Soul Boom - Spiritual Atheism & Religious Deconstruction (w/ Britt Hartley)

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

If belief dies, can wonder survive? Britt Hartley (author of No Nonsense Spirituality) digs into her journey from devout Mormonism to mystic atheism, her deconstruction of religious dogma, and her experience of profound nihilism after losing belief in God. THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! Quince (FREE shipping!) 👉 ⁠⁠⁠https://www.quince.com/soulboom⁠⁠ Fetzer 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://fetzer.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboom.com/store SUBSCRIBE to our SECOND channel:  @SoulBoomPresents  Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.com/store Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Send fan mail! PO Box 2180 Toluca Lake, CA 91610 Shipping via UPS/FedEx? 10063 Riverside Dr PO Box 2180 Toluca Lake, CA 91610 Executive Produced by: Kartik Chainani  @KartikChainani  Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Channel Branding Artwork and Graphics: Jack Sjogren http://instagram.com/sjogrenjack Intro Animation by: Sophie Ansari http://instagram.com/scribbledbysophie #SoulBoom #RainnWilson #mormon #mormontok #momtok #exmormon #Spirituality #Religion #religiousdeconstruction #atheism #atheist #deconstruction #rhettandlink Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I lost everything when I lost God. Wow, that's really dark. It's very dark. With the death of God was also the death of truth and the death of morality, the death of community, the death of my marriage, the death of identity. Every day I was like a video game character that had no meaning and purpose and it's all stupid. What were your hand holds to take you out of that? There's something in my body screaming.

This is meaningful. You're missing something. There's something meaningful here. But the shift that I made was, what if I'm having a little emotions? We welcome that here. I know you do. I know you do. Ladies and gentlemen, you saw it here.

An atheist has feelings. I know. I'm not just like a cold, bollied part. You've never seen it before in the history of YouTube. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life. meaning and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Well, thank you for coming on the show, Britt,

and it's a fun history of how you got here because we, you know, I wrote the book Soul Boom two years ago now and you are quite active on TikTok and have a big following. And I know Kartik, my producer showed me like videos like, oh, look, here's this spiritual influencer atheist who really dug your book or wants to have a conversation with you. And there was like a video or something like that. I was like, oh, that sounds cool. Let's let's check that out. And then I had Rhett and Link on the show who deconstructed, I don't quite understand that word, but deconstructed their Christian faith. And Rhett was very much talking about your book, no-nonsense spirituality, which is really thought-provoking and just terrifically written,

like I said. Like, it's hard to write about spirituality and have enough meat on the bones so that maybe someone who's getting a, you know, a degree in comparative religions or something like that can dig into it, but accessible for the common person and relatable. And you do all that with huge. humor and great style. Thank you. And he was talking about how seminal this book was in his kind of reconsideration of his

Christian upbringing. And so we're like, well, the universe wants you here. I know you wouldn't say it that way. I wouldn't quite, but I'm a huge fan of Rhett. And we actually like our timelines, we deconstructed around the same time, which is interesting because if we would have met, if him and I would have met 20 years ago, I would have have had a cheat sheet for how to make him a Mormon. And he would have had a, he wrote a whole book on how to convince Mormons that they're not Christian. So our conversation 20 years ago would have been

very different than the conversations that him and I are having now. Right. And just so we can all get on the same page, when you use the word deconstruction, what do you mean by that? Deconstructing truth claims and dogmas that come with a religion is really what I made that out. But usually deconstruction, as I've come to understand it, because I had never heard the phrase before I met Rhett and Link just has to do with ultimately a rejection of the claims of the religion that one was brought up in. Like one of the things I was kind of like dancing with Ret and Link a little bit about was like, well, can you deconstruct the parts you don't like? But like, let's say you accept the divinity of Christ, but don't accept that Christ is the literal son of God. Like is that

part of a deconstruction process? And I'm not quite sure it is. I think it is. And Brian McLaren, who's on your shelf here and who's been a guest on the podcast, talks about that quite a bit, that deconstruction can lead to deepening of faith, where you let go of certain truth claims, but then you're able to nuance things or see things in a new way. I think all of that can be part of a deconstruction process. But what's happening is when it combines with postmodernism, deconstruction becomes you're deconstructing claims about a religion. So truth, claims, historical truth claims. But then you're also deconstructing concepts of God. Maybe you're deconstructing certain narratives of society, gender roles, things like that. Then you're deconstructing free will. Then you're deconstructing the illusion of the self. And so like once that train starts going for people, it tends to to keep going. It doesn't usually stop at just a few historical truth claims about the nature of Jesus or, you know, something like that's interesting. because I, you know, I guess you could say I deconstructed my Baha'i upbringing.

I think so. Yeah. And around, starting in around 1990 or so. But it's interesting because for me, that process stopped at a certain point, you know. So at first it was kind of like, I'm not just going to accept the truth of my parents and the truth of the community I grew up in. In fact, let me jettison all of it. Yeah. And that's healthy.

And that is very healthy. And like I said before, in the Baha'i faith, the independent individual investigation of truth is like the foundation. And it's actually encouraged and no one is supposed to become a Baha'i just because their parents are Baha'i or because their culture pressures them to become a Baha'i. They need to find the truth for themselves. And if a lot of young Baha'is become Christians, a lot become atheists, some are spiritual but not religious.

And that's just part of the process. But it is most important to find one's truth from oneself. So for me, then I, like I said in Soul Boom, I tried on atheism like a jaunty cap. And I went a good year and a half, maybe even two of like, I'm an atheist. Let me see how this fits. Let me see how this, let me see how walking in the world

where there's nothing beyond, you know, know, atoms and molecules and energy, how that feels for me and let me, you know, challenge existing religious beliefs. And so this is part of that deconstruction. And just for me, personally, that just kind of like tapped out. And it doesn't, it didn't make sense, not just on an intellectual sense. It just, in a heart sense, and it just, I couldn't, I couldn't wrap my head, heart, mind, soul around a world that didn't have some kind of primal force or source behind everything. I want to ask you about that because when I watched, when I read Soul Boom and I loved it because I feel like the first half, you just like so perfectly defined like the

spiritual crisis that were in and the meaning crisis and I was just like eating it up. And then I felt like you went somewhere where I couldn't go. And the question that I've wanted to ask you since then, is that if your atheist phase, and then like we can go wherever you want for the rest of the interview, this is really my only question that I've had for you, is if you, if your atheist phase had a more spiritual root in it. So like my atheism has a Sufi teacher that I meet with regularly. It has mysticism and it has psychedelics and it has meaningful work and it has purpose and it has service and it has contemplation and it. it really has all of the aspects of religion that I have cultivated into my life. And so it's a thriving form of spiritual atheism. Do you feel like if your atheism had more spirituality to it, that that phase, that, like, because when you talk about your atheism, it's an emptiness, and for me, it's not an emptiness. It's very much a wholeness. And so I wonder if your,

if your atheist phase had spirituality in it, would it have been so empty for you? Well, I think that's an excellent question. And I think even in the early 90s, one would have been hard pressed to find a single spiritual atheist. Yeah, I guess that's true. You know, on the planet. So I didn't have those kind of resources. And one of the things that there's so much I despise about contemporary society and social media and how everything is working and falling apart. And it's this madcap, you know, uh, uh, roller coaster of, you know, short attention span fever. But there's a lot of resources out there for young people. And, and I know that young folk have found you and your, your channels online and your book to be incredibly revitalized.

and this idea that, hey, you can have spiritual practices, rituals, depth, meaning without a God, without a soul, without any kind of greater spirit beyond kind of the material. And I think that, you know, I don't know. And for me at 20 or 21, maybe that would have. Maybe that would have worked for me. I think for me, as you know, because you read the book and thank you for reading it, The essential question then, as it wasn't sitting right, was like, well, is there a God? And that was kind of a very long journey about trying to figure out if there was a God. And how does one figure that out?

I mean, you can get PhDs and you can intellectualize all you want. But I heard you say in an interview, I heard you talk about love as an experience of love. And of course, David Bentley Hart has the book, The Experience of God. And like, how do you experience God? Do you experience the divine? And how exactly does that work? And that's when I talked about this idea of Wakantanka from the Lakota Sioux tradition and how revelatory that was to think about God completely devoid from any kind of persona or human qualities. and being far more contained in kind of the miracle and mystery of nature than any kind of like superhero or any urge or anything like that.

