because they were women being people believed them. in some ways they were ideal intelligence officers. because people believed whatever they were doing couldn't possibly be important. >> all these authors appeared on booktv. watch them on our website, booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome, everybody. welcome, if you would please make your way it your seats. we are ready to begin. so hello, everybody and welcome to temple emanuel of beverly hills, to our second conversation of the year. i am rabbi sarah bassin we are delighted to be partnering with shibalyang books in order to brg

dr. reza aslan to speak about his newest book, "god, a human history." but before we bring out dr. aslan, i want to bring you a little bit context about what the baron conversation series is at temple emanuel. we started this program last year in response to had you our civic fabric has been tearing, to c the idea that it has become harder and harder for us to have conversations with people when we disagree, especially on issues that are important to us. so we were very lucky to have the berent family come forward to help us formulate this conversation series. larry and his wife stephanie and his sister judy, all of whom have been significant thought partners helping us shape this event. we are very lucky to have them and to have events like these.

so you might be wondering what it is that a conversation about god has to do with difficult conversations? and what i'll 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 talkf about god. all right? we don't often talk about what we do believe. we don't talk about what we don't believe, and i would even go as far as as to say that a lot of us are probably pretty happy that our prayers are in hebrew so we don't have to think too hard what it is we're actually saying about god when wehe pray. i think it is because the whole idea of god is deeply personal. what we believe and what we don't and it feels vulnerable when we actually have

conversations about these deeply-heldab beliefs. but i want 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 lives, in your life, when you have had a kind of spiritual or transformative experience. you may or may not use the language of god, right? you may reject that has anything to do with god. that is not the language that speaks to you in that time but i want you to, think of a moment f purpose or connectedness that you have experienced in your life. because i'm going to ask you to share that moment with somebody who is sitting next to you. so take 30 seconds to think in silence.

and when you're ready, make eye contact with somebody sitting next to you. maybe somebody you know or somebody yout don't, and take 0 seconds for each of you to share that experience. [inaudible conversations] if you haven't switched for the other person to speak, switch

now. [inaudible conversations] go ahead and finish your thought with the 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 incredibly lucky that over the next hour 1/2 we are going to be

guided through this difficult conversation by an extraordinary person, dr. reza aslan. dr. aslan is a internationally reknowned writer, scholar, producer, commentator and his number one best-seller book last year called, "zealot," the life and times of jesus of nazareth, caused a lot of conversation in the public sphere about religion. it was translated in over a dozen languages around the world. he is a recipient of the prestigious james joyce w award. he serves as a professor of creative writing at uc-riverside, and holds a phd in p sociology of religion fromc santa barbara. personally i am a fan of the work he has done but boom gen studios which is a production company focused largely on

contentt and of the middle east. one of my favorite documentaries was produced by boom gen studios, you saw it, called the square, the early days of the arab spring. reza aslan is one of the most important and prolific voices on religion in the public sphere in our time today. please join me in welcoming dr. reza aslan. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, everyone. thank you, thank you, thank you. >> so we are so delighted to have you here today. >> what a joy it is to be here. you know i drive by this temple all the time. >> really? >> it is one of the few temples in l.a. that i have never been inside of. nice to be here. >> you and i will talk about 45 minutes. for those of you who are interested in asking dr. aslan a question, you have got cards on

your chairs and pencils. so throughout the program we'll have people coming through to pick up those cards and filter them up to me. >> also you can call me, reza. i feel like dr. aslan, i'm kind of useless kind of doctor, the doctor that can't help anyone? so every time says dr. aslan, i get nervous, what if something goes wrong. people me for help. i'm no help. >> that is fair. probably appropriate to start on a first-name basis. because i will ask you some personal questions. >> i'm ready. >> first of which, you start off this book, discussing your own personalsc religious journey in your life and it is a really interesting and non-linear journey. i think it gives some good context about why you wrote the book. so, would you mindshareing, just with this intimate audience a little bit about your religious experience. >> sure. i was born in iran.

my family was, you know, culturally muslim the way so many people are culturally religious. with the exception much my father. my father was was always just like devout atheist. like you know, one of those atheists who always had a pocketful of prophet muhammad jokes pullt out at inappropriate times? like that kind of atheist, you know? when the revolution happened my father basically thought, maybe we should get out for a little while, lay low until things settle down. obviously think did not settle down. that was 40 years ago. and when we came to the united states, this was of course, you know, 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 is fantastic.

