Diana Walsh Pasulka: Aliens, Technology, Religion & the Nature of Belief | Lex Fridman Podcast #149

The following is a conversation with Diana Walsh Basalka, a professor of philosophy and Religion at UNCW and author of American UFOs Religion and Technology. This book is one of the most fascinating explorations of the interconnected nature of technology, belief and the mystery of alien intelligence. Quick mention of our sponsors Element Electrolyte Drink, Grammarly Writing plugin, Business wars podcast and Cash App. So the choice is health, Grammar, knowledge or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say, as I did in the recent video on how many intelligent alien civilizations are out there, that the nature of alien life, intelligence, and how they might communicate with us humans is likely stranger than we imagine and perhaps stranger than we can imagine. What is most fascinating to me is how the belief in the communication with such civilizations changes people's understanding of the world. And as Diana argues, the technology we create. Technological innovation itself seems to manifest the mythology in our collective intelligence that turns the seemingly impossible into reality. Yet a matter of years, through the belief of individual humans that carry out that innovation. The nature and power of this belief in both technology and extraterrestrial intelligence is mysterious and fascinating, perhaps holding the key to us humans understanding our own mind, our consciousness, and engineering versions of it in the machines we create. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe, review it on Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman. And now, here's my conversation with Diana Walsh. Basalka, you are a scholar of religious belief or belief in general. So the fascinating question, what do you think is the difference between our beliefs and objective reality? What is real? Period?

Sure. What is real? Easy question. So first let me start with belief. So belief is generally there are different definitions of belief, just just as there are different definitions of what is real. Okay, so for belief in my field, it would be attitudes toward something that dictate our actions. Okay, so we believe the sun is going to rise tomorrow. Therefore, we act as if it will rise tomorrow. All right? Beliefs can be wrong. For a long time, people believed, and actually some still do, that the Earth was flat. Okay, well, that's obviously an erroneous belief. So beliefs can be wrong. Now, the bigger question that philosophers ask is, is this belief accurate toward what we consider to be objective reality? So now let me go to objective reality. So what is real? I don't think we can actually obtain a correct understanding of what is real. And in that sense, I have to refer to a philosopher again, and that would be Immanuel Kant. So Immanuel Kant is one of the. He was basically in the 1750s. He wrote critiques of reason and things like that. So he said, well, if you're a philosopher or have any kind of understanding of Western history, you know who he is. He had this idea that we can actually never get to the thing in itself. Okay, so. And he called that the noumenal, the thing in itself. He said this. Let's take this table, for instance, that you and I are talking across. So this thing is a table. You and I both know that we assume it's real. We believe in it because we put our water on it and our water stays on it. Okay? However can we know this thing in and of itself as a table? So that would be what he then would call the phenomenal. How do we know that that phenomena exists as we know it is. Okay. How do we know. We use our faculties, so we use our senses and things like that. But again, even our senses can be wrong. So I've been on committees just recently, this year, last year, for hiring professors in my department who are philosophers and every. And we're hiring metaphysicians and, you know, people who are thinking about the nature of reality. And basically what. What I've learned from them. Yeah, they're very.

I'd love to attend those faculty talks, metaphysics professors.

What's funny is that for each one of them, I'm convinced each time. They all say different things, but they're so convincing, I'm like, yes, hire that one. Right.

Is it like historical philosophy?

No, no, they're.

They have an actual belief. They're practicing metaphysics. Metaphysicians.

Yes. So what they do is they come and they're usually excellent philosophers from Harvard or, you know, USC or whatever. You know, they come and they give what's called a job talk. That's what philosopher. Well, every academic does a job talk in order to get a. They talk to us about a department, about what they do. And so it so happens that we need a metaphysician, and now we're hiring again, for one. And so I've learned. I've learned a lot about metaphysics in the last year, and this is what I've learned, that they use physics as a basis for understanding what we can know about what is real. And what is real is really difficult to pin down. And so your question is, what is belief? Well, belief. Does it correspond to reality? That's the question. I would Ask. And first, we don't even know what is real. So the table, they would say, how do we know that the table even exists? Well, how do we differentiate it from the floor, for example? So these are the questions that philosophers are asking. No one else is, of course, but philosophers are asking these questions, and they have different answers for it. So I would say that it's very difficult to know what is real. And in fact, what I do usually is, I paraphrase my friend and colleague, Brother Guy Consolmagno. He's a Jesuit priest. He's also an astronomer, and he's the director of the Vatican Observatory. And so he says this. He's a very smart person. He says, well, well, truth is a moving target, you know, so. So basically, to know what is real out there, like gravity or something like that, you've got to approximate it. And as human beings, you know, we have senses to tell us what at least, so we don't get hurt. You know, we're not going to fall off a building or something like that. We have eyes to see and things like that, so we can approximate what reality is, but we're never going to get to it unless we develop better senses. Okay. And I think that that is what we are in the process of doing. We're developing better senses. We have telescopes, we have microscopes, we have, you know, extensions of ourselves, which are now called technology. And we can get to a better understanding of what reality is and what the objective world is. And therefore, our beliefs can be honed. So we can get better beliefs, more accurate beliefs. But can we get beliefs that actually correspond to reality? Um, not in any precise way, but in approximate ways. So I hope that's not, like, too big an answer to your question.

