#821 - Is Religion Good For Society?

Brittney Hartley is an atheist spiritual director and author of No Nonsense Spirituality. She joins Michael Regilio for a wide-ranging discussion including Fundamentalism v nihilism. More at dogmadebate.com

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hey, I'm Adam Carola Gillette.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Not only listening, I'm a guest.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
I'm a penn and teller, and I am a fourth listener,
and I am the fourth listener.

Speaker 3 (00:12):
And that must make me at least the fourth listener.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
It's Dogma Debate with your host Michael Rigillio. For extra
content and to join the conversation, please head over to
Dogma Debate dot com and join our Patreon and welcome
to what absolutely promises to not just be a fascinating
but a educational episode of Dogma Debate. Because I have

(00:37):
Britney Hartley here with me, and she's an author. She
wrote the book No Nonsense Spirituality, All the Tools, No
Faith Required, and I came across around TikTok and she's
just she's a teacher. I mean, I feel like I
have learned so much watching her videos. So Brittany, thanks
for coming on the show.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
That's yeah, my pleasure to be here. And you know,
being a teacher is actually was my job. I was
a history teacher before I started to do what I
do now. So I found a weird way to be
able to still be teaching. And so My tiktoks are
very long because I'm at like all history teachers, I'm
very long winded, but I do it's something that I

(01:15):
really enjoy.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Oh that's so great. That's one of my other passions.
I absolutely love history. So here, But you grew up Mormon,
you grew up deeply in the faith, and you lost
your faith in your exploration of your religion when you
were at theology school. Do you mind telling me a
little bit about that?

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Sure, so just kind of briefly, and then we can
dig in anywhere that you want. I was raised Mormon
and was the kind of kid that like took matters
of epistemology and metaphysics very seriously. I really wanted to
know what is and if there's a God, and if
there's a certain way I should live my life. I
figured that was like the most important thing to know,

(01:54):
and so I was always a curious child in that way.
And so I lost my faith in Mormonism the time
I was a teenager and was kicked out of my
home because of decisions that I made in in that
you know, faith loss and kind of stumbled into nuanced
Christianity is what you.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Would call it. Now.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I don't know what I would have called it then
it probably didn't have the language for it. Went to
theology school to study Christianity, because of course everyone says like, yeah,
deconstruct for Mormonism, like that's a crazy religion. You just
you had the wrong Jesus, you had the wrong God.
So I said, fantastic, like, We'll go to theology school.
Ended up losing my faith in Christianity in theology school

(02:37):
and then also lost my faith in God. So here
I am having spent you know, two decades studying history
and theology and philosophy trying to make sense of God
and faith and what is And at the end of
that journey kind of coming to a place where I
just said, well, I know nothing, and I'm a newborn

(02:57):
baby and now I'm you know, thirty five years old,
and what do I do now kind of thing. And
there were some dark times in that as I had
to recalibrate my foundation. How do you do truth without God?
How do you do morality without God? How do you
do meaning and purpose without God? How do you do
community and identity without God? How do you do ritual

(03:18):
in awe and love and transcendence without God? And kind
of rebuilt what I would call a spiritual, even meaningful,
purpose filled life, a thriving life post religion. But it
took a lot of work and tools to get there
that I think some secular people take for granted. You know,

(03:39):
when secular people or people who are raised atheists listen
to me, they're like, well, yeah, obviously religion, you know,
is crazier or whatever they say. But it's not obvious
when you're raised in it. It's when you lose your foundation.
It's very hard for the brain to kind of readjust
when you kind of lose your foundation for literally every

(04:01):
aspect of your life. So rebuilt and now kind of
do spirituality post religion, even spirituality post God.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
And now my job is.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Essentially helping others as a spiritual director wherever they are
in that deconstruction or reconstruction process and helping them find
tools to make that process easier.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
So wherever you want to jump in there, well.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Actually, the first thing I wanted to jump in and
I want to get to how you lost your faith
because that story was so interesting, the information, it's just
nothing that i'd heard before in somebody's loss of faith
story before. But before I get there. I do want
to just you said you got kicked out of your
house when you quit being a Mormon.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, so I was kicked out of my home when
I was sixteen for having sex with my boyfriend, which
was a part of like, well, I didn't believe Mormonism anymore,
so I may as well, you know, do what sixteen
year olds do with their boyfriends. And yeah, I was
removed from my home for that. Wow.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
It just it strikes me because it's a point that
I often make when debating Christians, which is they say,
you know, homosexuality is not natural. I'm like, well, we
look at the animal kingdom and we can see that
clearly it is. But you know it's not natural. Is
parents throwing a beautiful, wonderful child out of their home
for nothing other than just you know, loving who they
wanted to love or whatever. And it kind of makes

(05:18):
me think of that when you say that.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
That goes like with that quote that to make you know,
good people do bad things, it takes religion. The one
that comes to mind the most is in the FLDS Church,
kind of the more fundamentalist forms of Mormonism. There's places
in southern Utah, for polygamy to work, you need a
lot more women than men, and so they'll be mothers

(05:43):
that will drop off their their teenage son at a
gas station and drive away. And there are people there
who have set up, you know, mobile homes to try
to try to help these young men who essentially just
get dropped off and they drive away. And it does
take religion to do something like that that.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
I did not know that, And I actually read Under
the Banner of Heaven and I watched a documentary about
Warren Jeff's and the FLDS as well, And even with that,
I didn't hear that. That is straight out of like
you know, a Pride of Lions or something like that,
where the young man is like kicked out because the
alpha male doesn't want him, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, polygamy only you know, you can only have a
man marry fifty women if you've kicked out a lot
of young boys along the way.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
Wow, that is heartbreaking. That makes me so sad, And
what lost souls those young boys must be. And I
mean just cheaper is the rejection from your mother of
all things, And you know, you're just mind blown. That said,
and by the way, I guess in that case, the
polygamist in charge, I guess the Warren Jeff of sorts

