tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight a conversation with award-winning journalist and social critic barbara ehrenreich . she is best known for hard-hitting investigations, her new memoir, "living with a wild turn aways a sharp from that, chronicling mystical experiences she had as a teenager that continue to haunt her. we are glad you have joined us. a conversation with harbor aaron wright coming up, right now. -- commerce station with barbara ehrenreich coming up right now.

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: >> how does a self acclaimed atheist deal with mystical experiences from her teenage years that seem to challenge her certainty of the absence of god and the dominance of science? , that meantnreich writing a new memoir, "living with a wild god, a nonbeliever search about the truth about aerything to go to texas on

fascinating journey. barber, as always, great to have you on the program. i want to jump right into our conversation by asking you to unpack this title for me. "living with a wild god." >> well, this title reflects the fact that human beings have worshiped a variety of deities and spirits throughout history and throughout all the continents. most of these were not monotheistic gods who were good and benevolent. probably before 2500 years ago, most people were worshiping animal gods, and certainly some of my ancestors and the celts were worshiping a horse, and this was normal. our ideas of god are very limited by monotheism which god who one single male

is also benevolent and all-powerful. tavis: is it the model that ?rips you up versus poly you are open to poly but not mono? >> i'm just saying we need to think of a lot of things when we think of the word god. i'm pressing this because i want to lay a foundation here. does that mean, though, that you monostill questioning the but you are open to the poly? >> am open to all kinds of things. i'm not questioning the myopia stick god. there is no evidence -- i'm not questioning the monotheistic god. part of it is that the idea that god can be all powerful and also

benevolent is on its face contradictory. there is a lot of cruelty going on all the time. i'm not just talking about entry human cruelty. asteroids hitting planets. black holes gobbling up stars. this is a violent place. tavis: set the stage, what we are talking about you is atheism, not agnosticism. that is clear based on your answer here. let me delve a little deeper into how this came to be your way of thinking. in the book you unveil in a pretty transparent way how this took root in your family, all the way back to your great-grandmother. tell me about your family. most of the men in my family were minors or railroad workers. they were blue-collar people, mostly of irish or scottish

background. atheism as a family tradition is traced to -- i don't know if it was great great or great great great grandmother, who was a poor irish-american woman in the 1880's in western montana. when her father lay dying, she sent for the priest. she got back a message saying the priest will come and administer the last rites for $25. which was out of the question for these people. so that was the end for her. no more religion. a few years later she lay dying herself in childbirth and a priest showed up. i don't know how he knew. and he started to administer the last rites, which included putting a crucifix on her chest. the family legend is that with her last ounce of strength she took that crucifix and hurled it across the room.

that is not a legacy you can shrug off. tavis: what about your parents? >> atheists. these were not educated people, particularly. populist angerl at unjust authority. we were not to like or trust bosses, lawyers, doctors, or priests. all of those categories. manipulate people and use them. that's what i was taught. tavis: my mother is watching right now. she doesn't miss this program. i will be getting the phone call when the show is over. i raise that only because my mom watches every night. i love her, obviously, and my

, and i havey father nine brothers and sisters, so introduced toere the guy that i know because my parents ushered us in, specifically my mother. -- to the god that i know. i wonder how you think your life might be different, how you might view mysticism differently , have you ever thought about how different your life might be if your family, had been my mother where faith is concerned every x yes, it would have been very different. i first started asking big questions when i was 12. a big questions i mean why are we here? we are here for a few decades and then poof, we are out of your. if our you are had your mother, i would have got the answer,

this is gods plan. gods got it figured out. don't ask anymore questions. well, thank god, if i may say , for my parents who said keep asking. keep asking. they never put a lid on questions. i didn't get that answer. tavis: that's the one thing, again my mom is watching, and that is i have gotten older, i have pushed back on. it has in no way shaken my abiding faith in the god that i believe in, but i do not believe in people telling me that i cannot ask questions. was praying in the garden before he goes to the cross, he said, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. he is questioning his own father. he says, why has thou forsaken me? jesus can ask questions of

