executing justice so there's a second version of the story that makes him pretty. sydney never agreed to either version of the story. in the courtroom and in the prison cell talking to the reporters he consistently said that he hadn't shot any man accept in self-defense that he claimed she was sick in bed with the measles when the constable was shot and that's what his mother testified and they testified, but we don't know. we all three versions of the story and we don't know which one to believe. ..

>> i wanted to does you first, sort of broadly, about the vision that you put forth in religion for atheists, which is a kind of utopian look at a restructuring, reformation of secular society, and i thought maybe just broadly you could lay out some of the ideas in the book. >> guest: my starting point is

secular society has not worked everything out. in other words, once we reject religion, we have gaps. there's problems with the way secular society run, and it struck me that many of the gaps could be understood under the prism of religion. we secularized badly in the sense that we've thrown out a lot of stuff which was associated with religion, and which is now absent from contemporary secular life, but would do well to revisit. what i do is looked systematically through three faiths, christianity, buddhism, and jew dayism asked myself one question. what here might we use or inspire smit is that stuff here we left behind that we could, in giving up the side of religion, nevertheless have benefited from that, and that's the starting point. i look at areas like community,

education, ethical structure, art and architecture, the notion of an institution which, of course, the faiths are, and a few other things besides. >> host: and you have some sort of very specific proposals. you would like to see some secularized into the wider society. can you expond upon those? >> guest: sure. religions are giant educational machines. in the secular world, we take education really seriously, and a lot of money is devoted to higher education, and when people try to understand why we educate, one answer is skills for jobs, for the economy, you know, to compete, to be a competitive economy, that's simple enough, but there's another more noble sounding ambition creeping in the

passages of politician speeches or graduation ceremonies which is the idea that education should be a source of guidance, that it should help you to live, that it should be an education of your soul, help you to find meaning, consolation, ethical structure. in other words, that's a religious ambition. in the book, i trace it. i say that started in the 19th century as church attendance collapsed in western europe, people asked themselves the question, how do we replace many of these good things from religion? ethics, structure, and meaning, and an influential group of people like matthew arnold and john stuart mill, came up with an intriguing idea. they said culture replaces scriptture. the plays of shakespeare, knolls of jane austin. in these texts and works, there are possibilities for replacing

a lot of the direction of the ethics and structure of organized religions, and now i think it's intriguing and an idea that's disappeared. if you pitched up at a modern university, went to harvard or oxford and said the reason i'm here is because i want to learn how to live and die, find good and bad, find meaning, cope with my own mortality. they would dial the number for the insane asile line up. it's not an ambition we can bring to bear upon secular education, and i think the reason for that is there's an idea that basically people are wanting to find a family, confront your mortality, and basically all of that is easy. you kind of know how to do it if

you're an adult, and the only people that need help are stupid people, and they read self-help books. that's the elite ideology. the idea of relevance is ab sent. if you look at religion, that starts from a point of view that all of us, only just holding it together. we are desperate, vulnerable, and we need assistance right through every stage of life. we need wisdom. i don't necessarily agree with the wisdom that's on offer through religions. i agree intermittenly, but fascinated by the analysis of our fragility. that's fascinating and truer than the secular model leading me to think if i was the emperor of all space and time, i'd want to rejig how wisdom is transmitted down through the generations and argue the humanities should go back to the 19th century vision that vision of using culture, screw upture,

-- scriptture, and that's a good idea that's kneeing legislated. >> host: more than neglected, probably assaulted. here in the united states, we have just 100,000 college graduates a year majoring in in branch of the humanities. >> guest: yeah. >> host: harvard and yale began to train ministers, and they made that transition, the one you referred to expoundedly arnold and mill, but, you know, in major universities, department's philosophies are shut, and university of albany shut down their foreign language department and classic departments. in some ways, didn't that experiment fail? >> guest: yes. i think the fault is -- often people say, you know, the world is craft and materialistic.

