over the last few thousand years. And, you know, the Sermon on the Mount might, Might still have a privileged position on that bookshelf for its ethical content. Right. So, like, if the Golden Rule is.

[B]

So you want. So you want the ethics of the Christian tribe to win out over the ethics of the Muslim tribe. How interestingly tribal.

[A]

Because it has nothing to do with the tribal frame. It has to do with the ethical content. Right. So I want the best equations we can find, whoever first wrote them down. But.

[B]

Well, here's. I mean, here's the thing, Sam. I'm a Christian, not a Muslim, right? So if you want to tell me that you think that Christianity has a more successful universalist ethic than Islam, in the end, I'm not going to disagree with you because I'm not a Muslim. I'm just saying, like, that's not the center of my point, but what we know about. Well, no, I think. I think in effect, it. It is because you are the child of a Christian culture whose liberal secular ethics are still to some degree founded on ideas that you can find in the New Testament. And you like some of those ideas. You'd like to keep them, you don't want.

[A]

But they're not exclusive. They're not exclusive to the New Testament. I was just.

[B]

You were just throwing.

[A]

Giving.

[B]

You throwing me a tribalist. A tribalist bone.

[A]

But I mean, obviously I've been more influenced by Buddhism and Western philosophy and I mean, so it's not right there's a much larger secular conversation around ethics and, and moral norms and what is sane to want and how we can plausibly get there that isn't anchored to anyone's scripture. And my point is that.

[B]

And how is that now? We'll pivot to the doc. I'll try and pivot us to doctrine. How do you think that that conversation is going in the most secular parts of the world? When you look around the secular, I mean, America, Western Europe, these are more secular. Are we doing well? Have you built this universe?

[A]

I'm willing to sign on the dotted line of most of those invidious comparisons to some norm that we haven't achieved. But let me add this. We'll come back to dogmatism. Let me add the other piece that I, the other thought that was rattling around my brain as you were speaking before, because I think it'll focus us. My claim here, and this is really an answer to your question of why I would pick from anything from scripture and how can I get away with that? My claim is that whatever is true about us, ethically and spiritually and in any other way that matters is deeper than culture. Right? It wasn't invented by culture. I mean, culture matters in terms of its effect upon us. And the conversation we have about what is true and good is the thing we. This is the software we're running to orient us in our lives. But we have this evolving conversation about what is real based on our acts of cognition and our building of culture and technology. And all of this has flown the perch of any form of provincialism or religious sectarianism. Right. We no longer have, we're no longer entitled to being provincial. I mean, now all the languages have been, you know, are interoperable. Everything, all the books have been translated, at least in most places. We have access to all of human ideas. Right.

[B]

And so, so we can establish some, you might say, universal dogmas.

[A]

Well, no, no, no, no. It's not a matter of dogma. It's a matter of open inquiry and error and stress testing and figuring out what works and is no longer relevant.

[B]

But what works for what? Right. Like some things, I mean, you know, the Crusades worked for what they were. You want things to work for a particular ethical endpoint that you think we have, that you think we have evolved towards or discovered. Great. But what you're describing is a dogma, right? Like you think it's good that we don't murder people, right?

[A]

Yeah. Yes. It's not.

[B]

So that's. That might be, that might be A Sam Harris dog bite.

[A]

If you're going to say that we can't, at some point in our inquiry, you know, ethically and intellectually we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, right? If, you know, at some point our spade is turned, I'm going to agree with you. There's nothing, there's no system of thought, including arithmetic, that is perfectly self justifying. Right. You know, Godel gave us that for arithmetic and every other logical system and we have it for anything else we want to talk about. But our axioms can be incredibly simple and uncontroversial once we admit that we want to get out of the dogma and tribe business.

[B]

But Sam, you just started this by talking about how unhappy you are with dogmas and dogmatic behavior that has swept the culture of the liberal west in the absence of formal religious belief. So I don't, I don't see how you can tell yourself, ah, we have these sort of, we have these sort of.

[A]

Well, I mean the, the absence isn't necessarily the problem. I'm not, I'm not conceding that what's wrong with the west is it's insufficiently Christian.

[B]

No, no, I know you, but, but you were, you were describing the excesses of, let's say, woke progressivism and anti racism or just, just a few moments ago and you were saying, well, the problem is there that we just haven't unshackled ourselves enough from dogmatic habits of mind. But at the same time you want to say, well, of course, we need a few dogmas that, you know, a few, a few core axioms.

[A]

Yeah, happiness is better than suffering.

[B]

I would, I would. Well, real happiness. What is real happiness? We can, we could do two hours, we can do two hours on that. Right.

[A]

But it's not an empty conversation, it's an exploration that we, we know is valid.