Well, do you think beliefs are, in themselves can become reality? I mean. So you've now adapted the. In this little bit of a conversation, adapted the metaphysician view of reality, which is the physics. Yes, but, you know, we humans kind of operate in the space of ideas very much so. Like, we've kind of in the collective intelligence of human beings, have come up with a set of ideas that persist in the minds of these many people, and they become quite strong and powerful, like, in terms of, like, impact on our lives. They can have sometimes more impact than this table does, than the physics.

Yeah, I agree.

And in that sense, is there some sense in which our beliefs are reality even if they're not connected to the physics?

Yes. Even if they're not real? Yeah, even if. Okay, so. Yes, absolutely. So our Beliefs are tremendously. They. They create social effects. Absolutely. There was a belief that. I'm going to use this example. There was a belief back in the day. And we're talking about. When I say back in the day, I'm a historian, so I'm talking about like a thousand years ago. Right. That women had no souls. Okay? So look, I don't know if human beings have souls. I can tell you this, though, that if human beings have souls, probably animals do, too. That's my own personal belief. That's not a professor belief there. But there was this belief among the Catholic magisterium, which is. Runs Europe, that women had no souls. So they had to have this big meeting about it. You know, did women have souls? But that belief had consequences for women. I mean, women were treated and have been treated as if they didn't have souls. Okay? So there's.

And the soul was really the essence of the human being.

It was. It's the. It's called the animus, right? It's what is the. The essence of what is. It's eternal, you know, when women weren't eternal. Here's another example. Okay? This is an example from my own research. All right? So there in the Catholic tradition, there's this idea of purgatory, Hell and heaven. And these are three destinations that people can go to when they die. And if you're great, you go to heaven automatically and you're considered a saint. If you're okay, you go to purgatory, right? And you suffer for a time and then get back into heaven. If you're terrible, you go to hell. Right? Okay. Well, there was a place that the Catholics determined. And this. This was a belief for a long time, like a thousand years or more, and it was called limbo, all right? And limbo comes from the Latin limbus, and it means edge. And it was either on the edge of hell or on the edge of heaven. No one really could determine which it was. No. Historians are like, well, this person says it was on the edge of heaven. Well, listen, this was a terrible. First of all, there is no limbo anymore. In 2007, Benedict, the then Pope, got rid of the idea that there was limbo. Okay? So Catholics kind of went crazy because they didn't really know. They forgot that limbo existed, and they thought it was purgatory. And they said, how could you get rid of purgatory? But actually, he just got rid of.

This idea of limbo, distinct thing from purgatory.

It was.

And by the way, people should know they have a Book on purgatory that came before American Cosmic.

Yes, I wrote a book on purgatory yet.

Anyway, so limbo is a distinct thing from purgatory.

Yeah. And the types of people who go to limbo happen to be virtuous pagans. Okay. Like Socrates or somebody like that, and children who weren't baptized. So think of this. Think of for like more than a thousand years, mothers and fathers gave birth to babies who weren't baptized and couldn't be buried with their family in these burial. And, you know, they. Then they couldn't be reunited with them in heaven. Think of the pain and suffering that that caused. And that was nothing. Limbo's nothing. Yet the belief in it caused untold suffering. And that's just a small example.

And that was as real to them.

It was absolutely real. I mean, the effects were real, let's put it that way. The place itself, not real, but the families themselves.

Do you think they really believed it?

They totally believed it.

As much as the table is real.

