ASM173 Depression, a Loving God, and Jesus vs. Mithra

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depression a loving god in jesus vs mithra all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemike [Music] welcome to ask science mike the podcast where i answer questions about will really whatever people want to ask me it's a show about honoring the dignity of curiosity and reducing the shame we have about asking questions that go against kind of the taboos that are in our communities we're getting back into a new year getting back on a regular schedule and i'm so glad you're here so what do you say let's get it started [Laughter] i cracked myself up with that intro uh one because boy i nailed it on the length on the first try and two it's hilarious to me to talk about uh fighting taboo and shame in a big radio voice over like a pop song like a pop rock song it's i don't know it it made me laugh so maybe it brings a little joy to your day i hope that it does um i i don't know if you've noticed but this is like i think the third week in a row with an ask science mic podcast uh so things are really looking up in science mic land we've had some uh folks start uh in the liturgist organization if you're not familiar with the liturgists that's another much more popular podcast that i'm involved in actually kind of co-founded the organization i guess and uh we've had some professionals come in and help us make that work happen and then i'm also working with a manager not only with what i do with the liturgies but what i do with science mike in general and so the amount of like relief i have felt in the last couple of weeks is almost impossible to explain to you um and i sent you know some of my book off to my publisher and i thought it was terrible but my editor said it's not terrible he actually said kind things about the book and uh you know before we start answering questions this week i i just want to tell you that um you know i'm pretty vulnerable in my work and so you probably know a lot of this but i struggle in my daily life just like anybody else and my work means so much to me because all of you mean so much to me and kind of uh seeing a light at the end of the tunnel on what has seemed like a really tough year with my work um because of the growth you know we've gotten more popular and things have grown beyond kind of my ability to manage the required workload to get you podcasts regularly and and appear on stage as as much as you'd like to see me um and my mood has been lifted by having some help and so i wanted to start by saying if you're in a place in your life where you're feeling overwhelmed and you're feeling stressed out there might like be a legitimate reason and there might not be a way out of feeling overwhelmed and stressed other than reaching out to others for help i've had people offer to help me and offer me like really good advice on changes i could make for a long time and i've resisted them consistently even kind of passive aggressively fought them on really necessary changes to deal with with the changes in my life from being a public figure and maybe there are things in your life that you're resisting as well where you're getting good advice maybe maybe people are offering to help and you don't want to take them up on it for me it was pride i really thought i knew better than everyone else how to relate to and cope with the community that surrounds ask science mike and the liturgist podcast and maybe i'm too quick to turn around my experience to you uh my listeners uh maybe all i need to tell you is that for those who have been concerned about me because i've been quiet on social media or you've been hearing me go through kind of emotional transitions in recent episodes of the podcasts things are getting better for me so if you've been worried about me am doing really really well now so thank you for your cards and your letters which by the way if you want me to see something um these days the best way to do that is a card or a letter if you go to ask sciencemic.com there's a address at the bottom you can send me things there i'm not quite as easy to reach electronically anymore and we'll see if that if that gets overwhelming someone will have to probably sort through that mail before i see it too but for now i'm the one who goes and checks my p.o box uh so that's a little update on me here's another update on something we could do together that i am incredibly over the top excited about most of the events we do for the liturgist are in churches and a significant portion probably a little more than half of the events i do as science mike uh happen in churches and some people who listen to these shows they just can't walk into a church you just can't do it i get it i've had people who came to an science mike live or a liturgist gathering come up to me in tears and talk about how hard it was to be in a church building again because many of you have really significant trauma associated with organized religion so we've been trying to think like what would be a liturgist thing we could do that wasn't in a church i feel like the literature gathering is suited really well for church environments there's no other venues that are set up for that kind of experience so you know michael gunger and i put our heads together and we tried to imagine like what an event could look like that wasn't in a church and that wasn't a weekend so that people aren't having to get hotels overnight if it's out of town for them or you know arrange child care over a weekend a one-night event is just a lot easier to do and we can sell tickets for a lot lower because it's less expensive to put on a one night event than it is to put on a weekend event like the liturgist gathering so we're putting together a tour that tour is called tabs and wafers and we're about to put tickets on sale in two markets bowler colorado and portland oregon boulder's going to be may 10th and portland's going to be may 11th