[B]

I want, I want to agree with you to some degree. Right. I think a healthy society has a limited number of core non negotiable convictions like don't murder your neighbor and so on. And you don't want to multiply dogmas that everyone has to believe beyond that core and sort of ruthlessly enforce them with inquisitorial zeal. And that belief is again, why I don't want to fully impose Christian belief on everyone. But I think that temptation to impose dogma is just a universal temptation and it doesn't go away if you get rid of a belief in God or a belief in the supernatural or angels or whatever else. And I just think we have tons of evidence of that from the entire history of the secular West. If you read about, you know, the history of communism, it is a history of dogmatic intolerance carried to murderous extremes, which you can't just steal the base and say, oh, well, that's still religion. No, that's human beings in the absence of religious belief, becoming hyper dogmatic. And the problem is hyper dogmatism. The problem isn't whether you believe in God or not. I feel like that is the lesson certainly of the last 10 or 15 years, that America, the Western world, has become more secular, but it has not become more enlightened, rational, or reasonable. And a natural takeaway from that is to say, well, maybe belief in God wasn't this huge problem. It was just, you know, sort of fanatical dogmatism. That's the problem. And belief in God is just an idea like any other that should be judged on its own merits.

[A]

Well, so. Well, there we're almost in agreement. But to believe that a specific book was written or dictated or directly inspired by the creator of the universe, and that we must be hostage to the contents of that book until the end of the world to orient ourselves on the most important questions of human life, that's a dogma. Unlike a dogma that is far closer to the foundation of our rationality. Like, things have causes, events have causes. Right.

[B]

So look, I'm just. We can get now into missionary mode. I'm not. I'm not asking you, Sam Harris, to make yourself a hostage to the New Testament. If I were trying to persuade you to become a Christian, I would try and argue to you that the Gospels and the books of the New Testament record what is to this date, the most important religious event in human history. And if you believe that, it would be natural to orient your life around that story and that message. But it doesn't mean, like you should. If you don't think that I don't want to imprison you in a cell until. Until you concede that much. Right. Like, again, if Christianity or any religion is offered freely through reasoned argument and it persuades people, then nobody has been imprisoned in the Gospel of Matthew. They've just decided, huh? The Gospel of Matthew is a really. It's a really weird story. And if it's true, it should shape how I live even 2,000 years later.

[A]

Well, when I say imprisoned, I mean that the contents of this book, because this is the only divine piece of revelation we have. I mean, obviously it's in contest with all the other things.

[B]

Let's say it's the most. I think from the Christian perspective, the Christian would say to date, pending the second coming, it's the most important revelation that we have.

[A]

Well, no, but it has a different status.

[B]

We have access.

[A]

It has, it has a fundamentally different status. I mean, again, this is something that you encounter without any embarrassment or apology in the presence of someone like Doug Wilson. Right. It's like this. Everything in this book is essentially perfect, including the stuff that is, we've jettisoned, like support for slavery. And I have to figure out some way to make sense of all of it. Because this is God's word. Right.

[B]

I don't think that the, the Gospel of Matthew should be read as a endorsement of slavery. I know you're talking about Leviticus or something else. I'm just trying to. Well, no, but also I'm trying to narrow. Narrow debate.

[A]

No, but even the words of Jesus, I mean, Jesus says, you know, admonishes slaves to serve their masters well and serve their Christian masters especially well.

[B]

That's St. Paul.

[A]

That's St. Paul.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's the, I mean, just to, just to clarify, but clearly Jesus.

[A]

Neither Jesus nor Paul criticized slavery as an abomination.

[B]

Jesus did not call slavery an abomination. No.

[A]

Yeah. And had the creator of the universe wanted to get that message across, it would have been pretty easy to do it. Right. So you can draw the natural inference that slavery, unlike, I mean, I think that homosexuality, slavery was not a concern.

[B]

Just for the point of clarification, Jesus also does not talk about homosexuality. I agree that Paul does. And I agree that a teaching against homosexuality has always been part of Christianity. But yes, I think what you have to take from Christian history is that God was content to allow Christians to develop anti slavery theologies in the fullness of time. And that the centerpiece of Jesus's message in the New Testament was not specifically the Roman Empire must pass laws abolishing slavery. And if that makes you think that Jesus couldn't be the son of God, then that's fine. And that's a reason for you not to organize your life around the gospel according to St. Matthew.

[A]

But to come back to the deeper points here, or what I consider the deeper points is that if you think we live in a world where there are deep spiritual truths and intellectual truths and ethical truths of there are many dimensions, perhaps an uncountable number of dimensions where we can seek truth and goodness. And we're just getting started on some level. I mean, we've been language using for. I Don't know how many thousands of years. Let's give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and say it's been 75,000 years that we've been talking about anything and we've only very recently acquired the tools to do things that are fundamentally new. And this is quite disorienting. Right. So the last 300 years we've birthed something like science. Last 2000, you know, 3000 years we had something like philosophy. And you know, the notion of performing a scientific experiment is whatever, 300, 350 years old. Now we started this conversation with talking about the implications of AI, which is, you know, two years old.

[B]

Yep. New, fresh and new.

