Joe Rogan - What's the Difference Between a Cult and a Religion?

What? Sis, if you're full of let. Are there more or less of them than people that are in cults? There are vastly more paying attention. Then people in cults. Yeah. Well, you'd have to define it. Yeah. I think that's way off because I think there's like a billion Catholics. Oh, if you're going to call Catholicism, I call it that. It's a cult. I grew up in it. Okay. It's 100%. It's just a cult with a billion people. Well. Whenever you got a guy who dresses like a wizard and you're sitting on a golden throne. Oh, boy. We're here. Are we? Yeah. But that is why this is a problem, is that there's many people that live their lives by these ridiculous ideologies that are illogical. Okay. So I'm going to challenge you on this. So how would you protect them from predators and Facebook likes? I'm going to challenge you on this. Okay. Please do. Catholicism is not a cult. Here's, I had a bit for my act. Let me just. Sure. A cult is bullshit and it's created by one person and he knows it's bullshit. In a religion, that guy's dead. Okay. So let me, this is boy, this is rough territory, but. For you. Okay. Let's say. For me, this is every day. Let's say, yeah. All right. Let's say Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets. Oh, that dude. Okay. I don't know if Moses did come down the mountain with the tablets. I don't think he did. Let's say he did. Did he, did he know he was bullshitting people? Well, do you know what religious scholars actually believe in Jerusalem actually believe that was all about now, the whole burning Bush? Tell me. They believe it was the Acacia Bush, which is rich in DMT and they think the metaphor of the burning Bush was actually a psychedelic experience and that Moses during this psychedelic DMT experience came back from the other dimension that you go into when you go into the DMT trance with all this really standard, the standard messages that I've myself have gotten from these psychedelic experiences that you have to treat each other as if we're all one and that our separations are all illusions that you are literally living a life that if I was born in your body and I had your genetics, I would be you and you would be me because we are all the same and our differences are really what the illusion is. We are these temporary beings and that negative thinking and negative feelings and all these things manifest themselves in negative actions and negative thoughts and you can change that and you can change the frequency in which you exist in this world. Okay. Like this is essentially what the 3000 year old version of Moses or more than that Moses' tablets were that they were, the God was the burning Bush. Perfect. Perfect. So let me ask you a question. You've done some hallucinogens. Oh yeah. And you've had some insight. Yeah. And that insight had something to do with treating people well. Yes, it definitely did. Okay. Was it true? Well, it definitely has benefited me. True or false. If you ask me, is it true that you have had positive experiences from psychedelic drugs where you have interpreted those experiences and improved your life? Yes, that's true. Okay. So if you now go and you convey that thing to somebody who hasn't had the experience themselves, is it bullshit? Well, here's the thing about psychedelics as opposed to all the other ideologies is that they're very repeatable. You don't have to believe in DMT. If you smoke it, you're going to experience it whether you believe in it or not. Right. And actually I think this is, I mean, I am a cautious fan. I say cautious because I don't think I'm not a fan of the idea that these substances should be used recreationally. I think that's a mistake. I agree with you. I think it's fine to have a great time, but that these things are so powerful that one should be deliberate about it and don't do it with a TV. The only thing that I like about doing it recreationally is it's going to get more people to do it and that if you think it's recreational and then you do it, there's going to be a certain percentage of those people that go, what was that? That's not what I thought it was. I thought it was going in there to have a good time and I just communicated with God. Yep. Air quotes God. Yeah, air quotes. Well, but air quotes God is marvelous because air quotes God is the real deal. Yeah. It's not a dude on a cloud. It's something, it is a metaphor for something lodged very deep in the mind where you can't find it directly and this is a hack that many cultures have used to access that layer. It's all very familiar to us and when you talk to people that have studied DMT in particular, one of the reasons why I think it's so familiar to us, when you have this experience, one of the first things that happens is you feel like you've been there before and they believe that this is because during REM sleep your brain produces DMT. It's very difficult to monitor but they have been able to through the Cottonwood Research Foundation which all started from the work of Dr. Rick Strassman out of the University of New Mexico who wrote a book called DMT the Spirit Molecule which was one of the very first times where the DEA allowed them to do clinical studies on people with intravenous dimethyltryptamine which is like fucking