i have to say that with respect the fault lies in the humanities themselves. they have failed to make it of importance. the scholarship has been hijacked by a neoscientific idea that research is what matters, and one can research poetry like one can research a scientific problem. puts generations of students off, that the humanities committed suicide by being so cut off from the questions. i mean, it's extraordinary. when you think about it, there's enormous innate interest in the question of how to live. i mean, it's everywhere. the idea the humanities department reached the stage they are so cut off from the spontaneous curiosity of people that they have to shut down. the problem lies with the departments. they are simply failing to

analyze the needs of the audience and realize the material and culture they sit on is a resource to live by, and that if they handled it like that, their departments would be opening rather than closing. >> host: this is herald bloom's argument, and i don't know if you read his stuff, and, of course, he has the hierarchy himself. >> guest: i feel sorry for them. innocent people are, you know, being sacrificed in the name of the corrupt ideology, but, you know, we all know it, and you know it, there's appetite out there for knowledge, wisdom, structured argument, ect., and yet weirdly, it goes on outside the university. the university has, which should have been the center, should have been the mon starries where the wisdom was taught and transferred, and that dream that's written in the

architecture of american colleges for the most part, that dream has been betrayed and paying the financial price, and while i'm sorry, i can only think they brought it upon themselves. >> host: bloom would argument for those who truly grasp at the importance of the art and literature, there's no place for them anymore within the university. these people have to exist outside, and i think you would agree with that. >> guest: that's right. the problem is, of course, they are disorganized, and then weak, and one of the things religion teaches us is if you want to get something to get power in the world, you have to organize, self-organize, and so, you know, the problem of the lone, you know, would-be academic writing a book, it's weaker, and if you look at hour powerful religions are, it's because of the capacity to organize properly, and the dream was the secular world organizes itself around the universities. it's failed to do that. >> host: right. so you propose to create new institutions?

>> guest: well, i certainly propose a method of rescuing our existing ones and recreating departments. it seems striking to me the departments all reflect academic disciplines rather than questions of the soul. you have a literature department, which is a completely nonsensical category. literature is a department of human relationships. that's really what it's about, and 10 let's have the department of human relationships, department of loving and dying and not the department of anthropology, and the fact is comes first is part of the sickness of the university, putting the cart before the horse. >> host: i want to talk about institutions. i grew up in the church, and as i told you before, although you're an atheist, your far kinder to the institution than i would be. you have a healthy respect for institutions. there's certainly a strain within christian thought that

argues with constantine the third century, the rise of the christian church did as much to distort the message of the gospel as per pitch wait it. >> guest: i think we have to be careful. the templar of the modern world, the protestant idea that religious resides in the heart and that any group of people is corrupt. while that's no doubt true at certain points, it's also true that we have to understand what is good about institutions which is that they are able to gather money, power, intelligence, and can simply have a reach that the individual will never have, so, you know, i'm aware in the secular world, a lot of people trying to change the world by writing books. books are a dominant method. we found atheists writing books

to attack religion, and they want to bring it down, so they write a book. the problem about writing a book is it's one instrument to deal with something that's unsuited to be attacked by that institute. a book can't do much. what you deal with with a religion is an institution, which is a book, of course, books are central to religions, but religions are community centers, educational machines, and travel agencies, music halls, you know, they are involved in so many activities, and to think a book can sort of sharply just blow the whole thing up is to misunderstand what you're dealing with, and as i say, i think that we're not short of good ideas in the secular humanist world. the problem is those ideas generally don't have traction, and they don't have traction because they are not part of an organized system, so, for example, we have lots of professors and people writing wonderful books about ethics.

how to live an ethical life. lots of stuff, and yet, outside in the streets of new york now, is it happening? no. why not? because there's not that thing that religions are masters at which is the union of theory and practice. that's what's fascinating about religions. they are unified so that they have a branch of them in a corner and gets them to write the books, but there's a group of people producing those that can be read by anyone or reproducing advertising billboards now in the modern world or building cathedrals, and it's what the germans call a total work of art. it's a work of art that such it has that element of totality, and not just trying to access you through your brain, your reason, your intelligence, but reach you through a variety of ways, and the secular world

doesn't realize that. we have advertising and 789 luxury industries and the construction industry on one side, and then we have the intelligence on the other. it's a union of those in religion. it's construction and fashion and music. all it one embedded together pushing one thing, and i think this point is missed. >> host: to what extent does the consumer society, and you talk in the book about public relations and catering to people's needs, but, of course, what they are doing is catering to emotional deficiencies. >> guest: that's right. there's a distinction between needs and desires and to lead a good life, you have to distinguish appetites in you that are legitimate and links of serious need from those that are vain and flighty and linked to your fugitive desires, and that part of a good life is knowing how to separate that. we lost that sense that we need