(06:49):
would was the boy's father. Like, complete rejection from both
your parents, I mean, just me absolutely devastating. And there's
another example of religion doing bad. So you lost your
faith because you have this amazing skill, which is tell
me about your society and I'll tell you about your God. Yeah,
telling me a little bit about that, because that was
so fas sure.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
So what happens when you're studying the Bible and you
start really digging into the complexity of it that this
isn't just like a book where God just like says
things and it's all clear and you know, crystal clear.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
It's a very very.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
Complex document with multiple authors and translations and scribes and
additions and pulling mythology from other places is just an
incredibly complex thing. So as you're studying the Bible, you
start learning how aspects of the society at the time
will change, and then God will change too. So an

(07:42):
easy example is, you know, we don't really have a
concept of hell in the Old Testament. We have some
concept of an afterlife, but there's not moral distinctions, there's
not good people go here and bad people go here.
It's just kind of this afterlife place where there's not
really a lot happening, to be honest, and it's because
in the Old Testament, you know, the blessings and the

(08:04):
justice of God, you know, or the blessings or condemnation
of God happens.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
In your lifetime, it happens here.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Then they get conquered and the bad guys win, and
now they're a conquered people. And so what do you
do in your theology when you're supposed to be blessed
for how you know, being the covenant people and having
the correct God, and now you're a conquered people and
the bad guys truly did win. Well, what happens, Well,
all of a sudden we start to have well, maybe

(08:32):
justice then happens in the next life, and these people
will be punished and will be rewarded if we stay faithful,
and you know, we're being tested and all these things.
And that's just one tiny example, but there's hundreds of
examples of this where something will change in the society
and then all of a sudden, God or theology or
doctrine will change to the first belief, that is, you know,

(08:56):
the belief that's the first to go when you're in
seminary is this idea that like God is never changing,
because in the Bible of the God, the concept of
God and doctrines are are all changing.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
None of them kind of stay the same.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Right, So specifically about the Old Testament versus New Testament.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
God, there's changes there, but I mean there's it's it's
just a messy thing. So you get good at especially
when you start adding like the cognitive science of religion
and you're studying Mesopotamian culture, maybe you start studying other
religions in that you start getting really good at this,
at at knowing what kinds of societies create, what kinds

(09:37):
of gods.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
And I got so good.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
At it that you could give me a society, you know,
tell me how it's agriculture works, because if the flooding
is really devastating in random there's going to be a
lot of rituals because you're trying.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
To keep that God happy.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
If the agricultural agriculture is more stable, then you get
more benevolent gods that kind of keep the cosmic order going.
And you can tell me about the hierarchy, like the
social hierarchy. Is it authoritarian, then you're gonna get authoritary God.
And there's all these things that you can kind of track.
And I got to the point where you can give

(10:11):
me a society, tell me how it functions. I'll tell
you what kind of God they will have created, and
I will be right.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
And then when you.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Do, you can do that for a society. And then
you can start to do that even individually. As you're
learning about individual faith and why people read.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
So many different things in Jesus.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Someone who's really high in empathy reads a different Jesus
than someone who's really high in loyalty. People who are
autistic tend to be either fundamentalist or atheist, but not
in between. And you just start learning these things. And
I had this seed of doubt. This was all while
being a believer, and I had this seed of doubt
that said, what if this is a human project? What

(10:52):
if we're the ones creating God rather than God creating us?
And I put on that lens because I just still
believed that if there was truth, it could withstand scrutiny.
And I just put on that lens and said, what
does it look like to look at this whole thing
from the point of view of secularism or science, human nature, sociology, psychology, anthropology.

(11:14):
What if I looked at this as if it's a
human project, And when I did, it started to make
more and more sense. The easy example that most people
agree with is is, you know, we used to say
that people had demons inside of them, and now we
would say something like they've been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Even
believers will usually give me that right. They'll usually say

(11:35):
something like that, where our diagnosis for schizophrenia just makes
a lot more sense than saying that than our supernatural
explanation of what was going on. But for me, that
started making sense across the board for everything, for everything
we were doing with gods and religions and spiritual experience.
So I got to the point where I was ready

(11:55):
to write my dissertation and then had to admit to
myself which I was not happy about and where and
it's not somewhere that I wanted to go, But finally
had to admit to myself that I no longer believed
in this god.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Right and in your case. And this is why I
found it so fascinating that was not a I mean
as an antitheist and somebody that came to it very
slowly out of Catholicism. And I'd love to ask you
about Catholicism a little later. But it was liberating. My
life got better the minute I didn't feel like there
was a wizard in the guy looking down on me.

(12:29):
You had the exact opposite experience, and I think a
lot of particularly fundamentalist Christians have this experience because belief
is not a choice, and if you stop believing because
you just can't believe anymore, it can be detrimental, if
not devastating, as it was for you. But you found
your way out, and that's what your book is about.
But do you mind is it already if I ask
you about that dark time?

Speaker 1 (12:50):
Sure?

Speaker 3 (12:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
And I'm curious for you why. There's certain personality types
that when they kind of discover that there's no divine
plan going on, they find this to be like fantastic news,
and they find it to be very freeing. It's usually
personality types that value freedom and authenticity and autonomy. Usually
I see like those high core values that they do fine.

(13:12):
I did not do great. I'm high in neuroticism. I
had kind of no you know, higher in existential anxiety
even and I really struggled with things like, you know,
I'm gonna die, and what is the point of this?

Speaker 3 (13:27):
And I'm just suffering.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
If you're high in suffering, also like if you're neurotic
and introverted, which is kind of the most dangerous combination
as far as human suffering, you just need a lot
more to be able to make life worth it. And
so for me, it was a very dark It was
a very dark time because now I just felt like, what,
you know, what is the goddamn point, I'm just gonna

(13:51):
come here, just going to suffer evolutions, pulling the strings.
I don't have free will. You know, the self is
an illusion. God isn't coming, Jesus isn't coming to save us.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
This is all bullshit, and just.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Playing little stupid human games in the bullshit with no
like existential meaning or purpose behind.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
It was just so.