[A]

All of this is a, this is an evolving conversation among social primates who are just getting new tools in hand. And my point, as a secularist and a humanist and someone who's deeply interested in really what I think should be considered the baby in the bathwater of all organized religion, which is the contemplative life and mystical experience and the furthest reaches of human well being and human flourishing. Clearly there's a way to have to pursue all of that and talk about all of that totally unencumbered by the ignorance of our ancestors. Right. So we can just keep taking the best ideas, surviving contact with the other best ideas, and we just see again, we see what works, but what, which is what we do in science. I mean, which is precisely what we do in science. And the argument for religious orthodoxy, I.e. dogmatism, is to not do any of that really, but to be anchored to a 1st century conversation or a 7th century conversation, and to remain stuck there in some fundamental sense.

[B]

So on the last point, I think that the entirety of Christian history includes many, many examples and case studies, most of which built the civilization in which you are now sitting talking about how wonderful it is that we reason together in which Christians started, yes, Assumed certain premises given in a book written or a set of books written by a bunch of different people 2,000 years ago, and then developed from those premises, arguments about new situations, new conditions that led to everything from, you know, the, the abolition of slavery to, you know, honestly, the defeat of Nazi Germany and Soviet communism, both of which were resisted, sometimes insufficiently, by Christians, but were resisted on. On Christian grounds. So I think, first of all, I think it's possible, it's possible to say.

[A]

Both sounds too tendentious.

[B]

It's possible to be both and right to say, look, my perspective is anchored in a specific event that I do think was God breaking into human history.

[A]

There's a couple things I can't let go there. First of all, you're suggesting that the only way to have resisted the lunatic ethics of both chattel slavery and Nazism is to have found some point of purchase from Christianity. That's just not true. In fact, I mean, I think all things considered, Christianity was unhelpful on the case of abolition simply because the slaveholders had the better theological argument and Nazism. I mean, if you want to defend the way the Catholics and Protestants, on balance, you know, Bonhoeffer aside, behaved under the Third Reich, you know, go ahead.

[B]

I would say, first of all that we're not going to resolve it today, but I think a sincere accounting of the history of debates over slavery, abolition and racial equality would indicate that Christian civilization ended up having a unique capacity to critique and ultimately eliminate the universal human institution of slavery. And that that is very difficult to imagine historically emerging in a culture that doesn't have the starting point of Christian ethics and the Sermon on the Mount. On the Nazi point, I completely agree with you that the history of institutional Christian reaction, not to Nazi Germany, is a record of failure and disgrace. It's also the case, though, that the small minority of people who resisted to the end included really, really large numbers of sincere Catholics and Protestants, including people who died in concentration camps. And I think the same is true with a better record for complicated historical reasons in the case of Soviet communism. Whereas people who held your broad view of reality that the way we litigate debates is by sort of setting aside all religious dogma and making claims about what science and progress and scientific progress and the unfolding revelations of human history are showing us. Lots and lots of those people went all in for totalitarian ideas because they were seen as ideas that were the inevitable organic unfolding of human consciousness. And I think that people who think of themselves as secular rationalists need to reckon with that legacy.

[A]

Well, the reckoning, it's a very easy reckoning, which is if you, if things.

[B]

Things seem very good.

[A]

The problem is tribalism and dogmatism. You have a critique of Stalinism, certainly. And really, every, every place communism has been tried, you see the same thing, right? So it's not.

[B]

But the communists thought of themselves as universalists who were achieving a scientific, who.

[A]

Were following their dogmatism.

[B]

You're like, well, they're, they're, you're, you're like, well, they felt they fell too far into dogmatism. But you have decided today in the 21st century that their failure was, was dogmatism. But the best minds And I do mean the best minds of the early 20th century were all, were huge numbers of incredibly intelligent people, say, including the scientists who were, you know, splitting the atom, were convinced that the moral logic, the ethical logic of communism was the thing. Right? Like you can't just say, ah, well, they were too, they were too dogmatic. It's got it. There's gotta be a little more scrutiny of that theory.

[A]

Is, I mean all of the, the ordinary problems of power and corruption and I mean like, yes, you're talking about the capture of a whole society by a personality cult and it was awful in all the ways that you would expect. And dogmatism.

[B]

Intellectuals went along with it, but the, but the intellectuals went along with it because they were convinced that this was where science and progress were going. And it, and it was value. It's valuable in those kind of circumstances to have some limiting principle, some point where you say, well whatever science and progress allegedly say. But the point is we're not going to go here because God doesn't want us to do that.

[A]

Okay, but that's not the only, that's not the only brake to pull on the way to genocide.

[B]

It's not the only break to pull, but it happens to be a pretty powerful one.

[A]

Well, not if your God sometimes fancies genocide, right? I mean, not if you can read the line about the Amalekites and say, well, maybe this is sometime you want to get a little genocide going. So it's, the point is you and I can both come up with rational reasons to abhor genocide. And not being tribal is one of the one anchor point. Not wanting needlessly immiserate innocent people and kill them is another anchor point. Caring about human, the idea that the only way to care about human well being.

[B]

No, the anchor, the anchor point is what you think a human being is and why that means that a human being is inviolate. That's the anchor point. Saying we all agree, you know, genocide is compassion kills people.

[A]

Compassion. Actually, actually discovering that you love other human beings, that you want them to flourish, that you want to collaborate with an unlimited number of happy, prosperous people, that you want to spread their wealth around, that you feel incredibly lucky to have all the benefits you have.