help in doing that. i mean, the consumer society is based on the idea that the individual makes up their own choice. the individual is robust. they can make the difference between needs and desires. maybe little children can't so before seven o'clock or so, you have an add vert, but basically adults judge their true needs to have a massive poster in front of them say going to thailand on holiday and be happy, and it won't affect them at all. the advertising industry realizes it does have an impact, and so of course, the next logical step is to ask, well, what are we doing allowing the system to take place which willingly confuses needs and desires, and therefore, prevents us from accessing our best possibilities, and religion is an interesting model because really what it says is you do

need advertising all around, but the right kind, and you need reminders of how to live well because we're pulled in different directions, and that's how a lot of organized religions function. they have billboards, literally or a cathedral or temples or a billboard. it's an attempt to say you need some support. the whole of religious art is really an attempt to support a set of ideas. it's a kind of propaganda. it's a massive tool to propaganda on ideas. >> host: a way to delineate space? >> guest: yes. to create an area where you take time out from your normal life in which the values that are most close to your heart and close to the truth can get a full chance to express themselves. this is, yeah, this is the sacred space. this is the cathedral, the church, the temple, the mosque,

withdrawal from the hub of the city, and you're back with your true self. if i look that, okay, what do we do with that need now? where's that need gone now? if there's a serious need taken seriously by religious for thousands of years, where's it gone? what have we done with it? people say, well, there's the museum, and in the book i argue why museums are not doing their job properly, and so there's many ways in which stuff that religions are quite aware of in terms of inner needs, go unatannedded in the tech cue lar world >> host: there's religious scholars that argue, and, of course, religious systems are created by human kind and oftentimes serve the interests, not so much of religious tenants, but for those who run them. the mystery of the catholic church is a sorted one.

what about those sort of critics who would say, well, religion itself or institutional religion is, to quote the theologian, inherently demonic including the church, and that often times religious institutions serve as much as an impediment towards the capacity for transformation that the religious impulse that those yearnings to describe, articulate, and honor the non-rationallal forces in life, be that beauty, grief, the struggle for mortality, all the things you've written about, that one has to make a very sharp distinction between the institutions and the religious impulse and in many cases, and, you know, i covered the war in the former yugoslavia, the religious institutions signed on

for the crusades of ethnic cleansing and gave a sacred authority to murder. >> guest: look, without wishing in any way to underplay the terrible role of institutions, we also have to accept that institutions can make things possible that are not possible when it's just the individual, and i think maybe to take the heat out of the argument, it helps to look at other areas other than religion where many of the same things happen. i mean, take the arts and humanities. we've been discussing it. you know, the university as a system has the same kind of relationship between the spontaneous inner impulse and the system. take the impulse to read poetry. you can read it on your own and have wonderful private pure feelings. you can go to an institution, have a terrible time. corrupt your understanding of poetry, get involved in

departmental struggles. they'll misappropriate funds. they'll abuse students. they'll be sexual scandals, and the institution will be horribly corrupt; right? it's the same dichotomy. the per vision and corruption and violence and greed of the institution. this is not just a religious issue. this is a human issue. now, how would we look at that? my answer is inert one -- neither one is the perfect answer. you need both, and both can go wrong. it might not be properly guided or have no traction because it's just too squeezed out by the pressures of life, and actually you don't read the poetry. your religious impasses are squashed because you watch television or whatever. let's not think about the genius, spontaneous, you know, person on the hill who feels alone, and at the same time while respecting the

terribleness that inflights all institutions, you know, businesses, churches, ect., they are nevertheless able at the best moments to do extraordinary things like build a cathedral, like commission in a b minor and throw terminal 5 or the air bus 380. in other words, when humans come together to do big things, the result can be impressive, but, of course, it can be droughtive. we have to stop being obsessed with religion as an anomaly in the corruption that afflicts it. it is no more or less prey to corruption as an institution than any other human institution, and if you look at the history of general motors compared to the history of the catholic church. general motors has been going for a few decades, but in the decade, you find just as much corruption, abuse, you know,