Speaker 1 (14:14):
Such a shift for my brain that I just feel
like my brain like dissociated and checked out because it
was just too much to handle.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
I just lost.

Speaker 1 (14:22):
People will describe it as like the floor drops out
from underneath of you, because every choice that you've ever
made was built on this idea that God exists, and
so when that leaves, you don't even know what's up
from down anymore. How do I make a moral decision? Like?
Who the fuck cares about any of this then?

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Right?

Speaker 1 (14:40):
And so it was just it was a super dark
time and and got some existential depression and some nihilism,
even some suicidal thoughts before I was able to kind
of be able to kind of process what was happening
and be.

Speaker 3 (14:56):
Able to get tools and resources to help come out
to the other side.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, and what you discovered was that there were things
that religion offers to a person that we kind of
need to flourish and be happy, and that just straight
up atheism without I guess a society or a community
around you to offer up these things is going to

(15:20):
leave people probably, I don't want to say, worse off
than they were with religion, because I think believing as
many true things as possible and as few false things
as possible is the way to live life. But do
you mind talking about that a little bit? Like what
are the things that people get out of religion that
they have to then find a way to get without religion?

Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah? What atheists have to admit, especially if you're like
I'm all about the science and data is that the
majority of our studies show that religious people bear better
than non religious people, and there's certain markers that we're
using there. So longevity is one health community mental health.
Even with COVID, religious people fared better mentally over COVID

(16:05):
over non religious people. And so what we have to
look at is why are religious people faring better at
least on some markers of human well being? And what
comes up in the data is that it actually doesn't
matter what religion it is. It really doesn't whatever your
system of order and structure it is. Religion is just
the story, the vessel that's carrying all these things that

(16:28):
humans need. So stories which are ways to orient your
life community which is huge and gives you a social
safety net, meaning, purpose, transcendence, moments of awe. Ritual are
super Rituals are so important scientifically they help us to
decrease pain and increase pleasure and process our emotions. They're

(16:53):
really good for rights of passage, and religious people tend
to be higher in meaning and purpose. They tend to
be able to withstand even suffering more because they have
a story that can contain it. And when you lose
religion when you lose kind of the container for that,
you don't just lose. I don't believe Joseph Smith is

(17:14):
a prophet, Like that I can do. I'm doing fine without,
you know, orienting my life around that belief. But I
lost other things because I lost that belief. I lost
access to a family, I lost my identity. I lost
the belief that truth is good or that I could
even access truth. Maybe we're not even accessing ultimate reality
at all. I lost my sense of objective morality, and

(17:37):
I didn't know how to make sense of morality anymore.
I lost just like what do you do with your life?
Like what's the point of any of this? Right, I'm
just going to suffer and I'm just going to die
and I'm never going to know the answer to my
questions and is it would it have been better if
I wouldn't have been born? And blah blah blah blah blah,
all that kind of stuff. So religion, the beliefs are

(17:59):
easy to deconstruct, especially with something like Mormonism like very
easily proven true, proven false religion, but like being a
part of a community like Mormonism, like when you're in
isn't it like it was nice? The religion's crazy, like

(18:20):
and and Pendulette said.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
Something like this.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
He said that, you know, Mormonism as a religion, as
a belief system is absolutely bonkers. But he said, the Mormons.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
Have got it right.

Speaker 1 (18:29):
They live communally, very service driven, family oriented. They're they're
cooking for each other, they're showing up for each other
when when you're sick, they you know, don't don't do
a lot of alcohol and drugs and a healthier lifestyle
and it's a really purpose driven, service filled communal experience
to be a Mormon when you're in it not for everyone,

(18:51):
like obviously, like if you're gay, you're not going to
have that experience, but when you're in the community, it's
it's quite lovely and it's hard to leave behind just
because you know that the beliefs that create that community
are insane.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Right exactly. In fact, that is a motivation to I
don't know, force yourself to believe, which is not possible,
but to tell yourself you believe, to lie to yourself
that you believe, tell others you believe even if you
don't believe, because it is something of a threat and
that they don't treat the people that have fallen away
from the faith particularly well. Always in Mormonism, I know

(19:29):
people that you know, if you come out and say
I think Joseph Smith was full of it, like you
could lose the most loved people in your life, and
you know there is that threat and it makes it difficult.
It's not quite as bad as scientology, but you know
it's not great. You used a term in discussing how
it is you can find fulfillment in your life as

(19:51):
secular or atheist, and that was the internal meaning making system.
Do you mind telling me a little bit about the
internal meaning making system? I think I have one, and
I believe I feel like I have a purpose driven life.
The quote, who was that? Yes, Rick Warren, that was

(20:11):
a yeah. But what did you mean when you said
internal meaning making system?

Speaker 1 (20:16):
Yeah? So the people who do better outside of religion
are personality types that tend to be okay with a
couple of things. First of all, they tend to be
more okay with ambiguity like not knowing, because if you
need order and structure and closure, we know that that
personality type tends towards fundamentalism because that's psychologically keeping them

(20:40):
functioning when they need that level of order and structure enclosure.
So personality types that tend to not need religion as
much and thrive outside of it with little or no
work are ones that can handle ambiguity, handle chaos. They
usually value you know, freedom and authenticity and creativity and
things like that, but they also have a sense that

(21:02):
I can create my own meaning and they and they
enjoy doing that, or they do that quite naturally. Whereas
when you're raised religious, when you walk into a Mormon church,
they'll give you all the good stuff as far as
things that you need as a human, but you are
going to have to believe certain things and they're going
to give you your meaning and purpose. Now, it's easier

(21:24):
that way because like someone just lays out a path
for you to just walk on. It's easier that way,
but it's never going to be really an authentic life
because someone else is giving you your meaning and purpose. Now,
some personality types do prefer that because it's just less
anxiety inducing to say, like, you are in charge of

(21:45):
your one life and then you're going to die, like
some like we actually have an existential fear of freedom.
We like to think as humans that we value freedom,
but we actually get really overwhelmed with it. Like if
you want to pick a salad dressing, our brain would
prefer to choose between two than three hundred, like the
you know, it just takes a lot of work. So
we actually have an existential fear of too much freedom,

(22:08):
which is why we're drawn to authoritarian gurus or characters
or leaders to just say, here's the twelve step program,
here's the eightfold plan, whatever it is, because it can
release anxiety that way. So yeah, so the people who
do well outside of religion, going back to your question
are ones who either don't mind or enjoy being their

(22:32):
own meaning creator and saying, oh I see rather than
seeing this as anxiety inducing, I see a blank canvas
where I can paint, where whatever I want to paint.
And that personality type does tend to do better post religion.

