ASM165 LIVE in Placentia, CA

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coming to you live from placentia presbyterian church in placentia california it's ask science [Applause] mike [Music] science faith welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host mike mccarthy known on the internet as science mike i'm your basic deordane college dropout fool with a very popular podcast this week we have a live episode so the questions are unfiltered and the answer is completely unrehearsed so use google to fact check literally everything that i say tonight i do have some events coming up this month so i'd like to tell you about them october 26th and 27th i'll be at montreat north carolina for evolving faith with sarah bessie rachel evans and a bunch of their friends november 3rd and 4th i will be at first congregational united church of christ in greeley colorado for a conference on contemplative spirituality in christianity the liturgist gathering is coming to minneapolis november 16th and 17th and it is coming to nashville friday november 30th and saturday december 1st i also want to let you know that in the next few days we're doing an online pay what you can book club around panatheism and mysticism called the cosmic campfire you can sign up today by going to cosmic campfire party but we've got a podcast to do so let's get it started [Music] my name is jeff and in richard dawkins book the god delusion he proposes a seven point continuum one number one is a person of whatever faith who is deeply invested in their faith and would consider themselves a fundamentalist or whatever you might call that at the other end seven is the atheist for whom there is no external power of any sort where do you place yourself on that continuum and why fantastic question about the dawkins scale um so that's a scale of certainty about the existence of god so i don't know that one necessarily denotes fundamentalism merely a high degree of certainty about whether god exists or not um i think when i was a southern baptist i would have been a 1.1 or a 1 very very certain not only that god existed but that i knew specifically which god existed and then that god sent jesus as an incarnate son the whole thing i was a one the great thing about one religions or high certainty religions is i call them atheist training camps so if you look at the two denominations which in their d converts so 44 of americans will go through a faith transition at some point in their life um less than 44 of southern baptists and mormons go through a faith transition but of those who do they are much more likely to become atheists than your former methodists or presbyterians who are just become brunchers and that's because when you've been had this high degree of epistemological certainty and the systematic theology set up if it starts to crack at all it cracks big time so i went from a one southern baptist to a 6.9 atheist over a period of about six months real quick and that mainly happened because i read the bible a lot and that's true so today on a scale of one to seven probably the square root of negative 1 also known as i the imaginary number like the question doesn't make sense to me anymore because what does it mean to be certain about god what the heck do i even mean by god um so what i have found is that although in a certain framework i really appreciate skepticism and atheism that framework is a particular world view that i actually ascribe to materialism what is is what is this is real but what i understand about materialism from materialism itself from science is that when we study the human brain dawkins style inquiry into the world centers your entire life experience not only in the left hemisphere of the brain but in the very front of the left brain and the prefrontal cortex the enlightenment has caused a massive biasing of the human experience where we only trust reductive knowledge so you might have heard that on the two hemispheres of the brain the left brain is logical and the right brain is creative and that's total horseshit no neuroscientist has said that in 30 years what is true is that the left brain is reductive and the right brain is holistic so the left brain sees woven fabric and a filler inside the cushion and staples i didn't have to look i just knew they were there it sees a welded metal frame that sees various diameters it sees angles and the right brain sees a chair so when i ask myself what is my degree of certainty about god what did i just do i told my brain fear left and by doing that neurologically i've now shaped my life experience your left prefrontal cortex can't fall in love your left prefrontal cortex can't have its breath taken away by a sunset it needs the help of the right brain to do that i have learned that at the same time i have the same kind of existential epistemological questions that every atheist in the world has why i say that half of my brain is an atheist today that for the kind of experiences i have in meditation the kind of experiences i have when i've had a mystical experience the kind of experiences i have when i look in the faces of people that pass on the street and i see the children of god all that evaporates if i ask what my number is on the dawkins scale so my entire approach to faith is to let my left brain do my left brain stuff when it comes to physics and when it comes to asking questions about what truly is and by the way the idea is i will defend to other people if you don't think the world is round we're going to have a conversation and i'm going to be kind of a jerk if you want to say that you don't think climate change is occurring on the planet i'll say you're very likely wrong because i can use science and i can use skepticism to defend these ideas that are happening in our shared reality but when i apply that to god all that love disappears i'm just alone again and some people choose that and it's fine i love atheists they are some of the by the data most moral people in the world but there's just something about being in a room we i just got back from london and i was in a room with a couple hundred people in central london and we all chanted shalom for about 10 minutes and whatever happened in that room doesn't fit on the dawkins scale and it's far too beautiful for me to toss away just so i can be more certain about the structure of the world this is the humility we find in a mystical faith even a mystical christianity where i'm no longer making a post-enlightenment defense that at some point there was a man who was god who rose from an empty tomb after being crucified and instead i think what does sitting with that story tell me about myself tell me about others and maybe hint about the logic cosmos because if i ask the dawkins scale to interpret martin luther king jr saying the moral arc of the universe spins towards justice i say that's nonsense the moral arc of the universe is non-existent but the arc of the universe spins towards entropy and that's true for solving any physical problem but for finding the will to wake up in america in 2018 i need some love i need some jesus i don't just need like ambiguous love i need the person of jesus christ to say i came for every person every woman every brown person every queer person that no matter what story humanity tells itself to rip itself apart there's another story in which jesus said i came to draw all things together so on the dawkins scale i am an i [Music] hi there first off uh thank you so much for what you do um you inspire me you inspire so many people in this room so thank you my question relates to what we talked about earlier before the podcast aired and that was on building community outside of this podcast spear and um i've seen