terrible stuff in the history of general motors as you will in a representative chunk of the history of the catholic church. spread the history over a hundred years, and the church looks bad, but it's been going for hundreds of years. let's be aware of romancing the two because all institutions have their problems. >> host: although, general motors, you can say it embraces the ideology of capitalism, but it doesn't -- it -- and you're right, i mean, you look back certainly before the reformation of the catholic church that was it totalitarian entity ruling through fear and the threat of damnation as anything else, and that there was a kind of power, especially in pre-literate europe, which the church certainly abused. >> guest: these were violent times, and you know, compared # to the power that existed, you know, in normal government at

that time, the violence ruled in families, an age when children could not answer to the parents, wives didn't exist as legal entities, where the notion of being a subject was not part of the common law. we're dealing with violence right across the board, and so say, you know, the church in 1400 was intoller rapt. that's to -- look, i'm an atheist, i don't know why i'm defending the catholic church, but i'm saying, i'm a historian, and i know that, you know, set in its context, you know, the average monostary was set in kingship. they were violent days. >> host: at one point in the book you talk about how difficult, which, of course, is true, radical intellectuals, those figures like spinoas, who challenged an entire structure, the assumptions of an age, both

essentially cast out, not only by the institutions, i mean, spinosa was tried and denounced, and you -- i wonder if those figures can ever be comfortable in any institution? you seem to propose that it's possible. >> guest: well, i, you know, reading about his life, he longed for company. he looked back to ancient greece in rome and the fellowship of philosophers at that time, and the curist and garden held a huge thing for him. he wanted to be a part of a team, but he was living in 19th century in europe in the german university system which, you know, was less toller rapt than the university system now, but along similar grounds. they didn't recognize they had a top quality thinker and didn't give him a job. he was desperate for a job. he didn't want to be an outcast on the top of the mountain speaking claims to an audience

of four. he wanted to be a professor at the university, but he was kicked out, and so, you know, be ware of interpreting romantic view that, you know, people just wanted to be on their own because it's nice to live out of a suitcase roaming around europe. no, it's great to be the professor of x or y as long as you can say what you want to say and that's what he dreamt of. >> host: that's true, but i wonder whether institutions have ever embraced thinkers who have sort of dynamited the entire super structure on which social, political, and economic assumptions are based. marx is another example. again, it's back to the conflict between individual morality as neither rights, no institution can ever achieve the morality of an individual because finally institutions are concerned about their own per -- survival, and

an individual can make the choice and sacrifice that. >> guest: sure. i think there's institutions which better or worse address the needs of the individual, and i think that's really what interests me. you know, talking about the humanities, and how they are not particularly addressing the needs of their students, and that's why people don't want to study there. they vote with their feet. take another institution like the world of museum, and you hear it said that nowadays museums are new churches and cathedrals. what's going on there? well, what people are saying is these are institutions where you find the same enrichment for your soul. now, when i look at that, i think, well, that's interesting, good in theory, and then i go to the museum, and i think, well, i'm not sure it's going right because i think, again, the museum has fallen prey to a method of presenting its art that's too cut off from the lessons of religion. religions used in a simple way.

it's used as a way of helping us to know how to live. it's a reminder. religious art is a reminder how to live, a gracious attitude and a warning of how we shouldn't live. that's sounding odd when compared with what's going on at the museum of modern art or whateverment we don't expect art should have much of an intention upon us. that's the modern system. the modern system is put octobers in -- objects in a white space with a minimal caption and get crowds through. really, this is not revolutionary at the level of individual or society in general. it exists in the world of art, and so writing my book, i was struck by the way in which religions have -- as institutions use art in a provocative way, and just one example of how i see, you know, lessons that can be pulled out of religion, by a non-believer,

and applied to try to get some of the things in the modern world to go a little bit better. >> host: yet the renaissance was a reaction to the restrictions placed upon art. i mean, everyone else. >> guest: yes. what's interesting about the renaissance is it kept true to the ambition of religious art, and, indeed, roman and greek art. roman and greek art is exactly like religious art. it wants to guide you and know how to live. >> host: which was under the church, roman and greek art. >> guest: yes, absolutely, but that ambition that art should be a guide to life is there both in christianity and in pagen thought, and it only disappeared in the 19th century under the fact that art should be for art's sake and artists are lone figures that create works that are ambiguous and the dominant feeling you have leaving the museum is, what did that mean? the catalog seems like it was

translated badly from the german. in other words, you are not sure what the response should be. that's the modernist elite view of art. art is an ambiguous medium and the more complex a work of art, the harder it will be to say what that work of art is about, but, you know, religions, you know, take a rembrandt painting like christ crossing the sea of galilee, it's a propaganda on the heart of courage. you are supposed to look at that and remember what courage is 6789 it's complex in a work of art in terms of the qualities, but it's simple at the level of its moral, and that's a situation in which we have a hard time accepting in the modern world. how can it be simple morally and yet really complicated and noble as a work of art? we expect, you know, that's not going to be the case. >> host: although secular artists did it.