[laughter] everything's great now. and, and you know, i think that kind of pushed us to just sort of strip our lives clean of religion att all, you know. i mean we, certainly of islam. my mom would occasionally pray and you know, sometimes we would do some of the cultures and the holidays but, but for the most part, you know, back then being muslim was like being from mars. in fact i have admitted on numerous occasions that i spent a good part of the 1980s pretending to be mexican, which tells you how little i understood america. yeah, it didn't help at all. [laughter]. and, but, i think there 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 and despite the fact that i grew up in a, you know, fairly non-religious household i was always fascinated by religion and spiritualty and mythologies. i was looking for a way to kind of expresso that. when i was 15 i went with some friend to what turned out to be an evangelical youth camp and -- >> did you know that at the time? >> i now it was a youth camp and ii knew it was christian but i really didn't know what any of thatment to be honest with you. and when i, that was, essentially where i first heard the gospel story. and this, this incredible story about how the god of heaven and earth became a baby and, and he died for our sins and that anybody who believes in him will

also never die, and will live forever, and i had never heard anything like that before in my life. iter was a transformative moment for me. and i immediately converted to this very conservative, evangelical brand of christiane christiane -- christianity, spent next, four or five, six years, preaching that gospel to everyone. >> yourve family included? >> whether or not they wanted to hear it, frankly and my family and i converted my mother, who is still a devout faithful christian. and, and then i went to college and i decided i was going to study religion for a living. i, i have always wanted to be a writer. i knew i wanted to be a writer, i don't remember ever wanting to be anything else.

there was never another option for me but i'm also an immigrant, when you're an immigrant you can't tell your parents you're going to be a writer. that doesn't, yo know, it doesn't compute. in fact i remember this one conversation i had with my mom, and only one conversation, in which i said, mom, i, you know, i think what i want to do, i want to be a writer. her response was, who is stopping you from writing? [laughter] you go be a doctor, then you write. nobody is stopping you. so iou thought, okay, well, i wl be an academic, who also writes. that seems -- >> you still get the title of doctor. >> exactly. i still get to call myself a doctor. my mom milks that. and look, i had the experience that pretty much everybody has when they to to college, right? when you suddenly realize that everything you thought you knew was wrong, right?

every assumption you ever had, pretty much everything you had learned up to that moment was, was wrong and, this just, i mean it blew my mind and i abandoned christianity and, but i still was looking for some way of, you know, continuing to study religion but also having a spiritual life. it was actually jesuits at santa clara university, i if you know the jesuits, they are troublemakers, troublemakers. the jesuits said you grew up muslim, why don't you explore that? i knew nothing, i mean nothing, about islam at all. so i began to study islam. i especially began to really delve into the way in which islam defines god, which is the

opposite way christianity defines god. very much the way judaism defineses god. christianity essentially says that 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 sufi tradition of islam was, this concept of divine unity. this notion that, look if there is a god, and if that god is one, and if that god is indivisible, then everything is god, there can't be any separation between creator and creation. and t i thought, yes. that works for me. and so i, you know, i often say

i had an emotional conversion to christianity. then i had a a intellectual conversion to islam. but if you want to say something i think that is very important, i feel like should get it out at the beginning because it always comes up, 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 very difficult to take the truth claims of any one of those religions seriously because it doesn't take long to realize that these are essentially different languages for the same emotion, t for the same sentimet and what i'm interested in is the emotion. what i'm interested in is the sentiment. certainly you know, i have my own ways of expressing that sentiment but how one expresses it to me is irrelevant. >> so you walk this really interesting line of being both a believer an of being a scholar of religion. >>ar yes.

>> you know, i will confess my own bias, when i pick up a book entitled god, i'm expecting one of two things, right? i'm expecting either a religious a apologist who is telling me why and how i should believe in god or i'm expecting a new atheist, who is telling me it is all baloney and absolutely ridiculous and here is why you should reject god, right? you have this really interesting quote at beginning, hold on, it says i have no interest in trying to prove the existence or non-existence of god. facedo with a-faith is a choice and anyone whoho says otherwises trying to convert you. i love that. >> that's about it. >> what was it look for you walking this line as a believer and as a scholar? did you feel yourself getting pulled? >> by the way i should mention, that is actually unusual in the field of religious studies. most people go into the academic field of religion, those who are not going there in order to

become ministers of one sort or another, those who are going in there for the axe dem i can discipline. most people who enter the field of religious studies do so from a religious background. it is rare that somebody who had no religious instruction at all decides, i'm going to spend my life studying the religions of the world. that doesn't happen that often. you w know, i think for those of us who do, often we come at it from a particular perspective. that is how we enter it. then when you start studying religion, either religions or any particular religion, from a historical and literary and cultural and sociological perspective, and anthropological perspective, rather than from a theological perspective, which is usually how you were introduced to that religion, as a set of doctrines, as a set of beliefs, often what happens is

that, your personal faith starts to crumble, and it crumbles because so often, and this is true by the way of most people of, who identify with a religion, regardless of what religion we're talking about, most people, their faith is in that religion, not in what the religion points them to. and so crashes or fissures start to appear, particularly in the truth claims of that religion, the wholeh edifice crumbles. like i often think to myself, had i converted to, you know, a more sort of liberal or progressive christianity, i probably would still be a christian today but i converted to a brand ever christianity that is predicated on the inner ran sy and literalness of the bible. that is the foundation of

fundamentalist evangelical christianity. that is the bible is literally true and it is absolutely without errors. it takes about five minutes to realize that the bible is full of errors. as it should be when you're considering, you know a text that was 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 ludicrous to think that the truth claims of the scripture are predicated whether its facts are correct or not. but that's, that is the religion i was told, that i was fed. and so 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. >> i, so there are almost 100