we will add more dates if these go well we've never done this we don't know if people are going to buy tickets or not right now only patrons can buy tickets but on um gosh march 6th they will be available for everyone to buy tickets to this event and uh that will be just a couple days after this podcast comes out so march 6 2019 you can buy tickets to the liturgist tour called tabs and wafers now what in the heck is it about well we're still working on it but we're basically wrestling with reconstruction really looks like like answering questions instead of just asking them so we're going to say you know look into an idea like how can we be open to spirituality without being closed off or dogmatic toward others how can we embrace where we've been without the ways we've been hurt dragging us down what does spiritual community look like without organized religion now it's the liturgist we're not going to answer definitive dogmatic uh solutions here that's not what we're talking about but we are talking about exploring together what spirituality looks like in an existential typical liturgist way of you know it'll be high-minded and middle-school humor that you've grown to expect from us so you can go to the liturgist.com events to learn more about the tabs and wafers tour and check back regularly or sign up for our email list if you want to be notified when other dates get announced uh of course i will also announce them on the podcast so that's a lot of announcements but i thought there was a lot to share we went through a real period where we weren't talking frequently with each other and it just feels good to be talking to you again on a regular basis so what do you say let's answer some questions and i think this week uh we actually have a science question or two [Music] hey science mike my name is eric i grew up a southern baptist in tallahassee florida so i wouldn't be surprised if our paths crossed at one point way back in the day but i've been listening to you really ever since that first liturgist podcast came out um and so i've really gone through my faith transition and landed pretty far away from being an evangelical but that being said um i'm still surrounded uh with a with a community that is evangelical um and and a lot of people that um really do genuinely love others and and have great hearts um but obviously believe some things that that i just don't agree with anymore and and a couple years ago i had a really really close friend of mine um come to me and and asked me to pray for him because he had these really strong feelings for other men um and so at that point in time i didn't really know what i believed and um just kind of told him you know yeah i'll pray for you and and that was that um and i've been struggling with and trying to figure out um how to sit down now today and and talk with this friend of mine who believes that that that he is full of sin because of these feelings that he has um and so i i guess my question is what would your advice be for a straight man who is affirming talking to and speaking with a gay man who is not affirming obviously i want to go to him in love and i want to support him it it feels odd to sit down and try to convince him of something so i i'm just not really sure if of how to direct that conversation um so if you have any advice um obviously i'd really appreciate it um i appreciate everything that you do um and uh yeah thank you very much thanks mike i've encountered this really quite often where people are publicly and vocally against lgbtq equality especially in the church but personally experience same-sex attraction i've had i've had many people talk to me about that and i just have so much empathy for what that must feel like to be trapped between your worldview and the values of your community and your personal experience i actually think it's like one of the most tragic uh implications of non-affirming theology is the way that it turns people on themselves in addition to leading people to really hurt other people through their actions um that's why non-affirming theology is something i find so troublesome and frankly so dangerous so you're in a really hard situation here and i would just caution you to be very careful and to be very cautious there's a lot of psychological stress that your friend is under uh a chronic stressor here this this difference between their value system and their personal experience there's gonna be a lot of built up emotion there a lot of fear a lot of grief i i would not personally make any attempt to advocate that this person become affirming um because i think you're dealing with a lot of other things in the room besides the theological issue which by the way is always true people are never talking about lgbtq affirmation in some intellectual vacuum there is always an emotional investment and always a social value system at play why because we're people and that's true for literally everything we think and do so i just i'd be really really really careful it sounds to me like you're already publicly supportive of lgbtq rights and your theology is already affirming so just keep doing that keep standing up for these marginalized voices in religious communities especially in political policy especially continue to do that and as you do be a good and supportive friend to this person it's okay uh if he says something that's that's homophobic or he raises the issue to state plainly that you disagree um i you know i think that's that's necessary um but other than that just be a good friend to him and he'll approach you if he wants to talk about sexuality and ethics and theology if he does be very supportive be very encouraging listen a lot listen more than you speak this is this is a really really delicate situation um i i can't imagine a parallel honestly i don't think there is the analogy that can describe kind of the exquisite emotional pain that someone can go through i've definitely had conversations with people