Within Reason - #99 Penn Badgley - My Religious Conflicts With Playing a Killer

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Penn Badgley is an actor best known for his roles in Netflix’s You and the popular drama series Gossip Girl. He is less known as a podcaster and member of the Baháʼí Faith, a religion which teaches that there is a historical unity between major world religions and their prophets, having itself developed out of a branch of Twelver Shia Islam in the 19th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Penn Badgley, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. You've just finished up, Joe Goldberg. You've been playing him for what, since like 2017? Yeah, yeah, so just about seven years.

And now you're done. I'm finished except for the release, you know? Sure. The release, which is its own kind of work, its own kind of... Do you feel in character for the release, for the... No, not even close. The part of me that is... that might match it, is that there's always something grim about my relationship to the character

and therefore the whole thing, because I am sort of tasked the one person throughout the entire apparatus who kind of like, you know, it makes sense, I need to ground it. Everyone else is allowed to enjoy it as a piece of entertainment or frothy pop, whatever. You know, but if I don't ground it, then it's like, well, that's when I think we're in danger of consuming it in a way that is like, you know, damaging to our, to our digestive system. You know what I mean? Because at the end of the day, he's a protagonist who is, who's just, he's, well, he's what he is. He's a murderer and he's a manipulator and he's an abuser and all those things. And those words are like, they're so, they're heavy, you know. But if they're not, at least in directly in the context and the subtext and the pretext of all the conversation around the show. To me, I feel like that's ironically when I get uncomfortable. I heard you say once, it might have been to Rain Wilson, that the best actors aren't just like making something up. They're not just pretending to be somebody.

They're kind of themselves in many ways. And so, like, the best actors, they access a part of themselves, and you were talking about how it can be difficult to separate the actor. from the character and I found it really interesting and then I did think that you play a psychopathic murderer. So what part of me is that? That's right. Well, not not psychopathic or sociopathic but like okay so you know broadly what is the truth of this thing we call mental health mental illness mentality what is the portal to what are the causes of of sociopathy, psychopathy, you know, we don't, we understand some of them, well, I think,

and then others we don't. There's still this question of nature versus nurture. For me, it's my understanding, and I suppose my personal conviction, that there's, no one is, no one is made that way. It's caused, and its causes could be, could be in utero still, that could be, you know, the stress of the mother, the wound, and fetus, all that stuff, I don't know. but so what are the portals to it what do i understand of the portals to rage or rather the portals

to sociopathy and psychopathy for me are trauma and rage so then i think of for myself what you know what traumas do i understand in my past what what do i understand about my own rage my own capacity for rage how it blinds my uh it blinds my my my other senses really so you're not accessing like the surface level part of the character but looking at like the causes of that kind of behavior and tapping into that and presumably that's something you've got to work out for yourself like directors writers aren't telling you yeah and they don't and i don't i actually don't think it's really there they don't need to you know we um obviously for anybody who's seen the show it's like there's there's indications

there's the there's the broad major signs of it and he he does have like serious childhood abuse you know um but actually many people do and they don't become like this so then what are the other causes you know i i don't know there to be clear as well i think joe goldberg as a character is not in any way a clinical portrayal or portrait of a of a person who really has this psychological makeup in fact i i whether i'm right or wrong i don't know but it's my it's my position now that all is said and done i've seen the totality of his behavior i don't i think he's too many things. I think he's too many things at once. I don't think that that's possible for somebody. But, you know, that's where we're a show and we're a construct meant to be a portal

into, well, I guess ideally a conversation like this one, you know. I find interesting the way that a lot of, like, antagonist characters, evil characters are presented by modern media as complex, result of their environment. And that's something that you're hinting at there. But for a lot of people, it becomes a sort of apologetic for the character. And so a lot of these, like, there's a lot of expanded universe stuff where people tell the backstories of the, of the Joker or evil characters, and they almost sort of try to humanize them in a way that I think some people think is a little bit troublesome. Interestingly, some people don't do this. Like when Brian Cranston talks about Walter White, who is undeniably an incredibly complex character,

He always just sort of says, he's like stops people and says like, he's like a murderer and a terrible person. Is that the relationship you have with this character? Like, do you do any kind of defense of the moral character of this person based on those characteristics? Or is it just like, it's a bad guy, like, you know, full stop? I suppose I've done both. I've done the latter more.

I've somewhat, you know, notably. not spoken out against the character I mean some people have made it to be that I think what I've just done is remind people in that way like no he's a he's a murderer don't forget he kills her in the end sorry that's not a spoiler it's I mean it's clear you know it's from day one that's what he that's the whole purpose of the

the show is called you and it's called you because in the book which it's based on it's written in the in the first person you you walk into the store and I notice that you are wearing this. And so the reader is made to feel through that literary device,

literally like the victim, the object of this man's desire and eventually rage and lethal rage. And that's, I don't even remember what your question is at that point, at this point, but, you know, that's a very strong device. It's a very, very, very, very. strong device and and i'm recalling your question now so at this point i would love for the work to speak for itself and i think in time it's legacy it will but you know we live in an age where it's like

you can't do a thing and just let the thing be the thing you also have to talk about it a lot and press yeah you also have to talk about it a lot in press and um so because i have to do that i have just thought like how much can i bring reality into this conversation because he's not People speak about him like he's a romantic hero. And, you know, he's not. He's clearly not. But the point is that he is dangerously and disturbingly close to and following the logic of romantic heroism.

Yeah, which is so often the case for the self-justification of the character himself, but not you justifying the character. But internally the world, it's, I mean, that's what Joe Goldberg constantly does. like I'm doing this because I have to. This is for love. This is for you. I'm interested in you particularly here, though, because you're the second Baha'i that I've had on the show, the other being Rayne Wilson, that's right.

And I sort of dug into the Baha'i faith a little bit with Rayne Wilson, but I'm sure that you've talked a lot to interviewers and to curious members of the public about how difficult it is to play a psychopath and all of this kind of stuff. but specifically with regards to a religious belief. Yeah, yeah. I've heard you complain before about how you'll sometimes read scripts and they'll be listed with like essentially blasphemy, people saying, oh my God, you know, Jesus Christ.

And how like being a Baha'i believing Jesus is a manifestation of God. It's a little bit uncomfortable and you kind of would rather not. And then I think surely that's turned up to 11 when it comes to this kind of character. So is there any like religious conflict for you and trying to access that part of yourself of this character. Definitely. As the way you named it, definitely. You know, as a person who grew up feeling profoundly, like, resistant to and

wary of and just against religion, you know? That's not the word that it's not the way it kind of appears in my own sort of thinking and sensibility, but yeah, basically, as you said it, yeah. You know, the funny thing about the name, Jesus, which is invoked somewhat ironically or paradoxically

or fittingly by, you know, all of Western civilization regardless of what they proclaim their belief to be. God, actually, a word, too. You know, with a lowercase G, a word I never would have used seriously, you know, until my mid-20s. They're expletives, you know. Both the name Jesus and the word God are words that are inimitably

unparalleled in their invocation of a certain kind of like, oh, God, you know, or Jesus Christ, you know, those two words. I'm telling you, man, those words are, those three words, God and Jesus Christ, are used as much or more than any other expletive in scripts in a way that it's clearly part of a modern vernacular and it has. And I'm telling you, when you try to. to replace that word with something else it doesn't work at least for the person who wrote it i i got into this um and you know by the way i approached this never having thought about it deeply yeah i just

started to realize this being the first role i took after becoming a bahai and um yeah like reorienting my interior life you know as i understood it to be in relationship to the body of Baha'u'llah's teachings, I found that saying the word God, which I had come to say reverently in prayer, personally, you know, in my mind, and of the name Jesus Christ, which, you know, again, growing up so not religious or Christian,

really, really did view religiousity and Christianity as, well, I mean, I think I just adopted this loose approximation of the Marxist view, like religion is the opioid of the masses, you know, and having never read any of that literature myself, right? It's funny how that happens, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, so in a sense, I've never thought of it in this particular way right now, but in this particular way, but becoming a Baha'i for me was truly coming to think for myself.

And once I truly thought for myself, all words had a different meaning. particularly God and then this other one, Jesus Christ, and I just notice they're everywhere. They're just littered everywhere as expletives. This is the longest answer possible to such a short question. But yeah, it's a really interesting one because I just started to change it. I tried to change it.

In the voiceovers I made it a joke, I would invoke all the names of different saints and different, I think at one point I said, Thaeton, which I believe is something from Scientology. Oh, right, yeah. I was just trying to use other... Yeah, something. I think I said Mother Teresa.

I think I invoked the name of Gandhi at some point. I was just trying to use other ones, and I knew that none of them would work. Yeah. But it was sort of a joke that I was playing with myself because nothing works the way the name does. Nothing works like God. Nothing works like the name of God. I think there's something in the idea of it being an expletive too, though, because

like it's easy enough to replace words, but the point of expletives is that they say something very specific. And it is a bit cringe-making when it is. If you watch like a pre-watershed soap opera and the characters aren't allowed to swear and it's like, you know, somebody's getting robbed. Yeah. And they're like, give me the flipping money right now. And it's just, it's not just a bit cringe, but it's also like unbelievable. It's an authentic.

