ASM105 LIVE in Chapel Hill, NC

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coming to you live from holy trinity church in chapel hill north carolina it's ask science mike [Applause] got live even though he may not understand he'll talk anyway he got problems he won't stop there but he'll talk and talk and talk until he flew in the face science faith [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith in life and as you know in live episodes like this one the questions are on screen and the answers unrehearsed so who knows where we'll end up this evening we've got more events coming up on the finding god in the ways book tour in march so i'd love to see you march 20th at iris in athens georgia march 24th of the blue conference in fairfax virginia for march 29th at the christ and creation conference of biologos in houston texas four events available at sciencemike.com but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started hi so i'm also a fellow nerd grew up watching star trek all that stuff um but i'm a music teacher in the area and i'm curious what your opinions are on in this lovely educational environment in north carolina on how to keep the arts active in school and how to make sure that the you know we kind of teach the scientific method as well in the arts teaching kids how to test theories and so how do we integrate those two i guess and also my husband wants to know who's your favorite overwatch character overwatch oh yeah um my favorite overwatch character that's a video game from blizzard that's a shooter team shooter to play or like backstory wise either probably to play lucio i'm a healer who would have thought i'm a helper and backstory wise is probably um what's the robot turret's name bastion yeah bastion i really like i dig bastion's vibe that was real inside baseball to start the show okay the question on uh on arts education first of all man studies are really consistent that stem is better when it's steam right so we all understand that engineering and math disciplines are really really really good at creating a lot of neurological activity in the left prefrontal cortex and a left bias focus in the brain now you may have heard this popularized in the culture as the left brain is analytical and the right brain is creative that's hogwash according to neuroscientists i've talked to the the neuroscience perspective is that the left brain likes to take things apart and is reductive and the right brain is holistic and likes to view things as systems okay so certainly in technology and engineering and mathematics there's a combination of reductive and holistic thinking and then the arts the same thing is true but in terms of a bias we find that overall stem without steam shifts to the left and bringing in arts helps balance out our lived neurological experience in a way that improves test scores in non-artistic subjects so that's an amazing case for why we should include arts the problem is you ask how do we preserve that and that gets into like political policy and if i've learned anything in the last few months it's that i don't know a lot about getting things to happen from a policy perspective i've always kind of been a sidelines politics guy and i went all in on keeping our current president out of office and i failed miserably so uh i broke like my own protocols on behavior trying to outright guilt podcast listeners into not voting for donald trump and just i mean didn't work and i got hate mail so it was it was a lose-lose so i think in general we've been making some fundamentally poor assumptions about how education should work in america um and i think that's true on both sides of the american political divide because in america we are obsessed with accountability and uh test scores and performance and that works great in like corporate america like the ge model for rating highly aggressive alpha people who went to the top of their class and now i want to make millions of dollars every year it's a decent model not as good for seven year olds it turns out to you're part of the bottom 10 percent you don't get to continue school like that that seems to be where we're headed and i was reading uh a study about schools in finland and how great they are and their the goal of finnish education is not competition but equality and they have fundamentally different assumptions so um teachers compensation isn't tied at all to performance or competition they're actually paid really well what a strange idea like pay well the people who create the next generation of thinkers for your economy weird idea terrible terrible don't do it and then they have a focus on um empowering teachers to make decisions about uh what's right for their students and so they're like really autonomous how do you handle a bad teacher principals make the decisions on hiring and firing for teachers pretty much unchallenged in finland um and and that model there is no standardized testing at all and the school week is 20 hours a week so they think it's really important if children play a lot now why is that important because our study of child development is pretty clear like the best way children learn is play so here's my problem like the research isn't ambiguous a well-rounded curriculum that includes play and the arts is great for human development including in western societies right so finland is scoring um on math and science and language similarly to the like high brutal far east like chinese school system or singapore where the it's just you know all you got to study 19 hours a day and you'll be fine finland's doing just as well with 20 hours a week and no homework that's like a slam dunk the problem is in america we don't make decisions based on data like we just don't everything here is social identity and ideology and i am learning more and more that's true of everyone right like the the big sin in america today is turn against the ideology of your tribe and as long as we do that we're doomed well that was a how do i dig my way out of this answer i like to end somewhere hopeful let's see what works local activation if arts matter to you um you think like you changed the world you sent 20 because you felt the burn right like i'm getting active politically i contributed to bernie's campaign all right making a difference you want to swing elections contribute to the superintendent of schools your 20 will make a much bigger difference post-election when you pick up the phone right so for those of us who think engineering matters arts matters these are essential parts of curriculum we need to get involved as parents and voters in our local school systems and push change there if there's anything we're missing in america today is an obsession with winning the presidency and then the congress and if you want to change the country when you're city then your county then your state you flip the model right what's california thinking right now about trump the whole states just resist right they're all in why because they've been active at the local level by the way now i know the science mike crowd isn't 50 50 but it's probably 70 30. so we got people from both sides of the divide here uh the right has been way out executing local and state for 15 years right to huge success huge success so everything you want to change starts local and that includes arts education [Music] i like your comment about rankings because i was in the half in college that made the top half possible so my question is dealing more with faith you mentioned this environment that we're in in this country what suggestions do you have for helping us find ways to get through this through our faith because i think our country is in trouble and one of the things that really can help is our faith yeah right now uh i'm kind of struggling with that great great question yeah um i keep seeing the word civil war thrown around that has nothing to do with the avengers really confusing me um what amazes me about 2017 is it makes 2 000 i was in tallahassee florida in the year 2000 with hanging chads and the supreme court and it seemed kumbaya compared to now you know what i mean like we're all just friends let's go to the florida supreme court but it's it's bad now it's bad um so what do we what do we do now and what does the church do now especially because the church doesn't agree with what the church should do now i like to do stuff like this go on twitter actually get go on your web browser open two windows in one window i'm just gonna i'm name dropping i'm just doing it open franklin graham right and the next window richard rohr just read the tweets and realize that both of these guys represent a historic movement called christianity what um that's that's quite a spectrum so what's the temptation been always in the church well that's not a christian right we love to say they're not a christian but what do we hate when somebody goes turns the air around right you're not a christian i never go that person's not a christian i go they're a terrible christian it's completely different i'm just kidding i'm just kidding like the one thing i always remember about the church is every christian in the world in all of history is some other christian's heretic except jesus because he wasn't a christian and so that was a piece of cake for him nobody called him a heretic there was no church so how do we as the people of of of god do this how how do we love our neighbor here's what i realized the other day you've heard me talk if you've listened to this podcast about the good samaritan as a response to the grace two commandments a million times and i always say how if you wanted to have that story of resonance in america today you might call it the good muslim or the good undocumented immigrant right some group that's despised but we really have two americas right now and if you really want to make that land in this room you call that parable the good trump supporter or the good clinton voter right who is your neighbor your neighbor is the one who when they see you by the side of the road bleeding out they stop and they help and they say they carry you to an end and they say i'll be back a week later to take care of the bill that's who jesus calls the neighbor and to invoke samaritan