you demonstrate that in the liturgist gatherings i've seen you demonstrate that in gatherings like this um but also i see um a lot of people rising up and wanting to build gatherings of their own with the church and so i've had the privilege of trying to build these gatherings with the church that i'm currently at and i'm just curious kind of some guidelines you go by when building safe spaces yeah guidelines okay thank you thank you are you uh on staff at that church no would they would they have you in leadership just like curiosity based on your gender yes yes okay so they're already i'm already huge fans okay uh already a huge fan first thing i've learned recently and this is a hard lesson for me this is a i've been depressed lesson there are no safe spaces they do not exist i thought i had made a safe space for a lot of people and it turns out i made a safe space for post evangelical post mainline mostly white dudes that was the start of my work and they felt super safe because guess what we were all the same and so when i said something that we all felt safe oh wow and then uh as this kind of deconstruction process went the way i kind of found a way back into the christian faith was through liberation theology an idea that started in latin america and then took root in american soil through black liberation theology which is fire which exposed me to a small problem i am the physical and sociological embodiment of one of the most powerful oppressive groups in human history straight white western europeans so this space that i thought was safe it was super safe for people of privilege who for the first time felt like they were on the outside because their churches got mad and made them leave which is bad don't hear me wrong people commit suicide when they've been ejected from a faith community but no post evangelicals are being shot by the police there are no safe spaces uh so what i've learned about creating spaces well is i've learned to listen from the margins i've my people straight white dudes have been in charge too long have a clue about holding other viewpoints together so my go-to is to say what are black women and queer people doing so mickey scott bay jones who's a dear friend of mine says that we cannot create safe spaces we can only create brave spaces brave spaces are where we invited to come in with our [ \_\_ ] and show up for each other and in a brave space as my other dear friend hillary mcbride let me know recently there's a great rule for dealing with all the different viewpoints in the room it's called ouch oops because guess what tonight it's very likely that someone in this room has just begun a journey where they're thinking through the theological implications of same-sex marriage and they might have a question about that and their question driven with beautiful intent of knowing and honoring others might hurt someone who's actually queer so in a brave space as you are hurt you say out loud ouch and then the person without asking what the ouch is about at all says oops and moves on we acknowledge the fact that our best intentions can still hurt other people and we accept it into a space together because damn it we're here because we believe universal human love is possible that's why i'm in the room tonight that's why i give up so much my life to meet all of you is because i believe honest to goodness we can all love each other ouch oops the other thing churches need to understand you might be the sweetest most sincere staff and clergy team in human history and it'll still terrify people when you say the same thing that the staff person that molested them said so there's something about this entire format rows of pews a stage lights across that for some people brings up not just i didn't like the color of the carpet or that music was bad but the deepest hurt they ever experienced so what i have found and the reason i think millions of people listen to the podcast is i don't expect people to believe anything i don't expect people to behave a certain way except with respect for each other's dignity and i host but i don't lead there's nowhere i'm not trying to convince you of anything tonight if you're an atheist tonight and you leave an atheist yes as long as you're happy if you're a christian tonight something i say makes you an atheist but it makes you more free i'm excited about it right what i'm trying to do is create a space for people to know each know themselves better to heal and then connect with each other in a healthy way which means a lot of the kind of things we think are important in churches just aren't they just aren't and the final thing i would tell churches is if you're trying to reach a certain community this is tough because we follow jesus and jesus was the savior of the world we believe however none of us are jesus we're not the savior of the world so if you're trying to reach a particular group in your church get some of the people in that group and to plan and lead with you churches say we want to reach millennials how do we get them on the steering committee or whatever no if you want to reach the memorials and community get about three of them go to lunch and say what can we do and they'll probably talk about something justice oriented in the community and just do that it doesn't matter if it's on a sunday morning i think we're going through an era right now where a lot of institutional scaffolding that served the faith well for years is crumbling and that's because it got commandeered by systems of control and power and domination of oppression and i believe in a very i way imaginary number that maybe right now the name of christianity is being reclaimed by christ and that's why so many churches are in trouble because if we care more about the reputation of a given church than people have been hurt in a community i just don't think that's the gospel so create brave spaces host don't lead and invite the people you're trying to reach to not only advise but actively lead and partner in whatever you're doing um how many white churches went to an inner city area and thought we're gonna we're gonna redeem this community with straight eight praise music and then why didn't it work i don't know if you're in spanish neighborhood maybe people on the platform should speak spanish right um just simple stuff like that so it's not easy but it works hello hi um so i listened to your podcast about two years ago and made me an atheist so thanks my mom says [ \_\_ ] you but i say thank you um i've heard you talk a lot about you know his question like what is god and like kind of breaking that down but then i also hear you talk a lot about christ personally and a lot of the things that i ran into was like yeah jesus is cool i can get down with jesus but i can't get down with the what is god thing and so then i floated into mysticism and i was like i'm down with this and then i was like nah i'm not down with this actually and then i recently got hired at a private christian school and irony so i'm a living lie every day well i work with kids with autism so i'm i'm contracted i'm not for the school but i'm at the school yes listening to them thank you by the way yeah like a wolf in sheep's clothing exactly um and it's very triggering because i don't have anybody here seen the movie jesus camp uh it's on netflix go watch it if you haven't but that was my childhood basically just like evangelical charismatic spirits always doing something uh so my question for you is the disconnect seems very apparent to me but it's taken for granted a lot of christian circles and i keep hearing you jump back and forth between we need jesus but what is god and that's where i'm kind of sitting at and it's in a unique position