Within Reason - #90 Rainn Wilson - Reclaiming Spirituality From Traditional Religion

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Rainn Wilson is the actor and comedian best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on the The Office (US), for which he received three consecutive Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He is also the host of ‪‪Soul Boom‬, a podcast discussing spirituality, and authored a book of the same name exploring how we can use spiritual tools to help solve some of life's problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rayne Wilson, welcome to the show. Alex O'Connor, as I live and breathe, the legend. It's so great to have you here. Your book, Soul Boom, Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, I was really excited to learn that you'd written this because that's so much more in my field than what I'd known you for previously. So perhaps we should begin with the question that you begin this book with, which is, why did Dwight Shrewt from the office write a book about spirituality?

That's a, you know, that's the question. question of the hour, and it's a question that has really flummoxed a lot of people. It's just such a vast disconnect. Insert footage of Dwight here being a weird anti-social dick, and then cut back to me having this conversation. I think there's a number of different reasons. One is, and that I've been speaking to people about kind of more and more kind of forthrightly, which was when I was your age, when I was 17, I went through a lot of mental health issues and a lot of really deep struggles that had to do with the dark night of the soul. And I felt in my 20s really unmoored, lost, overwhelmed.

I had anxiety attacks, depression, a lot of addiction issues, kind of polyaddicted, like drugs, alcohol, porn, gambling, you name it, anything that I could kind of caffeine that I kind of get addicted to, I did. And that forced me to dig a little bit deeper than most people necessarily do in their lives. That kind of forced my hand of like, why the fuck are you alive? What is this life all about? How do you find meaning? and purpose. What grounds you? What is true and what is not? Because when you're facing your own mortality and, you know, questioning everything and when you are in anguish emotionally, that puts your feet to the fire. So during that time period, I did a lot of reading, a lot of exploration

around spiritual ideas. Why did I do that? Well, I grew up a member of the Baha'i faith. And one of the really the most beautiful things about the Baha'i faith is that Baha'is explore all kinds of spiritual paths. So when I grew up a Baha'i, we were studying Buddhism and we were reading the Bhagavad Gita. And we had, you know, born-again Christians, you know, come over to our house. And my dad would cook them pancakes and talk to them about the resurrection and what that means. And how literal is it and how metaphorical is it? And so in the 90s, when I'm in my 20s, you know, trying to get going as an actor and just dirt broke and kind of at the end of my rope,

spirituality and a kind of a spiritual thirst and a spiritual search was all I knew what to do with the overwhelming feelings that I was having. At that time, people weren't really, I didn't know anyone in therapy in the 90s, you know. Right. I guess Woody Allen, I guess, was in therapy. We see how that worked out. But it wasn't, you couldn't like pick up a phone and find a therapist and I didn't have any money. And then weren't even like self-help books about like, and there weren't podcasts about

how to deal with your anxiety and 10 easy steps. What a time. What a time to be allowed. So, you know, you had to figure this shit out on your own. And there wasn't even really words or language for what a mental health epidemic was or what mental health was. people just dealt with anxiety and depression and you just didn't really talk about it too much so this is a long-winded answer to say it kind of forced my hand i read all the the the religious books

and spiritual books i read a lot of philosophy and um after a very long multi-multi year journey i came back to my roots as a bahai but in a much kind of deeper more connected more profound way. And I found spirituality or a spiritual path to be greatly fulfilling to me on a personal level. And it provided me with some meaning, some hope, a North Star that allowed me to kind of tiptoe out of those dark times. It wasn't a cure-all. It wasn't like, oh, I found God and all of a sudden I'm saved and everything got better. It was not that at all. It was a thread for me to follow kind of out of the darkness. Yeah, you quote Julia Cameron as saying,

necessity, not virtue, was the beginning of my spirituality. It sounds a bit like a prodigal son story. You know, this sort of, you write in the book about how you go to, I think it's sort of when you're going to New York and getting into theater or anything. All this God stuff is sort of nonsense and silly. And people, it's just for people who can't make meaning in their own life and this kind of thing.

And then you sort of, you hit, if not rock bottom, then, you know, you go to a pretty dark place. And then you sort of come back with this newfound appreciation. It's sort of echoed that story. I was lost and now I'm found. It is the prodigal son a story. It's an ancient story. It's a story you'll hear in any 12-step room, you know. It's ancient for a reason, right?

Because it's a very human. It speaks to something true about the human condition. It's a human story. But interestingly with you, it's with, this Baha'i faith, which a lot of people might just not have heard of. I think you might be the most famous Baha'i outside of Basha'u'u'llah himself, you know, like, but Baha'u'u'u'u'la. Now Baha'u'llah is Baha, which means glory, right, and Allah, which means God, an Arabic word,

and this is the prophet and founder of the Baha'i faith. That's right. Now, I'm sure that our listeners will be fascinated to learn about this religion. It's one of the newest world religions, perhaps the fastest growing. I think by some estimates, the ninth most popular world religion. And yet... I've done your research. And yet nobody's...

Yeah, and yet I can't... However many episodes I've done of this podcast, I don't think it's ever come up once. What can you tell us about the Baha'i faith? Well, it's hard to summate a world religion with hundreds of books and tablets and mystical writings and prayers and history and ups and downs, you know, in a nutshell, but I'm going to try for you and your listeners. O'Connor Heads, you have like a name for your... I wish I did, no, I haven't got the believers or the low gang or whatever it is. I don't know.

I'll speak to some marketing people. Because eventually, like Joe Rogan, they can be a voting block that you can use for your advantage. Yeah, hey, if anyone has any ideas, then leave it down. Put them in the comments. Smash that like button. So the Baha'i faith, let me start with an overview. In the Baha'i faith, I did a little video online about it and what I call it cosmology. So the cosmology of the Baha'i faith, which is the kind of universal mythology, is that there is one God.

Now before you gasp and your viewers roll their eyes into the back of their heads, I would say that this conception of God is quite different in the Baha'i faith than it is in a lot of. of other faiths. It's nothing patriarchal. It's nothing human. There's no one with a beard. There is not a kind of heaven and hell kind of relationship to sin behind this God. That there is, you know, the unknowable essence it's called in the Baha'i faith, the cosmic force. It's like the source of all consciousness. It's beyond the ground of all being, to quote TILIC, you know, beyond all kind of way of measuring. And this source has decided to bring the consciousness of humanity online and wants to educate humanity spiritually.

So what does it, he, she, it do, but bring spiritual teachers throughout time to help educate humanity. And this is a concept in the Baha'i faith called progressive revelation. It's a little similar to Islam, but it's a little more inclusive. So if you go way, way back to like Lord Krishna and Abraham, and then you go to like Buddha and Moses and Jesus and Muhammad, the Baha'i faith would say that their essential teachings were true and pure and from this holy, sacred, all-powerful source. And these religious, religion, these world religions are like chapters of a book, ever being updated with various spiritual messages. Now, mankind swiftly corrupts those messages. As you can see, in Christianity

is a great case and point where the teachings, the sayings of Jesus Christ, the actions of Jesus Christ are very, very much differentiated from the dogma teachings and actions of most contemporary Christians, although there are a lot of very saint-like contemporary Christians as well. So this religion, because it's really just one religion, it's a being updated religion. When you say one, you mean all the world religions? All the world religions essentially are one. There's, you can, we can get into it and you say, well, Buddhism doesn't have a conception of God and in Islam. It's all about God and how can you rectify those two, those two differences, but that this ever updating, it's like an operating system on your phone.

It's like when you get, you know, the iPhone 11.3 and the, you know, Mountain Sierra update or whatever. It's building on the previous updates. And it's not wiping the phone and putting a whole new update in there. So the Baha'i faith views itself as a continuation of this, what Baha'u'llah calls the changeless faith of God, eternal in the past, eternal in the future. There will be these divine teachers that will come down in the future as well to help humanity move forward spiritually. Humanities move forward wonderfully, technologically, especially the last two, three hundred years, but we also need to mature spiritually. We need to gain wisdom and compassion and love and kindness and learn about these qualities

as a species sharing the resources of our planet. So the Baha'i faith is very much about how do we coexist that unity between and harmony of the races, equality of the genders, the essential unity of religion, that these are the building blocks to help humanity move to the next level. There's, again, a lot more to it than that. But that's it. And Baha'u'llah is the most recent of these teachers, according to this mythology, on this mythological narrative of the Baha'i faith. And the Baha'i faith appears to have grown out of a form of Shia Islam. It originates in modern Iran. So it's Baha'u'llah. Baha'u'llah. Baha'u'llah is a sort of Persian prophet and grows out of an already sort of esoteric sect of 12ish.

