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Let's bring on our two speakers and we'll get them seated,
I'll introduce them and then we'll get under way.
So would you please welcome Lawrence Krauss and Peter Rollins?
Welcome. (APPLAUSE)
You probably know lots about them already
so let me just give you a brief introduction.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a renowned cosmologist and science populariser.
He's a foundation professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration
and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University.
His most recent best seller is 'A Universe from Nothing'
and it's been translated already into over 20 languages,
and he's part of a film which is being shown tomorrow morning,
'The New Believers'.
-Or 'Unbelievers'? -'The Unbelievers'.
'The Unbelievers'. 'The Old Unbelievers'.
'The Unbelievers'.
Peter Rollins, who joins us, is a leading figure
of the radical Christianity movement
and author of books such as
'How (Not) To Speak of God' and 'Insurrection'.
A philosopher, a theologian, believer and doubter,
he has developed a number of contemplative practices
to help Christians accept doubt and complexity
such as Atheism for Lent, which he might talk a bit about later.
What we're going to do is ask Peter in a moment to come to the lectern,
he'll speak for up to 15 minutes,
then Lawrence will respond from the chair,
then we'll open it up to a conversation.
-So please welcome Peter Rollins. -(APPLAUSE)
Hi. Thanks very much. It's an honour to be here.
I was hoping this would be like a battle of the Titans
but both Lawrence and I are a little bit vertically challenged
so it's a war of the Hobbits.
-LAWRENCE: Speak for yourself. -(LAUGHTER)
-Heightism already in the mix. -Yes.
Just to say from the start,
I'm not here to try and win a debate with Lawrence or score easy points.
I'm not here to try and build a fortress
from which to lob flaming rocks at New Atheism.
I'm not here to try to set up a new tradition.
I'm certainly not here as an apologist
for some sort of outdated religious world view.
I'm here because I bleed. Because we all do.
I'm here because I'm a haunted house and we're all haunted houses.
We're all full of ghosts -
the people that we've loved and lost,
the people that we've hurt and the people who have hurt us.
It's like the perennial philosopher said, Winnie the Pooh,
in his introduction we read,
"Here is Winnie the Pooh coming downstairs now,
"bump, bump, bump on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.
"It is as far as he knows the only way of coming downstairs
"but sometimes he wonders if perhaps there's a better way
"if only he could stop bumping long enough to think of it."
And you have that beautiful image
of Winnie the Pooh bouncing his head down this staircase.
When I read that and when I read it,
I feel that that's all of our experience in life.
We're all bouncing our head through this cosmic staircase
wondering if we can make it through a little bit less painfully.
What does this got to do with the debate
between New Atheism and what's being called new religion?
Well, I want to kind of bring out three critiques of New Atheism.
I think New Atheism is better than that which it attacks.
But I want to argue that it is caught up
in the same problems and antagonisms as religion.
It often is used to create a new tribal identity,
a new way of feeling a sense of mastery over and against the other,
and in its antithesis to fundamentalism, it shadows it.
Point number one, I want to say that
New Atheism is a type of shadow of the fundamentalism it rejects.
What I mean by that is New Atheism concentrates on the 'what' of belief,
"What do you believe?", and it attacks that.
It treats religious belief as a problem.
It treats fundamentalism as a problem.
What I want to say is that fundamentalism isn't the problem.
Fundamentalism is the solution to your problem.
Think of it like alcoholism. Alcoholism isn't a problem.
It's the solution to your problem and unless you deal with the problem,
you won't get rid of the solution.
Even if I'm able to change you - if you're an alcoholic,
and I'm able to get you off alcohol through sheer force of will,
you'll pick up something else.
We all know alcoholics who are chain-smokers
or obsessively into fitness or have bursts of aggression.
In other words, a new symptom will come up to replace the old symptom.
Unless you deal with the reason why the symptom is there,
you can't get over it.
Anger at asylum seekers, that's not a problem,
that's the solution to your problem within the society.
Unless you can understand the projection that is going on,
you'll never be able to deal with
the aggression and the fear and the xenophobia.
In Northern Ireland, where I'm from, you see this with paramilitaries.
Sometimes a kind of terrorist will become a "Christian",
and the fundamentalism they adopt
looks pretty much the same as the terrorism.
It has the same texture, it has the same tone, it has the same tenor
because it's really accomplishing the same thing.
It's acting as a guise, a mask, to protect from seeing
your own internal antagonisms, your own ghosts.
Now, the response of New Atheism to this, of course,
is, "Hold on a second, New Atheism isn't a positive set of beliefs.
"It's the negation of a set of beliefs."
You know, it's like saying baldness is a hairstyle
or it's like saying that health is a disease.
It's a negation.
But anyone knows, especially physicists,
that nothing can be something.
Nothing can have a type of positive charge.
If you have an eating disorder,
it's not eating nothing, you are eating nothing is itself.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida used to tell a story
about a rabbi going into the synagogue
and he would bow and say, "I am dust and I am nothing."
And then this priest came in
and bowed down and said, "I am dust and I am nothing."
Then this imam did the same.
And finally this old guy comes in,
the caretaker who is looking after the building,
and he says, "I am dust, I am nothing."
The three religious leaders look at him and they look at each other
and say, "Who the hell does he think he is saying he's nothing?"
That's how nothingness becomes something.
We can protect ourselves.
I know someone who has very low self-esteem
and the way they protect themselves from that low self-esteem
is through self-deprecation.
In Northern Ireland, we're really good at self-deprecation,
that's what we do.
I use it all the time in talks, although I'm not very good at it.
(LAUGHTER)
I would attack him and go, "You're always late."
And he would say "Yeah, I'm really a rubbish person."
You go, "Stop saying that - you are protecting yourself
"from feeling me being annoyed at you by being annoyed at yourself," right?
Their own self-deprecation mechanism operates as a positivity,
hence, I would say you see in New Atheism a sense in which
it feels a little bit like the religion it rejects,
creating new tribal identities.
Second of all, I want to argue that
New Atheism legitimises and strengthens
the fundamentalism that it attacks.
For example, if you'd just had an argument with your mother
and I come up to you and I say, "You were a real idiot there.
"Look how you treated her. You shouldn't have done that,"
you're going to suddenly get your heckles up and say,
"No, no, I was in the right. You've never lived with this woman.
