Decoding the Gurus - Decoding Academia: Chris on Religion & Ritual *Patreon Sample*

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

It had to happen eventually. As Matt and Chris listen week in and week out to the world's greatest gurus pontificating on the mysteries of the universe, it's only natural that the siren call of Galaxy Brain takes and revolutionary theories would prove too great. And so seeking to take advantage of the parasocial bonds they have scrupulously cultivated (and signal their value to the University of Austin) they are launching a new Patreon bonus series on 'Decoding Academia'. The first two instalments covering Matt & Chris' work & main research interests will be freely available to all. But for the deeper arcane knowledge that only true free thinkers would dare behold, you will need to smash through our Patreon 'Strategic Economic Barrier' or SEB.In this episode, Chris discusses the cognitive and evolutionary relevance of religion (what is it?, why is it?, and what is it good for?), rituals (what are they? why do we do them? and why are there painful ones?!?), & Gods (why do we care about them? Do we need them for religion).So take a breather from the culture war and enjoy some light academic waffle!We will be back on Friday this week with a full guru episode on Brene Brown!LinksChris' article on 'Religion Without Belief' at AeonChris' article on Hazing Rituals at AeonPreprint version of Academic Article by Chris on 'Is Japan Religious'

Good morning, Matt. Good morning, Chris. are you i'm i'm all right today we're here but we're not covering a guru we haven't got another more intelligent person to tell us what's what it's just me and you mano mano mano oh mano yeah mano mano yeah mano mano yeah and i'm gonna inform Mano a Mano? O Mano? Yeah, Mano a Mano. Mano a Mano. Yeah, and I'm going to inform you. Chris, what is it? What are you going to tell me? We get periodic requests from people

to talk a bit more about our research or academic stuff. I think people need to be careful what they wish for because the, like asking academics to talk about research is just an invitation to hell, so, but we did think that for the patrons, we could do little condensed episodes where we talk little condensed episodes where we talk about our research, research topics that we're interested in, or research papers and maybe things like how to assess research papers and the quality within and those kinds of things. But that would come out naturally in conversations, but basically to talk a bit more about our research interests and backgrounds and that kind of thing.

And we're going to pilot test it today with a topic that you can describe. Do we have a nice name for this, though? We don't, but you're good at generating names. Guru Bites? That's terrible. That is bad. That's bad. Let's ask the garometers we're not garometers no that's terrible as well

anyway we need to workshop it we need to workshop people can tell us some suggestions right that's it throw the ball back in their court Yeah, because people have quite rightly said that our show mainly focuses on us kind of criticizing other people for their opinions and galaxy brain stuff. And we don't really put ourselves out there. tension because suddenly if you listen on occasion, we do offer our opinions and things that we value. They're just hidden. It's very hard to decipher what they are, but they're, you know, they're there floating under the surface, like a big iceberg waiting to hit you. Like most of the criticisms of our podcast, totally unfair. And when you think about it, when you think about it, and you you know the truth is that i haven't asked you

much about your research and vice versa so it is kind of good to you know i got a i got an expert here i got a guy who knows a thing or two yeah i'm an expert that's right i according to a little place called then i forget that i forget where I got my PhD. It's, yeah, it's an institution. That's funny because you were just showing me your doctorate with the emblem and everything just a moment ago. You were very proud. Yeah, yeah.

Matt, that's just, I was just setting the scene just to prove, I know that you need verification of qualifications before you'll even let our guests speak. They have to show copies of their certificates and and then you will be in the end of the room and talk to them but um so i i just follow in protocol they need to be signed by justice of the peace and all of that yeah that's true now i've cited it and i can confirm that it's real and in preparation for the conversation i would reread a small section of my thesis when I was actually like being intelligent

many years ago. And I still don't hate my thesis. That's an achievement. Like, yeah, yeah. That's good. I'd be too afraid to look at mine. But yeah, so your thesis was on religion and ritual and that kind of thing.

But give us, in a nutshell, not a of thing, but give us in a nutshell, not a big nutshell, just a modestly sized nutshell, Chris, what was your thesis about? The title of my thesis, which I've just remembered today, was Individual Pains and Social Gains, the Personal and Social Consequences of Collective Dysphoric Rituals. And so that's it in a nutshell. That's a very good title, Matt. It took me time and it condenses what it's about, but it only makes sense, I suppose, if you know what collective dysphoric rituals are.

And those might be slightly psychology jargony terms, not collective. Everyone knows collective. So dysphoric is stuff that is unpleasant, right? Correct. It doesn't feel good. You're a psychologist. Yes, that's right.