So for me, that was the turning point where it was like, okay, I can get with that. And that's kind of where at that age I built my foundation. And it still, for me, holds up. And that's a place where you and I will combine, even though we'll probably differ in maybe some of the words that we'll use. like you'll be much more liberal with your use of the word God than I will. But for me, even as an atheist, if someone walks into a cathedral and there's stained glass and there's music playing, it's just, it's beautiful. And someone says, I feel God here.

That's an experience. They're using a mouth sound God to describe what they're feeling. And even to this day when someone, if someone were to say that, I would say, I feel God here too. Because now we're just, we're just using a word to share an experience, a shared experience that we're having. But then when someone says God says this or is this or does this or whatever, okay, that's different. That's a truth claim that we're making, you know, about God in the nature of the universe. And that's where I'm going to be much more skeptical or wary of using that word. But that word of, I feel God here.

I have no problem as an atheist saying that because that's an experience that is permeated in my life. I think that's a quote from the office. I feel God in this jillies tonight. That's right. That's right. So Pam was right. Maybe Pam was right all along. She felt God in the Chile.

Pam, yeah, Pam the the theologian was on to something. I think so. Someone could write a book on the spirituality of the office. Get on that, folks. It's not going to be me. I'm too busy. There's so many ways that we align and our points of view. And I got so much out of your book.

And there's so many incredible points that you made. There's lots of ways where we don't align and agree to disagree. And the last thing I want to do on this conversation, is kind of get into the like the old proof of God debate kind of stuff, which is really boring and has never changed a single mind. Never convinces anyone. Yeah. So anyone, everyone who watches those videos that doesn't believe in God is like, yeah, she got in all that good points. And then people that do believe in God and like, yeah, he made all those great points. I'm with him. Like it, no one, no one changes their right. No one, no one shifts their heart. But let's go back because I, I find so many aspects of your story fascinating. And I've never. I know a handful of Mormons who are super awesome, nice people, and I have my own personal Mormon experience I want to share with you. Oh, I'm on the end of my seat.

It's positive. But I do want to hear about your story a little bit and leaving the Mormon faith because there was a lot of trauma and pain there. And I think it would be really helpful for people to hear that story. Sure. So I was raised Mormon and had a perfectly happy, normal Mormon childhood. And around the time I was a teenager, I was, I was always questioning. So even when I was younger, I would ask questions.

But I just assumed that the adults knew better than me, that I'll figure the reasons why to the questions that I was asking. And then by the time I became a teenager, I started really asking questions. And what were the nature of your questions? How do we know there's a God or is it more like Joseph Smith kind of thing? Not even that yet. So like the beginning of it was this pamphlet came. out. It was called the for strength of youth pamphlet. And it was like from God to the prophet to teenagers. So this is like directly from God what teenagers need to know. And I'm like fantastic.

God's making a pamphlet for me as a teenager. Life is hard. I'm trying to figure out who I am and the world and all this. This is fantastic. God's got a pamphlet for me. And the pamphlet is like, don't drink coffee and don't swear and don't get tattoos and lots of dues and don'ts. And I'm like, the creator of the universe, like this is, this is all you got for me. And it was really troubling for me. And that's just a very basic question of like, how do I know that the prophet's talking to God? Because this is really just like a list of random things that you're supposed to do and don't. And that's meaningless. And why does God care so much about what word I say when I stub my toe? So just like really simple questions. And why does God not want us to get tattoos? The concept of your body being a temple

and it's sacred and to not, which is strange. Because we, yeah, because on temples, even more, even, it's so silly because even Mormon temples will have decorations on the outside and it'll say like holiness to the Lord, house of the Lord. So even our temples we put writings on. But it's just, it's just been a cultural thing, especially as we, earlier on in Mormonism, because of polygamy, we really wanted to mainstream. We really wanted to become a part of American.

Christianity and not be so ostracized and persecuted. And so we made moves to just really, you know, like wear suits and be really clean cut and no tattoos. And so that was also just a cultural thing. But it just opened a lot of questions for me. And I wish I had the education and the knowledge to be able to go to my parents and say, I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance. And I'd like to, you know, but it just came out and just like punk rock, just like,

just like, you know, and I just really, like, all that angst came out in, in really, like, punk rock and bad decisions that led me to getting kicked out of my home when I was 16 and for having sex. And so at that point then, I'm 16. Where do 16-year-old Mormon girls go when they've had sex and got kicked out of their home? I went to my uncle's house, and he was a bishop in the Mormon church, and he was a bishop. supposed to like be able to clean me up a little bit. Yeah, sent me right. And it was very traumatic to to kind of lose my family and be losing my beliefs and lose all my friends and like have this stigma. You go to church, I can't take the sacrament because you're unworthy for about a year because of the, because of having sex. And so you go to this new church and everybody sees that you

don't take the sacrament. It's very much this like signal of shame, right? I'm a bad kid. I'm a I'm rotten and broken in some fundamental way. That's really hard. It was really difficult. It shows one acceptance. Yeah. And all of this, like I can talk about it now.

Like these wounds are so healed for me. My relationship with my parents now is, is fantastic. So these wounds are all healed for me now. But at the time, it was very painful. And so what I wanted to figure out at 16, and this is like such a big thought for a 16 year old,

like only 16 year olds can be this like audacious. Like if I can just figure out what the hell is going on with reality, like what religion is right and what God is right, I'll be able to like fix my life so that I won't end up in this like kind of fucked up situation that I ended up in. That's another thing we really have in common too because when I went through my dark years of the soul, especially in my 20s, in the 90s, it was a lot of similarity for me. Like if I can just figure out reality, especially on a spiritual level, then maybe I can figure out all this mental health.

you know, maelstrom that's going on upstairs. Yeah. And it's a big thought like, oh, all I have to do is like figure out the meaning of life and the meaning of the universe and then I'll be good. Like, you know, and so that's really what I set out to do. And to my uncle's credit, what he did have was an extensive gospel library in his, you know, in his study. And so I started reading, and that was the first time that I was reading nuanced Christianity and C.S. Lewis and, and getting a deeper form of Christianity that wasn't just like a pamphlet of do's and don'ts. And there was something in there that was just really like, oh, there's something more to this

religion than this list that my teenager's self had rejected. So by the time I was 16, I was doing what we would call now nuanced Christianity. And I went to school. I wanted to study philosophy. Every adult in my life told me not to do that because that's stupid. and so I ended up going into history and teaching history. But I was always doing philosophy even when I was teaching history. I would do like one day on World War II and like two weeks on, you know, have you met the Nazi within?

You know, like I was doing, I was doing philosophy because nobody cares what you do as a history teacher. I love that. I met the Nazi within. I think that would be a valid. We would explore that. That would be a valuable study for contemporary America. Right. Right.

And then I kept, I was always. reading though. I was always reading theology and philosophy. At that point, I was teaching Mormon seminary, which is a paid position. I was teaching scripture and really loved to doing what we would call nuanced Christianity, kind of like Brian McLaren, kind of Christianity. You know, folks, I'm not that big on trends. I've had this shirt since way before podcasts existed and it smells like it kind of. It's got a notes of regret. mothballs and a hint of mystery meat from the first season of the office. But I am big on clothes that feel amazing and don't disintegrate after one wash.