[B]

That, that all turned that. I'm just suggesting, Sam, that that all turns on sort of underlying assumptions about like what, what is a good person? What is a model?

[A]

What is moral sanity?

[B]

And lots of lots, but lots of people in human history. Like just, just to take a simple, a simple example like who is a better model of the great human being Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar? Who do you think? Who's a better model of human greatness?

[A]

I mean, discounting all of the uncertainty about who Jesus actually was, Jesus in half his moods is a great model of many, many virtues. And yeah, I would say you take him over Caesar. Yeah, certainly. Yeah.

[B]

Right. I know you've interviewed Tom Holland, right, the historian of early Christianity. So this is in a way stolen from him. Right. But there's a long standing philosophical tradition held by many intelligent and reasonable people in human history that says that, you know, Caesar, the masterful all conquering political genius is the model of human greatness. And Jesus, who hangs around with a bunch of, you know, prostitutes and tells people not to worry about tomorrow and let it take care of itself is, you know, is just sort of a shiftless loser. Right. And your choice between those people, Caesar, someone who of course did commit a kind of genocide against the Gauls. Right. Your choice between those two people is not a scientific choice. You're not going to, you know, open the periodic table of elements and say I figured out that Jesus, Jesus.

[A]

But it can be a rational choice given we can rationally discuss what human flourishing entails.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And we can say that, that Jesus.

[B]

Died on the cross.

[A]

You and I, I mean, my argument is you and I could come up with 10 commandments, a better list commandments in the next 10 minutes.

[B]

No, see, this is what I would. I am, I am disputing. That is precisely what I'm disputing. I am saying that in the end.

[A]

You don't think we can improve on graven image somehow? Like we could spend a few minutes and just swap in something like don't, don't own people and treat them like farm equipment.

[B]

I'm sorry, Sam. Part of this conversation has been you critiquing cults of personality as one of the central evils of our age. And the prohibition against idols and idolatry, I think is clearly linked to exactly some of the vices and abuses that you are, that you're describing. If you want, if you want to say the Ten Commandments would be better with a prohibition against slavery, that's fine, but don't tell me that, ah, you know those, those Ten Commandments, A bunch of, bunch of Bronze age simpletons thought them up. And they don't have any present day applications. They obviously do.

[A]

Oh, they do, of course, you know.

[B]

But also, but also commandment not to murder. But whether you, but whether you. But. Right, but you think that because you have, you have A particular conception of ideas about human equality and what a human being is and everything related to that that are not universally shared, were not shared in pre Christian societies and are not something, again, that you just advance naturally towards. At some point, you have to make a specific choice between, historically, that's not quite true. Caesar and Christ, to take that example.

[A]

There are many. Okay, but my point is there are many routes to living what we would consider a noble ethical life. And there are many deviation points. Right. And some of. And one thing that's confusing, I mean, you've made this claim several, several times so far in ascribing to Christianity some of the good parts of our. Of our moral development and history is that, you know, historically speaking, there was nobody else to do the job. I mean, basically everyone's been religious. So, yes, religious people were on both sides of every controversy. Right. So that they were both slaveholders and they were abolitionists. Right. And so you can. You can. But the point is.

[B]

But that's because God exists and most people in history have been aware of it. Yes, that's right.

[A]

So. And most people have been ignorant of physics and biology. And so you wouldn't argue that ignorance of physics and biology is a requisite for getting things done, even though most people who've gotten things done in our past knew nothing about physics or biology. Right. So the point is we can make progress on all of these fronts. And my claim is that we can just be honest about how we make progress in every other area of our lives except this one. And it entails editing, it entails error correction, it entails noticing. Okay, listen, we. Now, okay, we don't have to relitigate this. We know that slavery was wrong. Right. So we don't have to. We can literally cut this part out of the book and no longer call it wise where it seems to endorse slavery. And so it is with vilifying people for whatever. I mean, you and I, I don't want to get bogged down on gay rights because it'll take us sideways here, but in my view, feeling that homosexual attraction is a moral problem is something that is well put behind us. The idea that it should be a killing offense, as you get from scripture, that's obviously something we want to repudiate and never reenact. And it's very difficult to say that if you're anchored to this belief that the book in its totality is the word of God and cannot be edited. And we must figure out how to squint our eyes and cock our Head so as to always make sense of it.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think there are some, obviously some places, some moral issues, especially around sex, where you and I would disagree and you would say I'm fatally anchored to a text, A text from 2000 years ago, I think. But what I'm just suggesting to you is that if you look at the actual history of religious civilizations, but again, I'm a Christian, so I'll be a Christian chauvinist, especially Christian civilizations, you see a dynamic process of moral argumentation and development that again has brought us to where we are today. Given you, even as, you know, a agnostic sort of operating in a residually Christian culture. A lot of the things that you take for granted and is not just a story of kind of fundamentalism freezing humanity in amber, that's just not what Christian civilization looks like. And, and what I'm trying to suggest is that some of the anchor points that, yes, you do, you do get from saying God revealed himself here in this way are incredibly useful when an entire society ends up going under a theory of, a false theory of progress in a terrible direction. But I just want to, I want to press you a tiny bit on this, right, like the point, the, the religious perspective on reality, which is at, at its, at its core, I would say the claim that the whole universe has some kind of intentionality behind it, that there is some kind of mind, some kind of conscious purpose driving history and that human beings as beings with minds participate in some way. That to me is a source of confidence. Part of why I share your confidence. Right, here's where we agree. I share your confidence that human progress is possible. That by reasoning together about morality we can make some kind of progress just as we make progress in the sciences and so on. But I believe all of that precisely because I believe that the universe is in some profound way ordered for us and responds to our efforts. And I think the, the non religious perspective struggles mightily to come up with a framework in which you should have any confidence at all that the reasoning capacities of, you know, of evolved bipeds on, you know, what's the Douglas Adams line? The random, the random star in a, you know, a sort of dank corner of the Milky Way spiral arm. Yeah, I'm misquoting. It's been a while. Right. Like I don't see why that perspective on reality should give you the kind of confidence that you have in this sort of progress. Why, why shouldn't it be the case that we evolve and develop and end up in completely the Wrong place morally and just tell ourselves we're in the right place because we're chimps who delude themselves. Whence comes your confidence that we are capable of this sort of progress?