because my sister is going through kind of a similar thing that i did and i don't want to be like hey listen to this podcast i mean i'm an atheist uh but i also want to give her sound advice because she is kind of without friends so i want to be able to help her out as well so yeah thank you that's tough that's tough so you're post theism atheism private christian school which they tend to be a little more towards the conservative end of the christian spectrum to begin with why is that oh indoctrinate in the future okay um the main line's like we just want to love people and the conservative christians like we need to make more of us well we're going to die out in a generation do you remember that anybody in the conservative world we're going to die out in a generation wow god has not given us a spirit of fear um i just feel hopeful with what you just said one you went into a place that is spiritually antagonistic to your worldview but you did it to serve a community that is often forgotten and neglected in the world so first thank you thank you for caring about children with autism they are often forgotten and if they remember they're thought of as strange i'm also really hopeful because you're not sure what to think about god but you can get on board with jesus and as a weirdo christian i think that's what jesus is for if god is in any way the creator and sustainer of all things then everything i know about physics tells me god's pretty pretty hard to understand pretty much as soon as you get in the realm of language you've blown it that's why i love jesus one of the reasons is god in jesus has a face and a name and used words like when we have god talking in the bible moses is like who are you and god's like i am which is already a head trip in english but i understand that if you know hebrew and you read it in the original language it means i am that i am while simultaneously be meaning i will be that which i will be so like the first kind of thing god's saying to moses is existentialism thousands of years ago he beat the french by a long way and every time we see god other than in the garden which i think is interesting god portrayed in scripture god is this distant unknowable oh by the way if you look at god you die kind of thing and jesus made people breakfast and he fed him and if they were sick he healed them that they were tired he took care of them he seemed much more concerned with people existing in community together and helping others then getting people to make statements of belief he seemed to have most of his frustration for religious elites and most of his patience with people who didn't really quite know what was going on not just patience compassion love grace in matthew when it talks about the crowd this large of probably mostly agricultural people that would follow jesus where he went with no theological or scriptural education of their day go try to find jesus rebuke the crowd in the gospels look for it so you're not sure who god is but you like jesus and you have found your neighbor to be autistic children in conservative christian homes or at least in a conservative christian school and you as a good samaritan have decided i don't care what it cost me with a holy people these kids by the side of the road i'm there you identify however you want to me you are a kin in the kingdom of christ so if jesus is all you can handle just handle jesus that's what all the disciples did every time they mentioned god they were super wrong every time they'd be like jesus god done it on there he's like whoa man where did you get that put the sword away and there what is the right hand thing this is all about the kingdom of heaven is like a like a yeast what we're so obsessed with getting it right i don't care if people have i get so many emails thanks mike what if you die and you go to heaven first i'll be like holy [ \_\_ ] and you stand before god what are you going to say what if you were wrong what if it really is a profession of faith or whatever and i just don't worry about that because the story i see told in the scripture over and over and over one is does just not a lot of talk about the afterlife and a lot of talk about this life and number two all the commandments seem to be synthesized on love loving god and loving other people and when when when when religious elite tried to like contextualize that and proof text that and apply a hermeneutic and a systematic theology jesus said take care of the people that the religious elite won't touch because it's better to be a despised minority who cares for people than to be a holy person who looks right in the eyes of society and does nothing so if you're an atheist who helps autistic children if there's an in and out you're in and the people shouting unclean better watch out [Music] i want to know why you think there is no safe place that is contrary to what i believe i haven't uh you know and i'm i'm i'm maybe wrong but i i believe there is a safe place but i want to hear your rebuttal i would actually be really interested in hearing uh you tell me about what you see as a safe space because i'm genuinely fascinated why why does why does the bible say fear not [Music] i want you to keep your your thoughts and whatnot but i i like i like to know i'm on the right path yes okay thank you so much for your question and for speaking up this is a room where disagreement is not just allowed it's encouraged so i'm happy to respond i don't know that we'll enter a place of agreement but i hope we can enter a place where we are friends wouldn't that be amazing in 2018. um the reason i say that there are no safe spaces is because spaces have people in them and the way i understand the human animal is that we have a very very powerful set of innate drives to watch out for ourselves and those closest to us first our social group next and then to actually be kind of antagonistic or afraid of people that don't make that group and so that's always in every room this tension between the selfish animal and the altruistic animal and we don't particularly understand what it's like growing up as someone else and the more someone grew up in a different environment than we did the less we understand what their life is like so some of the things that make make us feel safe and not have fear might make someone else feel afraid so i can't speak for anyone else but i can speak for me so right now i am only speaking for me when i grew up growing in the southeastern united states any time i saw a police car i felt safer because police are here to serve and to protect that made me feel safe as i've grown older and made friends with people with a lot more different backgrounds i've understood that some of my friends in tallahassee florida who have dark skin who are black when they see a police car even when they were my age as a child they were afraid and nervous so the same symbol a police car made me feel safe and made someone else feel unsafe when i grew up nothing i was a bullied kid i had no friends as a kid i got my i got beat up all the time do you know where i never got beat up in a church so to this day i walk into churches and i go okay and i see one of these and i go oh wow i'm safe but to my friends and i speak only for me i don't know what your experience is i've had friends tell me that they grew up in church and at some point in their life they were a little boy and i was a little boy and we were friends and then one day a strange thing happened to me i noticed a girl who did not have the cooties i can remember it like it was yesterday suddenly this previously strange and formidable creature was the most fascinating thing i'd ever seen and i was very nervous but i went home i told my mom and she