>> guest: yes, yes, i mean, absolutely. you see some artist, and the greatest artists, i think, absolutely have that. the problem we have, at least, not the artists, it's the systems in which they operate. take mark rosco, fascinating artist, impulses, and i remember going to see his paintings at the gallery in london, and i wondered if what it was for. it was powerful. i looked at the caption, and still didn't know what it was about. i read books, never got the sense, and years later, i read an interview with him, and he said i want my art to be a place where the sadness that's common to all 6 us can find a refuge and focus. i thought, wow, that's simple. you can write that on a postcard. do i see that on the museum caption? no, anything but, and you find out with a lot of artists.

you know, if you have a castle, he says i'm trying to stop war, get people to be nice to each other, but when you go to the castle museum, is that stated? no, the castle is influenced by this and so in other words that very simple ambition of the artist has been drained out of it by the cureing systems. the academic world does this to written culture which is drain it of its revolution and therapy. >> host: couldn't agree more. i add that's what religion institutions did to the religion. >> guest: interesting, interesting. perhaps because i'm an atheist, i don't notice that as much. it's only to be possible through collective action, but i defer

to you in this area. >> host: strikes me, and it's also an admiration that i share that what moves you is not so much the institution, but the ritual. >> guest: yes. >> host: and rituals are designed to create sacred space, designed to honor a reality that goes beyond articulation. they are designedded, and i think this is also something you raise in the book, they are designed to put human beings in their place within the cosmos, and that, of course, is the power. there is something brilliant about it. >> guest: the way i look about it is the ritual is a communal event, something that a number of people do that have an impact on the inner self, and, again, in the modern world things that happen in the inner self come

spontaneously or influence from a book or artwork. in other words, there's the group that doesn't touch your soul, and i think what's fascinating about ritual is it's precisely an attempt to say left to your own devices solely, there's things you don't get to, and so we need -- you're not going to forgive people without yom kippur or look at the moon without the buddhist festival or properly forgive people without, you know, the jewish ritual of plunging yourself in a bar mitts fa. there's ruche chewables -- rituals that take place, and i'm deeply impressed by it. i know there's so much that i feel and want to do that i don't do because there's no communal structure. people say, yeah, but, us

atheists are brilliant at inventing things. i said, great, what is it? they go birthday parties. the birthday party? yeah, we read poems. okay, of course, there are secular rituals, but they tend not to be structured properly. they tend not to be psychologically rich. take something like father's day or mother's day which is a secular ritual, with a religious antecedent, but the reason it's stupid is it fails to recognize the number one thing is that we don't only love our mothers and fathers, but we hate them also. they let us down in many ways, and the relationship between parent and child is conflicted and by having a moment that honors only the positive makes the true relationship impossible. a more intelligence relationship or ritual starts by saying that relationship is conflicted so we

need the ritual to accept that. that's what's clever with things like the bar mitts fa, it acknowledges the fact that the parents are sad that the kid is growing up. it basically saying that the kid is murdering the father; right? this is a ritual murder of the father as the next generation grows up. the festivities and balloons and parties and the presents, which you've got, is an intergenerational, you know, murder, and it's healed and held together and done intelligently. that's the genius of religious ritual. >> host: well, it expresses, and you point it out in the beginning of the book, a fundamental truth about existence in the same way that the greek myths understood psychological truths and why freud kept going back to greek myths and shakespeare. >> guest: yes. >> host: and i think i'm certainly in complete agreement with you that to ask the

