ASM147 Plastics, Affairs, and Concerts for Jesus

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plastics affairs and concerts for jesus all that and more on this week's episode of ask science 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 mccarth known online as science mike although i am not a scientist i answer questions honestly and vulnerably after doing a lot of research to give you the best evidence-based answer i can that's how it works if you're new but if you're not what do you say let's get it started hi mike my name is jill and i have a question about big event conversion and what happens afterwards there's an event in my hometown next month where a christian band are going into schools and at the end of the week there's a big concert where people can in inverted commerce find out more about christianity i went a lot to lots of these types of events in my youth and i had the whole autocall conversion experience then i lost my faith and became very cynical about a lot of my early experiences and now i'm just beginning to put it all back together and the liturgist podcast has been invaluable here my 12 year old kid wants to go to this concert and i'm not going to stop her but i'm a bit skeptical about emotional manipulation especially where teenagers and pre-teens are involved i'm all up for emotional manipulation where i'm buying into it honestly and with open eyes i take the 14 year old atheist kid to rock concerts and i love it so my questions are one am i right to be skeptical about emotional manipulation for jesus two is it weird that i'm more concerned about an evangelistic church concert than a rock gig and three and this is the science question is there any data on what happens after big event conversions in terms of how many people keep their faith stay in a church or a faith community and so on very very many thanks and i'm sorry about the waffle if you ask a three-part question you get a three-part answer so question one is am i right to be skeptical about emotional manipulation for jesus well of course you're right to be skeptical about literally anything skepticism is a far too little used mode of reasoning and thinking in our species and i encourage skepticism at all times that include emotional manipulation or not you should be skeptical at an evangelical rock concert or worship event yes you should be skeptical uh if someone is you know divining the spirits the crystal at a new age spiritual center and you should be skeptical when listening to this podcast you should be skeptical all the time i am great at getting audiences to feel things um because i'm vulnerable and because i have good control over my voice if i was a different kind of person i could slowly build credibility on this podcast by saying things that are evidence-based and then occasionally sell you a line of bull and then you'd go along with it if you're not skeptical i love it when i post things i've thought about on social media and people tweet can you send your source i don't always it's often too much work and i think they could google it themselves but i love this skepticism that drives that question so yes you should be skeptical you should not be cynical especially in a chronic or ongoing sense don't conflate cynicism with skepticism from your question it sounds like you did not but no you're not in the wrong to be skeptical your second question was is it weird that you're more concerned about evangelical worship than a rock gig and is that weird well gosh i don't know i uh i tend to wear gym shorts and mtv flip-flops and random science joke t-shirts around people probably think i'm weird i mean i host a podcast about christianity and science for god's sake i am weird but what the hell is weird anyway to who you know i don't spend my time basing my decisions or my values on how odd i will appear to any given community including communities i identify with my actions and beliefs are interpreted through a different lens the impact they have on other people so by looking at it that way i think there's some really healthy helpful things that happen at evangelical worship events and there's some really healthy helpful things that happen at rock concerts but both of those venues also offer troubling things elicit illegal drug use sexual assault in both cases i could be talking about evangelical worship or a rock concert want to go into to these situations eyes open we want to understand that that people are often exploiting us for commercial gain i think there's a lot of honest people in the evangelical church leaders who care about crafting experiences carefully so that they can change people's lives for the better and i also think there's evangelicals who are in it to manipulate people and get power and money i also think that's true of the music industry um i think that's true of our species so no it's not weird to be concerned but i personally would approach with caution a rock concert or an evangelical worship event especially for my children now your third question is their data surrounding big event conversions well i got a swing and a miss here we had two weeks of special episodes of ass science mike that didn't require the normal research pipeline so i took that time and spent three weeks looking into this question and honestly i can't find any specific studies or research about event event-based religious conversions i even tried kind of cross-referencing using billy graham's crusades since those were a large cultural phenomenon and i might be able to find some sociological data there nope couldn't find it if you dear listener have found it feel free to go to ask sciencemike.com find episode 147 and then leave a comment the myself and the larger community would love to hear about it i couldn't find anything so we'll have to take a step back and look at faith transitions and religiosity in general and when we look generally at faith transitions we find that they are incredibly common