plus people in this room who are walking away with a copy of this book tonight. >> oh. >> that you have -- >> bedtime reading. >> without taking away the rationale for us reading it, can you walk us through a little bit of this trajectory of, of the evolution of human experience of bod? >> right. >> particularly this dichotomy you point out between the dehumanized notionhe of god and humanized notion of god. >> okay. so the basic argument of the book is that you can look at the entirety ofha human spirituality going all the way back, 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, inin the person of jesus christ, he becomes literally a human being. and what's fascinating about that is that it is kind of a function of our brains that believe it or not we don't have much choice in the matter. cognitive impulse without thinking about it. doesn't matter whether you believe in god or not. that is the really cool part about it. atheists do this as much as

believers do. in fact when you tell an atheist, okay, fine, you don't believe in god, describe what you mean by god. >> interesting, rabbi aaron, the senior rabbi, he says i don't believe in the god that you doesn't believe in, right? >> honestly that is such an important -- because this question of does god exist or do you believe in god or not, we all assume we mean the same thing by god. it is so funny which don't actually bother to think about the fact that this word, probably the most variable word in all language is one we simply assume. obviously you mean the same thing by god. even atheists they do this thing. we can talk about the reasons why we do it. we can certainly have a conversation what it is in the human mind that compels us to do that and why. we can also talk at length what

to do about it, i would love to have those conversations. i want to emphasize one thing. this is not a good thing. this is not a positive thing to humanize god, while it is true with what w it does you construt a god to looks, acts, thinks like you do, it allows you to have a relationship, to actually commune with that divine, that you have conducted as essentially a divine version of yourself. but what it also does is infuses that divine with your biases and your bigotries and your prejudices. basically what you do you create a god who becomes nothing more than a mirror reflecting back to you your own ideas, the things that you love, and the things thaw hate. and that is extraordinarily

dangerous. >> i really love the promo video you did, that, where you said, god doesn't hate gay people, you hate gay people. god doesn't love america. you love america. >> exactly, it is what i think is fascinating about it, is that, look, religion has done a lot of good in the world and it has done a lot of bad in the world. i think that there is this dichotomy, this sort of conversation that we have all the time that you know, people say, no religion is a good thing. no, religion is a bad thing. first of all religion is both those things and the reason it is both those things because they are nothing more than a reflex of everything that is good or bad about us. we conduct a god who is a divine version of ourselves. then we construct a religion based on that god we constructed, which is just a construction of ourselves. then we wonder why our religious institutions are so flawed. well they're so flawed because

they are human inventions. and i think you know what i would like to do is, at the very least start getting people to be aware of that cognitive impulse and to figure out whether that's something that they want to change or not. >> this is where i think your use of the metaphor of language is really effective, right? if o you think about religion aa tool, as a language then language can be used for good, right? language can be used for evil. but language is a necessity. it is a expression of what it is to be human. you will not get rid of language. >> right. >> we have to grapple with religion as though it were a language and pull it towards the good rather than towards the bad. >> that is perfectly said. i preach this constantly. don't confuse faith with religion. they are not the same thing. faith as we're talking about, it

is -- it is mysterious. it is individual. it is not a rational thing. it is an experiencal thing. it is an emotion. that is the best way for me to describe faith. it is an emotion like any other emotion and our emotions are not rational things. our emotions are based upon our experiences, our connections with each other, who we are, how we define yourselves. emotions are a mysterious things but we need a way to express what is fundamentally inexpressible experience. we need a language, a set of symbols, a set of metaphors, that we 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 resonates with you. use it to communicate this experience, to draw connections with other people who have the same emotion. >> so let's keep on this idea of the kind of emotionality around religion. your last book, "zealot," about the life of jesus of nazareth, it ruffled a few feathers. >> do you think? >> some in the christian community, right, had the critique what ismu a muslim doig writing a book about jesus. ignoring the fact that jesus has a role to play in islam as well. some took issue how you interpreted the sources and evidence from the era. i think, just, context allizing that reaction, it is about this sensitivity that religion has. and when people start poking at it, it can get very upsetting. >> yeah.

>> so with this book, have you happened money sensitivities that have been surprising? 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're about four years removed from "zealot." so i feel like i had enough time to process the response and really, you know, this is what i do. i'm an academic, i so i want to analyze it and create data that i can sift through and make certain conclusions about. and one of those conclusions is that, the negative response to the book didn't actually come from christians. not even conservative christians actually. part of the reason why it was such a big best-seller was because many christians bought it. they discussed it in their churches, and you know had these, you know, interesting conversations about it.

the negative reaction came from one particular group of christians and that was right-wing christians. and, you know, who in many ways have the same theology as mainstream christians but who have a different politics. i think this is, important to understand not just because of the context about what happened with the book but i think it is helps us understand exactedly what iss going on right now in american christianity. . . as a poor jewish peasant from the backwoods of whose entire message was predicated not on equality.