Yes, I've read. Listen, we have trigger warnings today, right. So don't read this. It's going to make you upset. Okay, History, primary sources, no trigger warnings. Okay. So you're going through like, you know, somebody's diary from 1400, and you hear the suffering and pain that they went through. There were times in my research where I'd have to put my primary source down, you know, and just basically go outside and take a walk because it was so horrific. I knew it was true because they wouldn't write something, you know, they're not going to write in their diary, something that's not true. And it was horrible. So, yes, these people went through untold suffering for nothing, for, you know, they. Because they had an erroneous belief, but they didn't know it was erroneous.

So it was real to them.

Yeah.

So I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman. He has this idea that in terms of the distance we are from being able to know the reality which is there, the physics reality is we're actually really, really, really, really far away from that.

Yeah.

So like, it's, I think his ideas that are basically like completely detached from it.

Yes.

What's your sense? How close are we to the reality? We'll talk about a bunch of ideas about our beliefs in technology and. And beyond. But in terms of what is actually real from a physical sense, how close are we to understanding that?

Pretty far. I'm going to use examples from what I do. Okay. So this idea that we're suspicious of what we actually think is real, is not new. Of course, it goes back a long time. Thousands of years, in fact. And philosophers. I. I'm not actually technically a philosopher, but I was one. I'm a. I'm a professor of religious studies.

Yeah. What do you introduce yourself at? Like, at a bar. When the bartend asks, what do you do?

I never tell people what I do, especially on airplanes. It's a bad idea.

Okay.

So generally, if they push, though, I say, you know, I'm the chair of philosophy and religion, although I stepped down last year, so I'm no longer the chair. But I. I've. I have, like, a master's degree in philosophy, and I was a philosophy major, and I've studied floss. I still study philosophy. So I integrate it into my research. All right, so this idea that we can't know, we're suspicious of what we know. It's called external world skepticism. That's the official philosophical name for it. Our faculties and our senses don't give us accurate perceptions of what is there. Okay. Especially at a quantum level or a molecular level. I mean, that's just obvious. So. Yeah, so I think that you're. The person you mentioned is correct in that I think we're far away from it.

I think you're talking about our direct senses. But, you know, we have tools, measurement tools, from microscopes to all the tools of astronomy, cosmology, that gives us a sense of the big universe and also the sense of the very small. Do you think there's some other things that are completely sort of other dimensions? Or there's ideas of panpsychism, that consciousness permeates all matter, that that's. There's, like, fundamental forces of physics we're not even aware of yet. Like.

Oh, absolutely. I do think. And this is why I write about technology, and I. I mean, that's actually what I specialize in, is belief in technology with respect to religion. So in my opinion, thank goodness for. Thank for technology, because where would we be without it? I mean, frankly, I think that it's like Marshall McLuhan was the person who said technology is like an extension of our senses. And I absolutely believe that to be true. I think that we're lucky that we, you know, that Prometheus gave us technology, okay, and that we use it and we're making it better and better and better and better. And that makes us more efficient. It makes us more efficient as a species. And, like, my point is that I think that our instruments. I mean, I don't want to be a religious technologist, you know, but our. Our. Our instruments will save us. I mean, they're already making life better for us.

You think it's important that they also help us understand reality more directly, more deeply.

I think directly is a. Is better than deeply. I think directly. More directly is probably a more accurate term for what you're trying to, I think, ask me, you know, can we actually. I mean, I think you're asking me that question that Kant basically was trying to get at was, can we know the thing in itself? Can we know that? Can we have, like, some kind of, like, intense knowing of it? It's almost mystical. And I would say that that's where religion comes in. Okay. That's where we talk about religion. And if I may also go back to Immanuel Kant, this idea that he just before he died, just as he died, he was working on, he did this critique of reason where basically he believed. He. He basically talks about, can we know what's real? He basically has this long, you know, the question, can we know what's real? And then, you know, a thousand pages later, no, I'll just give you the rundown. Okay, so. Okay.

Spoiler alert.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, then he does this other critique. And. Okay, so he does, like, three critiques. Then he does this critique of judgment. Okay, well, judgment is this other thing altogether. And I think that that's what you're getting at. So how do we know things? How can we know things really intensely and intimately? And I think that he thought that judgment was the idea that we can actually know the thing in itself. And he was working on that as he died, and then he never finished it. Hannah Arendt, another philosopher of the 20th century, took it up, took up the Critique of Judgment, and tried to finish it.

Oh, why the word judgment?

