Making Sense with Sam Harris - Making Sense of Belief and Unbelief | Episode 6 of The Essential Sam Harris

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around religion, atheism, and the power of belief.  First, we hear the stories of three guests who have fled their respective oppressive religious organizations. We begin with Sarah Haider, founder of the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America, who details how her encounters with militant atheists catalyzed her journey to secularism. Then our narrator, Megan Phelps-Roper, walks us through her story of abandoning the Westboro Baptist Church. Finally, Yasmine Mohammed presents her harrowing account of escaping fundamentalist Islamism and Sam’s role in inspiring her public advocacy work. We then tackle the concept of belief more broadly, diving into Sam’s understanding of atheism and what sets it apart from the views of other atheist thinkers like Matt Dillahunty and Richard Dawkins. We also revisit an infamous conversation between Sam and Jordan Peterson, wherein they attempt to come to some universal definition of the word “truth.” The episode concludes with two Q&A portions from life events in which Sam addresses some real concerns about purpose and meaning in the absence of religion.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to The Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Belief and Unbelief. The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,

the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest. And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions,

which range from fun and light to densely academic. One note to keep in mind for this series. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly affects, others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold. And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others. In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of moral and

political philosophy, free will, artificial intelligence, consciousness, death and spirituality, and more. So, get ready. Let's make sense of belief and unbelief. If there's a central fulcrum to consider for Sam's overall interests and efforts, it may very well be this concept of belief. Questioning the nature of it, considering the power of it, probing the fragility of it, exploring the absence of it, distinguishing it from other types of knowledge conjecture, and trying to describe it physiologically. and trying to describe it physiologically. We could use an examination of belief as the entryway to just about any of the episodes in the entire catalog of Making Sense. But to avoid such wayward meandering through the archives, let's take a quick look at the math that we'll be using here.

We're going to start with three interviews of women who left faith systems under different circumstances. Each of these women are now engaged with different levels of advocacy, and all of them have their own opinions and frustrations with what they see as a cowardly or hypocritical attitude when it comes to the promotion of universal human rights and the political sanctity of religions. You'll also hear Sam's full-throated agreement on many of those observations and critiques. We'll then take a turn towards the conceptual, philosophical, and existential concerns of religion and belief. This turn will take us towards Sam's brand of atheism,

which moves quickly towards his interest in selflessness and meditation, as being intertwined with what religions are claiming to have on offer. Then, we'll take a step further away from the personal and let Sam and a guest play around with ideas of epistemology, or the frameworks for understanding how we know what we know. And finally, we'll come back and do something slightly different in this compilation. We'll borrow a few important moments from Sam's career which are not directly from the Making

Sense Archive. These will be two excellent audience questions from live events that echo familiar responses and concerns regarding Sam's advocacy of atheism. So let's start there briefly. Sam's atheism. We are really prisoners of literature right now. We are constrained to talk either explicitly about these books or in some vague conformity to these books. Every person in this room has more access to information and scientific knowledge and just what is now basic common sense than the authors of the Bible and the Quran. And in fact, there's not a person in this room who has ever met a person whose worldview is so, is as narrow just by the sheer time in which they appeared in history as the world views

of Abraham or Moses or Jesus or Muhammad. And until we grapple with that fact and honestly commit ourselves to a 21st century conversation about the possibilities of human well-being, we're just going to be at sea and we're going to be trying to figure out whether we should pass laws about gay marriage, and whether we should ban blasphemy at the UN, and whether we should allow newspapers to print cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. And we're going to just be bewildered by the relentless certainties of people who are obviously lying to themselves. people who are obviously lying to themselves. From time to time, new listeners are taken aback to hear just how deep Sam's distaste for religion runs and how hostile he can appear to be to it.

Sam's public career began in earnest with the publication of a book called The End of Faith, which will be recommended reading for this subject. He's described this book as his direct response to the events of September 11, 2001. While he may change phrasing in certain passages if he would rewrite the book today, his attitude of frustration with the shielded, protected status of faith systems, at least in the U.S. at the turn of the century, would not be any less fierce. This book hit the shelves alongside Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, and Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell.

All of the books were successful and launched what became informally known as the New Atheist Movement. There are several vague definitions floating around, but Sam thinks of it as a renewed public effort to push back against the special status of religion, given an interconnected technological world quickly raising the stakes of the persistence and perpetuation of bad ideas, as exhibited by 9-11. New atheism's most controversial impulse was also showing little hesitation to speak about individual belief systems as causing specific and distinguishable levels of threat and danger. Sam and the New Atheists took a stance that all religious belief systems are philosophically harmful,

but that it is only honest and politically prudent to notice the specific political and social consequences that each system presents. It's important to note that that is a fluid stance that can and should constantly reorder its beliefs of most concern, given the complex contextual situation of global politics, technology, economic status, history, and much more. It also doesn't necessarily cast familiar codified religions

as the eternally fixed targets of critique. Systems of political ideology, pseudoscience, and magical explanations can become the rational targets of objection given the right circumstance. Throughout this compilation, we'll be considering some of the debates around the tactical efforts which take aim at all of these harmful belief systems. An important tenet to start with in order to follow Sam through these conversations is this simple one which Sam espouses. Belief motivates behavior. Sam goes to great lengths to make this point. Bad ideas are a far bigger problem than bad people. By this he means that bad people are luckily quite rare. A bad person would be someone physiologically disposed to do harm,