serious shit. So instead of like this 10 to 15 minute trip you're gone for a long time, half hour plus and deep, deep experiences that a lot of these people mirrored. They all, they had like super similar experiences but through the Cottonwood Research Foundation they found that live rats are producing DMT in their pineal gland. This has been proven now which was really just speculation. There was anecdotal evidence but now they know that rats produce this. So they don't know exactly when people do it because they would have to do the same thing they do to their rats. They'd have to open your brain up until they develop some sort of sophisticated detection methods. It's just speculation as to when the brain's producing this incredibly potent psychedelic drug but it's there. We know it's producing it. We know it's producing the liver. It's producing the lungs. It's endogenous to the human system and we don't know why. Yeah, well I'm pretty sure I have a good insight into why but for the moment let's pursue the issue of what the implications are. Okay, I'll hold on to why. I'll cross my fingers for a while. Yeah, cross your fingers on that one. The story you've just told is perfectly plausible whether it's 100% accurate or not and we don't know. Right. But the idea that your mind contains mechanisms that go into some sort of psychedelic state without your conscious mind being able to tap into it so your conscious mind walks around during the day not realizing that you're tripping at some other moments for some purpose. It's all very interesting. You're not tripping in your sleeping mind for no reason at all. You're doing it for productive reasons. Logically speaking it has to be the case that if you're burning energy and going through the costly exercise of thinking even in the psychedelic way that it's happening for a reason. Right. And that means that we have carried this with us from an ancestral state into the modern state and we now have molecules that we can trigger it when we want to. That gives you access to a style of thinking that you're telling me has altered your understanding of your relationship to other people and that it metaphorically lines up with what you often hear delivered in religious terms. Right? Abstractly, yes. Right. So when you say Catholicism is a cult I don't agree because Catholicism historically must have been delivering messages that caused people to correct their thinking in ways that made them collaborate more effectively, that made them better able to find the opportunities in their environment. I'm not advocating that we should sign up for belief systems that are at odds with our modern environment. But one thing we can say I believe for sure is that religions that have stood the test of time did so because their value to the people who believed in them was so great that those that disbelieved were outcompeted. Now so we get into trouble in the modern circumstance because we can look at many of the teachings of any of these ancient religions and we can compare them to what we learn scientifically and detect that there's something not right. Can I stop you there? Sure. Scientology, is that a cult? Too early to tell. Okay, but let's stop because we know the guy who created it. Well we do but we also, let me drag you back. By the way, I'm very uncomfortable with Scientology and what it does. But the problem is as Scientology itself points out, if you looked at the inception of something like the Catholic Church, you might be equally troubled. Sure. Which is why I think they're both cults. Well, but let's be careful about that. Okay. What do you think a cult is? What do you think a cult is? Well I think a cult is the predatory version. It is tapping into people's natural tendency to believe in what I call metaphorical truths and it is using it very often to extract resources from them. Like the Catholic Church? Well, no, not like the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is so long standing and the population that has, I guess what I would say is if a population succeeds by believing in these things, then cult is not the correct... I think you and I have different terms. We're using different definitions of the word cult then. But let me take this. There's a very interesting comparison. So Joseph Smith who started the Mormon Church had a competitor. He had a competitor at the time. There's a book called The Kingdom of Matthias about his competitor at the time. And to me, the two looked equally plausible, the story that they were selling. Now Matthias never had more than 30 followers and his religion died out and Joseph Smith won. And the Mormon Church is obviously a real thing. But these sets of beliefs are advanced by somebody. Whether those somebodies are cynical when they do it or whether they are earnest. I think many of these, the ones that we have, that have lasted for long periods of time, have been advanced by somebody who was in one way or another, conscious or not, DMT or not, tapped into something that when delivered to other people actually constituted a kind of insight. As opposed to being a con man. Right. Okay. And so the origins of the Catholic Church most likely came from some desire for order and a scaffolding of how to behave and to give people rules and structure for how to