happens in wisconsin after general motors closed assembly plant there and jerry ellen recalls back career as fighter pilot in world war ii, that's just a handful of programs airing this weekend on book tv, c-span2. for a complete schedule, visit booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome, everybody. welcome, if you would, please make your way to your seats, we are ready to begin. so, hello, everybody, welcome to temple emmanuel of beverly hills to our second conversation of the year.

we are delighted with partnering books, reza, a human history. before we bring out dr. asian, i want to bring out what it is at temple emmanuel, in response to how our civic fabric has been carrying to the idea that it has become harder and harder for us to have conversations with people when we disagree specially on issues that are important to us. so we were very lucky to have the berent family come forward and help us formulate this conversation series, larry, his wife stephanie hammer and his sister judy, all of whom have been significant thought

partners to shape this event, we are lucky to have events like this. so you might be wondering what it is that a conversation about god has to do with difficult conversations and what i will say is this, that i think that jews are good at a lot of things, but one of them is not necessarily our ability to talk about god, right? we don't often talk about what we do believe, we don't often talk about what we don't believe and i would even go as far as to say that a lot of us are probably pretty happy that our prayers are in hebrew so that we don't have to think too hard about whats with that we are actually saying about god when we pray. i think it's because the whole idea of god is deeply personal,

what we believe and what we don't and feels vulnerable when we actually have conversations about those deeply-held beliefs. but i would us to try. so before we bring out dr. aslan, i want us to take 30 seconds to think of a moment in our own life, your life when you have had a kind of spiritual or transformative experience you may or may not use the language of god, you may reject that has anything to do with god, that's not the language that speaks to you in that time but i want you to think of a moment of purpose or connectedness that you've experienced in your life because i'm going to ask you to share that moment with somebody who is sitting next to you. soit take 30 seconds to think in

silence. [silence] >> and when you're ready, make eye contact with somebody sitting next to you, maybe somebody you know or somebody you don't and take 30 seconds for each of you to share that experience. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> if you haven't switched for the other person to speak, switch now. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> go ahead and finish your thought with this sentence or the next sentence and focus your attention back up here because i would imagine that maybe that felt like a little bit of a risk, right, maybe that felt a little uncomfortable and perhaps

even a little difficult but we are lucky that over the next hour, hour and a half we are going to be guided through this difficult conversation by an extraordinary person dr. reza aslan, internationally renown writer, scholar and commentator and number one best-seller book last year, the life and times of jesus of nazareth caused a lot of conversation in the public's sphere about religion. itth was translated in over a dozen languages around the world. he is a recipient of the prestigious james choice award and serves as professor of creative writing at uc river side and ph.d, sociology of religion from uc santa barbara, personally, i'm a fan of the work that he has done through boom jen studios, a production

company focusedas largely on content and topics about the middle east, one of my favorite documentaries was produced by studios, it's called the square, you saw it on netflix about the early stages of the arab spring. needless to say, reza aslan, one of the most prolific voices in our time today, please join me in welcoming dr. reza aslan. [applause] >> thank you, thank you, everyone. thank you, thank you. >> we are delighted to have you here. >> i drive by the temple all of the time and it's one of the few temples in la that i have never actually been inside t of. >> we are delighted to welcome you. you and i are going to talk 45

minutes and for those of you interested for asking dr. as lan a question, throughout the program we will have people coming through to pick up those cards and filter them up to me. >> you can call me reza, i feel like dr. aslan, the problem is i'm the useless kind of doctor, like the doctor that can't help anyone. [laughter] >> and so like every time they say dr. aslan, something goes wrong and no help. >> i'm going to be asking you personal questions. >> okay, i'm ready. >> the first of which is that you start off this book discussing your own personal religious journey in your life and it's a really interesting and nonlinear journey and gives some good context about why you wrote the book, so would you mind sharing just with this intimate audience -- >> sure.

>> a little bit about religious experience? >> so i was born in iran. my family was, you know, culturally muslim the way so many people are culturally religious, with the exception of my father, my father was always just like devout atheist. one of those atheist who always had a pocket full of mohamed jokes, that kind of atheist, you know. and so when the revolution happened, i think my father basically thought, maybe we should get out for a little while, lay low until things settle down, obviously they did not settle down, that was 40 years ago. and when we came to the united states, this was, of course, 1979, 1980, it was at the height of the iran hostage crisis so it was not exactly the best time to be either iranian or muslim in

america, you know, as opposed to now when it's fantastic. [laughter] >> everything is great now. and, you know, i think that that kind of pushed us to just sort of strip our lives clean of religion at all. we -- certainly of islam. my mom would occasionally pray and sometimes we would do cultures and holidays but for theom most part, you know, back then being muslim was like being from mars. in fact, i've admitted on numerous occasion that is i spent a good part of the 1980's pretending to be mexican. [laughter] how little is you understood america. [laughter] >> yeah. it didn't help at all. and -- but i think it was something about my childhood

experience of revolutionary iran that left this lasting impression on me. and particularly about the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad. despite the fact that i grew up in a fairly nonreligious household i was always fascinated by religion and by spiritualty and methodologies and, you know, i was looking for a way to kind of express that. when i was 15, i went with some friends to what turned out to be evangelical youth camp and -- >> did you know that at the time? >> i knew that it was a youth camp and i knew that it was christian, but i didn't really know what any of that meant to be honest with you. and when i -- that was essentially where i first heard the gospel story and the incredible story about how the god of heaven and earth became a