Because judgment. Think about it. When you see a work of art, who judges that to be decent? Okay, so there is a group of people who come to the decision that that's rotten, or, you know, that's pretty good, you know, like, I noticed that you like to play guitar. Well, you choose music that I happen to like too. Okay. So you and I both have a, you know, sense of judgment. It's a sense. So he said there's a sense that some people have. Why do certain communities have a similar sense? What. What dictates that? And so he was working on that. He. He thought it had something to do with the knowledge, the intimate knowledge of the thing in itself. Yeah. So another philosopher that philosophers actually don't like at all, but religious studies people do is Martin Heidegger. So Martin Heidegger has some great essays. One is called what is a Work of Art? And again, he gets to, you know, he talks about Van Gogh and Van Gogh's shoes. You know, that picture, the painting Van Gogh's shoes, It's really a really intense picture. It's just shoes. It's. But it's a. It's an amazing painting of shoes. And I think everybody can agree that's a cool picture of shoes. Right. And so why, you know, the question is, why is that a cool picture of shoes? You know, what kind of knowledge are we accessing to determine that indeed, that that works. Right. And in fact, we still like it.

So basically, the. The nature of knowledge and what does it represent? It can operate in the space of. That's detached from reality, or can it ultimately represent reality? I guess that's the. Is. That's the space of metaphysics. Is that. Is that.

Yeah. So what can we know is actually called epistemology?

Epistemology.

But metaphysics is. Is basically what is the nature of reality.

Right. And those intersect.

Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of things intersect in philosophy. We just have fancy names for them.

Another non philosopher that may be considered a philosopher, since we're talking about reality, is Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. What are your thoughts on her sense of taking this idea of reality, calling her philosophy Objectivism, and kind of starting at the idea that you really could know everything and it's pretty obvious. And then from that you can derive an ethics about how to live life, like, what is the. What is the good ethical life and all the virtue of selfishness, all that kind of stuff. So you talk to a lot of academic philosophers. So I'd be curious to see from the perspective of, like, is she somebody that's taken seriously at all, why she dismissed, as I see from my distant perspective, by serious philosophers and also, like, your own personal thoughts of, like, is there some interesting bits that you find inspiring in her work or not?

Okay, so Ayn Rand, I've had so many exceedingly intelligent students basically give me her books and basically say, please, Dr. Basilka, read this book and I'll tell them, yes, thank you. I've read this book before and then want to engage in, you know, let me put it this way. They're religious about Ayn Rand, okay, so to them, Ayn Rand represents some type of way of life. Right? Her Objectivism. Now, why is she not taken seriously by philosophers in general? Well, let me Put it this way, philosophers in general tend to get pretty. I guess you could call it. They're. They're kind of scientists, but with words I always call philosophy. When I describe it to someone who's going to take a philosophy class, I say it's basically math problems, like word math problems. Okay. So that's basically what it is.

So they take words very seriously, and.

They'Re very formal and definitions very seriously. Yeah, so they all want to get on the same page. So they're not. So there is no confusion. So for Ayn Rand to basically say you can know everything and you know, and establish ethics from that, I think philosophers automatically say no. Now, that doesn't mean I say no. In fact, we even. We have at my university, a wonderful business school. And when you walk into the dean of the business school's office, Ayn Rand is everywhere. So. So it's. So I want to say that not all academics are anti Ayn Rand. And in fact, I don't think philosophers are either, except that they don't teach Ayn Rand. Okay. So in one, one sense, you could say that because they don't teach her, they're being exclusive in what they teach. Or very particular, perhaps, is another way to put it.

Yeah, it's hard to know where to place people like her, because, you know, do you put Albert Camus as a philosopher? So I guess, what's the good term for that? Like literary philosophers or whatever the term is. It's annoying to me that the academic philosophers get to own the word philosophy because, like, it's just like, people who think deeply about life is what I think about as philosophy. And, like, to me, it's like, all right, so I know Nietzsche is another person that's probably not respected in the philosophy circles because he is, you know, full of contradictions, full of.

I love Nietzsche. Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher.

Oh, really?

Yes, I absolutely love Nietzsche.

So he's def. You know, I. I love people that are full of ideas, even if they're full of contradictions. And Nietzsche, absolutely. And Ayn Rand is also that. I'm able to look past the obvious ego that's there on the page and the fact that she actually has, in my view, a lot of wrong ideas. But there's a lot of interesting tidbits to pick up. And the same. Same goes with Nietzsche. And I'm. I'm weirded out by the religious aspect here. On both the people who, like, worship Ayn Rand and people who completely dismiss her, I just kind of see it as, oh, can we just read a few interesting things and get inspired by it and move on, as opposed to have a dogmatic. Is there something you find about her work that's interesting to you or her personality or any of that?