thought it was adorable i told my dad and he thought it was awesome so i had my first crush on a girl well a dear friend of mine the first time he had that moment it was another boy now he was baptist just like i was and when he had that experience he was terrified and started to pray because he knew it wasn't okay for a boy to have a crush on another boy so as our lies unfolded i became a sunday school teacher and a deacon i got married in the church hundreds of people showed up to celebrate that union when i have kids the church affirmed and loved and affirmed and loved and supported and loved and affirmed and my friend tried to pretend he got married and it didn't work because he wasn't attracted to his wife and she couldn't handle that and they got divorced and then he told people at his church that he was gay and they drove him out he didn't want to leave the church he was driven out and he found refuge in the at the time underground gay culture in atlanta georgia lived through the hiv aids epidemic so when he walks into a church he does not feel safe and that's what i mean when there are no safe spaces everybody is carrying their own suitcase full of concrete and that what that weight that they carry is the wounds that have been inflicted on them in life and do i believe that jesus wants to wipe every tear from every eye you bet i do and i think if it's just the person in jesus they have found a safe space but when you add one more sheep to that flock things get dicey so the way we create the safest spaces possible is we understand that even with my best efforts to love and honor and support other people sometimes i will still hurt them and that means it's not safe but i can make it brave by saying i will respond with grace when it's brought to my attention that i hurt you in some way and in doing so we can provide healing to the world this has become like the most christian episode of as9 spike in years but that's the opportunity the opportunity for christianity is not to win elections it's not to have influence with the oval office or the halls of congress the potential for christianity in this country is to say we love you whoever you are we support you whoever you are we accept you and we affirm you whoever you are and not in some let's build amazing structures way but in a when you're in the hospital we're going to bring casserole away i imagine what it would have been like for my friend if he would have said i have a crush on a boy and his church would have loved him as much as my church loved me that would have been a safe world but we're not there yet but maybe the kingdom of heaven is making the whole world that way [Applause] hello my name is leilani um so i read your book this past summer and it shook some stuff up um and uh so one part that really stood out or at least what i understood it to be was this piece where you're talking about how your more conservative background and rigid religious structure actually helped develop the neural paths in your head and uh inclined you later to be able to engage a more mystic understanding of your faith um so my question is i work with a lot of youth and kids in my community i work for a local nonprofit and we are faith-based and we care about [Music] like faith and discipleship and creating spaces for students to engage that but now i'm in this place where i'm like i'm questioning everything i don't want to just teach you lies but or teach you something i'm not certain about but is it still worth engaging these practices or structures to help you later so if you could just yeah speak into when you're raising kids walking with youth what's your responsibility or how do you do that responsibly wow great question really really good question was the problem with my religious upbringing that i was told that the world was created in six days and that two people walked in a garden with god or was the problem with my upbringing that i was taught to be deeply ashamed of every natural impulse my body had i think if when i was in my 30s i would have simply learned that the universe took billions of years to form but that the the the subtext of biblical literalism was truly god is love not god wants to send you to hell unless you make the correct cognitive decision and affirm that verbally i don't think i would have had the messy smear fall apart here's the thing to teach children you have to lie to them to teach humans you have to if not lie you have to be inaccurate you can't learn about quantum dynamics unless you learn about atoms first when we talk about atoms there's something called the orbital model so you've got a nucleus you've got electrons that spin around it like a moon circling a planet and that's utter hogwash that is not how atoms work what actually happens is wave functions collapse when force carrying particles convey information to one another and therefore these probabilistic intersections called protons are surrounded by a wave function probabilistic cloud of electrons that cannot be definitively tracked in space and time simultaneously which helps you understand an atom this or the second one but guess what what i just said even about the wave functions is still a metaphor that doesn't convey the reality of the universe to really get electrons you've got to be fantastic at math and when you see people that actually get quantum physics on a mathematical level and you ask them to describe it you can just see the frustration on their face in the same way that when someone asked me what it was like on that beach it was like the veil coming off my wife's face on our wedding day it was like a mustard seed whatever god is is so grand and so magnificent and by the way if you're an atheist just substitute the word universe or god right now you'll get the same place whatever it is is so grand and so magnificent the only way there is metaphor so if we tell metaphors with love we do no harm as long as we are open so i stop believing in god and that i still taught my i'd said the sinner's prayer with my oldest daughter not believing in god and felt super ashamed but she had trouble sleeping because she was afraid that if she died she would go to hell it's the only answer i had was to talk about sin and salvation it's the only tool set i had so the way we do it is when children are very small they're developmental appropriate for certainty by the way did you know young children can only understand things that have faces or exist in the physical world you cannot teach a two-year-old about justice you can only teach them about a judge and the bible begins with what god walking with two people there's no better way to explain god to a two-year-old than the garden of eden so when they were little i told them the stories of faith and as they got older i let their questions guide when i would open up more so it came from god is to this is what i believe god is and this is what we believe well what do other people believe then i would tell them and i remember the first time madison asked me well how do we know we're right and they're wrong i said kiddo that beats me that honesty invites a dialogue and a discussion that leads to a faith that doesn't have to be torn down later i just think the important thing is that when we talk about faith we talk about it redemptive uh at good sam we had some sunday school literature jenny was teaching vbs um jenny has a limit to the degree of bible she would like to instruct to people including children and so she asked me if i would help out because we got to this one part that the recommended curriculum was to talk about a salvation experience and to take to have children write their names on paper and to nail their names to the cross say jesus took all your