good evening and welcome in world politics i'm your host bill wolff ward like many a christian you struggle to sit through a sermon and you probably erect walls around your faith to keep out doubt but the questions grow annoy you why is are so much violence and inconsistency in the bible who after all this side of the stories in the bible and why is there such rift with science before turning to prayer turn your inquiry mind to my guest tonight dr valerie  outstanding book trusting doubt dr trigo in her book remark you can accept ancient and conflicting stories of god or you can grow spiritually through doubt that leads to tru fundamentalist christian graduated from winning college billy graham john a modern journey a doctorate in clinical psychology and she maintains a focus on the psychology of moral development it is my honor to welcome distinguished grow we're always going to be a bit out of our comfort zone do you mean that even christians who have deep faith are going to be uncertain well you know if you look at christian history or even the bible itself it's a picture it gives us a story of a faith that was constantly growing it's a story of a kind of process of inquiry as each writer attempted to take the traditions he had received and kind of sift through them and come up with his best understanding of what was real and what was good and and and the same thing is true today if we want to have any chance of getting at something that is reality or divinity it's about growth it's about well i know that there's where we had a process of growth you were reared i understand in a rather observant christian family you told me just a little bit about your upbringing i was born into a family that was evangelical i was born again i prayed the prayer of salvation several times when i was a child because i wanted from a young age race absolutely so from the time i was five six i was kind of i was on my knees was one of the poor growing to mention in your book something that you did i had bible study books and i was out there notebooks i was out there on the playground actually during my lunch hours through growing sitting and studying and trying because i took my faith when i was in high school and there was actually these huge phone banks billboards went up in different cities that said i found it and it was supposed to be this big mystery and then people phone started phone banking and doing cold calling and asking if we could read to people the four spiritual  laws from the founder of campus crusade for christ i think in which it said basically you know god loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life jesus died for your sins and then basically lead people through this prayer that will save them from being tortured for through through high school you're a certain sign of weak faith that god disapproved of doubt and so i spent my time in high school fending off those doubts praying for god to take them away do you feel like your novel the only one with don't know as well you know isn't that interesting i probably was so self absorbed as teenagers are that i wasn't really thinking about whether other people had doubts but i was convinced that there was something seriously wrong with me you know when you went went to a college and you  your book what exactly does that liberation theology is that if you look at the prophetic voice of scripture the prophets of the old testament the voice of jesus as he says scribed in the new testament that it is very much not it's not just about individual salvation it is about kind of the the collective redemption of society that god is on the side of the poor the oppressed and that what he calls christians to do is to create a society that is based on justice and compassion were distorted distorted view on the well i think you know there were all kinds of things and ironically my upbringing was so closed that someone like a lutheran or a presbyterian or a catholic god forbid they weren't christians in my mind and so when i got to we college and there were these other people young childhood i was very devoted and earnest when i was in high school i was of my own free choice going to church on sunday nights going to bible study on wednesday nights i very much wanted to understand god's will and to do it but it took and countering things what the scientific i remember sitting in a biology class thinking to me a fertilized egg wasn't a person a person can feel things can think things can have preferences desires a person is someone that another person can care about  even then wasn't a person and of no of course i know looking back that throughout christian history there have been many many perspectives on when kind of a fertilized egg becomes a person with the time of quick you were still going on in the bible that made you feel like you were warned years old you know i didn't read the bible with intellectually or morally critical eye i would say until later it was more kind of simple things that troubled me like the idea that there were these people who were going to be going to hell and i was going to be as a christian in heaven completely perfectly blissfully happy completely indifferent to the fact that other people were suffering i could never understand that i can't i can't close out the fact now that other people are suffering even though i am so in perfectly conscious of people other than myself how could that possibly be the case in heaven how did you come up with the title trusting for this book by the way i want to say that i read it from cover to cover and it was really worthwhile return to trading our highly recommended you know one of the irony arnie's as a psychologist of course i was trained in the scientific method and and in science doubt is considered this kind of sacred guardian of truth the way that we actually accumulate knowledge the way that we correct our understanding some kind of our understanding of the world around us keeps growing is that we ask the questions that could show us wrong and yet here the thing that is considered so precious in science even in business if you look at kind of business leadership conferences and training and things like that it's all about how do you get away from groupthink so there's this  under standing that we have that doubt is precious that asking questions that doubting can help you to kind of actually get away from error and get on to something that is a better understanding of the world and yet in in faith their contents continues to be decided that doubt is a know the some of the assertions that are made in the bible at the time the bible was written you know it was during the bronze age people hadn't invented wheelbarrow sanding still so people can fight a battle the idea of a rod being used