Oh, I think she's fascinating. I don't dismiss her. She was a woman who reached a level of success with her mind at a time when that was difficult. So, I mean, she's definitely worth looking at for. For even that reason. But also her idea, I guess, part of the situation with Rand. First of all, I think that her work is. You have to. It's misinterpreted. Okay. And I think that's the same with Nietzsche. Like, a lot of people think that I'm in it. In fact, it is the case that Nietzsche's writing before the 20th century. So he's got the. You know, he's somewhat. His rhetoric is sexist and racist and, you know, of the time period. Right. He was a educated philosopher of that time period. However, his books are amazing, and Nietzsche's philosophy is incredible. And I think that. I think that's what you're saying about Rand, too. And I agree. I mean, I think that. That we get caught up. I mean, likely we should. And we should contextualize these thinkers in the time period within which they are. We should not forgive their. You know, because there were people during Nietzsche's time that were, you know, feminist and not racist and things like that. And, you know, so. But each has merit. I mean, I would say Nietzsche is. And I. You did ask me to talk about some of the books that made the largest impact on me, and Nietzsche's Gay Science is one of them. It's one of the best books ever, in my opinion.

I do think Nietzsche was. I don't know about exactly. Sexist. He certainly was sexist. But it felt like he didn't get laid much in his life. No, it felt like he was extra sexist. I was like, his theories on women are like, all right.

He's pretty angry.

He seems frustrated.

Yeah.

Like, all right, calm down, buddy.

The fate of philosophers.

I just ignore everything she says about women. So can we talk about myth and religion a little bit?

Yes.

I mean, can we start at the beginning, which is like myths? How are they born? There's this collective intelligence amongst us human beings, and we seem to create these beautiful ideas that captivate the minds of millions. How is such a myth born?

Great question. Okay, so that brings us to terminology again. And in my field, we definitely, I think, try not to distinguish between religion. This is Going to be controversial, I think, between religion and myth, because we call other cultures religions, myths. Right. And then we call our myths religions.

And I guess myth has a bad connotation to it that it's not somehow real.

Now, what's interesting is that people like Plato, who lived thousands of years ago, 2500 about, basically made this distinction himself within his own culture, which was Greek. Right. So Plato's a very famous Greek philosopher, and he would say things like this. He would say that he would make a distinction between the reality of the one God or the one. He would call it. He didn't call, call, use the word God, but he's referencing a divinity of. Okay. And he believes in the soul. Okay. So. But he would also say that the gods and goddesses of the Greeks are just myths. So even he would make that distinction again. You know, he would say the population is not too bright, so they believe in these gods and goddesses. But he himself is talking to his students and. And he's basically talking about forms, you know, so, you know, that live in. Seem to live in these other dimensions. Like this table. Let's go back to this table that we're talking around right now. He would say that this table is the instantiation of the form table, and that there is this table that actually exists somewhere. It's where this place where numbers exist, like the number two. Okay. So there we use the number two mathematically, therefore it exists. But have you ever seen a real one? Have you ever seen the real two? No.

No.

Okay, so, but where does it exist? So he says that tables. So he was also talking about things that, you know, he says are real, making a distinction between the people. And. And by the way, he got this from Socrates, is his mentor who was killed by Athens, because he would say such things. People don't like to be told that they. What they believe in is not real. Right.

By the way, his idea of forms is just. You're just making me realize how, like, incredible was that something like that was able to come up with that. I mean, that idea became a myth that the idea of forms. Right. That permeated probably the most influential set of ideas in the history of philosophy. In the history of ideas.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, Plato, we know him for a reason, right?

Yeah. So let's say that we're not. It's a gray area between religious and myths, and maybe not even.

It is gray.

Yeah. So what. How's that idea with like little Plato start and permeate through all society?