something akin to bad brain wiring or genetically determined sociopathic tendencies, where the person derives actual pleasure from inflicting harm, and is physiologically unable to feel empathy. These kinds of people do exist, of course, and you should listen to our compilation on free will to understand how easy it should be to conjure an attitude of honest compassion towards them, while also safeguarding society from them. But what is overwhelmingly more common is that an otherwise perfectly good person has bad ideas which motivate his behavior, bad software running on good functional hardware. Sam points out what is simultaneously so frightening and encouraging about this fact. If we lived in a world that was chock-full of actual psychopaths who were impervious to being persuaded by good ideas,

that emergency would feel rather hopeless and dangerous. But because the mind and brain are generally open hardware systems, it matters greatly what kind of software is running on them. If we take it as a given that the vast majority of brains out there are perfectly capable of enacting good behavior, then there could scarcely be anything more important than trying to transmit good ideas to as many of them as possible. This stance motivates Sam's effort to persuade through argumentation rather than condemn and cast out. He sometimes summarizes this situation by saying that conversation and persuasion is really all we have as an alternative to violence, and we've surely had enough violence already. This doesn't discount the truth of an enormously regretful necessity of violence when the situation

forces your hand, but that complicated point is best explored in our compilation on violence and pacifism. With that groundwork under us, let's go to our first clip. As we mapped out, this clip will be a personal story of shedding a religious belief system. And as we wanted to make sure to flag, it is only a very small aspect to an otherwise rich and full story. So our encouragement to seek out the full conversations after hearing these clips is especially urged here. One of the different strategies of persuasion, which is sometimes deployed by someone who is convinced that religious belief is a dangerous hindrance, could be called militant atheism. While none of these persuasion strategies have

firmly agreed upon definitions, this concept of militant atheism might be most clearly exhibited by the work of Christopher Hitchens. He used sharp and relentless ridicule and attack aimed squarely at religious belief and institution. This attitude is certainly not for everyone given its aggressive messaging and sometimes jeering tone. But we're about to hear someone's story that started with the intended, defensive, and retreating response that militant atheism can instigate, and eventually led to her taking a closer look at the charges coming her way. After failing to mount an adequate response, she was moved to reassess her belief system. This is an episode featuring Sarah Hader. her belief system. This is an episode featuring Sarah Hader. Hader co-founded the Ex-Muslims of North America, which does non-belief advocacy work and runs a supportive community of questioning

people. They provide safe and confidential outlets for Muslims who may have growing doubts and concerns about their religious faith. But for our purposes here, we're going to listen to her teenage encounters with militant atheism and her subsequent personal journey. We'll also stick with her conversation with Sam to hear a bit of mutual frustration with what they describe as a liberal confusion when it comes to open criticism of otherwise illiberal ideals. In the case of this clip, they'll be discussing the hijab specifically, and the clash of feminism with religious freedom. This conversation is from 2017, and there will be some political references and cultural touchstones mentioned from that news cycle. This is Sarah Hader from episode 81, Leaving Islam. Islam. Speak for a moment about your background and just how you came to be one of the founders of Ex-Muslims of North America. Sure. So I grew up in what I would consider to be a pretty liberal

Muslim family. I didn't know at the time that my upbringing was so liberal relative to other Muslims. I only found out as I began to meet other ex-Muslims about what their reality was to know how good I had it. But I grew up in a relatively liberal Muslim family, which means that they allowed me to move away for college. They allowed me to sort of be a little bit more independent than Muslims generally are. Where were you? Where were you growing up? I grew up in Texas. I was born in Pakistan. And I moved here, I think I was seven or eight when we immigrated to the United States.

I remember the process of coming here. I remember the shock of coming to this country. process of coming here. I remember the shock of coming to this country. I actually remember the first time I saw a woman in public whose legs were exposed. It was a flight attendant when we stopped in Europe on our way to America. And I remember the shock. I remember not really understanding what I was looking at and not really understanding that this was going to be a norm in America. Interesting. So when did you realize that you were a bit of an outlier in terms of your family environment with respect to religion? I started, well, I think most atheists would say this, and that's how I do identify as an atheist, that we were always sort of questioning, there were always sort of problems with religion. And I had them from an early age, but there was always ways for me to justify

religious traditions that I may have found problematic. Until I got to be a little bit older, I was in my mid-teens when I really started looking at the religion in a really critical way. I started actually reading for myself the Quran and finding that there were problematic verses and things that didn't really make a lot of sense to me. And the more that I looked into it, the less that it made sense. And I actually encountered quite a few militant atheists. And this is why, even to this day, I don't think that militant atheism is such a horrible thing, because it does push people like me to look into their faith, if only for the reasons that we want to defend it. And that is what happened to me, that I knew some atheists, and know, giving me some questions and probing questions.

And I wanted to be able to defend my faith. So that was one of the reasons that I looked into it with such urgency, because I wanted to be able to defend it. And I found that there really wasn't much there for me to defend. Were these ex-Muslims or were these Westerners? These were Westerners. These were people who came from a Christian background and then left their faith

and then started pointing out the problems within Islam to me. And of course I was offended. So this is something that people talk about a lot, that Muslims are offended when you talk about their faith in a critical way. And that's to be expected. And I was offended.