his father, certainly i can ask question. abidingver shaken my faith in the belief system that i have, but back to you. raises another fascinating question, which is how you got on the science track. you are raised in a family of atheist, would seems to make sense that you would go in the direction of science, but i do know scientists who are believers. so tell me how you got on the science track. you may not know this because we know you as a wonderful writer and social activist, but you have a phd and you win into the science field. >> a phd in cellular immunology. cells that cause our bodies to fight germs, microbes, viruses. tavis: how did you get on that science track? there wast figure anything else i needed from

school. i can read by myself and i was reading. i read everything as a kid from the public library. philosophy, history, and lots of great fiction. science is harder, this i can learn at school. tavis: your father was a scientist. miner.ad been a managed to get a scholarship and got a degree in metallurgy. that's what he thought i should be. he thought it was really the only worthwhile white-collar pursuit. tavis: let me ask you something very uncomfortable. this is not something i subscribe to, but i know people who i think have a warped sense of the way the world works and the way that god works in the world who might ask this question were they in this seat, so let me ask you. your parents into being

alcoholics. your mother tried to commit suicide countless times and eventually she succeeds. your further in sub dying of alzheimer's. i wonder if all that might have reset upon them had they not curse the god or disbelieve the god that brought them into the world. i just want to get your take on that. >> i would say that would be mean and spiteful. i would say to your god, look at the other side of them. ink how they are raising me an intellectually liberating fashion. part of that might be construed as neglect, but i'm not down with any idea of a deity that goes around punishing people. tavis: i asked that impart because five minutes ago and this conversation you suggested that if there were a benevolent

god, a number of things would not be happening in front of our very eyes. why is it your belief that god -- versus us bringing this on ourselves the way we now treat the environment? >> we have to take our huge share of the blame for a lot of things. but we have to also acknowledge that even without burning all this carbon and the other bad things we do, we are in a shaky position. we are on this planet, this rock in space. it itself is unstable. it's mantle is always shifting around. we have nothing to do with the earthquakes and volcanoes. the earthquakes are from fracking, i don't know. an asteroid could hit us at any moment. also, the most successful

kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. they are the ones who greatly outnumber us and may eventually destroy us. tavis: you look at man's inhumanity to man. how does god get the blame for that when most of what we deal with, almost everything we deal with is the way we now treat each other? war to poverty, it's man's inhumanity to man them openly. if you're a believer, god creates us, he puts us on the dissingnd then we start one another and killing one another and maltreating one another. how does god get the blame for that in your belief system? >> i guess my atheist world answer would be because there is no god, no benevolent god, anyway, that is going to intervene and set inks right. huge personal

responsibility to do so. i cannot walk past the beggar on the street who is actually reaching out for money and think take care ofd will that. no, it's up to me. that's what i tell my children. we have moral responsibilities. nobody is going to clean up after us. no one else is going to help. we've got to do that. now to the good part of the text am a which is these experiences you have had, these mystical experiences you have had that you write about in the text that you are now trying to figure out to some degree. pick one or two of them if you'd like and just kind of share. >> we are not talking about visions or hallucinations. i didn't have any words for any of this. i never talked to anybody about this until this book.

i'm coming out with a huge secret, and it remained a secret because i thought if i talked about it, i would look crazy. so i didn't, all my life. but the most shattering experience occurred when i was 17. under rather stressful physical conditions. tavis: by the way, that is a great picture up on the screen there. is it sexist to call you a pretty young thing? >> no, you can say that any time. [laughter] tavis: i don't want to get in trouble with you. anyway, you were 17, you were saying. >> and it happened. something where the whole world changed visually.

i did not so far as i know fall down or anything like that. it is as if the world burst into flame. not a flame that was hot. this was like ecstatically beautiful and at the same time almost terrifying. i felt like i had learned something totally profound and i understood something and i no longer had to continue on my search to find out the truth about why, that somehow now i knew, but i had no words for it. i was not in great shape for a while after this. adidn't even know there was term for such an experience. only much later did i learn the term mystical experience. and then i found out the one reason why it always -- why had always been turned off by that

or any account of that is that they are usually associated with religion. usually he saw god, like moses had the burning bush experience. tavis: they say great minds think alike. the minute he started telling that story i went straight to moses and the burning bush. ofyou can find a lot description whether in framework or a nonreligious framework. mystical experiences don't just happen to religious people. it is overwhelming. me, is ite said to like taking a hallucinogenic road? rodrug?lucinogenic i don't know because i have never taken one.