sin away when he died i was like i can just imagine like these shoulder every night this is something you did so we took the same message that god is love and we took a cross and we did talk about how unconditional love scares people and when you say that everyone belongs it scares people and that jesus knows what it means to take a stand for loving others and then we wrote our names on valentine hearts and when they would come up to put their heart on the cross i would whisper in their ear god loves you and so do i i don't want to throw out the christian story i don't want to throw out the bible it's like the bible and harry potter my two favorite serial works um i wish i was kidding when we do the liturgical gathering while i do a liturgy we do a sacred reading where i read from parts of the old testament the new testament and the deathly hallows and uh i don't want to throw any of that stuff out i just want to stop using it to terrify people and kick their asses let's use this great story of faith and this guy this is the most christian science mike ever this great cloud of witnesses all these people people say why do you call yourself a christian well the queer theologians can try to redeem that word who am i to say that i won't right if if people whose descendants were stolen from the continent of africa and brought to america on ships where they were owned by people who called themselves christians if those people can call themselves christians in whom i to say let's throw out that story instead i ask how can this story be used for redemption for liberation and for love and in all those ways friends i'm a christian and i think it's okay if kids are too as long as they aren't shamed and ostracized if they have questions or they disagree or they say i'm not into this the church i want is one where atheists don't get kicked out of youth group and there's no strengths attached so just try to get to that point [Music] uh kind of going back to youth uh we have an election coming up several hopefully in the future and uh the demographic that uh doesn't that doesn't show up the elections is young people i want to know what your take on why that is and if there's any solutions also can we just make an app and vote on that great questions and i always love talking politics in churches so um never goes wrong young people are idealistic politics isn't so if young people do get engaged politically they get behind some candidate who says let's start over they feel the burns so to speak and then because of political machinations maybe that person doesn't win or maybe the person didn't get enough votes or maybe they get railroaded or i was trying to think of a good colloquialism and then they go but i disagree with like 19 of the person who won the primaries positions i can't vote for somebody who disagrees with me on partial birth free range chickens see what i did there you thought i went one way and i went another i built tension released that you laugh it's my favorite thing but some like issue didn't line up so they go well i'm out i'm not voting and then somebody terrible wins hypothetically and and then like ah see the system's broken here's the thing the system really is broken it really is it doesn't matter if the donkeys or the elephants are in office multinational corporations are in charge doesn't matter they and the multinationals have figured out if they play a game of chess against themselves and they make the board social issues we'll all fight about marriage while they vacuum up the entire economy if they get us if they if they make us play social issue chess then white families on the edge of poverty in the midwest or below the poverty line will say that other brown people coming across the border also below the poverty line are the problem not the people taking all the money from every interaction and destroying local economies through massive shipping infrastructures do you know when multi-nationals open up a business in a town for every one job they produce they kill three to six which is nothing nothing compared to the 18 to 24 jobs lost when it comes in just one hour or just one day via a postal carrier i'm not naming corporations here because i'm terrified of them you notice all name politicians all name church leaders not corporations so there's this whole game going on and the way the political class that serves the corporate class wins is to disenfranchise most people and then manipulate gullible blocks of voters that's right i just called the republican and democratic basis gullible so the system's broken and the system breaks more when they convince us not to participate so i went hard i've never really weighed in i've waited on policy publicly i'd never waited on candidates until trump and clinton and i went oh boy this can't happen so the first time ever we did like a special liturgist podcast episode we were like we know this audience is almost entirely millennial and post millennial y'all go vote and they did mostly for gary johnston and um or wrote in bernie right so what we have to do is have a conversation with young people about how to translate idealism into reality so if we want to destroy the system i'm down you want to abolish ice sign me up but we're not going to abolish ice with hashtags and we're not going to abolish ice like everybody just shows up and it's like you ever watch the office you remember the office you remember when michael scott declared bankruptcy i declare bankruptcy if we all right now go to an immigration detention facility and say like you're abolished like it'll go on social media and the people in the building will have a chuckle to be like liberals the way we change things if the system has a three to five percent bias hypothetically towards one party in the popular vote then we gotta turn out ten percent of a vote difference to attack the system from within and outside it the apathy millennials expressed especially in the midwest and southern states and the last election really gave the system a strong boost the judiciary forget the supreme court federal benches all over the country have a 30-year stack now that's a huge problem it's not going to take one election it's going to take 15 20 elections and what i want is not for the democrats to sweep control of government the democrats are two and a half percent better on issues of racial justice than republicans and four and a half percent better for my queer friends what i want is every republican and every democrat who's elected in office in america to have trouble sleeping at night because a riled up an active electorate is looking over their shoulder and saying if you blow this you're out when we show up they lose now can we do it with an app no i've had too much time in information security personally to think involving electrons and voting is a good idea you show me any system and i by myself with enough time we'll find a way to compromise and use that system against itself what do we need paper ballots with audit trails and automatic voter registration and a national holiday so that people who are economically disadvantaged get the day off work and they get paid while they go vote and the corporations will say we can't afford it and we'll say i saw your quarterly report shut up organizing the government as a government which is us by the way is the way we keep you from creating policies that make you richer and us poor so we're going to register every person and we're going to make a national holiday and let's i love mail-in ballots they're paper they're auditable they don't have any significant exposure for voter fraud which is not a widespread issue anyway let's get the paper it's fine if machines count them let machines scan