baby and he died for our sins and that anybody who believes in him will also never die and -- and will live forever and i had never heard anything like that before in my life. it was a transformative moment for me and immediately converted to this very conservative evangelical brand of christianity and then spent the next i don't know, four, five, six years preaching that gospel to everyone. >> your familype included? >> whether they we wanted to hear it or not, frankly, and my family, yeah. and i converted my mother and who still a devout faithful christian. and -- and then i went to college and i decided that i was going to study religion for a yiving. i've always wanted to be a writer. i knew that i wanted to be a writero -- i don't remember evr

wanting to be anything else, like there was never any other option from my but i'm also an immigrant and when you're an immigrant you can't tell your parents that you're going to be writer, like that doesn't, you know, itca doesn't compute. i remember the one conversation with my mom and only one conversation which in which i said, mom, i think what i want to do is i want to be a writer and her response was, who is stopping you from writing. [laughter] >> you go and be a doctor and then you write, nobody is stopping you. and so i thought, well, i will be an abdemmic who also writes. >> you still get the title of doctor. >> yeah, exactly, i get to call myself a doctor, my mom milks that. >> yeah. >> and look, i had the experience that pretty much everybody has when they go to

college, right, when you suddenly realized that everything you thought you knew was wrong, every assumption you ever had, pretty much everything you had learned up to that moment was wrong. it blew my mind. and i abandoned christianity but i was looking for some way of, you know, continuing to study religion but also have a spiritual life and it was actually the -- the jesuits at my university. i want to santa clara university, if you went to jesuits they are troublemakers. they are troublemakers. jesuit who basically said, why don't you, you grew up muslim. why don't you explore that and i knew nothing, i mean, like nothing about islam at all and so i began to study islam and especially began to really delve

in which the way islam defines god which is the opposite way of the way that christianity defines god, very much the way judeos define god. christianity say that is if you want to know what god is, imagine the most perfect human being, that's god. and that just stopped working for me after a while. and what i was looking for was a different metaphor and. the metaphor that i found particularly in the suthi tradition the notion that if there is a god and if that god is one and if that god is indivisible, then everything is god, then there can't be separation between creator and

creation and i thought, yes, that works for me and so i -- i often say that i had an emotional conversion to christianity and then i had like an intellectual conversion to islam, but i do want to say something that's very important and i feel like i should just get out at the beginning because it comes out anyway, when you study the religions of the world, it becomes very difficult to take any one of those religions all that seriously. certainly it becomes veryy difficult to take the truth claims of any one of those religions that -- that seriously because it doesn't take long to realize that these are essentially different languages for the same emotion, the same sentimentt and what i'm interested in is the emotion, what i'm interested in is the sentiment. certainly i have my own ways of expressing the sentiment but how one expresses it to me is

irrelevant. >> you walk interesting mind of being both a believer and a scholar of religion. >> yeah. >> i will confess my own bias, when i pick upig a book titled d i'm expecting one of two things, i'm expecting either a religious apologist who is telling me why and how i should believe in god or i'm expecting a new atheist who is telling me that it's all bologna and ridiculous and here is why you should reject god. you have this interesting quote at the beginning that -- hold on, it says, i have no interest in trying to prove the existence or nonexistence of god, a choice and anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you. >> yes. that.ove >> that's about right. [laughter] >> yeah. >> but what was it like for you of walking this line as a believer and as a scholar and did you feel yourself getting pulled? >> yeah, by the way, i should mention that that is actually unusual in the field of religious studies.

most people go into the academic field of religion, those who aren't going there in order to become ministers of one sort of another. those who are going in there just for academic discipline. most people who enter the field of religious study, do so from a religious background, you know, it's rare that somebody who had no religious introduction at all decides, i'm going to spend my life studying the religions of the world. that doesn't happen that often. , you know, i think that for those of us who do, often we come at it from a particularly perspective. that's how we enter it and then when you start studying religion either, religions or any particular religion from a historical and literary and cultural and sociology call perspective and anthropology

perspective, set of doctrines and believes, often what happens is that your personal faiths start to crumble and it crumbles because so often -- this is true of most people that identify with a religion regardless of what religion we are talking about. most people, their face is that religion, not in what the religion points them to and so when cracks start to appear, particularly in the truth claims of that religion, the whole edafis crumbles. had i convert today a more liberal, progressive christianity, i would probably still would be a christian today but i convert today a brand of christianity that's predicated

on lateralness of the bible. that's the foundation of, you know, fundamentalist evangelical christianity, it is true and absolutely without errors, takes about five minutes to realize that the bible is full of errors as it should be when you're considering a text compiled by dozens of different hands over hundreds of years and those errors don't in any way diminish the divine value of the text, not at all. and it's lewd chris -- ludicrous that the truth claims of the scripture are predicated on whether its facts are correct or not. but that's the religion that i was told, that i was fed. when i discovered that that was incorrect, the whole thing crumbled because my faith wasn't

in god, my faith was just in this religion. >> so there are almost 100 plus people in the room who are walking away with a copy of this book tonight that you have sent -- >> that bedtime reading. >> without taking rationale for us reading it. can you walk us through trajectory of the evolution of human experience of god and particularly the dichotomy that you point out between dehumanized notion of god and humanized notion of god? >> yeah. so, okay, the basic argument of the book is that you can look at the entirety of human spiritually going all the way back to, deep, deep into our evolutionary past, to the very origins of the religious experience up to today. you can look at that entire

process as one long intimately connected, ever-evolving and remarkably cohesive attempt to make sense of the divine by humanizing the divine, by implanting in the divine human personalities, human motivations, human emotions, human weaknesses and strengths, virtues and vices, by essentially transforming god into a human until, of course, in the person of jesus christ he becomes literally a human being. and what's fascinating about that is that it's kind of a function of our brains that believe it or not we don't have much choice in the matter. it's a cognitive impulse, we do it without actually thinking about it and by the way, it doesn't matter whether you believe in god or not, that's