Yeah, like I don't think that's how people speak. And it is true that it's just become so embedded in the language that that's, that's probably why. But I do think that people aren't actually thinking about cursing God or Jesus Christ as people. people when they say these words. No, not at all, no, yeah. By the way, I don't see it as actually blasphemous. Yeah, right. I just see it as me realizing the power of those words

and wanting to not use those words in that way. Because I had all my life again. Yeah, it's almost, it's kind of, it's kind of eerie to think, like, you know, you might be, it's like sorcery or something. You're saying a magical spell without really realizing it. You're invoking this really important name and not knowing what you're doing, you know? Yeah, I mean, again, you know, yes, on one hand,

but I you know the mention of something like sorcery or superstition you know that to me is like also not to me it's not it's not and i mean you're rigorously rational so i know that's not what you're saying but but i but i think if if i if i try to dig into what it is like what i what i think it might be it's a deference yes it's an important deference and that deference is not because i'm afraid of sinning or some kind of evil consequence, I think that deference helps me at all times to continually reorient myself towards reality. Because I think for me, for anybody who quote unquote believes in God,

I don't think, at least it's not my experience, that it's ever been a choice. You know, I didn't choose to not believe in God. I didn't choose to then come into an, understanding where I experience and know that God is a fundamental reality, you know. I mean, acknowledging that the most fundamental reality, regardless of what we call it, is unknowable and unspeakable, you know, it's... Yeah, it's quite hard to talk about, right?

Although you do it very well. You do it very well. We try our best. I mean, Thomas Aquinas famously suggested that all religious language is analogical, that God is not powerful, God is not loving, God is not omniscient. These are sort of ways of mapping on human understanding into this unknowable essence. We'll get back to Penn in just a moment, but first, do you trust the news? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the bias that inevitably seeps into reporting. Wouldn't it be great if there were a way for us as consumers of news in this

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That said, back to Penn. This idea of it not being a choice is of particular interest to me, because A lot of my conversations are with religious people who I'm essentially trying to get to convince me that their religion is true. That's my job. And will I be the one today? One hope. Well, you're already closer in the sense that you are at least implicitly recognizing that it's not something you can just decide to do. A lot of Christians will tell me that it's because your heart isn't open enough.

As if I sort of chose to sort of close that door or something. So I wonder, however it was that you came to faith, and particularly the Baha'i faith, the fact that it's not a choice, do you feel lucky? Do you feel like you just sort of happen to fall upon the right thing? Or like, was it something you did? Was it a skillful way of living that cultivated that? Or did it just happen to you? Both. so maybe I can amend my yeah I don't think that it was ultimately

a choice that I understood I was making but I do think maybe the one time I've ever exercised my personal will in the most conscious way somewhat ironically is also becoming a Baha'i I think um you know we understand there's this question of like physical determinism you know which is sort of like the theological pendulum swinging

to the complete opposite end of the spectrum where some scientific people believe that we have no free will sort of the way that priests used to in the face of a biologically determined fate which is only determined because we're ruled You know, we're robbed of our ability to respond because we are just ultimately a nervous response to, you know what I'm saying.

We've got robbed of our ability to actually make an like an agential decision. We just sort of react like metal rusting in the rain or something. Yes. But it certainly feels like there's more going on. Yeah, so, you know, I both feel like I did not make a choice, and yet it is the one choice I've ever made in my life. Yeah, yeah, that's the great sort of paradox where, like, if you think about it too much, like free will itself, I for a long time argued that it doesn't exist. Yeah. And I've begun to realize recently that while that still makes sense to me, you can construct an argument, think about it rationally, there's no space for free will to fit into the world. I kind of feel the same way about something like consciousness, for example.

Like, I can construct an argument. Material does not beget immaterial substance. It doesn't make sense. And I convince you extremely compellingly. And yet, like, here we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just doing it. Well, I mean, we know that mathematically, like, existence is improbable, right?

Consciousness is even more highly improbable. So then you have to call into question for a moment, like, what is the relevance and function of probability in mathematics in the first place, not saying that they're irrelevant and dysfunctional, but that they serve a purpose. Can they explain everything? I mean, you know, one of the fundamental principles of the Baha'i faith is the essential unity and deep complementarity of science and religion as two systems, you know, as two systems needed to explore a reality which has, in some aspect, a duality. Now, the history of like dualism and stuff, which you, definitely know more about than I do is is it's is a little bit distinct from this but at the very at

the very least we can say science helps us understand our material reality religion um helps us to understand our spiritual reality now i say that taking it to account the baha'i faith and its teachings which are for the most part unaccounted for when people make claims like this yeah so to me it's really important to take into account those claims otherwise you've not taken the whole thing into account yeah the whole account of religion galileo said in one crude translation that science tells you how the heavens go and the bible tells you how to go to heaven yeah i like that it's a different set of of of instructions yeah you became a bahai how old I believe 28.

28. Yeah, I'm 38 now, so actually it'll be 10 years this May. Happy anniversary. Thank you. Congratulations. It's a fascinating religion in, like, so many ways. I mean, for me, part of the real interest was, like, a history of the Baha'i faith and where it came from. Yeah, it's got an incredible history.

In a weird way, you're kind of, like, a branch of Shia Islam. Historically and sociopolitically, yes. in essence, that's as much true as Christianity was at once an offshoot of Judaism. Judaism. Or Islam is, well, actually, that's not quite as true with Islam, even though, you know, what seems to be the case in, as you're well aware, and many people are now, of, like, Judeo-Christianity is that, in terms of the history, like, Islam accepts all the ones before it. Christianity accepts all the ones before it. Judaism accepts all the ones before it. Judaism accepts all the ones

before it you know um but but the the and they all in in some sense could be seen as offshoots of of the preceding one to that political reality at the time yeah you know i think at the time christians were seen as these radical jews yeah right um uh so in that sense i understand what you're saying but we it is a distinct and independent world religion which i know you also no. Yeah, extremely well read. Well, I'm intrigued, well, I'm not very well read in the Baha'i literature. Like, I don't think I've actually ever cracked open any of Baha'u'llah's writings or anything like that. I've read sort of about the history. Yeah. But, I mean, I was interested to hear that there was an essay from 1985, the possibility of world peace. The promise of world peace. The promise of world peace. And this

is something that you read, which was fairly integral on your journey to becoming a Baha'i, Yeah, so I said before that it wasn't a choice, and then I said that it also was a choice. This document was a key influence in it becoming a conscious choice. So what is this? It's a letter, right? Like who writes it? So it's written by the supreme governing body of the Baha'i faith, which in its organization has what we recognize as infallibility, but not in its membership, not in the individual members. There's no person in the Baha'i faith who has spiritual authority over another.

That's fundamental to our faith, you know, as Baha'is. But the members of the Universal House of Justice, when they consult together and issue formal letters of guidance or response to questions, we see them as divinely guided. And so as a person who was like investigating this faith and definitely never thought I would call myself a Baha'i if I could even pronounce it then because it looks like a more complicated word than it is the sound.

Yeah, that's a lot of accents and apostrophies. And it's technically an Arabic word. And it means glory. So Baha is glory, light, and splendor. It's, I think it's a bit of an archaic, it's, you know, for English it would be an archaic word. In Arabic, I think it's an archaic use of a word. I don't think that it's, I, I've asked Arabic-speaking people who I've met, who I don't know, like, say, a cab driver or something, you know, what is the meaning of this word? And I think sometimes there's confusion. Maybe it's my pronunciation, maybe I don't know how much the word is used. But anyway, you know, the way it's translated into English in the Baha'i faith is glory, light, and splendor, but basically glory. So Baha'u'llah is glory of God. And Baha'u'llah is the founder.

I don't know if you'd consider him the founder. I don't know if you'd use that term. Any word would be imperfect to describe his station the way it would be of any manifestation of God, any prophet, any teacher. Well, it's quite sort of secular to say that, like, Jesus is the founder of Christianity. It's a very atheist way of putting it. If I was speaking to another Baha'i, I would never call Baha'u'llah the founder of our faith. What would you call him?

Like, the main prophet? No, I wouldn't even use it. the word prophet because well you know look like Muhammad is the seal of the prophets right and we don't we don't uh there's no friction in our belief system with that he was the seal of the prophets Muhammad's coming and going uh rather yes that sealed the sort of age of prophecy um so that so that now with Baha'u'llah's coming um this is the age of uh I just many names for it but this is this is the age where the kingdom of God has promised

throughout all the world's religions, throughout all of history are resolving and coming to fruition, which you could at least see from a secular sense in the fact that we've never been a united world body before in need of like a world body politic. You know, we're confronted with unprecedented administrative needs, you know what I mean?

like we have the resources to solve all of the world's problems, except for climate change, which we could do a lot more for. But if you think of racism or poverty, poverty, like the extremes of wealth and poverty, famine, homelessness, did I say, inequality of the sexes, I mean, you name it. We have the ability, we have the resources. We have the resources. And this is the promise of world peace. Sorry, yeah, yeah.

So it's like, it's always sprawling for me. The promise of world peace is... But it's this sort of idea that it's possible, you know? Yeah, no, I mean, it's the promise of world peace. It was written in 1985. It's addressed to the peoples of the world. I was born in 1986. I read this in probably 2013 or 14.

And upon reading it, I thought, How am I currently reading the most prescient and incisive analysis of, like, all of history, political, social, cultural, spiritual, it's speaking to the moment right now, right now. And it was written the year before I was born. You know, what is this? Who wrote this? And this attracts you to the Baha'i faith because it's written under the auspices of this? of this Baha'i organizing body. Interesting how there's no, like, noun form for Baha'i.

Have you ever noticed that? There's not like a Baha'i-ism. Yeah, right. It's always the Baha'i faith. Yeah, yeah, and it's teachings. And, you know, it's funny, even if I, like, text the word Baha'i and Baha'u'llah, my phone cannot learn them because they're not, because they have so many accents and apostrophes, and the words are not the same thing, but it tries to interchange them.

So I'm still always struggling to even text. Yeah, he needs to come up with, like, a shorthand or something. something, B-H, whatever. I'm interested in the character of Bahá'u'llah, like, because a lot of people will be surprised to learn that by some estimates the fastest growing world religion and something like, I know, it's like the sixth or the ninth, like largest religion in the world,

is relatively recent. I mean, I don't think we've mentioned yet that we're talking about a religion that has its origins in, what, like the... 1844. Yeah, like 9. 19th century. I mean, it's, it's recent, right? And for a lot of people, I think that the idea of religion as being this ancient thing, it like ties you through history to your ancestors and these dusty scriptures buried in the desert in Egypt, to hear that you've got something dropping up in like the 1800s. Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, my kind of put people, put people off the idea that this is in the same category as normal religious thought, basically. I mean, always trying to recognize my bias as a Baha'i, of course.