to a jewish audience is to invoke alt-right to the left today that's radical stuff so we start by saying no matter what i think about you and your politics i'm still for you right so i talk a lot about racial justice in america and just how statistically provably awful we are at it but i also talk about the economic plight of poor rural whites because they're in their own way on the side of the road now it's not like a suffering olympics it's not what i'm doing and the plight of a of a rural white person doesn't justify them saying they're suffering to the expense of someone else who's marginalized and potentially more marginalized don't misunderstand misquote me here what i'm saying is the church response is to address all the suffering we see everywhere and the moment you walk by and say unclean the parable is talking to you does that mean we don't have vigorous disagreement of course not go look at my twitter i'm not silent on issues that i think are important at all but if i find out someone i know who's a trump supporter is in the hospital i'm getting in my car and i'm driving to the hospital you know what i mean so and i've thought about this if if the people of jesus can't agree to serve each other amidst disagreement is there any hope left and my gosh people of jesus what a condemnation on us it will be if it's the secularists who model this if that happens there is no resurrection right like the proof of the empty tomb is our ability to be broken and poured out for others we should be leading and not following the charge on serving each other and loving through disagreement but i also don't mean that in terms of forced forgiveness or entering into relationships that are a source of continual abuse or trauma right you can love someone well and set boundaries on the relationship so if you are gay and your family says your existence is an abomination i'm not saying go sit at their house every sunday and take it you see what i mean that is not what i'm saying i'm saying acts of service towards the healing of the world start to bridge this divide one hour standing together while someone dies will undo a lot of tweets right i mean that's that's why i'm a christian that's that's it that's the whole kitten caboodle it's i'm a good samaritan matthew 25 that this is what i signed up for that's what i'm here for and i've been having this paul renaissance i can't believe it like i came back to faith and i was like i'm totally on board with christianity but nothing paul said right like i don't know how he got in the bible uh i think that's probably we should probably just edit him back out um but i've been on like a real paul kick because paul is a guy that grew up with one tradition of faith and saw a bright light left his childhood faith and became a just a zealot about a new way of thinking and i thought like that sounds familiar i don't know where i've heard that story but it really resonates with me and then paul's like working out what that means publicly which i can't identify with at all and and so this this idea in paul filtering matthew 25 into renewing your mind daily like this is work to follow jesus it really it doesn't come naturally what comes naturally is to say unclean that's the instinct but the gospel is attending to the wounds of the broken even if they're samaritans or trump supporters [Music] um when you said you saw the bright light um in the beginning of your speech um have you ever had anything like that happen when you were like younger was it did you ever like hear anything before maybe not such uh as extreme and uh also i'm gonna kind of do two questions but it's like i'll make an exception this watch okay um and what kind of place were you in your life were you in a good spot were you just like having a hard time right when you saw it okay when i was seven mom came in said prayers like she did every night and then went down the hall to say prayers my sisters and i felt god reaching out to me to let me know that i needed jesus and i felt like i was going to levitate off the mattress the presence of god was so real and so powerful i could hear god speak to me and so i went to my mom and i was like mom i need to meet jesus now and she said i'll finish prayers with your sister and be right there so my mom's amazing um so then she comes in and say the sinner's prayer and uh and then i went to school the next day and told all the other second graders that i love them all the boys and all the girls i made a point of talking to every other member of my class at recess and i got sent straight to the principal's office because the kids were really uncomfortable and i learned okay so you don't always say it you just live it but like that's been the theme of my life from the moment i accepted christ like i felt god with me all the time so i would talk to god every as a seven-year-old every day eight-year-old nine-year-old 10 year old god is my ever-present companion god is what i love most more than my parents when i got married more than my wife my kids more than my kids and i would have experiences like that pretty often i remember i was in my 20s and a missionary came to our church to talk about the work he was doing in guatemala and he got about two minutes in and i could barely stay in the chair it literally felt like a cable was attached to my chest pulling me toward the stage the whole service doesn't that sound crazy it sounds crazy to me at the time i was like that's the spirit of god hallelujah i'm a baptist so um which uh honestly not really that's almost more pentecostal honestly my sbc ilk are stri strangely uncomfortable with displays of the supernatural yeah so oh uh internet i made a funny face okay so they can't see what's happening so i had those experiences all the time never to the intensity of the beach i never heard an audible voice god would speak to me in my mind so that was the first time for that there's a a gene called the god gene that is uh way over hyped with that name there's not like a gene that makes you believe in god but there is a gene that controls the amount of a neurotransmitter you produce and if you have a high expression of that gene you produce a lot of it and then one neuroscientist i read said that's basically like walking around on a low dose of shrooms all the time so you just see god everywhere right like and if you they've done a another study where they took random blood supples from people who were and were not clergy and they found this gene as over represented among clergy of course they see god everywhere so i suspect by the way if you're in a research institution that can do this test and want some free publicity email me because i'd love to know if i have that gene or not it's not just the genetic predisposition it's also the practice so the thing that probably encouraged me and encourages me to continue to have whoa god moments is the amount of time i spend in prayer and meditation i spend at least 30 minutes a day every day in prayer meditation sometimes four or five hours i meditated for two hours this afternoon research is pretty consistent that that increases your propensity to have sensory overrides or mystical experiences now what if you have a really low expression with god jane you don't know that but you you're a person for whom these kind of experiences don't come easily the practice of faith and corporate worship and prayer meditation will increase anyone's propensity i ran a marathon look at me like i am not a natural runner but i ran a marathon how i would get out of bed at three o'clock in the morning on saturday and run for seven or eight hours over and over and over which gave me the endurance to finish a marathon incredibly slowly but like the amazing thing was you run that long you get a 5 000 6 000 calorie deficit for the day you go to the waffle house order everything eat it and you still have a 3 000 calorie deficit it's amazing so just do that with prayer [Music] um yeah so i uh i work at a pretty large church in the south i'm not going to say the name because i don't want to get fired do we need to modulate your voice no i think we'll be good but i recently just filled out my one-year staff evaluation where there was a good questions and comments uh section on there where i brought up a bunch of issues about um the uh how our leadership at the church is mostly just white men of a similar background and a lot of the church is quiet and just deafening silence towards uh racial injustice refugee crisis um service to the community those kinds of things to the point where i get to have a conversation with a leadership team this coming week so i'm just wondering uh what you would think is the best way to approach that conversation to where i know i would be heard by them and and sort of what is going on in the brain of of the people i'm going to have this conversation with and how i can come in a very disarming way and not put up walls between both of us so yeah yes great there's at least if you're in a major church in the south that is conservative there's a statistically significant chance that your pastors emailed me and said don't tell anybody so never worry about like um if you're from a major church come on the show these questions are becoming common so people that really disagree with me are still like wait but i have a question i can't ask because i'm afraid people will get mad at me just for asking the question this amazing thing happened the civil rights movement in the 1960s fought segregation with the mission of achieving radical equality and the main outcome it seems is that white people are now afraid to be called racists that's like the i've been thinking about this a lot it seems like the biggest takeaway now is like kkk grand wizards or whatever they're called don't want to be called racists because there's such a stigma associated with the term it shuts a conversation down by the way that's a sister idea called white fragility so if you're i self-identify as white as your race if someone critiques behaviors common to white people or systems white people control you take it from a systemic critique to a personal one and either get angry or guilty or sad or some combination of the three and shut down the conversation right like