That is why I'm so glad I found Quince. They're organic cotton silk polos. I tell you, I wore one under the Soul Boom Studio, and my producer asked me if I had gotten my life together. For your next trip, treat yourself to the lux upgrades you deserve from Quince. Go to quince.com slash Soul Boom for 365. day returns, plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash soul boom to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash soul boom. I just want to give a big thank you and a gigantic

shout out to one of our sponsors, the Fetzer Institute. In an era where mental health is a growing concern, Fetzer's insights into the role of spirituality and building resilience isn't just timely, it's essential. They offer hope for what so many of us are seeking. Thank you for your support. Fetzer. Visit them at Fetzer.org. But you always stayed within the Mormon umbrella. At that point, I was like, no, I kind of saw Mormonism as not the one true church, but as one pathway of many pathways to God is kind of where I was at. So I participated in Mormonism as just the Christian community that I understood the most. But I wouldn't have said at that point or at any of those points that I was like a true believer that this is the one true church and it has like the one

proper priesthood. I saw all of that is like not not really necessary. But there is still a lot of beauty in Christian doctrine and even Mormon doctrine that was enough for me to work with. Then I go to my master's degree program in theology and I'm at all but dissertation in my PhD in theology. And that's where I lose my faith in God, which was much more as traumatic as it was to lose my Mormon faith and be kicked out of my home. It was actually more troubling for me when I lost my faith in God in theology school, which is actually not very uncommon to lose your faith in God in theology school. I find that interesting. A friend of mine apply to the Harvard Divinity School. Lots of atheists in Harvard Divinity School. The leader, you know, the head is an atheist. It's hard-pressed to find

someone that believes in God in the Divinity School. Yes. And that one is a little bit tricky for me to wrap my head around. But I know it has a lot of a lot of Buddhists as well that would kind of have some kind of urge toward the transcendent, but not necessarily call it a God or an entity. Yeah. Harvard Divinity School is really interesting in that the head is an atheist, is an atheist. and a lot of the students are too, where they're seeking for the transcendent but just not convinced of kind of the historical claims that we've made about God in the past.

And that's what happened to me is when you get really, how that happened, how I lost my faith, was that you get really good in theology school at watching how the society will change and then their God will change. And the society will change and then God will change. And then you get so good at it

that you can give me a society, tell me how the hierarchy works, tell me how the agriculture is, tell me a few things about the society, and I'll tell you what kind of God they had, and I will be right. And then I got so good at that game that I was like always right. Just I could, the society will change, something will happen, the hierarchy, whatever, agriculture gets worse or better, and then the God will change. And it just became this idea. It's the seed of doubt that happened in theology school that maybe we're the ones creating God because every time we change, we change our God. And so not only were we studying that in society and specifically in Christianity as Christianity and Judaism goes through changes of God, but then you also study it on the individual level.

People who have autism will have either tend towards fundamentalism or tend towards atheism. People who are high in empathy have a certain kind of God. people who are high in disgust, like moral disgust, will have a certain kind of God. And so now I'm to the point even in theology school where tell me, tell me about a person and I'll tell you their God, or tell me your God and I'll tell you who you are. And I got so good at that that it started to break down the concept of God as being something more than just a projection of what humans are doing. It reminds me of the Gottman's who are seminal therapists that are,

study marriage and relationships and they can sit down with a couple, ask them like 10 questions. Yeah. And know, like, if the marriage is going to make it and can tell you, like, could do a dissertation on what's going on in your marriage because they've just interviewed so many couples and they have so much data and so much studies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was like that.

And then you also, like, study your existential fears. And I can tell what your, I can even tell what your fear is based on the God that you have. Do you have a fear of, we have four existential fears, death, meaninglessness, isolation, and fear of freedom. And I can tell a lot by your fears. Fear of freedom. I haven't heard that one before. Fear of freedom is the most counterintuitive one because we like to think that we like freedom, but actually our brains really don't.

And so fear of freedom is this fear that we have that you are in charge of your own life and that you can you can eff it up or make it great. And that responsibility is actually quite terrifying to us existentially. We like to think that it's all the leader's fault and politicians' fault and cult leaders' fault and religious leaders' fault. But if every leader in every organization died today, we would recreate them tomorrow because we want someone. It's confusing. It's hard to be a human. Humaning is hard.

And so when someone who looks really competent says, I have a 12-step program for your life, I have six, you know, rules to live by that will lead you to be happy and healthy and all the things. We're like, thank God. And we give people. We want structure. We want a container. Is that necessarily such a bad thing? It's not a bad thing, but we have to be aware of it because if you're afraid of freedom, then you're willingly giving away your moral compass to others who claim to know what's best for you.

And that can create problems for you. Is this part of the problem of the modern world in the fact that there is no container? there are so many choices. Like even when you pick up your phone, you can be like, I can watch a movie on Netflix, I can watch sports on ESPN, I can go on TikTok and do this,

I can watch a lecture on YouTube, can listen to a podcast, I can play, you know, alien, you know, monster games. I can text back a friend. Like, there's just so many choices on this little handheld computer in our pocket. And that's just a symptom of a much large,

And that's what we're, yeah, that's what we're learning with Gen Z is, is in addition to, you know, all the other things that they have to deal with that other generations haven't. They have more choices, which is great. Like, we want people to have choices. We think we want. We think we want choices. We want all the choices in the world. But actually, we know that our brains don't like that many choices. It's like going into an aisle of salad dressing and there's 200 salad dressing. Okay, pick one that you're going to eat the rest of your life. It's like, dear God. And then, a friend says, I really like this one. Oh, all right. You know, like our brains like that. I used to just buy the Paul Newman's because it was good enough. And I'm like, well, a fraction is going to charity. So I'll just, there's 2,000 salad dressings. I'll just get the Paul Newman one. There you go. This episode brought to you by Newman's own. So yeah, we don't like freedom as much as we think we do. We actually need order and structure and ritual and things like that to have psychological safety. And the problem is,

If you're not going to get that from a religion, you actually have to build that into your life intentionally. And that's where Gen Z is really struggling, which is why we need a lot more on the secular side to be able to tell people like you need discipline, you need ritual. And you have brought so many tools from other spiritual traditions into kind of your atheist worldview. And I want to get to that in a little bit. But going back to you in graduate school, I'm not sure exactly when this happened in your time. timeline, but I know you went through a really dark night of the soul in terms of nihilism. Yeah. Why should I even be alive?

And how do I find my purpose? If there isn't some kind of afterlife or heaven or what have you, if there's essentially an absurd randomness to the universe, that was like a year of your life? Yeah. It was two years. And I can talk now about thriving in, in, in. secular spirituality, but you're right, that's skipping a pretty big chapter where that, that move was not intuitive to me at first. At first, it was absolutely devastating. The death of God,

which Nietzsche predicted that, you know, why he said that in a tone of mourning, not rejoicing, was that with the death of God was also the death of truth and the death of morality, the death of community, the death of my marriage, the death of identity, the death of self and soul, the death of free will. I lost everything when I lost God. And for people who are raised secular, it tends to be not as traumatic. Like people who were raised secular who come to me for a spiritual direction, they kind of just have like maybe an ache or curiosity or a longing. But for people who go from religion, especially like a fundamental, like a high demand

religion like Mormonism to nihilism, it's just devastating to your brain. Nileism. Nileism, just the belief that there's no inherent meaning in the universe. You live, you die. There's no real purpose. I was talking about the nihilists from the Big Lobowski. Yeah. So, yeah, there's some good nihilists characters and movies over the years.

But yeah, so for me, it just, my brain just shut down. And I was very depressed. And it wasn't a depression that, like, oh, you just need some sunshine and some friends. It was deeply suicidal. And for those who don't want to hear that part, this was where maybe you skip this episode or because I'm just going to be honest about that time of my life. I really so completely dissociated that I woke up and just every day I was like a video game character that had no meaning and purpose and it's all stupid. But other people in this game care about this character. So I'll just kind of like pretend to be human and pretend to be Brittany because these people care about me.

But all of this is stupid. All of this is meaningless. There's no point in this. It would be better to never have been born. I wanted to die. I had a lot of suicidal ideation. I had children. And so that pulled me back from the worst of those thoughts.

And really at the root of it, the deepest thought that I had that I couldn't get out of was if there's no purpose and then universe doesn't know that we're here and everything suffers and we're just products of evolution and there's no free will and to live you you know other conscious life has to die in order for you to live even when you're vegan then I'm just a machine of violence and it would actually be more moral to take my own life than to be alive wow that's that's really dark it's very dark and I was stuck in that for about two years. And because my brain had just lost every kind of foundation because when your foundation is built on God

and you lose that, you lose more than just beliefs. I mean, I lost every... The reason nihilism can be so dangerous for people is because you have no psychological or social anchors left. You're just people describe it as floating in the abyss, floating in the void. You can't even make a decision. because you don't have a hierarchy of values.