I mean, I do think it's different from the history of religious thought. As is every religion at its outset. And, you know, fundamental to these teachings of Baha'u'llah are simply that these manifestations of God will always be coming. they come throughout the life of throughout throughout the progress of evolving life forms on this planet and any other with them what is a manifestation of god a manifestation of god is a The light and reality of God is unknowable and unapproachable, to say the least, you know. So a manifestation is not that light, but the manifestation is a mirror. And so if you see light in a mirror, you could say both the light is in that mirror.

And I can see the light in that mirror. And in some cases, I can see the light better through the mirror than I can if I stare at the light. Because the light itself is too bright. And in the case of the sun, actually, you know, it's abundantly true. So that's the best metaphor that I think communicates the mysterious station of these manifestations. And these manifestations are people. Yeah. What traditionally people might think of as prophets, so within the Baha'i faith, generally, I think you accept people like Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, but thinking of these as these kind of manifestations of God rather than just some kind of normal human.

No, they're definitely not a normal human being. And so, well, I mean, you said before that there's no, nobody has spiritual authority over anybody else in the Baha'i faith. Does that apply to the manifestation? So they have spiritual authority? They definitely do. But, you know, I think the closest analog would be like the Quran. Uh-huh. You know.

Actually, I heard something. I think I saw a little YouTube short because you're now in my algorithm. That's great to hear. Yeah. I think you just recently said something, or I don't know when you said it. You compare Jesus to the Quran because, you know, can you share that real quickly? Yeah, so I think that most people imagine the Bible in Christianity as analogous to the Quran in Islam. I don't think that's quite right.

I think that Jesus is in Christianity what the Quran is in Islam. I think that's a really, really wise distinction. And I think it's because, I mean, if you listen to what Christians say, the word becomes flesh. What is the word? The Logos, the word of God. And because it becomes flesh, people think of the word of God as this sort of like living, breathing thing that manifests as Jesus. So the word becomes flesh. In Islam, the word becomes a book. But it still is this sort of, it's not just treated like a physical bit of paper with something down on it. Like that's a mushaf is a copy of the Quran. The Quran is the message itself. And some Muslims believe that the Quran is co-eternal with God. Okay, so explain that. So like the word of God is almost like an attribute of God. And I'm not sure if that's the language that Muslim philosophers would use. But in the way that like, you know, so like God's word is co-eternal with him.

So this message of the Quran is eternal. Yeah. Along with God. Which when you realize that, you realize that you're not dealing with, you know, a message which is written down on a bit of paper somewhere. Like the thing that's written down is like a copy of this message. I mean, Quran literally means recitation. It's being recited. But the Quran itself is co-eternal with God, again, according to some schools of Muslim philosophy.

And so, like, what's going on here? Well, Muslims believe that when you open the Quran, you're reading the direct exact words of God. Yes. As do Bahais. Christians don't believe that about the Bible in that they believe they're reading a God-inspired book, a God-breathed book as the Book of Timothy, the apocryphal book of Timothy has it, if you ask me. But they recognize that it's written by men, you know, even if you accept the traditional authorship, it's Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it's people like Peter, and prophets like Isaiah or Jeremiah. And so, it's, if you read something in the Bible that, like, is a contradiction, let's say, then there's room for a Christian to sort of go, yeah, okay, but that's because, well, this, this text didn't accurately record this, or this was a mistake made by it, or whatever.

there's no room for doing that with the Quran, because the Quran is the word of God. Disagreeing with the Quran in that way would be like if you had Jesus himself in front of you and you try to disagree with him because that is the word of God. Right. And so like, you know, you think of the evolution of even the ability to read and write. Yeah. No one was around to record Jesus's sayings right in the same way. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the people who surrounded him would have been completely illiterate. very well educated yeah i mean peter was like a a fisherman who could you know by i suppose all accounts

i'm aware of um his faith in jesus completely transformed him yes but he was uh you know um to use the more literal sense of the word he was dumb as as i there is a there is a point at which he's described as uh like unlettered or uneducated or something like that like it's it's well established that's the case interestingly you might hear the sort of new atheist critique that people say, oh, this text written by, you know, Stone Age peasants in the desert somewhere. And if you stop and think about it for a second, it's like, that seems to increase the validity of scripture, because if it really was written by illiterate merchants, then the fact that it's such an incredible theological, well, like, a tested text, if it was written by

otherwise illiterate merchants or fishermen or whatever that's kind of an indication that there's something special going on you know yeah definitely so yeah i mean the but i'm imagining that the way that jesus christians might think of jesus as like a manifestation of the word he is the earthly manifestation of the son of god who's an eternal part of the the trinity um in the same way maybe these these manifestations in the baha faith are a bit like that like it's sort of a not quite a representation, but like an embodiment. Yeah, I mean, again, like, take everything I say with a grain of salt because there's a reason this is difficult to describe simply. Yeah.

There's just a reason. You know, reality is difficult to describe somewhat ironically, regardless of how you subscribe, regardless of what system of belief you subscribe to, you know. So the manifestation has like a sort of, in some ways, a dual nature. Although I think the manifestation's reality is ultimately this like, you know, inconceivably glorious whole, which you could not ascribe, you know, division or fragmentation or any of this too, we'll never know that reality because we're limited and we're human. and so in some ways they're human and they're subject to human experience

to demonstrate specifically and explicitly to us how we can live a more purposeful and meaningful life how we can be happy to demonstrate for us actually what is the nature and purpose of life here it is not you know I think of it sometimes like using the very popular analogy of of physical reality being like a simulation well you know if you think of a video game a video game like grand theft

auto which or any other like pretty open world video game you could spend your time doing technically whatever you want yeah however it's most fulfilling when you adhere to the the when you play the game for the reason it was created yeah yeah right that is a really really really simple and i it's it's a dumb analogy because i know it can be written off but that is actually i think what religion, as Baha'u'llah has described it, has always been meant for, and that's why it always needs to renew itself. And that is why Baha'u'llah has come, and that's why another will come after him. I think that's a brilliant analogy, especially given that, although it's obvious to us the player, why the game is created, it's not obvious to Michael or Franklin, like

what the plot is. I was like Michael or Franklin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it's sort of to step it. I love talking about God's relationship to the world. as analogous to like an author and a and a play or a novel or I suppose a game developer and a and a developer and the characters in the game um might have been c s lewis who talked about how like if if hamlet were ever to make wherever to meet shakespeare it would be shakespeare's doing and not hamlet's you know shakespeare would have to put himself in the play it kind of couldn't be the other way around yes it's so it's so interesting to think about um and and this unknowability for that reason like the way that Hamlet could not comprehend what Shakespeare is. Even though, like, Hamlet as a character is a human being, he knows what writing is and stuff. Like, it's just an order of magnitude of thought that is completely unreachable to understand what it means to have this relationship with this Shakespeare character. I can't remember who said that trying to understand God by using reason is like shining a flashlight at the sun to try and, to try and, like, see it. No, I think that's about right, though.

It is, you know, look, one of the reasons I was even interested in coming on here, because I think, like, you and I are a bit of an odd fit, right? Maybe, yeah. Like, I don't mean, I don't mean as people, but I just mean, like, you know, the people you typically have on your, on this show are not, you know, like actors, I think, right? And I typically don't go on shows about philosophy and religion or however else you would define this, because that's not what I'm known for either. So, but I am very interested in the rational proofs.

There's actually a book by the son of Bahaullahala, who is named Abdul Baha, which means the servant to Baha. You know, you could think of, there's an analogy of their relationship where if Baha'u'llah is a manifestation of God was a sort of summit of the peak, Abdul Bahá was the lowest valley where the waters of the teachings

gathered simply because he had humbled himself to such a degree that he was the perfect exemplar, you know? He has a series of rational proves in a book that's been compiled called Some Answered Questions. I can't recall any of them right now

because I've not read it in a while. Yeah, and it's, but I am interested in having come from a highly rational sort of anti-religious secular background and then having had my own path to faith, and not just any faith, but, you know, this faith I'd never heard of and this faith that many other people haven't heard of, and these teachings that are incredible, which, again, scarcely, you know, anybody's heard. Yeah, no one's talking about it. Although at the time, somewhat world-renowned. You know, Tolstoy mentioned Baha'u'llah. Really? Yeah. The Bob, even, who is like the herald of Baha'u'llah's coming.

Actually, the Bob and Baha'u'llah, we both see as manifestations of God who are both independent from one another and have their own entire religious dispensations, the same way that Muhammad, Jesus, Moses do, and the others. But then we also call them our twin manifestations because they have a unique relationship, and they were somehow bound together and that's very mysterious and we'll be understanding that for a long time coming

but um good Lord yeah I mean I've lost my train of thought as I often do trying to approach trying to approach this do you remember what I was saying? You were talking about this book of rational proofs

yeah yeah and I imagine you're talking about sort of proofs of the high faith or proofs of God's existence sure because this is a commensory in religious history as people coming together and deciding to sit down and write some proofs. But I find them always to be ultimately like, and Abdulpah himself says,

the closest to ever get to sounding judgmental is that he says they are for, he characterizes something in the need for rational proves as weak. And that's, you know, as a highly rational person, I could take offense to that. But that's not the manner in which he means it. But I think what it does is it gets at the weakness of the flashlight in the face of the sun, as you were describing.