to make sure that some goats have spots and other goats don't those kinds of things were completely consistent with what people knew and understood about the world around them and today they are not and so it takes much bigger psychological walls you have to work harder to kind of shut out what we know about the world around us to kind of divorce your spirituality from reason and an imperious ism in order to hold on to the kind is such with the law and it's the goods will is shocking to a lot of people with that is the military order that is god's plan you know what i would say is that according to christianity there are two kinds of revelation one is that god reveals himself through his creation that the whole idea is that the miracle of creation reveals to us the hand of the creator and then there's this other idea that there are special revelation through the person of jesus and specifically through the bible and what i would say is you know if you look at the bible as a text written down by human beings there's only one of those two kinds of revelation that we know for sure comes directly from the hand of the creator without any human tweaking or corruption or misinterpretation and that is in the way your works that's right now you mentioned jesus and we talked about god or the almighty lots of different different terms your way who is god at least go of the bible well those are two very different questions i think the question who is god what is we are the is what we are god that's our goal northwest before which i think all of us should be humble and say who is the god of the bible well the god of the bible is actually quite a character i mean he would you be tempted to say the gods of the bible that's a great question i mean you know the whole notion of the trinity is kind of a way of having polytheism without  through through the router scriptural writings god does evolve he changes through the bible there's also the interesting fact that there are two creation stories at the beginning of genesis you know the one that's in genesis one and the ones in genesis two are different and one of them there is still this residual of the canaanite polytheism that preceded the bible so that you have you know male and female created he them in our image it says in the original text kind of you know the implication of the gods the gods graded man and woman in their own image and then over time what you see is that there is this evolution of understanding of god within the biblical texts themselves because they span quite a long period of time when we hundreds of years we are terms we're perfect god in the mission say they believe in a kind abstract god of theology if you actually ask them questions about their relationship with god what you find is that in their day to day narrative in their minds they really have much more humanoid kind of god concept that they relate to want to day to day basis so the idea that god loves them that i can have a personal relationship with jesus that god there's a sense that you have to kind of pray and get god's attention to get him to do you favors all of that is kind of much more keeping with kind of just how we humans tend to relate to the world which is to kind of project ourselves as human beings onto the world around us this must be a real challenge for the preachers to try to keep it all straight from the people who do sit in answer record of our ancestors struggling to understand who am i what is good how can i live in relation to that chapter the world around me what is what is sacred saying the bible is not the error in the word of god if we look at the historical construction of the document that the fingerprints of humans are all over it there are there are bits and pieces of earlier acadian and samarian texts embedded in the old testament there are hymns to the god bail that simply have the word jehovah  in which he talks about that how was the bible can structed we know it has human hand prints all over it and so i think that these people who say the bible is the perfect word of god that it's an errant that's a form of idolatry that's taking this thing that was made by humans that was designed to kind of give us some glimpses of a of a great something greater something that we can barely grasp that we see through a glass darkly they take the bible and they make an idol out of it and i would have to hear that your book would probably who's tried to be a christian who is a christian this phrase probably erected walls probably go some places in the bible but doesn't go other places in the bible i think there are some christians who kind of hold their faith with great humility they say genuinely i humble myself before the unknown i think these are my best guesses about what is real and there are other people who spend their lives kind of fending off fiercely any sort of questions or people that kind of cast doubt upon the kind of the traditional understanding of god in the bible but we can do so much better than that now how do you how do you explain when you do explain it in your book tell us about miracles what's what are the well miracles are this kind of funny idea really it's not any different than the notion of magic except that in other people's religions we call it magic and in our own we call it miracles but basically it's the idea that we can somehow get god to contravene the laws of nature he breaks the rules of physics he breaks a lot of biology he kind of breaks a law that i can only hope to god all knowing all powerful who made the planet who made the rules right and that's that there's this kind of magical intervention to watch we love the idea of magic of there being some way to get around these hard and fast rules that seem to govern our lives and that make things difficult for us we want an sure do i think people pray selfishly i think most of us are not so for us are very kind of centered in our own selves in our own needs how else could someone sit and say thank you god for this wonderful meal which we're about to receive when they are sitting at an american meal when they've eaten for hours before they know that there are people starving on the other side of the world if we weren't kind of caught as human beings in our own egocentrism and it's very hard for us to step outside of that even slightly it would seem like an atrocity to us if we actually cared about the hunger of another person as much as we care about our own hunger we would be troubled by that yes now you you brought up some really good points in your book and i do recommend it to read it even in celebration and i think you talked about the fall you talked you you made a very good analogy you know the sense of having the garden of eden adam and eve of course is probably just a