It's just all random and suffering and nothing and no point. And it's a very dark place that philosophers will describe as the void or the abyss. That is a place that your brain really doesn't want to go to, which is why it will cling to belief for so long. But you've got out of it. What were your handholds to take you out of that? Yeah, the first handhold, the first shift that I made was, was, and it's something that I'm, that really saved my life, I think.

And John Verveke talks about this. We just had a conversation. He's an expert on the meaning crisis. If I would have found his work earlier, it would have been a lot more helpful. But there was, there's this shift when you're coming away from religion, that your brain is built on this default system, that if you have a story, then you'll know how to pattern your life accordingly. And so even after religion, my brain was still looking for some grand narrative, overarching story. And I couldn't find one that I could really build on because skepticism would just blow everything up. And then you're just left with nothing.

And a brain without a story just shuts down. It doesn't know what to do. And so the shift that I made was this concept of building sand castles. that if you're just building a sandcastle to try to outlive the wave, it's never going to work. There's nothing I can do in my life that will matter from that scale. Three generations from now, no matter what I do, I'll be forgotten. And the last person who remembers me will die, and that'll be it. And so when I was trying to build meaning from that place, I couldn't find a handhold

because the universe doesn't care that I'm here when you're in nihilism. But the shift that I made was, what if the point of sandcastles is not to build it to outlast the wave? What if the point of building sandcastles is the experience of building sandcastles, the way that my children played when they built sandcastles? They weren't building it in order to make it last forever. They built it because they were experiencing something, experiencing a form of play. And there was something with my son, having a little emotions. We welcome that here. I know you do.

I know you do. But this is, this is. Ladies and gentlemen, you saw it here. An atheist having emotions. An atheist has feelings. I know. I'm not just like a cold, blue heart.

You've never seen it before. And the history of YouTube. I'm teasing. And this is a beautiful story. And I really don't mean to mind it. I love this idea of play. And you talk about play in your book and creating for the sake of creating and emulating the child. And you have some beautiful quotes about.

that but please continue my son my oldest son he would he would just get off the bus and he would look for my face and then when he when he saw my face he would just light up you know and and especially with with my sons the way that they that they love me as their mom is it's not a it's not a truth about the universe it's an experience of of being loved in that way and there was something there that changed me that said, even if the universe doesn't care, the fact that my son was looking for my face and lit up when he saw me, there's something in my body screaming, this is meaningful. You're missing something. There's something meaningful here. And of course, like, this seems so obvious to everyone else that there is, that there is experiential ways of knowing. It wasn't obvious

to me, because in religion and in theology, you have to be. truth that's first, ultimate truth, grand narrative truth, and then you build your life on that. And this was a shift for me, which is, what if you build your life on the experience of what sand castles are worth building just for the play of it, just for the experience of it? And it was the shift of even if the universe doesn't care about this child, I care. And that was a different ground to stand on that could withstand nihilism. because now I don't have to believe anything. I don't have to do any magical thinking about gods and the universe and manifesting

and all these things that just the skeptical side of my brain is like, we have better explanations for this, human explanations for this, naturalistic explanations for this. I don't have to turn off that part of my brain, but there is ground that you can stand on from the point of view of experience. And so the question that changed my life was, what are sandcastles for this meat suit that I'm experiencing? experiencing in the universe. What are the sandcastles that this meat suit enjoys building? And I

built my life on those things. And then my life changed. That's beautiful. You know, you've talked about experience a couple of times. And we referenced it earlier. One of the things you said in another podcast I listened to you is the experience of love. Like you can write a dissertation on love. You can do research on love. You can look at brain scans of love. You can't really understand love unless you experience it and feel it. And I'm not just talking about like romantic love. Like, oh, you know, I love you. But like you said, like that deep love of a child for their mother and the mother for the child. And it's it's beyond any kind of cerebral comprehension, right? It's in the fibers. And, you know, David Bentley Hart in his book, the experience of God, which is a tough one to get through,

but it really was important to me, kind of frames that around God, around the experience of God. And one of the things he says that struck me about atheism, and I don't want to spend the whole episode on atheism, but I'm just curious your thoughts. He's kind of like, he addresses nihilism by saying, you know, in an atheist, materialist worldview, he who can pretend that their life is okay and meaningful and fun until you, until you die and it's lights out and there's ultimate meaninglessness. He who can just kind of like pretend and play that game, the best kind of wins at life. But people, I guess, that he would say are kind of stuck in that kind of point of view, like, wait a minute, there's nothing beyond molecules and atoms and energy. And when my consciousness

extinguishes, it's lights out and it's all for not and the sandcastle is washes away. People that kind of stay in that mode kind of lose in this kind of worldview. What do you think? Yeah, there's some truth to that. I won't say that facing nihilism directly is easy. There's a reason that our brains avoid that place. But there is a kind of existential courage to, you kind of have two choices with that. You can choose something that's comfortable. You can kind of choose a security blanket or you can choose to grow in the face of something. And so for me, as someone who has spent a lot of time in a variety of religious traditions and spiritual traditions, the most wholeness I've ever felt is in this kind of form of more atheistic spirituality and

secular spirituality because I get to have all of me at the table. I get to have, you know, the story of my life and what I'm doing with my life can withstand nihilism and dictatorships. And we even see this in the people who are, you know, your Victor Frankl's, your concentration camp survivors, the ones who survive best. And we call this now the Stockdale paradox are... After Admiral Jim Stockdale who is in prisoned in Vietnam. He's in prison. And we studied him and we asked him, you know, who are the people who were first to die? And he said the optimists because the optimists would say, I'm going to be out by Christmas.

And then Christmas would come. And when reality hits your story and blows up your story, then you're going to crash and then you're going to die. And they died. And so the ones who survived were the ones who could do two things at once. They could be honest about this is a bad situation being tortured. I'm a prisoner of war. They could look at it and be honest. And they could actually build a story that could withstand what they were in.

And they were doing both at once. So maybe the story was, I'm going to choose something. I'm going to choose to make someone laugh every day because humor is a core value that I have. Or they would choose, I'm going to treat people the way that people should be treated, even if the world isn't that way. That was their story. Or I'm going to choose. I'm going to remember all this because, you know, Vicketts, I'm going to remember this book that I have in my head and I'm going to tell this story when I get out of here.

You know, and those are stories that... Do you feel, and just out of curiosity, does the Stockdale way of seeing the world sync up with the Victor Frankel? Is it? Because one is more about kind of hard truths and hard reality and one is more about finding meaning and holding on to meaning as a handhold that can take you through the direst of circuit. Yeah, I think they go together because your story and your meaning are going to be really intertwined. Like your meaning is your story and your stories are meaning. And so I think we can intertwine those two. But yeah, when you can have both, when you can have a story that can withstand the harsh truths of reality, for me, that's been the most stable ground to build on. Because no matter, you know, what Trump is doing or what the world is doing or if the world gets better, the world gets worse, whatever's true about reality,

the story that I've built can withstand those truths, even really harsh truths about reality, how much we suffer and lack of free will and lack of God and maybe the universe doesn't know here and all of these things. Does being an atheist necessitate a lack of free will? No, no, not at all. It's like an add-on, like your major was atheism

and then your minor was no free will? It's more of a train that kept going for me. So for a lot of people, you know, Deconstruction is really healthy in the sense that, like, you should deconstruct narratives that were given to you, and that's healthy. For me, that was a train that kept going until there was nothing left. And any idea or handhold or concept about the universe, I just had lost all of that. So for me, that, like, I just never stopped that bulldozer until I was just essentially, like, naked to the universe with nothing. And that's not common. And how did that end up with no free will?