on the contrary, but on the reversal of the social order. it is to say the rich and poor shall come together and hold hands. he said the rich and poor will switch places. the first shall be last and the last shall be first. that does who are wealthy now will become poor. will those who are fed become hungry. that those who rejoice will lead and though that was an extraordinarily radical revolutionary idea in jesus time and it 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 jesus. that's literally bill o'reilly's jesus book by the way, i'm not making that up. that's really in the book. and that to me was really fascinating to see that. and of course now four years later we are seeing precisely the political division within american christianity exert itself in the trump phenomenon and now with roy moore being openly offended by christians who are, you know, shrugging off pedophilia. and it's extraordinary that i got a glimpse of that four years ago. and then i think for a large part of why people respond the way they tend to respond

to my books is not because i'm according controversy. i promise you i'm not courting controversy, i'm not avoiding controversy but i'm not courting controversy. it's something you said, we have to understand religion regardless of what religion you're talking about, regardless of where in the world you are talking about, religion is often far more a matter of identity and it is a matter of belief and practices. that's not to say beliefs and practices don't matter, of course they do. but when someone says i'm a jew, i'm a muslim, i'm a buddhist, they are making first and foremost an identity statement. it's 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 things i do and these are the things that i believe. and so when someone deals some aspect of their religion is being criticized.

even from a historical perspective, without any negative intention, then what they are reacting to is that they feel 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 of theology, what i think some people feel as though i am attacking them as human beings. but it comes with the territory. and strangely, i mentioned this backstage. i haven't really had that net and not in two weeks. plenty of time. i don't know how this is going to go. so it could deteriorate 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 yes.

life, yes. i did. i guess i do do that and i guess that is a thing. so right away i think it's it takes them off guard a little bit. >> mand seeing how this is going to go, you all have notecards that you can write the questions on and we will have people to go around and gather some of those notecards so if you take a moment, we've got a few more minutes where resin and i are going to be in conversation with both of you . so in the middle you've described a little bit about this dehumanized part of perspective on god and toward the end, you bring back in your own state, you talk about how you arrived at the notion of god. through hinduism, through sufi traditions in islam and

i'm going to want you to explain a little bit about what that is. and you rightfully point out that there are specificity in all religions.>> including judaism, that's right. >> i'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to speak about the tradition. >> do it. >> sure. so yes, at the end of the book, i essentially make a kind of full throated argument for a more pantheistic view of god. a god that is dehumanized.a god that is 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 like, three chapters

are all about prehistoric conceptions of the divine and i make an argument about how that's 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 itself. and in our modern parlance, we have a term for that. it's called pantheism. the new word with an old idea. pantheism is a greek word that basically means all is god and god is all. it's the belief i prescribed earlier that there can be no division between creator and creation. they are fundamentally the same name. and that what we think of as the universe is nothing more than the self-expression of the divine. so first i should say that part of the reason that i make this argument is first and foremost i think it's

provides a deeper spirituality, a more meaningful connection then speaking of god in these personality terms. secondly, because i think it's a kind of spirituality that can lead to greater connections between different religions. and between different people. and i think it could lead to a better world. if you see god in every human being and every human being is god, it becomes possible to denigrate or devalue human beings. because those human beings are gone. you can't abuse or exploit nature because nature is god. i think it's a recipe for a deeper and more peaceful and ar more phone forward-looking spirituality. >> and yes, it exists in all religions and it exists in a very strong form obviously in the ballistic form but

particularly as it was involved by the great physicist and the louisiana,. >> why am i telling you this, you will notice. >> we might not all know it. >> so the notion of judaism is that it starts with this fundamental problem at the heart of monotheism. i should mention monotheism is a very new idea. hundreds of thousands of years in which we can trace human spirituality, the concept that there is only one god is barely 3000 years old, barely. by the way, i know i'm on a tangent but i say it's not that it didn't arrive, it's not that people didn't bring up the possibility. there were numerous religious reformers who did propose a

monotheistic area it's just that then when it was proposed, it was rejected sometimes violently.and the reason for that had to do with everything we've been talking about. which is that while we as human beings are perfectly comfortable with contradictory and conflicting attributes within ourselves, we are not so comfortable with contradictory and conflicting attitudes in god. we are much more comfortable having you know, a different god for each one of our attributes. a god of love, the god of war and the god of the sky and the god of the earth and father deity and a mother deity. we want all those things spread out. no, all those things

, just in a single god, the ancient's mind doesn't get it. why would one god be both good and evil? how can one god be responsible for darkness and light? it doesn't compute. so one of the many conflicts that arose, once monotheism started to stick if you will is well, hold on a second. how then did 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 and so the only possible response to that is that creation is god. that however you define all of this, that it is inextricable from god. and lori is way of explaining this is hecoined the term that essentially means

contraction, that's the best. contraction. and what he said was what god did was that he contracted his self. his infinite life, he contracted it and in contracting it, he made space. >> he made conceptual space. for creation to our eyes. now, just to be clear, philosophers have a different word for that view. they call it canon theism. it's just a show that the difference there sbeing that the ideas that god is the universe but is also above the universe. as opposed to pantheism which just says god is the universe