if if if someone's trying to have a substantive discussion with you and you start to weep uncontrollably hey that might be a good thing but if you do that every time it's kind of hard to talk about the issue you know what i mean just imagine like your own home if every time someone else asks you to take out the trash you just went to pieces you know what i mean like the trash has got to get taken out and we have to shop shooting black people in america right like both of these things have to happen so i'm glad you asked that question because i think the burden for talking about racism to white people who don't want to admit racism exists primarily falls on white people who understand that racism exists because what happens if a person of color tries to have the conversation they are angry or they are belligerent or they are divisive internet you can't see the air quotes i start by asking questions like what do we believe about race as a church do we believe that all people are equal before god before the law what do you think is the reason our church is majority white and the answer is so often well we're totally open if they want to come here you know what i mean that is the that is the refrain 80 of the time we would love to have more black people or more african-americans or whatever pick the group we'd love to have more people here and when that happens there's an implicit assumption of white culture in the institution which means we would love for dark-skinned people to come here and act white culturally white that we'd be super comfortable it would make great pictures on the church website we would go home feeling good about ourselves because we would know that what we aren't racists so why do you think it is we're so open but it's still like our whole congregation and our whole leadership is a you know white husky drinking milk and a blizzard white you know like what is what is making up this dynamic in our building and as that kind of opens up you continue to ask them for solutions and eventually they say well what do you think you'd be like what if we hired a person of color on staff and like maybe not just like to make the copies which would be fine but like someone who at some point appears on stage during the worship service and i don't know maybe not exclusively playing music right like what if we just tried that what would that do well i'll tell you exactly what it does what goes on the platform sends a message to a congregation full stop full stop what if you recruited families of color to come be elders in your church and really listen to them now this can get to a point that's super uncomfortable where they go well where would we find people like that which is when you discover that white social networks tend to be pretty white and i don't just mean facebook i mean like in parts of the country it can be a real challenge it'd be mean but you could like spring on someone name six people of color you know well and like no authors no movie stars no musicians right it's very difficult so if that's the case maybe it's time since everybody says we care about unity and no division in this country what if we partnered with a local black church in a ministry and work together and what if instead of colonizing their communities we supported them in the work they're already doing and what do you know we start to create connections we start to create understandings and the great thing is especially for a conservative church black churches preach the gospel they're going to love it they're going to get excited about it if they go visit one worship service they're going to walk out saying we got to change everything right so it's cravings opportunities for connection and awareness so could we get someone on staff could we look at what we do with our elders and can we partner with other churches in town and that lived experience destroys all the preconceptions and all the rhetoric and all the objections it's amazing when you get people together how we see we really are one body but the trick is going to be to avoid the colonizing attitude of partnering with their church and then trying to make that church be like us but instead to take them on their terms churches of color know more about reaching people of color than white churches full stop full stop they're the experts if we're just going to hire the best people for the job that's going to be people of color hey i thought it was really insightful how you made the point about how we develop our decisions based on ideology rather than data and that's something that i had an evangelical upbringing and one of my biggest things was getting over the fear of certain questions and certain data now a lot of the questions i was originally afraid of have gone away say evolution or the age of the earth those types of things that i used to actively avoid i'm a physics grad student now so i'm pretty comfortable with that type of science on the other hand i've found that my fear has just gone to other types of questions you know look at data related to gender differences in brains i don't want to look at that data at all because it's something that i'm invested in and i have some fear attached to it so and i'm probably a lot of people have fear related to one area or another and they have trouble detaching themselves from you know looking at something objectively and so i was wondering if you have any advice on areas where you might have fear how you get over that thank you boy that's a really good question so we have a problem as a species we have a crippling addiction that we're basically born with and it is to certainty we like to know that we know how the world works we have significant neurological real estate devoted to making predictions about the future and creating a model of reality and we have a significant emotional investment in knowing our model is right and that's an evolutionary pressure because if you were making predictions about how much it will rain and you live in a flood zone there's not like a big deal about a false positive if you move the tent and it doesn't rain that much no big deal but false negatives tend to take you out of the gene pool permanently right so we tend to be trigger happy and jump to our decisions especially if they're related to fear and we don't like it when we figure out we were wrong about something we thought we knew about this is why we get upset when people are close to change their behavior in some way throw us a curveball it's not as much as what they did as much as the fact is we couldn't predict it which means what we're vulnerable it's terrifying so wherever you're at you have some prevailing dogma in your life human brains are not instruments designed to seek truth human brains are instruments designed to seek survival and a huge component of survival for a social mammal is social hierarchy so when you call yourself a christian you now have an unconscious bias that filters out information that works against the label christian when you call yourself a liberal a conservative an atheist you know an american girl doll collector whatever it is that you label yourself as you start to take on assumptions common to that group and you're very resistant to confirmation bias to being pushed out of that frame of thinking so the first thing that's amazing for you is you're aware there are questions that you're afraid of which puts you way up at the top of the class today because most people aren't aware of like their unaskable questions i have found my solution to not being afraid of questions is realizing i am wrong all the time it's just the normal mode of operation for me i was a like 99.999 confident southern baptist that i completely understood god and how the world worked nope wrong so that was like i learned so i was only a 99.999 convinced atheist oops right so what i've been fundamentally wrong about my worldview twice in a row so i've learned like maybe don't hold my world view so closely maybe don't so jealously guard my knowledge and make an adventure out of figuring out things i'm wrong about it's one thing i love about this audience the correction emails are frequent and well cited um so i was like i think you were wrong it was like well you cited these studies and there are mythological flaws in two and these six studies tried to you know i mean it's like really intense and i love it i just got smarter for free i didn't have to go look it up and just showed my email box with clickable links by the way i am teaching you how to write me a critique email you're now learning what a signs might click on oh cited with clickable links he reads it okay the other thing i do is a hack i am certain in my uncertainty i am certain i don't know how the world works and probably never will and so i just dive into new questions that challenge my assumptions like a puppy that has to pee really bad like this is gonna be messy but there'll be relief at the end right so i just came up with that and i'll be honest i think it's gold so i have the same thing like for a while i didn't want to look at studies that involved gender or race-based differences because afraid of what i might find which is being a little bit racist and chauvinist like i can't even trust the data and no study in the world is a final answer on anything all they do is raise more questions even if you find differences between the genders from where does that difference emerge almost always significant social economic factors involved the other thing i like to think of in those kind of uh bodies of data is they're wonderfully informative looking at things in the aggregate but almost useless at projecting to the individual that's what we have to remember about data and science even if we agree there are some if you create two categories called gender and you can cleanly get most of the population into those two categories and you test something like intelligence you'll get two bell curves that have enormous overlap which means for any one individual making an assumption about some trait based on a statistical model isn't good science it's just stereotyping so i just lean into it and the great thing about science why it's my jam more than theology no offense theologians love you science doesn't