Oh, how does it happen? Okay. So there are different ways that religions work. So a lot of people would call the UFO narrative today, like. And this is what I talk about in my book, like a myth. Right, the UFO myth. But a lot of people believe in it. Okay, so how do these things work? Well, what I did was I took. There's a. And Taves at UC Santa Barbara. She's a pretty well known academic who studies religion. And she has this building block definition of religion. Like it builds. Okay. And so she says there are, there are. There are no religious experiences or mythic experiences. There are experiences and then they get interpreted as religious or mythic. Okay. And so I, I use that with the UFO narrative. So I take and I compare it to the religious narrative. So basically what happens. What happens is this, is that a person generally has a very intense experience. It could be with something that they see in the sky, a being, you know, that they see, you know, like Moses in the burning bush or something like that. They tell other people. Okay. And those other people believe them because they say, that guy, let's take you. Okay, Alex. Okay. So you're playing, you know, some of your music. Jimi Hendrix shows up out of the blue, say, Jimi Hendrix, who's. Who does electric church stuff. Right. The electric church movement. So he shows up.

I was. Sorry for small tangent. I was. I'm not aware of. I apologize if I should be. I'm just know how to play all of the songs. Electric Church, is this.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's Jimi Hendrix's thing. Yeah.

That was like a philosophy of his or what?

Yes, yes. So he thought he was. It was like a mission for him. Like a. Like he was a missionary and he was like doing the electric church. It was through his mission of music that he was actually impacting people spiritually. And I, I think you have to agree that his music is really spiritual. Yeah.

Wow, that's so cool to know that there's like a philosophy you there.

Yeah.

I wonder if he's ever written anything.

He's spoken about it many times.

Interesting to actually do some, some research here. Wow. That adds another level of depth. That's awesome. Okay, so.

Okay, so say Lex is playing.

Yeah.

One of his songs. He shows up.

What's your favorite Hendrix song, by the way?

Oh, that's a hard one. I like Castles in the Sand. It's a sad one, but I. I like it.

So I'm playing something.

Yes. I show up and all of a sudden, boom. Just like Elvis does for people. Hendrix shows up. All right. And then you're amazed. And then he tells you something that's very, very significant, and he says, you need to tell other people this. Okay? So then, like, okay, I go on social media. Yes. And you start. And because people believe you and because you are a person of, you know, credibility, people believe you. And so all of a sudden, a movement starts. Okay. And it's the Hendricks movement. It's Hendrix 2 or something like that. You know, we call it something the next iteration of Hendrix. Right. Hendrix lives, but he lives is this vibration. And only Lex can, like, you know, can. Can manifest this vibration. Okay. So, like, this is. This is how religions start. You know, excuse your audience who are religious. I'm actually practicing Catholic. So this is how religion starts. They start with, first off, a contact experience. Not. I mean, not all of them, but a good portion of them. Some person has an experience that's transcendent, sacred to them, and they go and they tell other people. And then those people tell other people. And then something gets written about it. Okay. And then it becomes. Because it's a charismatic movement, people become affected by it. And if. If too many people are affected by it, an institution steps in and tries to control the narrative. So this is what you'd call the beginning of a religion or a myth, A very powerful myth. And so it's almost like a star, right? A star is born. Okay, yeah.

When you say institution, do you mean some other organization that's already powerful doesn't want to become overpowered by this new movement?

Yes, absolutely.

Is this usually governments?

It's usually, yeah. So I have a couple of examples. I use the example of the Christian church in my book because I'm most familiar with the history of Christianity. And, you know, Christianity was started by this Jewish man, and it was a movement that, you know, he was a very powerful, charismatic person. Other people believed in him, and then his followers talked about him. And then other then, you know, usually early Christians, before the three hundreds, were generally people who were disenfranchised because he had a pretty radical idea that, you know, humans should have dignity. And this was pretty radical during that time. So women who didn't have dignity and, you know, slaves who didn't have dignity at the time, converted to Christianity in droves. And so what happened was that all of a sudden it became this belief system that was undercurrent. And then Constantine, who was an elite, had an experience and made Christianity to state religion. And by that time, there were different forms of Christianity, probably hundreds of them. Well, most likely. And Constantine and the people who were powerful with him, decided that their idea, this is the Council of Nicaea now, decided that there was one form, and they called it universal, the one form of Christianity, and this should be it. And so they kind of took out all the other denominations of Christianity and different forms of it. So you can see that a very, very powerful set of beliefs put a culture on fire. Right? And so how did they. They had to deal with that fire somehow. And so they narrativized it. They decided, how do we interpret this? And they interpreted it as they wished. But that wasn't the only interpretation of Christianity. I have another example in the Catholic Church a lot of times, and I'm going to use the example of Faustina. She's a nun and she's Polish. And I think it was in the early 20th century, if not the 1800s, that she had a very powerful many experiences actually, of Jesus. And she saw Jesus with rays coming out of his. His heart. And basically she called this his divine mercy. And it became a devotion in Poland, and it spread. The Catholic Church was not. Not into this at all. Okay. And so they did everything they could to try to suppress Faustina's influence, which was growing and growing and growing and growing. Okay. And so they were very successful in trying to keep her quiet. And she died. Okay. Years later, John Paul ii, Polish, sainted her and created the Divine Mercy devotion, which is worldwide now, and millions and millions of people. But do you see how they. They, you know, completely control.