I remember being offended. But that offense, it doesn't really mean anything. And in the longer arc of what we're talking about, which is truth. And of course, people will be offended if you talk about something that they hold so dear. But it did push me to look into religion. Well, the offense is really a symptom of not having an argument. I don't get offended if someone claims that my deeply cherished mathematical beliefs or historical beliefs are false because either they have an argument or

they don't. And just offense never enters into it. The fact that we're in the territory where someone only has their offense to wield shows that there's a problem intellectually. That's probably a part of it. At that time, when I was first being confronted with the problematic verse of the Quran, I didn't know it was possible. That seems ridiculous, and as I'm saying it, it sounds ridiculous, but I remember at that time not knowing. You just didn't know what was in the Quran at that point when you first had these conversations? Right. I didn't know exactly what was in it, and I didn't know that it was even possible to look at it in anything but as, you know, this extremely virtuous text. I didn't know that there was an interpretation like that out there.

So when I first encountered it, it was quite shocking to me. You did an interview with Jeffrey Taylor, which was a great read. And you said one thing there that I wanted to read into this conversation. You said one thing there that I wanted to read into this conversation. You said, If Muslims feel they're being badly treated here in the United States, they can go to Muslim-majority countries. But where can a person like me go?

I'm in the safest place I can possibly be, and yet I'm too afraid to tell people where I live. It's tragic for me that there's even a need for our organization. And that really does expose just how unique a position it is to be an ex-Muslim. You are in the safest place in the world to be if you're a Muslim, even, really. I mean, we can talk about the problem of anti-Muslim bigotry, but I think it is safe to say that most Muslims are safer in the U.S. than they are in most Muslim-majority countries, given how unstable and sectarian those tend to be. But for an ex-Muslim in the U.S. or in really anywhere in the West, I guess it gets worse once you go to Western Europe,

there is this real concern about not being protected by any community. Right. And just to mirror your language, it's true that, I believe it's true that most Muslims are safer in the West than they would be in a Muslim country. But more Muslims are safer in the U.S. than our ex-Muslims. Ex-Muslims are less safe in the U.S. Ex-Muslims are less safe in Western countries than your average Muslim. And I think that's a perfectly fair thing to say, and it should be extremely concerning. Yeah, and obviously you inherit all of the problems of, quote, Islamophobia, insofar as that is a problem. Having your name looking like someone who was born in Pakistan, you encounter the same bias or bigotry that any Muslim could be worried about going through an

airport or in any other situation where that would become relevant. And yet you have this added concern, which I would argue is a far more pressing one, which is you have some percentage of the Muslim community that thinks what you're doing warrants a violent response, and you never know how big that percentage is or how much you're on their radar. And it bears repeating, this is unique to Islam. As badly behaved as Scientologists are when you take a good swing at that hornet's nest, they don't come and kill you. You know, they can make your life miserable. They can sue you. They can show up at your office with a crazed look in their eyes and video cameras pointed at you 18 hours a day. These are bizarre people who are in an especially bizarre cult, but

they don't commit murders and they don't commit suicidal acts of terrorism. And so this is, again, anyone who wants to defend Islam against the unique scrutiny that it merits at this moment has to deal with this fact that, as I said before, you have a play like The Book of Mormon that becomes a Broadway hit, and the Mormons take out an advertisement in Playbill, in reprisal, right? Their reaction is really adorable. There's not the slightest concern that Trey Parker and Matt Stone will spend the rest of their lives being hunted by religious maniacs. And yet, no one can even imagine staging such a play about Islam at this moment. And the reasons for that are patently obvious,

and yet everywhere denied by people who complain about, quote, Islamophobia. by people who complain about, quote, Islamophobia. Right. I mean, I think if Islam could get to where Mormonism is today, that we would be in a much, much better place. And I think that in itself should be telling. The hijab is a good way to illustrate the extent to which liberals are confused about this issue. Because as you pointed out, it's ridiculous to see the poster, I think, Shepard Fairey poster of a woman in a hijab as part of the Women's March. And, you know, I understand why people on the left, why progressives have this tendency.

I understand what they are trying to do, which is to stand for the freedom of religion for Muslims. And this is a laudable endeavor. This is something that I support. This is a tendency that I really love about the left. I like that they instinctively want to protect the little guy. Having said that, not everything done in the name of good intentions is necessarily good, and not everything done in the name of good intentions will help the people that you want to help.

And in many cases, it might harm the very principles or the very people that you want to help. And I think this is, especially the hijab in context of women's rights, is a case where we can see this in a very clear way. And so I supported the Women's March. You know, I supported, generally speaking, women's rights are really close to my heart. And it's really important to me that feminism

is something that becomes universal, that becomes global. So I support, generally speaking, these kinds of initiatives. But I was really disheartened to see that the hijab was suddenly, it's become this totem, you know, it's become this symbol of religious freedom. And it's pretty perverse, given the context of what the hijab actually is, and given the religious justification for the hijab, which is distinctly anti-freedom. If this is your first time encountering those kinds of arguments, we encourage you to seek out the full conversations to understand the nuance,

and how someone like Sarah Hader and Sam are well aware of the counter-arguments and common objections to these kinds of critiques. The moral math regarding how we talk about these things, and who is best to talk about them in certain ways is quite tricky, but it's wise to go slowly through these emotionally charged issues and seek out a range of perspectives. It's also wise to note how easy it is to abandon solid moral ground when it seems to demand an outward expression that runs against the grain of one's tribe, whether that be political, religious, familial, or social. We're now going to a story of someone abandoning a

belief system, which is quite personal to me. It's actually my story, and my first interview with Sam on Making Sense. I'll be breaking the fourth wall as your narrator for a bit here, and speaking to you directly. So, my name is Megan Phelps Roper, and I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, you might better recall the images of colorful signs with bold letters and messages like, God hates fags. I grew up holding those inflammatory signs while picketing at funerals and learning the theology of the church, an institution founded by my grandfather, Fred Phelps. I tell my story in detail in a memoir entitled Unfollow, a memoir of loving and leaving the

Westboro Baptist Church. In this next clip, Sam asks me about some of the specific doctrines and beliefs I held while I was a member of the church, and we chronicle a bit of my journey, how I started out professing intensely held religious beliefs that I took to be completely true, to the place I am now, reading a script for a prominent atheist philosopher. My experience has surfaced the strange nature of belief in my own mind. After we listen in on my conversation with Sam, I'll be back to reflect on what those beliefs were and how my process confirms many of the arguments and stances that Sam has outlined in his career.

One familiar retort to arguments and stories like the ones we're sharing in this compilation goes like this, Well, that's not real Islam. Or, that's not real Christianity. Or that these people are just psychopaths who are going to do these things anyway. I'll provide some of my thoughts on those kinds of responses here. You should also know that for this conversation, Sam and I connected shortly after I'd read an article by Graham Wood entitled, What ISIS Really Wants, an article which didn't tiptoe around the explicit link between religious doctrine and outward behavior. Needless to say, I found some parallels in this article worth discussing with Sam. So here's me talking with Sam from a very early episode of Making Sense. Here's me talking with Sam from a very early episode of Making Sense.

This is from episode 12 from 2015, an episode entitled Leaving the Church. Let's back up and talk about your background itself and what the Westboro Baptist Church is. Many people will have seen the visuals online of you and the rest of your family, I guess, holding signs that say, God hates fags, or I think, thank God for dead soldiers is one of them. So tell me about Westboro, and let's get into what you actually believed growing up. Right. Okay. So the protesting started when I was five. And the church is located about half a mile from a public park in Topeka, Kansas. And this park was known as a place where gays could go and meet and have anonymous sex. And it was something that was well known in the community. And it was even listed in this nationally circulated address book of such places, listings across the country. And one day, a couple of years before the picketing started,

my grandfather was riding through the park with uh, with my older brother who was at the time about four or five, maybe, um, they were riding their bikes and, you know, my grandfather would ride ahead a little way and then circle back. Um, and one of the times when he was circling back, he saw two men, you know, trying to lure my brother into the bushes and just immediately wanted to do something about it. So he started writing letters to the city fathers and going to city council meetings trying to get the part cleaned up. I mean, it was really something that was well known. There were journalists and cops.

They were doing sting operations. And so it was really something that was well known. There were, you know, journalists and cops. They were doing sting operations. And so it was an undeniable fact. So this was in what year? 88, 89. And this was your father or your grandfather who had this experience? My grandfather. Yes, my grandfather is Fred Phelps. Sorry.

And he's the one who founded, I mean, who was the first pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church. Was he a pastor already or he just decided to become one at this point? So he was ordained when he was, I think, 16 or 17 in Utah. And he was kind of a traveling preacher. And then he ended up in Topeka. And, you know, he was preaching at a church called the Eastside Baptist Church. And they were about to start another church on the other side of town. And they asked him to stay and be the pastor.

So that's how he ended up in Topeka at this church. Was he already someone? He had to have already been someone who was quite fundamentalist in his belief anyway, right? Or was this a formative moment for him? So the church actually started in 1955. So he had been a preacher for some time before this incident. And his views over the years had gotten further and further away from the mainstream. And so when this happened, and he spent, I think it was about a year, maybe more than a year, trying to get the city to do something about it.

And he said, okay, well, I'm going to do something about this myself. So that's when the picketing actually started. And just relatively innocuous signs like, watch your kids, gays troll this park, gays are in the restrooms, and things like that. park, you know, gays are in the restrooms and, you know, things like that. And the response, you know, from the community, other churches started coming out to counter protests saying things like God's love speaks loudest. There was a huge contingent of protesters from, or counter protesters from, you know, KU, which is about half an hour away from the church. you know, KU, which is about half an hour away from the church. And so, yeah, and it started,

you know, there really wasn't much about God initially. But then when, you know, when these churches started to counter protest, they were like, well, you know, the Bible does say things about gays and it's not good. And we are a church and we have to address this issue. So that's how it initially got started. And then over the years, it just got more and more extreme. So first, you know, gays were the target. And then it was churches for supporting gays and otherwise, you know, not following what my grandfather and the church members believed. what my grandfather and the church members believed, they weren't following what the Bible said,

not just about gays, but about premarital sex and divorce and remarriage and adultery. And then pretty quickly, the funeral protesting started. They were protesting funerals of gay people who had died of AIDS. And it was partly an attention-getting mechanism, but it was never just to get attention. I remember, and this is something that a lot of people have charged the church with. Yes, they're not really Christian. They don't really follow the Bible. Here, look, they ignore this verse and this verse. But I remember listening to my grandfather in an interview a few years ago, and the reporter said,

some people say that you're just doing these things to get attention. And he kind of looked at her like she was crazy or stupid and said, well, of course I'm doing it to get attention. How can I preach to these people if I don't have their attention? The charge that things are done just to get attention usually carries with it the insinuation that people don't really believe what they say they believe, that these expressions of hatred are just meant to be inflammatory but aren't necessarily an honest statement of one's outlook. Was there any distance between what you and the rest of the family believed and what you were saying publicly? Or were you just simply giving voice to your actual worldview?

No, we were just giving voice to our actual worldview. I mean, my family didn't come to the table with hatred for LGBT people and then look to the Bible to justify that hatred, which is a common charge. They read, if a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. And walked away from that with, and not just that verse, but lots of other ones. They walked away from that with, and not just that verse, but lots of other ones. They walked away from that with God hates fags and supporting the death penalty for gays. And to categorically deny a connection between those words from Leviticus and our beliefs, to say that we read into the text what we wanted to see is, I think, to be blind to the nearly all-encompassing power of that sort of blinding

faith. And that's why it was such almost a relief to read in Graham Wood's article to say that ISIS is Islamic, very Islamic. It's not a matter of ISIS being representative of Muslims as a whole. It's a matter of them drawing inspiration from the text. Yeah, yeah. And the church and your grandfather are sometimes mentioned in this connection. So what I find as someone who criticizes the link between religious belief, in this case, Muslim jihadist ideas and a phenomenon like ISIS, I find that people who don't like that connection very much will say, well, we have our extremists. We have the Westboro Baptist Church. And it's always a frustrating thing to hear as though what your family has done is in any way analogous to what is happening throughout much of the Muslim world, and in particular in Syria and Iraq right now. But your family's church is often held out as the most extreme variant of Christianity in the West, and in particular in the U.S. I'm wondering if that's

true. I actually don't, I'd like to just find out precisely what you believed on other topics. So what are other killing offenses? What would you, what else would your grandfather pull out of Leviticus as actionable? I might say adultery, but we never, this was one, again, this was one of the things that, so I had, okay, for one, they're not actually trying to institute a theocracy. They don't believe that the United States, they believe that the world is going to end and that only a tiny remnant of humanity, which is to say the church itself, but only the true, the elect of God. So they're not trying to actually change the laws. They're not actually trying to make anything happen with the government. They don't believe it's possible, and so it's not something that they pursue.

But that question about death penalty for vags, that was the very first point, the very first real question that I had about our theology. And when I say question, I mean doubt, the first thing I realized that we were wrong about. And it came from a conversation with a Jewish guy on Twitter. It was really, I mean, I'm advocating for the death penalty for gays, and he, you know, and I'm quoting these verses from Leviticus, and he says, well, what about this member of your church who had a child out of wedlock? And I said, what about her? She repented, so she doesn't deserve that punishment. And he said, yeah, but that's also a sin worthy of death. and he said, yeah, but that's also a sin worthy of death.

And also, didn't Jesus say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone? So this is the first time stepping back from that and realizing, if she had been killed, if you kill someone, as soon as they sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent and be forgiven, which is a major foundation of Christian theology. This is what we were preaching, repent or perish. You have to repent and follow God's laws and live as we live, and that's the only way to heaven. And then for him to say that, quoting Jesus, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, I realized, because we would always answer that quote, because people would throw that in our face all the time. We would answer

that by saying, yeah, but we're not casting stones. We're preaching words. All we have are words. We put words on signs and we stand on public sidewalks. We're not hurting anybody. But we were advocating for the government to kill people. And what was Jesus talking about there if not the death penalty? So I take that to my mom and a few other people in the church and was just immediately shut down. It's like, no, Leviticus calls for the death penalty. If that penalty was good enough for God, then it's good enough for us. Romans 1 says that gays are worthy of death, and so are their enablers. No. So what did your mom say about the analogy to the other member of your family who had

had a child out of wedlock? Just that I was getting wrapped around an axle. Like, oh, this is just not an important piece of theology, or that the point is they're not going to do it. That's what she said. And I remember thinking, well, yeah, but if we're going to use this as a litmus test, the fact that, you know, instituting death penalty, since Jesus said, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, shouldn't the litmus test be the other direction?

Shouldn't the fact that we don't do that be showing that we're obedient to God and such? One thing that I think we should flag here is that it's often believed on the atheist, secularist, rationalist side of the conversation that you just can't reason people out of their heartfelt religious convictions because there's this meme that has gone around often attributed to someone like Mark Twain. I don't know who actually said it, but the idea is that if you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themselves into. But that's clearly not true. And anyone who's actually been in dialogue with many people like yourself over the years knows it's not true. Your effort to make your beliefs self-consistent and this person on

Twitter pointing out a logical contradiction in your beliefs was an entering wedge for you, which ultimately separated you from these ideas that had been drummed into you. So I want to get into what you now believe in a minute, but I want to linger. In 2019, I spoke with Sam on Making Sense Again around the time of the release of my book. The way I now conceive of those old beliefs is something like this. They made complete sense to me at the time, within a context of assumptions that I took to be unquestionable. Specifically, that the Bible was literally true, and that the interpretation by the Westboro Baptist Church

was completely accurate. I took those claims about reality as givens, and I was operating in a world where they were solid facts. Sam's reflection that bad ideas are a much bigger problem than bad people resonates deeply with me. With the rules of the world that I assumed myself to be in, I had all good intentions and was trying my utmost to be a good person. This may seem like an odd claim, given how hateful my behavior appears from the outside, This may seem like an odd claim, given how hateful my behavior appears from the outside, and it's challenging for some people to fully comprehend. When I revisit my behavior, I fully understand that I did not have a broken brain that was causing my actions,

and my family members, who were behaving in similar ways, nearly all of them continuing with that behavior still, also don't have broken brains. There is an unignorable, determinative variable causing that behavior still, also don't have broken brains. There is an unignorable, determinative variable causing that behavior, and it's their belief about reality. Now, of course, that belief is not the only variable resulting in their behavior. There are many complex psychological factors on the table. Things like loyalty to family, fear of ostracization, table. Things like loyalty to family, fear of ostracization, financial dependency, reactionary personalities, and so much more. But Sam emphasizes and insists that belief, and specific beliefs, must be acknowledged as causes of specific outward behavior. While this may seem uncontroversial and obvious, the implications have become politically radioactive given the tension with competing principles like tolerance of other cultures, ideas, belief systems,

and identities. Before I build the fourth wall again and morph back from included guest to narrator, I want to underline a contrast between my shedding of belief with Sarah Hader's. It's hard to know what other collisions with criticism and challenge to my beliefs would have resulted in, but what ended up pushing me to a close examination and eventual collapse of the first principal claims I held was not so much an aggressive, militant atheism approach with mockery and insult, but rather a steady, prolonged conversation and exposure to very patient conversation partners. Many of those conversations happened on Twitter.

We have a compilation dedicated to Sam's interest in social media, which we recommend in light of the unique role that that plays in my story. But now, let's go to another personal account of someone leaving a faith system. of someone leaving a faith system. This account will give air to some of the psychological variables that we've alluded to that can entrench people in belief systems and religious ideology. This guest's reconsideration of her belief system is absent the encounters with teenage militant atheists

or patient logical deliberations conducted on social media, but is instead interwoven with familial complexities, insecurities, fears, and abuses. But even with these variables highlighted in the brew of ideological trappings, the doctrines and details of the belief system still matter and must be considered. We're also going to let this clip drift into the frustration that certain women feel with a perceived political shield of criticism towards religious ideology, especially those religious ideologies that tend to overlay with specific racial and or national demographics. This is the exact kind of political taboo that Sam and many of the labeled new atheists were unafraid to trespass.

After this clip, we'll shift the conversation towards the abstract and philosophical notions of belief, and examine various approaches towards knowledge that might help us navigate our way through this topic, and propose some defining characteristics of belief. and propose some defining characteristics of belief. But first, here's the activist and author Yasmeen Mohamed sharing her story with Sam from episode 175, Leaving the Faith. Let's just start with your story from the beginning. Where did you come from and what were your parents like and what was your upbringing like?

This is the beginning of your story that has, for better or worse, made you one of the most courageous voices I can name at the moment. So to the beginning, I guess, would be my parents meeting each other in university in Egypt. So my dad's from Palestine and my mom is Egyptian, but Palestinians could go to university in Egypt. It was all covered. They were treated as Egyptians, but they weren't given citizenship. So they met in university in Egypt. And my mother's family were very angry at her for marrying a Palestinian because they thought he was so beneath her. But they got married and then they moved to San Francisco together. And they were there during the peace, love, hippie era. And they had my sister, and it was a bit too much

peace and love. And so my mom wanted like a quieter place to raise the kids. And so then they moved to Vancouver, Canada. And that's where I was born. But then their marriage fell apart in the end anyway. So when I was about two years old, my dad, you know dad left us, went to the other side of the country. So here my mom is now in a new country, no support system, no community, three children, and she's feeling depressed, vulnerable, sad, lonely, all that stuff. And how religious were they at this point? No religiosity whatsoever, neither of them. They're both grew up very secular. My dad had like zero connection to religion. It was just like a cultural thing. He's very anti-Israel just being Palestinian, but there's no religious,

like him personally, he wasn't very, he wasn't practicing. And then my mom's all alone. And so she goes looking for a support system and she goes looking at the mosque for community. And then my mom's all alone. And so she goes looking for a support system and she goes looking at the mosque for community. And at the mosque, she finds a man who is already married, already has three children, but he offers to take my mom on as his second concurrent wife. Right. So she is happy to have somebody take care of her and take care of her kids. And so she's willing to put up with whatever he's dishing out. My dad was abusive towards her.

He used to hit her. And this man never hit her. He'd hit us, of course, but he never hit her. So she felt like this was a better relationship for her. So she stayed with him as a second concurrent wife. We lived in his basement. And he is very, like my life changed completely when he entered our lives. So before him, I used to be able to, you know, play with my neighbor's friends. Like we'd play Barbies together. I'd go swimming. I'd ride my bike. I'd go to birthday parties, listen to music, just like a normal childhood. And then once he entered our lives,

it was just immediate. Everything is haram. Everything is forbidden. And all of a sudden, my mom started covering her hair, and we had to start reading from this book of these words that I didn't understand. And I had to start praying five times a of these words that I didn't understand, and I had to start praying five times a day. And I resisted it from the beginning. Of course, I missed my old life. I was especially upset that I couldn't play with Chelsea and Lindsay anymore. They'd always come knocking on the door wanting to play Barbies, and I was never allowed to go, and they were never allowed in. You were going to the same school at this point? to go and they were never allowed in. You're going to the same school at this point?

Yep, but not for long. Then I got, as soon as the Islamic school was, I mean, it wasn't built, it was in the mosque, but as soon as it was established that we would have an Islamic school and my mom was teaching in it, then I started going there. Was this associated with any religious awakening on your mom's part or she just needed a man to take care of her and it was just practical and romantic? Well, I don't know if romantic is part of it. I think practical for sure. And it was a combination of both of those things. So she needed, I think she was happy to have somebody to take care of her. But then also she just became a full-on born-again Muslim. So she just entered it, like she just jumped all in. It was never, you know, if you see her wedding photos, she looked like a bond girl, like

short wedding dress, big, huge beehive. You know, there was a belly dancer at her wedding. And to go from that to the woman that raised me that I remember is just a pretty shocking difference. And I used to always resent that. I'd be like, how come you got freedom? How come you got to live like this? Look at your pictures when you were a kid. How come I don't get that life? And she'd say, because my parents didn't know any better, and I'm raising you better, and you're going to be a better person, and you're going to go to heaven, and my parents

did the best they could, but they were wrong. And so how old are you when you're expressing these doubts? Well, I was about six years old when he entered our life, and I resisted all the way up, probably about nine years old is when I stopped, because that's when the hijab was put on me and I started going to Islamic school and it was just too much. So you can't really fight anymore when everything in your life is, you know, pushing you in one direction. You just, you know, succumb, especially when you're a kid. But according to my mom, I was never, you know, good enough. I, the devil was always whispering in my ear and making me question. I always asked questions, right? Like if a law created everything, who created a law and stuff like that? Like, how could I even, these are such blasphemous, you know, if Adam and Eve are, you know, the parents of all people, are we all children of

incest? So these basic questions of, you know, that a kid would ask, I'd get in trouble for them. So these basic questions that a kid would ask, I'd get in trouble for them. So was there any point where you just went hook, line, and sinker and fully adopted the worldview without doubt? Or did you always have some doubt humming in the background? The doubt humming in the background finally went quiet once I was forced into the marriage with Faisal. went quiet once I was forced into the marriage with Hassam. So once I married him and I wore niqab, so that's like full face covering, the gloves, everything, I was so diminished that I didn't have anything left. And I also kind of made the conscious decision that, I mean, I was desperate for my mom's love and approval. My sister was always the good girl that always listened and never questioned. And I wanted that.

I wanted to have that relationship with my mom. So she kept on pressuring me to marry this man. And I eventually gave in because I thought, you know what, maybe she'll actually love me if I follow what she wants me to do. I'll marry the man she tells me to marry. I'll do everything the way she says to do it. I've been fighting against this my whole life. What happens if I just let go and see if she's actually right? And how old are you at this point? So I'm 20. And I did let go, and I did follow exactly what she said. And until I had my daughter and held her in my arms and saw that she was about to grow up in the same environment that I grew up in, my mom was talking to her the same way she had talked to me. Her father was talking about FGM and her dying a martyr for a law and things like that. I'm like, okay, enough. I could maybe accept this world for myself,

but I'm not going to accept it for my daughter. There's no way she's going to live this same life. Was he Egyptian? Yeah. accept it for my daughter. There's no way she's going to live this same life. And was he Egyptian? Yeah. Yeah. And I think people aren't generally aware that FGM is practiced in Egypt. Like 98% of Egyptian women. Basically like Somalia in terms of the prevalence of that practice.

And this was just a fully arranged marriage or it had been encouraged once you had met him? just a fully arranged marriage or it had been encouraged once you had met him? So it wasn't fully arranged in that I didn't know I was going to marry him my whole life. Sometimes people arrange marriages for their kids like from the get-go, but it was definitely a forced marriage, which is a very common thing in the Arab world. So it's like, this is the man we want you to marry. And then you basically just get introduced to him. And the woman doesn't need to consent. Like in Islam, it says, silence is consent. So if you just sit there and cry, it's like, okay, we're good.