Just like reading and studying that concept in neuroscience. I'm not like if we do have free will, that's great news. Like I don't have my identity wrapped around like we for sure don't have free will. I'm not even really a missionary for that idea. I don't think it's, I think there's some things that are important for people to know. I don't think that that's necessarily one that a rabbit hole that everyone needs to go down. But it was one that was disorienting for me at first. first. One thing I find interesting about that and I was talking to my producer about doing an

episode on free will is it's interesting. I heard Brian Green, the physicist talking about how we don't have free will and between our DNA, between the wiring of our brain, between how we're raised, like you can pretty much tell people like the choices that they're going to make. They think there's an illusion of free will, but the mechanistic nature of, brains and endorphins and how we're raised, determine our choices. And that it's interesting that it sinks up with like a Calvinist philosophy where there is no free will. God has predetermined if you're going to heaven or hell. God is determining whether you're sinning or not. And God is making all your choices for you. So you're kind of just in this, you kind of go through your life,

not kind of actively making choices because there's a puppet. master behind you. But on both cases, there's a puppet master. One is the mechanistic nature of the brain and the chemicals of the brain. And one is like a supernatural, sky daddy superhero. It is a little different. I understand your point there. And the reason that it's disorienting is it does sometimes for people. And before Daniel Dennett died, he talked about this a lot. He was really wary about that maybe not having free will shouldn't be public knowledge. because there was a study that if you convince people, if you spend a day and you convince them that they don't have free will,

and then you track them for a while, and they'll go to the self-checkout, and there'll be an increase of things like stealing, because it's the universe, like the universe did it. And I was always going to do it. And it does sometimes... So a decrease in moral choices. There is some evidence that there will be a decrease in morality when that happens.

But it's also because of how we've built up morality. We've built up morality to mean we do this thing because God says so in heavens and hells and all of that. So it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. The argument against that would be that if we built morality on horizontal morality and how your actions affect others, then you actually don't see that dip. But anyway, yeah, just for me, it was something that was disorienting at the time because it was one of my last anchors that I lost before I was just kind of fully. in the void. But not not, not everyone goes down that rabbit hole or I think needs to go down that rabbit hole. And since you brought up Dennett, tell me your thoughts on unconsciousness. I think that there's three essential mysteries in the universe. There's the big bang, like,

when, why, how was there like nothing or there was a spec? And then all of a sudden there's, there's all this. And we're having this conversation and this pencil has graphite in it and writes. but even though the matter of this pencil is somewhat illusory, because it's not actually a solid thing. And the other mystery is, how did we go on planet Earth from having all chemicals to having biology? How did we go from, you know, and the nearest scientists can say,

it's like, well, maybe an asteroid fell in the ocean and then had life from another place so that chemicals and elements all of a sudden had protozoa and things swimming around. And then the last one is the mystery of consciousness. And at Dennett, of course, I actually went to Tufts University where he taught, I didn't take his class as my friend did, but essentially his theory, as far as I understand it,

is that consciousness is kind of a filling in of the gaps, that we have part of our brain that's memory, we have part of our brain that's emotion, we have part of our brain that's language, we have part of our brain that's will and intention, part of it is desire. And these are all working. And the gaps between these different sections of the brain are filled in to a story of

Rayne Wilson, who's sitting in this uncomfortable chair, having this awesome conversation and remembering kissing my wife when I left the house and how that when I felt when I was four years old and listened to the birds singing in the trees and that evoked this. but, but, and essentially there's, there's an, there's an illusion under all of consciousness. And I, I'd just love to get your, you're so smart, you're almost got your PhD. You've read so much, but I'd love to hear. The great thing about being an atheist is that you just don't have to like, you don't, because atheism is a negation, right?

Like, doesn't say, there's no, right? There's no force behind. All it says is I'm not convinced of a the theistic God. That's all atheism that can say. So the great thing about that is that, is that I can explore all these ideas. and I don't need anything to be true. So because I have my story and I'm meaning and my purpose, my contemplation and my experience and all these things

and I've built my life around those things, then truth becomes the place where I can play. And this is where I play. I play with ideas and I play in conversation. This for me is like two kids building sandcastles. It's very much play for me, right? I love it, yeah. And so because of that,

I don't really have to make any claims about how life started or what was before the Big Bing or any of these big questions. I did just listen to the 11-hour audio documentary from Anika Harris, Sam Harris's wife, on the nature of consciousness. And it does seem like lately the people who are studying consciousness... Life and hours, that's quite a commitment. Well, it's play. I love it.

And there is talk lately about consciousness being a fundamental quality in the universe, not something that emerges from matter. And so that's been the hard problem of consciousness. Towards God, the unified theory of everything and a conscious universe and that were all different facets of this one consciousness, including plants, trees and birds. It does move a little bit towards a kind of like a, either a Sufi or Hindu ideal, a Vedic idea. It does open up. It does certainly open up the conversation to have like hardcore materialists like Onika and Sam Harris really playing with this idea of consciousness being a fundamental quality. of the universe because it does open up the conversation quite a bit to have those voices get that conclusion. I don't necessarily think it takes us towards God. For me, the problem has always been

even if there was a creator or something like a God or were the universe experiencing itself or some of these statements, the hard thing for me is what it had to take to get there. So like let's say I'm part of the universe that's trying to understand itself. And we're making these mouth sounds to try to make sense of reality. And that's part of some conscious awakening. My issue with that is like millions of years of animals just eating each other alive for no reason, just like actually suffering. I mean, like, what is the moral lesson being learned when a tiger eats a zebra or whatever,

you know, alive. To get there, it feels to me as a mother like, okay, you're going to have children to understand yourself someday, but you have to wait 500 generations of just absolute torture and rape and genocide and suffering in order to get one of your posterity to be able to have a good, healthy life. I'm not sure that I would have children if that were the case. And so for me, yes, it opens up the conversation, but it doesn't like jump me back into the God conversation because I just find it so problematic, like the nature of suffering and how much specifically like animal suffering to get to the point of human conversation and human art and human beauty.

I just don't see benevolence behind that. And that's just always been a sore point for me. I get it. I get it. I know that's a sticking point for a lot of people about the amount of suffering in the world. And it is, it's a, it's a tricky, it's a tricky conversation. One of the things you said sparked me to ask you if you had any thoughts on the simulation hypothesis, which I know a lot of atheists can say, even Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk might say, there's, there is no God, but we really may be, you reference video games too,

like we really may be avatars in a kind of a fleshy, three-dimensional video game with a consciousness that's a faux consciousness and that when our avatars die, that we awaken to some greater reality past this material one. Now, of course, there's no proof of that, and it seems very spiritual in its basis, but it's an interesting line of thought.

I don't jump on that train. I know some other atheists do. Some other atheists also really get into aliens and things like that. For me, like my rejection of that is like twofold. One, I just, I think it's humans again trying to find a grand narrative, which is what we do. We just want some story to make sense of everything. And just because your atheist doesn't mean like you're exempt from that human desire, right? That to me just seems like a human idea. And then, And also, it doesn't change anything. Like, okay, we're in a Sims game. And, you know, we're Sims.

Like, okay, it doesn't really change, like, how I show, like, show up in the world. Like, if someone was watching, someone's video gaming this and somehow getting something out of the conversation of their sim characters, like, talking. It just doesn't really change anything for me. So that's just not a rabbit hole that particularly interests me. Well, let's talk about where we're in alignment. Sure. Huge fans of Lisa Miller.

And you talk about the hard science of the benefits of spirituality and how if spirituality were a pill taken by young people, I love the way you phrased this in the book, it would have greater benefits than any other medication you could take toward resilience, towards suicidality, risky behaviors, and addiction. Yeah. Yeah. And depression, I think. Yeah.

a sense of kind of meaning and connection, that's kind of next level. And so much of your work is about, hey, folks, you don't need a God or a soul or an afterlife to participate in these wisdom traditions that have brought humans so much meaning, connection, joy, wonder, awe, over the centuries. Let's humbly learn from them and try and bring them into our life. And that really is the center of your work and I'd love to hear about how you got to that point and where your work lies there, especially with your clients and the people that you interact with online. Yeah. So my clients a few years ago used to be mostly religious deconstruction. And that was, that was meaningful at the time. But something shifted where it's like, I think everyone kind of

can find resources for religious deconstruction or debates between atheists and theories. and everyone, not everyone, but like there was like a new atheist phase and everybody was watching Christopher Hitchens just like blow up religious people with his rhetoric. And then there was like a shift that happened where everyone was like, okay, then what though? Like, okay, now what? And this is where we see people coming, like young men coming back from religion, which is really interesting. We have people. Come back to religion, especially like Orthodox Christianity and Roman holicism. And and even people like Ayon Hersi Ali, she was the fifth. member of the atheist apocalypse and she's rubbing shoulders with Sam Harris and Dan Dennett and

Dawkins and Higgins and, you know, truly an advocate against the dangers of Islam as a religion. And then she goes through her own Dark Night of the Soul and has no, like secularism failed her. Like she had no resources for her own Dark Night of the Soul. And then she jumps back into Christianity. And when you listen to her talk about Christianity, it's not because, you know, an angel came and told her or she had some kind of like big God experience. She just had nothing. And she kind of found herself like wandering into Christianity. And my issue with that is not so much.