get through this life with the most amount of positivity and love. And by disciplining them and having these grave punishments being held over their head, burning in the fires, the pits of hell if they decide to have sex with another man or wear two different types of cloth or whatever the other silly things that were in the Old Testament by doing this, what they've essentially tried to do is offer people structure. No, it's not really structure. It is an analog for truths that can't be spoken literally because nobody knows how to phrase them. So let's deal with the church on the one hand and Moses on the other. Okay. Moses is obviously important in Jewish history. If Moses ate some DMT from the Acacia bush. They think it was smoke. Oh, he smoked it. That's why the whole thing of the burning bush. Okay. Let's say he smoked it. Let's say he was super savvy and farsighted and obviously he didn't know anything about molecules. Right. But suppose that he had some ancient model of something and he said there must have been something in that plant that caused crazy things to happen. Let's suppose he didn't believe that he had contacted God or that God had contacted him. But he woke up from the thing and was like, wait a minute. I know what these people are doing wrong. I'm going to write it down and tell them came from God. Right. Is Judaism now a cult? I think they're all cults. I think all ideologies are cults. I just don't, I don't know. I don't think there is any one person who wrote, first of all, when you're dealing with Christianity, you're dealing with translations, right? Or Judaism. You're dealing with like ancient translations of languages that aren't even spoken anymore. And you're also dealing with an oral tradition of who knows how many years before it was ever bothered to be written down. But written down by people and then people decide what stays in and what doesn't. They change the rules like the priests used to be able to marry. The priests in the Catholic church, the pope used to have wives. They ran armies. This is clearly something that human beings have a hand in manipulating and changing and they do it for the benefit of the structure itself. They're not doing it for the benefit of the human beings that are a part of it. They're doing it for the benefit of the structure itself. Oh, that I don't agree. What's in what case? Like the money and the amount of power. I'm not saying you don't have corruption in all of these structures. You do. But I am saying that there is a... This is exactly parallel to what we were talking about before. There is the predatory version, which I would call a cult. And there is the earnest version, which I would not call a cult. Now I'm very uncomfortable with any of these things governing policy in the present because none of them have a literal relationship with reality that allows them to deal with the fact that we've got all these new problems for which there's no religious wisdom. Maybe there's a problem in the word cult. Maybe we should just say a structure created by human beings, which is basically all structures. All structures, all models of behavior where you have to adhere to certain things. But the problem with religion, and even with a lot of cults, is the supposed grave consequences for deviating. Right? Well, so all right. Let's pick up Catholicism because it's easy, because so much of the structure is visible to us. Yeah. I would argue that Catholicism, this is gonna be true of all of Christianity, it's gonna be true of Judaism, but Catholicism is... It is easy to see how it would facilitate collaboration, that effectively it would recreate in some sense the insight that you're talking about from DMT, and that it would instantiate it in the population in a useful way that would facilitate collaboration and disrupt processes that cause infighting. Yeah, like what I was thinking before, it might be structure, it's the scaffolding for human behavior and ethics. Right, but imagine, I mean, we can see it in Catholicism, we know where it is. So every week you have to go and confess the shit you're doing wrong to the dude in the box, okay? That's how they used to spy on you, I mean, that's what that was for. Well, but why are they spying on you? I mean, no... Because they wanna make sure that they don't get overthrown. I think you're too cynical. Really? Yeah, because... What do you think they're doing? Well, so first of all, I'm a biologist. Okay. How are these priests who don't marry passing on their genes? They're not. Oh, they are. Oh, what are they doing? They're sneaky? No, they're facilitating the stability of the lineage that they are in charge of. So the point is, they don't pass on their genes directly, they're passing on their genes indirectly through the population. Their interests are synonymized with the population that they are preaching to. And so you tell the dude in the box what you've been doing wrong. Imagine it's adultery, right? Okay. Oh, God. If I die before next week and I haven't confessed my adultery... You go to hell. I'm gonna go to hell. That's bad. Hell is a very unpleasant place. I'm telling you. Tell that guy who doesn't get to have sex. I'm gonna tell him. So now the person I've been committing adultery with is thinking, oh shit, well, I was gonna keep this