them but when we have a recount let's have paper let's be sure our electoral process is working once now we can't do that now there's a significant part of america that wants none of that to happen because there's a huge problem america's getting younger and browner scares some people not just on the right by the way i don't know if you've seen a picture of the us congress a lot of white old male democrats serving um so those those people don't want this to happen so the way we do it is we not we not only get involved voting we get involved at the primary level i'm so excited about how many queer folks how many women and how many people of color in this last primary season got on ballots we start taking state legislatures forget the feds start taking state legislatures and start changing these policies california by the way should be way ahead on all of this right if we're supposed to be the the people's republic of california is what they call us back on or america of the future as joy reid says we should use the electoral gap here to drive i think maybe with the number two or three priority in california should be electoral reform we should show we should show the rest of the country how it's done and eventually i'm getting real deep this you didn't know it's political science mike we need to reform the electoral system so that more than two parties are statistically viable so our voting methodology right now first past the post voting means if you vote for someone who's not going to be in the top two your vote was statistically wasted it's impossible there are other mathematically viable forms of voting like ranked choice or first alternate vote systems that allow you to vote for third parties without tossing your vote or making the person you agree with least win so i guess in addition to the stuff i said before i would also say toss out first past the post voting starting at the state and local level what do you believe in more science or magic i mean not saying sorry interstellar space travel okay you had me at science versus magic by the way in a huge way so but help me i didn't catch the connection between science and intersexual travel around magic could you give me the question again interstellar space travel or magic which do i believe in more which do i like more believe in more believe in more okay uh well believe it or not i am super into magic there's a place in los angeles called the magic castle it's my favorite because i go there and the impossible is real uh i watched a guy not only do amazing things with cards he held a deck of cards in front of me and i could see a card that wasn't my card and with the card up he waved the deck of cards in full sight and my card was there he didn't flip the card he transformed the card in front of my eyes and i was like magic is real for my 40th birthday my friends got us into the magic castle we spent hours in there uh and in that process another person put a deck of cards in my hand okay i got this deck of cards i'm holding it he never touched it and it became a quartz crystal that was the shape of a deck of cards powers and principalities y'all spiritual warfare it's real i've been wrong about the devil apparently he works at the magic castle in los angeles what i mean is i like thinking about the world in magical ways i actually think that's important because in science the problems that seem impossible are first solved by imagination you talk about interstate interstellar space travel which i believe is possible but today would definitely be magic before we had submarines or spaceships we had people writing stories about them so i wouldn't say which do i believe in more i don't know if we'll ever travel outside of our solar system that would create we'd need a phenomenal amount of energy that i have no idea how we would get but i would say that believing that magical things are possible can inspire us through science in finding ways to make the impossible real which is why this november i'm taking night classes at magic university to learn magic yeah so if you want magic to be real learn a lot of math and engineering and you can make the impossible possible [Music] hello hi global warming so i work a nice gig i know i know i work at an office job nine to five until i die and i just finished listening to your podcast on it sorry yeah i know and what kind of advice do you have for regular people like like myself like why should i keep on going to work and living i was just i was just telling randy i should i learned how to make a fire and how does there won't be enough wood left don't worry about that okay see just kidding i don't know so that's my question how do you why are we here we we should be doing something else if it's all just going to hell thank you that's what i like to call an easy question i i really appreciate those that like i don't have to think about um i'm being very sarcastic i saw that got lost when they feel like that's an easy question just give up uh no last week on our science mic i talked about the most recent report from the ipcc on climate change the abbreviated version is we are so screwed basically the effects of carbon in the atmosphere are more severe than we anticipated and carbon is being released into the atmosphere more than we thought and the idea was that if we do the paris accords we can limit warming to two degrees or less and when the ipc studied the impact of the comparison cords it'll take us to like three and a half degrees celsius which is a really bad zone three and a half degrees celsius so uh what do we do about that one although the report said things will be much worse than we expected by 2030 and significantly worse than we expected by 2040 we do have like 11 years to make changes this is exactly the wrong time to give up so the first thing is yes i hit you and the news hit you with some terrible news last week so what do you do right now grieve get it out panic that's fine listen to you know sad music whatever you got to do be sad it's fine grieve get it out of your system because once you're done grieving it's time to work now what does that mean it means yes we as consumers can collectively make changes that reduce the amount of carbon in the air we can choose to take mass transportation more often right we can eat less meat we can use less energy set our thermostats higher and all those things will help a little not a little if we all did that it'd make a big difference but the fact is most of the carbon that enters the atmosphere happens at a much larger governmental and corporate scale so the real action we have to take right now is tell every politician non-action and non-dialogue climate change is not an option we understand you're a difficult electoral position maybe some percentage of our our local population doesn't think climate change exists don't worry we're going to organize and outvote them forever we're going to drive denial about climate change to an electoral non-reality and we demand action but guess what we don't have to win elections to demand action from corporations we can start looking at how much carbon different industries put into the air who's making changes and who isn't and vote with our dollars and change things much much much more quickly so this is a period where not you should feel like it's impossible and hopeless this is a period where you should be doing research to figure out what puts carbon in the atmosphere where now i get that that's tough so the other thing i'm doing is if i i've invited a bunch of climate scientists and climate economists to come on future episodes of ask science mike and we're going to have an ongoing series of people much smarter than me talking about what can be done because