Shia, Islam. So it sort of grows out of Islam, but... In the same way that Christianity grew out of a crazy messianic, small sect of Judaism to become a world religion. And, you know, you could say the same thing about, you know, Buddhism going out of a, you know, a small sect of Hinduism. And it's part revolution, it's part reinvention, and it's part its own new thing. Yeah, there's a fascinating history around Bashu'ala and also You keep throwing an S in there. There's no S.

Bahua. Baha'u'lla. Baha'u'lla. Baha'u'lla. Yeah. This is going to be your clip for your, this is going to be like the short clip as you're trying to pronounce Baha'u'll.

Are they going to be coming after me now? Because, you know, sometimes it can get a little bit touchy. They're coming after you. The Baha'is are coming after you to give you a hug. Yeah. Well, that's the thing about Baha'is is that they seem to be very sort of love, unity, peace, focus. Like you said, although this grows out of a Shia Islam, historically, it becomes its own thing and begins to see world religions as one big religion that have

these successive prophets dating back to Adam, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Muhammad, all of these people are real prophets of God. They just thought about in a more sort of unified way. the first, I suppose, objection that people are going to bring up to that is the fact that these world religions seem to have contradictory revelations at some point. I mean, what do the Baha'is think about the fact that in Christianity, God is a Trinity? In Islam, to see God as a Trinity is one of the most foundational sins that you can commit. You know, Christianity, Jesus dies on a cross and is resurrected, and that's foundational. Muslims don't think that Jesus died on the cross. what do the Baha'is think about, say, the person of Jesus and these doctrinal disputes throughout history?

Yeah, it's a great and important question. And it's a tricky one. You know, I remember listening to a radio show once, and the radio host had brought on, I think, a born-again Christian and a Muslim and someone else. And he was trying to, like, unify everyone and get him on the same page. And the Christian was like, to the Muslim, you're going to help. I reject your conception of God and religion. I only know God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And anyone who perceives it in any way different than that is doing Satan's work. And so that gets really tricky. So again, we'll go back to the source. If you go back, now I read the Quran a long time ago, and truth be told, I struggled with it.

It's a little, it's a, have you tried it, right? It's a tricky book, right? It's hard to. And it hits you with the longest chapter first. well, second, but it drops you right in at the deep end. Yeah, right, exactly. But if you go to the source, if you go, I guess Baha'is would call themselves red-letter Christians. You know, red-letter Christians are?

Right, no. They're the ones that look at what Jesus actually said. If you open the Bible and then the red letter is what Jesus said, Baha'is are red-letter Christians. So, you know, for the first two, three hundred years of Christianity, Christianity was all about peace, love, and unity, accepting everyone in every one in every one. everyone going to the same place, right? So it was, in fact, I think the first big tent experiment in human history, and I think it's not often respected as that. But if you are walking around the

earth at 200, 250 AD, whether you were a slave, whether a woman or a man, whether you were a centurion, whether you were a, you know, a Pharisee or a Samaritan or an Egyptian or whatever, you were welcomed to a church service where you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior and you believed in the glory of the Father and that your sins would be washed away and everyone was welcomed. That changed over the next centuries in a lot of different ways. But I would say that I have a chapter. Can I see my own book, please? Of course.

Give me that. I have a book. I have a couple chapters about. about this at the end, where I talk about the universality that all religions have, I talk about a higher power, concept of life after death, a power of prayer, transcendence, community, a moral compass, the force of love, increased compassion, service to the poor,

a strong sense of purpose. There's more in here, I'm not gonna dig around, but that, these universalities are what Baha'is would look at. And even if you go to Buddhism, which I think Buddhism is a tricky one. It's interesting. You can look through the actual writings of the Buddha and you can find a lot of things that lead one to think about a concept of a higher power.

I think Buddhism arose out of a Hindu, I mean, they didn't call it Hinduism back then, but let's just call it, for lack of a better word, a Hindu tradition where every village had its gods. What God do you believe in? I believe in this God, and I make offerings to this God on a Thursday and this God on a Sunday. So the Buddha, in a way, was kind of wiping the slate clean.

But also when you visit Buddhist communities, which I have in the north of India or in Thailand or Vietnam or whatever, there's a lot of God stuff going on there, by the way. There's gods, there's offerings, there's worship, There's, you know, and it's the very Western kind of idea of Buddhism of like it is, it is a godless, more of a philosophy than a religion.

But again, if you go to those universalities, service to the poor compassion, the building of community, the power of prayer, seeking of transcendence, that exists in all of these religious faiths. So Baha'is would reject dogmas that grew up out of misguided human administration in the hundreds of years that arise after the creation of, you know, I mean, the Prophet Muhammad himself said, said that there's no, you can't coerce people into belief. But then, you know, within a generation, you know, we know how that story is. Yeah, well, people often don't take the advice of their prophets. That's right. And that's, you know, why Jesus says so many will come to me and say, Lord, Lord, and I will

say, depart from me, I never knew you. There's sort of this message throughout these scriptures that so many people are going to get it wrong. What do Baha'is think about, say, the prophetic miracles? You know, the resurrection of Jesus, Muhammad flying to the moon on a winged horse, this kind of stuff. I mean, what's the Baha'i approach to understanding these stories? Well, there, hmm, how do I answer that?

The supposedly Baha'u'llah performed some miracles. Supposedly, this guy wrote them down and gave Baha'u'llah the book of these, hey, you did this, you healed this guy and you foresaw this. I don't think any big ones like flying to the moon or anything like that. And then let me just finish the story. And then Baha'u'llah took the book and washed it in the river and was like, this is not about miracles. This is about, this is about action, this is about belief, this is about what we're doing. So I think in, again, we're talking about a cosmology where there is this profound source of all love and all science and all knowledge and all light and that these especially anointed teachers come down. They have an ability to exist within and without kind of the bounds of physics in a way that would allow for miracles.

So Baha'is are not like anti-miracles, but Baha'is are just very much like, can we just not talk about the miracles? Like, let's talk about the truth. I think if I'm not mistaken, there were some reports that the, who's the guy that came? The barb. The barb, the gate. Yes. The forerunner of Baha'u'llah, like, who is kind of like a John the Baptist to Jesus. Yeah, yeah. And he is executed by the state. And there are some stories that the firing squad all fire, and he doesn't die the first time. And they all have to shoot again. And this was sort of another potential miracle. But Bahá'u'llah sort of does away with this and says it doesn't happen. He downplays it. I mean, he doesn't deny it, but we just don't. We don't lead with that, let's show us say. But that was witnessed by thousands of people and written about in the papers and even made it to Europe. And Sandra Bernhardt, the actress, performed a play.

about it like it was the there were shockwaves from this because it was such a such a public event but um we we don't really lead with that we lead with with the writings with the teachings with the love stuff yeah lead with the love we'll get back to rain wilson in just a moment but first do you trust the news i don't and a lot of that has to do with the media bias that inevitably seeps into reporting that is where today's sponsor ground news can help ground news aggregates thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place, allowing you to directly compare how different outlets are reporting on the same story. Try it out by going to ground.com news forward slash Alex O.C. Take a look at this story about US Bible sales jumping 22% in 2024. I can compare the different

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of one progressive revelation, everybody's part of one family, and so Baha'is are very stringently anti-tribalism, anti-racism, all of this kind of stuff. But then I'm sort of looking at the prophet Moses, who is the chosen prophet of a chosen people, led into their promised land, and thinking that, well, the Baha'is think that he was one of the, what do they call them, the prophets, there's like a word or an analogy that they use for the prophets. A manifestation of God.

A manifestation of this God who hates the tribalism and yet sends a prophet who is the leader of the nation of Israel. You know, it's the thing that makes me, most, I suppose, confused about how that historical picture of world history fits into the current Baha'i picture of one big happy family. Right. But again, think of it in terms of the updates to the phone. Think of it in terms of evolution. And humans were tribal. Humans were, we first were in caves and valleys and we fought with the people in the other caves and the other valleys. And then those people united and then the people of this like mountain range fought with the people of

that other mountain range and then so you you have to meet people where they're at sure and as a very tribal people we're talking about Moses is what like 4,000 years ago 3,000 years ago I forget exactly but um it's a super long time ago and that's what people knew was tribes So I don't know enough about Jewish history, but it seems to me, too, that, again, the Jewish philosophers greatly influenced the Greek philosophers and so much of what we know about, like, Plato and this idea of forms and the allegory of the cave really came from kind of Jewish mysticism. You know, supposedly, Plato and Socrates and all those guys traveled around the Middle East and learned a lot of stuff. And that it was ultimately, Judaism was much more open to just the people of that, of that tribe. But then if you look at Christianity, then it's breaking people out of that, right? It's saying, like, because there was that big debate, right?