[A]

Well, some of this progress has been demonstrated. Right? I mean, we've seen both morally and scientifically and technologically. We know what it's like to look back at periods of history insofar as we can look there. I mean, there was so little progress, they weren't even recorded. Right. But we know that if you dropped into any period of a thousand years of human history 50,000 years ago, you could jump forward a thousand years and not notice any difference. Right? Not notice any difference morally, culturally, intellectually, linguistically. I mean, you would just get the same stone.

[B]

So you're just waving away all the evidence for the lost city of Atlantis. But I'll let you do that. I'll.

[A]

So progress. We know what progress looks like. I mean, there's also. There's scary forms of progress that entail the possibility of disastrous regression. Right. You know, existential risk wasn't a problem in the same way when you only had stone tools. But I mean, my starting point is.

[B]

Okay, but there's evidence. I agree. There is concrete evidence for technological and scientific progress, but also moral progress.

[A]

The fact that I don't actually worry that you though the Bible is not much of a defense of this. I don't think that in your heart of hearts, you think homosexuality is a killing offense, even though you're uncomfortable with it on Christian grounds. That's progress away from scriptural literalism. Right.

[B]

But what is your. Again, I do think that there has been moral progress, but what gives you confidence in your belief that your limited. I mean, we aren't even. We aren't even getting into it.

[A]

You're asking why did you.

[B]

Free will and determinism. But you're. You. Your inherently limited consciousness can be definitely right in assessing when moral progress is taking place. Plenty of 20th century communists were incredibly confident that they were achieving the greatest moral progress known to man. And now we look back and say, well, obviously, well, the piles of bodies, that was wrong.

[A]

Some indication that they were wrong.

[B]

Well, the piles of bodies should have been an indication. If you believe in the Ten Commandments that says it's wrong to kill people. But if you think that Julius Caesar was a great man even though he killed people, you might not think that you have to make some kind of choice here. And you seem certain that we can make this choice.

[A]

Okay, I am certain that I can distinguish the difference Between, I mean, what I would call the good life and the bad life. Right. And insofar as we know how to migrate, I mean, I don't know how much you know about my work on this topic, but I'll give you the, the three minute version.

[B]