question, is this literally true is true from the beginning because they selectively look, you know, selective literal lists, pick and choose what they want. >> guest: yeah. >> host: contradictions even within the four gospels, and, you know, all sorts of issues. >> guest: it's leaving the individual with so much pressure to aseem that we as individuals can do all the stuff we have to do just by ourselves. you know, i was struck in reading the history of religion is there's always, in all religion, a festival of chaos, a moment in which the world is turned upside down, sexual religions -- relations are reversed, and all our perverse impulses are given room for expression, and, you know, whether it's carnival or the feast of fools or in ancient

greece festivals or whatever, it's a moment in the calendar where the darkness is allowed to come out into the light, and it's regulating, and that's what is fascinating. it's both chaos and structure. it's a wonderful mixture, and in the modern world, we get drunk on saturday, beat someone up, and break a car. it's uncoordinated or we have an affair, and it's left up to the individual. it's not done with dignity or seen as something that we all labor with, and 10 the individual comes to their own realization, oh, i have impulses or oh, i want to punch my boss, and this is seen as a private realization against the backdrop of a sunny on the mis-- optimistic vision of man. of course, this stuff will be in you. we're going to try to structure it, give it a place in the world. >> host: well, knowledge is

the dark impulses within human kind, which, of course; in the happy, cheerful, psychology world is completely denied. >> guest: right. which what i love about all the faiths is they are pessimists. christian pessimism is great. the book of job or buddhist texts that talk about the misery and human nature. they are incredibly important to read because we live in the sunny world where the assumption is that children are normal creatures rather than half crazy beasts, and that all of us are mature, you know, sensible people just looking forward to the next vacation rather than people who are, you know, torn apart by serious darkness, and i love reading christian and other jewish dark texts, precisely because i think, oh, i'm not alone here. oh, there's some -- this has been -- it's also very dignifieded. there's, you know, the prose or poetry that's beautiful. the language is beautiful.

it expresses those most private and articulate sides of ourselves, raises them out of the darkness, places them before us, and makes us feel lose lonely with some of the most unacceptable stuff that resides in the human soul. >> host: no division between art and religion when it began. >> guest: that's right, and there should be no longer a division between art and psychology, the psyche, that division that art served the needs of the soul directly with no -- it didn't exist in the art world. it was just -- it was part of ethics. it was part of living. we put it seriously in a corner, and we almost don't recognize how much we put it in a corner, but it's not in the service of life. >> host: and yet, this, for me, gave me a language, a vocabulary to describe aspects of human reality that i had not had before. >> guest: absolutely. it's not the artist.

the artists are doing a fine job. it's the way they are presented. i mean, i wrote a book a few years ago how it can change your life, and that got me excommunicated from the university i was in. the feeling was, well, this is not a serious man. if he's written a book about this, we don't want him here. he's written a self-help book, and i was happy to go because i thought we're not seeing eye-to-eye here, but it's symptommatic. everything, all works of culture should be how x can change your life, how picasso can change your life. that's the method that we've lost. >> host: more importantly, it's why they wrote it. the last book and a half is one charge after another. >> guest: absolutely. it's a man looking for the meaning of life and defining if you like a quasi religious path to redemption. he knew a lot about religion.

absolutely. >> host: you have some sort of specific ideas i want to ask you about, travel agents, and i don't need to list them, but spell some of them out? >> guest: well, one of the things i do in the book is provoke the reader into thinking, look, what i'm telling you is not a set of ideas, but imagine how to tweak and change the world with the help of certain concepts we've been discussing. why do i do that? i think there's sort of an assumption that practice is in one area and books are in the another, and that books shouldn't suggest practices. because i'm writing about religion, which is all about the union of practice and theory, it seemed exciting and interesting to look at that, and so, for example, i'm thinking about perspective and all the major faiths that are interested in the feeling of all, and they realize that if you put somebody in a space where they see how

small a human occupies, will be, how small a human being occupies in the vastness of space or time, there will be a quieting of the soul, of their anxiety, the pressure to succeed, and ego driven impulses, and that disappears in the night sky, in the cathedral, the grand canyon, wherever it is, you have a feeling, the distilling of the' go, and a feeling of awe. okay. religions are unparalleled at doing this. they do it all the time. they are great. where do we do this? we go to the grand canyon and ect., but i want to structure it more, stars, astronomy is a vital source of awe. when you go to a science museum, they'll treat you like you're a scientist. they don't treat you like you're looking for awe. they treat you like, you know, you're about to work for nasa, and seriously interested in the

details about g102 gal laxy 3 million light years away. most of us are not. we're looking to use science or scientific material as our religious fore bearers did. in other words, as a source of awe, but the modern museum do you doesn't allow that. i try to imagine a space to go that could be like a planetarium or science museum where the point is not to learn about science, but look at phenomena for the feeling of awe and its benefits it brings. i playfully imagine that these giant screens in time square that display the stock market.