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Yeah, and one of the other things you were talking
about one of your videos that brings of all the
things that religion brings that we have to find a
way to kind of replace if people are going to
fall away from religion, which is in truth, I've changed
it from being anti religious to when I look at
the world, I say I'm just against people believing things
based on no or bad evidence, because I think religion

(23:08):
falls under that, but so does every other bad thing
in the world. Right now. One of the things you
talked about was dancing. You said that dancing is psychologically speaking,
I mean, possibly on a neurological level, they might be
able to measure it due to dopamine releases or whatnot,
that it's very good for people. And when I watched
your video and I said that, I said, maybe that's
why being Catholic is so miserable. We don't sing, and

(23:30):
we don't Our songs are melodyless chants basically, and there's
no dancing of any kind in our services. I mean,
we are just sedate. And you were talking about the
whirling dervishes in the Islamic faith and just you know
in the black churches the music and the dancing and
the clapping, and how beneficial that can be. Is that so,

(23:54):
I mean, just it's it's the joy of life that
I think we need to replace when you take somebody
out out of religion. Would you say that that's accurate?

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yes, And this is where sometimes atheists are at a
disadvantage because if we know that things like song, singing
together really good for you. Dancing like when we look
at you know, the study that I was referring to,
it does better than both exercise with an antidepressant together,
I mean, just really powerful for resetting your nervous system

(24:27):
when it comes to depression. So we know religion does
all these good things like accessing wisdom, like listening to
I don't want to say sermons because those tend to
be born, but listening to advice we need help as
humans that that tends to be good for you. Wisdom
collection is good for you, song is good for you,
Awe is good for you, Dancing is good for you,

(24:48):
all these things. And when a religion comes with all
those things already built into the system, it makes it
easier for religious people to access all these tools that
are good. And so when a an atheist hasn't kind
of rebuilt some of that into their life, all of
a sudden, now someone dies and Jews have these fantastic

(25:08):
rituals for what happens day of what happens the first week,
don't you know you don't have to talk to anyone,
and you're not going to go to work, and we're
going to take care of you, and then you kind
of have come back to society, and then after six months,
we're really going to pull you back, you know, into
the community and make sure that you're okay. And they
have this whole system of rituals to help you process grief.

(25:32):
And so, you know, as an atheist, if you haven't
rebuilt some of those things that are in religion that
are good for you, now you're struggling with someone's death
that you don't have rituals to process now, Like you
can read a paper that says dance is good for you,
where are you're going to do that. You can read
a paper about how singing together is good for you?

(25:52):
Where are you going to do that? And you have
to start piecemealing it together. And because we're just fundamentally
lazy and it's harder to do it, takes more motivation
than just showing up at a church to build something
like it. Sometimes this is where atheists are at a
disadvantage when it comes to their mental health. So something

(26:13):
like dancing, you know, dancing has been a part of
most religions. When it starts to get really institutionalized, that's
when like they'll take away psychedelics that's when they'll take
away song like ecstatic dancing and song, because now it
becomes more of a business and a bureaucracy and institutionalized.

(26:33):
But at its root, most religions do have access to
things like song and dance and even psychedelic use, but
those go away once it becomes a business.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Interesting, my mind immediately went to the Shakers, nineteenth century
American religion where it was all about dancing. But they
had a fatal flaw to their religion, which is they
were one hundred percent celibate. You couldn't have sex even
with your wife or husband. And they died out.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Go figure, that'll do it.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
That'll do it.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
They definitely had a lot of dancing. So you talk
about spirituality from an atheistic point of view, what I mean?
Sam Harris talks about that a little bit. He's a
he's a well known atheist as well. Some of us
scratch our heads a little bit when we hear about
atheists talking about spirituality. Do you mind expanding on what
you mean when you talk about that?

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, And it's really interesting because Yeah, I think when
you talk about the four atheists of the atheist Apocalypse,
they they'll meet that word differently, So Sam Harris much
more open to using the word spiritual. Richard Dawkins is like,
I don't get this at all. This is this is dumb.
But even Richard Dawkins like he's still will seeing Christmas

(27:46):
carols and he still values aspects of Christianity as a culture,
and he has been talking about that more lately even
for him. So spirituality for me and other people may
define it differently. But when we talk about a word
like spirituality that can contain all the different kinds of spirituality,
even non theistic religions like Buddhism and things like that,

(28:09):
I think what it boils down to is connection to
your deepest self and connection outside of self. For a
lot of people, that connection outside of self is to
something supernatural or some kind of higher power.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
For me, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
For me, it's connecting outside of myself to other humans
and nature and you know this kind of story that
we're all collectively writing as humans, and I feel great
connection to that. So spirituality for me doesn't include supernatural elements.
But we just don't have a secular word that really

(28:44):
means that level of inner peace and connection with yourself.
Trying to understand the universe within you that you'll never
fully understand, and also trying to connect to the universe
outside of you that you'll never fully understand. And that
process that's why there's lots of spiral in spirituality and labyrinths,
because it's always coming back to this idea of connecting

(29:05):
more within you connecting more outside of you. And atheists
have like, I understand the allergy to words that have
religious baggage. I do, but my fear is that if
we throw away the baby with the bathwater, is now
we're looking at essentially nihilism, where we've thrown out religion

(29:26):
and all the shitty things about religion. I'm on board
with all, you know, all the bullshit, but I'm afraid
that if we don't hold on to something in this
that now we're going to head towards nihilism. And when
we hit nihilism, people turn to political religion or consumerism,
or numbing or suicidality. And I don't like those any