So that makes me think of things like, I'm just stippling here, like at a Masonic temple, for instance, where they have these weird ceremonies that I know they get their bottom spanked or something. I don't know. Indeed. That's bottom spanking was the primary focus of this dissertation. No, but actually, yeah, not that far off base. I did three kind of empirical studies as part of the thesis. There were originally six. I was just being optimistic that I was going to fit those in.

But in any case, I did one, which is on a survey of Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners. They have this kind of thing, which they do at greeting ceremonies, some groups where they whip each other on the back with their belts and the people are often not wearing their gi top. So they get like very badly bruised and welts on the back. And it's kind of like, you know, part of the promotion ceremony. So I was interested in whether that had psychological effects on how you see the group and how connected you feel with the other people.

Because some groups do it and some groups don't. That was the interesting thing. Then the second study or set of studies was getting people to do artificial rituals, small, small rituals that we had invented in laboratories in Oxford and in Hokkaido in Japan. We would get like groups of three people and tell them a cover story that psychologists and anthropologists in Oxford were working together and that they had found these kinds of instructions for old rituals.

And one of the ways that people explore what rituals do, this isn't necessarily true, but we told them that anthropologists get people to perform the ritual instructions. And then we try to see what people think that the rituals might have been about. And academics look at what was involved. to see what people think that the rituals might have been about and you know academics look at what was involved um so this was the reason that we told people to come in and do a follow this set of ritual instructions together and perform a ritual but actually what we were doing was that we were modifying the environment across a couple of conditions so the manipulation was basically

conditions so the manipulation was basically whether it was unpleasant neutral or unpleasant and this was manipulated by whether the background sound playing during it was screaming infant and a babbling generic infant or like happy laughing infant but laughing in a non-creepy way that was an important thing to their calibre. And then also, the room was either dark or well lit and the little idol that they were doing the ritual with

had an angry expression or a happy expression and so on. So you were varying whether or not it was dysphoric or not, right? To a certain extent, right? Like we couldn't make it.

So just like environmental cues that were a bit more unsettling it was very unpleasant to listen to a baby scream for like it took 15 minutes yeah five minutes for each person to do it so but the ethics board wouldn't let you spank people right yeah not in that study yeah so that was that was the like experimental one and then also in Japan, went out to a bunch of firewalking and some cold water festivals, but they're not actually in this thesis.

So in the firewalking festivals, we took people, we gave surveys to people before and after a firewalking festival. And then we looked at how they felt about the community and the firewalkers and so on, and also if they were more generous in a disguised donation game and this kind of thing, both the people who took part in the fireworking

and the people who were in the crowd watching. So those were the three studies that we're in. And that gives a general idea that you know the kind of area that i was interested in as my phd yeah i understand why you describe yourself more on that like a psychological anthropologist because that's that's all quite similar to stuff that a social psychologist would would do yes so maybe, like the thing I think that would probably distinguish it is that we, like field experiments are more common, right? Going out to festivals and that kind of thing.

And also if you saw the lab experiment, you might be very upset because of the, the ecological validity would just terrify you because, you know, psychologists always want to strip things down and make like no potential influence from confounding variables. But in so doing, they make the situation incredibly artificial. And we more emphasized on like making a thing which looks like a real ritual. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the takeaway from, so skip out all the a real ritual. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what was the takeaway from, so skip out all the intervening steps and skip right to the sort of conclusion sort of section, what, what was your

main takeaway from, from doing that stuff? No, it's kind of messy, but like the basic idea was that, um, and this isn't, I don't think this is a grand insight, but that like painful or unpleasant experiences post-event that are subjectively interpreted as positive, right? So it doesn't matter how much you suffered at the time or that kind of thing. It's the subjective reassessment of the experience that leads to the heightened group bonds that you feel towards other people and that this can be associated with greater

in-group generosity and so on behaviorally um but it doesn't always lead to that and it is obviously stronger for the people that are participating in things than the people that are observing with them. So the other thing was looking at the existing relationships that people have and how committed they are, and these are significantly confounding. So it stands to reason, but you can't, I think in most cases, it would be hard to generate a deep commitment to a group purely from getting them to do a ritual event.

It has to have the invested meaning in it. Yeah, yeah. These things in the real world, they happen within the context of a big community generally of people that have been living together and working together for their entire lives. I mean, stepping back a little bit, one thing that occurs to me is that one of the underlying assumptions from people like yourself and psychologists like me is that a lot of the things that people do in groups are functional. They serve some kind of purpose. It's not just random stuff that happens. But of course, the sort of null hypothesis is that.