parable most people probably believe it is people that believe every word in the bible is inerrant you want to explain that analogy made between well it's an analogy it's might not mind i read it but the idea is that you know it's like you have a child who has no experience whatsoever defending herself or being tempted and you leave her with a known child molester an older relative who kind of is is got a history of creating only to jesus that's right and then and then you leave your this innocent child in the care of this older adult you come back and you find her naked in the arms of the molester and what do you do you decide that her so even in a metaphorical level the story isn't is this is profoundly troubling if that happened if we had a parent who can who left their child with a known molester and for long enough for them to kind of end up being molested we would say the trouble wasn't with the child it's with the parent you talk about the trinity of course everybody has to talk about the trinity whenever they're discussing inconsistences the bible i don't think anybody really understands it can you make sense out of the pores the father the son the holy spirit and in the fact that jesus had to atone for man's sin well those are two separate questions so one is that i think that  biblical christianity does this balancing act in a woods that these traditional doctrines that were kind of assembled by the church to kind of try and make sense to create this coherent narrative out of what is some contradictory stories in the bible  the way that that happens is by getting people to suspend judgment and so what you say is it's three in one yes there's one god over there's three gods it's a paradox and the word paradox means stop asking questions don't try to make sense of it suspend judgment don't lean on to your own understanding in other words don't use the intelligence that god has given you because the only because that would be a threat to these traditional understandings of god and goodness ironic that so many of us think i does have what do we think most of us kind of follow the religion of our parents i was you know i without a doubt i accepted the religion that my parents had lived i have brothers and sisters who are still very devoted to this evangelical form of christianity and i think is if what kind of irony that we just happen aren't we lucky that we just happen to get born into the one true form of faith you know the not only the one true religion christianity but the most true form of christianity would be doomed to hell if we were born in toyland but the irony of course they will is that from the outside there is something so narcissistic about that it's so arrogant to say  wow i guess i just got really lucky as opposed to there maybe there's a scan of human psychological phenomenon that whatever religion we happen to get born into seems the most likely to us and for some reason we tend to take it on and not ask questions but if there is a god whether there's a god or not truth seeking requires that we can move beyond that that is a childhood understanding and you'll be mor drug well you know there there's a sociologist named phil sucker mint wrote a book recently i think called society without gods in which what what the what the least religious can societies can teach is about contentment i'm not getting that title exactly right but the fact is he did this analysis in which he looked at countries that have very low rates of dogmatic religious beliefs which i am going to distinguish carefully from spirituality because i don't think they're synonymous but that those dogmatic belief don't correlate well with people being kind to each other with people being compassionate with people being honest and contributing members of society come close to being called that all of a sudden we're on our knees praying like you're really go all the believers well you know that saying goes way back and many people believe it but the reality is we have soldiers in iraq and in other places who are definitely atheists  who are their kind of fighting for what they believe to be the right cause fighting for principles that they value trusting that our government has put them into the right place at the right time and in fact what we mike weinstein at the military religious freedom foundation has taken on the cause of defending those atheist soldiers and other soldiers who are minority religions jewish soldiers wiccan soldiers all kinds of soldiers who are there as americans who may or may not believe in god so the old there's no atheists and false in foxhole sorry just simply isn't true freedom from religion foundation in fact erected a monument to atheists in foxholes in virginia and i think georgia i want to interrupt now and just let let our viewers know that there are a number of copies that will be available if you e mail us and you can e mail and ask a follow on question to dr to rigaud what her book is very worthwhile reading you know not getting any money  u read it and i do heartily recommend it it's in a class with board erdman so there is the e mail where you can make your requests for free calls you trust and it will make you think about christianity and getting back to some thoughts on christianity how can millions and millions and millions of people be wrong for so many people who believe in christianity i mean are they wrong there's millions and millions of people who believe in islam there's millions and millions of people who believe in buddhism there's millions and millions of people who are hindus so so regardless of whether christianity is the kind of best most true religion or not what we know for sure about human beings is that millions and millions of people over long periods of time can be wrong if you were you just pointed in your book and i think you do an excellent job you mention dawkins and his concept of the man that can explain how christianity can successfully spread even though it may not be the right doxology may be actually very wrong and i think a lot of people know that well if you're being completely right because there's too many inconsistences and conflicts and  that comes from three thousand years ago just as one day like slavery and polygamy how do you how do you account for the spread of christianity well so first of all i would say that you know you mentioned slavery i far easier to depict the fende flavor from the bible than to criticize it and one hundred fifty years ago there were more sermons stalking about why god wanted us to have slaves than there were to the contrary and so one of the answers to your question is that people within any given cultural context they pick and choose what parts of the bible make the most sense to them which parts fit their culture