about 44 percent of people will go through a faith transition at least once in life and of course this doesn't include joining your family's religion as a child when sociologists count faith transitions they don't count that so that would be an additional conversion now when we look at how faith transitions last conversion experiences alone typically are not enough to sustain a faith transition over time that requires connection to community so if your child goes to a worship experience that's powerful and moving and they feel god is very close and then they come home and they don't connect to a christian or evangelical community that experience is going to fade in time so it's the connection to community on an ongoing basis that sustains religious faith in general statistically i i i could hear the keyboards clicking with people telling me about their you know their amazing experience and they're they're they're on their own and not in church that's great i'm not denying that i'm saying statistically in blocks of people religiosity and sustained faith transition are strongly associated with uh religious service attendance or communal participation so here's the key thing i think it's okay to let your child go to a rock concert or a worship event as long as you have clear lines of communication that are open and non-judgmental and you have a trust-based relationship with your children so they will not only be comfortable expressing to you what they experienced but that they're confident that you won't judge them and that you will communicate honestly and non-judgmentally in return and i think as long as you have that approach hey you know let's go see i literally can't think of a current rock band i literally can't think of a single current rock band with which to complete my analogy the first that came to mind was weezer i know they're still around but i don't think a lot of 14 year olds go to see weezer anyway so we could go see dj khaled or we can go see hillsong and as long as we approach those skeptically with our eyes open and with communication afterwards i think the benefits will far outweigh the harm so for the next few months i've got a lot of private events going on that aren't open to the public but i do have three events in the next few months that are open to everyone first of all friday march 23rd in los angeles i'm doing an event with the liturgists and mickey scott bay jones called comic books and contemplatives this is going to be event uh all about contemplative activism that you won't want to miss if you're anywhere near the la area but tickets are going fast for that they're only 15 bucks and every penny of those proceeds goes to support mickey and her amazing work in activism may 7th i'll be at jesus wrote a dinosaur faithful youth ministry and a scientific age a conference that also features none other than krista tippett along with a strong roster of thought leaders and leaders in youth ministry that's going to be in minnesota and then i'll be at the skylight festival in ontario canada july 27th so if you'd like to learn more about any of those three events just go to ask sciencemike.com click that events button and you can buy your tickets or learn more there our next question came in via email and it reads hi mike i recently finished your book and a second book the phenomena of man and i am experiencing some cognitive dissonance i have been waffling on what i think about the consciousness of god and if god is a conscious being at all tahard makes the comment that love dies in contact with the impersonal and anonymous as a self-proclaimed non-theist how would you reconcile god's love for us in the traditional anthropomorphic christian sense with the popular idea that perhaps god is the emotion of love itself rather than a supreme cosmic deity or say math in its purest form it feels to me as though for god to truly love us that he or she or it would require consciousness for love to exist isn't love ultimately a product of consciously knowing the object of affection in a non-abstract literal way language as always fails me here but i hope that vaguely made sense and i would really like to hear your perspective thanks for all you do lauren well you know lauren i have not read the phenomenon of man but it does sound interesting i've heard a lot of people discuss that and other works by de chardin i guess where i would start is why do i need to reconcile my personal god experiences with this larger philosophical quandary about god's beingness or beinghood i spent so much of my life doing that and it caused me to either stand at odds with what i understand to be true about the physical universe or to write off all of my experiences with god as immaterial has nothing more than social conditioning and i'm not interested in doing either of those things this is why i am a mystic i sit in contemplation of the divine i understand based on science that spiritual expression and religious practice is a normal part of human emotional and psychological development that it is not bad for people although certainly authoritarian religion is bad for people and for society uh the personal expression or even the communal expression of non-authoritarian spirituality is healthy and beneficial for people myself included not everyone has to be religious not everyone has to believe in god i support just rampant pluralism people should believe what they believe without pressure from governments or really even society in my opinion but i have had such beautiful moments with god such gorgeous moments in the light of the divine where i felt god's presence so near to me and where god showed me something new there have been moments in contemplation and meditation where god has shown me people in a new light it's contemplative experiences that led me to care much more deeply about the plight of black people in america it was contemplative experiences that led me to deeper concern over the systemic inequality