a secret. But now the priest is gonna know that I've been committing adultery because he's gonna hear from the other person. And so I better confess too. So now the priest has a sense of like, oh, there's an adultery problem in the congregation. And the priest is flipping through the book and thinking, oh, this week, what should we talk about? And so the priest then gets up at the pulpit and turn your book to Psalm, whatever, and what's going on about adultery. And the people in the congregation who are engaged in adultery are thinking, oh shit, this is God talking to me directly. God knows what I've been up to and he's not happy. And that's why we're reading this Psalm. I better cut it the fuck out. So my point is the dude in the box, he's taken a vow of poverty. He's living in the church. He does well when the town does well. He's not having babies of his own. So he can't really get ahead by himself. He gets ahead genetically speaking when the town does well. And he's in a position to spot what's going wrong in the town. And he doesn't have a dog in that fight because he's not involved in business. He's not involved in mating and dating. You know, this is all relatively recent when it comes to the Catholic church in the last couple of hundred years. Yes. And I would argue if you look back at any of these traditions, any of the ones that worked will successfully have addressed the question of how you prevent corruption from emerging. Well, apparently it was sexual corruption. These guys were rock stars. Like the priests were essentially the guys who had the direct line to God. And just like professors have been known to do, not you, but you know, some have sex with their students, you know, and because the students like look at them like, Oh my God, I can't believe the professor sitting down here with my work. I mean, that's a very minor connection in comparison to the connection to God. Anybody who's going to have power is in danger of abusing it. I would say it's interesting that in the Catholic church and in other traditions where marriage and making money are impossible, that these appear to be evolved. What's the word? It's like error correction or protection from a virus. So an outbreak of corruption in the church is a bad thing from the point of view of the wellbeing of the congregation and something that says, well, if you're a priest and you're spending money in town, people are going to look at you funny because you're not supposed to have money. And if you're, you know, hanging around with cute girls, people are going to look at you funny because you're not supposed to be having sex. So this limits their ability to get away with stuff. I'm not saying it's zero. Obviously it's not, but the idea that there will be protections in each tradition for this that religions that don't successfully protect against abuses of power will succumb in competition to religions that do it effectively. And so you're absolutely correct that all of the changes in religious texts that people believe in, that's all human beings making decisions about what to keep and what to throw out. I'm not arguing anything else, but what I am arguing is those that have been insightful about what to keep from the point of view of the particular problems faced by the population that they are in will have a competitive advantage because they will function more cohesively than a population of atheists who doesn't have somebody looking out to prevent outbreaks of competition inside the lineage or outbreaks of infighting. So if you were looking at it in an objective way, like say, if you were an alien from another planet that didn't understand the language and you're just observing the structure, you would see this error correction in the structure. It would say, oh, they realize there's an issue here with power. And so they error corrected by making these priests be celibate. And then they figured out a way to keep them from having money and that'll keep them from being invested in, you know, in, okay. Yeah. And I think it's very misleading to people who analyze things the way you and I would because there's so much hocus pocus associated with these structures that, you know, it's like constantly putting a finger in the eye of an analytical person. Of course. I mean, just the way they dress, right? I mean, just the wearing the wizard costume and holding the staff and sitting on the golden throne and all of it. I mean, all the pageantry to it. It's all preposterous. I mean, I agree looking at it as a modern person, it looks preposterous to me. On the other hand, there is no way I'm telling you, I mean, most of my colleagues, I'm sure would disagree with this, but I hope to show them to be wrong on this front. There is no way that the huge amount of effort and resource that is invested in these structures was an error. Cannot have been an evolutionary error because if it was the huge investment that populations put into these structures is an opportunity for some population that behaves in exactly the same way, except it doesn't make that error to win. Right. But when you get power and then you have the momentum of that power overcoming the population and then you have positions where the behavior patterns are extremely restrictive and you have to behave inside these behavior