who are in ministry uh who genuinely and sincerely believe that same-sex relationships and same-sex sexual encounters are a sin who are deeply attracted to members of the same sex and try to rationalize that away you know they talk about how it's uh it's the devil for example uh trying to destroy their ministry or destroy their marriage if they're married at all um it's it is it is it is truly tragic and my heart breaks for those people uh and i i expend no effort trying to change their theology and instead tell them that i don't judge them that i support them um that i'll always be their friend and when those people say things to me and it definitely happens that are homophobic or discriminatory uh then i tell them that i i don't tolerate that kind of language and i don't that's a condition for being my friend you can believe whatever you want about the bible you can believe whatever you want about marriage but i'm not going to stick around and hear you devalue the lives and experiences of lgbtq people i just won't do it um i don't expect people to listen to me talk about evolution if they don't accept the theory of evolution if someone says i just can't talk about that that's fine we don't have to talk about it uh but that's that's a boundary for me if you're gonna if you're gonna say derogatory things towards women towards people of color towards any marginalized group disabled people i'm out i am out and i'm not out quietly i'm going to say something as i walk out um yeah so just just be really careful i love that you're in this person's life and that you're concerned for them please continue to do that that he he's in a really difficult spot and i think friends like you are probably few and far between in his community and if he does decide to shift on his theology or his public display of his sexuality you might be a person that he approaches first and it's always important to handle with grace and with dignity anyone who is in the process of coming out or reconciling their sexuality or exploring their sexuality that's such a vulnerable thing for a person to do um and it sounds like you're on the right track sounds like like you really care for this person i would just say once again be really really careful there's a lot of emotional pressure here [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads i'm a bible loving christian who's read your book listens to your podcast and wants to stop having questions however this one is a doozy what do we do with the pagan myths that predate jesus which have striking similarities to jesus since you're a scholar i assume i don't have to explain or list all these but to name a few mithra krishna dionysus horus etc this is troubling because as i've deconstructed and reevaluated my view of the bible the thing that kept me in the christian club has been jesus and the resurrection is it possible that the jesus story is to these pagan myths as the creation story is to the enuma elish if so it seems we lost the cornerstone of our faith don't we thanks for any time you can devote to answering this gosh i don't know a bible loving christian means anymore because i'm a bible loving christian um so i don't want to make any assumptions about you based on that phrase i would say if you want to stop having questions this is a terrible show as this show is all about questions including yours it is a great question and i'm so glad that you submitted it this is something that i hear a lot about and it's in a in the framing of a debate between usually evangelical christians or more theologically conservative christians and atheists and skeptics uh if you haven't seen this there's all these images online they show up in religion debate forums that basically point out pieces of of the biography of of jesus as outlined in the four gospels and then compares that to ancient and contemporary or at least contemporary to jesus religious figures and i have a tremendous problem with that image i i really do because it's nonsense i know you don't expect me to say that but that image and that line of thinking is ridiculous it's completely absurd it is not grounded in any historical scholarship which by the way i take exceptions to you calling me a scholar always remember i dropped out of community college after six weeks so i'm not a scholar i do i do love learning but i i could not call myself a scholar uh in good faith or good conscience so let's like look let's look at mithra specifically we don't know anything really about mithra mithra was uh the deity of a closed cult they were forbidden to share information about their god with outsiders what we know about mithra is from stone carvings that don't have any captions they're just depictions so we can make historians make some assumptions about the theological claims of mithra but uh you know like i've seen an image that says mithra was born of a virgin well as we understand it from historical scholarship mithra was born from the side of a mountain so i guess technically a mountain is a virgin because a mountain has never had sexual intercourse but that's really stretching really really stretching the notion there's another thing it's it's not uncommon for december 25th to be a day of celebration for deities but nowhere in the gospels is december 25th listed as a special time that's a that's a church tradition that came later so the this idea that the story of jesus is lifted whole cloth from other ancient deities is ridiculous it's not true it's just parts of the jesus story share commonalities with other ancient deities because the gospels were a collection of documents that were designed to illustrate the divinity of christ in a way that was noteworthy and understandable to audiences in the first century so jesus this is why the debate cries me crazy evangelicals pretend that jesus is this completely unique singular figure no one like him ever in history and that's not true resurrection is of course a recurring theme for ancient