You know, it's like... But then why bother with it at all? I mean, like, how much of your conversion to the Baha'i faith had to do with rational considerations? Like, did you become convinced that God exists because of some series of causation or, like, Like, was that nothing to do with it? I suppose. Being somebody who's, you know, hyperrational, atheist, critical types, you know. Well, let, I'm inclined, whether I'm skirting the question or answering it, I'm not sure.

But I'm inclined to sort of step back and recognize that actually we are all subscribing to a belief system and a framework. and an ideology because you know atheism has as many logical conclusions to it which are so magical and incredible that they're you know essentially religious like you know for reality to have sprung from an inexplicable non-reality or nothingness or pre-existent point you know these are all it's pretty phenomenal you know so i just want to at least state that um And so the simple emotional kind of grounded part of, like, my own journey, I think that in my mid-20s, from about 12 to 20 years old, I think were the most harrowing years of my life, as I think is often the case for people growing up, because we aren't given much of any indication for a reason for living. Coming to the conclusion that there is no reason to life, there's no purpose in that. life but that we must create it for ourselves i understand that there is some intellectual beauty

in that if you want to conjure it but that takes a lot of maturity and will yeah and i think when you're growing up that's not what you want that's not encouraging that isn't what a mother's embrace feels like a mother's embrace truly does not feel like a purposeless happenstance um You know, a father's guidance and love and wisdom does not feel like that. Young people and children are actually inclined towards love and meaning, I think. But our culture increasingly says that those are creations. Those are fictions, more or less, you know? And I think realizing that,

there was a despair always, which felt logical. It felt like a normal, like, it felt like a sensible response to, you know, the belief system, the default belief system of our culture. Right. I never described myself as depressed because I felt like, no, I can identify the cause. Yeah, right.

You know, that and then also personal things within my family, within my, you know, growing up in Hollywood, How many more icons do we need to see going through that experience who are, you know, sort of morally, spiritually bereft, you know, emotionally bereft, I should say, at least. So, yeah, I mean, I think when I was 20, 21, 22, I was on Gossip Girl. I was living in New York City. I finally lived in Brooklyn. And by the time I was 24, I actually was... With the independent films I was doing on the side,

I was, I had begun to achieve more or less everything I had set out to achieve. I lived in the place that I wanted to live in since I was a youth listening to, like, most deaf rap about Brooklyn. Yeah. I was madly in love with a second great relationship of my 20s. I had just played Jeff Buckley in a movie that is very little known,

but it was an incredibly rich experience, incredibly rewarding and an introduction to spirituality in a way because i felt like i was in communication with somebody who was dead um but then all but but there was not the resounding feeling of you've succeeded in the unlikely and the improbable you know not only have you have you made your own money but you've made it meaningfully doing what you find meaningful, doing what you think is important. I mean, you know, being a star of gossip girl to me

was not meaningful and important when it comes to, you know, the sort of stuff of life, but it had opened that door to some other opportunities. And so, you know, it's the age-old thing, like recognizing that fame and wealth can't give you happiness, or satisfaction. I mean, again, it's like we all know it. But that's it that you say we all know it. You say it's the age old thing, but I mean, even if you ask somebody, if I'd have asked you when you were, you know, 16, 17 or

something if I'd have said, do you think that money and fame will make you happy? I doubt that you would have been like, yeah, totally, maybe you would have done, but, you know, somewhere people, people sort of ironically say, like, well, yeah, I'd rather cry on my yacht or whatever, but they know within that joke that it's not going to. going to do, and yet we still just are going after it, you know, what's going on there? That's, well, and that's the thing is like, I actually think a lot of us, if we really interrogate the way we're living and the way we think we think, we're not, they're divergent, you know, and so when I say it became Baha'i, I feel like I started to think for myself.

And I'm not saying that I always every day wake up and I know I'm thinking for myself, actually, for the most part, I'm trying to constantly undo that and remember to think for myself. and it's quite hard. But that is also the purpose of life, as I understand it. It's ultimately a spiritual classroom, you know. Yes, all the physical things matter, and they have enormous implications. And then also what we're meant to do

is achieve spiritual ends through material means. You know, we need to be sacrificial with our wealth, with our time, with our energy, with our everything, you know, for the sake of others. That spiritual classroom, to me, would be more like a, from what I understand, of the Baha'i faith, like a spiritual school where you have different classrooms because

there's first class the day where it's Jesus and then it's Muhammad, and then, because, you know, you say that you believe that the Quran is the word of God. In its day and time. And I I mean, the most common question that Baha'i is probably

receive, and I certainly don't expect you to speak as any kind of authority here, but I mean like, personally, right, when you, when you read various religious scriptures and they sort of seem to have different ideas about what it's sort of all about like to be a christian an orthodox christian you have to believe in the trinity if you're a muslim if you believe in a trinitarian god you've committed perhaps the most fundamental sin in is shirk you know as describing to to god that which is is not god or vice versa

right and so i've always struggled to to understand exactly how it is that a bahai considers all of the Because for people who don't know, Baha'is consider like all world religions to kind of just be one religion, right? It's like there's the eternal faith of God, changeless, no, sorry, I believe it's the changeless faith of God eternal in the past and eternal in the future. Sure. So it's sort of one big family of religion and one sort of one God who manifests in different ways throughout history for different people. And I understand that, like, God might need to tell people a different ethic of, like, charity because, you know, there's no capitalism and then there's capitalism. So there's a kind of new message. But when it comes to things like, you know, the Trinity or the relationships between humans and scriptures and stuff, I struggle to know what I'm supposed to think of Baha'i actually believes about this unity between, say, the Quran and the Bible or Jesus and Mohammed, you know. Because I like to think that if they were to meet, a Baha'i would think that if Muhammad ever met Jesus, you know, they would have a lot to talk about and they'd get on pretty swimmingly. Well, actually, my understanding, my response to that is that Muhammad is Jesus. Jesus is Muhammad and Jesus is Muhammad and Moses.

They are all actually the same. In one sense, in the sense that their station, in the sense that their station utterly effaces selfhood, so that, you know, within this exercise of thought here, God is the most fundamental reality, which is unknowable and unnameable, but the utter effacement is to polish the mirror. We talked about the mirror earlier. Yeah. A mirror that has dirt on it, which is, you know, more or less what we all are, some amount of dross, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, can reflect that light some, but it augments it. And it also has color, you know? In that sense, you can think of a lamp,

the way a lamp, all these beautiful lamps, they augment the light within them. The light within them, actually, if you were to break the glass, is formless and electric and powerful and dangerous. Yeah. Yeah. But, But you reduce it, you reduce it. And each light is a different manifestation, each lamp is a different manifestation of the same light. In fact, all of these lamps are connected to the same light source. Yeah, right.

That is, in some sense, what these manifestations have got off. They are, we perceive the difference in their lamps, but they know that they are the same light. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Now, another sort of problem that's raised here is that there's no list of sort of who counts, right? Like, there's no official list of the behind manifestations of God. And so there are some obvious ones, like Jesus was pretty big. And then it's like, well, what was Confucius and who was Rumi?

What about Joseph Smith, you know, the Mormon problem? You know, like, it seems if there's no, like official guidance on this, like if somebody, like a Joseph Smith, type character comes along and says, I'm starting a new religion and I'm translating golden plates in my back garden, how a Baha'i will respond to that, because God will continue to manifest himself, and you've got to be on guard to see when that will occur. Yeah. And is there, like, a criterion by which you might be able to judge that? The shortest and most graceful answer would be time.

Right. Yeah. Time elapsed since this person comes and does that thing. And then, you know, what are, how are those teachings manifesting in each community? Yes. By their fruits, you shall know them. That is my shortest and most graceful answer. Yeah.

You know, like, it's also significant that I don't remember when the Mormon, I don't know how it's referred to, the Mormon faith or the Mormon. Yeah, the Mormon, they don't like being called Mormons because Mormon is a... Is it the Church of Latter-day Saints? Is that what it is? Yeah, the Church of Jesus. as Christ of Latter-day Saints. So different governing bodies have some of them have said, it's okay to say Mormon because it's a bit of a mouthful.

And then some say, no, no, you must. It's the deference thing again. Yeah. You know, to use the correct. But yeah, I mean, the Mormon, the Mormon religion, I think is pretty standard. Well, you know, around, my understanding is that this was in the early 1800s. That's, so the world from like the 1790s to the 1840s, the world over, east and west, was experiencing a revival, you know,

a sort of this like fervor. They were all anticipating the coming of their prophecy, the fulfillment of their prophecy. Many even, you know, doing the math of the various scriptures that they saw as holy, people of the East and West both thought, some of them, both thought that this would all mountain 1844, which is again the year of the inception of the Baha'i faith.