"She's a nightmare, right?"
and you'll justify what you did even if you think you did something wrong.
Because it's a defence mechanism.
Defence mechanisms operate to protect you from attack.
It's like 'The Blob' or the evil force in 'The Fifth Element'.
They are firing missiles at it and as the missiles hit it,
it actually feeds it and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger.
Or Freddy Krueger, the more you attack him, the worse it gets.
The best way to attack Freddy Krueger, if he ever shows up,
is to ignore him, I think that's the trick -
just letting you know, that's the trick.
If you attack a religious fundamentalist,
that just gets the defence mechanism operating at a hyper rate.
And even, as I say, if you do beat them,
they will then take on the alternative position
in...functioning in the same way at the level of the 'what' of belief.
By the way, it also legitimates them, just arguing.
Whenever Lawrence debates William Lane Craig,
who do you think is the one going around talking about it all the time?
It isn't Lawrence, it's William Lane Craig
because the very fact that someone took him seriously enough to debate
it's like, "Look, you know. Somebody took me seriously today."
(LAUGHTER)
You know, imagine after this debate,
Lawrence and I, we'll have a few drinks at the hotel room
and he invites me up to do some crazy *** fantasy after, like.
(LAUGHTER) No.
I'm not inviting you unless you are interested.
Otherwise it's just an example, right?
But we were in the room and we're doing something crazy
and he's got the duck outfit on and it's all going great,
and then someone walks in and we're shocked.
We look up and we're surprised.
We're not so much surprised
because this disbeliever is looking at what we're doing,
we're surprised because the gaze of the disbeliever
breaks our suspension of disbelief.
We realise how stupid we look.
What I want to argue is a lot of fundamentalism,
it already knows it's not right.
If you hear a preacher say, you know,
"If you pray and if you have enough faith, your child will be healed."
We all know what that means.
It means, "Yeah, unless it's really serious, then you call an ambulance."
Right? That's the underlying unbelief that sustains the belief.
That's my problem with unbelief, by the way,
is that it actually sustains belief.
You have your belief but you don't really believe it,
which allows it to continue to function.
It's actually harder whenever someone doesn't call the ambulance,
prays for their kid and their kid dies.
That's more of a problem for fundamentalism
because it exposes its own kind of lie
that's going on under the surface, you know?
What I want to argue is
in the same way that New Atheism shadows the religion it critiques,
new religion, as it's being called here,
doesn't operate at the level of 'what' - what you believe -
it operates at the level of how you believe what you believe.
How do your beliefs function?
And in the same way,
instead of directly attacking religious fundamentalism,
it uses parables and stories and the resources of religion itself
to break it open, to not take it seriously.
It's the outside gaze to the *** fantasy that we're playing out.
It's the one that goes, "I don't know if that's really what's happening.
"Let's go a little bit deeper."
If I, instead of saying to you,
"You shouldn't have treated your mother like that."
If I take you out for a drink, we sit down, we have a pint,
we have a laugh, and then I say to you,
"You know, what was that argument about? That was a bit ferocious,"
you are more likely to go, "Yeah, I know. I probably acted a bit bad,"
and you are more likely to change.
Finally, I want to say that New Atheism doesn't have the resources
needed to decentre us in the way that it often claims it does.
No world view can decentre you.
What we need is a space to share
and rituals and liturgies and music.
If you've just broken up with someone...
Or if I've just broken up with someone,
and I go to my friend, "Look how she treated me.
"She slept with somebody else, she really treated me badly.
"She did X, Y and Z."
And my friend says, "No, no, no, that's not the truth. Come on.
"You know there were lots of problems and issues in the relationship,"
I could quite rightly turn around and say,
"Hold on a second. I already know that.
"But let me get all of this out
"so that I can come to know what I already know.
"I know that I mistreated her. I know that I wasn't there.
"I know that I was always travelling around
"and I was never in the place where she needed me to be.
"But I have to say all this stuff
"so that if I ever meet her in the street,
"I'll be able to go up to her,
"I'll be able to shake her hand and say, you know,
"'I miss you. I care about you and I wish things had been different.
"'But, you know, I think about you and I hope you are doing OK.'"
What we need as human beings is not
a world view that will help us look at the ghosts in our lives
and help us be more human.
We need the spaces that invite us to say that within any world view,
despite whatever world view you have,
whether you are an atheist or a theist or agnostic.
It's the hive of belief that's functioning underneath.
Kierkegaard once said, "What is a poet?
"A poet is someone who screams and cries in agony
"but whose lips are so formed that when they cry out,
"beautiful music is formed.
"And so when we say to the poet, 'Sing to us again,'
"we are saying 'May new disasters befall you,'" alright?
If you've gone through some deep suffering,
you can go out and get drunk, right, and you can go and see a pop band,
but the next day, the suffering comes back.
Or you can go and have a pint and listen to a singer/songwriter
sing about their brokenness in a way that helps you glimpse your own,
in a way that it helps you work through your own,
so that you might do the work of mourning.
What I'm arguing is that that's what the new religion attempts to do.
It attempts to create structures
that help us encounter our brokenness and our unknowing.
It helps us enter into that space where we're not afraid of the other,
not projecting out on the other.
It sees fundamentalisms of various sorts,
not as the solution or the problem but the solution to your problem
and it tries to get underneath those things.
I'll finish with this.
People think it's courageous to talk about what they believe
and to fight for what they believe and to die for what they believe,
but that's the cowardly thing.
Think of Batman - you know, Batman dresses up on Saturday,
thinks he is a tough guy, goes and beats up some criminals
and then goes back to Wayne Industries,
makes billions of dollars.
He doesn't care about the people he's beating up.
Those guys, they're criminals.
What use is that going to have for Gotham City,
beating up a few criminals
who are just trying to put bread on the table, get their kids to school?
If Batman really cared, he wouldn't
spend billions of dollars in high-tech military spec.
He would start after-school children's programs,
he would have healthcare,
he would, like, job training schemes in Gotham City, much more effective.
The Joker might not want money, but the people who work for the Joker do,
but Batman doesn't care.
Batman's courage is actually fear. Fear of what?
Fear of looking at the death of his parents.
Fear of actually dealing with that stuff and working it through.
He's out there beating up criminals
because he's too afraid to look at his own brokenness.