that women face in our country and frankly it has been contemplative spaces that have led me to view with grace and compassion religious conservatives who voted for donald trump and indeed for donald trump himself i've heard from frankly strong women leaders in my life the redemptive power that could happen if say donald trump got in touch with his own pain and suffering as well as the growth in my life that could occur if i both advocated without hesitancy for justice while still viewing the person of donald trump through a redemptive perspective now that might sound very silly to you but it doesn't matter those were my moments of contemplation those are my experiences with the divine and i no longer try to push out back into the world my experiences with god is some kind of fact claim about the universe because again science tells me that viewing the world the enlightenment frame through the scientific method is one type of brain function primarily centered on the left hemisphere and experiences of religious contemplation and spirituality happen primarily in the right hemisphere and are more holistic and a dance of these two perspectives allows me to see the world more clearly allows me to connect with people with more empathy and more love and to view myself more charitably i've spent so much time in life looking at myself as a reductionist taking myself apart and finding what i saw lacking but when i view myself in wholeness through a holistic perspective through a connection with the divine i see a person of great worth whom i love and that love turns outward towards all the people i see informs every moment of my day when i'm stuck in traffic in los angeles how different is it to look out and just feel radiant love towards every person driving every other car around me than it is to shout because i lost a place in a line that's meaningless here's what i would say lauren if you'd love to wrestle with the philosophical and theological issues of faith if that brings you life then i say buy a bottle of wine find two friends who feel the same way and wrestle with this question all night in community if it brings you joy then do it that's how i would approach this question not as a question to answer but a question to engage with others in community but if this question is motivated in that you are finding a tension between your rational perspective and your lived experience of faith maybe it's time to learn to sit in that tension maybe it's time for a more mystical approach to spirituality or the answers to questions and faith are less important than the experiences we have in the practice of faith i always thought it was was a cop-out when theologians and spiritual leaders made an appeal to mystery to not answer difficult or pressing theological questions and that's true if one's goal is to answer the questions about the divine through some kind of empirical scientific lens but if the goal is a life of faith even in conjunction with a scientific world view some of these questions are best asked and left open to facilitate a transition into the transcendent or indeed the imminence of god all around us in every moment [Music] hi science mike could you talk about the science of plastics and food i feel like i hear a lot of scary things on the internet shocking i know about the dangers of cooking in plastic bags bowls and other vessels however i also hear a lot about how plastics are actually pretty safe to cook in i love cooking sous vide which uses a lot of plastic bags i also love microwaving things because they're sometimes you just need food in two minutes can you expound on the safety of using plastic bags and bowls while cooking thanks i actually want to extend a little charity to the internet for once regarding plastics because hearing that plastics are safe and that plastics are very dangerous are both true because it depends on a lot of factors like what kind of plastic there's so many different kinds of plastics plastics is a huge category of physical materials and they all behave differently when they're heated for example so when we're asking if a plastic is safe or not especially in regards to cooking we're asking a group of questions like how much leaching occurs like leaching of plastic molecules plastic materials into the food item at what temperatures does the leaching occur does the heating method matter is there a difference between you know inductive heating and you know microwave cooking does that affect it and are the leached materials dangerous for humans to consume and it would amount so you could imagine if you had a container that leached a lot of material into foods while cooking but that material was completely harmless to humans in any quantity and you had another container that leached very little but that produced you know a compound that very small doses created a high high risk of terminal cancer you see what i mean we can't simply say how much leaching occurs as the threshold for whether a material is safe or not now here's the rub we don't know the answers to all these questions for huge amounts of the plastics that we encounter in our world and we know much more often how much leaching and at what temperatures then we understand the immense complexity of what plasticizers and microplastics do in the human body over time gosh let's start with the practical when it comes to cooking you want to stick with plastics that are explicitly labeled as safe for cooking or microwaving you want to see it on the package maybe on the plastic itself otherwise don't use it because some chemical or molecular migration always happens with food even in a glass container or metal container very small trace amounts of leaching do occur and of course today plastic cans for example that you might drink a soda out of or have a food item in they'll have a plastic coating on the interior so you can have metal containers that leach plastics that's where we are in this millennia here in the