patterns or there's grave consequences. I mean, you could conceivably run that for a thousand years without any error correction. And that's what you've got with Islam. Right. You've got a very ancient form of religion that Michael Shermer wrote a piece about it that's pretty interesting where he was talking about how it's the only religion that didn't go through the Enlightenment. And he makes these comparisons to like the corrections that have been had with other religions as time has gone on that haven't happened there. And you could equate it to resource management. You could equate it to the part of the world in which they live. You could equate it. There's a lot of different ways that you could try to figure out why this happened. But the reality is that that thing has not changed. That structure has not changed for a long time. I think you've hit on exactly the right point. Islam's mechanism for preventing outbreaks of... Change. ...parasitism was to hard code the thing. And this is a tragedy because what it means is that where Islam needs to update, it doesn't have the mechanism for doing it. So... But also as a built-in way to keep people aboard. Yes. Like if you become an apostate, you're allowed to...you can kill them. Right. And kill apostates. There's no other religion that we have right now that operates like that. It has draconian punishments. Imagine if Scientology did that. Right. Well, I mean Scientology obviously has a huge number of completely unacceptable mechanisms to keep people from leaving. But how is that not a cult since it was created by a science fiction writer literally out of nowhere? I'm going to be horrified if I said it wasn't a cult. I think what I said is it's too early to tell. So how's that possible? So there could be some benefits in the future if Scientology continues to evolve and self-correct. It could get to the point where it's a behavior pattern that could be complementary and perhaps even beneficial to people. I do not believe that this is where it is headed. But if a thousand years from now it had flourished and the population that believed these things was successfully growing, you'd have to say, well, there's something in that set of beliefs that's working for these things. So anyway, I'm not arguing that it isn't a cult. It has lots of hallmarks that make me think I'm troubled by it. Well, including much like Mormonism, you know the guy who made it. But this, and unlike Mormonism, which was in 1820, we have video. We see L. Ron Hubbard's bad teeth and his fucking captain's outfit on with the medals that he gave himself. You're like, hey, what is this? Right. Oh, you get a planet when you die or something like that? It sounds like a cult to me. On the other hand, you know, I mean, we've got the Mormons get a planet when you die. Sorry. I'm confused. Scientists don't get a planet. No, no, the Mormons do. And it was in one of the Osman Brothers albums. They all went to these planets like in the album. I forget what the album is. It's a hilarious album. But if you open it up, it's all planets. And the album, the name of the album is this concept that you get a planet when you die. This seems stingy to me because the universe is so big, we can each afford to get a planet. There is. The plan. That's it. See, that is some Joseph Smith shit. By the way, it's a wonderful book. If you read the actual origins of Mormonism, people that are listening go, wait a minute, what do they believe? Wow. Do they believe some wacky stuff? That he had a golden or a seer stone rather that allowed him to read the golden tablets. The seer stone was a special magic rock that allowed him to read these golden tablets that contained the lost work of Jesus. Was that the inside of the album with all the planets? So I believe he was actually illiterate. And that he was a con man. He was murdered. Put a sheet over his head and dictated what he was supposedly reading to somebody else. That's my understanding of it. He was a charismatic person, like many people who've created cults. He was. I think what they did right, Mormons are some of the nicest people I've ever met. They have an amazing sense of community. They're super nice. And I've always said that if I was going to join a cult, I think I'd join the Mormons. But where they fucked up is they, regulations came in. They started restricting the market. They started, the regulators came in and stopped these people from having nine wives. And then they're not going to be so nice anymore. The reason why they were so nice is because they had these crazy relationships. They were having orgies every night. Well, nine people living in the house and they allowed to have sex with. There's a problem with your they because for everybody who had nine wives, there were eight dudes who had none. Those guys got to get their shit together and start their own cult. I guess. Where, you know, well, maybe they're gay. I don't know. What about the women, too, right? How about a woman who has 10 husbands? You know, this is bullshit for her. That doesn't happen. Yeah, it should. Right. No, it'd be possible. No, no. See, there's a very good biological reason. Oh, I understand biologically. It doesn't make any sense. You were ready to dig deep into biological. Oh, man. Don't go polyandrous on me.