the problem with climate change when we talk about the real scale people get terrified and they shut down and that's the worst thing that can happen and i'm not hopeless because my ancestors could own people but that's not okay now in my lifetime i've seen major changes on how society relates to gay lesbian bi trans and queer folk we're capable of change we're capable of rapid change and the time to tell stories that create that rapid change in regards to climate change is here it's now so make you know we did an episode on climate change for the liturgists and i had a thing a call to action where people could call their congressperson and the response rate was so low that i got depressed and was like oh we're done i'm going to buy a very large suv run on my credit card bills and not worry about it and then i started noticing it every episode every live event i do three to five people tell me you know i became a vegetarian because your climate change episode so it's not just that change could happen change is happening other good news related to our voting question a moment ago there's not the same split on climate change among millennials and post millennials that there is among gen x and boomers so the faster i can help all you young people take over society i am here for it hey spike hi maybe not the best question but i'm legitimately legitimately curious about this you create podcasts what if any podcast you listen to yourself and why okay i listen to podcasts on airplanes so i tend to queue up a bunch i'm still a fan of you made it weird by pete holmes this podcast called uh so many white dudes i like that one a lot it's not hosted by a white dude and they have one white dude token guest per season all the guests are people the host and the guests are people of color women of color queer folk um pod save the people when i need to get my my liberal rage on is a good one um i like invisibilia i was fascinated in the way you're fascinated watching a train wreck elon musk on joe rogan that's from the rob cast sometimes but it's weird because i i've talked to rob not on a podcast so i don't know what to do i try to talk back and i'm like oh wait he's not here i had the opposite problem when i went on npr's all things considered because i didn't know i could talk because i was used to listening to npr so i came out they had asked me a question i'd be like oh [ \_\_ ] i do know that all the faith-based podcasts i check out are uh hosted by women or people of color um but i actually for a podcaster don't listen to podcasts that often um i used to and then this is weird i get this like dread that i'll rip somebody off if i listen to a podcast which is ridiculous uh i think it's safe to say i kind of have my own style and way of doing things and it's not like i have any creative control over the literature's podcast whatsoever um like i don't want it like michael is grammy nominated very end of the scoring and i'm like well i quoted some science just make sure it's in there uh but yeah it's a thing i worry about and i've also learned that podcasts are people who commute i don't work out i don't do yard work i do water the lawn but i like to do it in silence it's not lawn it's plants um so yeah it's a great question and the worst answer of the evening uh hey hey um so i had a spiritually transformative experience like you did um you know bright lights overwhelming peace all that good stuff um and so i looked more into those experiences and one of the things i found is that a lot of people that have them tend to become more spiritual but less religious and generally they believe that there's no singular correct faith but rather all faiths have some truth to them and that they're all valid and i'd be interested to hear your take on that because i know you specifically mentioned that you heard jesus in your experience okay thank you what's what is religion what does it mean i'm spiritual not religious what does that mean is it about specificity i mean i was saying that rhetorically to set myself up for an even easy answer but that's fine [Laughter] no i'm serious go ahead right so a lot of these people will have uh in their experience they'll experience you know not necessarily jesus but they'll experience muhammad or they'll experience buddha or they'll experience some other religious figure and so i guess the question is specifically do you think that jesus is more valid than the other spiritual leaders or do you think that so long as we follow the path of love that is the correct path gotcha okay so correct incorrect go no go um yeah jesus is the only way to heaven which is a literal place we go and we die and if not you spend eternity in eternal conscious torment 100 joke greg leave the doo doo doo that was on purpose um something i've noticed when people are raised without a navigating faith story they try to find one when they're older so people raised in free thought or or non-religious households they get into adulthood and i've had countless people secular non-spiritual parents come to my events and ask me what to do about their child who is now in a cult or a mega church which is like a very large cult i said it on stage i love my job i don't have any sponsors so but i can pull their ads um so we grow up in a tradition we grow up in a stream and i think there's something beautiful about that i didn't get to know mystical oneness i didn't get to know ultimate reality as a kid i got to know jesus who didn't make fun of me and said he loved me even when i got beat up i could have never gone anywhere more in faith without jesus is jesus more valid than muhammad i don't know jesus certainly helps me reach the divine more easily than muhammad though i have read the entire quran though i'm told reading it in english is just not the same i've heard it read and it's beautiful so we we grow up what i've noticed is we grow up in our traditions and we get very defensive of them because if jesus helped me know god and scriptures say that jesus is the way and the truth and the life and there's no way to the father but by jesus then not only do i feel defensive like i need to protect god but i feel like god kind of wanted my protection which meant it was very awkward for me at lunch every day i had lunch in high school with an atheist an agnostic a hindu a hindu i'm seeing their faces a buddhist and a muslim and sometimes people would be fasting or in the middle of a festival that would be like oh man i like you so much i wish you weren't going to hell and then they would think the same thing about me because we were all navigating our tradition and then i lost my faith and then i encountered god on the shore of the pacific ocean and everything about that moment was beauty and light and you know what i'm talking about and when i went back and read the stories of the tradition i grew up with they seemed so small and profane and exclusionary and limited compared to this great love that i encountered and then i read the writings of sufi mystics who came from a tradition called islam and i went they saw that light that i saw and then i i started reading jewish mystics and was shocked that other people who thought yahweh was awesome had experienced this beauty i discovered the christian mystics last mainly because betsy told me about them and um i was shocked to see how all these people from all these different traditions found the same beautiful light i was training for a marathon a few years ago and i was running outside and i saw a tree and then a tree and then a tree and then a tree and then a tree and i was tired and i looked up and i saw the canopy how it was all one canopy there were lots of trees in one canopy and i saw a squirrel on the ground the squirrel saw me the squirrel was unsettled by 225 pounds of me running his direction he felt scared do you know what he did he ran up a tree you know which one the closest one do you know where he got the canopy where he could roam the entire forest which tree was the right tree a tree that was there now when a tree is small it's weak it's easily broken the gospel of jesus at some point needed defending because they were like 11 christians who didn't even call themselves christians 11 followers of jesus and that was a very little tiny twig of eternal truth but in time it grew and grew and grew and it's when you have a small tree and you put little steaks around so you won't step on it that makes sense but if you put steaks around a mighty oak tree well that's ridiculous the oak tree can handle people in its branches i think that all faith traditions come from the same soil the same truth i think they lead to the same place that which we call god there's only one tree that i'm good at climbing there's only one tree where i know that there's a notch for my foot here in james there's a hold for my hand here in augustine and i can use that tree and i can make it to the canopy and for that i will be eternally grateful but the goal of my life is not to convince people that i climb the one true and correct tree my goal in life is to help others find the same shelter the same rest in the same canopy that i have been fortunate enough to discover [Applause] okay last one right there thank you hi um i have an advice question okay um so this question is how do i go about creating dialogue with people that want to throw my identity under the rug well to be clear when you said you had an advice question i thought you were about to give me advice and i was thrilled because i'm winging it up here i cannot answer that question i think that it would be wrong for me to attempt to answer that question because no one is trying to take away my identity and no one ever has someone might say science mike you're a straight white man haven't the feminists tried to take your identity and i would say no i think the feminists are just trying to get people to believe that they have one too science mike aren't gay people trying to destroy the family no i think they're just trying to have families too so i can't answer your question i would refer you to the reformation project i would refer you to black lives matter i would refer you to some marginalized group doing advocacy work at the intersections of your identity which i do not know for that work what i can tell you is i don't think you should have to have the conversations with people who want to take away your identity i think one of the most inhumane things progressive people do is expect the marginalized to explain the texture of the boot on their neck whose job is it to talk to clueless straight dudes and they're weird questions about what happens in people's bedrooms that's me now don't get me wrong i'm not saying i'm an expert i'm not saying i should get paid to do it i should not but i should do enough of my homework to take that first inevitable wave of guilt that is the foundation of fragility we are not psychologically equipped to handle the notion that in the act of trying to live out our lives we have hurt and oppressed other people we are not psychologically equipped to have been raised as white people and told that we had a civil rights movement where we fixed racism and then understand that in some way too many people with my skin color can make a brown person uncomfortable because the culture we don't even know exists follows us into the room the job for people like me is to be justice first responders because although i cannot say what should happen and i cannot say the manner in which marginalized people should be liberated that is for them and them alone to say to dictate and to demand i can say i understand that you feel icky when men hold hands i used to feel the same way i understand that when someone says on twitter white people y'all that you feel personally attacked because you feel like a good person so i can say i get that i can sit with you let's talk about where that comes from let's make an appointment with your therapist so you can work through your stuff and we can stop worrying about the feelings of powerful people while less powerful people struggle to survive in our society i am a first responder in the justice movement i will never and should not be a leader or a guru or an advisor and i know this because i am a christian i know this because i've devoted my life to studying what a first century palestinian said about the world and about god and i know that jesus the human person lived in a society dominated by european rule and i know that when the church first started that it was controversial to consider the notion that greeks and romans could be included in that fellowship because we had the militaries why did i say we because i'm a roman i'm a white man in america rome's empire is nothing compared to the police force and stealth bombers that exist in the world to protect my place in global society so when i think how do i participate not only in justice but in the gospel i'm not looking as much at matthew as i am the roman centurion what did the roman centurion do he went to this jew and he called him teacher i don't primarily listen to people of color and queer folks on theology as a matter of discrimination against white people i love white people i love white people i love straight people i love mayonnaise every time i eat a ham sandwich i put mayonnaise on it that is my culture i love straight people i love straight men other straight men typically dance as poorly as i do and then i feel comfortable i like starting meetings precisely on time that's great i'm not saying that white people aren't christians that straight men can't be christians can't be leaders can't be pastors they've been for a while what i'm saying is part of the perspective god showed us by becoming incarnate in someone living under the rule of empire is what god thinks about human empire so i am doing my best to lead the great white revolution of getting out of the way of everybody else because the people trying to take away your identity i bet i'm right when i say they're a lot like me dress like me they drive cars like me police officers call them sir like me so all i want to do y'all it's real simple i get asked this all the time and it this depresses me oh it's it's angry science mike time the fact that so many women and so many queer people and so many people of color tell me that i'm the only white man who's ever talked about their experience in a way that resonates is an indictment on all of us because who am i i'm a deordane college dropout i used to get beat up in elementary school horribly i've been sexually assaulted by four different people is it that some of us haven't heard enough to know what it's like to hurt so for every person of privilege listening to my voice if you are straight if you are white if you are male any one of those things if you are a christian if you are an american understand tremendous global privilege has been handed to you if you can turn on a faucet and drink water if you can walk into a store and get vegetables tremendous privilege has been handed to you and instead of getting angry when people who don't have what you have say their life sucks listen to the hurt in their voices because i know you listen to the hurt in mine and if there is to be a safe space and if there is to be a brave space and if there is to be a kingdom of heaven wherein god is with us and there is an empty tomb it will only come when roman centurions learn to say to jewish rabbis that's all i got