age of plastics so that's going to happen there's going to be some leaching the issue is we don't really know what most trace amounts of plasticizers or microplastics do in the human body and that is a big issue and forget about your food for a second there are microplastics absolutely everywhere now because we dump 19 billion pounds of plastic into the ocean every year let me say that again 19 billion pounds so it creates these massive formations of plastics in the oceans they rub together the sun works on them and these plastic items slowly break down into micro plastics that's in ocean water that migrates through the food chain into our forests and into our rivers so we've got microplastics all over the place now and they're they're nearly immortal i mean they will last for in some cases hundreds of millions of years in that state and uh we don't know what they do to us so we think for example that bpa and uh gosh i don't know how to say this phthalates it's a type of plastic um are endocrine disruptors that they mess with your endocrine system because they mimic the function of human hormones and we assume that's not good but we don't really know there's not enough research because these kind of studies take a long time a lot of funding and there's so many kinds of plastics and it's so hard to isolate so we don't we don't really know i mean one study that came out just this week found that 93 of bottled water contained micro plastics or plasticizers 93 of the bottles they sampled in this study but we don't know what that means we don't know what microplastics or plasticizers all do to the human body they may kind of just float around and not bond with anything or they may slowly interfere with biological functions we know dioxin for example is a highly powerful carcinogen causes cancer but only happens when you burn a plastic and so on the internet you'll see that dioxin goes in your food when you microwave that nope that's not true so in the lack of concrete scientific information which we don't have hysteria fills the void it seems which is not warranted plastics and microplastics i think are cause for concern and certainly warrant significant public health funding to do the research companies are not going to do this research this is something only governments would do and governments should do to watch out for their citizenry that certainly cause for concern it's not cause for panic there's not a ton you can do about microplastics right now if you get off the grid you're still gonna have microplastics in your food and water just perhaps less so here's what you can reasonably do today to be as safe as you can be number one stick with items that are explicitly labeled as safe number two when you're in doubt transfer the food item to a ceramic or glass container that's really easy and we know those substances don't leak as much even close three don't use plastic wrap like saran wrap or anything like that as a covering when cooking especially with meat and cheese meats and cheeses and fatty foods are the most likely to leech micro plastics and plasticizers during cooking you want to treat take out containers disposable containers and food packaging as unsafe and less explicitly labeled safe for consumption and then you don't want to reuse those so if you get a tray for a tv dinner your hungry man whatever use it once throw it away in accordance with the label and of course if you care about plastics don't eat tv dinners that's a pretty wasteful way to eat in terms of packaging it's a lot of packaging going back into the environment and then if containers are old or scratched those are much more likely to leach out microplastics and plasticizers so replace your plastics yeah consume more plastic to use less plastic eek you know if you want to be really safe just ceramic and glass ceramic and glass containers old school they shatter they're tough to have with kids but they will leech much less into your food items you're talking almost unmeasurable perhaps actually immeasurable quantities uh of their base components going in your food as opposed to you know a much higher amount in plastics so i'll have three links on sciencemike.com if you want to look into this further including the link to that bottled water study an article about our oceans and plastic and then an article from harvard health talking about microwaving food and plastic and they'll articulate the guidelines i gave you along with a few more so that'll be on ask sciencemike.com episode 147 show notes how do you like ask science mike is it a significant part of your week is it part of your commute does this help you learn does it help you encounter new ideas if so would you consider partnering with me and keeping ask science mike going on a platform called patreon several hundred people send me one or five dollars a month and they make the show financially possible there's a team of people behind this podcast who get paid for their time i really appreciate those of you who have faithfully given money to patreon on a monthly basis i appreciate those of you who said hey money's tight and i've got to take a break and those who have come back after periods like that i am so sensitive to commercial marketing and coercion especially you know spiritual coercion regarding finances what i'm asking is if this show means something to you and you'd like to see it keep going and you can afford one dollar or five dollars a month i would greatly appreciate it if you do so you'll get access to vote on the questions that make it on the show i frequently ask for direction and guidance on what to do in the future and if that sounds good to you i'd love to see you on patreon to learn more go to asksciencemike.com and click on the patreon icon our last question came in via email and it reads i've just ended a nearly three year extramarital affair after being found out i know i violated my basic moral code and told numerous bold-faced lies but i literally