actually claim to be ultimately authoritative science operates under the assumption that more data can tear this whole hypothesis apart even deeply held like how excited i know there's physicists in this room and i know if they figured out the flaw and the standard model to sigma confidence significance they'd be like yeah prevailing dogma going down i'm getting a no bell right like that's baked into not just any science that resists like if you came out with that amazing paper and you have the evidence people would still go whoa well we need a while to review this which they should otherwise science is just crackpots but um that's the fundamental model and what i've noticed so often in christianity and in religion in general we fight over like whose interpretation is the one perfect one for all time and in this case i would love my friends of faith to learn from my friends of science the great joy of uncertainty that you have so beautifully demonstrated [Music] hey mike thanks for being here i grew up methodist until i was in high school and had um i was a science guy in high school and all the prevailing religion was you had to believe this this this and this and i threw it out so i was an atheist for 35 years oh man you beat me handily um then i had a friend in high school i was teaching high school there was a kid with muscular dystrophy who passed away and i was at his funeral and previous to that all the funerals i had ever been to were god has a plan he's in a better place and i was just like shaking my head please don't so for the first time this pastor it was a room full of kids saying i don't have an answer this sucks this is hard and in that moment something clicked i mean i had been away from the church for 35 years [Music] and i guess part of the question is is there something in us that craves something larger and then very recently was at a church service and literally had not sung the doxology in probably 45 years and i know the words and when it started i bawled i couldn't get the words out and i'm like where is this coming from i mean i literally had been 45 years since i sung it disregard it for 35 of those and now i'm a blubbering mess i can you explain that yes okay the university of oxford small school in england you may have heard of it um tried to figure out why people believe in god no big deal so they did a a decadal study multiple cultures multiple continents to figure out what are the common threads for god and they found like three principles if you've listened to i think i did this in grand haven if you heard that episode so if you want to hear the three go back to grand haven because it'll burn too much time tonight is that cool or do i need to okay that's fine good so there's three cognitive things that lead to a belief in god uh very briefly people tend to believe in the afterlife even if they're not religious we tend to believe that there's an all-knowing entity because as infants we believe our mom is all-knowing which is mostly correct to begin with and we have a bias towards purpose-based explanations for a given phenomena those three things come together to create a neurocognitive bias for god so you don't have a god-shaped hole in your heart because you die because your heart pumps blood but you do have a god-shaped set of neurological neurocognitive biases um yes real tweetable uh so yes we have a longing right into the way human consciousness develops for some form of higher power that creates purpose and a promise of continued consciousness after death yep done now that doesn't say there is such a thing it just says we desire it you know what i mean like i desire a pizza made of donuts but i'm not saying it exists this crowd is obviously a skinny crowd fat kids would have eaten that up so uh so when you become open i've noticed faith at its best is not when you're like finding the answers faith at its best is when you realize you don't have them now what that's the faith that like really amazes me like go try to pin a mystic down on theology and problems of suffering and what do they say light a candle and sit in front of it what that's a dodge come on tell you try it and when you move into that kind of unknowing contemplative faith studies have shown there's a corresponding emotional vulnerability they've also shown that you can take a telegens absorption test for the absorption scale and if you have an experience that's traumatic and respond with contemplative faith you change your intelligence score which specifically in men makes them warmer and more empathetic so if you've had this experience where you've got to the end of your rope and just kind of let go to see what happens it changes your emotional responses i know this for a fact because i cry constantly what did i cry about on the way here on the plane this morning i was watching a netflix show because of my brain injury i get sick if i read on planes which is terrible um and there was like a moment where a husband was glad to see his wife and i bawled because i needed my wife in three whole days right and there's a constant vulnerability to me now there's my emotions are just right there and i don't mean like emotional outbursts that's not what i'm talking about i'm talking about like there's a joy in that kind of sentimentality and there's a beauty i used to love to watch action movies where like the guy comes down on the rope and lands with the superhero like this and then just kills all the bad guys and now i can't watch it because whether the bad guys have kids what if they had dreams what if they were living out of some result of trauma and they didn't fire the first shot anyway the good guy literally came in guns blazing and i'll cry at action movies because it makes me think of the human condition and our predilection to solve things with violence and i've just decided i like that about me i'm all in on that i tweeted the other day i cry a lot and that wasn't a confession that was a humble brag because i think the world is better when men kick off the bondage of forced masculinity and just be authentic real people right how much of the world's problems because guys are trying to act tough in front of each other and girls aren't impressed anyway so even if you're like hetero that's a bad reproductive strategy like the amazing thing is the studies also show women generally respond better to men with higher telogen absorption scores like set down the football grab a book and a cardigan and let's fix the species so yeah you you have been open to the beautiful mystery that is another breath that you don't know where it comes from and that gratitude has to go somewhere and it's okay for a skeptic to decide that place is god even in the absence of empirical data to support a celestial being hey okay so mine's like a sci-fi question okay um this is becoming less fixtures so it's about neural lacing um if you don't know what that is it's where they say neural icing lacing lacing okay that's real weird computer interface moving into the brain yes okay so they did a study in 2015 with mice and they found that their brain was able to um grow around the the lace and elon musk said he's making more headway on this so what do you think that means for like humanity do you think that gives more control to the machines or to the man and do you think that's going to do something to religion good or bad and uh morality and humanity in general so it's getting broad okay [Laughter] okay um yeah so we're getting an increased capacity to directly connect computers to our brains around 2015 i saw another study where they attached a machine brain interface to a man into a rat and the man could think and move the rat's tail oh man look at the no just no no that didn't happen science mike it's real so uh you know i'm sure you've seen the remote control cockroaches like well it's really cheaper like how do we build small robots that crawl really well that don't use a lot of energy oh wait nature did they're called cockroaches so we just connect interfaces to their brains and take control of their bodies which i think is totes ethical and not troubling at all uh like i literally picture ian malcolm in jurassic park as i imagine a swarm of like military cockroaches accidentally destroying a city he's like your scientists thought so much about if they could they didn't stop to think if they should right um so what's that gonna do well you're tempted to say well we make computers so they're just going to do whatever we say how's that working with facebook there's this um cognitive bias we have called the availability cascade have you heard of this the more often you hear something the more true you believe it to be ouch so now we have cloud computers whose job is to figure out what we like to hear and tell us over and over so they can sell us ad impressions we'll actually technically sell companies ad impressions aimed at our eyeballs and what is this done where's all this polarization coming from we live in literally individually tailored media environments that tell us what we want to hear over and over so we believe it more readily i've been preaching this like crazy people on the left get all excited look at that man conservatives forty percent of them are likely to fall for fake news only twenty percent of liberals are one in five is terrible that's not like bragging you know what i mean give me a break like you're you're not going like top of the class with 80 so um this is a huge problem and the computers are still outside of our brains i have a vr headset i have two vr headsets because i'm real nerdy and i'll be using vr and like a lot of games where you're building things like you don't gravity is selective so if you're like working with a tool you just like let it go and just stays there until you need it and you grab it again and so i took my vr headset off and set the controllers down and picked up my coffee mug and drank of it and just let it go and it fell on the ground and i was like what's happening because my brain got used to what it was so convincing the sensory information from goggles sitting on my face that my brain made vr just r and i just assumed it would continue you know what i mean um there's another bad habit i have like i