my guess is no, it is not the same. tavis: the reason i always push back on those comparisons is because you self-induced whatever experience you had when you ingested those drugs. you were in an altered state of mind, versus you being in your right mind and having an altered state of consciousness. those are two fundamentally different tanks and i push back on anyone who makes those comparisons because the comparison just does not hold up. what does fascinate me about this is your statement of moma that you hadt ago a rough time but you pushed back because the next step is, and then they saw god. based upon your atheistic upbringing, you don't want to open yourself up to that because you don't want to encounter what that next step might be. how does your life change if that 17 and any other time you had a mystical experience, you open yourself up to that

experience? >> you are trying to convert me. tavis: you deliberately shut yourself up. i'm asking if you open yourself up to it, what might have happened? >> i could have just slotted myself right into that and said that was god, it's a little scary, but that must be god. tavis: what i'm getting at is not that you had to have her religion. you had more than one mystical experience, that obviously shattered you, so rather than walk away from that, if you had open yourself up to it, and this is not about religiosity, i'm talking about being open versus closed. >> in this way i was open. i could not get rid of it. it didn't go away. i could not stop questioning.

this was not an encounter with someone or something are some sort of other, then what was it? was i just mentally ill? i really thought that quite seriously for years, that i had had some sort of mental breakdown. so i had all these questions in my mind. and somewhere in midlife i began to more seriously pursue, without thinking of writing a book that would be a memoir, the history of religion, to read not -- to try to better understand. that's when i find out this is not an uncommon kind of experience, it's just that no one would talk about it. tavis: i get it, and people don't want to talk about it because people feel it makes

them look crazy to do so. those of us who happen to be believers -- it leads me to the point i heard you take on a number of occasions, i thought i heard you say that belief is intellectual surrender. unpack that for me. this is where your conversion process is going to break down. believe? there are religions that don't involve a leaf or faith at all -- don't involve belief or faith at all. a lot of those religions were wiped out by european colonialism throughout the world. but there are religions where nobody asked you to believe in a deity or spirit or whatever. they give you ways to experience this. tradition itfrican

was through ecstatic rituals. like voodoo.in nobody says you have to believe in the spirit. they say you will have face-to-face contact or mental contact with the spirit through our rituals. to me, that almost tempts me. to be convinced about something you have no evidence. tavis: exactly. to the nonbeliever, belief is intellectual surrender. to the believer, intellectual surrender is faith, the substance of things hoped for that you ain't got the evidence to prove. if you're going to try to navigate through this thing called life with experiences and happenings that you have no control over and you don't have the power to get yourself through, you've got to believe in something. you believe when you walk out

this door that you're not going to fall and bust your head. you believe when you get on the plane that's going to lie you back to washington, you believe when you walk up the steps are going to hit that next step even if you're in the dark and you cannot see. we all believe in something, barbara. those are not grand metaphysical beliefs that you just sketched. i don't believe there is a benevolent being trying to make sure i get home. with a few airport delays i might start sacrificing small animals. [laughter] i'm not very trusting. look, i wrote a book announcing .ositive thinking bookshelf. on my why this book now, and doesn't mean that you are open at this and acceptingving

something else, whatever that is, at this point in your life? >> it was now or never, i thought. by the way, i don't really like the idea of writing memoirs. that is self-involved. that is why this is relist dory about this quest of mine. this is really a story about this quest of mine. i am open to any evidence and data you want to bring me. in god we trust, but barbara wants data. [laughter] i love barbara ehrenreich. as you can see we don't always agree on everything, but there is nobody in the world i would prefer to talk to more than barber. i love talking to her because her mind is so sharp and she opens me up and challenges me to consider her point of view. "livingtext is called

with a wild god, a nonbeliever search for the truth about everything." i delight in having a conversation with you about that. barbara, good to have you on. thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith. >> congratulations. >> congratulations, you are finally getting your star on the hollywood walk of fame. >> welcome to the walk of fame. >> i can't think of anyone who deserves this more than you. i love you. >> good job. you rock. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with two-time grammy-winning composer and conductor james conlon, director of the l.a. opera. that is next time. we will see you then.

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more. pbs.

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