the i really cool part about it. atheists do this as much as believers do and, in fact, when you tell an atheist, okay, fine, you don't believe in god, now describe whaty you mean by god? >> it's interesting, rabbi, rabbi at the congregation, he says i don't believe the god that you don't believe in. >> yeah. honestly, that's such an important -- this question of does god exist or do you believe in god or not, we all assume that we mean the same thing by god. it's so funny how we don't actually bother to think about the fact that this work, this word that is probably the most variable word in all language is one that we just simply assume, obviously you mean the same thing that i mean by god but, right, so even with atheists, they do this thing and we can talk about the reasons why we do it, we can certainly have a conversation about what it is in

the human mind that compels us to do that and why and we can also talk, i think, you know, at length about what to do about it, i would love to have those conversations but i do want to emphasize one thing which is this is not a good thing, it's not actually a positive thing to humanize god because while it's true, what it does do, when you construct a god who looks and feels and acts and thinks just like you do, it allows you to have a relationship to actually commune with that divine that you have constructed as essentially a divine version of yourself but what it also does is that it infuses that divine with your biases and your bigotry and prejudices, basically what you do is create a god that becomes nothing more than a mirror reflecting back to you your own ideas, the things that you love and the things

that you hate and that is extraordinarily dangerous. >> i've really love that little promo video that you did, that piece where you said, god doesn't hate gave people, you hate gay people. god doesn't love america, you love america. >> exactly. it's what i think is fascinating about it is that, look, religion has done a lot of good in the world and done a lot of bad in the world and i think that there is this dichotomy, this sort of conversation that we have all of the time that people say, religion is a good thing, no, religion is a bad thing. first of all, religion is both of those things. the reason it's both of those athings because it's nothing me than a reflection than everything that's good or bad about us.at we construct a god who is based on ourselves and god that's a construction of ourselves and then we wonder why our religious

institutions are to flawed, well, they are i so flawed becae they are human, what i would like to do at the very least is start getting people to be aware of that cognitive impulse and whether they want to change or not. >> here is where your use of metaphor is effective. if you think about religion as tool, language can be used usedr good, language can be used for evil. language is a necessity, expression of what it is to be human. you're not going to get rid of language. >> right. >> we have to grapple with religion as though it were a language and try to pull it towards the good and not the bad. >> that's perfectly said. i preach that constantly, don't confuse faith and religion. they are not the same thing.

faith as we haveot been talking about all of this time is, you know, it's mysterious, it's individual, it's not a rational thing. it's an experimental thing. it's an emotion. it's the best way to describe what faith b is. it's an emotion like any other emotion and our emotions are not rational things, our emotions are based on experiences, connections with each other, who we are, how we define ourselves, you know, emotions are mysterious things. but we need a way to express what it's fundamentally inexpressible experience. we need a language, a set of symbols, set of metaphor that is we can communicate those feelings to ourselves and to like-minded people and there are throughout the world a set of ready-made languages already and

you can, if you so choose, you don't have to, but if you so choose, find one of those languages that resinates with you and use it to communicate this experience to draw connections, you know, with other people who have the same emotion. >> so let's keep on this idea of kind of emotionality around religion. your last book zealous about the life of jesus of nazareth, ruffled a few feathers. >> you think? >> some in the christian community had the critic that what is a muslim writing a book about jesus, of course, ignoring the fact that jesus had role to play in islam as well. some took issue with how you interpreted the sources and the evidence from the arab but i think just kind of -- it's really about sensitivity that religion has and when people

start poking at it, it can get very upsetting. >> yeah. >> so with this book, have you happened upon any sensitivities that have been surprising or -- or have there been points of interest that people have really emotionally connected to? >> yeah, thank you for that question. well, so, you know, we are about four years removed from zelot and i have had enough time to process the response and really, you know, this is what i do, i'm academic so i want to analyze it and create data that i can sift through and make certain conclusions about. .. .. the negative response to the book didn't come from christians or even conservative christians actually, part of the reason it was such a big seller is because many bought it and discussed it

in their churches. but negative reaction came from one particular group of christians and that was the right-wing christians who in many ways have the sam had the y is the mainstream of different politics and this is important to understand not just the context about what happened in the book that helped us understand what was going on right now >> because the issue that people seem to have was about jesus' politics, you know. that they had a very difficult time recognizing jesus as a poor jewish peasant from the back woods woods woods of galilee whose message

was predated not on the contrary but on the reversal of the social order. jut did not say the rich and the poor shall come together and hold hands. he said the rich and the poor will switch places. the first shall be last and the last shall be first. that those who are relevanty now will become poor. that those who are fed will become hungry, that those who rejoice will weep. and this was an extraordinarily radical revolutionary idea in jesus' time and still is today. the problem is that jesus has been -- you know, defanged by i think most modern, particularly american christians, who would rather think of jesus as a middle class business owner who

really hated taxes. right? like that is jesus. that's bill o'reilly's jesus book, i'm not making that up. that's literally his book. and i think that to me was really fascinating to see that. of course, now four years later we're seeing precisely the political division within american christianity exert itself in the trumpphone -- from phenomenon and now with roy moore in alabama, being openly defended by christians who are -- like shrugging off'd fee a. you know -- off pedophilia. extraordinary. i got a glitch of that. >> a harbinger. >> yes. i think for a large part of why people respond the way they tend