love in vr you can walk up to the edge of a cliff and then like walk off of it and just float because the floor is still there i'm going to die that way one day i'm going to the grand canyon be like girls check this out so what do you do and instead of typing google you just think what's the sun's mass in grams and you just know by the way ask alexa what is the sun's mass in grams it's amazing she talks like two minutes what do you do when you can look at a person's face and see how many friends they have we are already judgey you see someone you're like 26 friends talking to you you know what i mean and then what would happen to me with like 20 000 followers on twitter do people start mobbing me i hope not like how weird were that up in the social hierarchy look at me i think cognitive science is the most important disciplines right now we've gotta have a better mechanistic understanding of how signals and inputs affect human consciousness to be able to understand what continuing to reduce the distance between virtual digital information and our consciousness will i read a fascinating piece the other day about the linkage between 4chan and the alt-right if someone spent a lot of time on 4chan i got to be honest i saw that train coming what happens when you have self-reinforcing nihilism and a celebration of anything that destroys the system regardless of outcome just because you're you see then hatred at the system itself i'll go ahead i don't make a lot of absolutes but i'm going to say we can go ahead and assume any community that celebrates the posting of dead bodies including children for fun or the lulls is going somewhere dark right that's not going to lead to a greater empathy for other people and a thirst for justice if you're like that's the corpse of a dead child and that's what it's still outside of our brains i don't mean to be alarmist but we are just starting to taste what a global light speed communications network is going to do to this species and i think we should think very carefully before we pipe it into our brains because the moment someone does it's an incredible survival advantage and everyone else is going to want to right it's already like if you're not on twitter or facebook if you're like a job application they're like yeah what are your social media profiles you're like i don't have them they're like not even linkedin do you build bombs in your basement you know so what happens when you're the only person in the room that can't just know how many widgets were sold this quarter by thinking about it or how close we are to quota if someone has to like send you an email what are you a primitive this is going to be huge implications in our society now what does that mean for faith it could become technically possible to build a unity of human consciousness transcend the limitations and the boundaries of self into something more collective i think that could have profound consequences for faith and theology and belief if it becomes difficult to tell so what if what if instead of just so for a while we were amazed i'm old my wife could send me like a message it would just appear on my phone like magic called texting and then we got these apple watches and she could send me her heartbeat i can literally like feel her heartbeat on my wrist which is weird if you think about it but just don't think about it too much what happens if instead of sending a smiley you can send a snapshot of your feelings and a person for a moment can just feel what you feel it's not your feeling but if the person's really sad and they blast you with sadness you can feel sad for hours where do you end where do they begin huge faith implications i don't have the answers i just say proceed with caution hey thank you for being here in north carolina we really need you um this um i live in florida yeah i know i know it's just this is actually it's a two-part question okay um part of it is a parenting question and part of it is also about individuals that have very high iqs so we have a nine-year-old son who tested in the 98th percentile for his iq at the age of six and so he basically is two different ages so he's functioning at one age but his life experience is at another he's nine years old right now um but at the age of seven he was asking questions like what if this is all a dream and what if there is no god and and all of that so we we are now at a point um as husband and wife where you know my husband has been deconstructing his faith and he basically sounds exactly like you except with medical stuff instead of your science um and he's very much so holding things with with an open hand and i'm kind of on my own journey right now he very much so is a black and white kind of kid we think he's an eight on the enneagram as well he's been asking why why why push his back on everything but like i said he's also functioning at a really high level so we want to be there for him and support him and he so desires certainty and security and stability um he's so sensitive to anything he couldn't watch disney movies because anything evil or bad was just too much for me to feel it too much and so basically the question is do you know anything about people who have really high iqs like maybe what they were like when they were kids or what their parents did right any suggestions in this day and age and living in a small town where boys play football girls wear dresses and you know our son has some streaks of pink in his hair and he likes earrings and you know all these different things um we really support him in that but the community that we're in not so much great question i wouldn't know anything about being a young boy who doesn't like football um my dad would throw football throw a football at me i don't know how to like conjugate football and i would squeal and duck and cover my body because footballs are sharp and they hurt and boy i was popular at school in tallahassee florida home of the seminals is there like an adjective before seminoles i don't know like well great the great florida seminoles um right now people in my hometown are like oh mike this one thing it's fine to be an atheist i get it but no football things are better than when i was a kid i've noticed there's even in rural america there's more openness we seem to be making a little bit of a relapse since about november i don't know what the cause there is but a couple things one this is key kids don't have enneagram numbers right enneagram by its total pseudo scientific admission is how your adult self deals with your childhood so your your title forming their enneagram number so be careful with the enneagram projecting that onto your kids because guess what your kids in many ways become what they hear you talk about them becoming it's why the words we use about our children are important i don't just tell my girls that they're beautiful or smart i say that they're hard working that they struggle well that they know how to talk to me when they suffer see what i'm saying they use that language to reinforce it um biggest picture you can take in parenting as someone whose kids aren't out of the house yet so i could be way off like you might want to wait a few years to hear my kids like end up in prison or something but right now it seems to me the biggest thing you can be aware is that you will screw it up and they will talk about you in therapy and it's a given it's a base assumption you are not the perfect parent because there's no such thing and if you're a great parent with one of your kids they do this frustrating thing where they're individuals and you might struggle with a different child and it's not your fault or the child's fault it might be a personality conflict between a genetic originator and a genetic replica right it's amazing so the thing we do horribly in america is set crazy expectations on ourselves that our job is to create an environment for an unscarred flawless human being to live up to their full potential in the world we as a species are wired for struggle we're great at it you know what i mean in your lineage are animals that ate their young you're already way ahead of your great great great great great grandfather if you don't eat your children more recently in your evolutionary history if babies didn't look quite right or were too loud or not loud enough we left them on the savannah right holy cow are you a good parent so what do you do does your children know you love them you reinforce that often do you encourage them do you apologize when you realized you messed up do you set some boundaries and expectations and are you open to discussions about those boundaries and expectations as they get old enough to do so oh and by the way young children are fundamentalists developmentally we don't they don't do nuance yet even brilliant young children don't do nuance they don't do shades of gray they do right and they do wrong when my seven-year-old told our nine-year-old that there was a literal hell and if she didn't believe that she might end up there i didn't panic because seven-year-olds are fundies that's just how it goes that's they need to know there's a god with a face makes decisions there's consistent rules i know what's required of me and what's not great so my nine-year-old dad macy said don't worry about macy she's a fundamentalist what do we do wait wait her brain is going to mature she lives in science mike's house she's going to ask questions about her faith it's just gonna happen so and it did it did just trust like the biggest thing just let's lower the stress let's celebrate the limited years we have with these amazing people in our homes you know what i mean what like i structure my life in a way that when i'm home i sit down in our kitchen every morning and we have breakfast together and we talk about our day and we're goofy and i spill food on accident and the dogs eat it and mom pretends to get angry and mom says she has three children and she's she's just kidding just like me and we just celebrate living together and then they go to school i try to drop them off when i'm in town then i go pick them up and i'm like how was your day what was hard today what made you laugh today then way later we might talk about like school we sit down and