(29:48):
anymore than a lot of those are worse than religion.
I would rather like I would rather be a part
of a religion than a political religion. Political religions could
be just as dogmatic and violent and they have no
soul to it, Like at least with a religion you'll
get some mysticism or a nice parable from Jesus or something.
Political religions I think are worse. So I'm wary of

(30:08):
this baby in the bathwater. And I think Sam Harris
and another atheists are too. Nick Jenkles another one. He
wrote the Spiritual Atheist, And there's something here that I
feel like is worth preserving that sometimes as atheists, in
our kind of high horse snarkiness about how religion is stupid,
we're maybe too quick to throw away things in it

(30:30):
that are good for people. And we don't have a
secular word for the umbrella that is ritual, transcendence, community
to all the things that I've mentioned, We don't really
have a secular word for that. Well Being is the
one that Sam Harris uses to try to try to
get there. But I just feel like spirituality is I
almost just want to reclaim it from religion's grasp. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
I mean, I've heard it said I'm not religious, but
I'm spiritual, you know, And I will confess that is
maybe a younger man. I stuck up my nose at
people that said that, Like what the heck do you
mean now?

Speaker 1 (31:07):
That phrase still bothers me because like New Age spirituality
is just like it's oftentimes just religion and a new package.
You know, it's still prosperity, gospel and then manifesting. I
can't get behind any of that. Astrology drives me nuts.
So some of that spiritual but not religious group annoys
me too, But I still think there's something in their worth.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Claiming absolutely, And you know, there is so much detrimental
There are so many detrimental effects from religion. One of
them that you talked about that I wrote down which
gets me into our society as we have it today,
that people that a belief in Jesus it reduces the
motivation to make the world a better place. Basically you

(31:46):
did a video about that, and I certainly agree. But
as always, you come with the receipts. So would you
mind telling me a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Yeah, we can anecdotally, and you probably know someone who
like this, who's like this, don't know how much I
have to defend this with data, just because you you
all probably know someone who says, like, we don't really
need to worry about that, because Jesus is coming, like
I know.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
Many people like climate change.

Speaker 1 (32:14):
Uh, you know, there's even just dealing with the Middle
East and what long term prosperity gospel is. We're not
really motivated to even be a part of that if
this is just a sign of Jesus coming, and so
it's like, why are we even going to mess with it?
Like all of this is prophesied and it's gonna happen,
and She's gonna come. This is great news, I know,
Like I know, it's not even just like hyperbole or

(32:36):
I've seen someone on the internet, like people directly in Boise,
Idaho where I live, like I know talk this way
like it's it's not. I don't really have to go
too far into studies, but there are studies that show
that when you believe that Jesus is coming, it reduces
your It reduces how uncomfortable you are with suffering because

(32:57):
you can know that everything's going to be okay, and
that child that was abused or whatever the situation was,
at least they're at peace now they're with Jesus. And
it gives you this spiritual bypassing where I don't have
to feel this really uncomfortable feeling that really like looking
at pictures of the Middle East and dead children. I
don't have to look at this because I can know

(33:18):
that everything's going to be okay, So it bypasses uncomfortable feelings.
That's why we have spiritual bypassing and every aspect of
religion and spirituality it shows up everywhere because it's just
an easy way out of feelings that we don't want
to feel. The problem with that is that if we
don't sit with that feeling, it doesn't change us. And
if it doesn't change us, it doesn't change how we

(33:39):
show up in the world. And so if we actually
don't sit with that tragedy of what happened to that child,
that was for me it was Gabriel. It was Gabriel Hernandez,
who was a little boy who has a documentary on
Netflix who was abused, by tortured by his parents, and
then killed. And it was one of the first documentaries
that I watch after I'd lost my faith in God,

(34:02):
where now I have no buffer for these feelings. I
just have to sit with the actual reality that it
was a child's experience and not just one child. Now
I have to realize that it's a lot of children
that they came into the world.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
They suffered from the.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
People who should have cared for them, and then they
died and I had no buffer for it. And for
about two weeks I just laid on the couch because
I had like an emotional flu because it was the
first time that I really had to feel the suffering
of the world without that buffer, and it took me out.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
It was so.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Painful to this day like it. You can you know,
you can see it in my eyes that it's so painful.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
But sitting with that.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Means that I'm more likely to check in on my
social worker friends and see how they're doing and support.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
Them in the workload.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
I'm more likely to watch for signs of abuse and
be able to say something. I'm more likely to adopt children,
which I did. I'm more likely it changed the way
that I showed up in the world. It changes because
I want to deal with this now and not just
bypass this feeling and imagine this kid and heaven doing okay, because.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
I can't do that anymore.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
And so we just know enough about human motivation to
know that if you don't sit with that feeling and
have it change you, it's not going to change how
you show up in the world. Now, that doesn't mean
that every Christian is like going around littering and just
destroying the earth and doesn't care. There are a lot
of Christians who really try to make the world a
better place because of their Christianity. I know that that exists,

(35:40):
but I just don't see that being as motivating as
truly believing that this is the only planet in the
universe where we know we have life, and this is
the one life that we know that we have. That's
a far greater motivator for making the world a place
where there's less suffering than when you have that out.
That just seems to be an intuitive way to understand

(36:03):
human motivation, even without looking at the sideities.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
And there are studies that show that although.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
I will say the younger generation Christians gen z Christians
tend to do this less, they tend to care a
little bit more about their environment than their grandparents.