deities there's a lot of components of the gospels that are basically god marketing from the first century but neither is that you can make historical claim that because there's some similarities which these these jesus versus mithra versus dionysus versus horus images are wildly overblown and not based on good scholarship um it's just it drives me crazy it drives me crazy most historians accept that jesus of nazareth was very likely an actual historical figure so the kind of jesus mythicists are not the kind of majority opinion in the academy even if you exclude church scholarship and you just go with secular institutions that jesus was a myth is not a majority view of course though the idea that jesus was god is not an idea that is accepted in secular scholarship he's he's a historical figure a very important one that shaped western civilization in major ways so if you have concerns about jesus and the resurrection as depicted in the gospels which by the way tell pretty different stories especially john that should not be because of any similarities that you've seen online about mithra krishna diagnosis or horus there are other reasons to be skeptical my podcast is not really about that but there's of course if you if you want to if you want to pull on that thread and see how far it goes it goes quite far indeed uh i will give you a link to wikipedia of all places about jesus and comparative methodology on the show notes this week for ask science mike um which you found on asklinesmark.com but i try to avoid wikipedia but this article is really good it actually is a good summary of the sources uh which you can all are all linked there you can explore yourself if you want to really dig into this i am a christian not because of some like really compelling historical claim that there was a resurrection uh that is definitely a minority opinion in the church very very very very very very minority i have no problem being a christian if it turns out that jesus was never bodily resurrected i think there were a lot of first century christians who who who maybe like had never even considered a bodily resurrection um and to be so obsessed with that despite some of the writings attributed to paul i think is uh i think you miss a lot of the value of the way in which jesus taught us to approach god and approach others if you're obsessed with the resurrection um that's not to say uh i don't like theology based on the resurrection that i don't contemplate a physically risen christ i do um but yeah unique historical uniqueness is not the feature i'm looking for in my faith experiences in the christian church i'm looking for a religion a religion an organized religion with lots of scholarship about how to encounter the divine and some way of understanding god and understanding myself through communal practice of faith that's what i want from the church that's what i want from christ and through christ i've had truly beautiful experiences with god to the point that despite my kind of better ideas as a skeptic i just can't get past that empty tomb [Music] hey science mike this is lauren from florida my question is do you think there are compelling reasons to believe that god is good outside of using the bible or appealing to personal experience or do you have to appeal to the biblical narrative or an experience that you can't explain away in order to get there so what would you tell somebody who wants to believe that god is good but doesn't know where they stand with the bible and doesn't have any personal experiences that necessarily point to um a loving god thank you you sound so thoughtful and intelligent and considered um but in your question i hear this appeal to like a rigorous and logical understanding of faith and i just don't i don't have one and i don't ever try to convince anyone of anything about god um that's that's not what my life is about that's not what my work is about uh i'm ju i'm over that so i'll go into this because you asked me but i want to make sure that the way i'm relaying this is i'm assuming it's you who are asking that you're not asking me how you could convince someone else because i'm not about convincing other people of things about god but i will tell you as a friend what i think and how i approach the divine um and i really thought about your question deeply and i don't have any reason to believe in a loving god that doesn't come down to either my personal experiences or the personal experience of others remember the way that i view the bible is basically as a catalog of the personal experiences other people have had with god so i don't view the bible as a separate category than personal experience it's just personal experiences written down which i don't see as a problem by the way i love the bible for that at this point in my life my faith is so profoundly personal it's profoundly profoundly personal personal and so i have trouble with the kinds of heady discussions the logical let's demonstrate the validity of fact claims let's let's ground things philosophically that people have about god through the lens of like rational analysis or even debate anything of that that category dealing with the existence or characteristics of god like it's just a password to me now i mean i can maybe over a beer kind of as a thought experiment a game i'm in um it's just not it's not where i'm at but the very last part of your question so what would i say you know someone who wanted to believe in a loving god but had trouble because that there's these there's this lack of evidence is maybe one way to phrase that i don't know i don't know how you would say it and what i would say is let go of the intellectual pursuit of god entirely and i know that's strange for me to say because it sounds like i'm saying have a blind faith and that is believe me not what i am saying what i'm saying is how we understand the way that human beings relate to the divine through psychology and through neuroscience is that