Like I want her to be thriving. And like, of course, like, you know, practice whatever faith is meaningful to you. my my concern with with her and people like her is when you listen to her talk she has her rationality over here and she kind of has like her heart soul stuff over here and she has to keep them separate and so in order to like survive her nihilism and her dark night of the soul stuff she goes into Christianity but her brains kind of like at war with itself because she struggles with many of the historical truth claims and also the institutional problems that she also saw in Islam. And it just doesn't for me feel like wholeness. It feels like she had nothing.

And so she jumped back onto the ship of religion. And so lately my work has been not so much doing religious deconstruction because I feel like people have a lot of resources for that. It's warning people like it's almost like as people are running from the burning building of religion, like there's a cliff ahead. Like you have to be aware of this cliff ahead. where you're going to lose something. And religion. Because, and you said that you say this before a lot. I want to hear where you're going,

but I think it's an excellent point that, again, atheism is a kind of inherent in it is a negation. Yeah, there's nothing to build on. It has nothing for you. It's not necessarily a force beyond the material. That's it. But it doesn't necessarily provide a path forward. Yeah, it doesn't at all.

life. If you ask atheism, how do I raise children? What's important? I don't know. I got nothing, right? Yeah. How do you define morals? How would you teach your children morals? So it can be, yeah, the negation can give you, you know, new ground to stand on, but you're going to have to fill it in with something. Even something like secular humanism, which is even that is still lacking in a lot of ways because it, it kind of lacks a sense of spirituality. And so lately my work has really been about kind of this separating from the baby from the bathwater, there are studies that show that religious people are happier, live longer, more friendships.

They did better over COVID. Religious people fared better than non-religious people over COVID. There's solid science, like science that shows that religion is good for you. Okay, well, then what's going on there? Religion is almost like this vessel for all these things that are good for us, awe, contemplation, ritual, community, love, all these things that really, and we have the science, especially with Lisa Miller and the science of spirituality, the science of human well-being, shows that these things are good for you. And religion is just the vessel for it. And so if you

don't have that vessel, you're going to have to build these things into your life, or you're going to struggle, or you're going to be lacking in some way. And so now my work is essentially twofold. Like I'm still calling out religion from time to time when I see things that annoy me. But it's now almost on the other edge where I want to sell spirituality to the most skeptical, the most atheistic, the most nihilistic. Because when you really talk to people who are atheists who don't have these things, even those who say they don't have spirituality, like, and then they'll tell me about their life. And I'm like, okay, you have some things here. You may not call it spirituality, but you have some things. And that's great.

But if you don't, there's this sense of, I wish I could believe in something. They seem so much happier. I can't tell you how many clients I have that come to me and say, I can't believe in anything. But I almost wish that I could because the Dululu people who believe in whatever story that I can't seem happier than I am. So what do you tell them to believe in? We can do it without belief. Belief is just the vessel for the things. So we're going to bypass the belief part

and just talk about the things that are good for humans and then give you options. And what are some of those things? Prayer and meditation. Can you pray if you're an atheist? You can. I know some who's... Or is it just kind of a meditation on awe, curiosity, wonder?

Yeah, so where I would start with people is I usually start with something called the tree of contemplation, which I do mention in the book. and it's a study that we did, that feeling that you feel of like awe and oneness where you're less neurotic in your brain and less self-obsessed, how do humans feel that? And then we gathered all, this was a study done in 2004, and we gathered all the responses, and we kind of organize them into different things that humans were doing to feel that thing. So for some people,

it's creativity. Like when they get into that flow state, that's when they get that lowering of neuroticism. That's when they feel something. For some people, it was political activism. For some people, it was meditation, but it was like just quieting the mind. If they could just be quiet, they could drop into that place. For some people, it was meditation that was more visualization. So, like, you have to do kind of more active forms of meditating in order to, like, get into states that you want to be in. And then for some people, it was even just like the body. So these are the people who get up and go on a run, not because they hate their body or they're trying to lose weight, but because it's a spiritual practice for them. This would be my husband. My husband's a

iron man triathlete, and it took him a long time to actually claim that that is spiritual for him. When he goes on that long bike ride in the sun, and he gets in a breathing, and it's his time, and then he'll, and then his iron man is like a pilgrimage where he gets all these people and you gather together and you do this thing. And then, and now he goes to, to Hawaii when there's the World Cup of, or the World World Cup, World Triathlon, and he'll be one of the volunteers that, like, gathers the family and the finisher. And he's just crying. It's very, it's, it's, he's claimed it as, as a, kind of a spiritual practice. These are body people. Um, and then there's like ritual people, people who are, uh, you know, seasonal, like witchy types,

you know, who are always coming to them back to themselves through various seasons and various rituals. And so I'll essentially talk about, here's all the ways that humans experience this thing, this thing that people have called God, which is what mystics will say. Mystics don't care what words you use. Mystics care. Have you had the experience of what people have called God? We don't care what you call it. It wasn't just mouth sounds. Have you felt it, right?

That's beautiful. And then usually the person's been alive long enough to know, I think I like this thing. Okay. How can we build that into your life? And then we just start building piece by piece. We'll build in the awe. We'll build in the community. We'll build in a practice.

We'll build up morality. Where does your morality come from? We'll build up your horizontal morality. We'll build up what are your core values? What are things that have always kind of spoken to? Maybe you've always leaned more towards justice than mercy or mercy and justice. And then we start working on your story intentionally. What is your story?

You're a character. Let's start writing your story. What do you stand for? What do you stand against? What are the stories that, what are the movies that have made you cry? Okay, that's a story arc. How can you become that character? And so religions just give this to you.

Like if you walk into a Mormon church, it'll give you your meaning and your purpose and your story and your community and your awe and your contemplating. It'll just give it to you. The cost is you're going to have to believe some pretty wild things and you're going to have to maybe turn off your brain for some of that. And it just, for me, is never going to be wholeness. And there's also going to be institutional problems and all the things and patriarchy and whatever. But if we can actually bypass that, we can actually build all those things into your life from the ground up, from you up. And I found that that's been not only a stable ground to build on for me, but also for a lot of people, even skeptical people, even nihilistic people, who then fall in love with life again. So there's a new series of the New York Times called Believing, and the main journalist is Lauren Jackson.

and it's just looking at belief, spirituality, religion, all of its components in the modern world. And she was doing an article about the positive benefits of belonging to a religion and some of these practices that humans have been doing under the umbrella of some kind of religion for, you know, 10,000 years. and she called Richard Dawkins. And he was like, I really feel like he should be fired as the main atheist spokesperson. You should be appointed in his place because he's like, you don't need a church to have community. You can join a golf club. Oh, yeah. And then he literally, and then he said, and you don't need to feel awe and wonder like in a cathedral or on a pilgrimage.

You can get together and you can watch nature documentaries. And it was like, come on, man. Yeah. Come on. You can do, you're super smart. You can do better than a golf club and nature documentaries to find kind of meaning and completion from an atheist viewpoint. And actually, Dawkins does like openly sing Christmas carols, which I find interesting. And, and so I do think that there's more. He's got an amazing voice. Cut to Richard Dawkins singing God rest ye merry gentlemen. And that would be. We don't have that footage. We don't have that footage. Continue.

But he does say like, like, like, that Christmas Eve he'll go and he'll sing Christmas songs and he doesn't believe in the words, but he doesn't just sing the secular ones. Like he'll sing Silent Night and things. And so, you know, he's kind of tough because he really just cares about what's true and he cares less about what is true through experience, which doesn't make him a spiritual mentor of mine. I can like read his books on biology.