I'm a reader.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I view. So consciousness is the one thing we can be truly certain of. Right. I mean, you know, even if this is a simulation or this is a dream or we're both psychotic or, you know, the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that something seems to be happening. And that seeming is what I mean by consciousness. Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now that's actually, that really is a place where I believe we do pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. That's not a dogma I just articulated. That is just. I can't see any other way to use language here. This is just something seems to be happening. And I'm now gonna use this word consciousness to describe that fact. And on this landscape of seemings we can both begin to notice, even in a moral solitude, I mean even on a desert island, we can both begin to notice that certain things feel very, very good and certain things feel very, very bad. And when we get together in groups of hundreds and thousands and millions and now billion and try to organize ourselves, we can notice radically different outcomes. And so to take the, you know, some version of the good life, a good life would be, I mean imagine, you know, a circumstance of abundance of the sort we started with in, you know, with AI happy talk, where we're just surrounded by, you know, ethical, well intentioned people, non zero, all positive, some people who are all impressively creative and engaged and full of love and positive affect and pro social emotions. And there's a level of civility and compassion of a sort that we tend to experience only at the high points in our life. Once a decade, in the normal course of events. But now we've birthed a culture that has just maximized this to a degree that makes our current degraded state almost unrecognizable. And it's just we're in some kind of perfect utopia that's imaginable to me because I've had these experiences. And it's imaginable to you because you've had these experiences, you've cried for joy, you've been bowled over by creative genius, you've loved another person. Now there's obviously there are situations that you and I could find if we wanted to right now we could get on an airplane and fly to Some war torn hellhole. And we can see the opposite of all of this. We could find people who are in, you know, who are kidnapping children and forcing them to be child soldiers. And on the first act of their induction is we force them to murder their families, you know, or force boys to rape their sisters or what? I mean, just go to Congo or some other awful place right now with all the bad incentives that are enshrined in this awful behavior and you discover this right, and everything is wrong. You know, the life expectancy is low, not just the violence, but you got all these tropical diseases that are as yet uncured or untreated treated. And everyone is unlucky. And we're so glad we weren't born there, right? Now, if we know anything about anything, if we know anything about biology, from biology to economics and everything in between, sociology, psychology, engineering, every relevant field of human conversation, including ethics, including moral philosophy, including the finer points of the contemplative life, we know that we now have a navigation problem, right? How to move toward the good life I just described and away from the bad life. And how to get everyone to move, however incrementally, in the direction of the good and away from the bad. And how to spread the good luck around when we notice that there's really no rational accounting of why you and I are so lucky. And those poor kids being inducted into some awful internecine war are unlucky for reasons that they didn't earn. And here I think religion is often unhelpful in tuning our moral compass, whether Eastern or Western. I mean, the Eastern religions would tell you it's their karma, right? I don't think that's especially helpful or compassionate. But we have a navigation problem and there are right and wrong answers as to how to move in this space, right? We can talk about how to design an economic system that reliably returns you to some malarial swamp in a place like Congo, and how to design an economic system that is going to make life better and better for more and more of us and incentivize the things we want to incentivize and et cetera. There's a longer conversation there, but there are right answers here. And all I'm this is I really only have one hobby horse, which is we should fight for and try to implement and try to discover the best ideas possible insofar as we can see them. And respect obviously value those that have earned the test of time, but freely jettison those that may be in the same chapter of the same book. That have reliably immiserated so many of our ancestors and our contemporaries. And dogmatism, religious and otherwise, is the thing that provides an obstacle to doing that.

[B]

So just, I'm trying to think of the best way in here, but two points, right? If you take a view that consciousness is fundamental and therefore some kind of peak experiences of consciousness should be the goal of human beings.

[A]

It's not peak. I mean, I would say that because.

[B]

A baseline of consciousness, there's an intrinsic well being.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That we can room for peak. Right. I would still argue that you have some big questions about definitions of both peak and ordinary experiences of well being. And this goes back to what we were sort of kicking around with, you know, an abundant future. Right. Like you.

[A]

Yeah. Brave new world.

[B]

You need, you need some conception.

[A]

Why would soma be bad, right?

[B]

Why, why is it bad to, to drug yourself? Why is it better to experience, you know, a Beethoven symphony than to lose yourself in a heroin reverie or something? Just, just to take an example, right. You, you still need some kind of conception of that goes beyond the mere fact of conscious experience and gets into what human beings are for and the, that that are not exclusively religious questions, but are somewhat religious questions. Then on the, on the question of progress front. And again, this is I, you know, in seeking to achieve material progress time and again in extreme forms and simple forms, you run into questions about, you know, what do people have to give up in order to achieve progress. Right. Like what is, what are you allowed to destroy and do away with? And again, this came to sort of was most extreme in the theories of communists and other 20th century utopians who again would have agreed with you, but would have said, well, and if we have to, you know, liquidate the kulaks along the way, it's worth it. But, but even in more basic debates about, like, what should a capitalist society look like, what should a welfare state look like? Like how much suffering is allowable for the sake of growth and dynamism. And this is where again the, but the anchors of the anchors that religious claims, biblical claims have offered over the years around saying, well, look, even if you think that the glorious tomorrow is achievable along this path, you're still not allowed to sterilize these people. You're still not allowed to kill these people because they're made in the image of God and God said not to do it, those are themselves, I think, issues that, where you have inescapably dogmatic questions, I guess. Can I ask you why, given your belief in the fundamental. The consciousness as fundamental. Why is the conception of God? Why. Why are you resistant to that conception? If you've. If you're willing to stipulate that mind, conscious experience is the fundamental thing that we know about the universe, whatever else we know, we know that mind is. Is real. To me, that is a starting place of religious inquiry, right? Because you. You assume, like, okay, there's this thing called mind that turns out to be able to unlock the mysteries of the universe, a universe that seems to have been structured in order to allow for that to happen. And therefore the religious person says, probably there is a form of mind that is higher than our own that is responsible for this. Why does that not strike you as a conclusion to be drawn from your ideas about mind and consciousness?