do homework together and if we can't figure it out we go on youtube together and we go on wikipedia together and i not only teach them how to do the problem i teach them what to do if you don't know how to solve a problem understanding that like my influence on these people is pretty limited madison's 12. it seems like as she's getting a little bit older she's losing muscle tone in her ocular muscles because her eyes keep rolling around when i say things so i'm aware that there's like this golden window that's closing and pretty soon it'll be a miracle if we're all home and there's no yelling and i'm going to be fine with that just because we're all home you know what i mean so i don't worry about like teaching them how to do it right i worry about teaching this to struggle well now at the same time you have this other thing in this community where people are maybe excessively judgmental on the one hand some of that exposure is important you know what i mean like the mean teacher is a great preparation program for the mean boss they will have you know what i mean learning like how do i deal with a teacher that i think hates me oh you need that life skill that's more important than arithmetic right but if there's a like a pervasive systemic issue the change of environment might be the only answer but i say that and like what if my parents left tallahassee and i didn't get beat up all the time and i had friends earlier in life i literally wouldn't be me my capacity to stand on stages four or five nights a week and then do meet and greet for three or four hours all my friends who did this earlier like why do you do that because i am so moved by your life experiences and your suffering and your pain because i understand it because kids used to stand on my head and stomp you know what i mean there i cannot exist as me today without those experiences would i care so much about racial equality if black kids didn't protect me from white bullies i needed both of those experiences so in a very real way the worst things in my life that i talk about the most in therapy are the things that defined who i am and the reason i'm who i am is because even though all those kids were horrible to me i never doubted for two seconds both of my parents loved me and were 100 behind me and i almost hauled my mom while you're asking your question to hold the phone up to the little microphone here because she would answer this question so much better i'm not high q but i am weird and if your son knows you love him that's going to fix everything else and the people that really carry scars and i know they talk to me and they send emails into this program are the people who wonder if their parents loved them that's the scar that doesn't heal that's the wound that never stops bleeding and those are the people who can never believe god loves them so what do you do to be a great parent love your kids and let them know with words and with actions [Music] hey so first of all i just want to thank you for your work and uh for the liturgist and michael gunger and uh you have been influential in many ways and i just want to thank you for that um so i am a two on the enneagram uh i want to start there because that plays into this uh since okay so about up until about a year and a half ago i was in this nice little conservative bubble that i liked and didn't really know much and i was fine with that and then about a year and a half ago with the uh election and primaries and everything i had this huge shift in my life and i became a feel the burn girl and started reading a lot of articles and educating myself about what's actually happening in this country so since november it has been rough and i think for a lot of people including a lot of listeners and i've heard you speak to taking time to grieve throughout the process and i feel like i'm trying to do that but it's everywhere i mean i can't separate myself 100 from uh from hearing something that's going on that day uh with the president or the cabinet or congress anything um and i i don't know how to to fully grieve that and then take that into uh advocacy work and uh having grown up in a conservative bubble and not ever really doing that in my life my biggest question now is how do i begin a work in advocacy yes whether it be with lgbt or with women's rights or environmental protection or any of that where do i start to do that fantastic question there's no expiration date on grief it's a cycle it's a process it ebbs and flows my grief has been greatly helped by implementing a couple of practices i tightly cap the amount of time i spend on social media per day and i typically do it in one sitting so if i'm going to spend 15 minutes on twitter i do all 15 minutes at once and not three five minute sessions or 15 one minute sessions and let's be honest who's gonna spend one minute on twitter right so same thing with facebook although avoiding facebook is really easy i hate it i only consume the news once per day i turned off all the breaking alerts and email alerts nothing can happen that'll make a difference if i don't know till tomorrow unless it's like nuclear missiles inbound and then i don't want to know i just want to vaporize i don't want to like flee for shelter and maybe get outside the blast zone and then be one of the people struggling to survive in nuclear winter no i want to disappear in a puff of smoke right maybe i'll just think it was the rapture um sorry i knew that would get a laugh and some people would be uncomfortable but i always go for the laugh um so i just i limit the inflow that's not to say i'd go no nothing's happening it's not what i'm talking about i'm saying i'm trying to put myself in an emotional position to effectively participate in change so i only read the news once a day but i pretty much call all my congressional representatives every day to weigh in on what's happening and i do i write a lot of letters like have you heard of this like it's like an email but you print it and then you sign it and you put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it and mail it and uh all those get opened and tallied all of them all of them basically the harder it is to do something the more a politician pays attention to it right and then i like kind of pick the things i'm working on so i'll like throw my weight behind pretty much anything for a moment but there's some issues i'm engaged in an ongoing basis where i'm a member of organizations with smart people who are organizing that will say do this at 3 pm on thursday and that way we shut down this switchboard of these congress people who might swing on this vote and that's effective right um but in general you figure out the things that you are compelled the most in terms of suffering and injustice and then you find out the people who are already doing that work and help them if you're white and you care about racism maybe like the most helpful thing is to not go cry in a black lives matter organizing meeting right because they're like making real plans to do real work but joining surge might be really showing up for racial justice it's basically like white folks trying to figure out how to not be in the way while helping and i don't mean that like in a demeaning way i think that's important and beautiful so whatever those issues are get plugged into groups already doing the work and study under them for a while and then as you learn the work you might see like where you have a fresh perspective or something new to offer or not it might just be that you're good at helping move that forward google's a good resource for learning the ideas behind it but i've typically found when it comes to participating in action getting involved with some civic group or organization or advocacy group will radically amplify the benefit of your efforts i think there's surge nearby here i'm a donor to the gay christian network because they're doing important work and i try to amplify whatever work they're doing and you just find the people and it at first so i get at first you're like i literally don't know who's doing this at all um some googling some tweeting asking friends you'll eventually connect with people by the way one thing we're trying to do on the liturgist podcast is the people we have on the show are the people doing that work and so if we say and how would people get in touch with you and they see a website go to that website and you'll get like way farther ahead in 10 minutes than you would have otherwise so what we're trying to do now on that show is not only make people aware of an issue but also give them an on-ramp to participating that's the reason we did the black and white show episode 34 loaders podcast huge reading list at the end right that was on purpose because we didn't want to like get a million people all fired up who then went and bugged their black friends like what do i do now trying to like create some self-service um but you can't do any of that if you don't take care of yourself we've got an episode coming out on advocacy with christina cleveland and mickey scott bay jones and listen to what they both have to say about self-care because they they do justice work vocationally at a greater personal cost than i'll ever know and so their words on self-care will be far more illuminating than anything i could say [Music] first uh thank you for being here and um also i'm involved on campus with an adoption community and education group and many of the people in the group myself included have a very unique relationship with their father whether or not they know their biological father and thanks to richard warren i'm very much a trinity nerd but i've always had a problem with the father part of the trinity growing up and still do and many people i know also have that sort of problem and i was wondering if you have any tips for people who've always struggled with a relationship with god because of that and have liked the idea of the trinity but have had difficulties whether or not they're adopted just because they have a unique relationship with their earthly father amazing question absolutely stellar um i find it's helpful to start by having an informed historical understanding of christian theology church history and the cultural