>> guest: to use the journey to help your soul, and we kind of have that, and i'm going to go on a journey to try to do something, but it's very

unstructured, don't connect destinations with our inner needs, and the real -- if you look at the travel pages of newspapers, the dilemma is how do i find the hotel or get a cheaper rate on something? the real question of travel is how do i match the outer world with evolution in the inner world. that's how religion uses travel. i try to imagine what a travel agency might be like that's properly studied religion, and it's a playful suggestion, but a real suggestion like many of my suggestions, and really what you would do is you would have -- medieval christianity before going on a pilgrimage, you go see a priest, and you discuss your soul, and the priest guides you to a destination. you would have a map or book of destinations around europe and your outer life and upper destinations are matched. plenty there, and you might walk because as religion understands,

often the ease of getting there underminds the capacity of the journey to affect a change in us. there is, in difficulty, a metaphor a opposed to removing the difficulties. you undermind your willingness to enjoy the difficulty to change. >> host: the other problem is that people having lived for 20 years in the developed world from, you know, an industrial to a replication of that to a resort, and, in fact, they don't travel at all. there was an essay about this once. >> guest: yes, yes. they don't travel at all, and genuine touching ambitions and people want serious things from travel. they travel to find themselves, in order to improve relationships, in order to discover their children, in order to understand the world. these are really, really serious ambitions, and yet how ouch travel goes wrong, you know,

because serious ambitions are not taken seriously by the travel industry. >> host: the cruelty of marketing. >> guest: absolutely. we can be easy dissuaded and mobile impasses can be taken. >> host: going to club med in bermuda. >> guest: that's right. that's right of the that's another area. i also look at the area of community and it strigs me that one of the things religion is brilliant at doing is bringing a group of strangers together in an extraordinary accomplished beautiful space and through certain basic actions basically introduce themselves, agent as hosts like a host at a party, breaks the ice and allow people to release their humanity and curiosity, and so a religious host of that with, you know, the group of people, we lost that ability, the city, in a city like new york or anywhere, it's full of bars and restaurants, but these are corrupt visions. they are not communal spaces.

they are where no one talks to anyone or only in slightly candid ways. we lack any systematic mechanisms for turning strangers into friend. it's to all religions that have the table in which the stranger can come, eat, and break bread. these are wonderful traditions. we spent so much time worrying about restaurant and the quality of the tomatoes there, and it's nonsense comparedded to the real ambition of the table, and i suggest in the book, you know, let's get tables, you know, doesn't matter what you are going to eat. the point is friendship and community and that ancient religious, originally religious ideal of breaking bread with a stranger. >> host: you don't talk about theater in the book, classical theater. i wonder, especially having lived in new york after 9/11, and the whole build up to the iraq war, the one institution

that thought to remind us of horror of the horror which was not the church that pretty much signed on to the war as an constitution, but theater, and there were numerous productions and all sorts of great stuff done, and theater itself has a sacred quality. >> guest: yeah. >> host: it gives, you know, in some kind of way, almost brings back to life our past, our ancestors. it has a communal quality, a rich one. i just wopped r your thoughts? >> guest: if i were to criticize theater and in relation to religion, certain religious rituals have elements of theaters, you know, but it's not simply what's there that theorists, it was called the society of the spectacle -- no, it was -- >> host: a guide -- >> guest: what was called the

society of the spectacle, he criticized modern culture for extraordinary things happening on the stage, and all of us there like this, and he compared this with religious and pre-mod earn societies where there's extraordinary stuff going on stage, and that impacts the audience, and you leave transformed and with an energy to transform, and i've been in so many plays, wonderful moving plays where the audience is wrapped, and the audience is ready to go anywhere, and the play of taking them anywhere, we're an ceo stay -- ecstasy, and in the hands of the actor, and want curtain comes down, and we go out for ice cream and go home. that's it. the whole thing, the energy in the theater that could have transformed the world, it dispate, and so, you know, i look back to a radical tradition of others who thought about this, that theater should not just exist in a play house, that