So I think, so, you know, giving a longer and less graceful answer to this question of how a Baha might see, you know, the case of Joseph Smith and many people all over the world were inspired by, you know, you think of the, if the Holy Spirit is a really, really, really flawed and imperfect and small phrase for the generating impulse for life and consciousness throughout the universe and all time, which we currently call maybe a couple of things like the Holy Spirit, that is breathed sort of without distinction the way the sun shines without distinction upon all people, you know? And when it animates a person, it can animate them to become rigorously intellectual and atheistic because they see the folly of previous religions. It can become a person

who has a certain kind of religious faith to be like, ah, I'm looking for the return of Jesus and I'm going to find him somewhere. It could manifest in a person in the, you know, sub-Saharan Africa, you know, to follow the sort of, I actually don't know a lot about this sort of, the various religions and mythologies and spiritual practices of sub-Saharan Africa. but you know i think people all over the world were inspired and seeking seeking answers uh as i understand it jose smith was one of those people yes um and and again i returned to the shortest and most graceful answer which is in time and by its fruit and you know uh one of the greatest fruits i would say needs to be must be um diversity of all kinds diversity of every nature and i

And it's not just a euphemism for race, because race is in and of itself as a social construct. It's not just nationalities because nations come and go. Diversity of every kind is, I think, should be one of the most essential fruits that must be witnessed in order to be some kind of rational proof for the word of God as it guides a community to be what it says it is. Baha'is are extraordinarily progressive in this regard in their beliefs, particularly relative to religious traditions as a whole. If I tell you no other information about someone than that they are deeply,

foundationally religious, and ask you to guess their politics, depending on where you are in the world, you might guess that they lean more conservative. But Baha'is, I think it's quite a lot of, a lot to do with their view of sort of the oneness of all religions and stuff that are very sort of open, very socially progressive. And I was interested in how that rubs up against the idea that traditionally speaking, things like, you know, gender roles and segregation

and pools sort of questionable comments about the vision of women in church and families and societies, how it is that a religion that's so socially progressive can be so intimately connected to texts and traditions which have historically been used to buttress these social inequalities. Yeah. That's a great question. So, like, my working understanding of this is, well, it again returns to this notion of progressive revelation, which is every religion is meant for a time and a place. When the next one comes, it is no longer the time and the place for the previous one. So some of the eternal teachings, which are essentially of what, I suppose love, you know, of wisdom and restraint, of compassion, these are part of these sort of eternal teachings that are present in all the scriptures. And then there's this other aspect to all the various scriptures of the world, which have the teachings which apply to the social reality of that.

time. You know, I mean, as I understand it, certainly don't quote me on this, but I guess you are going to record me anyway. You know, the laws around the station and the treatment of women in the Quran were a serious improvement compared to the way that they were treated in the Arabian Peninsula around the time of Muhammad's birth, you know what I mean? because of the social and spiritual evolution of humanity since then, those laws are now extremely prohibitive. But that is a sign of their efficacy and our evolution since. Yeah, interesting.

Same goes for all of the religious teachings. There was a time when it was not safe to eat pork. Okay, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Same with shellfish. uh uh you know if if divorce had been allowed um through certain periods of humanities of a given community's struggle everybody would have just gotten divorced yeah there is an interesting moment in the gospels where jesus says something to the effect of like because you know the law of moses allows

divorce in some instances and and his disciples sort of say like if divorce is bad then then why did why was it allowed in the law and Jesus said something to the effect of like because of like how you were at the time like it was necessary at that time but now now not anymore and I often hear this line of it forms like an apologetic defense for a lot of Christians that I speak to for example I talk about slavery in the Old Testament or whatever and they sort of say something like this they say yeah it was an improvement a regulation which sort of points us towards a better way yeah where's that way well I always took issue with that with Christianity because it's like but it's done now like you've had your new testimony yeah like that's that's it closed book whereas for the Baha'is we say the way's come again you know and so that's why there's an update you know to me I really understand an atheist perspective because it's like if you if you look at religious behavior of the last couple thousand years yeah there's just so much hypocrisy and it's and it's like I think kind of circling this application of teachings of

social teachings that clearly don't have their place anymore, you know? And it's like, well, yeah, this is clearly just meant for another time and a place. It's like, so then how does your faith, how is your relationship with God and your understanding of God that there has not since been a progression of these teachings, you know what I mean? And so the Baha'i faith provides that. You know, it does provide that without denigrating or reducing the station of these other prophets when you really pay attention to the writings of Baha'u'llah and the teachings of Muhammad and Jesus and Moses. You know, there's nothing that is in conflict, actually. It's our interpretation, which is in conflict.

Yeah. Well, the biggest criticisms of Jesus are reserved for hypocrites. Like, his biggest sort of, the thing that really gets them riled up is when people are being hypocrites, particularly religious authorities, Jewish leaders being hypocrites, knowing what they should be doing, but not doing it. Yeah. But also having these sort of blatantly legalistic interpretations of scripture. You know, the instructive example here for me is like the Sabbath, you know, when Jesus is healing on the Sabbath or reading on the Sabbath. He's eating on the Sabbath with his disciples and the Jewish leaders are outraged. Like, it says in the law not to not to do this on the Sabbath. And Jesus says that, you know, the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Which just encapsulated, right?

Because it's like, yeah, sure. But like, you've completely missed the point of what it was supposed to be about in the first place. And in fact, the legalistic, pedantic requirements to stick to the letter of the law. aren't just like over the top they've actually like come at the expense of understanding why we're doing this in the first place. You've turned it upside down. Yeah, these rules that are invented which serve a particular purpose. And when doing that particular thing doesn't serve that purpose anymore, you keep doing the thing. Yeah. Forgetting why it was there in the first place. It's like the thing that goes in your shoe to shape your foot as you're growing. And then like

once it's shaped your foot, you're supposed to take it out. Because if you leave it in there, it could actually deform your foot. You know, you've got to know when to take it. out. Teaching of any kind is like this. Yeah. I have a four and a half year old. He's learning to read right now. Once he learns to read, if I kept on trying to teach him how to read, it would drive him crazy.

You drive him crazy and me. Yeah, yeah. It's the same thing. All teachings of every nature are this way. Religious teachings are the same. Does that apply writ large cross humanity at scale? So is there a point where these manifestations of God and sort of stop? Because humanity as an organism has...

has finished its teaching my understanding um is that manifestations of god uh have been and will be present throughout humanity's existence on this planet um you know that was even true when we were um single cell organisms there is some divine impetus still there uh what that looked like and what that was it's as difficult to describe as it is biologically um You know, the short of the long is that Baha'u'llah has come as the manifestation of God whose role it has been to aid in the unification of the world so that we can address all the problems that we're facing right now. And, you know, once that's achieved, well, literally only God knows. but that there will be the continuation of life you know as i understand it paula inaugurated a 500,000 year cycle so we at least have another 500,000 years on this planet we expect countless

manifestations of god to come after that throughout that cycle life will presumably continue on this planet in higher and higher stages of conscious evolution physical evolution i think happens much more slowly um until life is literally impossible on this planet for any number of reasons i suppose the the the greatest of which will be time and closest to the sun or something um and then at that point i mean i don't know i don't know surely surely anybody's guess a lot of people are worried about the effect that human beings are having on the planet either through uh climate change or like the ai terminator revolution or all kinds of existential threat If you believe that a manifestation of God has instituted an at least 500,000-year cycle of manifestations,

for me personally, that might demotivate me to care about these existential threats, because I'm pretty confident they're not going to come to pass because God has instituted this cycle, right? Does that have that effect? Well, so I'll go back to the promise of world peace. Yeah. At its outset, I think the beginning of the second. paragraph is something along the lines of some of this is verbatim some of this is off so you'll have to you'll have to go to the arrest material um you know world peace and the unification of its peoples is

not only uh possible or probable but inevitable whether it is to be achieved through whether it is to be achieved now through through consultative will, through an active consultative will, or after the precipitation of unimaginable horrors, or sorry, after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity's stubborn cling to old patterns of behavior. So roughly saying, you know, the laws of physics will always abide by their nature as well. They will always govern, you know, our material reality. If we continue living in the ways that we are now,

we're going to face worse and worse and worse consequences because we're not arising to our responsibility as stewards of the planet. So actually stewardship of the planet is a really, really important part of the Baha'i teachings as I understand them. We have to live responsibly. We have to live lives of sacrifice, which is to say for others, you know,

which is also to say for every other organism on the planet. We're reaching a stage where we know that if we don't change our behavior, the whores visited upon us will be significant, severe, so actually to not address them is uncongenable. That's actually a word that is used. So, you know, I think failure to stem the tide of conflict would be uncongedable, you know. Do, like, non-human animals fit into this picture? I mean, just because the way you said, making sacrifices for others, you know, and possibly for the planet and other organisms, like, it seems to me that, like, a Baha'i faith would lean quite nicely into vegetarianism or veganism or animal rights advocacy.

like is that is that a common thing the beehis often yeah i mean yes yes definitely i would say that peter singer is one of the manifestations of god or something you know to me one of the greatest errors we're committing in this age is is like at this point willful ignorance of our true nature we as an organism alone have you know untold capacity and clear differentiation from all the other organisms in the planet. This is not to say that we don't, we aren't bound together by our physical evolution together. I mean, you know, everything that science understands about evolution is of course true. Except for maybe it's cause, because that's a philosophical question.

You know, but we are different. We are different. And so recognizing that that is just, obvious truth, you know, that we do have a capacity and a power, which is different from any other organism, and that we need to recognize and cultivate that power. Otherwise, we're like an irresponsible, ignorant, sort of petulant child who's, like, refusing to clean up his room, you know? And it's, and it's, and it's just, it's getting to the point where it's just immature to presume that we are, that we are simply nothing but animals. We have a greater responsibility than that because we have completely i mean again this gets into this sort of philosophical

logical conclusion which is to say if we are only animals then what we've done is awful and unnatural it's so aberrant it's so aberrant right i mean it's like it's so inconceivably like myopic and self-centered and you know i understand the position of many like um sort of atheistic humanists who have a passion for like morality but but also see people as being you know as the matrix famously described them like in 1999 you know agent smith describing humanity i remember how do you know what i'm talking about how does he describe you're younger than me so this is where i've different i have seen it so yeah but i mean the matrix and oh man the matrix says for a 12 year old in 1999 brother man it was it's uh anybody watching who saw it in theaters then knows what i'm talking

about. So, you know, Agent Smith, who is the antagonist of The Matrix, um, suit guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are many of them, but he's the main one. Yeah. You know, at a climactic moment, I don't want to ruin it for anybody who hasn't seen it, but at a climactic moment, where it seems as though he will win and defeat Neo, Keanu, Keanu's character, he has a terse monologue describing humanity as a cancer, as a disease, as a blight on the rest of

organic life. And what he's essentially saying is that the machines having come alive are actually committing like a great sort of sacred end which is ridding the world of humanity

and turning humanity into the life source which is the you know the battery um because it is drained because humanity itself had sort of drained the planet's battery and it's it's a it's a convincing argument it's a really convincing argument in fact you know if there is no reason for life and there is no god and we are just these aberrant animals i think it's a i think it's the strongest logical conclusion we have you know um but it's it induces uh dread and fear and despair and i and i And again, I think, you know, there's also so much of science that flies in the face of having that kind of viewpoint.