The courage is to look in whatever world view you have
and not create a new system to think that, "We're right,"
but to rather circumvent every confessional system.
To put a 'perhaps', as the philosopher John Caputo says,
a philosopher into every metaphysical system.
To deconstruct New Atheism, to deconstruct religion,
to create a space where we can
encounter each other in our brokenness.
People say this sounds very depressing. No.
I'm not trying to make you depressed, honestly.
I'm telling you you already are depressed, you just don't know it.
(LAUGHTER)
The way to overcome that depression is to look at the ghosts.
Bring them to the surface. Do some exorcisms.
That's what new religion is. That's what new religion does.
(APPLAUSE)
OK, Lawrence...Lawrence Krauss, you have to weave in
at least one duck costume into your presentation.
PETER: Yeah. I've got it already, at the hotel. (LAUGHS)
OK, I asked Peter to speak first
so I might have some basis of understanding what new religion is.
-Um... -(LAUGHTER)
-(APPLAUSE) -But anyway.
So, let's see.
-(LAUGHS) -(LAUGHTER)
Let's start with New Atheism
because that, I know, is an inappropriate term.
(LAUGHS) I don't understand what New Atheism is.
It's the same good old-fashioned atheism that's always been there,
which is not a belief system
and not something that cares about what people believe,
it's how they think.
And in particular, atheists don't spend their time attacking beliefs.
They just say
that they will choose to accept things on the basis of evidence,
and not doing so is foolish.
And they don't...
Certainly people like me, who are apparently called New Atheists,
don't spend their time...
I don't label myself as an atheist or a New Atheist or an old atheist.
I don't label myself at all.
I don't label myself an a-leprechaunist
or an a-Santa Clausist.
I don't label myself by the things that are too silly to worry about,
one of which, in general, is religion.
In fact, what amazed me...
And we had a little discussion, a little email discussion
because Peter was trying to teach me some things.
-(SCATTERED LAUGHTER) -No, in a good way.
Um, is that...
What I don't understand
is why you want to replace a religion that doesn't work
for one that's based on angst.
It doesn't seem to me that it's any different.
It's the same old-fashioned religion,
namely believing things in spite of facts.
You talked about...
The whole point is that of course
a lot of the things you said are quite reasonable.
We should try and get to the bottom of things
and think about why we are thinking about things
and trying to understand others
but that's kind of, in my mind,
what science is all about, or rational thinking.
And why you have to call it 'religion'?
Just not... Just get rid of it and say, "Hey, let's be rational.
"Let's be sensitive, let's be thoughtful, let's be considerate,
"and let's be reasonable people."
We'll base that on the evidence of reality
and we'll try and understand experience
not by trying to experience things from some vague primal...
..sin or whatever, or angst or depression,
but from the world the way it really is.
And understand that the world doesn't care about us,
that we create our own meaning.
All of those things, which are really the thrust of science,
is a reasonable way to act.
And to call it new religion just seems to me to be saying,
"Well, I need some hook, I need something."
And you began by saying "I believe".
You didn't tell me what you believed.
I don't believe.
I don't believe anything.
I look at stuff and say,
"Well, is that likely or unlikely based on evidence?"
I can test the hypothesis.
I can choose, if I want, to walk out the 10th floor of a building,
in a window, and see if I'll fall or I can...
I've tried it out beforehand and assume I'm going to fall,
so I won't do that.
I can base my actions... And that's really the point, that...
This vague philosophical premise that you talk about is irrelevant.
The real problem is not that, the real problem is that
most people...many people, who call themselves religious,
use that religion as a basis for actions which are silly
because they are based on non-facts,
they are based on something that isn't true.
They are against gay marriage because being gay is a sin.
It's not a sin or unnatural. It's not unnatural.
But that kind of basis, it governs the actions of the world,
and if you are concerned about making the world a better place -
which is really the reason
I get involved in some of this public stuff.
I think science can make the world a better place by getting people
to force their beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality
rather than the other way around.
There are real problems, and religion is a source of real problems.
And, sure, let's get rid of those real problems,
let's get rid of that nonsense,
but why does one have to create a whole new fabrication to do it?
Just say, "Let's deal with reality."
Let's call new religion 'reality'.
Actually, you know what? Let's call it 'science'.
-(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE) -And then we agree.
And...
accept...
And in fact before I... You know, I know I'm begging a question
because some people are gonna say, "What, isn't science your religion?"
No, it isn't.
Religion is something that in some sense
is based on firm beliefs that don't change,
and that's not what science is all about.
Science is based on beliefs, if you wish, that change.
That's what's great about science. We change our minds because we learn.
That doesn't happen in religion.
And it's vitally important that we be willing to change our minds.
And so when we talk about the problems,
let's focus on what the problems are.
Let's not say we need some crutch.
Now, it is true that religion in its form, as it's usually practised,
provides some crutch, provides some sense of community.
One can't deny that. That's why it persists so long.
It provides people something they need.
But let's look at what the things they need
and try to address those needs in a rational way
that makes the world a better place.
And get rid of the idea that
there has to be a belief system based on that.
Instead, we just deal with the world around us.
And, in fact, use that not as a loss.
I mean, not to say that "God is dead" is a loss.
It's not a loss. It's a game.
Of course, he's not dead because he never existed.
But saying you get rid of God is somehow...
We talk about the loss of faith.
That itself is a sentence which is incorrect,
just as incorrect as the sentence "New Atheism",
or the phrase "New Atheism".
Loss of faith is not a loss of anything. It's a game.
By saying that somehow you lose God and therefore
you've lost something intrinsic that we all need is just nonsense.
It is for some people because it's ingrained.
Unfortunately, we ingrain it in children.
We do that child abuse of teaching them religion when they're young.
Before they have a time...
Before they are able to talk about Jacques Derrida or whoever.
I mean, these are deep concepts
but we take 3-year-olds and label them and tell them what they are,
and then it gets ingrained,
particularly, probably, if you grew up in Northern Ireland, but...
Or anywhere.
It gets ingrained in any of us who've had religious training
because as children, most of us have.
Overcome that and just realise that...
..we don't need to label children.
We don't need to feel that we've lost anything
by understanding the world for the way it is.
Understanding the world for the way it is
fills you with awe, wonder, excitement, appreciation,
spirituality, that I've said before,
is much better than spirituality of religion because it's real.