Speaker 3 (36:17):
But I still think it's there. Yeah, I still think
it's there.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
But I mean, you said it at the opening of
the show that people create God's individual gods for themselves.
So I find that because of that that the people
who do good in the name of Christianity, if you
get to know them. They're just good people and they're
doing good because that's in them. And the Christianity might
just be the reason that they say they're doing it,

(36:41):
But just like a secular person, it's in you, you know.
I always, you know, when debating Christians, which I do
so often, I'm saying, you know, if you don't think
the Bible is literally true and every word of it
is perfect, and you say I like this part but
not this part, which so many Christians do, I'm saying,
then the morality is clearly in the book.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah, you're already objecting.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
You're seeing it here and not seeing it there.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
You know. The only pushback I would have to that
is I do know people, especially because I was in
my doctorate program was in open and relational theology, which
is a much more nuanced kind of God, a relational God.
And I do know a few people where they so
believe in a God of love and it drives their
life in the sense of how can I act right

(37:26):
now from a place of love, from.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
What Jesus would do? How would the good.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Samaritan act in this moment that they do that they
do that exercise so often in their life that I
do think it creates amazingly beautiful, love driven people. I
wouldn't say that that means that that God is true
or real, but them believing in it. It's like believing
in that projection, like projecting out the ideal of love

(37:52):
and then working in relationship with it your whole life.
I do think that that has the capacity of creating
really beautiful, lovely people. I just think that religion is
not doing that for the majority of people.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, here's the thought I was having, because I do
want to get into our society today if it's okay,
but that you know, I see the callousness. And I've
actually talked to Trump supporters who coil at the callousness
of their brothers and sisters in the MAGA movement, particularly
towards like Alligator Alcatraz or just throwing people on planes

(38:24):
and throwing them in third world prisons and whatnot. And
I had the thought where I was like, well, that's
nothing compared to the punishment they think is coming for
all of us, Like I've I've committed no crime, but
because I don't believe in Jesus, they think they just
walk around cool with the fact that I'm going to
be burned in a lake of fire forever. So these

(38:44):
punishments seem tame compared to the punishment that they've already
allowed themselves to be okay with. I mean, this is
based on no psychology or sociology or any study or data,
which is the world you live in just out of
my mind. But it's yeah, I just religion seems like
such a net negative that when I watch your videos

(39:05):
and you talk about that people that fall away from
faith or don't have a faith, it can be so
bad for them. And then, as I said to you
before we started rolling here, like there's a talk about
the lonely young man crisis we're having, you know, and
they do have religion, which is the religion of Maga,
the worship of Trump as near as I can tell.

(39:27):
And if we took all that away from them, I mean,
we've already seen what lonely young men can do, the
in cells can do in the way of it's not
something I like talking about, but school shootings and things
like that. And so I feel like we we as
a society, we are in a dangerous place where the
modern world and science has given us so many answers

(39:49):
and the gaps that we were filling with God are
shrinking and disappearing as fast as they can. I mean,
there's not a lot of gaps left for God to
be shoved into. I mean there's still where did the
universe come from? Okay, you to have that one probably forever,
but beyond that, you know, I don't know if you know.
A comedian by the name of Tim Minchin, he had

(40:11):
a line that he said, every history, in every mystery
in the history of the world that we ever solved,
turned out to be not God. You know, that's just true.
Like we had all these things that we attributed to God,
every one of them were picking them off. Not God,
not God.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
That wrote that's a one way street. It never goes
the other direction.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah, not once have we been like, oh, turns out
it was God. But what else?

Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yeah, a supernatural It's never been where a supernatural explanation
turns out to be a better explanation than whatever the
naturalistic explanation was.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
That's a one way street.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Yeah. So you do talk about the dangers of pulling
the people away from religion and what could happen to
a society, and a question right before we get to
that is you talked about societies and their gods. Are
there atheistic societies? Is there a society that you could
define if I told you about the society that you
would say that society you would have no god?

Speaker 1 (41:04):
Yeah across Yeah, So you can get societies that don't
really need to create a god that's watching over everything.
For that, I mean when you even look at the
Nordic countries, you need some things for that to happen.
You need stability, you need some wealth, you need some education.
You also need a small homogeneous population so that there's
inner trust without there having to be a god that's

(41:26):
watching over everyone. You don't need to do that if
you're actually like if you know your neighbor and you
are similar in culture to your neighbor, there are you know,
cities in Finland or whatever where there's no there's no
one checking out the food, Like everybody just goes in
and scans their stuff and it's not manned by anyone
because this is our community, this is our town, you know,

(41:50):
shop and we all support it, and nobody's going to
steal from everybody else because you're my neighbor and I
know your name, and it just can function like that
quite well.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
But you need quite a bit of stability.

Speaker 1 (42:02):
In the society to be able to do that. So
what we know about poverty is that poverty and instability
creates religion, and then religion continues to perpetuate, perpetuate the poverty.
And so atheists like to say that, you know, the
most violent countries in the world are religious, And while
that is true as far as the data, it's not

(42:23):
that the religion causes the violence. It's usually the violence
and the instability causes the psychological need for religion. You
need a story that can withstand the bullshit that is
your life. And when you are in a small town
of Finland where everybody knows your name, and everybody's wealthy,
and there's social safety nets and.

Speaker 3 (42:44):
There's not.

Speaker 1 (42:46):
Different groups that see things differently that are vying for resources,
then you're essentially able to function quite well without a God.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
If we could get there. America is not like that.
We don't really have a culture outside of Christianity. We
destroyed all culture in you know, when you know, in
Christianity's crusade, we kind of destroyed whatever was culture before
before we became Christian And so I don't know. A

(43:18):
lot of people want to say, like, let's just be
more like the Nordic countries, and it's like, I see
what you're saying there, but like we are not a
small homogeneous group of people with a social safety net
and culture outside of religion.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
We actually don't have that, and so then what do
we do? What do we do in that case?

Speaker 1 (43:34):
So going to your question that I think the root
of your question is the one that I think about
almost every day, to be honest, is when it comes
to existential risk for humans, what is actually more dangerous
fundamentalism or nihilism?

Speaker 3 (43:49):
And we don't know the answer to this question.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
And this is why I think the four part Sam
Harris Jordan Peterson debates was kind of the conversation of
our time. Even though people have a lot of feelings,
you know, Jordan Peterson has said so many things about
in so many areas that everybody has a strong opinion
on him. But essentially it boiled down, especially in the
third debate, it boiled down to what's.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
Going to do us in as humans?