Because the collaboration inherent in reality, inherent in nature is exquisite. It's like it's so perfect and incredible. It is astonishing. I mean, it's quite hard to step outside of it because we think that like the laws of physics and things, they kind of just describe what we see, like, some people are amazed about how well mathematics maps on to reality and how perfect it is, but people say, well, it's just because maths is something that we use to describe what's there, so of course it's going to map on, but there is something inexplicably harmonious about it all.

And I think that there is this, like, middle kind of argument. You know, we were talking earlier about how some people come to God through. proofs of his existence and some kind of just because they feel a god shaped whole and some personal experience for me there's something in the middle here of like talking about how the laws of physics exist and how mysterious that is that's not quite like an emotion but it's certainly not some syllogism that's valid that proves god's existence it's just this weird sort of in-between thing that that kind of points towards the the eternal mysterious divine essence that people often say is at the base of the universe. And that's why I call

myself probably an agnostic, because I don't have enough to say, yeah, I believe that, but I have too much to say that it's false, you know? Did you grow up with religion in your family? Kind of. I was an altar boy when I was younger. I was a Roman Catholic. Okay. Yeah. That's a little more than kind of. Believe it or not. Yeah. But how much does a, does a, you know, 10-year-old Catholic actually know? about Catholicism. Right, and how much was it actually spiritual? How much was it? How much did you know?

I don't think I knew much at all. Like, I couldn't have even pronounced half of the controversies that were, you know, quelled at the Council of Nicaea. I don't know about Arias and Athanasia's battling it out. And given how integral these kinds of ideas are to the doctrines of Catholicism, it's very difficult to imagine that any 10-year-old

is really that religious. Did I believe in God? I think so. How did you feel when you walked into a church? bored but then maybe that's just Catholicism for you I was so young that it's hard to remember but I do remember for example once being on a school trip

and I think I was praying a rosary at the back of the bus and I have this image in my head that the other kids were kind of making fun of me for it but I might have just misremembered that you know how you like it because that's kind of the image that I'm trying to get across in my head is that I'm like the weird kid doing a rosary at the back

I know I did that at some point so I must have had some kind of devotion at that age, but it's difficult to know what that looks like for someone that young. My dad has been an atheist for as long as I've been alive. His dad died when he was young, and he just instantly became an atheist, as far as I can tell. And it's interesting how that kind of experience pushes some people head first into religion and some people head first into atheism. And I totally understand both of those.

Was your mom then religious a bit? It's sort of nominally Catholic, but I'm not sure how much she, how much. she, like, knew about it or believed it fully. I mean, she went to church. So since you're not 60 years old, how did you become an altar boy in England with a father who's an atheist and a mother who's nominally Catholic? It must be what Muslims called the Fitra, the sort of natural longing towards God that dragged me there. I'm not sure. But, yeah, and I mean, that's great. No, practically, I don't know. I mean, because my maternal side, maternal side of the family were nominally Catholic, but also, like, practice, you know.

We go to church. That is what we do. This is how we bring you up. This is how it goes. Never super steadfast, but enough that it was like, yeah, you go to church. I got confirmed. I'm still a Catholic, according to the Catholic Church. It's actually very difficult to leave, if not impossible.

Like, I used to think that you had to, like, write a letter to the bishop officially. And I'm not even sure if you're excommunicated for some reason, if that means that you are no longer Catholic or just, like, a really bad Catholic who gets, like, exiled. But, like, they'll count you a monk. Once you'll confirm, like you're in the club. Yeah, you're in. I like to think they've got the message by now, but who knows? Well, it seems like a lot of Christians. Maybe Catholics don't include themselves in this group, but it seems like you're beloved

by Christians, right? Because a faction of them or some thread of them, because you're such a student of the Bible. Yeah, yeah. Well, I do love the Bible, and I love the character of Jesus. I'm just fascinated by the historicity of Jesus, but it ebbs and flows. So when I'm on a podcast, like I'm speaking to you and I'm saying, it's like what Jesus said and the Christians are going, yeah, man, I love this guy. But then ask me if I think Jesus claimed to be God and you'll see the other side

because I'll be highly suspicious of that. I don't think that that's the case. You don't think he claimed to be God. I don't think the historical Jesus was like claiming to be God. Interestingly, I think he might have been doing so in a way that is sort of in keeping with this Baha'i picture of Jesus because he's making, some strange claims for himself that seem to imply like an eternality, a very special relationship with the father, this kind of stuff. He says, like, I and the father are one. And when pressed

talks about how, like, he's in the father and the father is in him. And he hopes that the disciples will one day be in him, just like he's in the father. This sort of sharing sense. I don't think it's like a numerical identity with Yahweh, for example. But when I say something like that, you know, a lot of Christians will jump down my throat. But that's the nature of being online, is that people who have something to say about it are more likely to say something, and people who disagree with you are more likely to speak. And so I think if I don't say anything controversial, and you just have this baseline noise of general commenters just saying whether they liked it or didn't, yeah, I think the majority

of Christians look at what I'm doing and see that I'm at least trying not to be this new atheist sort of edgy type. I would even think that the way that you just described a relationship between Jesus, God and his disciples probably feels pretty intuitively true to a lot of people who identify as Christian. That's my... People who are like, you know, roughly in our age bracket.

We are not in the same age bracket, but we are representative of, you know, young and younger people, you know? I think so. But then I think a lot of young spiritual types who sort of get attracted to Jesus a bit, like who are willing to annex this character of Jesus into their sort of ungrounded spirituality without taking it wholesale, which I think upsets Christians too.

It's like you'll take some, but you sort of go al-a-cart with the way that you pick your religious teachings. It seems like the highs go like full on. They do sort of take bits from different religions, but they like take the whole thing. It's like, yeah, we sort of really believe that it's all one. Yeah. And the opposite side of that is like, I'll have a bit of this and a bit of that. have the Jesus' moral teaching on sermon on the Mount, but we'll get rid of the apocalypticism

or we'll get rid of the special relationship to the father or the whole let's give up all of our money kind of thing, you know. Yeah. So I think it's like what we do is we see the eternal, again, it's like there's the eternity, every teachings of every manifestation have an eternal quality and then a temporal quality. And the temporal is always meant to fall away, always. Like, as are Baha'u'llah's social teachings. They're meant to become irrelevant. That's the point of evolution. That's the point of progress.

Hopefully, all laws become irrelevant because we don't need them in the same way. We need finer and finer and finer more refined and more refined laws. Subtler laws, you know? I suppose it used to require stones, you know what I mean, in some sense, whichever ones those were. It does not require that now, you know? Have you seen these guys who, go around breaking archaic laws, which are still technically on the books, like, especially in

England. Like legal laws, not. Yeah. I've not heard. No, that's interesting. Yeah, like, I'm pretty sure that I think it's illegal to like carry a fish in public suspiciously or something like that. And so, you know, or there are a bunch of things like that, which are technically illegal. It's still technically illegal in the United Kingdom to call for the abolition of the monarchy as well. That's still actually on the statute book. I think it was the Guardian newspaper. who like went to the Supreme Court and were like, we're pretty sure it's still illegal to say that, you know, we should be a republic.

And the court first said, no, no, no, that's ridiculous. And then had to revise it and issue an apology and say, yeah, it's, it's still illegal. But it's that, it's that thing where like, obviously that made sense once upon a time. And that might even, as myself being not a massive fan of the British monarchy, I can totally understand how there's a time and a place where this Hobbesian

leviathan aesthetic of watching the king get executed, like from your bedroom window and being absolutely terrified and the anarchy resulting will make you go, yeah, let's set up the monarchy in the time and place. But now we have parliament

and they seem to do the trip pretty well, at least for now. Maybe it's something similar going on here. It's hard to say. But I do find it really interesting. And speaking to rain before as well, it was like my first introduction to anything about the Baha'i faith.

I think I hadn't even heard of it until I sort of was going to meet rain. I think that was the first time I ever came across it, which is surprising to me. Something that a quote comes to mind. Let's see if I, the world's equilibrium has been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new world order, mankind's ordered life. life hath been revolutionized to the agency of this unique, this wondrous system, the likes of which mortal eyes have never witnessed. So to me, what we've been talking about and what we've been always sort of what we're,

what I feel is though I'm often muddling through because I'm not as studied as you are, let alone some of your guests. You know, Baha'u'llah came in 1844. Um, at least that was when his, that was when the declaration was made, which now inaugurates a new cycle for all of humanity, regardless of how you subscribe, believe, see yourself. No one watching this, no one alive now was alive then. No one has experienced truly living in a different time

than we live now. What is characterized life on planet Earth for humanity since this time began has been complete disorder and disruption of every previously existing tradition, norm, and system for governance, right? Every... Think about it. Every single one of them. You know, when Baha'u'llah came, the world was mostly ruled through monarchies.

Now, it's not. There's very few of them left. You know, and they have almost no relevance. Yeah. You can make a show on Netflix about them, and people are more excited about that than the real monarchy. That's right. You know what I mean?

Like, we live in an era where... We have never been, we have never understood what equilibrium meant hundreds of years ago. We can theorize about it. We can read about it. We will never conceive or understand it really truly because we have been living in an age of disequilibrium that has been upset through the vibrating influence of this, this new manifestation of God. And in this sense, it's to say a name, to ascribe it to a person, is very difficult.

