Interview:
TRANSCRIPT (auto-generated by YouTube)Imagine your neighbor tells you that he believes that he has a diamond buried in his backyard the size of a refrigerator, right. This is this is the biggest diamond anyone's ever heard of. And every Sunday he digs for it with his family. And you ask him why he believes these things. And he starts saying that it's been prophesied that someone would have a diamond this size in his backyard and he might as well be him, right. Or he, he draws a tremendous amount of meaning from this. Don't you understand how offensive your your doubts and criticism are? In the face of how meaningful this experience is for him and his family every Sunday to dig. They spent long hours digging in the hot sun for this diamond. And shed tears of of solidarity over the project. They've been doing this for years. Don't you understand that the sunk costs they have there? And how offensive it is for you to doubt the wisdom of this behavior.
Or what if he said to you. I wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't a diamond in my backyard that's the size of a refrigerator. These would be the statements of a madman, right. This is a person whose mind you can't trust. Really on any topic at this point. And yet this is precisely what religious people say even moderate religious people, even liberals, even people who who criticize fundamentalism as something that's dangerous and divisive and retrograde. This is the sort of things this sort of thing you hear from religious people rather reliably and yet it's obviously dysfunctional. it's obviously not the way you would think and talk and reason if you wanted your beliefs about the world to reliably map onto the world.
Many people wonder why there's anything wrong with believing consoling fictions or just ceasing to care whether your beliefs map onto reality at all, right. There is nothing wrong with believing whatever you want to believe and all we should be concerned about is human behavior. You know the kinds of things people do in the world the kinds of laws they want to push through. The problem however is that belief is almost never merely private, right. Now if it were if it is truly private, if it doesn't show up in any way, in a person's dealings with other human beings well then then there's there's nothing to worry about really apart from that person maybe not actualizing himself or herself as as much as they might in this life. So whatever price is to be paid for an erroneous belief by that person, if it's truly private is is paid just by the person himself. But far more often, beliefs become engines of behavior and engines of of emotion and they are the basis for a person's reaction to events in the world.
The moment you map some extreme religious commitments onto public behavior it becomes clear how dysfunctional all this is. I mean just imagine a an airline pilot who really believed in the efficacy of prayer, right. Not just you know sort of believed that you know just as a consoling proposition sometimes but really thought that you know it's possible to fly a plane, he knows to be damaged purely on the power of prayer. Because you know God wouldn't want to to strike down a believer like him, right. So a person who is willing to take unconscionable risks not only with his own life but the lives of his passengers because he knows that prayer works, right. Who's going to get on that airplane, willingly? No one. Not even a religious person really at the end of the day.
So it's it's a beliefs insofar as they're really believed become active whenever they're they're put in play by by events in the word. What you what you think about what happens after death; or about the moral order of the cosmos; or whether they're are invisible beings who are watching you and and acting like travel agents and traffic cops and helping you get through your day.
All of this potentially shows up in the world to the degree that you believe any of these things. Of course is true, people pay lip service to certain beliefs that they don't hold to the degree that they claim,right. There's a distance between what people say they believe and what they really really believe. But, if events like September 11th have taught us anything, we now know that certain people really do believe in paradise. And they really do believe in martyrdom as a means of getting there. And this is this isn't or shouldn't be open for debate anymore. Some people really do have the courage of their convictions. And now we just have to deal honestly with the consequences of believing those things at this point in history.
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