context in which scriptures were written the bible written over a 1500 year period starting 3 500 years ago patriarchy the norm in all those cultures throughout the biblical arc so to talk about the origin and ruler of all you need a paternal image to resonate with that culture now when we think about creation we tend to think feminine which is why the bible actually uses pretty generous feminine imagery for god often but that i don't think the bible ever actually calls god mother but i do don miller like one of my favorite quotes of his is about god the father and people who are really adamant about it he's like so you're telling me god has a penis like when you think god that's what comes to mind you know i just love like how visceral that is because it's ridiculous like in trinitarian theology the godhead the source of all creation the sustainer of all creation gender is a weird construct to put on god this is a really weird thing but we need what we need sometimes god to have a face for us to understand it so people used a metaphor that helped them connect with god and i think mother's an equally valid pointer to the mystery of the divine as father i think for some people it's more appropriate than father by the way that's why reid did a liturgy called god our mother with the liturgists which was universally positive in conservative churches the people loved it no hate mail at all from god our mother i tend to not say he or her with god if you listen carefully and also say god is doing things for god's self i kind of like bypass the gender of the father or the mother or the the godhead all together um not only because it's i think theologically beautiful i think when we invoke the word father we inevitably tie someone's understanding of god to their own father my father cheated on my mother and i became an atheist and i didn't even catch it i didn't i thought i went on this like incredibly cerebral intellectual journey through deconstruction but my father failed and i became an atheist so i think i think yeah it's a fine training wheel i think god the father is perfectly good training wheels i'm not saying we have to tear the training wheels off for everybody i'm saying some people don't need training wheels let's take on the bike and i realize like also at the same time that's an incredibly unorthodox idea i don't know what percentage of denominations that's heresy in probably 85 or more but that's okay i care about people knowing and encountering god of of experiencing a depth of beauty they've never imagined and seeing life itself as a beautiful mysterious and fleeting gift if the word father gets in the way of that toss it [Music] hi mike hi my name's doug i'm an enneagram four i can tell so i i have i have a very robust fantasy life and i have since i was a child and i've kept kept from ever sharing really to many people how robust that fantasy life has been throughout my whole life uh just because i've never heard anybody else say something that is like oh you must experience life like i do uh case in point ever since i was a little kid before i was 10 years old i would uh lay on top of my sheets and i would imagine i've called it a forceful lucid daydreaming before i fall asleep believe me i totally know what you mean and and i'd have to put my my my knuckles from right here onto this area of my head like my frontal cortex or whatever it is and uh just your forehead or if you put your knuckles on your frontal cortex you'd die but yeah okay yeah my forehead my forehead my uh uh so anyway so what i would have to be on top of my sheets because i would sweat my whole body would sweat because of what my brain was doing but i don't know what i've been doing my whole life now i'm a musician i tie that in with like imagining uh songs before i make them and jam to them these ideas in my mind so i'm just wondering as a little kid i was wondering if i was hurting myself by like burning out brain cells or something but i just when you went to get a cat scan with your mystical experience as an atheist yes that's awesome who do i go to or what neurological expert do i have to seek out uh you know this unexplored territory okay yeah i don't think you have a brain tumor don't worry about the cat scan i mean i'm not a doctor so you might have a brain tumor but it's not because you have vivid daydreams if it was if you had a brain tumor that long i mean you're dead by now anyway so we can kind of rule that out with brute force diagnostics do you know like how people ask all the time like how are you how do you answer so many questions like reasonably well because i have imagined walking around on stage answering questions since i was like six i've been rehearsing for this my whole life in vivid imagination and visualization that's happening largely due to the work of your orbitofrontal cortex among other things that makes ethical decisions and calculations by thinking about the consequences for potential decisions but it also powers daydreaming and humans spend one third of their waking hours daydreaming on average one-third at any given moment tonight a third of the room has been daydreaming busted i just pulled you out it won't last long that's normal now some people dream more vividly we get made fun of at school but then later we make films and movies and podcasts and people buy tickets to see us so it's not all bad i don't think you need a neurologist i think you need to celebrate your gift and not be self-conscious about it and i think you're not burning out your brain research would tell us that you are generating connections between neurons on an ongoing basis and your association cortices are probably ripped you know what i mean i mean you're so it's more up here but you can't flex your skull i mean you can flex your skull but it's really bad for you um oh i'm serious it is you don't want to increase intracranial pressure so yeah like that's that's a good thing that's a good thing celebrate it um there's a lot of people that will like tell you we cannot give to a brain scanner and in real time no those people are generally not correct about that the the studies aren't encouraging the studies are encouraging on creativity and dreamers though watch out for signs of depression though yeah creative people um tend to if they get depressed get really depressed and they excel at not only being depressed but having creative thoughts of suicide so uh if that ever becomes part of your journey don't wait ask for help fast um mike i really liked the point that you made about prayer and meditation or at least the science that you attributed to it and the way that we grow specifically i'm curious about healing prayer just a quick context i had no interest in healing prayer and really i kind of judged anybody that believed in it and then out of nowhere i started studying john wimber and was really mad at myself for studying him he was a fuller professor that believed in healing prayer um for about a year and then we found out he believed in healing prayer for about a year or you read him for about a year i was studying him for about a year cool yeah i was like that's not that impressive a testimony [Laughter] and uh and so anyway a really really quick wrap-up um about 11 months into it we found out that my son uh in his second trimester uh developed a gap between his kidneys and his urethra which as you know set off a chain reaction over the rest of the pregnancy and he developed fine but then passed away about four hours after he was born and so after discovering healing prayer i had a reason to pray for the first time in my life and god chose not to heal my son and so i just kind of got put in a really strange place where i was waiting for bitterness to set in but it never did and i'm just kind of existential about it now and i'm just curious what you think about it both scientifically and personally okay i hate to do this to such a heartfelt question i have a whole chapter on prayer and finding god in the waves and dig deep into intercessory prayer versus other types of prayer in the science so i'm still going to answer your question but i will let you know and people listening all across the internet uh that there is a deeper resource available uh available bookstores everywhere so you just outline the problem with healing prayer the phrase god chose not and when people believe in intercessor healing prayer and they get a god chosen knot how often that results in their faith becoming shipwrecked and destroyed very common my email inbox probably 40 percent of my former christian current atheist friends who email me it's because of a god chose not i was a huge and intercessory prayer was the foundation of my faith and then i read the god delusion and richard dawkins had a challenge pray to a jug of milk the way you pray for god that's ridiculous richard dawkins but he said if you say god can answer prayers with yes know or wait you have covered every possible outcome there's no other option to a question other than yes no and wait so i tried it i asked my milk jug for two weeks for a promotion and i got the promotion so i never threw out that milk and no obviously i threw the milk i think i drank the milk but my point is milk chose to give me the promotion my whole family got together and prayed for my grandmother to be healed from cancer and she was they said she had six months and she went back for x-rays and they said the tumors were all gone and meemaw was with us for several years and then the tumors came back and they took her scientists would say some percentage of ailments are going to recover even the ones that seem hopeless when we've studied healing prayer scientifically which we haven't done as much as you would think we tend to see this people who know they're being prayed for get better a little less often than people who aren't being prayed for or people who are being prayed for but don't know it that's the that's the statistic when you do large scale analysis this stuff is tough to control there's a lot of variables people in bad physical health tend to not want to be completely cut off from friends and family and how do you talk to every friend in every family and say okay don't pray for this person that's impossible right so