But, you know, there's something in that that would be like. lacking for me, but he also has a very vibrant life for him. He's involved with people. He has communities in the ivory towers and conversations and things that he's interested in and he gets his awe from nature. So I think he's actually doing a lot more of that than he realizes, but not everyone can, not everyone is going to find the same kind of awe that he does in, you know, in biology. Not everybody is wired that way and he doesn't, he doesn't quite see that. Right. One of the things I find fascinating about you is that you're an ordained Sufi. Now, first of all, I didn't know one could become an ordained Sufi, like, and I didn't know that an atheist could become an ordained Sufi,

because the heart of Sufism is, God is everywhere, it's in the material, it's in, it's within me and without me, and there is a kind of a unity of the experience of God. But it's it is it is god and the divine and a corollary to that for me is this kind of understanding that listen we're wired to worship we're going to worship something humans are going to worship something in maybe contemporary secular society it's materialism the accruing of wealth it can even be i'm going to worship science or i'm going to if i don't have a god or a higher power i'm going to worship myself and where we see the altar of the ego kind of being such a big part of contemporary American society and and the worship of the self, even social media kind of

promotes like me and how do I express me and this is who I am and like we wake up thinking about ourselves and we go to bed thinking about ourselves. And that's something I have to, I'm a natural narcissist and I have to really watch for that. And I part of my spiritual practice is to kind of be like, rain, take it down a peg here, bro. Like, settle yourself down. There are forces at work much larger than you. But I'm wondering how that works with your Sufi practice, how you got ordained as a Sufi,

and how, and for those who don't know Sufism, is a kind of a, for lack of a better term, a mystical branch of Islam. And can you tie all that together for me somehow? Yeah, this is where I, I really try to be an equal opportunity offender, and I really do, I think, offend everyone, which is okay.

Like, you know, once... I get that with soul boom. I've offended atheists. I've offended born-again Christians. I'm really talking about spirituality in a way that makes atheists uncomfortable. I certainly am going to make Christians uncomfortable. And now, you know, just to be fair,

let's make all the Muslims uncomfortable too. So I'm part of a universalist branch of Sufism, which is the mystic branch of Islam. And it is my connection to a mystic tradition. And mystic traditions tend to avoid a lot of the problems of institutional religion. And they often pass from teacher to student instead of like building buildings with dogmas and the things that religions do. And so it's my connection to a mystic tradition. And I found my mystic teacher when I was in college and he was a history teacher.

And I took a class called Dante's Divine Comedy and as just part of my, theological studies. And he did something with text that I'd never experienced someone do. And for lack of a better word, and I'm just going to use this word, and it's fine because secularism doesn't really have a great word, but it like stirred my soul and it awakened my soul. And I was 17 years old. I was in college. And I took this class on Dante's Divine Comedy. And what he was doing with text was using text as a mirror to what's going on within you. And that, every character is you. And something happened. My soul woke up in a way that I had never before experienced. And I kept in touch with this teacher. I took some other courses from him. And I kept in

touch with this teacher over the years. He's just one of those professors that like you eventually become colleagues and was really influential and is just a dear friend of mine now. And years later, he told me that, you know, because I was trying to always get a sense of like what was he doing with text that was different than everyone else. He wasn't doing it for truth claims. He wasn't doing it for historicity. He did it for soul work. How did he do that? Like, what was that? And I didn't, I know, I felt it and it was meaningful, but I didn't know what it was. And then years later, as we stayed in touch, he told me that even though he was a, you know, he's Christian, he's Mormon, he's Sufi. It's a, it's a, he's a, he's Christian. It's, he's a, he's a Christian. It's,

mystics don't really care because, you know, there's this great quote that says, religions of the world may quarrel, but mystics speak the same language. And it's true, when you go to these mystic gatherings, Sufi mystics, mushroom mystics, atheists mystics, Christian mystics, they can all, they're all, because we've let go of all the truth claims and trying to convert each other. And we're just inviting each other to experience, because that's what mystics care about, the experience of what people have called God. And I started a mystic atheist. I am a mystic. atheist, yes. That's even better than spiritual atheists. Yes, I would say I'm a mystic atheist.

All right. Keep going. And so over the years I kept in touch and he was very helpful for me when I was stuck in religion and couldn't quite make sense of it. And he started to show me kind of the mystic way of looking at these things, that religion does, here's the story, Adam and Eve, whatever the the story is. Then here's the ethics, the do's and don'ts of what you should and shouldn't do. And then you can move into being, you know, like, you know, Jesus saying, you know, the law written on your heart, stuff like that. And that's what religion does. Story first, ethics, being. And what mysticism does is it does it in reverse. So first we're going to do being. First, we're going to go soul space, right? We're going to do that experience stuff. Then once you feel that, that I am you and you are me

and all of that, then we can go into ethics because I'm not going to steal from you because I'm you and you're me and you're over there, but you're a human just like me. And then the ethics just kind of flow more easily. And it's less about like a checklist of commandments. And then we go into story, not as truth, but as a place to play. And so mystics will read all, I read all the holy texts, because these are all playgrounds to explore what I am, to see parts of my ego, to see my blind spots, to see my shadow, to see, to see all of that. And so mystics will read Jesus and read Buddha and read the Bhagavadha and read the Quran and read anything, but they're not doing it for truth or historicity or what is God.

They're doing it as a playground to explore your soul space. It's a mirror and all the characters are you. And it absolutely transformed the way that I read scripture. And so you can go back even now, I'll still read the parables of Jesus, even as an atheist. because when you are all the characters, it becomes less about like, we're right and you're wrong over here and we do this and you do that. When you're all the characters, the scriptures change, the parables change. And I have incredible soul work that I've done with the Good Samaritan story or the prodigal son,

especially when you are the father and you're also the wayward son and you're also the righteous son, when you're all of them, the story completely changes. Oh, yeah, that's a great one. That's interesting. I've got to think about that. Because then if you're the father, is there a space? That's actually all of a sudden the story made sense as soon as you said that. When you're the father, is there a space that you can make for the shadow, the part of you that wants to squander and push boundaries?

And the ego, because the righteous son is the ego, I'm always doing what's right. Give me what's mine. I'm always protecting your ego. And the father is the space that you can make that can hold both of them. And the story changes. You can do absolutely wonderful soul work with it. And that's when, and so when people say for me that, you know, you're an atheist because you want to sin, you're an atheist and you've lost all the magic, it's the complete opposite

for me by letting go with the truth claims and building more on experience and having this mystic teacher in Sufism who allows me to not use the word God, that that word is just, maybe just from my past is still kind of tainted for me, but we can use other words. And he doesn't care because it's a universalist form of Sufism that came to America in the 60s through Mershid Sam, Sam Lewis, who was kind of a part of the 60s and all the Eastern kind of curiosity in the 60s. It didn't quite take off the way that secular Buddhism did in America, but it was very much a part of that movement. And again, they just don't really care what you call God. They just care that you experience it.

And so with that, I'm able to be an atheist and still play in these places. And what about the idea of worshiping something? Yeah, I mean, if we want to call, if we want to call worship, just kind of like your actions

and your direction. Or what do you put on an altar? Yeah, so I do love the idea of like sacred altars. And for me, it's always, it's very narrative based and story based because I'm just a words person. So like in my, in my she shed that I have at home.

You know, I have a wall of art, of meaning of art. That's what she shed. Sheeshed. That should be a she shed company. That's what she shed. My she shed is amazing. And it's books and its story. And it's just things that inspire me, right?

And it's, so for me, the concept of God is what we've done, especially with the Western mind, kind of the Eastern mind has a different approach. But in our Western minds, what we've done is projected our ideal onto something. called God and we get better at, we improve as humans by being in relationship with our projection of the ideal. And for me, I can still do that, work towards the ideal of beauty and goodness and truth and grace and humility and compassion and all of those things. I just don't have to, for me, it's not something out there in the universe or something that I have to make truth claims about for me that's an entirely human project and that still keeps the magic enough alive

for me that that i'm i'm dancing with sufis i'm reading parables with christian mystics uh i have an incredible meaningful work where i sit with people in their nihilism we we talk about death or their existential fears i'm able to sit with people in places where i needed someone which is what a wounded healer is you help people where you were previously hurt and i i have um all kind of kinds of spiritual practices and spiritual exploration, and I'm still exploring concepts of God and theology, but it's more playful now, and it's magical, and it's mystical, and it's beautiful, and it doesn't have to be grounded in truth claims about God, which cuts off a part of my brain because it feels like my rationality and my skepticism isn't fully on board when I make that move.