Like some things are a bit random and just kind of arbitrary. But I guess the underlying presumption of that theme of research is that the rituals that are occurring, dysphoric or not, are there to serve a kind of, whether it's social bonding or something like that, some kind of purpose. like that's some kind of purpose. This might come dangerously close to the Brett Weinstein and Heller Haynes, like what Omega principle or whatever the case it may be, but I think there's a much more legitimate version of what they posit and it applies in the case of dysphoric rituals, which these are preserved culturally recurrent. This is an important thing that there's essentially no society in which you don't find rituals and that you don't find dysphoric rituals. or whatever the case may be, there is a question of why, like, why are people doing this? And why

is it being preserved if it serves no purpose? And it can be, there are bound to be occasions when it's preserved as a byproduct of something else, which has a functional purpose. But I think there is enough evidence to show that dysphoric rituals, especially collectively performed, do seem to have functions in terms of bonding people together. And you find them often in groups which are highly committed or engaged in risky tasks, including terrorist cells or military groups or cults, right? These groups which need to get high commitment. And there's a theory by Joe Henrich which focuses around rituals as creds, credibility-enhancing displays.

And the argument is that taking part in rituals demonstrates a behavior to indicate that you hold a certain belief or you hold respect for a certain group and if the behavior is unpleasant difficult and so on this is a more convincing behavior than just like staying yeah yeah i believe in whatever yeah it makes me think of like costly signaling yeah i have a section on it. Of course, Matt. It's there. So the idea with that is that you can't just rock up to the Masonic temple and say, hey, I'd like to be a member. And they say, okay, here you go. Here's your badge. And they go, great. And then you stroll off. You need to demonstrate your commitment by some sort of costly signals. And this is where I could see

where the dysphoria could kind of fit in, right? Because it's something that's not easy. It's not necessarily pleasant. It's something that indicates that you care enough about this group to want to suffer a little bit in order to be a part of it. And there's a researcher called Aldo Simono

who has taken this perspective and applied it to an evolutionary framework. And he's argued that initiation rituals specifically are a means of weeding out free riders on groups. Because being a member of a group can give you elevated status, elevated access to resource. And that if you have people that ultimately don't contribute to the group, but just take, that this is a problem and would have been a problem evolutionarily for human groups. So being sensitive and developing cultural tools that allow us to discover uncooperative members is important. So his framework's interesting. works interesting i've i've actually talked with him and we have some areas of disagreement or that we are unsure what the empirical evidence show because he's primarily focused on initiation

rituals and a lot of the rituals that i'm talking about are not initiation rituals they're rituals for people who are already members of the group and so it's a slightly different dynamic but yeah but we actually plan to do studies together to look at some of that if we ever get time yes well just a little side though i'm going to put a bit on this because but i'm just going to mention it just because i think it's interesting is that back when i was doing my phd just just i happened to read this paper where they they played around with the iterated prisoner's dilemma and for who aren't familiar, the prisoners dilemma is the sort of thing where you can cooperate, you can defect. And depending on what the two actors do, there'll be these differential payoffs.

It's this classic little toy model for exploring these sorts of evolutionary cooperative or cheating defective type behaviors, which you just referred to. So the iterated prisoners dilemma is one where you play that game not just once but you do it multiple times and it gets much more interesting then one of these days Chris I'll tell you about how I programmed up the iterative prison dilemma with some very simple little computer DNA strands that govern their behavior based on what the other player had done and then they there was a population of them. They all played each other.

And so you had this population of little agents playing the game against each other and getting differentially selected into the next generation based on their scores, basically, their cumulative scores. So that was really fun. And it was fun to watch how the population evolved. So one of these days we could talk about that, but to steer us back onto, sorry. Well, we had one, there was just like one offshoot of that is that I didn't directly do this, but I was involved in the paper where it's published.