With James and with Peter and Paul in the early days of the church about, wait, is this just a reinvigoration of the Jewish faith? Do we need to keep the Sabbath and, you know, what do we do? Or is it for Gentiles? do we teach the Gentiles? And that was a huge source of debate early on. And I think properly, Christianity moved and said, this is not just a reinvention of Judaism. It's a new revelation that includes, folds in Judaism, but has a new path. So that's how I would answer that. Humans were tribal and they needed to be addressed as tribal at that time. And now we are tribal again, but it's on a on a global level where we're seven and a half billion people sharing the resources of a planet what do we do now yeah that idea of the software update is interesting here because it's like you might think well if the if the message is sort of the same if it's always broadly speaking love for your fellow creature and this kind of stuff then why would we need these progressive updates but it's almost like that broad message being more situationally applied throughout history

in the same way that the phone does essentially the same thing it allows you to call your friends and connect to the internet and stuff but it's updated so that that same idea can like fit into this physical space that we humans just fucked it up because if we had just followed what jesus had said and if we had followed his example maybe we wouldn't need more updates and if we had follow what the you know prophet mohammed you know peace be upon and blessed be his name had followed what he said said about peace, love, and surrender, instead of moving into war and coercion, you know, maybe we would have, you know, a peaceful world right now. But humans got to, humans got to be humans, bro. How much of that do you think is to do with them having the wrong image of God? You've, you quote this Zen teaching, pointing at the moon, the finger that points at the moon is not the moon what does that mean i don't know you tell me man oh did i write that the yeah it's i have a chapter in the book called the notorious god um um uh and i love this conversation i love a conversation about god i don't love a you know an old-fashioned youtube debate about

whether god exists yeah you kind of open the chapter by talking about how useless and fruitless YouTube religion debates are. Yes, yes. I wasn't going to mention that. Well, I know it's, I think it used to be your bread and butter, but I greatly admire how you've expanded your vision to just have just big, meaty, beautiful conversations and challenging conversations, too, as one should. And I hope you'll challenge me as well. But just having like, you know, Richard Dawkins versus some priest and then fighting it. out. And, you know, there's a lot of kind of angry 23-year-olds at home going, oh, you landed a good

point there. Oh, yeah, you got him, Dawkins. It's kind of like Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson. And it doesn't really change the atmosphere. But I do think, so the finger pointing at the moon. So I think people often confuse that. So when I read that in your book, I thought of this, I keep quoting this poem by C.S. Lewis. And there's a point where he says, thoughts are but coins, let me not trust instead of thee, their thin, worn image of thy head. It's like people often worship their thoughts more than they worship the thing that their thoughts are supposed to be directed to. And so you end up with these ideas of God and these pictures in your head. And isn't it Wittgenstein who talks about the fish bowl? I don't have the quote

right on the tip of my fingers. Something about like how long, no, no, fly glass were caught, like flies caught in a glass and the glass is the limitations of our language to be able to summate stuff that is, you know, beyond the beyond. And we're stuck like fly popping around in this fly glass because we, our language is so limited to try and encapsulate something that is kind of beyond our current consciousness is understanding. It's impossible to comprehend just how much our language restricts our thinking. I only speak one language fluently, semi-fluently, I like to think.

I think it was Gerta who said of language, he who knows one knows none. Because without this comparison, it's difficult to even recognize the constraints that you have in your language. I did a podcast recently with a guy's got a channel called Magnify, and he was talking about how the English language, for example, is embedded with sort of accounting terms. It's very sort of trade-based because that was the... society that this language evolves in. And so when you apply it to religion, it's Jesus accounting for sins and we're in spiritual debt and these kinds of language. Oh, interesting. Look at the way that religious language is completely embedded into the Arabic language. Totally understandable. And the original word for sin, sin was an ancient Greek term of archery.

Did you know this? Oh, like missing. The sin is missing the mark. Yeah. Like you, you know, you're doing this and like, oh, I sinned. I didn't hit the bullseye. So sin isn't like this black mark on your soul that's going to damn you to hell for eternity. It's you missed the mark. And guess what? That's what we do all the time, us human beings, as we miss the mark. But again, and then that language got translated. When it got translated into Latin or whatever it was, it got translated, kind of misappropriated.

Yeah, as so often happens. I think the history of translation, especially in religion, is something that needs a bit more focus, because so much of our understanding of theology can be affected by one person's decision to make sure. Have you ever seen paintings of Moses with horns? No. A lot of the times you see a painting,

so Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses has horns on it. If you go to the San Chappelle in Paris, you see on the windows there are pictures of Moses with horns. Wow. And it's because there's this word, I think it's Keden in Hebrew. which can be translated as like rays, as in like rays of light, but it can also be translated as horns. It's like the same word.

And so when St. Jerome makes the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible, he translates it literally as horns. So there's this passage in Exodus where Moses comes down from the mountain, and he did not know that his head was Keren because he'd been speaking with the Lord. So he did not know that his face shone is how most translation. will have. But Jerome translates it as he did not know that his face was horned because he's been speaking with him. Which doesn't make much sense because like five minutes later, he has to cover up his face because of the effect it's having on people around him. It's quite clear that that's

what it meant. Because Jerome translated it as horns, you end up seeing all this religious art with Moses having these devilish looking horns. And I mean, that's a, that's quite a sort trivial example. But you can imagine that happening theologically. It's not just like the painting of Moses, but your conception of God is completely altered by the fact that some concept has been translated wrong. And sin is a great example of that. I mean, shifting your perspective on sin from being this this punch that you've landed on God or this this wrong that you've committed that you can sort of do an

evil giggle and it's God who's kind of upset about it to rather being, it's you missing the mark for yourself, can transform the way that you interact with the world. Just by that one word, I think. Yeah. There's one of my favorite stories from the Baha'i faith is the son of the founder, Baha'u'llah, Abdul Baha. He came to the United States a little over 100 years ago and toured around for about a year.

And when he landed and he was everyone, he was on the front page of the papers like, the Persian prophet has landed and they have pictures of him. He's got a big beard and a turban and stuff like that. And this journalist said, Abdu Baha, do Baha'is believe in Satan? And Abdu Baha thought about it. And Abdu Baha was like, yes. And they said, oh, how do Baha's view Satan? And Abdul Baha said, Satan is the insistent self.

And I love that so much because obviously Baha'is don't believe that there's a red devil man with scales and a pitchfork in an evil. place like trying to tempt us. But when you think about the insistent self and you think about the universality of religious faith and religious belief, the ego and the allure of the ego of lust and passion and power is hardwired into our DNA as well it should be because we are part ape. We're part, you know, we're part animal. Maybe we're mostly animal. Speak yourself.

That's how we survived, was to have our own self-interest, to spread our seed, to seek power, protect ourselves. But that is the ego. That is so much of what Buddhism is about, about the need, the clutching, the need to possess, that this is a source of great unhappiness. So this idea that Satan is not something outside of ourselves, but something in ourself, and it's not an evil power, but in fact, something that we all wrestle with speaks to every spiritual tradition.

Who was it, Bahá'u'llaz? Abdul Baha. There's a quote from Abdel Baha on your book, page 98 for those following along at home. People have pictured a God in the realm of their mind, in the realm of the mind, and worship that image, which they have made for themselves. consider then how all the peoples of the world abowing the needs were fancy of their own contriving how they have created a creator within their own minds and they call it the fashioner of all that is it's people worshipping their thoughts rather than worshipping the thing that their thoughts are supposed to point to yeah i think that so thomas aquinas uh famously thought that all religious language was an allergy and so god is not powerful god is not is not is not knowing God is not, you know, any of these things, because these are human concepts that we used to sort of analogously think about the way that God kind of operates, but he's obviously not powerful in the way that a human is powerful, being able to lift heavy things and influence people and stuff like that. It's a totally incomprehensible notion, but we use these analogous terms. But now, if you ask the philosophers even, you know, how do you define God? They'll say, oh, he's an all-powerful, all-loving, you know, all-knowing. And perhaps in doing the- Pointing at the moon.

