Joe Rogan - Religion Lets People Excuse Bad Actions

You're talking about Trump. You're talking about the Trump before he found Jesus. And he's like, I don't have a past. And he was like, I am born again. I do not have a past. Do you? And he was going on about this whole thing about this concept of Trump is now an agent of God. But I don't necessarily even think it's Christianity. I think that religion can be infinitely malleable to the purposes of the moment, right? Like, he wouldn't have said that about Obama or whoever, right? You know, you pick and choose when you apply your criteria. Like I did this once as an exercise for myself. There's certain phrases in the Bible or certain passages in the Bible, which are sort of unapologetically left wing and socialist, right? Just like there are others that are unapologetically right wing and authoritarian. It's a big book full of different things. So I wondered like how, what do they tell themselves? You know, what do people who don't fall on that side of the spectrum tell themselves about these passages in the Bible? So there's one very famous passage about how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Right? Clearly, I think that anyone who reads this says this is an anti-rich person statement. So I like, you can Google it like, so what do people say about this? So my favorite explanation was that, sure, it's impossible for camels to pass through the eyes of a needle, except if Jesus helps them. Or if you grind the camel down to a very fine dust and one particle at a time. They interpret this as Jesus said that only through Jesus do we get into heaven. That's really the only lesson they get. Oh, okay. So that's nothing to do with rich people. All you have to do is find Jesus and if you're rich, you're good. Well, on your own, you're fucked. This is why I can't, even though I'm an atheist, I'm very happy to explain why I don't think that God exists. But I don't blame religion most of the time for people's bad actions, because I think that religion is just sort of a catalyst. It lets people find excuses for their bad actions, but it's usually the bad actions, the desire to do bad actions that comes first most of the time. Do you ever look at religion as a potential almost evolutionary software program that's allowed people to sort of adopt morality and impose certain standards of behavior that are conducive to civilization? So people talk about that. And again, I'm not an expert there. I'm a little skeptical because it sounds like too much of a pat story to tell after the fact, right? I think that we are a little bit quick to attribute ideas and cultural concepts to evolution. But certainly, religion was not like just science done badly back in the day, right? Like what religion was was something much more expansive, interleaved with your life overall. So it was not just how the world was created and whether God exists. It was how to be a good person, how to live in your community, things like that. And disentangling these things is one of the reasons why religion is still hanging around, right? Like even after the kind of underpinnings of the religion in terms of understanding how the world works have been removed by science, the other functions are still there. And I'm a big critic of my fellow naturalists who have not put enough effort into replacing the other functions of religion now that the claims about the world are no longer viable. Hmm, that's a great way to present it. Yeah, and it's really a problem when there's so many versions. Yeah, so I mean, one of the many, many reasons why I think that it's not really credible to be religious intellectually is because if in the classic traditional Western religious sense, where there's a God and he cares about us, right? So there's all sorts of questions about where we define the boundary of religion, whether Buddhism is a religion or something like that. But in the usual sense that we grew up with in this country, surely if that were true, God would have done a much better job of explaining himself to us, right? Like, why would God give us his message through a bunch of people in a tiny country who didn't write, you know, like the New Testament wasn't written down until decades after the event. None of the people who wrote it down were eyewitnesses. Why is it only shared there? I mean, God is God, right? Like he could easily have showed up to everybody in the world, talk to them, explain how things were going and let them make their own choices. That would have been a much more efficient way of getting the message out. And so it's just not really sensible to think that, so if God didn't exist, then what you would imagine is that in different countries and different parts of the world and different periods in history, people would tell their own stories and they'd all be a little bit different and they'd be adapted to their local circumstances and they'd be utterly incompatible with each other. And that's exactly what you find. Do you speculate as to what the origins of the concept of God are since so many different groups of people all over the world have a very similar idea at least that there's some omnipotent superpower that's controlling the destiny of everything? Yeah, so number one, I think that the idea of omnipotence was actually somewhat late coming onto the scene, right? Like if you dig into what was happening before 2000 years ago, you know, the Hebrew God was not omnipotent at the beginning, right? I mean, the Hebrews came out of a polytheistic society where there were lots of different gods around and you can trace how their God evolved over time and first, you know, became their God, right? Like this was one God that the Hebrews were, you know, worshiping and the Egyptians and the Babylonians would worship other gods. Then they started saying, well, our God is better than all the other ones. And then they started saying, well, the other ones don't even exist, right? And it was an evolution over time and omnipotence came late. Like you would talk about the gods quarreling if you were a polytheistic, a pagan culture, it's actually makes more like a lot of the world makes more sense if you believe there's a whole bunch of gods out there who disagree with each other, right? Suddenly lots of aspects of reality, you know, come into focus. But the idea there's supernatural, very powerful influences in the world. I mean, that's just an obvious idea, I think, like, we're human beings, we tend to, as our first guess in understanding the world, treat the world as, you know, humanists, like, we're anthropomorphic, right? Like if something exists, it must have been designed, there must be a reason, there must be a purpose. Things work in a certain way because someone made them that way. And that we don't see that person hanging around. So it must be, you know, up there in the sky or something like that. I don't think it's that hard to imagine that all sorts of different cultures would evolve. Do you think it's also a function of us growing up with mentors and father figures and leaders and chieftains. And there's always someone who is the big, the big kahuna. So this is the sky daddy. Yeah. Sky daddy overlooks the big picture. I think there's that and also the idea of your ancestors and ancestor worship or veneration, right, which is also very almost universal, you know, in primitive cultures. Like you don't want to admit that you died, right? That's a sad thing to sit through. So I don't know, I'm sure there are real experts who know a lot about the actual origins of these things. But my point is just that I don't take the commonalities between different sets of religious beliefs as evidence for anything other than there's a very human thing to invent. People search for meaning and they take meaning from whatever religion or ideology that they subscribe to and they use it as sort of a reason why they're living. It gives them hope. It gives them something. Yeah, it's a very common theme among religious thinkers that if it weren't for the existence of God or whatever, there'd be no reason to live. There'd be no reason to be a good person and so forth. And you know, I think it goes back to the motivation we have as having bodies versus being in a computer. Like there's plenty of reasons to do different things. Like in the big picture, my last book, I talk a lot about, you know, it's okay to admit that we as human beings have desires, that there are things we care about, that we want to be true. And you can talk about why that's true from evolution, from biology and whatever, but it doesn't matter why in some sense we have goals. We're not completely aimless. Like we want to survive. We want to flourish. We want to be friends with people. We want to have families, whatever it is we want to do. All that we put together in terms of morality and ethics and meaning and purpose comes out of thinking hard and carefully, hopefully, about how to systematize and grow those existing desires that we have into a way of living in the world. We don't need anything external to make that happen. We just need to sort of think about where we are already and try to make it better.