Yeah. You're now, you know, that's like saying I do. And so it was, you know, you get pressured into it in the same way you get pressured into everything else. So it's just like wearing the hijab and you get given two choices. Like, do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell? Do you want to be a good, pure, clean girl? Or do you want to be a filthy whore? Like, these are your choices. Make the right choice. So forcing you into a marriage is similar kind of coercion. So it would be things like there's a hadith that says,

heaven is at the feet of your mothers. So your mother gets to decide whether you're going to go to heaven or not. So this was the one that was used all the time. And it's a very dangerous weapon for an abusive mother to have. So she would use that one. She'd say, you're never going to go to heaven unless I approve you to enter heaven. And if you don't marry this man, you will never go to heaven. You will burn in hell for eternity. And you will suffer here on earth because you are no longer my daughter. I want nothing to do with you. I won't even allow you to come to my funeral because I don't, like, as far as anyone is concerned, you're no longer my family. And then

when you die, you'll burn in hell for eternity. So go ahead and make the choice. Yeah. Yeah. So, and you're wearing the niqab at this point? At what point did that happen? Hijab was at nine years old, you know, as far as I could remember. And then once I was engaged to him, started wearing the niqab, he got it all delivered from Saudi Arabia. And that really helps in dehumanizing you. That really helps in turning me into a nothing that he can control very easily. It just suppresses your humanity entirely. It's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber. And you are no longer connected to humanity. You can't see properly, you can't hear properly, you can't speak properly,

people can't see you, you can only see them. I mean, just little things like passing people in the street and just making eye contact and smiling, like that's gone. You're no longer part of this world. And so you very, very quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there. Yeah. Well, we're going to get to this, but it is amazing how sanguine Western feminists are around this practice. This is just another culture's ideal of how to honor feminine beauty and empower women. Who are we to criticize it? We should differentiate the hijab from the niqab. The hijab is just a straight-up symbol of female empowerment now in the West. It is just amazing to see what is being done with this. And we have, you know, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre,

the Prime Minister of New Zealand puts it on as the only possible show of respect for the community. Like there's just no other way to express solidarity but to don the symbol. And there's so many examples of this. For some reason, people, one, can't see that most of the women on earth right now who are wearing a hijab are not doing it based on some empowerment they felt at an Ivy League institution where they're just going to take the male gaze off them at their own discretion. So they're forced to do it. The consequences of not doing it in many cases are, if not absolutely coercive social pressure, it's actually physical violence.

What have your encounters with Western feminists been like? Well, that makes me really sad that they consider Muslim women to be of some other species and that are so completely different from them. So for themselves, they will recognize all of those things that you talked about are basically victim blaming, slut shaming. They recognize those elements of rape culture when we're in the Western context, which are, you know, they're much harder to see in the Western context. But under Sharia, it's very, very easy to clearly see a perfect example of rape culture. But they somehow, when it's those women over there, they somehow, when it's those women over there, it's empowering? Would it be empowering for you if you were told you have to wear this clothing in order to protect yourself from men who might rape you, or you have to wear this clothing in order to be good and pure and go to heaven,

because if you don't wear it, then you're a filthy whore. No woman would want to hear that. No seven-year-old child would like to be told, you have to wear this in order to go to school. And your brother doesn't have to. He can wear whatever he wants. But you must wear this or you're not allowed to get educated. It is an atrocity. That's something that every human being an atrocity. That's something that every human being should be upset about. And the fact that they think that it's okay for those humans over there, but not for us, is the part that really upsets me. Yeah. Yeah. The double standard is so clear, and it really is sanity straining so clear, and it really is sanity straining that it's so hard for people to see. So the clearest case for me in the media was when, I don't know if you remember this, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Mormon cult, his compound was raided, and all these little girls

and young women were led out in these little house on the prairie dresses, right? They were made to wear these awful 18th century dresses. And they had been married to men who were, you know, their grandfather's ages. And these forced marriages were described as rapes. And the men were totally unrepentant. And, you know, Jeff's got, I think it's at least 15 years in prison. I forget, he got a real prison sentence. And this was all talked about on the news as just an unambiguous example of patriarchal

exploitation of girls. The fact that it was associated with religious belief was not even slightly exculpatory. fact that it was associated with religious belief was not even slightly exculpatory. And everyone celebrated the fact that there was a SWAT team raid on the compound. We kicked in the door of this place to free those girls. And it didn't matter at all that the girls didn't want to be freed. I mean, we knew they had been brainwashed. So when they're talking about how they loved their husband for to a man or whatever it was, no one had any qualm discounting that for their obvious ignorance and brainwashing, right? And when you compare that to what is happening routinely in the Muslim world, the mainstream media has the opposite response. And this is the most benign case of real extremism in the Muslim world. I mean,

in truth, it's not even extreme, but the extremism in the Muslim world, you have to add to that the clitorectomies that would have been performed on these girls. The fact that they were raising their sons to be suicide bombers, right? And there was an explicit indoctrination of martyrdom. And they were exporting terrorism to the capitals of Europe and America. That's how the fundamentalist Mormon cult would have to behave to make it an analogous situation. And no one can see it on the left. So, I mean, when you were talking about the difference between that Mormon cult and girls in the Muslim world, I started to tear up because it reminded me of your TED Talk, which I'm going to tear up again. anybody in like media I'd ever heard somebody care about those girls the same way you would care about any other girls like the argument you were making in that TED talk like these girls in Afghanistan why are they different than the girls from the Mormon cult? Sorry, Sam.

That TED Talk was late. Thank you so much. You don't have to apologize. This is good radio. guys. This is good radio. At the end of that clip, you heard Yasmeen make reference to a TED Talk that Sam delivered. That talk compressed his argument against moral subjectivism, an argument he fully lays out in his book, The Moral Landscape. That topic is explored deeply in our compilation on morality, but you can appreciate how intimately it's related to the delicate issue of morality. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.