Yeah, pointing at the thinking about the finger. The pointing at the finger itself, you know, which is probably the wrong way of thinking about it. I think a lot of David Bentley Hart seems like someone that you've read. Yes. And I'm pretty sure that one of his biggest critiques of the new atheism movement is that they're just thinking of the wrong kind of God. They've just got the wrong picture of what God is supposed to be. I mean, what do you think God is supposed to be? Well, that's the ultimate question, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, yeah, because you could go even further than that, and you can say that to exist is a quality of the physical world. You know, this pen exists. Does God exist? Does God have the same quality that this pen has? Right, right. You know, you can't say that God exists.

But again, that's how trapped we are by language. By language, yeah. So, yeah, I love David Bentley Hart. The experience of God, his book is, is a seminal book for me and that really illumined a new way of thinking about God and I have a chapter in there

I referenced before The Notorious GOD and I'm actually doing a documentary I'm going to start next year doing a documentary called The Notorious GOD I'd love to interview you for it Are you up for that? That sounds like great fun.

Okay and but this idea that God is much closer to an experience than a being with superpowers. Yeah. So Jesus said God is love, and the hippies were right in a way. Like, can God be closer to something more akin to music than to a dude?

You know, David Bentley Hart calls him like a demiurge. That's this old idea of like a god with superpowers on a cloud, like striking you and giving you favors and like, and having opinions and whatnot. Can God be closer to physics and beauty than to any kind of being? You know, that's what so many people are striving to understand through psychedelics. You know, I'm not, I'm not a huge fan, but I'm also an addict, so I can't do them. So maybe if I wasn't, I'd enjoy them. Who knows?

But that reaching for something beyond. reaching for something transcendent. And when I experience God the most, I experience God in nature. I experience God. I think the closest I've ever come to God was at a Radiohead concert. And I saw Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl and song after song after song from In Rainbows came up. And I was just like my face was melting and I felt one with the world. And I just felt love and abelian. and joy. And I was just absolutely mesmerized and transformed. And I was like, this is a religious, this is like the most religious experience I've ever had. So, yeah. Well, I've talked about this before. I saw this like meme going around atheist Twitter for, for a while, which was people

saying like, you know, I used to think that I was really religious and I was feeling the Holy Spirit, but turns out I just liked music. I just liked concerts. And it was a way of sort of dismissing it. It was like, oh, I was fooled into thinking I was having a religious experience when really it was just because they were, you know, I just like the beat and the music. But I read this and it just seems so confused to me because it just pushes the problem back. Well, why are you moved by music? That doesn't sort of do away with this, with this mystery of why you felt this sort of spiritual experience in that room. I mean, sure, maybe they didn't need to be singing about Jesus or whatever.

But there's still this great mystery as to why that vibration in the air of a particular sort of frequency can. bring up very specific emotions in you i can i can press the ivory keys on a piano in a particular way and vibrate the air to bring up the feeling of and then and it resonates on a little drum in your ear and then that gets translated to neuro impulses to your brain and you start to cry and you feel longing you feel nostalgia you feel very specific emotions but that that whole process is a mystery i mean the way you just said those vibrations get translated in to trans how do vibrations get translated into neurons? Like how the hell does that work, you know?

And so the sort of dismissive attitude, I think, that people can bring to these spiritual experiences by comparing them to something like a concert, I think it should go the other way. Like you say, you go to a radio head concert and you experience something approximating, you know, a church gathering. And the same thing happens in nature. And I'm sure you've felt it. And I'm sure a lot of your viewers who are more skeptical.

of religion or God or theism, which is completely understandable. And I want to just say, sidebar. Abdulbeha said, if religion be a cause of disunity, it were better there were no religion. So in a way right now, the only reasonable stance right now is that there be no religion. Because the idea that followers of Jesus or followers of Moses or followers of Moses or followers of Mohammed or Abraham or anyone, or even Buddhist terrorist monks in Sri Lanka, looking up, you know, fighting in the revolution, are killing innocent people in the name of this all-loving God is an anathema to being a human being, and it were better to just

have no religion whatsoever. And we should just try our luck with some kind of like evolved socialism like in Denmark or something like that. And so, but putting that aside, what were we talking about? Oh, nature. So a lot of your, a lot of secular humanists say, well, I don't understand God. I don't understand this sacred. But when I'm in the Redwoods or I'm at the Grand Canyon or I'm camping out under the stars, I feel something closest akin to transcendence.

If you look back at the native cultures, indigenous cultures, all over the planet, there is zero separation between religion, culture, society, and a way of being and art. So you could be in a Native American tribe and there's a blanket or a pot and it has on it a symbol of a mountain, but that mountain is holy and that's where the great mystery lives, where God lives. and that the ancestors are buried there in the river that comes down from the mountain that's on the blanket or that's on the pot, has a beauty to it, it has a history to it. They look at it on the pot and then they look at the mountain. They feel connected to it to their ancestry under the power of the stars. And this guides their interactions, their loving interactions. I'm not painting every indigenous culture as like some kind of utopia that's not at all the case. But there was something essentially pure about eliminating those barriers between art, love, religion, culture, you know, morality, that it is all far more unified. And everything is so codified in contemporary society. It's like, well, what is your belief? Well, I'm a Methodist. Well, how does that manifest itself? Well, from Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 1138, am, I go and I do this. And then every year at the canned food drive, I bring apricots. And that's my religious faith, you know. And then here's my political belief, which is in contradiction to what I

hear, you know, at the church, at the Methodist Church, and here's my social life and here's my professional life. And I'm grinding myself and working an 80-hour work wake, working myself to the bone here and in nature is something that I do when I go camping with my friends or whatever and there's you know there's all these little boxes that we put the human experience into I'm really interested in your views about transcendence in the sense of there being more than the material you've got I think a chapter or at least a section in this book where you talk about consciousness and in fact I think that there's a When you write a section that's called yo atheists, and you're sort of addressing the atheists.

Respectfully. Respectfully, indeed. And you ask yourself the question, why am I not an atheist? I think that one of the things you land on is something like the conscious experience, but perhaps we should hear it in your own words. Why are you not an atheist? I tried being an atheist. Like I said, I went through a lot of shit and had a hard time and felt a lot of anguish. and it wasn't working for me.

And that might sound like a cop out, but that's just my experience. And but ideologically, to me, essentially there was something that just didn't make sense about it. It just as a try as I might, and I tried for years to just embrace the fact that there was just stuff.

There's just stuff. There's 11 billion years ago. There was something the smaller than the head of a pin. And then there's a universe and there's, you know, billions of galaxies. And there's physical laws and there's chemistry. And then for some reason, creatures are born out of chemistry. And chemistry becomes biology. No one knows why.

It's just like, oh, it maybe came from, you know, a... an asteroid or a yeah lightning hit the ocean and created paramecium and it's like okay sure um and try as i might at that time uh in my in my early mid 20s i just couldn't it just didn't make sense to me and i don't even mean like philosophically i mean like um just on a grocking emotional level And as I thought about my life, as I, and I was thinking about the mystery and magnificence and beauty of consciousness itself of, you know, you talked about, we talked about music concerts and we talk about like falling in love. I remember holding my son when he almost died in childbirth at 4 a.m. at a shitty hospital in the middle of Van Nuys, California, you know, in the hallway with, you know, my wife bleeding from her vagina. and holding this miraculous birth and this doctor that saved my son's life and looking into his eyes and the profundity of that experience. And my job as an artist as an actor to create characters to take like, oh, these little pigeon scratches on a page and decipher that and make

that into a character that people respond to. And not just Dwight, but dozens of characters I played before Dwight and after Dwight. And the mystery and miracle of art itself, of making something kind of beautiful and profound, of having these emotions and the totality of the experience of being a human being, again, as David Bentley Hart talks about, the experience of God, it just didn't make sense to me that stuff just exists and then spins around and then humans are, you know, there's little, you know, there's little guppies and then there's lizards and then there's beavers and then there's dinosaurs and then there's you know uh orangutans and then there's humans and here we are recording a podcast

and having this kind of conversation at this level and that it just has a an essential meaninglessness to it as i experienced it i know lots of people that have zero problem with that and just kind of are like I completely get with that. One of my best friends, Mike Wensel, who's a school teacher when I went to high school in suburban Seattle. Like he's just zero problem with that. And he's just like, I just am.

He goes camping a lot. And I go camping with him. And he's like, I'm just in the woods. And this is just how it is. And there's nothing beyond it. And it's beautiful. And I appreciate it. And every day I make a choice to be alive

and to enjoy, you know, my experience of being alive. I know, and I know lots, not only do I know lots of people who have no issues with that. I know lots of people that are some of the finest human beings on the planet with the finest sense of kind of morality and right and wrong and truth and beauty and goodness that don't need any transcendence beyond the mere material. Do you think they're missing something? Do you think some people are just wired that way or do you think that there is something that they are not recognizing that they should be recognizing?

When you sit at dinner with someone and you say, like, we are conscious creatures, it's not just the existence of stuff, the existence of the laws which govern that stuff, which create objects and which somehow then produce this thing called life and biology, which then itself compounds a further mystery, which is why that needs to become self-conscious, and they're sort of like, yeah, man, can you pass the salt, you know, like, is there something that they're missing or are some people just wired that way, do you think? you know I don't really go there I excuse me I don't really go there um again I think those debates are kind of tired and I just feel like listen essentially as a Baha'i but even if I wasn't a Baha I'd feel the same way like to in in my view the world is falling to shit right now and we need to make the world a better place and I don't give a fuck what you believe like are you a part of the problem or a part of the solution and the solution

is banding together and creating community and creating deeper compassion and educating ever deeper and seeking healing and peace and truth and love and if you do that without a conception of anything

beyond the mere material you know God bless you God bless you kiddies but and if you're a if you're a born again Christian and you, you know, you speak in tongues and you're still doing it, great. God bless you too. Like, we need people to band together. So that's just, I don't mean for it to be a cop out, but I don't have a judgment of people like that. I also view, you know,

two things come to mind. One is that David Bentleyhart talks about how, you know, to be a real atheist, you have to kind of like fool yourself on a daily basis that there is no real meaning to the world. You can kind of create this meaning, but you, I'm not articulating it very well. You know, I'm going to scrap that one because I'm not able to summate it right now. But I will say that I think it's all one. I think that Radiohead, there's not much difference between Radiohead. and Jesus at the end of the day and the Redwoods and um whatever allows us to experience connection and and beauty and love um that's what it's all about and that is god we may not view

it as like some kind of power or entity beyond you know atoms and molecules and energy it's all one what is it that doesn't convince you about the reducibility of consciousness because you talk a little bit about this too the idea that some people think that well these experiences that we're having they're just neurons firing that's that sort of what's going on there but that doesn't cut the mustard for you no I mean when I read about like I think it's denet talking about like how the brain is just an illusion that you know consciousness is an illusion that the excuse me yes that consciousness is is an illusionary byproduct of neurons firing and that when I see my son who almost died and I'm holding him in this hospital hallway

that there are some biological reflexes from my amygdala that have to do with the furthering of the species and those fire a little bit. And then, you know, I have a few beauty synapses that fire and that give me this, you know, kind of the illusion that I'm actually seeing something and having connected to something. And I understand the principles of that. It's just so deeply how I don't experience being alive that there's a disconnect for me. Again, some people can feel like that and it makes total sense to them so at the end of the day um i think we're more than just our cognition and so i understand it on a on a meta level but that's not how i experience being a human being i'm much i'm having much much more than just a biological experience as i motor along

fretfully being the consciousness of rain wilson you say in the book you're having more than a biological experience. I thought that was such a beautiful way of putting it, of getting to the nub of what we're talking about here, because when you say that experiences are just brain activity, well, are they? I mean, the experience of love or beauty or whatever, but even more trivial things, the experience of sight, things that your color, that kind of stuff, well, it's just brain activity. I mean, is it, is redness or love or beauty? Like, if I, if I, if I, if I, if I, if I cut open your brain and look inside it. Am I going to see beauty and redness and blueness?

I'm going to donate my brain to you. To find out. Yeah. When I die, which is probably not long from now. Would you? In fairness, I probably would see a lot of red. I'll grant you that. Is it red?

I thought it was like white. I thought it was like cauliflower. I don't know, actually. I've never, fun enough, I've never actually dissected a brain, but never say never. There's a first time for everything. Live stream it. Bro. Yeah.

The subs will go up. Yes, Christopher Hitchin said, I'll try anything once except incest and folk dancing. Why not? Let's give it a go. The atheists are funnier than theists. That's part of the problem, isn't it? Yeah, but then people are beginning to kind of make religion sexy again, which is probably part of where it was going wrong. Like you say, it was like the Jake Paul Mike Tyson thing.

But isn't that because the kind of secular material kind of ideal is kind of playing itself out and it's not really working, you know what I mean? So they say, so they say, I mean, new atheism, it's difficult to know. Because Gen Z is very different than like, you're, you're, you're a millennial tried and true. And millennials are very kind of like anti-system, anti-God, anti-religion in a lot of ways for a very, very good reason, kitties. But now Gen Z is kind of like, well, that's what my older brother and sister have been saying, you know, for day. But I don't know. Nothing seems to be working.

open to whatever the fuck maybe works well it was all very theoretical for a long time wasn't it it was very like if we throw off these these these chains yeah humanity can finally be free throw off the the chains uh they'll pluck the flowers from the chain not to wear the chain without consolation but to what is it throw off the chains and call the living flowers marks has it's all very theoretical speaking of marks i think marks theoretically is amazing i read marks in college i was like sign me up this sounds interesting incredible. A common story, yeah.

We are going to build a community. I mean, there is something very Christian about Marxism. Has anyone else read this? Yeah, yeah. No, it's like, oh my God, we're going to create this utopian society where the workers control the means of production. Oh, my God, this is incredible. And we're going to share the resources with commonality and compassion and mutuality.

And, you know, even if you're a Ph.D. from Oxford, you're going to mop the furnace floor because you're part of the collective. and it's great on paper and it just doesn't it doesn't work and and maybe secular humanism is the same way although you could say the same thing about religion we just haven't found we haven't found our way yet that's true but then religion has really been in the purely theoretical stage i'm not sure that's ever happened where people have said here's a way that we could reinvent the world and it should work it's like if we can throw off superstition and faith then we can base our morality on reason And when you give that a go, you realize that's actually like a quite a tool order.

And I think you're right, whether it's true or not, people are certainly perceiving that the way that atheism, secular, humanism, whatnot has played out has not been fulfilling, has not fulfilled the promises that it made. Of Descartes and of Kant and, yes. Exactly. And then more recently on the popular level of the new atheist movement, where people would say, you know, regain your spiritual autonomy. and don't don't just do things that are right and wrong because someone else tells you to do them because you believe that they're good you know are you just are you just being good because you're scared of hell well that's no good you know do it for your own sake and people go yeah sure that sounds awesome and then they throw it all off and then I think okay well what do I believe is good and why does it matter and suddenly it all starts sort of falling apart a little bit this is the insistent self this is Satan wrestling with humanity on a collective level we can look at look back at this election you know religious has declined year by year for the last, you know, 50 years in the United States. And people voted self-interest. People voted their pocketbooks. And just like, I think I'm going to just get more stuff if I vote in this direction. And how do we curtail that human impulse

toward being self-centered and moving that towards being other-centered? How do we do that. I don't know. I do it as a Baha'i. I think there's a great blueprint for moving forward in that way. But we have to figure this out collectively, because the only way we're going to survive is setting aside our immediate self-interest for the greater interest and the greater good, which is why Marx was so resonant for me in my 20s, because it was all about that. And essentially, both Jesus and Karl Marx taught the same thing. Like, how do we love one another collectively to uplift each other, setting aside what we just immediately want, you know, that insistent self that is our little caveman that wants

to accrue more, you know, figs and elk meat. Well, like you say, religion can do that too, which is why I'm interested as to whether you are pessimistic about the decline of traditional religion in America. In England, the latest census, I think, showed for the first time that less than 50% of the population were Christian, which was like big news, but also really kind of not big news at the same time. I would have thought it was like 20%. Yeah, it's amazing, right. I mean, the Church of England is, especially right now, is kind of falling off a cliff. But people who sort of profess a Christian belief, it was unsurprising in one sense, but also it was a bit of a sort of

a moment. Because even people who just normally say they're Christian. Let's start a religion. You and me. We could do this. I thought you already had one, Rayne. Well, I was set it aside. Let's come up with something now. Yeah, we'd have to come up with a name for it, I think. Yeah. We'll get, write those ideas down, down in the comments, down below, smash that like button. I think that would be fun. But then this is where people go wrong, isn't it? This is, this is, it's an angle sat in a room going like, dude, I think we could like crack this.

I think we could work this out. Give me a bit of paper and God forbid what comes next. But these religious communities, I suppose, are a little bit like that in that there's God and there's truth and there's love. And then there's the human construction. So what soul boom is all about is I have been very honored that the book has been embraced by Born Again Christians and the book has been embraced by atheists and by this mere spiritually curious. what it's about, it doesn't have any agenda to convert anyone into any way of thinking. It's kind of saying, listen,

there is a debate about, you know, it's first of all separating spirituality from religion, right? Because there's two different kind of ideas going on there. And then how can we use spiritual tools to better our lives? Not just on a personal level. Like for me, prayer, meditation, surrender, connection, reading holy words that uplift my soul, finding the sacred in my life helps me on a personal level, helps me with my mental health issues, helps me with my

anxiety, right? But more importantly, in the conversation that we're not having by and large is one that we have been tiptoeing into, is can we use spiritual truths and tools, ancient wisdom, if you don't want to call it by anything, you know, traditional human wisdom from the bedrock of our, you know, of our uber consciousness on a Jungian level, how can we tap into that to build a better society, a more just society, a more compassionate society? How can we use those tools to, you know, to create bound, how can we use those tools to, you know, create bonds, you know, between us and move things forward on a societal level and on a global level.

So we often, I say, I say there, we threw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. So, you know, you and your generation, but, you know, even the new atheists, you know, chucked out religion for a very, very good reason, but have we thrown the spiritual baby out with that?

Like, how do you generate maximum compassion on a daily level with or without God because that's what we're going to need in order to sacrifice of our short-term needs for the betterment of our species. I've been trying to say

throwing the baby out with the holy water but it's not really catching on as a joke. I'm hoping that all that will pick up some steam the more that I bring attention to it. Clip this, like that. Put your comments down. Let's get that phrase going, folks. Come on, Conorheads.

Guys, we've got to do better than that. We've got to do better than my heads. Although, look, I guess it will stick if it sticks. That's what she said. I'm interested, hey, there it is, folks. There's your other clip. I'm really interested in how the Baha'i faith tackles the problem of evil. You were just talking about compassion.

You were just talking about building a world, which everybody cares about each other. Compassion and caring, a sort of prerequisite for that, is recognizing that people are in need of it. People are suffering. Natural disasters occur. Fires, which have just recently personally affected you in a very deep way. And as somebody who believes that this is being overseen by a God who is love, how do the Baha'is make sense of that?

Or rather, I should ask how you make sense of that, because I don't want you to be a spokesperson. That's such a great and complicated question. and such a loaded question. I quote Stephen Frye in my book, who had a very famous viral YouTube moment where he said that I could never believe in a God

that would create babies with bone cancer. And if I ever met a God, and someone asked him like, what if you die and you go to the other side and you're at the pearly gates and there's God? and you're going to meet with God. Essentially, he said, I would say, fuck you.

All of the suffering, all of the suffering that's going on. Like babies with bone cancer, how can you do that? What a cruel, unconscionable God you must be to have something like that exist. And, you know, what do they call the problem of evil? There's some kind of theosophical, theological term for it. They call it the problem of evil. And there's something, there's some, like, Greek. They call theodices, the attention.

to reconcile evil with God. So the response to that would be, would be an attempt at Theodicy. I'm going to tie you down and shave off your mustache. I think my audience would probably be pretty happy to see it. If we live stream it, smash that like button. Brought to you by Manscaped. I'm game. I'm game. The, so, and I certainly understand where he's coming from,

and you turn on the news, and you look at Gaza, you look at Ukraine and you look at diseases and you see all the suffering. So there's a couple different buckets I want to go into because it's a complicated question. Number one is what is the expectation? The expectation if there is an all good, all loving like source God that this God would create a physical universe that didn't ascribe to certain physical laws, that we would be humans on a planet and we would never break bones. We would never suffer. We would dying, we would all die at age 100, kind of like in Logan's run, everyone dies when they hit like age 30 or something like that in the science fiction book.

And that births, you know, vaginas would open wide and babies would come in without crying and no one would ever break a bone and there wouldn't be any suffering or like we would live in a three-dimensional physical universe that didn't owe itself to the laws of physics. Like, that to me seems a little bit cray-cray to think that a God would want to create a world like that, a sufferingless world, because in some ways, this world is about suffering. I am actually grateful for the dark times that I have been through. I actually look back on them with great gratitude because they brought me, what, wisdom, connection. forced me out of kind of a certain way of thinking that it is through tests and difficulties that that we grow and mature.

This is not only is that's how we grow and mature individually, but we grow and mature societally through going through tests and difficulties. I remember seeing this interview with these German, just, worker guys. It was like a janitor and like a guy who worked in a warehouse and a factory worker and stuff like that. And because Germany had been through what it had been through, there was such a a cognizance of how dangerous certain ways of thinking could be to a society, even from people who had basically a technical school, you know, education. These were not elites sitting around talking about it.

And so we need to learn and grow and mature spiritually. If we had followed the dictates of the Prophet Muhammad or of Jesus or of the Buddha and we were living in peaceful harmony right now, we could take all of our resources that we're putting into drone warfare and cyber warfare and making more money and, you know, one-click shopping on Amazon. And we could take all of that, you know, incredible ingenuity. And we could cure bone cancer in babies. And we could extend life.

And we could limit suffering greatly. Not completely. But, you know, in a utopian ideal, we could do that. So what is evil? Evil is like darkness. I don't believe that evil. Like some Christians would believe. that evil comes from Satan and that there is a lord of darkness and a lord of light,

which is very like O'Hura Mazda, kind of Zoroastrian, you know, good and evil. And I don't ascribe to like evil as a source, but evil is darkness. And you turn on a light and it eliminates darkness. So we just need more and more light in order to deal with the problem of evil. I don't know. Yeah, evil as the as a privation, as the philosophers would say. as being not a thing, evil is the absence of good and it's good that's the positive thing. That helps us to overcome this image of a God who seems responsible for evil because

you can't be responsible for something that doesn't exist. You're only responsible for what is and then there might be gaps. And this God from the Baha'i conception has given us amazing tools in the Bible, in the Quran, in the writings of Baha'u'llah, in the Dama Potas of the Buddha. And us humans have turned our back on these tools that are about building compassion and community and love and personal sacrifice for the common good. There's this question of why that compassion and why the cure for cancer would be needed in the first place. It's almost as if we discovered a cure for bone cancer and children. And somebody said, this is such a great day. What an amazing achievement. What a beautiful

moment. I'm so glad that we had bone cancer and children so that we could have this glorious moment of overcoming it. It seems mysterious why the problem is there in the first place to be solved. I think that is probably the foundational atheist point. Basically any argument for atheism that captures the public imagination is a version of the problem of evil. And so, because we've spoken about some of the real, like, consciousness, the existence of stuff, the meaning crisis, all of this, like, strongly points us towards God. There are so many different ways to think about why God exists. There might even be an argument for God's existence from the sheer number of different arguments for God's existence. That itself is kind of an argument.

The atheists had this one big thing, the problem of evil. And, you know, when they hear about how suffering can transform and morally progress people, it's easy enough for those who've made it through to say that, you know, but the... But not for a six-year-old who just got bombed in Gaza. Exactly. Yeah. And so there's kind of a selection bias going on because anybody who's able to even reflect on this will have had to have sort of come out the other side. But a lot of people don't... But that six-year-old wouldn't have been bombed in Gaza if the Jews were really living by the laws of the Torah. And if the Muslims were really living by... I'm probably getting it to skate.

skating reviews for this were, you know, living by the laws of Muhammad and not electing something like Hamas. I mean, it's much more complicated than that, obviously. But what I'm saying is that there are certain ground rules about love one another, sacrifice for one another, that would eliminate that completely. But again, it's all a continuum. So from a Baha'i meta-conception, I am a spiritual being having a human experience. So, Teherte de Chardin, as you know. And so how do I come into the material world? I come in as a fetus in the womb.

And what is happening to me when I'm in the womb? I'm growing fingers and toes and fingernails and eyelashes and ears and eardrums so I can hear music at radio head concerts, all of the things that I will need to have the human experience in my body in this glorious, sumptuous 58-year-old man body. And when this sumptuous man body falls away, my essential spiritualness from a Baha'i conception

and in the conception of pretty much all the world's faith traditions, there is a continuation of life beyond the material world. So what is the purpose of the material world? The purpose of the material world is to kind of bring our spiritualishness into a corporal existence and to have some struggle and some growth, and then to continue it in the Baha'i conception, there's not a heaven and hell in the Baha'i faith. It is just a continuation of growing ever closer to this source,

to the unknowable essence. In the Baha'i faith we say a prayer every day. That is, I bear witness, oh, my God, that thou hast created me to know thee and to worship thee. so we are created we are here to know and worship god what's the number one way in the behi faith that one identifies god as unknowable how can you know the unknowable and i love that conundrum i love that an essential mystical conundrum of and this is what the sufi poets you know really they they are the ones who wrote about the finger pointing at the moon you know with with the

most kind of perception. But I love that idea. So there is a there's a continuation of infinite worlds of God that we are only at the beginning of. So like the question of evil kind of like to me just only, it only accepts the material world. It only accepts this as kind of the end. And death is the end. Death is not a continuation. There is great suffering. All of us are going to suffer. We are going to break bones. We are going to die. You and I are going to to die and it might be really, really painful. And we're going to lose family members. Hopefully it's not, but it might be really, really painful because we are spiritual beings in the bodies of, you know, pasty monkey boys. And we're, uh, and we've got 80, 90, 100 years in this physical

realm. To me, it just makes total sense, but, you know, I don't know. What do I know? There's an analogy. I'm just a sitcom actor. I think if this interview can prove anything, it's that that is not the case. What's that? That you were just a sitcom actor. I think people are, well, I hope people will be pleasantly surprised if they didn't realize that you've sort of taken this spiritual arc and have been talking about this. Like you say, I think that no matter where you are, no matter what you do, at some point you get confronted with these questions. And I think when you have the benefit of the ability and interest to read and study about it,

and you feel like you've worked a few things out and have had some interesting stories to tell, there's something great about sharing that with people, I think. Now, what about you? Let me ask you a question. Sure. You want to swap seats? I do metaphorically. I want to swap seats.

How did you get your start as kind of like an atheist debater? and what is it that you are trying to do in your conversations now? I think I know, but I'd love to hear it from you. I got my start when I was probably like 16 or something like that. And so I was... Last year? Yeah, yeah, it's been a long year. I was wrapped up in the New Atheist stuff.

Sure. I'd read Dawkins and Hitchens and Sam Harris. God bless him. Not so much, Dennett, because he seemed a bit less debatey in that respect. Yeah. But yeah, I thought that it was interesting. I thought that it was fun. It was exciting.

Hitchens in particular would give these rallying speeches that would sort of motivate you. It's one of the greatest speakers that has ever existed in the English language. Seriously. And so funny. Yeah. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I think he's had some of the best speeches of the past hundred years that we have on record. I agree 100%. And that does something to you.

something to you when you're 16. And so I suppose I was also filled with confidence because you'd think to yourself, even if you hadn't quite worked out everything, I think, well, there are these uber intelligent, charismatic people, and there are so many of them that they'll surely have an answer. Like if somebody, it almost felt naive when someone came up and said, you know, but what about the existence of trees or what about the teleological argument? And you think it's so naive because that's so obvious that surely, what, you don't think we've thought about this. And in a way, what I came to realize is that maybe actually, yeah, we kind of haven't thought about this, at least not in the right way, right? Because there's like this, the sort

of bell curve of the really stupid argument for God that like, well, but there's stuff exists, man. It's like the most basic thing you could think of. And then the bell curve of IQ goes up to the cosmological argument and the modal ontological argument and all of this kind and the fine tuning. And then it goes right back down to the highest and you're right back to, but stuff stuff exists. And it actually is the most powerful sort of consideration. It bears reflecting on. And so I think I waltzed into university at like 19 or however old I was thinking, yeah, I've got like, whatever it was, 150,000 subscribers on YouTube. I've done these debates about religion and philosophy. I kind of know what I'm talking about. And I just got slapped in

the face every single day, not even so much by the course, but by the people I was meeting. You know, I had friends who were, like, doing PhDs on, like, hyper-specific areas of philosophy of religion. And here's this, like, 19-year-old YouTuber kid, thinking that he can, like, have something to say on that. And they were never rude about it. It was always very friendly and polite, but I suddenly began to realize how out of my depth I was. And so, coming out of that, I haven't, like, developed that depth. It's not like I understand this stuff, but I'm, as is the common story. much more aware of the limitations, if not just my thoughts, but the tradition that I come from.

What made you access your humility and what made you then decide to kind of harness that experience to say, I'm going to go deeper and I'm going to go further because it would have been pretty easy for you to kind of become more entrenched and just kind of say, yeah, well, fuck you, I'm going to be, you know, Dawkins Harris 2.0. just stick to my guns. And I'm, I'm not saying that you're, you're not an atheist, but I think that what's so interesting about your journey is that you are, you are just striving to know the meaning of life and what it means to be a human being. And whether it's theology or psychology or, you know, physiology or physics or, um, what have you that you, you have, you have continued that journey in a way that many don't.

It's hard to know how much of that is just growing up and how much of that is the experiences that I've had specifically because if I wasn't doing the YouTube thing, I might have shifted from the edgy new atheist to the sort of more chilled out truth seeker dude anyway. I'm not sure, but I have had the benefit of speaking to some incredible people. And I've done debates. And there have just been moments in my life

where I've realized that I'm not who I thought I was. Hmm. You think, yeah, like I'm... You must have had good parents. Yeah, well, I did and I do. And they were always not exactly supportive, but I think they kind of just didn't really understand what was going on because you'd go home and, Mom, I've got 100,000 subscribers.

Oh, that's great, honey. That's great. Take out the garbage. You could say 100,000, you could say a million. You could say 500 million. and it's like they're just numbers like it doesn't sort of mean anything um but yeah my problem with the new atheists is my same problem i have with a lot of born again religiousnesses people which is self-righteous know-it-all's lecturing no one likes a self-righteous know-it-all lecture

so i was going to you know no one like what no matter what side it comes from uh the world is in too much trouble for us to spend more time doing that, but we need to excavate more and we need to cultivate our heart experience more, regardless of whatever side of the spectrum you're on. To your question, I was thinking, I was going to say, you know, oh, it's impossible to talk about humility. It's like a sort of a faux humility. Look how humble I am, but talking about accessing humility, one thing is to just look at what other people have done. You talk in the book about how sometimes you would meet like an old man. You meet like a nice old man and you'd remind yourself, you know, rain, become like that man. And you meet like a, meet like a horrible,

nasty old man and you just have to remind yourself like, don't become that man. And it seems silly because as if I'm going to become a grumpy, evil, mean sort of, but like not thinking it's going to happen is what makes it happen. It can happen. You have to be on the lookout for it. And I see so many people who have just doubled down and been like, oh no, like there's no evidence. for God, and religion is stupid and evil, and yeah, maybe rightfully so. But looking at the fruits of that, it seems like an incuriosity develops because you get so embedded. I've talked before about how people have an I know this one attitude, where somebody would ask a question, especially public speakers who are going around and doing Q&As, as soon as somebody mentions

the word cosmological or evil or whatever, they go, oh, I know this one, I've got my, they have slideshows that they can pull out to answer the questions that have just been asked spontaneously by an audience member. Sometimes when you pay attention, you realize that they're actually asking something subtly different or actually getting at something else. A lot of these debates collapse because people listen to the question rather than the questioner. There's a, like, what is someone actually getting at? When someone gets up and they say, you know, I just think that because if there's no God, then I don't understand how you sort of, where this sort of stuff exists, and it's a bit sort of fumbling. And you can either as a debate or go like, well, that's a nonsensical question.

You don't know what you're talking about. Or you can try and understand what they're really actually getting at. An example that I've talked about in a different context, this is this Ben Shapiro clip where it went super viral. Somebody came up to the microphone and was asking about like the Boy Scouts and why like girls can't be in the Boy Scouts or something, right? And why it can't just be like, you know, they're just gender neutral. And I think she asks the question. The Bay Scouts. Yeah, sure. Why not? You know, she asked this question like, well, like Ben says only boys can be in the Boy Scouts. And she says, well, where is that written? And Ben goes, in the name, Boy Scouts. And everyone laughs and the floors, right? And it's this really funny, great moment. But in a sense,

it's kind of really stupid because you know what she's actually asking. She's not literally asking, where is it written in the rules of the Boy Scouts that only Boyscouts? She means like, why is that the case? She means where is it written in the law of the universe? You know, and it just came out wrong. She said, well, where's that written?