to respond to my books is not bach i'm courting controversy. i promise you i'm not court avoid controversy but -- i think we have the understand, regardless of what religion you're talking about, regardless where the world you're talking about, religion is often far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices. it's not to say that beliefs and practices don't matter. of course they do. when someone says as a. >> i'm a muslim, i'm a christian, i'm other buddhist, they're making an identity statement. a statement about who they are, how they understand their place in the world, how they define their relationship with other people. it's not just these are the thinks i do and these are the things i believe, and so when someone feels as though some aspect of their religion is

being criticized, even from a historical perspective, without any negative intention, then what they're really reacting to is the fact they feel that their very identity is suddenly under siege. so it's not just, hey, maybe jesus didn't really want you to drive a really nice car. instead of arguing about the text or theology, what i think some people people as though i'm actually attacking who they are as human beings. but it comes with the territory. strangely, i kind of mention this back stage, i haven't really had that with this yet. it's only been two weeks. plenty of time. i don't know how this is going to go. it could deteriorate really quickly. but so far, i think it's because when i start telling people what the book is about, usually what

happens is people start to go, yeah, like -- yeah, i guess i do do that and i guess that is a thing. and so right away i think it takes people -- it takes them offguard a little bit. >> seeing how this is going to go, you do all have note cards that you can write your questions on and we'll have folks who are starting to go around and gather some of those note cards. please take a moment. we only have a few more minutes where reza and i will be the conversation with ourselves before we loop you in. so, the chunk in the middle, you described a little bit about this humanized versus dehumanized part of perspective on god. then towards the end you bring back in your own faith experience, and you talk about how you arrived at a notion of god through soofi tradition

within lahm. i want you to explain what pantiaism is and you point out there are threads of this in all other religions. judaism including. >> including judaism. >> so i'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to speak about the tradition. >> let's do it. >> to tie it into yours. >> sure. well, so, yes, at the end of the book, i essentially make a kind of full-throated argument for a more pantiastic view of god , a god that is dehumanized, not a divine personality who looks and acts like we do but a god who is essentially the animating force of the entire universe, and i do talk about how this was -- the whole first three chapters are

all about prehistoric conceptions of the divine, and i make an argument how that is actually the original way in which the idea of god was understood, as the force of the universe, the creative force of the universe, the universe it. in our modern parlance we have a term, called panhiasm. it's a break word that just basically means all is god and god is all. it's the belief, as i described earlier, that there can be no division between creator and creation, that they are fundamentally the same thing and what we think of as the universe is nothing more than the self-expression of the divine. so first should i say that part of the reason that i make this argument is, first and more

foremost, provides a more meaningful perception, rather than think of god in a personality term. secondly, it's a kind of spirituality that can lead to greater connections between different religions and between different people and could lead to a better world. if you see god in every human being, every human being is god, it becomes impossible to denigrator devalue human beings. because those human beings are god. you can't abuse or explode nature because nature is god. it's i think a recipe for a deeper and more peaceful and more forward-looking spirituality, and, yes, it exists in all religions and it

exists in a very strong form, obviously, in the form of -- particularly as it was evolved by the great luria and the the cabal, i the notion is that -- again, it starts with this fundamental problem at the heart of monoism. they concept there is only one god is barely 3,000 years old, and this is a tangent but it's not that it didn't arise, not that people didn't actually bring up the possibility.

there were numerous religious reformers who did propose a mono theistic system, just when it was proposed it was rejected sometimes violently and the rope is why we as human beings are perfectly comfortable with contradictory attributes within ourselves we're not so comfortable with contradictory and conflicting attitudes in god, and so we are much more comfortable having a different god for each one of our attributes, a god of love, god of war, and a god of the sky and a father deity and a mother deity and we want those spread out. when someone says, no, no, no all those things exist in a single god, the ancient mind dund get it. why? why would one god be both good

and evil, i one guide be responsible for darkness and light. it doesn't compute. and so one of the many conflicts that arose, once mono theism started to stick, is, well, hold on a second. how, then, do we explain creation? because if there was god and god created the world, what did he create the world from if not from himself? and if he created the world from himself, doesn't that violate the nature of god as indivisible? the only possible response to that is that creation is god. that however you define all of this, that it is inex-struckable from god. and lurias way of explaining

this, he kind a term that mean -- coined a term that means contraction. what he said was what god did was that he contracted his infinite light. he contracted it, and in contracting it, made space, made conceptual space for creation to arise. now, just to be clear, philosophers have a different word for that view. they call it panin. it's to show that the difference there being that the idea is that god is the universe but is also above the universe as opposed to panthiasm which says god is the universe, put panin is another form of pan theism.

exists in judaism, in christianity in islam and the soofi tradition in daoism and buddhism and hinduism. it's not just a religion term. it's a philosophical term. the great philosopher spinoso was one of the first to talk about the notion of -- the idea of all things being irreducible to one thing. it exists in science. in the very concept of the preservation of energy and matter. the idea that whatever exists now has always existed and will always exist as long as the universe exists. that's a scientific fact. and even there -- i mean,

scientists ten to call it pan -- they don't say all is god. they say, all is psyche, meaning all is mind or all is consciousness. bus those are just words. they're just words for the same idea. what want to do with this book -- this is the first time i'm actually saying, this is what i believe and it wheres woo be cool if other people believed it, too. but that is ultimately whatnot i want to do. a british newspaper "the spectator" accused me of wanting to start my own religion and saying give him ten years and he will be wearing a turban and flying his own private jet. and that didn't sound to bad, actually.