Speaker 1 (44:14):
Is it fundamentalism and you know, terrorism and blowing each
other up because of our God? Or is it nihilism?
Which is when we lose community and meaning and purpose
and service and transis when we lose all of that.
We you know, now we're talking about school shooter stuff,
and we're talking about suicide, and we're talking about consumerism,

(44:35):
and we're talking about numbing behaviors going up in the
secular world where people are just numbing themselves to death
because what's the point of it all? And we've never
had a society of nihilists. We don't even know what
really what that looks like. We don't know if we're
capable of surviving it. We've never had to before. We've
always had a story, always, whether it was a religious

(44:57):
story or a political story, or you know, if you're
in Japan, then the Emperor is God and that's your story.

Speaker 3 (45:03):
We've always had a story.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
And so we don't really know what humans are capable
of surviving outside of how we've always survived, which is
stories and communities. And so we don't know which one
is more dangerous for us, religion or nihilism. So Sam
Harris is on the side saying, I'm much more worried
about religion. I will take some nihilism and some you.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
Know, there's going to be some suicidality, and there's going.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
To be some problems, but we only have the hope
of getting the world to be better if we can
stop blowing up each other over our gods and start
solving modern problems. And then Jordan Peterson kind of takes
the other side, which says, once we pull it this strand,
the whole society and the whole infrastructure, which is what
you saw in the Eric Weinstein video, the entire infrastructure

(45:51):
of what we are as humans is going to fall
apart if you pull on this thread, and it's and
it's gonna end up destroying us because we cannot psychologically
handle life without meaning, life without story, life without community.
There's just no point at that point, and that's going
to bring out the worst of us. And so essentially
everybody's in these conversations, we're trying to decide both. We

(46:13):
have the data that shows that both fundamentalism and nihilism
very bad for humans, but we don't know which one
is actually going to do us in.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Well, I think that you are making me ask a
question I have not asked. I don't think ever, or
certainly not in twenty years since I became a loud
and proud atheist, which is I always thought the answer
was religion was doing so much harm that we needed
to do away with it. But I look at America
today and we are in bad shape, and you have

(46:48):
me asking is it better to try and fix Christianity,
which is so ingrained in our culture and just make
it the nicest, sweetest, most benign version of itself? Is
that better than helping people out of this belief in God?
And it's not a question I have an answer to
in my head, but I guess I'll pose it to you.

(47:08):
Where do you stand on that?

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Yeah, it's it's it's a question that I think about
all the time, especially in the ethics of what I'm doing,
because I do think it's unethical to eventually you have
to choose what's more important, truth or well being. If
I push someone into the void and they end up
committing suicide, I don't like Ethically, that does not feel

(47:32):
very good. I don't I don't want to be in
that situation.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
So it's it's it's a hard it's it's just a
hard question for me.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Even though I think people are going to struggle without religion,
people are going to struggle. I did too, facing death
and facing the fact that the universe doesn't care. I'm
more willing to go through what terrible growing pains lie
ahead for the chance that we could accept what seems

(48:03):
to be reality, which is that we're on this planet
and we don't really know why, but we seem to
suffer more or less, and let's maybe start getting together
and solving modern problems so there's less suffering.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
I'm more willing to.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
Go through the growing pains of what it would take
to lose God than to just kind of coddle ourselves.
And like, would it be more comfortable to have a
world with benevolent the nicest forms of Christianity where everyone's
just kind and you have your neighborhood church, and you
get married and you have children and when you die

(48:39):
you're going to see them again.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
Is that? Like we have statistics that show that you'll.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
Probably suffer less and you'll have less depression. It's a
security blanket. It might even make life feel better. But
you know, if you were to force me and like
put a gun in my head on this one, I
would rather go through collectively what it would be mean
to leave that security blanket even though it's going to
be hard and it's going to get really ugly, and

(49:05):
we're going to fall in Nietzsche predicted, the first thing
that we're going to do is fall into political religions,
which is what happened in the twentieth century. Even so,
I just like you, I just feel like I would
rather face what is than coddle myself with what is not.
And that's that's my personality type.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
That that happened.

Speaker 1 (49:26):
That answer happens for people like you and me who
are willing to pay the high cost of truth. And
not everybody has that personality type. But but for me,
I'd rather face what is, even though it's harder than
to coddle myself with with with a being ki or
security blanket. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
And plus I can't be that person so condescending that
it's go ahead with your little religion if if it's
good for everybody or whatnot. I you know, I try
and talk to religious people with as much respect as possible,
And by that I mean I just give it to
them straight. I don't sugarcoat, and I just tell you
you're an adult and I respect the heck out of you.

(50:08):
And you seem like a smart person. So I'm going
to tell you you're into a fairy tale, you know,
And I know you find that offensive, But this is
just me being as respectful as I can. That'd be
disrespectful if I decided that you are some special person
that I need to coddle and treat special and tiptoe
around issues with. Like, I respect you enough that I'll
just look you in the eyes and tell you how

(50:29):
I feel. But I also am like man with I mean,
just this week, the EPA is not going to monitor
emissions anymore of factories and whatnot, Like we are just
on a rocket ship.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
And we just saw last week that now churches can
officially endorse political candidates without losing their tax exempt status.
So not only are corporations people, but now churches are too,
and so that that changes things too. So it's it's
scary out there, but but yeah, there's dangers on both sides.

Speaker 3 (51:04):
And so where I'm.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
At is like I'm helping people flee this like burning
building of religion that have hurt them.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
But I'm like wary of this cliff that's ahead.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Of us, and I'm trying to like trying to find
the place in the middle and really the place in
the middle, like the place the difference between the most
spiritual atheist someone like me who really is embracing spirituality,
and the most most deconstructed Christian, where like it doesn't
really mean that, it's more about this, The difference between

(51:34):
those two people is not a lot, Like it's just
it's a hair.