It's written in the name Boy Scouts. It's very funny. Well, so much of what happens on YouTube is, whether it's political or religious, is kind of like you have, you know, it's a lot of like the Charlie Kirk kind of thing of like, let me take this dufous liberal college student, you know, with,

Chuli and Birkenstocks and they're asking this question and I've I've rehearsed my answer a thousand times and I'm going to come on. I'm like a ton of bricks, you know, and it's great media. It's a great show. It's like a Jake Paul boxing match, but it's, it doesn't illuminate anything. It isn't a real, it isn't a real conversation. And we know that because people have historically been attracted to the sort of destroys. Yes. And it's, it's hard to. remember that there was a time where that was done like not ironically, where these titles like, you know, X gets destroyed with facts and logic and all this kind of. People do it as a joke now, but there was a time when that was sincere. And that was like a real sort of sentiment

that people were trying to latch onto. You click on that video, if you're being honest with yourself, because you want that rush. You want that boost. You want that point score. You're watching the Mike Tyson knockout clips because it's fun. You're not actually watching it because you're interested in figuring out who's the better fighting. And we have, for the title of this, can be like, Baha'i destroys atheists. Well, what I'll do is I'll put that and then I'll put atheist destroys Baha'i and then I'll split test them and I'll see which gets more

of a click through. Oh, goodness. Yeah, I think you. That's the way. Yeah. Honestly, I don't know. People have spoken as if I've sort of made this shift in the approach that I've taken and I think that's true.

But it's just the most natural thing in the world. to me. Like, I could sit across from you right now, and when you talk about, you know, your thoughts on the problem of evil, I could say, oh, well, haven't you heard this objection and this commits this logical fallacy and stuff? And, like, maybe I'd be right, but it would just be a completely fruitless conversation that I don't think anybody would get anything out of. And so it's, I just, I just realized that, I think it must have started. There are a few people you speak to where they're so nice and so kind that you almost like can't like put those piercing objections in the same way. And I did a few interviews like that. And I realized off the back of it that

it just came out as a better episode. And you begin to realize that there's just something about that. The crux in the pudding. Yeah. That friendly atmosphere that people, people prefer. And the channel is doing better. I mean, people, more people are watching. More people are enjoying the content. Well, I'm really not trying to, I'm really not trying to kiss your ass. But really like what you're doing is so important because you have a legion of young viewers and followers that are that you are getting to have to allow them to think about the human experience and consciousness and and love and meaning in in in some really amazing and fruitful ways and it's i think it's really important work that you're doing and and i'm glad you didn't smash me on evil and and whatnot because i'm

I've thought about these things a little, but I haven't spent tens or hundreds of hours debating them, and I haven't researched them and gone down rabbit holes of other YouTube arguments about the nature of evil and consciousness. These are just some thoughts I've gathered along the way. So I'm not an authority at all. I want we at Soul Boom are all about sparking spiritual conversation in a new way that hopefully leads to. some hope and meaning and solace. Yeah. Well, I think it's doing a great job, and thank you for saying so, because that does actually mean the world. It's very difficult to say something like that, and it sounds sincere, but really it means a lot.

I suppose let's end on a final message to those who are suspicious of all of this. You know, first the sort of spirituality stuff, the love stuff, the religion, the transcendence, the... they can sort of listen to this and go like, it sounds great, I'm really happy for you, but I don't know about all that. Like, it's a bit sort of wishy-washy, a bit sort of hippy-dippy-dippy.

To people who just, it's one thing to say, well, give it a try. You know, like, give it some thought. It's a bit like telling someone to try praying. There's an extent to which they can sit down and go through the motions, but unless they kind of already believe that there's something legitimate about it,

they kind of literally can't do it. And there's a sense in which people who are super suspicious about this kind of can't can't begin to engage in it very easily because they'll feel a bit silly to those people the skeptics what would be your advice?

Well yeah there's I love that that's oh motherfucker I'm not even kidding I got a Charlie horse in my leg holy shit that was so weird here's your viral moment that was so weird I'm turning into an old man

I got a sorry did I kick you under the table I'm okay now I think I'm in less pain I had my, I had my leg wrapped up. I'm good, Mike, I'm good. We're going to keep going with the problem of evil and pain. You see, I'm in a, I'm in a greatly... They do say God has a sense of humor.

God, I was about to utter the most profound shit, and then my fucking leg cramped up on me. And then God scatters the proud. Please keep that in. Please keep that in. If you insist. I insist. Now I feel great. the um so yeah the the the problem of evil so problem of evil uh i will say this i will say that

um this is not a bunch of hippy dippy airy fairy love thy neighbor kind of petulie soaked you know, music festival, raw, incense burning, yoga class, frou-frou, stuff. The world is hurting right now. What are we going to do about it? However you want to try and make the world a better place, you can work for social justice,

you can work for income equality, you can create jobs in a company that, you know, allow people to support their families. You can educate children there are so many different ways you can work on the environment you can work on climate change there's so many different ways to participate in making the world a better place but that's what we need to shake people out of is this idea that um i'm just going to take care of myself and i'm going to make my own life and the life of my family better and you know the world is going to shit and i don't believe that change is possible the biggest epidemic that's going on in the world right now is this idea in young people that change is not possible, that we cannot make the world a better place. That is a vast majority of young people do not believe that the world or humanity will ever become more noble and more wise and more kind.

So that's the biggest pandemic going on with 8 billion humans right now. So regardless of whether you're an atheist or a theist, regardless of whether you use some spiritual tools, or you use social justice tools, we have to try and make the world a better place. And we have to believe that hope is possible. We have to believe that change is possible. So that's what, you know, six, seven million Baha'is are doing in their own way. That's what, you know, I think a majority of Christians and Muslims and Buddhists hopefully are also doing. but these ideas contained in this book

about consciousness, transcendence wave to every camera new ways of thinking about love, new ways of examining death and how we process death and what this world means. Hopefully these are tools that we that motivate us and inspire us to try and make ourselves better

so that we can make the world a better place. The thing I hate most living in Southern California, is this kind of like insular yoga class idea of of spirituality that it's like this really general kind of like you know I listen to these Tibetan bells in my yoga class and light a certain incense and look at a certain crystal and I feel peace so that I can go back to my workaholism and my materialism and my selfish activities spirituality at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday yeah and I'll try and shoehorn that in for 90 minutes and and then I'll check my phone and then get back on the on the countless you know zooms and um and whatnot now we all got to feed a family we all got to you know we all got to work and and whatnot and i'm not denigrating that at all but spirituality has to be much more than simply tools to be used to reduce anxiety uh spiritual tools also need to be used to galvanize people inspire people create hope create community um if you don't want to use spiritual tools to do it

if you want to use more material tools and tried and true organizational tools great Gandhi and martin luther king perhaps create led the biggest social change movements they were spiritually inspired they were religiously inspired movements um whatever you want to do but this this is not a conversation of like what makes you feel good in the trees or at a radio head concert. This really is like that this is peddled of the metal stuff. Like we're on the verge of war. We're on the verge of destroying our planet.

We need everyone to pitch in. So I don't mean to lecture, but that's what I truly, truly believe. And that's why this conversation is important and it's why what you're doing is important. You're not talking about like, well, theoretically, so-and-so said this because of this. Like, you're getting at the ideas

about what the stuff is of human being and what we've been trying to harness for thousands of years. So get to work. Let's get to work. Yes, sir. I hope you're feeling morally and like you're developing your soul

through the pain that you've just experienced in your leg. Oh, my God, that was so weird. Oh. You know what it is? I'm doing this play. I'm doing waiting for Godot. When do you leave?

Oh, shoot. You're like day after tomorrow? Are you here on Wednesday night? It might be. You've got a show. Come see Waiting for Godot, the ultimate kind of absurdist existentialist. I'm doing down at the Geffen Playhouse, but it's on this raked stage. So all week I stand on this. I stand on this stage like this.

So once again, evidence of the sufferings of mankind. That is. And that's what Beckett gets at in waiting for Godot. But truly, it's such an honor of speaking to you. And thanks for coming to Los Angeles and speaking to us here at the Soul Boom Studios. Yeah, thanks. much. Thanks, Alex.