it should start in the playhouse, but it's for everyone, and that tradition looks to religion as an integration of spectacle and public engagement. >> host: and yet in times of repression, and i covered chile, art and theater, i mean, the two major institutions that set it up were the church and the theater. >> guest: yes. >> host: i think -- i think you're right. people do walk out and are sort of immensed, and that's because of the sort of culture that's upon them. once everything's stripped down, and susan sontag went to the country when it was being shelled and that has a power to speak. when all of the comforts are gone, i think oftentimes the ain't to see and hear -- ability to see and hear as you

point out is the narcotic. >> guest: it's the idea of how seriously we should take works of art. we pay attention to arts, we don't want to allow it to transform things, and whenever a very powerful work comes along, just the way in which, i don't know, there's just this, you don't want -- one doesn't want to call it a conspiracy, but it almost feels like a conspiracy to strip of it its truly transformational power. you know, we all know films and plays, and you come out, and i want to change my life. you know, this piece of work has urged pop me an agenda different from everything around, and the problem is that by lunchtime the next day, you have forgotten it, ben by the next weekend, it's something new at the theater, and, you know, that's it. we don't have follow through, and, again, to look at religions, that's about by saying, you know, there's up sights, these powerful insights,

we're going to go back to them. you knee them on sunday, but you forget by next saturday. we have to go back to them. modern culture almost like it can't take its own high points seriously enough. it underminds itself, and there's a constant search for the new. the new is great because you move on to new things, but there's sort of kneeing -- neglect or repetition or rehearsal and it does take a work of art to effect change. >> host: you deal with judaism and christianity, systems of thought that were witnessed by an o -- oppressed class. by what extent is that aimed for the oppressed? i was in a refugee camp in the war of el salvador and decorated the camp for the the day of the innocence. i knew the story.

i asked a refugee why it was an important holiday, and they said on this day, jesus fled with mary and joseph to egypt before harod killed the children. i heard the story from a position of privilege, and i could recite it and understand it, and i'm wondering, you know, if you look at the antebellum south, there's two strains. you had the black church and you had the white slave holding church that used the bible, of course, to defend slavery, and i think there's a thee low jailing that's made a pretty strong argument in many ways closing the white church, and not just the antebellum, but he called it the antichrist, and talked about lynching as the modern cross, and as we close, can you address the issue of justice, issue of

oppression, and what extent finally a religious theological system can in some ways may not have been written for people like you and me. >> guest: look, i think there's something immensely important in a message which is there in all the the major faiths which is that defense of the vulnerable, the weak, the child, the dispossessed, and more broadly, the self that exists outside of power, money, and status. all religions are at their purist on the side of that, and on the side of the status list person. the secular world is a winner society. you know, we live in capitalism. capitalism rewards productivity and economic merit and demonstrable economic success. this is an immensely punishing ideology that the madness at its

most extreme because only a fraction of the members of this map et, and even the members of the united states, can ever live up to that ideology. under that ideology, a huge portion of the world's citizens and american citizens are users, and that can't be right, and where do the losers go? what ideology is it that led half the population to be definedded as a loser. it can't be the right philosophy, and what religions have cleverly done is to say, no, that's the wrong ideology, and what matters is not power and status and the position of vast castles, but the inner self and inner being, the stuff a parent would love in a child, that the outside of power relationships is what we love in people the is pure person, and that that's what matters, and in different form, that's what all the religions say. love the powerless, love the

child, love the weak person. love the mortal self, not vanity, power, ect., and we need that voice december pratly, and what families -- desperately, and what families need is it's really on the the face putting forward that voice articulately. it used to be put forward by the left, but the left was discredited by economic positions, and it failed to capitalize on what was the richest area which is the emotional analysis of what we need. by focusing itself as a scientific economic cure to the ills of mankind, it shot itself in the foot, and we're now in the world where there's capitalism on the one hand and faith-based organizations on the other, and what gives the faith-based organizations such strength is a capitalism labels so many people losers. i think as the ruler of the world, i would say we need a non-faith based ideology recognizing dignity and humanity

of the vulnerable, the weak, and the child. >> host: all right. thank you very much. >> guest: thank you so much. . .