Yeah, that's very clear. That makes a lot of sense. And I get it. And along those lines, we had as a guest on the show, Neil Brennan, brilliant stand-up comic and comedy writer. And I know that you have done some work with psychedelics. And he tells this story of being just a dyed-in-the-wall atheist and having this one drug trip where he saw everything connected and had an experience of a kind of. of divine will force kind of beyond that connection. And he knew of a certainty there was, for lack of a better word, God.

Again, not a dude with a white beard on a cloud, but there was some kind of force, source, creative energy beyond matter. And now he said, like, no one could ever convince him otherwise because he had that experience. Yeah. Have you ever in your dabbling in that world? Have you had anything close to what you would call a transcendent experience that might have opened a pathway toward some kind of divinity?

Yes and no. I haven't heard that story for Neil Brennan. I do like his, he does a bit on white atheism being like the highest form of privilege, which is just a fantastic bit. Maybe we can talk about later. He has a great bit about. I would ruin the comedic timing of this, but he says, atheism is the height of white privilege because you ask a white people, can I interest you in an afterlife? And like, oh, no, thank you. I'm good. I'm good. I'll just take my supplements. Like, how much better could it be?

You know? And it's just a fantastic bit that he does on atheism. But we do have studies that show that two thirds of atheists who do a high dose specifically of psilocybin was the study. Two thirds of atheists will not self-report as atheists after an experience. like that. Now they don't go back to religion. They don't really go back to theism either. So I wouldn't even say that they would say, I believe in like the god of the Bible. That doesn't seem to happen. But they will stop calling themselves atheists and they'll say they're agnostic or spiritual but not religious or they'll become deists. There's something. You know, some, you know, the deism is like

the god of the founding fathers. Like it's a god, it's a creative force, but not one that does miracles or answers prayers. That would be the God of the Founding Fathers. So we do see that even in the data, not just him, that two-thirds of atheists who have a high dose of psilocybin will not self-report as atheists. It really opens them up by shutting down the default mode of your brain, which is really like your ego, that sense of self. You really see, you break through the illusion that you're separate and you experience that kind of oneness of just being, just sitting in being. You know, the main source of atheism isn't really science. I think the main source of atheism is the corruption of the world's religions.

And I do, and there is a lot of evidence that shows that Christianity creates atheism in the sense that if you build up Christianity to say that there is truth and you should seek truth to get closer to God and God is morality, then when Christianity starts not acting moral and not being truthful or being grounded in truth, then it kind of is, it's almost like we practice truth seeking in Christianity and trying to build morality in Christianity. And then we got so good at it that it turned on itself and like, oh, actually, maybe we're not truthful and maybe we're not moral. Right. So Christianity does create atheists in ways that other religions don't necessarily. Right. But yeah, to me, and this came up in the Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson debate,

where Jordan Peterson was like, why don't you just do like a high dose of psychedelics? You'll know what I'm talking about. And he's like, I'll play that game with you all day long. Like that doesn't, those experiences don't necessarily mean something about reality. And so where I, something that, that I would stand on here is I think the mistakes that we make as humans is by saying because this is my subjective reality, it must therefore mean something about objective reality. So because I feel that the Book of Mormon is true, it therefore must be true. Because I feel, you know, all of our, and we have crazy ideas and crazy religions and lots of gods and all the things. And I think that's the mistake that we make too easily, that by saying you have an experience, it therefore means something is true about ultimate reality.

And I just don't think that that's a jump that we can make confidently because when we look back at all the times that we've made that jump, we were wrong. We were always wrong. And at the end of the day, you and I will both be dead. Hopefully we'll live long, vital lives, helping lots of people along the way. And either my consciousness ends, and then that's end of story. And the, you know, the projector whirls and goes, chitch, chich, chich, chich, chit, chit, chit, and fades to black. And that's it. Or you will die.

And there's some other plane of existence beyond the... The difference is you get, and I told you so. wrong and I don't get in. I told you so if I'm right. And that sucks. Feel free to give it to me right now. I'm going to give you a preemptive. We're both dead. It's black. There's nothingness. Just like before your point. There's nothing else. Rain, I told you so. Doesn't that feel good? Oh, that felt good. I want to tell you, oh, I have two more questions when we wrap up. First of all, I want to say, I want to tell my positive Mormon story. Oh, I can't wait. So I have a couple Mormon friends. I play tennis with some and I and I know some from some 12-step groups.

And I don't have any opinion on Mormons that seem nice. I mean, I've seen some crazy documentaries or whatever, but regardless, I don't really have an opinion. I haven't read the book of Mormon. I don't know that much about Joseph Smith and his history. But here's what I do know is I had a layover in the Salt Lake City airport. and I was at a coffee place right by, I know I was drinking coffee in Salt Lake City.

That's heretical already. Okay, but family after family was coming back from missions. And I was there for over an hour. And it was so beautiful. These incredibly large families holding up signs, people coming back from overseas. There were a lot of like South Pacific. like islanders that were there.

And the hugs and the warmth and this giant family after giant family just celebrating, hanging out together, high fiving, embracing. And I watched an hour and 15 minutes of it. I would say that's better than any nature documentary is go watch Mormons greet each other at the Lake City Airport. And I was like, you know, maybe these Mormons have got something right. I mean, the world feels to me like it's falling. apart to such a degree and there's mental health epidemics right and left. And here are all of these

big, beautiful, loving families. And they didn't know they were being observed. They weren't putting on any kind of show. There was genuine moderation there. Now, I'm sure all the unhappy Mormon families perhaps were not coming to the airport to greet each other. So this is a select group. But it was actually a really moving experience. And I said to my wife, like maybe the Mormons have got something really right here. I have heard that Penn and Teller, what's Penn's last name? Because I just think Penn and Teller, Penn Gillette. He said something like that where he said, do you know who's got it right is the Mormons? Now, he's a very outspoken atheist. And why he said that was, yes, their doctrine is wrong. And like, the truth claims that they were built on is wrong. But like, like the vessel of their religion is wrong. And I actually think you can. With some, with some religions, they're so old, you can't quite prove one way or another. But, but, like, the vessel of, of their religion is wrong. But, Mormonism because it's young and it's new and it's a record keeping people, we actually kind of do know what happened. And I do think it's a religion that you can prove is wrong. But what that vessel created was actually something quite magical. And it's something that I don't regret being a part of because I know what a communal service driven life is because I was a Mormon. And so I know what to look for. And you have a big family. That's service-driven.

I have four children myself. Yeah. So there is something there. And so he actually said, Penn said, you know, I live like a Mormon. Like I don't want to drink and smoke. I want to stay away from addictions. I want to focus on family and service and love and my community. And he says the Mormons have it more wrong than anyone else when it comes to their truth claims,

especially like, you know, historicity of the Book of Mormon. but as far as way of life, they're the ones who've got it right. And there is something there. And so what I'm trying to do essentially in my ex-Mormanism is, how can I get all the juicy stuff that I experienced as a Mormon without building my life on something so unstable as these truth claims that not only are not true, but actually cause harm to people, of course, like women and gay people and black people in the church,

that we just have horrible histories around and horrible doctrine to this day, that we haven't discounted. So I want all the good, I want the baby. I just don't want the bathwater. And that's what I'm trying to do as a mystic atheist. But there is something there. Yeah, for sure. Well, mystic atheist and mystic Baha'i were on the same path,

which is trying to enrich people's lives with meaningful conversation and people making choices on a larger level about what's true for them. and I've so enjoyed this conversation. Really loved your book. Check out No Nonsense spirituality. Although I think you should write a book called Nonsense Spirituality. That has all the mystical elements that you're talking about. That's all the nonsense.

We can do. We can still ground that. That's the thing about love. Like, yes, it's an experience, but you can also ground it in chemistry. And so for me, as long as you can still ground it in something that somewhat resembles what we're calling reality, that that feels a lot better for me. Okay, fair enough. But great book, great conversation,

and thanks for the work you do. Thanks, Rain. All right. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.