So fascinating that it. That it just starts with a single. So, like you said, contact experience. Experience is the key word and is your sense that those experiences are legitimate. So it's not.

Yes.

It's all artificially constructed.

Yeah. I think for the most part, there are legitimate experiences that people have. Why would someone want to put themselves through what they go through? Like, why would Jesus want to get crucified? I mean, that's a pretty nasty way to die, you know, why would Faustina bring this upon herself? The people that I meet who've said that they've seen UFOs, that most of them don't want to be known because of the ridicule that goes along with it. So I honestly think that, you know, there are people who are maybe not stable and would like the attention, but for the most part, normal people don't want this attention.

So you mentioned building blocks. You didn't mention the word God, or sort of the afterlife. Are those essential to the myth? So there's a contact experience. Is there some other aspects of myth and religion? Which makes them viral, which makes them spread and captivate the imagination of people.

Yes. Is there a pattern to them? I think that for each era it's different. And people have. First, let's talk about the definition of religion, if that's okay, because most people assume the definitions that we in the west are familiar with, which is that, you know, that of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, you know, monotheistic religions. And there are. That's not. I mean, those are just some religions. There are so many different types of religions. Some religions have no God at all. Zen Buddhism, for example, is a religion that asks you to take away your belief structures, like to kind of like. In fact, I would call that a Kantian type religion. Right. And that is. It's basically telling you to get rid of your casino concept, concepts of what you think about things so that you can actually have the experience like you were talking about earlier, of the thing in itself. And they call that satori. So there are people who believe, you know, they try to. They call it meditation, Zen meditation. And it's fairly radical, actually, in some monasteries. I don't know if they still do this, but they'll whack you on the head if you appear to be not focusing and, you know, that kind of thing. You know, they do things to basically take you away from your conceptions of reality and bring you into a state of all that is, which is what they call satori. And that has nothing to do with God.

I like this religion and anything that involves sticks and whacking, in order for you to focus better, I'm going to have to join a monastery. So, okay, so that's. So digging into definitions. Religion. So, like, what is. What do you think is the scope that defines a religion?

Oh, okay. So in my field we have a few different definitions of religion, as you can imagine. Just like philosophers have different definitions of what is real. So I take this definition and it comes from John Livingston and it's. Religion is that set of beliefs and practices that determine that is inspired by a transformative. What is perceived actually to be a transformative and sacred power.

Can you say that again?

Yeah. So religion is a set of. It's not just belief, it's also practices. It's both belief and practices, because you won't have the practices without the belief. So you have those together. Okay. And it's inspired by what is perceived, because we don't know if it's real or not. What is perceived to be of sacred.

And transforming power so perceived by the followers? Or is this connected to the original sort of experience.

No, no. Well, it's perceived by the followers.

That's a really good definition. So, and that's the governing idea, is that there's something of great power.

Yes.

Perceived to be of great power, to which you can connect yourself either emotionally or intellectually somehow in order to explore the world that is beyond your own capabilities.

Yes.

And is there communication also involved or generally. Yeah, yeah, that's a great definition. Okay, so within that falls everything that we've. We've talked about so far, including technology and alien life and so on. Do you think ultimately religion is good for human civilization? Let me maybe phrase it differently. Is what's religion good for?