people don't experience a loving god through an understanding but through a knowing and i don't mean some kind of philosophical truth claim knowing i mean a knowing like you know your close friends or you know the sunrise you've experienced something beautiful with your friends and with the sunrise if you're a boring person so cultivate practices in your life that have been shown through science to make people feel closer to god things like regular prayer or meditation 15 minutes a day six days a week for six weeks has been shown to make people feel closer to god as you meditate or pray focus on the image of a god that loves you and that will make a loving god feel more real and closer to you over time practice faith with others in some kind of community i like church i get it that a lot of people don't i think church like a church that's not toxic um pastored by a woman for example uh with really bold language about you know being lgbtq affirming like printed on the building and in everything they hand out are usually good signs for me that i'm going to be in a church environment that i'm not going to find toxic and when i'm in those rooms when i engage in the liturgy which is weird at first for me but the repetition the practice in community does make god feel closer to us and makes god feel like god is a loving god it for me at this point my life it's all about practice it's all about experience which is why i am a mystic it doesn't mean my faith is blind or thoughtless i do have rubrics for evaluating theological claims primarily through the lens of consent and harm to others i believe that god is love that's that's a part of the scriptures through contemplation and through study i have found increasingly resonant over time not just that god is loving but god is love itself that everywhere there is love there is god but i can't uh i can't ground that somewhere for you but all i can do is kind of show you the road signs that led me to that place moments of stillness and quiet and contemplation where god drew near moments of my day and my life where god's love felt apparent both in wonderful days and terrible days i have found god to be a faithful companion through my life and a dear dear friend and it's strange to tell you about a dear friend whose existence i very often doubt myself at least as some kind of being or personal deity but i i can't get away from those those tremendous moments those personal experiences that you speak of um i guess i would say of knowing god through personal experience don't knock it till you've tried it [Music] our last question this week came in via email and it reads dear mike we met at the liturgist gathering in london i've been plagued by the following question for a while now do people fully recover or heal from chronic depression emphasis on chronic some background information i've struggled with depression my entire life recently i got diagnosed as autistic which i'm sure plays into this but doesn't fully explain my neutral emotionally speaking is it neutral but rather like a four or five out of ten instead of a six or even a seven worse i easily default to feeling miserable or even suicidal you've talked about how the brain tends to go there more easily if you've considered suicide or simply had suicidal ideation in the past i understand situational depression is different and recovery from that is likely slash common to return to my question is there scientific evidence of chronic depressed individuals ever truly leaving chronic depression behind without recurrence for a long time or period of life thanks so much for any insight you may be able to share keep being awesome i truly admire your work well a couple of things one um i think the research i was citing said that people who've attempted suicide are more likely to have those recurring thoughts based on some changes in your neurological structures and and and neurochemistry following a suicide attempt um but i i could be wrong um i think more important is talk about depression and recurring depression is really common even only in people who've only experienced depression one time 20 to 30 percent say that their symptoms never go away completely we understand today that depression seems to have genetic components and neurological components that it's not simply a matter of temperament or circumstance that there's something more fundamental going on and because of that what i've seen in the literature and in the language of health care providers is that they don't talk about major depression or clinical depression in terms of cures or recovery but instead in terms of management and i know that that that's that's a hard way to think about depression when you're stuck in it but it might be a more helpful framing that depression in some way is a part of you and it's a part of your life that has to be managed uh i am also an adult with autism and that is a part of my life that i have to manage and that i often need help managing and by often i mean multiple times per day my wife's out of town right now and uh i forgot to eat all day until i uh started getting lightheaded and kind of faint so i need help managing this ongoing concern this ongoing health issue mental health issue physical health issue of course as an autistic person i am appreciative of some of the gifts and insights that autism brings to me and autism is so intrinsically a part of who i am it's difficult if not impossible for me to tell what parts of me come from being autistic because i all of me is autistic and this is going to sound strange but i've started to think about depression in a very similar way because although i don't have pro chronic depression i am prone to repeat situat situational depression it is not hard for me to become depressed so most times i'm actually kind of a sanguine person i i tend towards positivity my neutral might be a seven or even an eight but as circumstances change even just increased stressors or deviations