You know, the name, Baha'u'llah, does something new, because most people have not. not hurt it and to then study the body of teachings and writings that come along with this vibrating influence. Also, most people have not done it. So therefore, it's really, really advantageous for us all to study and become aware of it, to take it into account as a very significant resource that actually makes some pretty significant claims about the nature and the purpose and the reason for this upsetting influence, where we have been in a constant, say of disequilibrium, and actually hardly anyone can identify, you know, the root cause. Is there one cause?

The same way that science is seeking for a theory of everything. Can we sort of name mathematically the sort of primary impulse, the most root thing? Well, can we also do that for, for, you know, our spiritual, our political, our social, our cultural reality? Why is the world in the state that it's in right now? Why? Bahá'u'llah would say. I shouldn't say what Baha'u'll I would say,

what I understand of Baha'u'llah's writings is that the prime cause is our disunity. And that actually what we are approaching is, in order for any of the problems of the world to be addressed, we actually first need to address its disunity. So we first need to establish unity before anything else. And what's ironic about that, or what's interesting about that,

is that most, I think, think systems of thought would have us approach every other ailment the world is faced with, every problem. We would address those before we would finally get to, in its culminating stage, the eventual nearly impossible unification of the planet. And actually, Baha'u'llah is saying, no, no, no, no, no, we need to do that first. And so then the question becomes, what on Earth would or could ever even possibly unite the entire world right now before peace is established, before well-being is established, before there is universal justice actually implemented and existing and cultured and fostered?

I mean, so then that becomes a question of, I think, actually, of all things, identity. At what level of identity can we go where we are all. the same. And that is the soul, you know? And it's a terribly short and small word with so many unique connotations for every person listening. So in some ways, it's a really limited and imperfect word that I don't like to use. But what it gets at is what is that level of being where you exist? You are not just your body, let alone your clothes or your nationality or the color of your skin, you are a unique configuration of characters, of attributes, which we can call human, but which are ultimately divine, those like dignity, honor, truth, nobility, the pursuit

of justice, mercy, forgiveness, patience, kindness, compassion, love. You know, the list is essentially infinite. These are the things that we care about most. you know i think these are the things that anybody cares about the most is actually it is our character and it is this level of identity that we are being called to recognize in one another i might disagree with you to a point of violent thought hopefully not violent action you know so what is it going to take for me to resist my sort of primary animal nervous system impulse to just feel rage or to shut down and want to flee whatever it is how can i overcome that um i need to see in your character something that i agree with hmm between me and you it's very easy like you're so and not

that there's other things i disagree with but you know it's so easy to see your your your your like curiosity your fascination with with with religious thought because you because you want to learn and you and your ability to listen to other people and engage in like conversation that I think transcends debate, you know, I love that. And I think that it's something that we are sorely lacking now, you know, at a time that it couldn't be more vital. Well, thank you. And I agree with you that it's necessary.

And I still sometimes do debates, but I'm doing them less. Because like you say, they're fun. I've always said that they're theater. And there's nothing wrong with theater. As long as you know it's theater. That's right. You've got to know that it's like a boxing match. It will tell you who's the better boxer, but it won't tell you who's the better fighter.

It won't tell you who would actually flatten the other one if you're on the street. I've never heard that particular analogy. That's a great analogy. It's a different kind of sport. I mean, you can become the world's best boxer without learning how to throw a kick. Yeah. And you'd be screwed in the street fight. Yeah, right.

And it's the same thing with debating. That's why Christopher Hitchens or his ilk would get. flawed if he tried to write academically, which is why his books don't have any footnotes in them. But in the debate sphere, he reign supreme. It sounds like unity is like the key words there. It was the fundamental animating principle. Yeah, because like it seems like if you had to sum up in one word various world religions or philosophies, you can kind of do it. Like for Christians, the answer is obviously love. Like love is the Christian thing. That's their word. For Islam, arguably it might be more something like submission.

But then maybe that sort of means the same thing. But that's the word that comes to mind for a lot of people. That's what Islam is. For the atheist rationalist type, in their own description, it might be like truth or reason or something. So for the Baha'i faith, that word, would it be something like unity? I do think in the way that you just arched it out with the others, yes. I think unity is the best word for it.

The power of unity. Is there a Baha'i, like, evangelical strategy? Because it's different religion. What that mean? Is evangelical mean like a proselytization? I mean, as in like proselytizing, yeah. So we have a law against that. We cannot proselytize.

So what counts? It's a good question, because, I mean, I technically speaking, what I'm doing? Yeah, you better be careful. You know, like, what does proselytize actually mean? Does it mean to attempt to convert others? I suppose, I actually don't know what the exact definition of proselytize is. But yeah, let's say that. So you're not allowed to, like, you're not allowed to, like,

Yeah, definitely not, because, I mean, you know, the first principle of, like, becoming a Baha'i is the principle of independent investigation. You actually cannot be born a Baha'i. I mean, of course, you know, children can call themselves Baha'is. They can live their lives as Baha'is. But they need to, as Raine, you know, I think spoke about, is like he always knew about that principle. He spent a time where he needed and wanted to investigate, you know, not only the other faiths, but, like, other ways of being and living i don't want to speak for him i mean and he says he sort of came back to yeah you know uh but you know you know you have to as a bahai you in order to declare your faith formally and and formally become a bahai you you you are abiding by this principle which is that no one is forcing coercing or somebody might be encouraging you to do it i suppose but no but no door knocking. Certainly not. And I mean, it really is, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a really, really fundamental to, to what we're meant to, to be as Baha's. Of course, yeah, you know,

the Baha'i community like any other is, is imperfect and it's, and we're learning about our teachings, you know, we're learning about our own teachings, how to embody them. Um, and we're trying to recognize where else anyone else in the world is already embodying parts of our teachings better than we are, because that, they understand implicitly things about this, you know. That's really, really, so as a Baha'i, I think maybe the way we approach the problem of proselytation or evangelism, what would that be? Evangelism? Evangelism, yes, yeah.

Would be simply that we want, you know, if we believe in Baha'u'llah's claims, what we want to do is we actually want to just share this resource that most people don't know about. Yeah, sure. Just consider this too. And read this book. We're not to even say consider this to become a Baha'i. Consider this because it's a resource. Yeah. Consider this as a resource.

Use it to, you know, I think with my friends who, um, my friends who are religious, I guess in my case would probably mostly be like Christians, some Muslims, maybe a few people who are Hindu, you know, I've had the experience that when we, when we get together and sort meditate on some of the Baha'i teachings, it, it vivifies their own faith, you know? Yeah. And then, you know, my highly intellectual, uh, uh, atheistic friends, I think, what we tend to talk about a lot is, you know, the, the, the, the incredible capacity that science has to reveal truth and the nature of reality. Um, definitely never trying to convert anybody. It doesn't work anyway, you know, it just doesn't, I mean, I, like,

Conversion seems to be the problem of religion today, is that it's a superficial solution to a more fundamental problem. Yeah, and there are these kinds of, some of these laws that we're talking about, which maybe are, as a Baha'i would see them as archaic, like, to do with apostasy, and what you're allowed to do once you believe and, like, how leaving a faith can be. So, so, like, you know, within Islam, there are sects which will punish people with the death penalty, just believing, which, might be an effective way of retaining people as nominal Muslims but probably doesn't capture the heart right right right right but that's another instance of something where I look at the Baha'i faith and I think again so sort of so open so so like recognizing so readily that it's about the heart and allowing people to do their own personal investigation yeah agency

and yet attached to these religious traditions which have these sort of that that's the thing that's the conflict that I get the most interest out of exploring with Baha'is, I think, is how that's, like, how that's accounted for. Because you might say, like, it used to be the case that laws about shellfish made sense, but to say that it used to be the case that a law about, like, apostasy would have made sense. It's a harder pill for me to swallow, you know? Well, that's where, look, I don't know the, so let's approach this theoretically rather than me saying,

like, actually, this is what it is. Of course, I don't, you know. We have a different view of mortality now than humanity has had throughout its evolution. Yeah. People didn't used to live as long. I suppose there were some times where people lived longer. You know, what it really would have been like to live two and a half thousand years ago, we cannot imagine.

Yeah. We simply cannot imagine. I agree. On so many counts. And the way death was viewed, the way punishment and reward was viewed, even just what was social cohesion? You know, I mean, again, one of the roles of these manifestations have had throughout time is, like, at one point, it was difficult to keep a family together. Not because of the reason it is now, but because it was like, you know, it was difficult to survive, period. Yeah, right.

It was difficult to survive as a human organism. It's impossible to know what it was like. What was the mindset? You think you might be able to put yourself in it. No. I've got a friend who's really good at doing. He's been on the show. He's called Sheehan.

He's the cultural tutor on the internet. And he's really interested in history. And he's constantly finding ways to remind me that life was not. Like, I just remembered distinctly sort of, I think we were like by the river. And him just explaining to me what it would have been like for like the, the Vikings to just show up. It's like, you just, you just, someone who runs up to you and they tell, you know, the Vikings they're here, they've started burning down the city, they're killing the men, they're taking

the women, and more are on the way. And something about the way that he managed to like, I'm like, yeah, right, I just do not know what it would have been like to live in a time of that kind of thing could have happened, you know? It's like incomprehensible. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, that level of atrocity, unfortunately, is of course, still happening so ironically in some places not many anymore but there's places right so not on the sen or the thames right so i actually think so i'm with you on that yeah to me

my version of trying to appreciate what life really would have been like is like so when something atrocious wasn't happening it was just a day like yeah what was birth like yeah yeah what was not ever brushing your teeth like what was knowing that water is always 1.6 miles away but you also have no idea to measure that you measure that do you measure it do you measure anything you know what do you do before the sun comes up if you're lucky you have a candle how do you light that candle what do you spend your time doing yeah what do you look out with that candle yeah yeah what i mean like yeah that is a radically different way of being and so in that context you know in that context laws which are punishable by death or whatever again i'm not i'm not

apologizing for any anything like that yeah however i know that they applied to a different a radically different place in time where mortality was not um i don't i don't think it was as precious as it is now because death death was as commonplace as birth and life we weren't divorced from its organic place in the world or our organic place in the world sure we we we you know i think versions of atheism and agnosticism i've actually always existed their own you know every culture has its own, like, you know, I don't know, materialists, its own divines, its own philosophers, whatever. But I think that for the most part, you know, we seem to be now, as intellectually gifted as we've become as a species, we seem to be more divorced from just some simple

matter of fact of life, you know? And death was one of them. Death was just one of them. And I just don't think that, that we saw it the same way. Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, death is, we don't even think about it. You don't bring it up in polite company. Yeah. Whereas it used to just be everywhere, you know. Yeah, it was impossible to, to ignore. And I think that instilled people with a bit more gratitude for the same, the same reason. Like, it's, it's not, it's why I've always said that I'm a fan of a secular grace before a meal. Not because I'm thankful for that particular meal, although I am. It's just like a good moment. It's like washing your hands when you go to the bathroom. Like it's just a good interval at which to just remind yourself

to stay clean. It's a good interval eating food to just stop and remind yourself to be. And usually when people say grace, they don't just say thank you for this food. They say, oh, thank you for the company. Thank you for today. Thank you for this. Thank you for that. And I suppose it's it's easier to do that when you've narrowly escaped death like three times that day. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, maybe we need a bit more proximity to death. Maybe we need to talk about it more. I definitely think so.

I mean, you know, that's what to me prayer is. Prayer is communication with the other side. Yeah, sure. Okay, so finally then, pushing this to the very end, eschatology, do Baha'i... Yeah, what does that word mean? I feel like going and out of knowing what that word means. Study of like sort of end times or like what happens after you die. I don't know what the actual etymology of eschatology is, but afterlife picture.

What do Baha'i's think happens when you die? Something similar to what we think happens after birth. So when you're in the womb, you spend quite a long time there from your own vantage point. You started out as I think a single cell. yeah i guess i guess i'm not an embryologist yeah yeah at some point maybe two yeah right at some point you're two and then you're more less than less than 10 you evolve you evolve at a rate that is staggering staggering um you do it in a world that you know which is relative to the world you're going to be born into later very dark and small but you don't know that because you actually

don't even have eyes to perceive it or a mind to think about it or experience it. You don't even have a nervous system really to record any of it. But you're developing those things. Interesting, they're developing all of those things for a place that you don't need them for where you are now. You're in the womb. You don't need a nervous system. You don't need lungs to breathe air. You can't breathe air yet. You don't need eyes to see. There's no light in there yet. You don't need any of the powers you're developing, really, in that womb. However, where you are and it's all you know and eventually when you leave it uh there's a certain kind of death it's a bit extreme probably a bit terrified you don't know what's going to happen um and then you leave

it and you're suddenly somewhere that you realize you've always been that is more expansive full of more light inconceivable to your mind then so much show that you need many many others all of those who came before you to help you to guide you in this world that they've been living in for some time but still don't know everything about that's what the afterlife is like it's just like this it's here yet it is not it is lighter yet it's inconceivable um those who have gone there before us are waiting for us uh the soul and the mind and consciousness is all just eternally continuous we progress through infinite worlds in this way um this first life has uh uh a purpose of of teaching us and orienting us and preparing us for this next life it is quite mysterious actually

that if this is true, it's not more explicitly taught or known or understood. And that is the strange and mysterious nature of God's way of teaching us and for our need to learn, actually. So that's, you know, from this sense, God is not a sort of a pointlessly mysterious or opaque teacher. Presumably God is teaching us in the way that we most benefit from.

So if this is opaque to us, And if this sounds bizarre as I say it, you know, well, there's a reason for its opakness. There's a reason for, or it's opacity, I suppose I should say. Yeah. There's a reason for it to be this way. And there's actually a book about this called The Purpose of Physical Reality by John Hatcher, who's a Baha'i philosopher who I think you would really love.

Incredible book. So the afterlife. is just a continuity of existence. There are a lot of writings about it in the Baha'i writings. Is there any sense in which, if you're good, you go somewhere nicer, if you're bad, you go somewhere worse, or is it just... Not in the sense that, like, yeah, heaven and hell, that sort of thing. So, so my understanding of what the Baha'i teachings say about that

is that heaven and hell are constant states of being, or rather, I shouldn't say constant states of being, that we are constantly in a state of being which can reflect a degree of heaven or hell. You know, any kind of spiritual, which is to say moral, intellectual, philosophical regression is hell. Any kind of spiritual progress, which is moral, intellectual, emotional, philosophical progress,

that's heaven. You know, that which used to be heaven for you, if you've progressed, becomes hell, which is, like, let me think of an example. Well, in the body, I think an example would be cortisol. Cortisol used to save lives. Now it ends them. Cortisol used to be a chemical which alerted the systems of the body to go because it needed to go.

You know, there is an animal close by. You need to save your family or yourself. You need to get out. Cortisol used to be, you know, heaven it used to be a teaching in a way it used to be you know a north start now um cortisol is like is as i understand it it's slowly killing us because let me see if i can keep rocking this metaphor through um um well we have a really distorted relationship to it i suppose we we no longer have stress response to appropriate stimulus we do we actually don't again we seem to be in an age

of misapprehending and misapplying our nature. And so therefore, we have really disordered responses to all kinds of stimulus. Yeah. Cortisol being one of them, you know? So again, what used to be heaven becomes hell. That's a really, really obtuse answer to your question in a way, so forgive me.

But like, you know, we go on, our state of mind is our heaven or our hell. Yeah. Are you happy or are you sad? What is the cause? Do you understand the cause? Like, this is heaven and- And that sort of continues.

It continues absolutely. Like, yeah, always. And again, as I, I'm saying these things emphatically because it's like, it's a really, really encouraging and empowering framework by which to view the human being, I think, you know? So it's like, so I get excited about it. I don't mean to state it emphatically because I want to be authoritative either in, you know, you know what I means? But it's, you know, I think it's, I think it's in some ways a radical view.

You know how earlier you were talking about how, you know, money and fame and success don't make people happy and everybody knows this? I was thinking for the religious reflective life, which strives oftentimes for asceticism and humility, might make it worse. Is it difficult to be practicing behind whilst being rich and famous? Yes. The simple and graceful answer would be yes. If I try a longer and less graceful answer, well, why?

I mean, I think even in Islam there's a saying that like it is easier for a camel to pass through the needle's eye than for a rich man to, you know, find God, something like that. It's from the gospels. I'm not sure if it's reproduced in the Quran out. think it is. But yes, one of Jesus's, Jesus is saying. Right. Interestingly, a possible mistranslation, because it's a very weird thing to him to say. Some people, some people think that it's, I think some people think that he actually said something more like a thread going through the eye of the needle, or that the eye of the needle was like a physical location. That's actually my understanding. There's a place where camels would pass through that they

had to get on their knees. There are a few different ideas because it is a little bit. Because it's not impossible. Yeah. Because that, if you were to take it literally, It would be impossible. And it would be a little bit straight. It would be like me saying, like, you know, it's easier for a zeppelin to pass through a little mouse hole. So it's like, okay, but why did you pick a zeppelin? I think every manifestation of God has like these metaphorical sayings, which have a surprisingly literal translation if you find it. And I do my understanding, because it's referenced at some point, I think, by the son of Baha'u'u'llah, and I think this book, some answer questions. I believe it's there. I'm not exactly sure on that. But my understanding is that it is a, is that it was a reference to a place where camels had to get on the gates.

Yeah, yeah. Which is to say simply that it's possible, but it's difficult. and and if you would like to pass through this place well it might be better if you just didn't have a camel which is to say it might be better if you didn't have excessive wealth you know yeah um uh uh yeah it's i think no matter who you are i mean i've heard a saying on uh one of your youtube shorts recently

which i really liked i forget who said it but um christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried. That's right. That's true about really... I don't care of...

It's Chester's and G.K. Chest isn't... Okay. So, that is true about any rigorously applied moral framework. Yeah. Because any moral framework, I would believe, is really trying to be true and right and just, right? So, therefore,

any moral framework is, you know, aspiring to be godlike and therefore it's going to be hard therefore you're going to find yourself at some point challenged with your own hypocrisy i mean that's just try and be married you don't have to have any kind of belief system you'll be challenged with your own hypocrisy there you know like inevitably at some point um and again just to ground this all it's all about human relationships it is about the perfection of human relationships because that is what will lead that is the answer to every problem facing the planet right now, bar none. Try and test it. The answer is the perfection of human relationships. And what else is going to do it? You know, science will help

us. Science is an understanding plenty about the nature of relationships. Maybe the function of them. Can it identify the purpose? Yeah, it's not quite the same. It's not quite the same. the same thing you need nature and purpose you know you need function and philosophy i don't know yeah rain told me a quote and i can't remember who it was who who who where the quote was from but we were talking about this stuff and him being behind as well the quote was uh the something like the finger that points at the moon is not the moon yeah i remember that you know and i think it applies in a slightly different context but it's it's the same thing don't don't mistake like the mechanism by which we might learn about a thing for like an explanation of the thing

or for the thing itself, you know, you can scientifically explain a lot of things in this world without actually, well, you can describe them, let's say, or you can go into detail and explain its organization or its constituent parts, but you go no further towards telling us why it's there, telling us what it is, or indeed having any kind of interactional relationship with it. And I think that's worth keeping in mind. Yeah. And Bajley, thank you so much for your time. It's been fun. Thank you for bearing with my tangential and rambling mind.

But, you know, the questions that you're asking matter a lot to me. And I think they're so difficult to answer. And I'm grateful that you have this platform and that you've invited me on. Absolutely. Well, cool. That'll do the trip. Yeah. Nice.