Okay, yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking that. Most people don't ask that. And I think it's the question to ask, why do we still have religion? That's the question. Right. Because scientists and others, scholars, humanists, even thought that there's this thing called the secular secularization thesis. And it's this idea that the more we progress rationally and we have better instruments for understanding our reality, the less religious we will be. But that's been found to be untrue. We're still very religious. Okay, so why. Why is it around? Well, it's adaptive in some way, in my opinion. Most many people would not agree with me, but I kind of see it as an evolutionary adaptation. Now think about religions. Okay, Think about Christianity again, for one. Here comes this idea when you have this ruthless empire called the Roman Empire, which litters its roads with crucified bodies to let you know, don't mess with us. Okay. All right, Here, all of a sudden you have this guy saying, God is love. Okay, all right. Well, that's weird. Okay, so why. Why does this take off? Well, it takes off because we're becoming a. A colonial power. That means we're going into other countries, we're conquering them. We are. You know, how do we survive together as. As cultures that don't clash? Well, we have to have a belief structure that allows us to. And I think religions function that way, frankly.

So the religions help us in from. So the Richard Dawkins meme idea, it allows us to explore a space of ideas, and that in itself is the. So it's like evolution of ideas. And religion is a powerful tool for.

Us to explore ideas because, you know, if. If I believe that men have souls.

Do they?

Yes, they do. Okay.

Still trying to figure that out, you know. Well, I still, in terms of souls, do believe cats don't have souls. But we'll never, we'll never, we'll never be able to confirm that.

Maybe if we get better instruments, you know the Soul instrument. You need to come up with that one, please.

For cats?

Yeah, not just for cats, but for all animals and people in general, for sure. You could put them in like a little, you know, soul machine and find out what, what's the status of their soul.

That's funny. I hope will become a scientific discipline of consciousness. And consciousness is in some sense connected to maybe what the meaning of the word soul used to be. And I think it's a fascinating open question like what is consciousness? And so on that maybe we'll touch on in a little bit. But yeah, anyway, back to our religions being adaptive.

I think that Christianity probably helped us become better people to each other as we moved into a more global society. And I also this, it goes along with my book, which is basically making the argument that belief in non human intelligence or ETS, or UFOs, UAPs, whatever you want to call them, is a new form of religion.

And how does that work with the, the scientific method, do you think? There's always this role of religion as being, in his broad definition, religion as being a complement to our sort of very rigorous empirical pursuit of understanding reality. There's always going to be this coupling. We'll always define, redefine new eras of civilization of what that religion actually looks like. So you talk about technology and so on being the modern set of religious beliefs around that. So is that always going to, is religion always going to kind of COVID the space of things we can't quite understand with science yet, but we still want to be thinking about.

Oh, I see what you're saying. That's a great question. When you say religion, I would, I would use the word religiosity because I think that we're moving out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a. I hate to put it this way, but an X Files type religion where we can say I want to believe or the truth is out there, but we don't know that it's out there or we don't, we don't know yet what it is, but we know it's out there. So there's this, this kind of built in capacity for belief and something that we don't have evidence for yet and that's a sort of faith. So I would say yes to that question. Absolutely. I think it's adaptive in that way. We're moving into a new. I mean, heck, we've already moved into this culture. Most people have not caught up with it yet. I see that in the school systems, you know, and I think that I'm hoping we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are.

So I mentioned to you offline that I'm finishing up on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. I'm not sure if you have anything in your exploration interesting to say, but the use of religion by dictators or the lack of the use of religion by dictators, whether we're talking about Stalin, which is mostly a secular. I apologize if I'm historically incorrect on this, but I believe it's secular. And Hitler, I think there's some controversy about how much religion played a role in his own personal life and in general in terms of influencing the. Using it to manipulate the public. But definitely the church played a role. Do you have a sense of the use of religion by governments to control the populations by dictators, for example, or is that outside of your little explorations as a religious scholar?

It's not outside of my framework, absolutely not. I think that it's done routinely. Propaganda is done routinely, especially. There's nothing more powerful than religion to get people to act. I think I have. My mother's Jewish and my father was Roman Catholic, okay. From Irish extraction. And so both members, both great grandparents came here under duress because they were being. What would you call it? There was an act of genocide on both sides being done by other cultures. Okay. So on the one hand, obviously, we know about the Holocaust, okay? So they came. The great grandparents came here to avoid that, and they made it. On the other hand, there was an English genocide. We just have to say it, of the Irish. It was called a famine, but it wasn't one. It was a staged thing. And so millions of Irish left Ireland on coffin ships is what they called them, because they usually wouldn't get here. Mine happened to get here, okay? So those. That's the context that I'm coming from. So in each case, for one thing, the Irish weren't considered. You know, there was. Catholics weren't considered. They were considered to be terrible. And there was a lot of anti Catholic rhetoric here in the United States, which is kind of strange because one of the. In fact, the most wealthy colonial family were the Carols in.