from my routine my new home base can become a three or a four i've sometimes wondered if kind of my increased disposition towards depression despite being kind of a more emotionally positive person could in fact be related to autism spectrum disorder and i i do understand that it seems that people with asd are more likely to experience depression so my own experiences which are really the only thing i'm an expert in with depression and suicidality have taught me some fairly effective coping skills as i manage my depression i use cognitive behavioral therapy whenever i notice my mood is drifting down or that i've gone from feeling down to feeling nothing at all those those truly tough times of depression when when everything feels well just like you're you're in a fog barely existing at all in those times i use cognitive behavioral therapy to notice patterns associated with negative thinking especially about myself and interrupt and correct them so i might think oh it's never going to get any better and life really isn't worth living and i'll stop and i'll say no that's not true life is worth living and then i might name two or three or four reasons that i'm happy to be alive i'll name how i feel as well sometimes when we feel depressed or anxious simply naming that helps sometimes following that along i feel depressed because now you're in chronic depression that might be hard to say you'd say well there's nothing in my life that i feel like is leading to this depression so you could say i feel depressed because of how my brain is structured you might find naming your depression provides some relief i reach out to trusted friends and family as soon as i notice that i'm entering a period of depression so that i'm not alone as i work through it i talk to mental health professionals and i do my best to act on their recommendations that is more difficult when you're depressed but reaching out to friends and families means they support me in that process they ask me how i'm doing and how my treatment is going and i open all the blinds in my house and i let the sun in you might say well what does that have to do with anything i don't know just for me sometimes a little sunlight makes me feel better now here's another thing i'd like you to understand about depression there's a personality typing system called the big five system it's one of the few personality systems that has good peer-reviewed science demonstrating its effectiveness and its reproducibility it places you on several traits five traits actually as spectrums and one of those spectrums is is effectively negative affect how prone to negative thoughts and emotions are you my wife is a person with very high negative affect and as researchers contemplated and studied negative affect what they found is people tended to do positive research on positive effect and negative research on negative affect biasing the research so some researchers started to look for the positives of negative affect and they found that those people people with high negative affect are here for a reason they keep our species alive positive affect people are easier to fool or deceive they are not very cautious and so people with negative affect are the the watchers the guardians of their social groups watching out for potential dangers in a way that the more happy-go-lucky people don't notice and listen i don't want to minimize your experience i've been deeply depressed before even recently take what i'm saying here and what i'm about to say in that light i believe depression is serious and i believe depression is part of your brain keeping you alive you are depressed because in some way your brain has identified depression as a survival strategy that can help you navigate the world i am not saying that you should be thankful for your depression or something awful and dismissive like that what i'm saying is that for me it helps me to manage my depression when i understand that depression is a survival strategy that for me depression is probably related to autism spectrum disorder to some genetic predispositions and some pretty dramatic life experiences depression has been there at times when my feelings have been too powerful and too overwhelming to directly process and has offered me the space even in a state of depression to gain distance from the experiences so that i can ultimately process them safely i don't know what the recovery rates look like for chronic depression i couldn't find a consistent answer in literature what i do know is that it seems common among psychologists and mental health professionals to talk about depression in terms of management and if that sounds like it could be helpful for you i would talk to your healthcare practitioner about ways to manage your depression my list may or may not be one that helps you but i hope i hope you find that over time chronic depression is something that doesn't stop or impair you from living a full life or a life with joy or life with companionship and that you find that when you're honest about your feelings with others it promotes honesty in them as well and may chronic depression in your life be a gateway to profound and intimate friendships because those in my opinion are part of what makes life worth living in the first place [Music] well you've made it through another episode of ask science mike and i'm so glad you're here it's good to be back on a regular basis i don't know if we'll keep the weekly thing going but i'm at least going to do every other week until i finish this damn book i'm working on i want to thank greg nordin for his work on ask science mike i'd like to thank andrew golucky for handling the pre-production on this episode and of course i want to thank all of my patrons on patreon who keep ask sciencemic going if you'd like to join them in making this show financially possible just go to ask sciencemike.com and click on the patreon icon thanks for listening everyone and i'll talk to you next week