and and theism is just a norther form of pantheism. it exists in judaism, very profoundly. it exists in christianity. it certainly exists in islam and the superior tradition. it exists in taoism, buddhism and hinduism. it is this in philosophy. there pantheism is not just a religious term, a philosophical term. the great philosopher spinoza was one of the first to talk about this notion of monism, the idea of all things being irreducible to one thing. and it is in science. in the very concept of the preservation of energy and matter, the idea that what ever exists now has always existed and will always exist as long as the universe exists. that's a scientific fact. and even there, scientists tend to call it pan psych is in. they don't use it or pantheism. they don't say all is god,

they say all is psyche meaning all his mind or all is constant but thesehoare just words. there are just words . with the same idea. and i think what i want to do with this book, it's unusual. it's not like the other books i've written because this one has a very personal best. it's the first time i'm saying this is what i believe and it would be cool if other boat people believed it to. but that is ultimately what i want to do. that the british newspaper, the spectator accuse me of wanting to start my own religion. give reza aslan 10 years and he'll be wearing a turban and flying his own private jet and i was like .. >> tempting. >> that doesn't sound too bad actually. >> .it's a lot of acts with their career have led you to

people who identify as religious. and i want to know when you have the cultures, what are you most curious about and are there anything, you've got to write, is there anything you want to ask me? >> what i noticed in the conversations i have with religious people is usually twofold. one, that the metaphor that they use olto express their religion, ultimately express what seems to be a very similar base experience. the questions they ask, the way they ask them. they use that we've been talking about all along different language so it's like the equivalent of hearing someone speak french

or german. and you need a translator. you need someone to tell you what's being said. and once the translation starts, it's not that you are understanding, it's your connecting. you're having dialogue back and forth. the next person i noticed, the second thing i noticed is they all confuse the metaphor for the thing itself. when you point out no, i believe something very similar. this is how i describe it. and often that's not the same thing. these are metaphors andthat's my metaphor . i notice the spiritual conversations that i have that are the most rewarding are with this new sort of

category of americans who refer to themselves as the nonaffiliated. it's basically a way ofsaying i'm spiritual but not religious by the way, jesus had been pioneering that for years . >> interestingly, in the forum on religion and public life which is has been around spirituality for decades hasn't actually, with this new category. only about 10 years ago, because of the fact that a lot of people were turning in their questionnaires like faso simply refusing to choose eg which category they were going to. even though there was a category on that list that said atheist and another that

said agnostic and they would turn it in and say none of this, that's not who i am so they had to come up with this new category and the category that they chose was titled as nonaffiliated. that has kind of become known as the non-. and in the 2016 pew study, 24 percent 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 10 years. i don't think it's a coincidence that those two things have arisen in tandem with each other. but i find that they are the most rewarding to for r this reason, because the metaphors don't get in the way. >> so my last question before

i start to get to some of these audience questions and ethese are great so far is i'm going to require this and not be able to get policies. >> i come and gone in a very similar way. and one of the struggles i found in understanding this deep sense of connectedness and not separating creator from creation and removing the emphasis on reward and punishment is this looming question of morality. and this concept of god seems to be morality and leave it in the hands of us and is very imperfect. is that your read to? and if so, how do you grapple with that and where does morality fit into this conversation? >> and i actually address it

at the end of the book. i do think it's a large part why the pantheistic conception of god isn't very popular. >> i think partly it has to do with the fact that when you dehumanize guys make it that much harder to kind of form a relationship. it's easier to think of god as some dude you met on the street. so and how that conversation, you're like me, let's talk, let's connect. and no offense, no offense to anyone but god is not just like you. and then the second thing is exactly that. if god isn't punishing my misdeeds and rewarding my good deeds, then why should i even have good deeds or misdeeds? what i find interesting is that often times, people who asked that question tend to be very sort of conservative

religious people. these days, the devout christians or you know, ultra-orthodox jews or you know, fundamentalist muslims. those are the people i think most often get over this notion and honestly, more than anything, it just depresses me. it really depresses me to think that you know, your moral behavior towards other people and towards your world is predicated on getting a reward at the end of this thing. that there's some kid who gets a lollipop or 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 pantheism is that i was saying before that if you remove that aspect of the divine and instead infuse everything with the divine, then it still prohibits you, if you are a devout believer, it still prohibits you from acting in morally to other people and the world because doing so is acting in morally toward god. if you're taking this seriously at all instead of thinking of it as a prize that you get when it's all over, instead, think about this as your relationship with god. and you know, i get it. i get that it's a different way of thinking but that's

why i think that it is a deeper spirituality. >> it's the closest experience i've ever had to religious epiphany was my third year of school happening on a moneybox, this idea that commandment comes from another. they never related to what was beautiful and valuable and wisdom but it didn't come with that sense of command in this, of reward and punishment and these are the things you have to follow but 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 there. >> perfectly puts. >> i've got a lot of these. i'm going to ask you to try to wrap it in fire. >> i'm a talker, that's what i do's you plan to take this

book to read states out of new yorkand la ? do you suggest, we should tackle this, i'm not sure what this is. 62 percent of americans who don't know a muslim. >> i think it's higher than that but yes. i'm traveling the entire country. i just came from georgia and i'm off to texas.and yes, i do. i, people ask me all the time about the audiences that i talk to. and for the most part, to be honest, i don't believe about it speaking about it because that's one of the details that i face and somebody give me a list and says oh, you're in alabama tomorrow. >> okay. i guess i'm in aalabama tomorrow.

and i'm not clever enough to think of something new to say so i'll think of the same thing over and over. and you know, people, there are people who react negatively. there are questions about that but i think the one thing that inoculates is that i take faith seriously. idon't denigrate people's faith . this is the foundation of who i am. if i actually do believe that religion is mdifferent for languages for expressing a similar fate, then i'm okay with those different languages that the people bombard me with. and i'm perfectly fine sort of meeting them where they are. it doesn't bother me. >> the next question, why the believer must muslim, why not a more generic spiritual. >>. >> i think that's a very good question. and you can sort of indirectly spiritually, i don't think that it's i think

it's a very rare thing. again. going back to the non-, there have been in norma's amounts of study done on the non's, people who say there is no religious identity but they are spiritual and they are actually describing their spirituality immediately revert to this comfortable metaphor and symbol. usually the ones they grew up in. so you know, if you, when you think about or talk about such a thing as faith, you do just kind of immediately revert to the metaphors that you've been taught and the metaphors that you grow up in. i chose my metaphors. and i chose them because , it goes back to something that the buddha said, that has become kind of a mantra for me. he said if you want to strike water, don't dig 61 foot

well. you dig 160 well. and islam is my six foot well. but again, the important point there is that the buddha was making it very clear that no matter whatwell you are using, the water is the same. >> . >> have you had a religious experience of an altered state of constant consciousness and if so can you share it? >> i had a few in my life . i had, i had a number in my christian years. you know, particularly in my christianity, it's a christianity that's very cosmic. evangelical christianity is all about good versus evil, light versus darkness and which side are you on kind of a thing. but there is a spiritual battle that you're just really, you're nothing more than pawns in this. the things that we do have cosmic consequences and that mindset, i think naturally

full minutes certain metaphysical transcendental experiences. that are very real. and, but i think as i've gotten older, the majority of my metaphysical experiences, through my family. i once asaid that my family is my church. and i mean that like , first of all i mean that quite literally and my family gets together on sundays, just my family and we have our own thing we call home church. but it also is the force of my ritualconnection. where i , it's where i feel the closest to god, however that is being defined. >> i've got a couple questions here that i'm going to put to combine but they are pointing to this idea of

monotheism and in turkey, or hierarchy and those structures being particularly gleaned. so i'm just going to throw that out. connection to you for you to comment on. >>. >> let me take you on a very, very brief 20, 30,000 year history. it's going to be very brief. >> when we were hunter gatherers, merrily, our god were the gods of the spell because what was important at that point was geography, landscape, and so the way that we understood our connection with the deities was s through those aspects of nature that helped in the hunt. and most of those deities were male deities, with some

exception. the moon is often seen as a female deity, not always. but the sun is most definitely a male deity. the sky is a male deity. these are male deities. >> when we transitioned to agriculture, interestingly enough, our 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, to plant seeds in it. sprouts life, we live off of it. the fertility of women became demonized in a way. but then something very interesting which is that with agriculture came the hrise of civilization. and with civilization came the creation of organized religion. 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 we began to plant fields and build villages and cities, we also 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. you need someone who's in charge of that thing now. and that, the idea of the future intermediary between humanity and god almost always felt a man. or exceptions, it could be in mesopotamia with when you have like very, very powerful goddess and donna or as we know her, ishtar. those kinds of goddesses were extraordinarily powerful with

women in charge of them but even that was a patriarchal thing because the idea was that the goddess is a woman so it requires women to take care of her. but the other gods, those are all just male-dominated. so that is a process whereby what we start to see is the creation of organized religion almost immediately. it becomes a patriarchal thing. and that just extends for the next you know, 10 or 12,000 years.it's sort of an unbroken chain that can really go back to the very first civilizations and the very first temple that we built. >> so you think that the strutting back in a pantheism in those earliest days will start to shift that feature?

>> most definitely because it's not a coincidence that particularly once we start morphing into monotheistic god, it always conceived of in male terms. so as a result, i think the idea is that men should be in charge of this thing. but if you see gender god, if you think of god as an it instead of a he or a she, then yes, absolutely it fostered i think lesser patriarchal control over religious institutions. >> you said god does not hate people. but we are born into a religion which has ideas that it hates us. for religious jews even though we may not hate people, you may still owant to include exclude a relationships and not because

we hate people but because it's in scripture and we believe in the divinity of scripture. how do you reconcile those things? >> i guess what i will say is that i assume that the person believes in the divinity of scripture when it comes to issues of homosexuality, also believes in the divinity of scripture, commands us to take our disobedient children to the outskirts of town and stone them to death. so if you do that, then i accept your interpretation of the divinity of the scripture but until you accept that do, 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 that historical context.

that's a cultural thing. that's how they did it then. we are not going to stone our children today when they disobey us. okay. so historical context there but not historical context here? 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 that you are picking and choosing. >> does god like kevin spacey? >>. [laughter] i'm going to take a hard pass on that question. i don't think anybody is recording anything and knows whatever i say is not going to come out right. >> i think this one is more personally to you as reza the muslim rather than reza the scholar. do you believe we're heading into our reformation? >> i'm going to be an academic here and first

defined terms. because we can't say god until we define god. you can't say reformation until we defined reformation. that's not what you think it is. because we live in protestant america, we have a huge view of what reformation is. reformation is the universal phenomenon that takes place in all great llreligious traditions wherein institutions and individuals begin to fight over who has the authority to define the faith, to define the scripture. the jewish reformation is what we refer to as radical judaism. the process whereby authority 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 accelerated by thedestruction of the temple , but that's what that means. the christian reformation wasn't between catholic and intransigence and protestants reform and by golly, the protestants one. that's not what happened. this was an argument between the institution, 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. the islamic reformation has

been going on for almost 100 years now. and you're just now paying attention to it. i think people look at the violence taking place in large parts of the muslim world and say you know what they need is a reformation. the violence is the reformation. you're watching it before your very eyes. . it's this dramatic global fight over who gets to interpret this thing. is it t going to be the institutions of islam, the traditional schools of law, the traditional laws that maintain for the last 1400 years and iron grip over the meaning and message of islam, primarily because they're the only ones who could read the koran. they're the only ones that have access. 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 rest in the hands of individuals, not the institution, you are opening up a can of worms. because that means any individual, any individual now has the power of an e mom or the power of a priest or the power of a rabbi. any individual can go to the text and define for themselves what the text means. so you're going to have individualistic interpretations that promote peace and tolerance and pluralism. you're going to have interpretations that foster violence and autocracy and bigotry. and you know, there is no muslim hope. nobody gets to say who's right and who's wrong so the result is this gigantic clash over who gets to decide. i don't want to sound heretical here but probably one of the most significant leaders of the islamic

reformation, the man that we will probably look at 100 years from now has playing a federal role in the reformation is osama bin laden. bin laden's argument umwhich was so profoundly popular was , and you read this in his writings all the time. stop going to mosques. stop going to your mosque. stop listening to your imam. don't pay any attention. ignore the saudi clerics. they have nothing for you. he said go to the text yourself. examine the text for yourself and 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 that he did not have a single day of instruction in the islamic science, he was an engineer. he had no degrees in the koran, never studied islam or

islamic thought but that's where his power came from. the argument was even more mosix-inch than that.the argument was that it doesn't matter what the imams have to say. they very fact that they say it from a position of learned authority negates their position altogether. and that's why the leaders of his movement were doctors and engineers and sociologists. they work imams. they were scholars or religious leaders. that's not who they wanted. so again, i think if you understand what the argument is, and what's at stake, then suddenly things become clear. stop talking about a reformation. stop recognizing the reformation that you are

living through. >> i've got a couple questions here that are framing secularism as this foregone conclusion or in one case as a challenge. can you speak more about the non's and about their relationship to religion as an implied teacher of religion? >> let's defined terms once again. there is secularismand secularization. we are not a secular country . . far from it. we are a secularized country in the united states. tourism is an ideology that says religion has no place in the public realm. that religion is a private thing that should not be part of the public realm. france is a secular secular country. secularization, the process whereby political authority

rests in civic people, not religious leaders, this idea of the separation of church and state and the antiestablishment claws and all that stuff. that you 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 secularism is a necessity for modern society. secularism is a necessity for democracy. and that's not true at all. you can be a religious country and still be democratic as long as you maintain adherence to the principles of democracy chief among them the equal rights for all people regardless of their faith, regardless of their race or ethnic city or gender. but the idea that the laws and values of a nation can be

predicated on a particular religious morality, that's called america. that's not what we do here. so what i would say is i think as the non's 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 a big deal. they acted like he was coming out of the etcloset or something. it was a congressman who was like, i'm not sure i believe in god. and that was like the washington post wrote an article about it. that's the kind of country that we are. so i think that as the non's become a greater social and political force, what you're

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

you know what we say? okay, let's vote on whether we oagree with that or not. there are politicians in egypt and you stand up and say i want to change the constitution so that it's in better alignment with the koran, you will never be heard from again. you will instantly disappear and no one will see you again. so yes, egypt is a secular country. >> what is the best way to make people practice a humanized god and the dangers of doing so. and do you think that our desire to humanize god conquers our advances in science and technology. >> question. the first part, i already said which is basically asked someone to describe god. don't say do you believe in god or not, just say describe god to me. describe what you mean by god. and then point out to them that basically everything that they said is just a

description of a really powerful human being. human being but with superhuman power. and they recognize it themselves. secondly, i think the opposite. i actually think and i've written a little bit soabout this . then i firmly believe. i think 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. in many ways they are just two different modes of knowing, two different ways he of approaching the fundamental question of theology and existence. they don't necessarily mean or need to be in conflict with each other. secondly, i think what you've seen now is this slow convergence of religion. in many ways, a more

scientific needs to ask the fundamental questions about the nature of reality. not just about the laws of physics but about concepts such as total consciousness and the sort of issues like pan psyches and that we were talking about. so that more scientists start to use language that at least to me sounds like some 16th century mystic and the way that they talk about these ideas.y 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 of you who think eventually 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. number christians absorbed that information and moved on. if aliens suddenly show up from some distant planet and you know, walkout and say take me to your leader, first of all we would say no. no, we don't want to meet our leader. it's better if it's just like this. 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 keep going. so i think honestly, that's

where i would say we are headed. just the convergence of these two things. in the future, religion is going to look a lot more like science. and science is going to look a lot more like religion. >> in your book you say there's no evidence that moses ever existed. if he never existed, what was the concept that he created. and i'm going to add on to these questions, can you speak a little bit about the nature of scripture and how it incorporates some of these things that don't have logical evidence or facts behind them. how did those things come into being.? >> so first a correction. i don't say there's no evidence moses ever existed. the problem is when you're talking about that far back in history, the idea that you can actually pinpoint the existence of an individual is

impossible. there is no evidence that jesus existed . and that's, you know, almost 1000 years later. so i think it's important to understand that we are not talking aboutindividuals . we are talking about certain narratives. it's true that there has never been any archaeological evidence to show the existence of this is real life in egypt or the existence of a massive exodus of israelites across the sinai. that doesn't mean that we w won't find something one day. we just have never found any and 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. .

we as products of the scientific age have been taught that that which is true is that which can be factually verified. so we want to, we want that same idea of truth from our scripture. without recognizing that the people who composethese scriptures , have completely different understandings of the concept of truth. for them, truth in fact are two totally different things. and that the facts of the story are far less important than the truth that is conveyed in that story. and i think again that we would be better off, that we would have a more meaningful spirituality, that way we would be reading the scriptures in the way it was intended if we also understood that truth and fact are two different things and that if we read our

scripture and were more interested in truth then we are in fact. >> as a structural originalist rather than a literalist. >> that's good, i'm going to steal that. >> you're welcome. last question. the dalai lama wrote an op-ed that says speech had evolved beyond religion so believe in a secular ethics and morality. that exists and what you have concluded as well or have you run a pathway to that? >> if i were to describe my morality, i would describe it in the same way. my ethics and morality are not predicated on what i think god does or does not do. >> with my fellow human beings and to my fellow creations. my morality are predicated on this idea that i have certain responsibilities to creation

and to my fellow human beings, responsibilities that 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 that there are proper moral ethical ways in the web world that lesson of suffering, that lesson of violence and all that is a good thing in and of itself. >> i do think that what's fascinating about the dalai lama the way that he has been talking recently, perhaps for another time and i won't get too deep about it is that he is preparing the world, buddhists, not just those into that but those around the world for essentially the end of that religion. >> and it's an extraordinarily thing to watch.h.

those of you who are familiar ho with what i'm talking about, the dalai lama just past that he will not be resurrected, will not be reincarnated. but there will be no dalai lama. and just so we're on the same page here, the dalai lama is the reincarnation of a bodhisattva and this bodhisattva is an enlightened being who thousands of years ago decided that rather than getting off the wheel of rebirth, and going into nirvana, even though she has the ability, she had the ability to do so, that she reincarnate ue to over and over again until she had finally provided that

same nirvana to all of humanity. >> the politics of the situation that's created a situation in which china has said that it will decide the next dalai lama. and it is actually demanded that the dalai lama reincarnate, officially demanded it. and the dalai lama's response has been to say, no. >> that this is it. i'm essentially going to go. i'm going to go to nevada and you all leave you behind. n i know. honestly, people like me who live for this kind of stuff

are just like, we don't know how to process it. religions die all the time, religions go away. >> but they don't intentionally. >> they don't intentionally die because the main figure says it's all over, everybody. go back to your homes. >> it's all over. >> and this has caused this real conflict in the heart of tibet and buddhism. many, many tibetans are rejecting this dalai lama's, not just his statement but rejecting the dalai lama. it gets juicier, they are being led by the dalai lama's younger brother which is so fantastic that it's also a family thing. and you know, again, when i see things like that i think this is why it's also fascinating. religion isn't just about 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 tobe religiously literate and why i do the kinds of things that i do . because you can't avoid it. you can't avoid religion. and you need to be aware of it and you need to be learned in it because it will help you navigate the craziness that is the world that we live in. >> so what a wonderful and time. i'll say i'm a rabbi. i do religion for a living. >> as you, in a different way. i haven't gotten to talk about god. as much. this much in the last five years in one sitting and it's really a joy and i think sometimes our community needs

external catalysts to have theopportunity to reflect on ourselves. so i want to thank you and i think we all want to thank him . [applause] >> it's a great honor to be it here, thank you. >> so for those of you who do have books, reza will be for a book signing at december 9, 2015 sharp and we have some cookies and it's for you to enjoy outside so thank you so much. >>. [inaudible conversation] >> the c-span bus tour

continues its 50 cities tour with stops in raleigh, columbia, atlanta and montgomery. on each show we speak with washington journal programmers. join the tour and join us on january 16 at 9:30 a.m. or are stopped in raleigh north carolina when our washington journal get his north carolina attorney general josh stein. >> .. . also, harold holzer,