[A]

Well, so first let me say that the point I was making about consciousness is an epistemological and phenomenological point, right? It's like this is the one thing we can be certain of, but that's not to make any claims ontologically about the cosmos or the history of the cosmos, or. I don't think that the fact that consciousness is all I can know or care about or all I can imagine anyone knowing or caring about, that. That gives me any license to say that I know what happened before the Big Bang as a result of this direct confrontation with my own experience. But experience is the point. And wherever the lights are on, that's another locus of moral significance or ethical significance, because this admits of the capacity of suffering and happiness. And it's obvious to me that the horizons of possible experience exceed what any one of us have touched, right? So we don't know how much more mind we could have. We don't know how different minds might explore the space of all possible experiences differently than our own. And so I do imagine something like a vast landscape of peaks and valleys where the peaks are where things are very good and the valleys are where things are very awful. And those spaces can be explored by the requisite minds, right? And some of those spaces may never be explored, but they're possible. This is where a few dogmas begin to creep in. And we might wonder whether possibility is even a thing. Maybe we don't live in a universe of possibility. Maybe that's just the way we think about things. Maybe there's only the actual, right? And whatever happens, happens. And there was actually nothing that was ever possible. But my view of this suggests that to follow JBS Haldane, the universe is very likely, not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose, right. I mean, so I'm not ruling out profound strangeness and paradox and surprise. Right. And so if the universe is in some sense a creation of an intelligence that I can't fathom, I haven't ruled that out. Right. That's not at all something that I am confident isn't true or couldn't be true. But what I am very confident is the case is that there's no indication that that sort of mind wrote the Bible or the Quran or any of our holy books to which are, you know, the various sects, you know, warring and otherwise are beholden. Right. So and again, that kind of mind.

[B]

But that kind of mind, assuming that such a mind cared about your mind, which I'm stealing a couple bases there. But that kind of mind allowed for those books to be written and to shape history.

[A]

But those are precisely the. I mean, when you, when you think of how good a book would be if it were written by an omniscient mind, that an omniscient and compassionate mind, you know, it's trivially easy to see how much better any one of our books would look.

[B]

Right? Right. Well, I mean, yes. Although would our minds be able to see how good it was or would be like someone encountering some modernist opera and we'd be like, oh wow.

[A]

But you'd want the most inspiring and onward leading document. If you were really compassionate, right. And you really wanted people to get it right, you'd say, I mean, so like for instance, I mean, this is.

[B]

Something you so like, maybe you'd tell a story where hypothetically the omniscient mind came down to earth and participated of his creation and died on a cross and opened life. Would that be inspiring enough? If we're going to want more inspiration, that's not enough.

[A]

So for instance, in your book you draw. This is sort of where we're going here. One point you make is that the utility of mathematics, right? The scientific utility of mathematics, the fact that math not only can help us describe what we empirically discover about nature, but can indicate areas in the darkness that we hadn't yet fathomed. And lo and behold, we discover that there's something in the structure of equations that's predicting physical reality. And how is it that we live in a universe where this thing that we just we, these apes invented is a key that unlocks these doors that didn't even exist, Right? So surely this is evidence that this whole thing is designed by a yet greater mathematician on some level. But if you want to, you have to play tennis here with the net. Right. If you want to hold that possible truth in view, which would be fine. Right. It may be suggestive of something, then you have to say, well, what kind of book would this compassionate, omniscient mathematician have written us if he wanted to guide us? And surely he would have put something in there that was just one page of mathematics that would have Inspired even now, 2,000 years later, would have inspired human mathematicians to one, recognize that they live in a universe that was so designed, but two, continue to deepen their understanding of it. I mean, that would be so easy to have done, right? David Hilbert University.

[B]

You want one Theoretical physics proof encoded encode it doesn't have to be encoded. Jesus just has to say it. He's out there preaching and he's like, by the way, you won't get this for a while, but E equals MC squared.

[A]

Yes, exactly. Something that no denizen of the first century could have said, proving the omniscient or supernatural origin of the text.

[B]

Surely you want that, that is fair. I think that, I think that any conception of a God who cares about human beings has to accept that for whatever reason, this God also wants to allow for the possibility of you, Sam Harris, not believing in him. And yeah, I agree. I can imagine a world that's a good example. I can think of a thousand others where God makes it just 10% easier for me to give to you that he exists. And you swap out a couple of.

[A]

Lines about sacrificing goats and you swap in.

[B]

Right? You don't want the sacrifice of goats.

[A]

High level physics.

[B]

Yeah, I guess. I think if your argument is there are things that God could have put in, could have done or said while he was on earth as Jesus Christ, that would have make full belief easier. I'm not going to argue with you.

[A]

Not even just easier.

[B]

I would suggest that you should think.

[A]

Not even just easier though.

[B]

I think that you have gone quite deep into certain worlds of fundamentalist religion where you are always saying like, well, you know, the fundamentalists say this, you know, this holy book is perfect in every way. And yet this holy book seems to have been written by some people in, you know, first century Judea. Doesn't seem that perfect to me. I think that in the case of the New Testament, I think it's true of the Old Testament as well. The Christian claim is that these books are divine inspiration. One is different from sort of pure divine dictation. Like the Bible is not presented to people. Right. And what you're seeing, what, what Christians think you're seeing in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are a bunch of human beings wrestling with the appearance and revelation of God on earth. And therefore the books do look like first person memoirs rather than, again, this sort of crystalline, crystalline form. But yes, if this is how God operates, then he is always leaving the door open for you, Sam Harris, to say it's too much goat, too many goats here, man. I can't, I can't get there. And that, that is fair.

[A]

But again, it could even be sharpened up to the point where any Campos Mentis person would believe thereafter. It just, it could be God.