let's admit there's some limitations in the methodology so i got to the point where i'm like intersecting prayer is not a thing god doesn't respond to prayers period the point of prayer is for us to be connected to god and transformed by it and became contemplative and you'll find many people the other alternative to shipwrecked faith after god chose not is a contemplative faith where they rest in a trust in god it's beautiful and in my case total hypocrisy because when my dad had a stroke and they said come now we're not sure how long he'll survive he's half paralyzed when i got in the car i prayed and i prayed for a miracle and i pray that god would keep dad long enough that i could tell him i loved him again and when i walked into that hospital room and my dad like the football playing former military superman of a human is lying in bed with half of his face etched in pain and the other half completely slack i held my dad's hand and i went to my knees in a hospital room and i wept and i prayed and it wasn't centering it was begging so obviously i resolved the philosophical contradiction of intercessory prayer before i did so now that prayer was an admission of my powerlessness and my hopelessness but also of my hope and a search for my power what can i do in this room for my dad it mainly consisted of constantly changing washcloths off his head into a bucket of ice and water because he had this horrible headache because half his brain was dying and the cold water helped a little bit i told you i cry all the time is the answer to write off intercessory prayer and healing prayer it makes a lot of sense to me philosophically i'm real bad at it i keep praying for peace in our land i keep asking god that black teenagers aren't killed in this country i keep asking god that gay teens not feel like killing themselves would be left suffering i beg from god often even as my mornings begin in contemplation i am convinced that god is the worst jigsaw puzzle in the world he's the worst riddle look at me i talk intercessory prayer starts saying him because i go old school that god is a horrible equation but that god is our companion on the journey through life that god is the path that we walk on itself that god is never farther than our next synaptic firing and never any less grand than the cosmos itself and if in my tiny fleeting havel vapor of an existence if sometimes the only way i can cope with the cost of the gift of awareness and consciousness and life and beauty is to get on my knees before the grandeur and intimacy of the divine and beg then i too am grateful for those moments even if the philosophical implications are unclear because they open my eyes to the reality of love and beauty that animate every moment and i never want to be the person who's afraid or reticent to beg my god for peace justice and love in this world man that was probably one of the most moving expressions ever but um so you mentioned earlier about the god gene and how it kind of it's like walking around on a low dose of mushrooms and so um a lot of people uh with like connection with it yoga things like yoga or different things fine uh other ways aside from christianity to try to get in contact with god and a lot of their experiences are like on shrooms or ayahuasca that they have like these transcendent experiences so i guess in my mind i was thinking about other various cultures in western culture and we might look at these things as like primitive or like them as underdeveloped countries and broad generalization and their interactions with god and divine but is there any correlation that you know about the natural substances is helping people connect uh to the divine and spirit through these things or validity and how it relates to like neural theology yes great question uh someone asked me earlier like what's the question you get the most and i forgot that's the question i get the most today like hiawask is psilocybin lsd god um which is tough for a southern baptist who went through dare right drug abuse resistance education i remember this plexiglas handout with actual drugs in it and i was scandalized at immorality of the police because what if that plexiglass broke and a child got a hold of drugs they would instantly be an addict their futures doomed if they so much as touched a leaf of that cursed marijuana plant and now denver's like just in right so so one thing the science is really clear on some substances like opioids and all the propaganda we heard has great scientific merit heroin's terrible for you don't do meth i saw this amazi i don't know how they got clearance to make this or cocaine i saw this tv show i think on an airplane it's the only time i watch tv that showed people taking different drugs and what the effects were on them so they had to like do like cognitive tasks and then like carry a washing machine up a ramp it was real weird but they would do it like without the drug and then with the drug and like um like the cocaine people felt like they were doing great but weren't at the cognitive and then but like literally had an improvement in their ability to move like the weight i really think it was a washing machine um and then like they literally had someone like heroin and like he didn't even finish the test you know what i mean and then the meth guy like i can't believe you said the meth guy the meth guy was like huge penalty cognitive and then was like weaker and like couldn't successfully he tried but like literally his physical life was so diminished so like they were telling how meth makes you feel terrible and reduce your mental and physical performance i'm like that's a great sales like where does this i'm serious how's that habit forming anyway so what i've seen more recently studies they didn't show me and dare are that psychedelics don't necessarily belong in the same structure as heroin and cocaine and meth that the consequences to health are not as clear-cut the habit-forming tendencies seem to be dramatically overstated and like i've seen some studies on psilocybin that it creates a hyper connected state in the brain one dose can help treat depression for like 14 months i mean that's that's pretty powerful stuff it's real taboo in america to talk about that right now it's not as taboo to talk about marijuana and like i think if alcohol is legal marijuana should definitely be legal like alcohol and cigarettes the science is pretty clear these are more dangerous things now also don't fall for the green lobby smoking marijuana is not harmless inhaling smoke things that are burning anything a stick outside is terrible for your lungs okay so let's just put that on the record smoke bat so but specifically one interesting thing about psilocybin lsd and dmt is the way they create activity in the brain remarkably similar to what happened to me on the beach which for the record i wasn't dosing anything but life okay um and i don't think the usages of those substances in other cultures is primitive because they were tied to experience with guides in a social context typically a coming of age or a life transition and these were ways that people explored themselves and their community and i think in that way those can be beautiful life expanding substances i think treating them like a tourist event or a fun party exhibit is dangerous and habit forming and let's be clear today in the united states a misdemeanor or a felony that can't be avoided i have a feeling maybe drug enforcement is going to be different in the next few months so you know we're in north carolina be careful um but yeah those things have gotten like this so far what i'm reading it seems like the 80s statements about those substances was way overblown i literally thought because i was shown research in school that lsd burned holes in your brain right like i was like oh my gosh don't deal with d every time you take a dose it burns a hole in your brain now there's like no peer-reviewed research to back that up but again the thing that worries me is is it touristy or are you some things are good because you work for them you can't tell because of this cardigan but my biceps are an inch and three quarter larger around than they were seven weeks ago because i have been working out and at first i felt this weird dimorphism like whose body is this because i know it's like my muscles would start to grow and then be firmer and instead of being like i'm getting jacked i'd be like something's taking over my body i woke up in somebody else's body i'm supposed to have skinny arms and a pear torso and that's just who i am as a person but like i'm starting to like like being able to pick up my luggage and put it in the car that's amazing or like watch this i'll sit in a chair internet i'm sitting in a chair and then i stand up no hesitation no groan like i'm not a little bit winded that was literally true i did a fitness assessment how many push-ups can you do and the app was terrible because the lowest it would answer it would take was one and i could do zero push-ups so i had to lie on my assessment because it didn't let you put in zero i did 40 push-ups yesterday did you know like a hat like i felt amazing i puked but that's true i made it to the sink it's okay but like i puked in sarasota and from doing push-ups but i was like at a 40-push so if you can like take a pill and how do i head on the beach i don't think you'll appreciate it as much as you will on the other side of two years of suffering and fear i think as part of a search for the divine these substances may have a role to play i think is a substitute for a faith of exploration and study and community let's just go into a rave [Music] well you've done it you've wasted a perfectly good couple of hours listening to ask science mike live thanks internet uh i want to thank andrew golucky for his work on pre-production the show and i thank greg ordine for being my amazing producer and sound designer i want to thank my patrons on patreon for making sure i can pay my health insurance and oh by the way do the show and the fine people of chapel hill for one heck of a time tonight uh if you'd like to see where i'll be in the future go to ask sciencemike.com but otherwise it's been good talking to you and i'll see you next week