>> a lot of suspects of your career have led you to interview people who identify as religious. right? i want to know when you have those encounteres, what are you most curious about and is there anything -- you have a rabbi in front of you. anything you ran to ask me? >> what noticed in the conversation is have with religious people is usually twofold. one, that the metaphors they use to express their religion ultimately expresses what seems to me a very similar faith experience, fright the questions they ask, the way they ask them, it's just that they use -- as we have been talking about all along, like a different language. it's sort of like the equivalent of hearing someone suddenly

speak french or german and you need a translator, right? you need someone to tell you exactly what is being said, and once at that time translation starts, then it's not just that you're understanding. it's that you're connecting, right? you're actually having a dialogue back and forth. and so that's the first thing i notice. the second thing i notice that the almost always confuse the metaphor for the thing itself. you know what i mean? when you point out, you know, i believe something very similar to that, and this is how i describe it, and the response is often, that's not the same thing. it's not the same thing. your metaphor is different than my metaphor so therefore it's not the same thing. i notice that -- the spiritual conversations i have that are

the most rewarding often are with this new sort of category of americans who refer to themselves as the nones, the nonaffiliated. this is -- it's basically a way of saying i'm spiritual but not religion. >> jews have been pioneering that for years. >> an old idea. yeah. the pew forum on religion and life, which has been mapping american spirit actuality for decade, had to come um with the new category. only ten years ago, because of the fact that a lot of people were turning in their questionnaires blank, and just so simply refusing to choose which category they were going to -- even though there is a category on the list that says, athiest, and another that says agnostic, and they would say,

none of this matches what i am. and so they had to come up with this new category, and the category they chose was titled nonaffiliated, and that's just become known as non, or the nons in the 2016 pew study, 24% of americans chose non. it's the fastest growing label, and i think it tells you something about where we are as a nation and partly, i believe, it has to do with the marriage of religion and politics in america over the last ten years. don't think it's a coincidence that those two things have risen in tandem with each other. i find that they are the most rewarding to speak to for this reason, because the metaphors don't get in the way. >> interesting.

so my last question before i start to get to the audience questions -- here's great so far so i'm going regret i can't get to all of these. i come at god in a very similar way that you do, and one of the struggles that i have in understanding this deep sense of connectedness and not separating creator from creation, and removing the emphasis on reward and punishment, is this big looming question of morality. right? and this concept of god seems to leave morality in the hands of us as very imperfect beings. is that your read, too? and if so, how do you grapple with that and where does morality fit into this

conversation of religion? >> i actually address this at the end of the book because i do think it's a large part why the pantiaskic conception of god is not popular. when you dehumanize god it makes it harder to form a personal relationship with them. easier to think of god as some dude you met on the street, and so -- and have that conversation, you're just like me. let's talk. let's connect. god is not just like you. and -- no offense to anyone but god is not just like you. and then the second thing is exactly that. well, but if god isn't punishing my misdeeds and rewarding my good deeds, then why shy even have good deeds or misdeeds? now, what i find interesting is

that often times the people who ask that question tend to be very sort of conservative,'ll people, be they devout christians or ultra orthodox jews or fundamentalist muslims. those people most often trip over this notion, and honestly, more than anything, it just depresses me. it really depresses me to think that your moral behavior towards other people and towards your world is predicated on getting a reward at the end of this thing, like you're some kid who gets a lollipop for not crying while getting a haircut. how immature and childish are we

as spiritual beings that that's what we need. at the same time, i get it, and so part of my argument for panthiasim is if you remove that aspect of the divine and instead infuse everything with the divine, then it's still prohibits you -- if you're a devout believer, it still prohibits you from acting immorally to other people and to the world because doing so is acting immorally toward god, so if you're taking this god thing seriously at all, instead of thinking of it as some prize that you get when it's all over, instead think about this as your relationship with god. and i get it.

i get that it's a different way of thinking, but i -- that's why i think it is a deeper spirituality. >> the closest experience i have had to religious epiphany was the third year of school, happening upon a philosopher with the idea that commandment comes through the face of the other, and it was just an ah-ha for me. i never related -- torah is beautiful and value and there for me to mine for wisdom but didn't come with that sense of commandedness and reward and punishment and these are the thing you have to follow. the idea that commandment comes through the fact that i am forced to face your existence, and you have a claim over me. that was something that was just really profound. >> perfectly put. >> so okay. i've got a lot of these. so i'm going to ask you to try to do these as rapid fire.

>> okay. i'm a talker. that's what i do. >> could you plan to take this book to speak to red states out of new york city and l.a.? do you suggest we -- tackle the -- i'm not sure what this -- 0, 62% of americans who don't know a muslim. >> i think it's actually higher than that. yes, i'm traveling the entire country. i just -- i just came from georgia and i'm off to texas, and, yeah, i do. i -- people ask me all the time about the audiences i talk to, and for the most part to be honest with you, i don't really think about it partly it's just because that's -- i'm not a details guy, and somebody gives me a list and says, oh, you're in alabama tomorrow. oh, i guess i'm in alabama tomorrow.

and then i'm not clever enough to think of something new to say so i'll say the same thing over and over again. people -- people react negatively. no question about that. but i think the one thing that inoculates me slightly is that i take faith seriously. i don't denigrate people's faith. this is the foundation of who i am. if i actually do believe that religion is just different languages for expressing the similar faith, then i'm okay with the different languages that people bombard me with, and i'm perfectly fine sort of meeting them where they are. doesn't motor me. >> the next question, why be a believer as a muslim? why not be a more generic spiritual? >> yes. i think that's a very good question. you can be sort of generically

spiritual. i don't think that -- i think it's a very rare thing. again, going back to the nons. huge amount of study on nons who are spiritual and when they're forced to actually describe their spirituality, they immediately revert to the comfortable metaphors and symbols, usually the ones they grew up in. so if you -- when you want to think about or talk about such a thing as faith, you do just kind of immediately revert to the metaphors you have been taught, that you grew up in. i chose my metaphors, and i chose them because -- it goes back to something that the buddha said that has become a mantra for me. if you want to strike water you don't dig six one-foot wells.