That real spirituality is something we should all celebrate.
Let's just celebrate and not take all this stuff too seriously.
That's the other thing about religion that when we say
we attack fundamentalists and we strengthen them...
Well, you know, I've debated a lot
whether I should talk to that crackpot William Lane Craig,
and the point is, I don't care about William Lane Craig,
I don't care about the fundamentalists.
The fundamentalists, you can't change their minds.
What you do when you talk to them
is you take the vast middle, the rational people,
and try and show them the fallacies of one thing,
or at least try and get them to think about questions.
So the reason to engage those people
is not to change their minds because you are not going to do it.
If anything, if there is any reason,
it's to affect the people who are listening
who may not have thought about the issue
and to provoke them to think about questions.
And that's all, really, I ever want to do is get people to ask questions,
which is really...
And not provide answers but ask questions
and get people to think about the real world
and try and come up with the answers together.
So, um... Anyway, I think that's all I have to say.
-SIMON: OK. -(APPLAUSE)
I'm gonna pose just a question or so to each of you,
but as I'm doing it, you might be wanting to make your way
to where the microphones are so that you are in position
if you've got a question to pose to our panel.
I'll start with you, Lawrence.
There were three critiques that I took from what Peter said
about your approach.
And accepting you don't label yourself as anything,
but that you are perceived to be part of the movement, if you like,
of critique of religion, which I think would be demonstrably true.
His three criticisms were that the movement of which you are a part
looks and feels like a religion.
Secondly, that its strong attacks
on fundamentalism and religion generally
just reinforce their position.
And the third point that it lacks the resources to decentre us,
which I'm not quite sure what that meant but I'll ask about that later.
I want to talk about the first,
which you touched on slightly when you said that
there is a guy that you will debate to expose the middle.
But does it worry you that
people are perceiving the critical response to religion
as being religious in its character, or does it just wash across you?
(LAUGHS) If that's... Yeah.
If that bothered me, I'd be bothered by a lot of other stuff a lot more,
the critiques that I get that are a lot more vicious.
Look, people...people like to label things and people call...
I spent a lot of time with Richard Dawkins,
and I'm much more sympathetic with him now than I used to be.
I used to argue with him a lot more
until I wrote the 'Universe from Nothing', in fact.
So in 'A Universe from Nothing', I asked the question,
"Can you create a universe without God?"
That's all I did, asked the question.
I'm then labelled a strident atheist fundamentalist, OK?
So all you have to do is ask questions about religion
and suddenly you are labelled.
So people label this movement as a movement.
And it's the same
when I get labelled as a scientist, pejoratively, by many people.
I'm told I practise 'scientism' and it's a movement,
and scientists are no different than religious people.
I get those kind of letters.
"What's the difference? You just believe in the God of science."
Well, that's nice for people to say but it's just nonsense.
It's not a movement in the sense of religion.
There is no authorities, there is no belief system.
It's not a belief system
where people have to reinforce each other every week
because it's so ridiculous
that they have to go to church to remind themselves about it.
-(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE) -And it's... Anyway...
So to be labelled as such
is just what people want to do because they feel insecure about it.
I think the reason...the response, the violent response that happens
is insecurity.
Whenever people respond, attack you for asking a question,
there is usually a reason, and it's insecurity.
I think what one is hitting on...
And when one talks about
the effectiveness or the non-effectiveness
of talking to... of confronting religion,
the point is, it's just... it's very effective to ridicule it.
Ridicule is a vitally important tool.
We ridicule sex, we ridicule politics,
and religion is at least as silly as either of those if not more.
And so just treat...
What we can try to do is just treat it like everything else,
and that itself is such a shocking thing
that the minute you say, "Hey, let me ask a question," "Let me make fun,"
people get so shocked that all we have to do
is raise people's consciousness
to realise there's nothing wrong with doing that.
It takes a while and people will respond and attack you for it,
but after a while, they realise it is ridiculous.
Peter, before I come to you with a specific question
arising from what Lawrence said about religion,
do you want to respond to that?
Because it strikes me that
there is a very strong riposte to your claim there
that what Lawrence is engaged in, or Dawkins or others,
is in any sense like religion
because fundamentally it's about just simply asking questions,
and it's provisional in that sense.
Yeah, I mean, I tried to address that
by saying that even a negation can be positive,
even kind of like not eating nothing can become something.
And so I totally agree with you in that
but I think that anything can become a tradition.
Especially in America, you know, you do meet....
Like, if somebody adopts this new position
but their old position was a way of avoiding a confrontation
with their own anxieties or problems with family or problems at home,
then New Atheism itself becomes a protection mechanism.
I'm not arguing for the world of belief.
That's why you didn't hear what I believed
because I'm not interested in what people believe.
I'm interested in how they believe what they believe,
how the belief functions.
I can go along with most of what you say
but my main interest is that
still I think you are treating fundamentalism as a problem
when I keep saying I think it's the solution to your problem.
..women that get *** for being ***, and it's a problem.
OK? I mean, if that's not a problem, what is?
Yes, but you've got to understand, like...
So, for example, take the asylum seekers that are here in Australia.
This is a big thing. You treat it as a problem to solve, you know.
You'll always be fighting it
but if you try and find out where it's coming from...
Like, say, fundamentalism in the Middle East,
if you connect it with US foreign policy or something,
you're not directly attacking it.
You're realising that it's fuelled by something else.
But that sounds a lot like science - going to the root of things.
That's a scientific approach. I mean, I've written about it.
I do think the way to attack fundamentalism
is to educate women in these countries
because that's the best thing you can do to improve
not only the experience of family -
but women will generally educate their children if they are educated -
but also the economy, which is also a huge...
Fundamentalism stems from, in many cases, from poor economies,
from people who are disadvantaged
and look at the wealth of the Western world and resent it.
You're right. But those are scientific approaches.
Those are saying, "What's the evidence?
"How can we address the problem?"
But I will say...look, the one thing that I would agree with is
people do...atheism for some people, or at least that term,
does provide comfort for some people in the same sense as religion
because it provides them some identity.
I've been at meetings
that are humanism or ath..., or whatever they are called,
and these are groups of people who come from small towns
where they can't even tell their family or their neighbours
what they are thinking.
They find a group of people who are like-minded
where they can say what they really think.