There was some agent-based modeling. I think it's agent-based modeling, which attempted to look at ritual dynamics and modeling costly rituals as rituals which minus fitness or whatever the points-based system were, but can potentially lead to... they modeled it in but in the paper it indicated that this was a counterintuitive way of making communities of agents more successful in the long run than ones that didn't do yeah so it's not like the thing with modeling studies is always there's a lot that goes into the parameters that you build in your model so if you're good at modeling you can almost produce always get the answer you want no i know i know but it was interesting you can like do modeling with rituals as well right you can model with anything you can we're getting into a whole different topic now but i've always been interested in that and i completely agree with you that you you have

for a modeling study to be good it always has to be so simple that you do not have the flexibility to tune parameters you know and um but then when it's so simple it's so abstract yeah it can be questionable as to whether it's it's it's real but ecological validity that's the important academic term here matt yeah. Yeah, yeah. I like the hydrated prison soil there, regardless of thing. I think it's a good model. It captures a lot about interactions, that things can be

beneficial to you in the short term, but they will harm cooperation and rewards for everyone in the long term. That's a common situation. And the iterated version, meaning that it depends on the way it's implemented, but that you can track reputations

or potentially have a third party punishment element and stuff, right? And these do reveal interesting dynamics about human psychology. Yeah, I think there's lots of interesting places you go to that actually I'm connected to religion and we're going to get back to religion in a second. But it just made me think of how at our university, like a lot of organizations, I've noticed a tendency where they want new applicants or new members to sort of do their time.

They'll sort of be denied promotion or whatever and they'll be given the worst jobs and so on. And it's kind of like this thing where everyone's got to do that for a year or two or more. And I think a lot of it's got to do with showing commitment. And once you've done that, then... Like you could even, you could view writing a PhD thesis in some extent as a hazing ritual, right? Because like, often because, sure, if people write it over five years and they spread it all

out that's good you know that then it isn't but like the reality is many people condense the writing into a very short period of time and they suffer tremendously for that but then many people have had similar experiences and you know if you talk to them you'll feel yeah you know i went through something similar and it you feel more. So yeah, it extends the definition a bit. But I think there are these, like, I think there is something fundamental about having experienced something difficult and potentially personally traumatic that you regard as like core to your biography this is one of the like a relevant thing can make you feel very attached to other people that have a similar thing which is core to them

and you know this is why i have a lot of sympathy for people talking about the idw and going through a what they regard as like a public trauma right right. As being part of the initiation into their group. It's, it makes perfect sense to me, uh, in terms of like ritualized dynamics and psychology that they, they would feel that and that that would work right. If you, and it, it works as a costly signal as well, like from their perspective, because you, you know, in our world being heterodox is a very costly, dangerous, brave thing to do. So when you think about it, like entering into any kind of relationship or, you know, entering a group is, is like entering into a relationship, if it's like a deep

and committed one, what you're being expected to do is to kind of recreate yourself in a way in order to be this sort of functioning group member. So I could see that what you described as like a personally, whatever existentially significant thing could be important as a signifier that you've actually honestly undertaken to make that kind of, it's almost like a sacrifice, a little bit of a sacrifice of self. And like with hazing rituals and so on, it's like a sacrifice of dignity to join the group. So yeah.

You can see, I mean, like I'll get off the hazing ritual thing, but like even the Nixxiom cult, right, recently, part of the thing that people really disliked about them were that they, they had this concept. I think it was, I can't remember how they termed it, but it was like, you had to give collateral to the group, which was like secrets, right. Or, you know, or nude photos or, or something, or, you know, branding is the most obvious obvious like physical demonstration of commitment. But even telling people things that could damage your reputation, like you've had an affair or something like that, these are all ways of demonstrating your commitment

to the group, but then they function as a way that you can be controlled, right? And Scientology has done that as well. But the point in mentioning all this is just just that like, those are very cultish examples of it, but that kind of dynamic happens in a lot of tightly bonded groups. Yeah. And like even just getting closer to people is often part of revealing information, right, that you don't reveal publicly.

So the notion, like this is self- self serving for me, but like understanding ritual and religious psychology, it feels like it's an evergreen topic because it's remains relevant regardless of how important actual religions are in a society. The psychology is still there and there's no society where rituals aren't like a big part of daily life they're just not what people imagine ritual to be yeah that's right like sports and so on so yeah reminds me of the cultish discussion we had recently it's just degrees but it's it's everywhere so getting back to the broader thing so let's talk about religion and stuff general right so so let me be joe rogan

i'm gonna be joe rogan like what's it all about if you're joe rogan you just need to spin it the relate the covert so okay so religions like rituals are omnipresent. Yeah, pretty much. They're like a fixture historically in cross-cultural. So why? Yeah, why? That's a good question.

But there's also one pin to put in it, which is that some people and some scholars of religion, no less, argue that that is not true. Religions are not cross-culturally consistent and they're not omnipresent, but rather they are a product of modernity, in particular Western or at least Abrahamic-focused concept that does not apply throughout history. So they're saying that the word religion conjures up images of institutions and priestly classes and doctrines. Yeah, okay. That's not what I meant by religion.