found it unstoppable i've never been addicted to anything in my life but i can only describe it like i've heard heroin or crack addictions described it was unlike anything i've ever experienced i feel i've never had a connection like this with any other human being i do love my wife but i even considered and still do consider leaving her my kids and my community for this other woman i'm trying to figure out how to process this i'm wondering what was and is going on in my brain to make these decisions even among all the pain i've caused why i can't seem to get over her or really even regret what i've done well first of all i want to thank you for uh sending in this question and for being honest and self-reflective and i know that you and your family and your wife are going through a very difficult time right now and it's very stressful and so the first thing i'd want to talk about that's happening in your brain is chronic stress you don't have any certainty about what the future is going to look like you have no certainty about what you really want you feel like like a a bunch of different impulses pulling you in different directions i read some research that says our cingulate cortex is wired to be honest that it generally wants to compel us to tell the truth and when our circumstances lead us to be dishonest the cingulate cortex which is incredibly active in our emotional formation begins to produce feelings of satisfaction less often and replaces that with stress and anxiety so i want to start by being present with you and saying i know what it's like to be anxious and i'm sorry you feel that way and that chronic stress doesn't help us make good decisions when we are stressed and we are anxious we actually have difficulty executing our higher brain function our executive function becomes impaired jonathan hate describes the human mind this way imagine an elephant and a rider the elephant is the subconscious mind and the writer is the conscious mind and if an elephant is well trained a writer can get it to do much of what it wants but if an elephant really decides that it wants something a human on its back can actually do very little to change its behavior especially over the long term so if you're wondering what's happened your elephant is very involved in this affair your elephant for who knows why you know i'm to go in general strokes here but there's so much i would need to know about your life about your childhood and about your marriage to be specific about what could be happening in your brain some of this could come down to attachment theory depending on how you approach relationships how your and how your wife approaches relationships could be one of the things driving this it could have been your childhood experiences seeing how your parents behave that informed you towards healthy or less healthy ways of relating to other people in a romantic and a sexual relationship and then your wife has a similar dynamic and that's all exacerbated by the stress of living life together it's difficult to share your life with another person over the long term and kids only add to that stress here's some things i know across almost all human cultures affairs are very common depending on the research between 20 and 40 percent of married men will have an affair in their life and between 20 and 25 of married women those are historical rates we've seen among millennials that are not married women are actually a bit more likely to cheat than men statistically so those things are changing what isn't changing is that infidelity is common that's the first thing the second thing is affairs are almost universally condemned across human cultures and societies so they're very common and they're universally condemned i think there's a strong case to be made that one part of infidelity is driven by heredity especially because affairs don't clearly correlate with marital unhappiness lots of people who report being happy in their marriage still cheat on their spouse i'm going to quote from an article i read on ted called 10 facts about infidelity that links to a huge body of helpful research that i would strongly encourage you to look at and i'm just going to read a paragraph from that article studies show the possibility of a gene that correlates to infidelity in 2008 walman colleagues investigated whether the various genes affect pair bonding behavior in g humans 552 couples were examined all had been married or cohabitating for at least five years men carrying the 3-3-4 vassiopressin allele in a specific region of the vassiopressin system scored significantly lower on the partner bonding scale indicating less feelings of attachment to their spouse moreover their scores were dose dependent those carrying two of these genes showed the lowest score followed by those carrying only one allele men carrying the 334 gene also experienced more marital crisis including the threat of divorce during the past year and men with two copies of this gene were approximately twice as likely to have had a marital crisis than those who inherited one or no copies of the allele last the partners of men with one or two copies of this gene scored significantly lower on questionnaires measuring marital satisfaction isn't that fascinating so here in a study not causality driven this is simple correlation but rather advanced correlation these researchers found a genetic link between marital satisfaction and infidelity with genetics genetics definitely happen in the elephant part of your life experience what else do i know is happening in your brain a lot of dopamine a lot of craving we know that humans respond strongly to sexual novelty that that's something that humans generally crave even people that are faithful to their spouses so that's going to create a lot of dopamine and you're right that kind of cycle a dopamine cycle is common to heroin and pepperoni pizza and smartphones and extramarital affairs these are things that we desire