Speaker 3 (51:38):
And maybe it's an important hair, but it's just a hair.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
And I just want everyone to get to that place,
whether you come from the side of secularism or you
come from the side of religion. That place in between
fundamentalism and nihilism is the place where not only you
will thrive, but also doesn't seem to hurt society. And
so however people get there, I want to kind of
help that, and that tends to be ethically where I

(52:02):
end up. And then my rule for myself on social
media or just with people in general is I want
to be tough on ideas but soft on people. So
I'm going to be tough on beliefs and ideas that
I think are causing harm in the world. But I
was once Mormon. I was once like doing apologetics for Mormonism.
I'm not going to call religious people stupid, like that
was me too, and we're far more emotional than we

(52:27):
are rational. We do all this rational work with religion
because emotionally we just don't want to die, and emotionally
we want to be Okay.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
I understand that. I'm human.

Speaker 1 (52:35):
I can understand all of those emotions. So I think
when we do that, if we can be tough on
ideas and soft on people and allow people to get
to that happy middle place, whether they come from religion
or from secularism, I think that's the project I'm most
invested in, even if it's a losing battle, even if
religion wins. It's kind of the rock I've chosen to

(52:56):
push up the hill anyway.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
I've sort of co to a Christian expression and twisted
it for my atheist points. And I always say, love
the believer, hate the belief.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (53:06):
Yeah, that has been my approach and you know, point
of pride. Every Christian I've debated on this show I
still dm with, I'm still friends with. We you know,
shoot each other messages just to make sure we're okay.
I truly love the believer, I hate the belief as
an atheist. And I'll just close my closing thoughts on
this is that it. The thing that gave me comfort

(53:28):
was when I realized you're all I have in this
world brothers and sisters and fellow human beings like we
that you and us together, we're the only ones that
can make this life worth living and good. You can't
do it by yourself. And it's made me expand my humanism.
And this planet is you know, it's nobody's there's no

(53:49):
magic wands, there's no rainbow at the end of the
flood of a promise to not destroy the earth again.
It's just it's a delicate biological place and we have
to treat it well because it's just I've become more
conscious of a fellow humans and of the planet because
of my atheism, because there's nobody that's going to help

(54:10):
us out here, and that there's no heaven to go to,
that this is it. We have to make it as
good and as beautiful and is loving and experience as
possible because you're just here for a second. Make it
the best.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Because some people will ask me how, you know, I
don't want to become an atheist, or you know, they
get the sense of, like Richard Dawkins, atheism where there's
a sense where people fear that you lose the magic
and that last two minutes of what you just did,
like people don't realize that. And for me too, that
it was hard at first when I lost my beliefs

(54:45):
and it was dark for a time, But the magic
is still back, just in a different way.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
The idea that.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
You know, rather than God doing everything, and so the
magic is with God. Now. It's so magical just to
be alive and just to be on a.

Speaker 3 (55:01):
Planet at all, to exist at all.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
The fact you can break it down where it's like
the fact that we are across the world and I'm
making mouth sounds and sometimes you make mouth sounds and
it resonates in my body, and we're playing together and
we're just talking to each other about what it's like
to be human, and like, what's your story, how's it
going for you over there as a human? There's a

(55:24):
beauty in it and a sacredness in it and a
magic in it. To realize that this God stuff, this
religion stuff, all these words that we've put to things,
it was all us and there is.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
A sacredness to that. And the magic comes back for me.

Speaker 1 (55:40):
And it doesn't it doesn't in any way lose the
magic that all of this God stuff was happening in
my own brain. My brain's amazing, Like it makes me,
you know what I mean, Like your brain has been
the magic the whole time. When you've been talking to God,
you've been talking to yourself. When you have dreams and
figure things out or have ideas that pop.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
Into your head.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Your subconscious was working on that, Like we know that,
like all of this, you know, what you felt was
revelation was actually you. Like that's not not magical, that's
incredibly magical. That was you and and and so for me, yeah,
the magic and the zest for life is back.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
But I will admit I didn't.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
I wasn't there at first, and I had to learn
how to.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
You know, it wasn't intuitive to me.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
For people who enjoy life more naturally, I think it's
more intuitive. For me, it wasn't intuitive, and I tend
to be more more on the neurotic spectrum, and so
I had to learn. But it did come back for me,
And I'm much happier now as an atheist, in the
magic of what I think you know of my life
now as an atheist than when I was thriving in Mormonism.

(56:49):
I'm doing much better now than even then, and so
hopefully that just gives hope to someone listening who may
be who may be struggling and feeling like I can't
go back to religion, but I'm not exactly thriving out here.
That's the population that I tend to work with the most.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Yeah. I always say, you know, I'm your sentient being
on a rock in an infinite vacuum, and you get
to contemplate that. Yeah, what could be more awe inspiring
than that. There's a band called Neutral Milk Hotel and
they have a line that just says how strange it
is to be anything at all? Yeah, And it just
hit me so hard when I heard it, and I
heard Jerry Seinfeld interviewing Stephen Colbert, who's Catholic and religious,

(57:29):
and Stephen Colbert said, my favorite lyric ever is neutral
Milkcoat tells how strange it is to be anything at all?
And I was like, that's how it is, Like how
where are we?

Speaker 1 (57:40):
What are we?

Speaker 2 (57:40):
How strange? And mean too?

Speaker 1 (57:42):
With electricity in my brain and it chose its own
core values.

Speaker 3 (57:45):
I had just discover them.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
I didn't even choose them, and then sometimes like, some
music makes me feel like dancing, and some music I
don't really like it all and it's all a mystery
and all of that magic can really come back but
for Yeah, but if that's not where you're at.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
Then you can.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Actually, I'm a testament to the idea that you can
learn to be more like that when maybe you don't
feel like that right now, especially with like the world
on fire, you can still find a way to dance
even in the madness and absurdity of it all.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Wow, I know a good final line when I hear it,
And that was it. Britt Hartley, Thank you so much
for joining us on Dogma Debate.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
Oh this is so this is so fun.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
I could have done this for another few hours.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
This is this is absolute peak play for me.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Nice, we'll have you back. Thanks again,