you dig one six-foot well, and islam is my six-foot well. the important point is that the buddha was making it clear that no matter what well you are using, the water is the same. >> the water you get to. have you had a religious experience involving an altered state of consciousness, and if so, can you share a few words about it? >> yes. i've had a few in my life. i had a number in my christian years. particularly in my christianity, it's a christianity that is very cosmic, right? event gel cal christianity is vaccinal christianity is about good verse evil, darkness, lightness, which cider you on and there's a spiritual battle. you're nothing more than pawns on this earth, that the things

we do have so cosmic consequencs and that mindset naturally foments experiences that are very real, but i think as i've gotten older, the majority of my metaphysical experience come through my family. once said my family is my church, and i mean that. i mean that quite literally. my family literally gets together on sundays, just my family, and we have our own little thing we call home church. but also is the source of my spiritual connection. it's where i feel closest to god, however that is being defined. >> so i have a couple of questions here that i'm going to

butcher in order to combine, but they're pointing to this idea of mon othe jim and patriarch can i or hierarchy and those structures being particularly linked. so i'm just going to throw that out. that connection to you for you to comment on. >> yeah. easy. let me take you on a very, very brief, like 20,000, 30,000 year history. very, very breech. when we were hunter-gatherers, our god were the gods of the sky because what was important at that point was geography, landscape, and so the way we understood our connection with the deities was through those spoke nature that helped in the hunt. and most of those deities were

male deities, with some exception. the moon is often seen as female but not always, but often seen as a female deity but the sun is definitely definite male deity. the sky is a male deity. thunder, lighten in, male deities. when we transition to agriculture, interestingly enough, the focus went from the sky to the earth. the earth as opposed to the sky is associated with female deities. obviously. right? it gives us life. we plant seeds in it. it sprouts. life, we live off of it. the fertility of women became divinized in a way. then something very interesting happened which is that with agriculture came the rise of civilizations, and with civilization came the creation

of organized religion. right? religion, like we, was not stable. it was not static. it was in constant movement, but when we stopped moving, and we settled down and began to plant fields and build villages and cities, we also built temples, a place to house the gods, and here's the thing about temples. the second you build something like that, you need someone to administer it. right? you need someone who is in charge of that thing now. and that -- the idea of the intermediary between humanity and god almost always fell to men. there were exceptions, particularly in mesopotamia, when you have very, very powerful goddesses, like anana or ishtar. those kinds of goddesses that

were extraordinarily powerful would have women in charge of them and even that bass a patriarchal thing. the goddess ace woman and it requires women to take care of her but the other gods are just male dominated. and so that is the whereby what we start to see as the creation of organized religion almost immediately becomes a pate tram track -- patriarch cal -- patriarchal thing. it's sort of an unbroken chain that can go back to the very first civilizations and the very first temples that we built. >> do you think that the threading back in of panthiasm

from the earliest days will start to shift that patriarchy? >> definitely. it's not a cor deincidence that the mon otheisic god is conceived of a in male terms so i think the idea is that, well, then men should be in charge of this thing. if you de-jennifer -- de-jennifer god and stop thinking of it as he or she, it fosters lesser patriarchal control over religious institutions. >> okay. you said god does not hate people. you hate gay people. but we are born into a religion which has ideas that predate us. for religious jews, even though

we may want to exclude gay relationships, and not because we hate gay people but because it's in scripture and we believe in the divinity of scripture. how do you reckon sole -- reconcile that. >> i assume that the person who believes in the divinity of scripture, when it comes to issues of homosexuality, also believe in the divinity of scripture when it maps to us take our disobedient children outskirtses of town and stone them to death. if do you that, then i accept your interpretation of the divinity of scripture. until you season -- i'm joking obviously but it's remarkable how selective we are when it comes to what parts of the scripture we choose to read literally and what parts we say, well, but that is historical context. that's just a culture thing.

that's how they did it then. we're not going to stone our children today when they disobey us. okay. so, historical context there, but not historical context here? you don't -- i mean, if you're going to pick and choose, fine, pick and choose, we all pick and choose. everybody picks and chooses. but at least admit you're picking and choosing. >> does god love kevin spacey? i'm going to take a hard pass on that question. anybody is recording anything, i know that whatever i say is not going to come out right. >> i think this one is more personally to you as rosa as a muslim rather than reza as a scholar. are there muslims fomenting --