It's liberating and wonderful
and that sense of community is a good thing.
So, yes, if it provides that sense of community, that's great.
If that sense of community replaces religion
or is similar to religion, that's fine.
But all you are saying is that anything that provides people
with a sense of solace and community is like religion.
Fine, but it's better than religion.
For me, there's two ways to set up a community.
One is through scapegoating,
so you set up your community by a mutual hatred of somebody else.
So for the Fascists, it's the figure of the Jew or something like that.
The idea is "They're stopping us from having a solid harmonious community."
But in actual fact,
it's having a shared enemy that creates the context.
You know, but you go to these meetings, there is no shared enemy.
It's people celebrating free thinking.
But there is another, the second one is like AA?
Where AA doesn't scapegoat anyone.
AA says, like, "My name is Peter Rollins, I'm an alcoholic."
So you bring in the brokenness.
So whatever humanist group, Christian, or whatever it is,
you'll either find solidity by scapegoating -
and I think sometimes the atheists, New Atheism scapegoats religion -
or it can be more like an AA meeting.
Of course you still have a set of beliefs
but you are saying, "You know what? When we think THEY are the problem,
"actually, that's a projection of certain insecurities within us."
I want to get to the audience but one question for you.
Lawrence, I think, made a very clear distinction.
His approach is rooted in asking questions
and acting according to what evidence provides,
in other words the facts matter as far as we can ascertain them.
The implication being that
what you call new religion, or religion in general,
has no regard to these facts, that they don't matter.
Is that a fair criticism
or do you say it's pointless asking about facts in any case?
Well, I mean, the main concern I have when Lawrence says that
is for me, he's taking the idea that we believe what we say.
We believe what we say we believe, and I'm saying that we don't.
-(LAUGHTER) -Most of the time.
If someone says in an argument, "I want you to leave,"
most of us know that often means "I want you to fight to stay,"
but you can't say that because if you say that, the person can stay,
so you have to say, "I want you to leave," and...
What about something like, "This is a glass of water."
Absolutely. In a scientific type of claim, you can say, "Glass of water,"
but I'm talking about metaphysical beliefs like religion,
so that's kind of the topic or whatever.
But you are just taking a scientific approach.
You are saying neuropsy... evolutionary psychology tells us
people couch what they say in a certain set of terms
but we have to work deeper to try to understand that.
But that's a scientific approach, I don't understand...
Because I'm saying that you keep attacking the surface level,
but if you understand that actually
most fundamentalists don't actually believe what they are saying.
We say, "God will take care of everything,"
but they still put a steeple on top of the church.
They still lock the door at night.
That actually the most radical thing is to understand that
it's not trying to convince the facts - "You are factually wrong" -
it's realising the person already knows it.
You have to create a context where they can admit that what they al...
Like WikiLeaks, Slavo Zizek uses that example,
the most radical knowledge in WikiLeaks
isn't the stuff we didn't know.
That's all boring what one politician thought about another.
It's the stuff that we knew but we didn't want to know that we knew -
black-hole prisons, *** of innocents, all of that.
It's the stuff that we know but we don't want to know.
If I say, "I think your wife is having an affair,"
and you kick me and get really angry, I'm like, "Oh, so you already know."
But if you are confused like, "Oh, no, I didn't know."
In other words, what I am saying is
a lot of the aggression you see in fundamentalism,
pushing out the other, is not the fear of the other,
it's the fear that the other exposes your own otherness to yourself,
ie, the other expo...
When I meet someone - your genuine multicultural experiences -
"They're monstrous and weird. They're bizarre."
But if I really look at myself through their eyes,
I realise I'm weird and monstrous and bizarre -
my views on marriage, my views on relationships.
And what I'm saying is I already know that my views
culturally and politically and religiously are probably bizarre
but I protect myself from that insight.
-Well, let's... -Could I...
-Last comment then we'll open it up. -We'll get to the audience.
-Far more interesting. -(MUTTERING)
-I... -(LAUGHTER)
I'm just trying to think how to frame this.
First of all, it's not just fundamentalists who don't believe...
It's everyone who calls themselves Christian or whatever,
they don't buy most of the garbage, you know, they pick and choose.
They want to be good people, and for them, being Christian is good people
so they pick the things in the Bible they like,
they throw out the stuff they don't like, they call that their religion.
What we're trying to do is to set up a framework for saying,
"Don't be afraid of being wrong."
That's the whole purpose of learning and knowledge.
Don't be afraid of being wrong, don't be afraid...
In fact, question your beliefs. That's what science teaches us.
That's what we wanna encourage other people to do
is question your beliefs and ask yourself
why do you believe what you believe, and is there a basis for it?
If there isn't, give it up, throw it out like yesterday's newspaper
and get on with life, anyway.
We'll probably get a chance for you
to come back in some of the questions.
I love this Islamic saying - "Trust in God but tie the camel's leg."
Yes.
Peter, how is what you're talking about any different to say...
Sorry. I'll start again.
Peter, how is what you are talking about
any different to pop psychology or philosophy?
I mean, if I'm feeling down,
why wouldn't I just open Spinoza or go to my doctor?
Yeah, I mean, my work is very influenced
by existentialism and by psychoanalysis.
But the funny thing is both psychoanalysis and existentialism,
you know, came out of the religious tradition in many respects.
Kierkegaard, obviously, his work is based on reading of...
Well, it's about Regine, really, but, you know, and Abraham and Isaac.
And Nietzsche, profoundly religious.
And the psychoanalytic tradition is very Jewish.
So in some respects, those are the resources that I use,
that I think faith is not a mode of belief,
it's a way of participating in the world.
For example, if you believe the world is meaningless
and it's all going to end in a cruel death or whatever, entropy,
but you love, you experience love,
you cannot help but experience the world as meaningful.
And vice versa - if you believe the world is meaningful
and it's all going to be roses and heaven and harps,
but you don't love,
you cannot help but experience the world as meaningless.
For me, faith is...it's anti-wisdom
because...not because it's against nihilism.
It's a lived protest against nihilism.
It's a way of living as if the world is worth dying for.
And it doesn't matter what you believe,
as long as you live that way, is that your point?
But this idea... What you said is just wrong.
(LAUGHTER)
The world is mean... The universe is meaningless to me
but I'm in awe of it.
Those things can happen together, in fact, they go together for me.
And so one doesn't have to love the universe to be in awe of it
and one doesn't have to think it's meaningful to be in awe of it.
In fact, the fact that it's meaningless
I find much more fascinating than if it was created by someone,
you know, some Saddam Hussein in the sky.
I wouldn't say that you have to love the universe.
I would say that you have to experience love,
ie, when you lose someone you love,
you don't just lose one object that you love,
like I love my car, I love my house, I love physics, and I love my wife.
When you lose the person that you love,
you lose your ability to love all the other things.
They are the object cause of our desire.
Our jobs become meaningless, our work becomes meaningless.
And what I'm arguing is in love, things become beautiful.
-There's no inherent beauty... -But the loss of love...
The person I love the most in the world happens to be here right now.
If I lost her, I would be...
Every day I would think about how precious that love was
and it wouldn't mean I'd love people less.
It might...I suspect that I would be more considerate
and more caring of others
for understanding the pain that I'd experienced myself.
What I'll do is take a couple of people
so I get a bit of a grab bag of comments and get through a few more.
We'll go first of all to this microphone.
If you can just give your name, please, then say it?
And then I'll come to you over there.
Sure. My name is Shan. I've got a question for Peter.
What will happen to your memories when you die?
OK. Question there. Don't answer yet. Hold that.
-We'll get someone from over here. -I don't know. That's it.
-(LAUGHTER) -The answer is, "I forgot."
My name is Anna.
My question was about, for Peter,
how is your new religion connected to Christianity?
I just don't quite get the tag line with... Where is Jesus' resurrection?
Like, what is your fundamental beliefs of new religion, what is it?
Does anybody else want to have one more here?
I think you can handle three since the first one you don't know.
Hi. My name is David. Question for Peter.
Isn't saying that you are interested
in how people believe rather than what they believe
just a convenient way of putting your own beliefs beyond criticism?
OK, so what happens to your memories when you die?
-I don't know, so that's it. -You don't know.
Then we've got the issue about where's Jesus
and the traditional Christianity in your new Christianity?
And are you just obscuring yourself from criticism
about saying it's just about how but not what?
I know I have to be quick. Is that right? Yeah.
-No. -You keep it, right?
Partly, the next talk that I give this afternoon
is an attempt to answer that question more fully about...
I mean, I don't know if you're gonna be at that one.
I will say very quickly what I'm gonna try and do
is that what I argue is in the very beginning
of the biblical text, of the story -
Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden - and they want this apple.
Now, an apple is... it's not even an iPhone,
it's not even anything interesting, it's a piece of fruit, right?
What makes a piece of fruit interesting?
And I argue it's the prohibition - "You can't have it."
Anybody who has kids knows that
as soon as you say you can't have the Transformer, it makes it magical.
"I really want the Transformer. I really want the Transformer."
What I argue is that that is a deeply psychological experience for us,
that we have this initial connection with our primary caregiver
and as we are weaned off that, we have this...
..it's a very painful experience for us.
I argue that we continue to live like that,
so then we think money will make us happy, a job will make us happy,
if I go out with that person, I'll be happy,
if I divorce that person, I'll be happy.
We're always seeking the thing that will make us whole and complete.
I argue that there's this image in the biblical text
that reframes that
where you have the Holy of Holies in the Temple,
this Temple curtain and then the Court of Gentiles where we are.
The central moment of Christianity is the ripping of the curtain
where we realise there is no God, there is nothing behind the curtains.
It's the 'Wizard of Oz' moment.
We realise there's nothing that will make us whole and complete -
existentially, I don't mean intellectually.
Existentially, we experience that.
But then it doesn't end there.
We experience that there's a depth in being
and we can re-understand the term 'god' not as an object that we love
but rather as a mystery we participate in
in the act of love itself.
That is a very truncated answer to the question.
For me, Christianity and religion is not about beliefs at all
partly because there are so many beliefs in the Bible.
I mean, you've got four gospels and one event.
If someone says they've been abused in some way, had a trauma,
and they in court say what happened,
and they can give a very coherent argument for...
What they said to the police is the same as what they said to the judge
is the same as what they said to their parents.
That points to not them telling the truth, that points to them lying.
Whereas if someone has a traumatic event and they can't...
..the times and the dates don't quite fit
and what they said to the police
is different from the judge and the parents,
that's not evidence they are lying.
That points towards them telling the truth
because a trauma is an event that you...
So which are the gospels on that thing?
Are they the not telling the truth or the trauma which mucks up the answer?
-I see the text as so full of belief. -Probably both.
You've got polytheism, henotheism, monotheism, you've got atheism,
you've got everything, and these are clashing together.
What I say is that one of the ways to protect you from believing something
is to inundate you with beliefs that are all mutually contradictory.
I've got a friend in Brisbane who believes everything.
She believes in everything but it's actually
a means of protecting herself from believing in anything.
Just on the question about this being really a technique
to obscure yourself, to hide yourself from criticism,
can you briefly answer that?
Yeah, no, because this can be attacked.
The great thing is I want to be
very clear about my craziness and ambiguity.
You know, it definitely protects me maybe from saying what you believe
because I'm saying that's not the important thing -
I have 10 different beliefs before breakfast.
And by the way, my beliefs don't tell you who I am.
My beliefs are designed to protect you from seeing who I am.
They aren't to protect me from who I am.
I say I love animals but I eat meat
and I know that meat comes from places, very dark places,
the mistreating of animals.
I say I love kids
but I know these clothes were made by kids in Indonesia.
My beliefs don't...
If you want to know what I believe, don't listen to what I have to say.
I have a vested interest in making myself look good
because I hang around with myself all the time.
If I thought I was an idiot... This is why reality TV works
because nobody thinks they are an idiot, right?
That's why you go online.
For me, beliefs are not... don't tell me who I am.
My beliefs are a protection mechanism,
protecting me from encountering that.
That's why in AA the first thing you have to do
is take the false narrative you tell yourself about yourself -
"I can give up drinking any time I want.
"I'm not an alcoholic," which happens -
and then you have to make it fit with your material reality.
That's very different.
That's part of the spiritual disciplines for me
is taking our false narrative and making it fit.
I am interested in what we believe
but what we believe is found in our actions,
not in the fantasies that we have in our heads.
Well, I think, let me just...
You know, I was going to read my Kindle
because I'm sure all the questions were for Peter.
-(LAUGHTER) -But, um...
But let me try and jump in.
It is true, actions are what matter, and that's the problem.
I mean, if we're interested in social policy,
if we're interested in how to make the world a better place,
we have to see what people... how people act.
The problem is that people's actions are sometimes based on their beliefs.
When those beliefs don't conform to the evidence of reality,
those actions are wrong.
If it's the new government of Australia
not believing that there is human-induced climate change,
they are going to make bad policies
because they refuse to accept the empirical evidence.
-Refuse to accept? -Refuse to accept.
As in there's something else going on.
-(STAMMERS) -They know the truth.
What they do is they deny the evidence of reality.
-Deny? -(LAUGHTER)
Sorry.
You know, what I was thinking...
Don't take this the wrong way, although you will.
-(LAUGHTER) -I wouldn't have until you said that.
Yeah. No, it's obvious...
But there is, you know, I'm not...
Someone told me the other day that scientist...
Einstein said scientists make bad philosophers
and to which I said, "No loss."
-But... -(LAUGHTER)
But anyway, the...
But it does remind me, I actually was influenced
by existentialism more than anything else,
but mine is more of Sartre and Camus.
The best philosophical line which came to mind when you were talking
is one from a TV show I used to watch
called 'The *** Van *** Show' in the United States,
where the head of that said one time, he was looking and he was saying,
"You know, what on the surface seems vague is in reality meaningless."
-And, um... -(LAUGHTER)
I get the sense that at some point to say that...
..I'm not trying to get people to like me,
I'm trying to get people to question me and question themselves.
That's what science does.
And that as an ethical, if you want to call it,
or just as an act of living can make the world a better place.
That's it. There's nothing more fancy than that.
And I would make an appeal that if you'd like to ask Lawrence a question
to stop him retreating into his Kindle, that would be really great.
-No, no, I'm enjoying hearing Peter. -(LAUGHTER)
I think we were up to here, so here first. Again, we'll take a cluster.
Hi. My name is Levi.
So far the discussion has had lots of good rhetoric and things like that
but I think the underlying question is
is there something that religion, or new religion can give
that a secular rational lifestyle can't?
And if not, then why don't we just ditch it?
-Excellent. -LAWRENCE: I think that's for you.
-(APPLAUSE) -Um, yep.
Hi. My name is Edward.
-This question is for Lawrence, just to mix it up a little bit. -Yes!
I'm a non-believer myself.
I don't like the word 'atheist' but I'm a non-believer myself.
I'm a huge fan and I follow the Four Horsemen, etc, etc.
One thing that I believe - and please correct me if I'm wrong, Peter -
that Peter is arguing
is the utility of religion or the placebo effect of religion,
explicitly if not implicitly, he said that many times.
Now, the question is
with that sort of utility also comes the feeling of community
and the feeling of togetherness and oneness
and having friends and peers, etc,
How can we... If we get rid of religion,
how can we replace that sort of feeling
with atheism, I guess, for lack of a better word?
Because I can't see any way of being able to do such a thing.
OK, so we'll take those two. Maybe last one with you.
First, OK. Because it's going to be hard for you to answer that one.
-(LAUGHTER) -That's easy. Easy.
-It's easy, is it? -Easy.
Anyway. OK, it's a good question.
I've thought a lot about it, obviously.
By the way, I'm not sure religion has a placebo effect.
In fact, that's a claim that...
It does give people solace at some points
but you know, in fact, actually if you look at scientific studies,
as you probably know, the people...
There was a study of people being prayed for in hospitals,
and on the whole,
the people that knew they were being prayed for did worse.
The argument was quite reasonable - that they were more anxious,
that they felt they better get better because people were praying for them.
(LAUGHTER)
So I'm not sure there is a placebo effect.
But your key question - and I think
it does relate to something Peter was talking about -
is how can we create a sense of community
but a sense of community based in a real world
instead of a community based on this fairy tale?
One of the ways, I think,
is sharing our common humanity - which science does,
it tells us that we have these incredible connections -
and celebrating that.
I think we, you know, should go and have...
We should have Sunday meetings about quantum mechanics every week.
(LAUGHTER)
But actually I'm thinking better than that would be rock concerts.
No, I'm serious.
People tell me, "Well, you know, religion provides a place
"for people to go and be happy and share and feel good with each other,"
but it's all around some fabrication.
We just have to think of other ways for people to share things,
love of music, love of whatever.
We can build communities around a common humanity,
which is really, to me, the best way of doing it
instead of representing our differences
and saying, "We'll meet because we're this sect
"and other people will meet over there because they are that sect."
That just separates people.
And the difficult question with the easy answer.
Well, basically for me,
society today, we are acting in an ironic way.
We all do question our governments.
None of us believe that having more money will make us happy.
None of us believe that having that better car
will make us more attractive to the opposite sex.
But we treat these as a fetish.
A fetish is an object that we know is not magical
but we treat it as if it is.
What we do is we go out and materially enact this.
We go to a '70s disco, we dress in the '70s clothes,
we dance in the '70s way and we also take the *** out of it as well.
We actually mock the very activity that we are materially invested in.
What I'm seeing in secular society
we can all click our thing on Facebook
and say how sad we are about various things,
and what we're doing is we are acting in this form of disavow.
Very quickly, a story from back in Ireland about a guy, Shamus,
went to the bar every week, had five pints of Guinness.
One week, he comes in, has four pints of Guinness.
The barman says, "What's going on?"
Shamus says, "Well, I've got three brothers and a father,
"they are all over the place in the world.
"I have a drink for each of them and a drink for myself every week."
-LAWRENCE: I know that joke. -Oh, yeah?
But he says...but he says, "My father recently passed away
"so now I have a pint for my three brothers and myself."
Fair enough. He comes back next week, he orders three pints.
And the barman says, "Listen, I don't mean to pry, Shamus,
"but has something happened to one of your brothers?"
Shamus says, "Oh, no, no, no."
He says, "Doctor's orders, I've had to stop drinking."
-That is the ironic gesture. -(LAUGHTER)
You mock the very behaviour you're engaged in.
New religion does not try to change what you think.
It tries to help you enact
the breaking free of the frenetic activity
for the pursuit of things that will make you whole and complete.
I think the question that was posed is in what sense is it religion then?
You have to go to my next session because that's my whole argument.
-It would be good to just answer it. -(LAUGHTER)
I'll answer it very quickly.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
is not an intellectual atheism because it's addressed to God.
It's an experience of the loss of God existentially. "Why are you gone?"
What I'm arguing is that the heart of Christianity
is the existential experience of the loss
of whatever it is you think that will make you whole and complete.
But why do you call it Christianity?
Because "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
is definitely in there somewhere.
Oh, but, I mean, you could... What's Christian about it?
For me, Christianity is not a worldview, it's not a tradition.
Christianity reflects the mood of life.
Why isn't Islam? Why isn't Judaism? Why isn't paganism?
I'm sure there's elements of it everywhere.
Yeah, I'm sure there's elements everywhere.
I'm just talking about within the Judaeo-Christian tradition
because I don't know other traditions.
But I don't want to also say it is because...
So the thing you don't believe in
that's the heart of your being is Christianity.
That's why you call it the new Christianity?
For me, Christianity is a radical negation.
It is the experience of the loss of...
So if you negated Islam, you'd be the new Islam?
I don't know because I don't know Islam good enough.
The reason...by the way that's only...
I think it might be there but I just don't want to say
because there's probably something better there.
I don't know. I'm just working within that tradition.
You'll hear the full version of this later on, as you've gathered.
We'll take a couple more questions. Up here, firstly.
My name is Nissar Ali.
And my question is for Lawrence as well as for Peter.
About the basic school of thought of atheism and as well as religion.
If you can explain that, like, what is the basic school of thought?
Like this is the basic question of philosophy
about idealism as well as materialism.
If you can explain that what is the basic question of philosophy,
because I'm not satisfied with the explanation.
So if you can explain the basic school of thought of atheism
and as well as about the religion.
-Can we answer that right away? -You can do that straightaway.
Yeah, because, you really hit an important point
that's a misunderstanding.
It's really the way this is framed.
Atheism isn't a school of thought. It's not.
It's just saying... It's not a school of thought.
It's defining...accepting evidence and not...
It's just saying,
"I won't choose to believe things that are untrue,
"for which there is evidence against them."
You can call that a philosophy, you can call that realism, rationalism.
Those are schools of thought.
Atheism is arguing in some sense, not all atheists, but they are saying,
"Look, I won't call myself a Christian or a this or that
"because I see no evidence for this or that."
It's not a belief system.
It's an umbrella thing for just saying,
"I don't believe these things."
At the basis of it,
you might call a school of thought rationalism or humanism.
Those are sort of schools of thought,
and those basically are that what I just said -
you accept the world for what it is,
you try and look at evidence, act rationally upon it,
both on a personal level and a societal level,
that will make the world a better place.
People have probably noticed an uncanny similarity now,
that you are both saying
"It's not our beliefs, it's our way that we relate to the world."
But you've given more precision to what that is,
it's about the questioning and acting on evidence.
-(MUFFLED SPEECH) -Sorry? Is it a separate...
Yeah, there was another part of my question.
I think I'll have to go to one other person.
If there's time, I'll come back to you. Just to be fair.
-Yep? -Hello. My name is Owen.
Actually, it's a very similar kind of question to the last one.
-SIMON: Might be part two. -Again, to Lawrence.
Just from what you were saying about your beliefs
is you don't like to...
..you don't like the way that religious people approach life
because they are stuck to their religion,
and you said something about there is not necessarily a meaning to life
and that doesn't bother you.
But what about your definition
of anything higher than ourselves in the world?
Is there a higher consciousness?
Is there anything
that what the American Indians would call the "greater spirit"?
SIMON: That will have to be the last question.
Is there like anything that joins...
Well, there's two misconceptions of what you said.
Let me respond to what, you know, as a politician might,
I'll answer the question I wanted to answer
rather than the one you asked.
No, I'll try and answer it.
The first thing is you somehow argue
that I don't like religious people or something like that.
That's a misunderstanding.
I'm talking about ideas. I'm not talking about people.
So the question is are ideas silly, not people.
We should all be able to ridicule silly ideas,
and that's all I'm saying.
Now, we all hold silly ideas, I hold silly ideas,
certainly I've discovered Peter does.
(LAUGHTER)
But so that doesn't make me better than anyone else.
I should question my own silly ideas as much as anyone else's.
In terms of higher, that whole notion that there is something higher
suggests a hierarchy, which I don't see anywhere in nature.
There are natural phenomena and they are incredibly interesting
over the scale of the largest size of the universe
to the smallest size of the universe.
To say that something is more significant than something else
is to apply some subjective criteria for which there is no evidence.
If you are saying, if you are asking me
is there something that governs me other than me,
well, it's probably the society in which I live in
and the biology in which I'm based,
and the chemistry that governs my biochemical process
and the physics that says I can't fly out of this room,
whereas several times during this I wanted to.
-(LAUGHTER) -But that's it.
That's it. That's it. OK.
-(APPLAUSE) -Any last comments from you?
-PETER: Just, er... -(APPLAUSE)
Just whether he's got the rubber duck outfit.
Pardon?
Just whether he's got the duck outfit.
-(LAUGHTER) -Have you got the duck outfit?
And you don't want to say anything about the notion of higher being
or atheism, whether you see it as...
..is it equivalent to what you're talking about
but just a different way?
No, I mean, at its core what I'm saying is that actually -
and here's a biblical bit - that Paul says
there is neither Jew or gentile, slave or free, male of female,
I want to add neither Christian nor non-Christian, atheist nor theist,
pacifist nor hawk, whatever.
That there is a loss of identity, that embrace of our brokenness,
a sense in which we can be
instruments of each other's further transformation, that's it.
And do you see science in the way that Lawrence talked about it
being as equally a valid route
to resolving what you describe as that condition?
I think they are different. No, I don't think it has...
I'm very pro-science but I don't think it helps us
encounter ourselves at that deep level.
OK, well, ladies and gentlemen, as Peter has indicated,
he will be expanding upon his thoughts in another session.
-Which is in an hour or so, is it? -Yeah.
So please, if you'd like to hear more of that, you are welcome to join.
But in the meantime, both will be signing their books outside.
-(APPLAUSE) -And we thank them very much.
(INAUDIBLE SPEECH)