No, that's why they're wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a much broader definition which involves dealing with supernatural agents and, uh, powers and, and, and performing rituals, but which is the view that I take of it. So I won't deny that the English word religion and that the concepts that most people associate with religion are based on the Abrahamic frame. But, but there's much this interacting with invisible spirit entities and concerns with ritualized practices is ancient cross-culturally recurrent and

doesn't require all of those things. You don't need institutions or princely classes to have it. So in that case, I think, and a lot of anthropologists have argued that it is a, uh, like like human universal cultural universal rituals and religion um so why why is why good why yeah so there's lots of explanations right there's tons there's there's like terror management theory explanations which i think are maybe largely debunked but but it's, it's still quite popular. The notion that like to deal with existential dread, we develop

afterlife scenarios and so on. And then there's also functionalist takes about like the roles that institution playing kind of gluing societies and communities together, right, creating totems for groups to belong to. And it relates to the stuff that we've been talking about with costly signaling theories and so on, and kind of evolutionary perspectives on why religion exists, which probably is what are worth talking about. But I would also say that I think at a very base level, there's good arguments that the way that human minds and human cognition

functions makes us likely to believe in invisible agents and to see patterns of causality where there are none and to regard ritualized performances as important ways to transmit culture and information and so on. So there are all these little parts of our cognition, which would incline us towards believing in invisible entities and supernatural causality. And these then, I think, bleed into the more evolutionarily, not group selection, but like cultural evolution explanations about how religion and religious institutions in particular, there's a researcher called Dominic Johnson, and he argues that if you want to create communities that can function in very large groups, right? This is like a thing with prisoner's dilemma. How do you maintain trust and cooperation with a non-kin, right?

Which we see a lot in human non-cooperation with non-related people. And the answer is usually cultural institutions and early cultural institutions that can fulfill the role of punishing people for non-cooperation for immoral behavior and say that you even if you escape sanction in this life you will receive ultimate sanction are supernatural punishment systems and so that's interesting isn't it the idea of the punishment systems because like these days modern people we're used to the idea of these cod know kings or leaders or whatever and the supernatural and the religions provides a direct like a yeah it's almost like a direct route to legitimacy doesn't it the two weren't separate right like the mandate of heaven in china was is like a supernatural concept right that the rulers who were supposed to be like that the

cosmic order had determined where the people that should lead would be the rulers who were supposed to be like that the cosmic order had determined were the people that should lead would be the ones who led. So if you, and if they didn't have the mandate of heaven, they could be removed by revolutions and so on and, and vice versa with like the divine right of kings. Right. Of kings. Yeah. So the, in Europe, so you you you have the intertwining of like supernatural legitimacy

and more secular but they weren't secular then but you know concepts of laws and and social contracts and that kind of thing so just just social organization like yeah like like hierarchical like a rationale for this is why you're working in the field covered with shit and i'm riding around on a horse, right? It's not just luck. You're meant to be there. I'm meant to be here. I think I don't know the details of them that well, but the Hammurabi codes, these kind of ancient inscriptions that will set out a series of codes and laws. I would be surprised if they were, you know, entirely secular in nature and,

you know, but completely divorced from any concepts of like divine authorities and invested in Hammurabi or that kind of thing. So, and you do see like in, in stuff like the old Testament, those sorts of scriptures, it's full of rules and exhortations

of what you should do and what you shouldn't do and who you need to respect and so on. And a lot of it's kind of crazy or contradictory. But if there is a theme, then one of the themes is cooperate, play your role in a cohesive society. That's kind of the theme you get to be a good religious person. But I like what you laid out there because you sort of laid out

those three broad sort of theoretical explanations. So you've got that social bonding and cooperation stuff that we just talked about. And before that, you talked about the cognitive aspects which i think are kind of interesting we could talk a little bit more because there's that these natural heuristics and biases and so on that we have in terms of seeking explanations for things causes and things i think it's i i still despite the fact that terror management theory i think has been debunked or heard that too but but I still personally have a lot of sympathy for existential concerns. I think it's debunked in some of the stronger claims, but maybe the core

idea that belief in an afterlife provides existential comfort, I think is hard to debunk entirely. Or the notion that people will be punished eventually if they transgress even if they don't seem to be in real life like there's an obvious psychological satisfaction in that idea that you know when we look around the world and we see trump being the president and so on right like that it seems like exploiting and being the worst kind of person is often rewarded in society. But you want that if that were the case, you know, that's not a good message to send the people.

So you prefer to have one where there is a universal system of justice that will take care of that, even if the human life doesn't. And even if you suffer tremendously in this life, but you are a good person, you will be... This often is why religion sometimes gets associated with social conservatism, because it's saying, you don't need to worry about your condition so much in this life because, you know, do what you're supposed to do, follow your position in society and be a good whatever you are, and you'll get your reward eventually. You don't need to become a revolutionary, right? But on the other hand, religion has also served as a potent stimulus

for various revolutionary groups or social justice movements throughout history, right? Often have religious figures at the helm, especially in the modern period. So yeah, it's a rich tapestry. Like it is not just the opiate of the masses, though it has functioned as such in many societies. Yeah, I don't think any of those explanations are mutually exclusive. No, they're not. And that's a general takeaway, is like religion is such a complex phenomenon.

I have some sympathy for the people who want to say we shouldn't use the term religion. It's too reductive and it suggests like too much of a cohesive whole. But I don't think you need that in order to discuss the topic. You can highlight there are all these different contexts where things perform differently. There are all these different aspects, supernatural beliefs, ritual, psychology, like the branching division within religious communities and so on and so forth that you can look at individually as components, but having a broad category and a family resemblance type definition is fine with me. It's the same as politics or any of these broad categories where there's lots of individual things you can talk about, but the

general category does make sense to examine. If you talk about prehistoric politics, it makes sense, right? Even though you're obviously not talking about multi-party democracies or that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As long as we define our terms, it's fine. Use something snappy like religion instead of using one of the definitions you posted into the chat there. A system of beliefs and practice that revolves around commitments

to supernatural anthropomorphic beings. That's a bit of a mouthful. So yeah, just pick a word. That's the shortened version. The yellow one. So yeah, one thing that sometimes gets purported is not necessary. And I think it is important is that like the distinguishing feature, because people sometimes say, well, there's nothing distinguishing.

You can apply the definition to anything. Right. But, but no, because to me, what distinguishes religion from other areas of life to some extent right that it's always intertwined like we talked about with politics and all that kind of stuff but that is the supernatural element the appeal to invisible beings or forces that are the driving things and then the ability to manipulate said forces by the correct beliefs or the right rituals. And that is not inherent in every other aspect that one might associate with similar dynamics.

So some people say, well, but there are systems of religious belief that have no gods. And that is often sort of true. Like people made that came about Buddhism, but the word is completely not true because Buddhism has gods, not, not even the Buddha and stuff. Well, what his status in most Buddhist context, he's almost functioning as a God, but even when not presented as that, there was actually a realm of rebirth in traditional Buddhism, which is gods. So the, there are gods in, in Buddhist, but, uh, but there are other systems which have a better claim, right?

Animistic systems and so on. But in those cases, you definitely still have supernatural, uh, things, things which are invisible, which are, that are not the same as like a bore running through the forest and people sometimes take exception because they say, well, in those societies, they are treated as if they are, you know, physically there and just as real as a bore and elephant then, but I, even then I, I often find those claims on convincing when you read the literature, it's like people believe they're real, but they don't treat them in exactly the same way they would, you know, just a wild animal that needs to be mollified or that kind of thing. No, I don't see how that's different from modern day evangelical saying that Christ is literally here with them and talking to them and him and so on.

Christ is literally here with them and talking to them and him and so on. But I think I agree with you that I think that supernatural element is a necessary one and one that distinguishes it from other kinds of belief systems. Because if you look at those theoretical explanations you mentioned before, you can take those cognitive reasons, which it's like a shortcut to explaining why things happen. It's one way to sum that up. But then again, you can imagine various types of conspiracy theories and other sort of weird irrational or non-empirical beliefs that would still fit that. If you could think about the social bonding, you could think about football clubs and stuff

like that. There are stuff that's- Exactly. But it's those existential concerns around death and the afterlife and meaning that sort of adds the extra spice that makes religions a bit special. understanding QAnon as a political cult makes more sense, right? Because it's primarily focused around these kind of political actors and hidden forces. And they might be like given a level of power, which is supernatural, but they're not presented as except, you know, so this is the difference between like, say, when you start bringing in religious motifs about blood sucking demons or, you know, Alex Jones style, Christian ethno-nationalism layered on top of the conspiracy worldview. And you can have those overlaps, but I think that kind of what you're

suggesting when you're talking about the afterlife things is more that the motifs and the kind of figures and cosmological systems in religion are much more powerful because of the depth of symbolic meaning attached to them than something invented whole cloth. So even new age cults will usually reference Jesus, you know they might even take muhammad and and so on but they'll mix it in with other more modern things but but you still need those people well here's an interesting example of that i was listening recently to these people with these very strange extraterrestrial beliefs right you know it followed most of the tropes that people would be familiar with. You know, there's all these different alien civilizations and there's good ones and there's

bad ones. And there's like, there was this whole elaborate Baroque system that was being- The raptors, the graves, the spider aliens. Yeah, that's right, the graves, the spies. And there were these layers of Baroque craziness. But you could just tell that the way they spoke about it, it had these really strong religious overtones. I think these people were sort of simultaneously quite Christian and religious, as well as

totally believing in the alien overlord thing. And I could just tell, I can't articulate it. You could probably explain it to me, but it felt to me like it was it was an overlapping magisteria, you know, it was the same thing. And sometimes directly overlapping because the Elohim from biblical or, I don't know, Abrahamic sources get like brought into that cosmology as actually. Aliens. And then they, so you have, you know, a kind of Stargate scenario where the ancient religions are associated with alien beings and have overlaps. Also, not just in like cults and UFO believers or so on. The interest in a detailed cosmology of different beings and factions and powers attributed to different individuals within this grand system, right?

Cosmologies. That's something humans love. And they love it in their fiction as much as they love it in their dramas, right? People will build the Game of Thrones huge chart of all the relationships. And I think that comes from a combining like social primate love of interest and gossip and human interaction with a bigger significance, right? And a more counterintuitive properties, which make it more interesting because it's a problem of science fiction, a lot of science fiction that you have

aliens, which are supposed to be alien and, you know, completely separate evolutionary lines, but the way they're written is fundamentally human. They have the pettyifuting and their social primates that look like lizards or jellyfish. I think there's a lot of overlap and it cosmological systems in the pre-modern

period, you have to also understand them in a world where there isn't mass media entertainment. That's right, like thereek pantheon or the norse pantheon uh as entertainment you know stories right legends and myths with when there's no netflix it's a long evening you have to fill that time well most of humans were just telling in figures the majority of that but but when you come back from your your

back-breaking labor you you know you want to do something so you gotta hear a story yeah story yeah and there were always people in society who you know were good at that the yeah so in some respect i mean this might be stretching things a bit far, but I think the gurus that we cover in a different time might very well have been the storytellers, the type who would be talking about the spirits and so on. But I like the thing that you hit today, which is that people love the complexity. They love the intricate social relationships and the different powers and qualities that are attributed to the different actors and agents in these things. And that rang true for me because in one of the things I've studied, which is complementary and alternative medicines, and one of the interesting questions is, why do people like them so much? Because they do like them. They're inherently appealing. And one of the reasons I genuinely believe is that most

of them are just fascinating. They're just intrinsically interesting. Just to take one example, like this color therapy thing, there's like hundreds of different colors. They all have different qualities. They can combine with each other in different ways. And, you know, homeopathy, energy therapies, you name it. They all have an absolutely fascinating kind of backstory. And for those who want to dig deep, it's like if someone is giving you a massage, that's nice, right? If someone's giving you a massage and's nice right if someone's giving you a message and telling you that this pressure point is connected to this thing and whatever and that's

why that's or whatever it makes it feel better it is like even when you know it's bullshit having a story attached to it is really nice it gives it a bigger significance and it's it's always something that like when I'm teaching students about, you know, monotheism and polytheism and the different systems that like, when one thing that people don't appreciate so much is like even the monotheistic Abrahamic faiths that are ostensibly about a God, you still have this pantheon of angels and saints and like, and, and beings who, if they're not gods, they don't have creator God status, but they still have a lot of powers there.

And they're often battling bad versions who also have powers and stuff. So like in all our context, those are demigods or they're feuding gods. And I always liked Buddhism. This is why, you know, the kind of atheistic presentation of Buddhism that is popular in the West is slightly grating because one of the historically recurrent features about Buddhism is that it's been very good at accommodating existing pantheons into its cosmology.

So very often when it goes to somewhere, it didn't like ban the gods, right. That existed, you know, in the kind of Roman Greek thing, it took them. But I like that specifically in Japan and there's something to bet as well with the bond religion there, but because they have these anthropomorphic gods, right, in Japan, the kami in the Shinto system, and they have shrines dedicated to them. They built this theological justification that the kami could study Buddhism and become like, you know, protected deities for Buddhism. So they built these temple shrine buildings of where, which were shrines

housed within temples where the kami are then, you know, kind of learning Buddhism, becoming protected deities. And it's like a, you know, it's a very physical manifestation of the ability of religions to do that, to like enter an area, provide a theological system that they say is better. And then to look at your existing gods and say, you know, those are nice. And we can, we can do something with them, you know, it's not a teardown, you know, we could, we could renovate this.

Yeah. And there are other ways it can go, right. You can go that no, like fundamentalist movements that all that's got to go that's impure and i i much prefer the syncretic version although you know people often the presenter that is like debasing the religion because it's not it's not pure but it's as a modus operandum it often leads to a lot less burning of heretics so So I'm generally in favor of it. Yeah, we can all agree about that, I think. So, Chris, I'm conscious of your time.

I mean, it's been... Yeah, we slightly over our intended bite-sized chunk. But still... You've been very generous. You've been very generous with the time. We've had a few hours. But I mean, genuinely, I love this stuff. So probably if people found stuff interesting in this,

they could let us know. And I'm sure you wouldn't take much encouragement to follow up on any of those threads. So you can ask about if there's any topics. Maybe, you know, I don't know if people know our research areas that, that well, but like that, I, I've just explained what I'm interested in like ritual and, uh, religion.

So you should, now I'm out before we finish, give people some idea of your areas of research interests so that if they have a, you know, a topic that they want to hear about, cause the intention, like this, a topic that they want to hear about, because the intention like this, this, this episode is quite obviously focused on my research, but we're not planning to get always that way. We, we want to switch roles. So what, what are your, in a very, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no not chill, Matt. I won't do it now because I'll have my time in the sun. The next one will be your intro. People can ask me follow-up questions if they wish after that. Don't worry. It's fine. I tried to be

an equine analyst. That's it. The next time we do this, we'll focus on maths research. And then after that, we'll go into the research sphere. Come on, we need the name for it. Well, actually, the other thing we're going to do, we talked about this before, which I think would be really fun, would be like a little mini journal club because occasionally we come across papers that are just interesting and they're just a good

they may not be right or whatever or hugely influential, but they're just interesting and a good springboard to talk about good stuff. So I've got a couple of those in my back pocket. So once we've plumbed the depths of our expertise, which won't take long, I'm sure we can get into... I'm almost done. We could get it to, yeah, other people. And that'll be really fun because, yeah, I'd like to, yeah,

I think we'd like to talk to each other about them. And, yeah, maybe other people will be interested in hearing. So that'd be great. Yeah, we can maybe, you know, send it to Heller and Brett to show them how to critically review a paper that like it is, is possible. How you do that? That's, that's just a dig, man.

It's just a dig. It's a petty dig, but I mean, they claim to do that and I've never seen them like properly critically review a paper. So. We could actually do that. We could actually, so that's kind of a separate thing in a way because I was just thinking of papers that are sort of fun and interesting to talk about, but there's kind of

another thing we could do, which is just take an empirical paper, for instance, and go through how to evaluate it critically. Yeah. It's a bit dry, but it can be fun.

It can make it fun. You can make it fun. Just become extreme. There's worse people over there. It depends on the people. There's been one recently that has got academic psychology Twitter in flame about, I don't know if you saw, the

feeling cold women wearing... Women who feel hot, like a dress, going out to a club, clubbing, physically attractive, don't feel cold. Or feel less cold. Yeah, there's more to it, but there's a lot to be about like the quality of that paper and so on.

And maybe, maybe we don't want to do that paper, but I just want to mean that Maybe we don't want to do that paper, but I just want to mean that there's, uh, you know, there are like papers which become interesting because for various social dynamics on Twitter, because they have features on them, which are interesting to talk about. So we could do, you know, controversial papers and whatnot. Yep. Yeah. Both good.

Both good things. Very good. Last thing, I enjoyed that enjoyed that yeah last thing i just was thinking self-promotion um i have an article at eon which i published a couple of years ago and it's called religion without belief it's 3300 points long it's a long article, but it's, I think it's a nice condensed thing about my view about the importance

of rituals and how people might attribute too much significance to belief. Sam Harris and so on.

So, if people want to, that's probably a non-academic-y summary of like some of my opinions about religion

and ritual. Nice. We'll put a link in the show notes. Very good. All right. So, Matt, back to Monday morning work, and we will release the Brené Brown episode this week. We promise we'll get to it.

So, yeah. He's been busy. I've been sick. But it's going to happen. It's going to happen. All right. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Thank you.