>> i'm going to be an academic here and first define terms. right? just so can't say god until we define god. can't say reformation until you define reformation. reformation is not what you think it is. i think because we live in protestant america we have a skewed view of reformation. reformation is a universalphone that -- phenomenon that takes place in all great religious tradition when institutions and individuals begin to fight over who has the authority to define the faith. to define the scripture. this jewish reformation is what we refer to as rabbiical judaism. the process for the meaning and message of the jewish faith was

wrested from the temple priests by scholars and individuals, rabbis, who wanted to interpret the faith on their own. that process was accelerated by the destruction of the temple. the clinch reformation was not between catholic and protestant reform and the protestants won, that's not what happened. this was an argument between the institutions, in this case the papacy, and individuals over which one of them gets to define the faith, and in both of those cases, the result of that argument was violence, often catastrophically so. the christian reformation resulted in the death of half the population of germany alone. to the islamic reformation has

been going on for 100 years and people don't pay attention to it. violence in the muslim world, they say they need a reformation. the violence is the reformation. you're watching it before your very eyes. this dramatic, global fight over who gets to interpret this thing, is it going to be the institutions of islam? the traditional schools of law, the traditional -- who have maintained nor last 1400 years an iron grip over the meaning and message of islam, primarily because their the only ones who could read the koran, who had access to the koran. or is it going to be individuals who are going to seize for themselves this power to interpret the text as they see fit. now, as we all know, when you say that the interpretation of

the sacred text rests in the hands of individual, not the institution, you are opening up a can of worms because any individual now has the power of an imam or the power of a priest or the power of a rabbi. any individual can go to the text and def fine -- tee fine for themselves what the text means. so you'll have individualistic interpretations that promote peace and tolerance and pluralism and interpretations that foster violence and bigotry, and there is no muslim pope, so nobody gets to say who is right and who is wrong. the result of this is this gigantic clash over who gets to decide. don't want to sound -- one of

the significant leaders of the islamic reformation, the man we will look at 100 years from how to as play as playing a pivotal role in reformation is osama bin laden. bin laden's argument, which was so profoundly popular, was -- you read this in his writings all the time -- stop going to mosque. stop going to your mosque. stop listening to your imam. don't pay any attention to allah. ignore the saudi clerics. they have nothing for you. instead, go to the text yourself. examine the text for yourself. you will see that it compels you to act in these certain ways. and it was by setting himself up as an alternative source of authority, despite the fact he has not had a single day of instruction in the islamic sciences.

he is an engineer. he has no degrees in the koran. never studied islam or islamic law. but that where is his power came from. in fact, the argument was even more succinct than that. the argument was it doesn't matter what the ulama have to say. the very fact they say it from a position of learned authority negates their position altogether, and that is why the leaders of his movement were doctors and engineers and sociologists. they weren't imams. they weren't scholars or religious leaders. that's not who they wanted. and, again, i think if you understand what the argument is and what is at stake, then suddenly things become clear. stop talking about a reformation

and stop recognizing the reformation that you are living through. >> i've got a couple questions here that are framing secularism as kind of a forgone conclusion or in one case as a challenge. can you speak a little bit more about the nons and about their relationship to religiousity and what that implies to the future of religion. >> let's define terms. there's a difference between secularism and secularization, we're not a secular country in the united states. far, far from it. we are secularized country in the united states. secularism is an ideology that says religion has no place in the public realm. that religion is a private thing and should not be part of the public realm. france is a secular country. secularization is the process

whereby political authority rests in civic leaders and not religious leaders. right? that's the whole idea of the separation of church and state, and the anti-establishment clause and all of that stuff. that we do not allow for our religious leaders to have political authority, like, for instance, in iran. so, the reason i make that distinction is i think sometimes people think that secularism is a necessity for modern societies. that secularism is a necessity for democracy, and that is not true at all. you can be a religious country and still be democratic as long as you maintain adherence to the principle of democracy, chief among them is the equal rights for all people, regardless of their faith, regardless of their race or their ethnicity or gender. but the idea that the laws and

values of a nation can be predicated on a particular religious morality, well, that's called america. that's what we do here. so, what i would say is, i think as the nons start to become a greater force in society, funny story, last week the very first elected federal representative in history came out as a non, and it was like a big deal. acted like he was coming out of the closet. a congressman who was, like, i'm not sure i believe in god, and that was like the "washington post" wrote a. article about it. that's the kind of country we are. so, i think that as the nons

become a greater social and political force, what you're going to see is less of specific religious influences on society, but i don't think that you're going to suddenly see the kind of secularism we see in countries like france or in countries like egypt. and, yes, egypt is a secular country, egypt is in country in which religious expressions in the political realm are responded to with profound violence. if you -- if you are rung for president in america and you stand up and in front of thousands of people and say, as mike huckabee said when he was running for president, as president i will change the constitution so that it is in better alignment with the bible -- that was his trump -- trump -- that was his --

>> oops. >> his stump speech. what we say? okay, well, let's vote on whether we agree with that or not. if you're a politician in egypt and you stand up in front of thousands of people and say i want to change the constitution so that it is in better alignment with the koran, you will never be heard from again. you will just simply disappear and no one will see you again. so, yes, egypt is a secular country. >> what is the best way to make people cognizant of the fact they humanize god and the dangers of doing so, and do you think that our innate desire to humanize god will go strong with our advances in science or technology or diminish. >> great question. the first part i already said, which is just simply ask someone to describe god. just ask them. don't say do you believe in god or not. just say, tell me -- describe god to me. describe what you moon by god. and then point out to them that

basically everything they said is just a description of, like, really powerful human being. hike a human being but with super human powers. and they recognize it themselves. and then secondly, i think the opposite. i actually think -- and i've written about this but it's something i firmly believe. i think that often times in our conversations about religion and science, we tend to believe that these are diametrically opposed things that are diverging from each other. first of all they're not diametrically opposed. they're in many ways two different modes of knowing, two different ways of approaching the fundmental questions of reality and existence, and they don't necessarily need to be in conflict with each other. secondly, i think that what you're seeing now is the slow convergence of religion and science, and many ways the more

