good evening welcome to more politics i'm your host valerie to rico and this is our monthly series christianity in the public square during the last month we people all around us have been celebrating some of the most beloved holidays of their religious calendars hindus jews christians pagans and we've talked on the show about why it is that our religious traditions many of them provide an opportunity during this dark dreary time of year in the northern hemisphere for us to celebrate light and hope and the return of a new life our guest tonight dr richard curtis is a theologian and a philosopher and he says that this is not all religious traditions happen comment that we human beings are meaning makers that we are more social moral and emotional animals and that each of our traditions responds to each of these needs he also says that each of our traditions combines timeless wisdom with some things that are simply nonsense or wrong headed thank you for joining us tonight dr thank you very much my pleasure i need to start by asking you you're a theologian and yet you are not a believer in any specific tradition what does that mean that means that well but i spent time in school taking an interest in the big questions of of human life and those have historically been the t why are we here and how should we live how should we live together you know and we always we answer that question over and over again through history and since theologians are the ones that answer it i mean that to get to the atheist part i well as a life lifelong atheist never turned to god for answers so that never made sense to me but the questions always seemed like they were important questions so great place taking are the questions in fact as you describe them to the very heart of what is the meaning of life what is the meaning of the how how should we live how should we live in community with each other so so if you say you're an atheist and yet you have also said that you but well it means that the part we have in common the reason reason the same word is that the idea that humans are essentially religious now for me i study religion so people who study religion usually use the word in a little bit different sense than people on the street so to a scholar religion is that system of symbols and actions that define a particular culture or a way of being and have some history in the world and so every society that you find around the world has religion or religions well so a lot of people when someone raises the question of existing like human beings are religious here they were raised kind of the example of the scandinavian countries where people seem to live fairly more interconnected lives a good quality of life and yet there's a very low rate difference yasi how would you explain that right well see from the from my point of view if we look at it generically it's there's a low rate of church attendance and there may be a low rate of belief in a god and certainly organized religion would fall down into a low level also with church attendance but if people and the argument is that religion is is that part of culture that provides its foundation so as it in a generic sense we all have to have this religion thing and that was actually that the thing that was probably most surprising for me as an atheist who'd been interest in studying religion for me when i first started it was just well people who are religious and i was at first studying mystics interesting people you know i certainly didn't share anything in common with their belief system but the ways they talked about the world and the passion with which they they they wrote and spoke in the lives they lived it was all amazing stuff to  an atheist have in common with them well what i discovered is that we all have the same human brain and that the people who have still been the towering giants in the study of religion have identified common identify with his religious experiences directly to that this sort of feeling of afraid called it oceanic you know that was sort of a word that was common in the time when he and but this standard did this in touch with the universe that people have but it but there is there are ways in which i'm religions that existing religions have of structuring how people appreciate the world what turns out when we study the way brains work human brains work there's something very important about managing emotions that comes with consciousness before we had consciousness we were really we're just emotional creatures i mean think about the way most animals react to the world they react to and sort of peer emotion well if you're going to be conscious so you're going to have this big big brain in your thing complicated thoughts and you have language we can't just be swanning off or fighting with everything that you encounter you know it has to be more mediated so you have to have ways of encountering reality that give give you time to mental time to pause and think and say ok i'm going to do this and it's a situation i'll do something else but not just be overwhelmed by our emotion i'm so getting lost not in the sense of why do  need some kind of cognition that takes us out of the moment and lets us think longer term but how does that relate to religion be because religion is the part of culture that provides the current the content that brings along those skills so it's the idea that the brain as a sort of the sort of sophisticated biological computer needs tools and we might maybe think of those better as skills and sort of human life for human thinking so we need these skills to engage the world and the skills that come with content so the it comes with particular beliefs so every religion pet may have it books i argue does in fact have the have in common three particular things this is the first of the first and probably the most important but that a way to regulate emotions a sense of meaning as an existential and social cohesion and social so ethics so right a complex universe of emotions ok now and so since since we all have those needs we all need to do it but when we when historians of religion look around they see lots of ways that people have done that throughout history and they have in common that they're providing these three needs and in my work that's what i've done is actually combined the stuff that other people of the big names in the field that if you're saying no matter what the content of religious system is living and if you're a secular atheist you have the same needs so you can find them in some sort of community but it's done a little more haphazardly so the theologian in me says well you know the people who think of themselves as secular atheists they have these needs to their basic biological needs so they come with being human they need theologians to seche secular atheists and so there i guess content and and it you know there's a lot that happens that theologians do that it doesn't ever kind of trickle down to what happens in in the mosque or in the synagogue or in the church but it tends to have an influence and there's some things that trickle down pretty directly theologians do but they're all doing the same thing they're all providing this content so if it and in an organized way and that's the that's the point that what we call religions in the world existing religions have in common that they have this in an organized way well we all need it so we all need it in organized so my argument is that people like me need it so i in studying religion discovered that oh there are these the trysting things about how human brains work and how religion feeds these particular needs and then realized well maybe i need that too and i guess you know it's we're in a weird way i have discovered certain lack a certain longing in my you know that the people around me the the who are believers they have they have these you know the dispassion that's really driving them and what i discovered is well i had the same one but one of the same answer now it's interesting that there's been some research recently in fact that you know this back and forth argumentation badly some research at least that suggests that people who are religious believers doesn't matter which religion they belong to that you are devout are more generous they give more to charities they kind of do were altruistic behaviors they are and in fact there was a recent new york times article saying you know kind of was talking about new year's resolutions and with the best the defeat of new year's resolutions to get religious they join a church join for the god whatever because people who are more religious have more self control but what do you make of that i think it's because the wealth of the complicated version is they have their brain is forming this thing we call a self and that self needs a context in which to be formed and when you're in part of an organized religion you're doing it in or in an organized way and it it really is all about the biology of how our brain works and we need communities and we need meaning and we need stories that provide meaning so when people have that they tend to score better on these you know happiness scales that are so popular these days to people who don't have any form of supernatural supernaturalism supernatural belief system do they  protestant religion there's there's a movement that the was called the death of god theology that back in the fifty's that went for a while where products protestant theologians were saying well yes we can give up on the notion of god as a as an god but you still think god is useless a symbol what is the symbol what is it what does it represent it represents our highest aspirations so they're influenced a lot by the work of a german philosopher by the name of woodward for your bach who talked about the idea of god as a projection of human desires and wishes but one of the things that also is a projection of sort of our highest ideals about ourselves you know that god and this was his his argument was that because god is our idea of what it means human would be like well for it comes to be there's a long history to the two ideas about god and men and a lot of them have not been at all like that but but there is this this trajectory that protestant thinking in particular takes and and arguably there are variations of it did that happen in catholic theology as well but it but this movement was particularly strong in protestant  so it's and you know a lot of people you know that they don't they're not hard and fast numbers but a lot of the unitarians are are not believers either but they're participating in a religious community because the religious community has this value however abstract and then the question was specifically is there also room for not the isn't for complete lack of god concept and that's what which actually goes back in the history of the unitarian movement in their can in their combination with them in the universalist because they universalist church in america its whole point was to was that this god concept should be open to whatever people thought it should be and they are the two organization to merge some time and it was forget how long back or early  you know they're bigots it's that you get thrown at atheists almost as an accusation right that kind of people who do we have some kind of belief system saying atheism is just a form of they essentially what they're saying is it has no work evidence  feel when people said that yeah well as an atheist are you really annoyed when religious people would say that and then you know i study religion for another ten years or so and i realized that you know is it the hardware some hands or there's something there there's actually there is some truth to that that will we all need these systems of meaning well that's true we all do yes we all do now as you know as a matter of argumentation logically positive claims require positive evidence negative well it probably wouldn't look look very different from mainstream protestant churches because there's a reason why mainstream protestant churches looking the way they do they have this really have a functionality to that the you know it you have a sermon in which someone who's been giving some thought to an important issue shares those thoughts with you that's a very valuable thing that ministers do you have prayers well ok and atheists are not going to be into prayer per say but it certainly is a good thing to have a little quiet time say ok we'll stop for a minute and just sort of think about you know what what what our week has been or what the month will be or you know those things have value and and certainly singing has great value so protestant services have all those things and they have them for very good reasons what and there's a reason why modern jewish services look a lot like protestant services because the reform movement looked at lutheranism and said wow you know this this really makes a lot of sense functionally you should it will borrow what borrow a lot of this because it works so there you know you can use a lot of the same models so moving forward i guess as we look at the evolution of protestant christianity in an innovative kind of entrepreneurial culture like ours what you see is increasingly you've got kind of a media show right that sounded like you got a rock band you got this whole kind of entertainment think so i guess that's what  somebody without a god concept without some sense of righteousness or need right now that creates a kind of tribal identity that says i've got a mandate from the man in the sky he tells me to be here rule what religious communities in any generic sense would have in common would be shared values so you had you'd have to build a community around shared values now you're right that's a lot easier when you have a tradition you know exist you know christianity can talk about that two thousand years that it's been around in the values that it has so even if you're going to transform the meanings of what some of those important symbols are what is the symbol of god mean you it's good there's that there's  now if you're going to do it from scratch that's hard because we we have americans or especially you know very individualistic very diverse people with lots of different ideas about how things should be and getting people to come together around that and that is the i think the the most complicated question that i still have that i'm that i wrestle with is what would i see how would that work how could you do that how can you make a church that's going to be overtly atheistic in its in its foundation in its claims but is going to do the same things that a church has always done weddings funerals someone who goes to the hospital and if some something someone who is functioning so analogous to clergy i mean how do you how do you do that if you don't have the you don't have the tradition to point to to say well there's this truth ok well yeah we've interpreted for to interpret it for two thousand years and this is what we think now that you do for doing it from scratch you don't have that will what do you what do you do and i don't know i don't know it seems like it should be possible that you know that and i suppose that you know it it does exist i mean when people get together and form a commune and those have existed throughout modern history there you know those intentional communities are people who are saying we have these shared values to get our we're going to live together but they don't often sustain themselves over long periods of time really grow even like the hard part you know that secular jewish circles for example or  you know forgetting the name of that tradition that comes out of dutch humanism there are these kind of traditions of secular kind of spiritual world communities and yet they don't seem to they don't have the and what's what's the magic i know they think the magic is jesus i look at it as a psychologist and i see all kinds of other you know betterment of other that i think for fundamentalists in a way answers come easy and when you ask people to think for themselves to say well we're going to have shared values because we humans and there are things that are important about that but you have to think for yourself we're not going to tell you what to believe so hard or sales pitch i'm going to part of the problem with people who try to form secular moral commute world spiritual communit is that there are too weary of the i'm over what you call the emotional peace the wonder and transcendence joy that so often people who who value rationality are almost afraid to go there so that you have people who are in this other place where they love that stuff where they're kind of really to embrace some kind of rational for lack of a better term we they they they kind of get rational he said it gives you as you said emotion and i think that emotional piece connects more deeply to our feelings about meaning so that's why it's the one that's going to have the greatest hook and also why it's the greatest difficulty to overcome if you're going to do this in an intentional sort of scientifically informed way because people have very different emotional responses and if you don't have this claim about ultimate reality to say well this is how you should do it because it's right because ultimate power has determined this but you say it no you know we're struggling to discover what it is that we can find out about how our brains work and how we encounter the world and what it what to do with all that and we're going to have to have these rituals that have worked for other people in the past and will toy with them in different ways it is but it's all if it's good clearly doesn't have that sense of polished product t it's it's you know you can take it off the shelf and run with it well but when you're part of that older tradition even someone who's in it you know doing something really you know innovative musically and in a sort of bringing a new styles and stuff like that to update  feeling in the church state is still resting on all of that tradition and all of the deep metaphysical claims the that they can make that are part of that emotional piece on the internet people are talking think think we do that in the modern world a lot and unintentionally now that it's and it's part of human history in a way i mean in time people are sharing ideas they're doing some of that so doing that in an in an organized way seems to me to make sense and and to be moving in a direction that can well suggest i guess is maybe the the best idea of where possibilities are going to be for taking that kind of sharing of ideas and values in a in an open accepting form and then to saying ok well we found stuff we can agree about the conflict can be important and then we can take that and sort of live it with you know which is what the church is doing it's sort of it's taking its values and it's trying to live them finding stuff we can agree about taking it in with you again i love that thank you very much for joining us