not all of us my weakness is much more the smartphone pepperoni pizza category uh you know and i've had friends whose weakness you know they could walk past a pizza anytime but they had cheated on their spouse the other thing you've got to be aware of is is you might have a lot of oxytocin a lot of pair bonding happening in this affair because the affair is not only sexual novelty it's not subjected to the same stresses of real life that your actual marriage has you don't have to deal with your real world problems when you're with this person you have this romantic fling and this allows you to idealize the relationship and frankly behave in ways that aren't sustainable over time most relationships that begin with infidelity don't last 75 percent of marriages that began with an affair fail if you have ended the relationship you said you you ended it after it had been found out right up top so if you've ended the relationship you can expect you're going to have separation anxiety and that could last for some time that craving gets stronger and not weaker at first because from an evolutionary standpoint infidelity makes a lot of sense if you can imagine early humans males who were unfaithful to their partners even if they were pair bonded they produced more children than faithful males females i'm intentionally not saying men and women are using gender here we're going down to biology females in that era who were unfaithful might gain additional access to support mechanisms and resources both carry some risk though you can break a pair bond and in doing so jeopardize the life and safety of your offspring of course you know we we've evolved to do lots of things we're one of the most violent species of primate but that doesn't mean we approve of violence the question is do we approve of marital infidelity a lot's happening in your brain you're flooded with powerful emotions and under chronic stress it's not a recipe for good decisions which makes this next part harder you have this personal experience happening this is what's happening in your brain and your emotional landscape but something separate is happening ethically and morally as the child of someone who survived a divorce that began with an affair my father cheated on my mother i say it in a very biased way it is unfair and unkind to leave your family in a nebulous state while you figure out how you feel you have a right to your feelings and you have a right to your experiences but to be a partner and to be a parent is to also shoulder a responsibility in the lives of others and in my opinion at this time you are derelict in those responsibilities if you're going to leave your wife then leave her so she can grieve and move on and build a new life and you can do the same if you're going to stay then commit to staying commit to the difficult work through counseling and professional support of grieving through the loss of the extramarital relationship and start to rebuild trust with your partner and with your family and either way be crystal clear about your intentions i try to be impartial and non-judgmental as much as possible obviously i bring my own set of emotional baggage into this situation you i really want you to do what's best for you and for your family and that might be leaving i don't know i don't know you i don't know the circumstances of your relationship i just know that the longer you stretch out this period in the middle the more people will be hurt yourself included i know so many people so many people who had messy divorces or reconciliations that started with an affair whose lives are in ruin absolute ruin social and economic ruin you've got to get in a situation where you're removing some of the stressors from your life now might be a good time to to begin a meditative practice it's definitely a good time to start seeing a therapist or mental health counselor to build the problem solving tools you need in this time to make decisions that will be good for you and your children and your spouse and indeed for the woman you had an affair with the best thing for all involved is for you to understand who you are what you want out of life and what you're willing to offer others in a romantic sexual partnership and that requires a lot of self-development work and i think you'll find that as you do that work you'll be less likely to have an affair in the future you'll find it easier to build the communication skills to form secure attachments with other people i've been married 17 years and in some ways i'm incredibly grateful for my father's infidelity because it made me examine what i have in my marriage how much that jenny means to me how much waking up in the same house with her every day means to me how much sitting at the dining room table with jenny and our children all together means to me and i doubled down on marriage in those years but my insecurity over will i father in my follow in my father's footsteps led me to develop better communication strategies with my wife and so in this time i hope what comes out of this experience for you is new insights about what you want out of life as well as the tools to communicate honestly clearly and early about what's going on in your life because so often i think affairs are born out of our inability to be honest with our spouses about what we need about what we're experiencing about what frustrates us and in fact about what we love about the ones we're with i wish you peace and hope in this difficult time and i hope that you your wife your extramarital partner and your children all find better days ahead of you than behind you thank you for listening to another episode of ask science mike i'd like to thank andrew golucky for his work in pre-production on the show greg nordine for producing ask science mike and my patrons on patreon for making the show financially possible jeff otiford wrote the theme song to ask sciencemike and thanks for listening everyone i'll talk to you next week