[B]

Yeah, no, and it's totally clear. God. God has. Not God, I think, I think for reasons having to do with the nature of human freedom, but God has not placed us in a system where every reasonable person has to look at the evidence and believe in him. That is true. However, it is also the case that, you know, the history of the civilization, inspired by the books that have too many goats and, you know, sheep and whatever in them, has done a pretty creditable job of yielding up the scientific minds that have done a lot of the work of unlocking the mystery of the cosmos. Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and so on all show up in societies steeped in the New Testament, the Old Testament and everything in between. So at the very least, maybe that's like a little indicator light for you. You know, just a flashing light, not a certain proof, but like, here, here you go, Sam, here's a breadcrumb to pull you, to pull you towards the truth. But, but yes, we, we can't. I look as, as an apologist for the existence of God, which I do think is extremely likely. I often think to myself, yeah, you know, it could be, it could be 20%, 20% easier and would be nice if, you know, wouldn't you have found.

[A]

If you had found. Just imagine the Dead Sea Scrolls, if those, what Was that, the 40s they were discovered?

[B]

Yeah, late 40s.

[A]

Imagine that find and you pull out these scrolls and they get patiently translated, Right.

[B]

And it's the law, Right. It's the laws of. It's Einstein's theory and it is right there, Quantum theory, Right.

[A]

It's Claude Shannon's information theory. It's.

[B]

Sure. But on the other hand, on the other hand, you could very easily imagine a cosmos where you and I were having a debate as an atheist and a believer, and you said to me, well, if only this universe were organized by pellucidly clear and amazing mathematical laws. If we only had that then, then I'd concede that there's probably a God, and yet in this universe we have those. And you're like, well, that's not enough. I want it written in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[A]

No, no, no, no, no, no. Because I actually don't, I don't think that. I'm not granting you that the strange utility of mathematics suggests that there was a mathematical mind designing the universe. I mean, I think it's open to many other interpretations than that. I'm just saying that if you're going to say that, then you should have also required really that there be some shred of that intelligence in the one document you're using to organize that worldview. And why, I mean, why pick a document that doesn't have any of that? That's my.

[B]

Again, I think I would just stress, and I won't just that I do not think that Christians or any religious believers are obligated to see their sacred scriptures as the only document that organizes or the only theory that organizes their worldview.

[A]

I think the only one. That's revelation, the one.

[B]

Right. The revelation. The revelation in the New Testament is about the kind of. It's, it's about salvation and questions related to that, but it's also about the kind of people that God wants us to be. And I do think you can draw from the fact that it includes moral codes and not the laws of physics, that God does care more. That's an indicator. God cares more about what kind of person you are than how fully you understand the secrets of the cosmos. I think. Yeah, that is an implication you do have to draw if you are a Christian. Yes.

[A]

All right, Ross, one quick question before we go.

[B]

That ties it all together.

[A]

Does not tie it all together. It's a lateral move. But I'm just interested to hear how it it landed with you, given a couple of lines in your book. So in your book, you talk about the possible reality of demons and demonology, and you express some, albeit sheepish, interest in that topic. What was your reaction when Tucker Carlson claimed to have been assaulted by a demon in his bed with his four dogs, I should point out, and he had the scratches to prove it. What was your reaction? Do you believe that, as Tucker apparently does, that he was assaulted by a demon?

[B]

Or do you think I'm going to plead agnosticism on that one? Not least because I have vague aspirations to interview Tucker at some point and I'll probably ask him about that question. I hope you get that chance. I would say that I think that in fact, for Reasons that you yourself just suggested the idea that consciousness as we understand it could interact with matter in the material world in a lot of different ways. I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe in the existence of consciousnesses that are different from ours and that are morally, let's say, very dangerous. I don't, I don't think there's anything irrational about that belief. And I do think that the literature on demonology, which is quite interesting, is suggestive in that sense. Just on like the point of, like what you do. If you think, I think if you think that, that a demon is operating in your life, it doesn't imply that the demon is after you because you're doing the right thing or that you're, you know, definitely on the right track or, or anything, or anything like that. And that's, I mean, that's the, that, that I think is an important point to stress. Like the, the, the idea of demonology is used by people in a lot of historical context to essentially sacralize themselves and demonize their enemies. And I think you and I would agree that's interesting that that's a big mistake.

[A]

I hadn't even thought that there was a self aggrandizing motive in Tucker for claiming to have been assaulted by demons.

[B]

I'm not saying self aggrandizing. I'm just saying, like, I'm saying that you just, you said I have a sheepish interest in demonology. I don't have a she. I have a sheepish interest in UFOs, in demonology. I don't want to be interested in it because I think it's a topic that if demons exist, you know, you don't want to give them any openings.

[A]

You don't want to put out the bug light for them.

[B]

Don't, don't give them openings. That is my advice to all of, all of your viewers and listeners.

[A]

Right. All right, we'll leave it there, Ross.

[B]

All right, good.

[A]

That's just in time for Christmas.

[B]

Merry Christmas, Sam. It's been a pleasure. This was a lot of fun.

[A]

Yeah. Thank you for your time. Great to talk to you.

[B]

That was great, Sam.