science begins to ask these fundamental questions about the nature of reality, right, not just about the lose fies six but about concepts such as proto consciousness and the issues like -- the more scientists start to use language, that at least to me sound like some 16th century mystic, and the way they talk about these ideas. and so i think probably what we are going to see is a time in the not too distant future in which these two things, science and religion, increasingly begin to use the same kinds of terms, the same kinds of language. for those who think that, oh, eventually science -- science will just continue to make discoveries and with each discovery, religion will go

away. i don't think you really understand religion. when we discovered the earth was not the center of the universe, it's not like christianity went away. the pope was like, my bad, never mind. no. christians just absorbed that information and moved on. if aliens suddenly show up, from some distant planet, and walk out and are like, take me to your leader -- first, we would say, no. no. we're not -- you don't want to meet our leader. trust us. it's better if it's just like this. and then secondly, we would just simply absorb that information in our religions and move on. scientific discoveries do not diminish religion. religion just absorbs those discoveries and keeps going. so, i think honestly that is

where i would say we're headed, is towards a convergence of these two things. i think in the future, religion is going look a lot more like science than we think it will, and science is going to look a lot more like religion. >> so in your book you say there's no evidence that moses ever existed. if he never excess its when was the concept of the character moses created. and i'll add on to this question, can you speak a little bit about the nature of scripture, and how it incorporates things that don't have archeological evidence or facts behind them. how did those things come into being. >> first, correction. sent say there's no evidence that moses ever existed. the problem is that when you're talking about that far back in history, the idea that you could actually pinpoint the existence

of an individual is impossible. there is no evidence that jesus existed, and that is almost a thousand years later. so, i think it's important to understand that we're not talking about individuals. we are talking about certain narratives, and, yes, it's true, that there has never been any archaeological evidence to show the existence of israelites in egypt or the existence of a massive exodus of israelites across the sinai. doesn't mean we won't find something one day, but we just have never found any -- there's been a lot of looking, as you can imagine. we just haven't found any. but i think you bring up a much more important point here, one that we touched on slightly, and that is the idea of scripture

being understood as either truth or fact. right? we as products of the scientific age have been taught that which is true is that which can be factually verified. and so we want that same idea of truth from our scriptures without recognizing that the people who compose these scriptures had a completely different understanding of the concept of truth. that for them truth and fact were two totally different things, and that the facts of a story are far less important than the truth that is conveyed in that story, and i think, again, that we would be better off -- we would have a more morning philadelphia spirituality, we would be actually reading the scriptures they way it was intended if we

also understood that throughout and fact are two different things and that if we read our scriptures, more interested in truth than we are in fact. >> it's scripture originalist, rather than a literalist. >> i'll use that. >> the dalai lama rote mat the had a believe in a secular ethics morality. this it what you concluded as well are or you on a pathway to that. >> if i described my ethics and my mority i would describe it in the same way mitchell ethics and morality are not predicated on what i think god does or does not want me to do. toe my fellow human beings and my fellow creation. my ethics and morality predicate on the idea i have certain

responsibilities to creation and to my fellow human beings, responsibilities that in my case come from the idea that i do see the divine in them but i don't necessarily need to see that in order to understand there are proper moral and ethic ways of behaving in the world that lessen suffering, lessen pain, lessen violence, and all of that is a good thing in and of itself. i do think that what is really fascinating about the dalai lama and the way he has been talking recently -- this is perhaps for another time so i won't get too deep -- is that he is preparing the world's tibetan buddh diggsists, around the -- buddhists around the world for the end of that religion, and

it's an extraordinary thing to watch. those who are unfamiliar with what i'm talking about, the dalai lama has announced that he will not be resurrecting. he will not be reincarnating. there will be no dalai lama after him. and just so we're on the same page here, the dalai lama is the reincarnation of a -- and this is an enlightened being who thousands of years ago decided that rather getting off the wheel of rebirth and going into nirvana, even though she -- it's a woman -- even though she has the able to do so, she would continue to reincarnate, over and over and over again, until

she had finally provided that same nirvana to all of humanity. the politics of the situation has created a situation in which china has said that it will decide who the next dalai lama is, and it is actually demanded that the dalai lama reincarnate. it's officially demanded it. and the dalai lama's response to that has been to say, no. that this is it. i'm essentially going to go. i'm going to go to nirvana and leave you all behind. yeah, i know. it's like -- honestly, the people like me who, like, livermore this kind of stuff, are just like, we don't know how

to process this. religion dies all the time. >> but the don't intentionally sunset. >> they don't intentionally debuts the divine figure says, it's all over, everybody go back to your homes. it's all over. this is caused this real conflict in the heart of tibetan buddhism. many tibetan buddhists are rejecting the dali lamb in's not just his statement but now are rejecting the dalai lama. even juicier, they being led by the dali lamb in's younger brother so is so fantastic it's also a family thing, and against to me -- i see things like that, this is why it's all so fascinating. religion isn't just about the things that a person believes.

it has these profound social and political and even global aspects to it, and part of the reason why we do need to be religiously literate is because you can't avoid religion and you need to be aware of it and be learned in it because it will help you navigate the craziness that is the world that we live in. >> so, what a wonderful note to end on, and i'll just say, i'm a rabbi. i do religion for a living. as do you in a different way. i haven't got ton talk about god -- gotten to talk about god this much i think in the last five years in one sitting, and it's really a joy, and i think that sometimes our community

needs external catalysts to have the stunt to reflect on ourselves. so, i want to thank you and i think we all want to thank him for providing us that opportunity. >> thank you. thank you. a great honor to be here. thank you. [applause] >> so, for those of you who do have books, reza will be in our chapel for book signing until 9:15 sharp, and we have some cookies and tea for you to enjoy outside. so thank you all so much for coming. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations]