There’s been a growing acceptance of religious belief from the previously religious-averse, especially in the Covid contrarian space. This comes in the wake of a number of recent high-profile conversions, most notably Russell Brand getting baptized. Why are the skeptical suddenly finding faith?
Derek and Julian discuss their atheism in the context of these recent changes of heart—including Brand’s recent appearance on Bret Weinstein’s Dark Horse podcast. They share how their own skepticism has evolved and informs their work, debating on what value religion and, specifically, a belief in a god, holds for spiritual practices today.
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker.
And I am Derek Barris, and we are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can also grab our bonus episodes and subscribe via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
And today, you are listening to a conspirituality brief called, Is God Necessary in Spiritual Practices?
All right, here we go.
So, Derek, in some perhaps unexpected ways, our podcast has this subplot that has been emerging internally around how each of us thinks of religion.
And I think that attentive listeners, especially our Patreon supporters, will have noticed that there are some recent episodes that present differing perspectives on religion in relation to conspiracy theories, religion in relation to authoritarian politics, and even a little bit Religion and science, and that's healthy.
Perhaps, obviously to some, you and I have the most in common with regard to atheism as a significant part of our skeptical worldview.
And I would say, over the last four years, our co-host Matthew, who's not with us here today, has sort of hovered on the edge of atheism, but he also has a real humility and empathic respect for the positive role he sees religion playing in people's lives, as well as the diversity of what they might each mean when they identify as being religious.
And more recently, he's been very interested in supporting and platforming voices from within conventional religious communities who are fighting back against conspiracism and reactionary zeal.
I think he'd find that description fair.
On a pragmatic level, I see the point of wanting to support those voices, those more moderate voices who are fighting back against the reactionary and conspiratorial kind of fever dream.
But I still have this objection It's like being skeptical and rational in all areas except carving out this special compartment for religious beliefs.
Like they're somehow over here and they don't really affect everything else or we don't really question those on the same grounds that we're questioning everything else.
And I mean obviously more extreme religious belief is a bigger problem.
But as an atheist, I just see the falsehoods of religion in general as foundational to so much of what we cover here.
And I just want to own that.
Like, that's my temperament.
That's my perspective.
To my mind, both New Age spirituality with its pseudoscience paranormal beliefs and Christian nationalism with its warrior apocalypticism, these two threads are woven through QAnon.
They're woven through its New Age cousin, the fifth dimensional Great Awakening.
And to me, the danger lies precisely in their shared religious connective tissue.
And that's true for cults as well.
Another thing we cover on this podcast.
And then pseudoscience like supplements and alternative medicine as well.
So I guess my position is that once you've been persuaded to hold sacred values and beliefs artificially categorized as beyond evidence and reason, I think the ramifications of that downstream can be destructive.
But, on the other hand, and that's not to say that anyone who has religious beliefs is inevitably going to be a QAnon supporter or a fundamentalist extremist.
Of course not.
But I can't get away from the perception that if you remove the metaphysical, the supernatural, the faith-based foundational beliefs about the nature of reality, Then, any of the things I've just been describing really lose most of their persuasive power, if not all of it.
So, like, Jesus was just a man, and he isn't coming back.
Your guru does not have supernatural powers, because there's no such thing.
He isn't the reincarnation of an ancient sage, because that doesn't exist either.
Aliens are not communicating to your favorite influencer on Instagram in advance of, like, a cosmic spiritual awakening.
It's just not happening.
Quantum physics doesn't prove telepathy.
Claims of magical healing herbs or techniques that fail when tested with the same rigor that science devotes to medicine are better left behind.
And that kind of clears up a whole lot of stuff from jump, right?
So for me, philosophically, underneath all of that is an understanding of how facts and evidence, and therefore the probability scale of what is true or false, what is more likely to be true or false.
can inform what we believe and why about, you know, pretty important stuff.
Personally, I see the phenomenon of conspirituality over the last few years as a kind of amplified resurgence of the overlapping irrationality that's required both for supernatural beliefs and for conspiracy logic.
So I know as we continue that some people will be saying, well, what do you mean by religion anyway?
We may have to define that at some point, but that's a lot.
For now, maybe you can kind of position yourself in relation to some of these things and give me any of your thoughts.
In terms of a definition of religion, I've always Appreciate it, Joseph Campbell, who talks about religio, coming from the Latin to bind.
And it has a dual purpose in terms of binding the perceived spirit or metaphysics to the human flesh, but also how religion binds members of a community together.
So that was his general mindset as he was exploring world mythologies.
But I also think of Frans de Waal who attended a conference of religious scholars and in the very first session, it was a multi-day conference, but in the very first 15 minutes, he says, they were trying to set the foundation of the entire conference By defining the term religion, and it became so heated in the room that half the people almost walked out and ended the conference right there.
So just actually coming to a shared definition is that difficult.
So I, you know, I agree with everything that you said.
I know in a little bit, I'll talk a little bit more about how I came into atheism myself, especially as someone who has a degree in religion and studied them academically.
But I do have a pretty simple heuristic for how I work or operate within the understanding of the value of religion because I don't think it is all without meaning to the people.
I don't really debate people about religious topics unless they want to, which I'm happy to do.
I actually think debate is really important because it pushes your Mental boundaries, it pushes your understanding of things.
And one thing that I have noticed is that when you do start to debate metaphysics, people will shut down very quickly and usually revert to, it's just what I feel.
So, you know, you can't take that away from me.
And then the conversation's over.
But in terms of the value, my heuristic is that if a religion or being in a religious community makes you a better person in terms of doing charitable work, Taking care of your family or those around you, if it motivates you in life, if you feel that there's something behind you pushing you forward, great.
I'm not going to take that away from anyone or even try to because it's not worth it.
But as soon as it becomes metaphysical, and you were hinting at this before, those metaphysics begin to separate you from others.
And almost always, that usually means it puts you above others.
I have very good friends who are Christian and they know I'm an atheist and we joke about it, but occasionally I've asked them, I'm like, no, but seriously, you think I'm going to burn in hell for eternity because I don't have this?
And they admit, yes.
And that makes very awkward friendships and conversations.
I don't take it personally because I don't believe it, so it doesn't affect me.
But there's this putting yourself above.
And there's this other layer, if I said a better person, if religion could be a tool for good.
And that's a whole other conversation because How do you define good or better, for example?
Because then the metaphysics come into play because if your God tells you that gay people shouldn't be married and you believe that, you think you're doing good, but a whole lot of people would disagree with that.
So it's very tricky territory, but that is my general heuristic for understanding any value that can be derived from religion.
Yeah, I mean, for anyone who doesn't know, you referenced Frantz De Waal, and he's the researcher, you know, you were just referencing the good and how do we understand what the good is.
And Frantz De Waal has done all this really groundbreaking research into primate behavior, and especially theorizing about how moral psychology has evolved in humans by looking at primates and trying to get a sense of like, how do they deal?
Like, do they have concepts for fairness, for example, right?
How do they think about barter and exchange?
So to think that, okay, here he is at this conference, probably his role in the conference is to present something about all of that, and they can't agree on a definition for religion, right?
That made me think of, we both watched and listened to Russell Brand's conversation with Brett Weinstein yesterday, because we were going back and forth about it, and I'm sure that some of those themes will come up.
But when we were texting back and forth about it, it made me think that People should understand that atheism is a spectrum, just like anything else.
A lot of times, because Brett says at one point, or he says repeatedly actually, that the atheist community is what makes him not want to say the word atheist anymore.
And I've heard a number of people say that I'm turned off by smug atheists.
And I completely understand that because I've written about religious topics being my field of study for a long time.
And whenever I talk about it favorably, I've had atheists yell at me being like, it's all bullshit.
And I'm like, that's not really what I'm talking about though.
I'm talking about this communal aspect.
So just like there are thousands of types of Christianity, there are Three main types of Islam, but within that there are subsets.
There are a lot of different types of Buddhism.
Atheism exists on a spectrum as well, and I think that's important to recognize because we tend to get lumped into this one curmudgeonly group, and that doesn't really reflect the diversity that exists within non-theists.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because when you were giving your example of your friends who, you know, they're perfectly happy to be friends with you, and they accept the fact that you're not Christian, but when push comes to shove, if you really ask them, they're like, yeah, you're going to hell.
And, you know, it's because of your bad choices, like you should have let Jesus into your heart.
I think some people listening might say, well, that's a straw man, or that's an overgeneralization, or there's, you know, like, sure, some religious people, some Christians think about it that way, but what about all of the ones who don't, and aren't you sort of like, You know, lumping them in together.
And I think by the same token, you know, turnabout is fair play.
Very often there's this straw man that is created of atheists, that atheists are nihilists, that atheists believe that nothing has any meaning, that atheists, you know, like are just like, you know, logical positivists and anything that can't be proved mathematically or via scientific evidence doesn't exist.
And maybe there's even no such thing as love.
And, you know, it's like, I don't know anyone who actually thinks about the non-existence of God in that way.
Actually, there's a whole lot of room for everything that makes human life meaningful.
None of it goes away, I think, when you remove God.
But I think if you've grown up believing that God is very closely tied to meaning, to purpose, to being moral, to, you know, Everything that is kind of emotionally of the essence in terms of being human, then it can be hard to disentangle those things.
And that brings to mind something with that very argument that you just said when you kind of flip it around.
I've noticed that in these sorts of debates that the religious tend to, and this also is true for like anti-vaxxers and a lot of the people that we cover.
They tend to treat where we are right now as an end point in humanity, not in terms of metaphysics, but in terms of understanding of science.
And that's really frustrating.
I got into a conversation the other day with someone about Semmelweis and about handwashing.
He was a physician who realized that doctors going from the morgue to deliver babies without washing their hands were killing more babies.
So he floated the radical idea of, hey, let's wash our hands when we leave the morgue.
And his entire discipline was like, that is insane.
That's impossible.
Semmelweis ended up becoming insane.
Literally, he died in a mental institution.
Totally.
But it's just an example of, like, Handwashing is just such a known public health intervention now for so many things.
And so when people say things like, You know, science doesn't know these things, and it's like, you're correct, we don't.
We're constantly learning, and that's part of the value of questioning in science.
So when people use that argument to say, well, you can't explain this thing yet, I'm like, well, not now, and honestly, maybe not ever.
But that doesn't mean that A, there aren't people trying to understand it, and B, Oftentimes when people say that, I'm like, no, actually some of the things you're saying have been answered.
You just don't know where to look for that research.
The tides go out and the tides come in.
Nobody can explain it.
Yeah.
I mean, this is like, there's two pieces here, right?
So one piece is, um, Yeah, the God of the Gaps argument, or the argument from ignorance, where it's like science can't explain this thing, whether it's the missing link, supposedly, between other primates and humans, or it's what happened before the Big Bang, or some people will invoke the placebo or something.
And they say, well, the only explanation is divine or supernatural or paranormal, because if you can't explain it, somehow that seems to lend greater weight to my unevidenced explanation.
And then you're the arrogant one because you're not open.
It's like, wait, you're the one who's rushing to put in an answer that actually doesn't make sense.
But then there's the flip side of that.
When I say doesn't make sense, I mean that you have no good evidence for.
But then there's the flip side of that, which is kind of the Galileo gambit, right?
So I've seen people do this a lot where they'll say, they'll use Sammelweis as an example.
Well, look at Sammelweis.
He was persecuted.
You know, they gaslit him.
He went crazy.
But he turned out he was actually right.
And so how do you know the anti-vaxxers are not going to turn out to be right?
It's just arrogant.
You're just not realizing that things are progressing.
Look at Galileo.
He was persecuted by the Catholic Church for saying, you know, that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
And so maybe Brett Weinstein is Galileo.
Maybe Robert Malone is Semmelweis.
It's like, then you have to get that to me, you know, earlier in the discussion, I talked about the likelihood of certain things being true or false.
You can never be completely certain, but you can look at evidence
and you can look at the body of knowledge that has been established through science
on certain topics that can be looked at scientifically.
And you can say, how many things would have to be, how many things that we are certain,
you know, as close as you can be to certain are true would have to be wrong in order for this thing to be true.
And the more that, the more things would have to be wrong that we have very strong evidence for
that's never been contradicted, the less likely it is that your novel claim
is gonna be true.
You know, and vice versa, how many things are you assuming?
This is Occam's razor.
People often mistakenly say it's the simplest explanation is the right one.
But actually, Occam's Razor really says, make as few assumptions as possible.
How many assumptions do you have for which there is no evidence that brings you to your conclusion, even if your conclusion otherwise seems reasonable or plausible?
If there's a lot of assumptions like that, you're probably not Galileo.
So on one level, let me say this.
You were talking about like, you know, if your religion makes you a better person, And you said as soon as it becomes, that's fine, but as soon as it becomes metaphysical and those metaphysics then separate you from others, that's where it gets problematic.
And I want to push back on that a little bit because on one level I get it, like I totally empathize with or can get behind.
This idea that, you know, if moderate religion, as has developed largely in the West post-Enlightenment after the end of theocracy and monarchy and the institution of religious freedoms, right?
Yes, you're free to believe whatever you want to believe.
And as long as you're not hurting me, that's fine.
As long as you're not hurting your kids and stopping them from, you know, getting medical treatment when they need it.
Okay, whatever.
Like we're all entitled to our own private Idaho.
But I don't think that religion at some point becomes metaphysical.
I think the argument a lot of people will make is that religion in its essence is just love, and it's just comfort, and then something comes along and makes it into all of these other things.
I think religion in its essence starts off fundamentalist.
It starts off purely metaphysical and supernatural.
It starts off from a set of beliefs that are an attempt to understand the world, And it's like from from quite early on, it's imposed on people in very, very brutal and tyrannical ways.
I mean, to me, by definition, religion is organized around supernatural core principles and supernatural beings.
And they're deemed to be the source of divine scripture, morality, instructions on how to behave.
Otherwise, you're going to get punished.
Answers to the central questions of human life that we've always puzzled over.
And to me, without all of that, once you remove that stuff, so you said the metaphysics, right?
Once we remove the metaphysics, I think you're really just left with a community center and values of love and kindness that are available to all of us.
Well, I think it's sort of a nature-nurture thing in that sense because if you think about how religion developed, it was in much smaller communities.
So, these communities needed narratives in order to explain what they were, what they thought they were.
So, the metaphysics were part of that because there was a Profound ignorance, and I don't mean that in a negative way, I just mean not knowing.
Sure.
About what lightning was and why a certain area flooded at certain times of the year.
We often take the knowledge that we have as if that was the knowledge that humans have always had, just like humans centuries from now, if we're still around, will do to our time.
So, it's a bonding principle, not unlike any other I don't think it can really be disentangled.
And I think the, you know, when you talk about doctrine and scripture, I mean, again, for a long time, they were just stories that were passed down and the stories would be remixed through every generation.
There would be small details changed.
I mean, if you actually look into what we now call Hinduism and the Hindu literature, like the contradictions that exist within all of the deities is because they were being expressed by different people in different areas of that land all the time.
And then eventually a corpus was created out of all that literature, but it was never intended to be one document, one documentation of one religion.
Sure.
It was always diverse.
So I think I agree with you like looking now in the way that doctrine has become embedded in communities and the ways that certain
religions have used it as a way to attain power.
But I think leading up to that, it wasn't as nefarious.
I think it was more necessary for survival.
Yeah, necessary for survival.
And I would even argue emerging out of a kind of neurochemical propensity for certain kinds
of altered states, whether those are induced by plants or whether those are naturally occurring
in the individual, whether some of those have to do with slight variations in neurotypology
or maybe really profound variations.
That there are experiences that feel very important and very meaningful and that seem to give a sense of revelation, a sense of prophecy, a sense of, oh, now I finally understand.
I mean, I almost think about it, and now we're just speculating, like getting a little galaxy-brained here, but I think about it as like, There's an architecture to cognitive functioning that has this hierarchical way of categorizing things, and it makes sense at some point to us to say, okay, well, if I'm the parent of the child, and my father is the parent of me, who's the ultimate father of all things, right?
Who's the great bear spirit that lets the bears come into the world so that we can hunt them and we can survive?
We should make offerings to the bear spirit.
What's the cause behind all these things?
I can cause this thing to move from here to there, but who makes the wind move?
There are cognitive kind of extrapolations that I think lead to some sense that there must be an invisible supreme being that's behind all things.
And so that's all really understandable.
Part of the reason why I push back the way that I do is that for a long time I was a proponent of an idea that's very common within New Age circles, which is that there's a pure religion That is mystical.
There's a pure mystical religion that is common to all the different traditions that comes out of individual direct experience of some divine higher truth.
And then that gets corrupted by power dynamics that gets taken over by the priests that gets literalized by the fundamentalists.
And I'm just not as bullish on that idea as I used to be.
Oh, agreed.
I mean, we know the problems with purity culture from everything from all of the medical treatments that we cover up through any sort of spiritual practices because there's a certain moralizing that inevitably follows purity.
Because as soon as you think you're on track to Either be the purveyor of something pure or that your practice is leading you to something pure.
Again, there has to be something impure on the other side of that, and that binary is really, really toxic.
And so, you know, I guess we see this again and again with the strict moral codes of fundamental traditions.
And then, of course, you can look at the power dynamics as well.
I know, like bringing it back to the present, for myself, I entered the yoga and wellness space as a young man, really interested, really attracted to what I thought of as a kind of intellectual, philosophical, psychological, but still like experiential and body-based process of becoming really more mentally lucid.
And from day one to me, that path always seemed to lie in the opposite direction of magical thinking.
Or denial of death or adherence to old world superstitions in the name of some kind of tradition.
But the funny thing, Derek, this is interesting.
You and I, we're quite different in a lot of ways, but we have this weird thing in common.
We both took a lot of psychedelics.
We deeply explored various types of altered states.
We got super into yoga.
We're creatives who love music and create music.
And for many of our peers, that combination of things would end up amplifying and validating their more religious convictions by any other name, right?
They might be more New Age spiritual or they might be like mystical and undefinable, but it still would, it would kind of push them further in that direction and seem to validate it, but not us.
So tell me about that on your end.
Like what do you think led you towards an atheist orientation combined then with studying religion academically and getting involved with yoga?
I'll give the history and that conversion in a moment, but I'll also point out that you're correct that a lot of our peers do really get into metaphysics with psychedelics, but I've also noticed that that often happens when they start doing psychedelics in middle age or later in their life.
I did most of mine at 18, 19, and 20.
Me too.
Exactly.
So, when you do a lot of them at that time, and then you do have some sort of conversion, I'll call it, like I did, then I still do them, but they have a different balance now because I'm not looking for anything metaphysical and I don't take the things that happen to me while under their influence as metaphysical.
It gets back to what I was saying about science and not knowing.
Just because we don't know how certain physiological or biological processes happen in the body doesn't mean that those aren't Physiological or biological processes.
It's not a matter of, for example, a popular one is humans are antennas for the divine spirit to enter during these states.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Cool, cool metaphor.
But no, I don't think that's necessary.
So I got to college.
I was raised with no religion whatsoever.
I was confirmed, but I never made... I made First Holy Communion as a Catholic, but then I was never confirmed.
Because in sixth grade, I just said to my parents, I don't want to do this anymore.
And they're like, okay, because they were both agnostic at best.
And so when I got to college, psychedelics and Buddhism and Hinduism came into my life at the same time.
You know, I want to see if you had the same experience that I did.
And so I was like, wow, you can imagine if you are in that space where your mind is being blown open at that time, a
lot of spiritual rhetoric makes a lot of sense to you or at least there's this striving to understand what's going on.
You know, I want to see if you had the same experience that I did. I remember taking acid and saying, holy shit, what
was going on with all of these Eastern mystics that they were seeing that that that.
That all of these deities that we're seeing are actually so psychedelic.
Like, this is psychedelic imagery, but it's the sacred art of this culture.
Which very well could have been psychedelic, or it could have just been they didn't have media in their pocket all the time to look at, and their imaginations were better formed than ours because they had to fill in gaps that we don't have to because we can see it all the time.
And especially with AI, we can create so much that never existed before, but they didn't have that possibility.
Totally, totally.
But it's very convincing.
If you have a level of spiritual curiosity and countercultural curiosity and you take psychedelics and then you're looking at that kind of art and you're reading about those kinds of ideas, it's very convincing.
It gives you the sense of like, oh wow, this is the The deep truth of reality that I've intuited might be there, right?
So on campus, I would be doing psychedelics, and then I would go to class, and then I was a religion columnist for the Daily Targum school newspaper for two years.
So I did a lot of interviews.
It's where I started my chops as a journalist.
And I would interview all the different religious organizations on campus and the leaders.
And every time I went to one of them, Whether they were hardcore or they were more open and multi-denominational, they all had a sense that they had the right path.
It's like, yeah, these are cool, but this is the one.
If you really want to know what's going on, this is how you do it.
And so, when that is your vocation and you're talking to people, it's like, well, the guy I just talked to yesterday said his was the right one.
And then now you're telling me this, and then the guy I talk to tomorrow, the woman that I talk to tomorrow, they're going to tell me this is the right one.
And that was where my skepticism started setting in because in one sense I'd be having these incredible experiences with my group of friends or on my own sometimes with these substances, but then I would then try to contextualize it in the context of these religions who all thought they had the right path.
And that's when my atheism started.
I never fell into one religion.
Even to this day, I think that the secularized modern form of Buddhism is what I resonate with most, but it doesn't require any sort of deity.
It is not the traditional Buddhism by any means, but it is something that has evolved like all religions do.
I find that I can use that as a framework for understanding existence without the need for anything metaphysical.
So, that was sort of my own pathway.
Where did your skepticism start?
You know, I actually count myself as kind of lucky because my parents never laid any religion trip on me.
I was never indoctrinated.
I never said prayers.
I was never told that the explanation for this question you're asking is God.
I was never told that if I prayed to Jesus every night, then good things would happen.
You know, I remember asking my parents, what happened when you died?
And they would say, nobody's come back to tell us.
And then I started going to school and I was like, Hey, they said Jesus came back and he told us.
And they're like, yeah, some people think that.
So my parents were just very neutral about it.
So I wasn't, I wasn't taught that religion is terrible, but I also wasn't told that I had to be religious if I was going to be a good person or, and I, and I, Yeah, I just didn't have, religion wasn't part of my upbringing.
I did end up going to a church school from about age, I think about age 9 or 10.
And through the rest of my school education, I was in this church school where we had, what did they call it?
It wasn't called Mass because it was an Anglican school.
We had like a service every Thursday.
We met in the chapel every morning for assembly, and there was a prayer and a hymn.
So I was involved in that, but I didn't take any of it seriously.
There were aspects of it that I liked.
The Anglican cathedrals are really beautiful.
We would go to the big cathedral in the center of Johannesburg for some, you know, special holy days and stuff.
And I liked the pageantry of it.
I liked the robes.
I liked the incense.
I liked how beautiful the cathedral was.
I enjoyed singing.
I enjoyed harmonizing.
You know, all of that was cool.
But I was always like, this whole thing is really just, at its heart, it's just kind of silly.
It's just an old, outdated way of thinking about things.
Yeah, and I think that that that just persisted for me.
And then when I got into adolescence, I got really curious about, I was really into the Woodstock generation.
And as a musician, I was just really, you know, obsessed with musicians who had taken plenty of psychedelics.
I was like, I want to, I want to experience what they experienced.
So I took psychedelics.
And that got me really interested in Eastern spirituality as well.
My parents had a very rich Diverse bookshelf that I had access to where there was everything from Houston Smith's book about the world's religions to the beat poets to books about self-help psychology and, you know, sexuality and really interesting novels.
And so I read all that.
I was very advanced in my reading age.
I read a lot of material that was really for adults as a young person.
Yeah, I just never really went down that road.
And then even once I did get into Eastern mysticism, it was always from this very philosophical place of like, these are complex, metaphorical, conceptual ways of trying to deal with some of the deeper questions of who we are as human beings, and I never took them as supernatural.
Yeah, agreed.
And I'll also say that my father's side of the family is Russian Orthodox, so talk about pageantry.
Although I never went to those churches, it was more they just kind of pushed me into a Catholic church with my mother's side of the family.
I don't want to escape, and we're coming up on time, I don't want to escape talking about this, but I found the Weinstein brand conversation pretty boring, but also pretty telling in a lot of ways.
And one thing I found interesting, and I do think this encapsulates a lot of the problems
that I have with religion, just as I do with people who just take ayahuasca for the first
time and, hey, if you do it, awesome.
I love it.
It's great.
I love the ritual, everything about it.
But all of a sudden, think that they've tapped into some secret knowledge.
We have Russell Brand, who as a reminder, six, seven months ago was the subject of a
a deep investigation about all of his sexual abuse and potential rape charges.
And now he's come out as Christian and he's been baptized.
And very early in that conversation, he started talking about other people having false idols or worshiping false gods.
And I was like, this is so par for the course with one of my biggest problems with religions.
It's like, I was baptized last week and now I'm going to tell you what gods you can't serve.
Or which ones are not the real ones.
And it's that thing about a little bit of knowledge and, you know, it reminds me and when I used to have students when I taught yoga, sometimes I would, people would be very excited early on.
They'd take a few classes and come up to me and be like, I'm going to dedicate my, you know, this is the most amazing thing ever.
I found it.
I'm going to do this.
And I would say to them, and I think this relates to your, what you just said about the introspective knowledge or the quest of knowledge.
I would say that's really awesome.
Come tell me that in six months.
Come tell me in a year that you're going to be doing yoga three times a week and that's your thing.
Because there's always that, anytime you get that dopamine rush, anytime something is new and you just want to, you know, and I get that.
I've been there too, but everything is a discipline.
And I think sometimes when...
You enter a pathway and you're very early on, you tend to become very, very fervent about the way it is.
And that was what jumped out most, but while there was a lot of shit that Russell said, but that one really caught my ear.
Yeah.
So you're talking about the conversion experience, right?
When people get converted to something and they're very, it's a, it's a very, It's an uplifting, exciting, emotionally impactful thing.
And it's almost like their psyche just feels like, I found it.
I found the answer that I've been looking for all along.
And it's here.
And you know, that's what cults really rely on to get you hooked in.
And then, you know, the love bombing and the separating you off and, you know, not saying that all religions are cults or that Russell Brand isn't a cult.
But I think that, you know, in this project, The reason why conspiracy theories and spirituality can become the portmanteau of conspirituality is that they do rhyme, they do overlap in various ways.
And some of that has to do with believing things with insufficient evidence.
And some of this has to do with believing things that are unfalsifiable, that you're actually there.
There is no counter argument that would change your mind.
And that's the opposite of a scientific mindset.
A lot of people would say, well, you've been converted into atheism.
You even use that term.
And so now you are you're stuck in some kind of You know, dogmatic stance about the world.
That's your religion.
It's like, well, maybe, but the place that I've entered into does have to do with falsifiability.
It does have to do with believing things based on evidence.
It does have to do actually with, with being open to new evidence and that I would change my mind if it came along.
So there's this fascinating phenomenon now that we're kind of tracking and you just referenced it with brand, but like several people who had Before, then kind of new atheist IDW adjacent, you know, intellectual dark web that they kind of come to prominence through the intersection of those things have are now becoming very religion friendly and even, you know, saying that they are religious.
So Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one.
Uh, you know, several months ago, and that was really interesting because she had, she, she was even called one of the four horsemen of new atheism or whatever with, with the usual suspects.
So she's now, this is, this is someone who grew up in a, in a fundamentalist Muslim country who suffered genital mutilation as a result of like the, the, the hardcore beliefs in that tradition and got out of it and got involved in atheism in such a way that her life was threatened.
And now is saying, yeah, no, actually we need Christianity in order to protect Western civilization, essentially is what she's saying.
What is Murray's first name?
I'm wanting to call him Andrew Murray.
Douglas.
Douglas Murray.
Andrew Murray is the tennis player.
So Douglas Murray is another one, right?
Douglas Murray is actually a very conservative, like anti-immigrant, kind of a hateful human being who, because he's gay and because he speaks in like, you know, Oxford English, Um, is often perceived to be like really brilliant and really even handed, but he's, he's always, he's always like moved through those new atheist circles and IDW circles.
Um, he has not necessarily converted, but more and more he's saying, yeah, I think, I think we really need Christianity.
I think Christianity is a really important part of like saving the West, you know, which like only further, you know, amplifies the, uh, the stereotype that these, these people are kind of like, You know, veering into territory of a certain kind of bigotry and Western chauvinism.
And power.
There's no other way to describe it.
I'm working on this project about the history of Oregon I've talked about, and I hope to release it in the fall with a friend of mine.
But I've been looking at the Discovery Laws, which were implemented, which is basically what gave the white colonizers in America the ability to just take all of the land that they wanted.
But they stem from the Crusades.
And basically, the Pope, dating back to the 14th century, the Popes were like, if you're not white or Christian or a man, just take the land.
This is our divine mandate.
And so, whenever I hear someone saying we need to save Western civilization, that is the heritage that you're talking about.
Yes, there are great thinkers and there's actually scientific movements in the Enlightenment.
There's a lot going on.
But, the way that Western civilization spread, the mechanism by which it was able to colonize everywhere on the planet, basically, for at least brief periods of time, or longer, or still today, was through this idea that we are endowed by a creator god to civilize all of the uncivilized people in the world.
So, when I hear them say these things, that's exactly where my brain goes.
So, it's really hard for me to differentiate between any sort of metaphysics of a God and how that is applied in reality.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because that same critique has been leveled at the so-called New Atheists, which is really just atheists on the internet, basically, right?
But it's been leveled at them too, like, oh, this is really your white supremacist kind
of belief that everyone who's not like you is primitive and this is part of that colonialist
mindset.
But there are other people too, right?
Like Jordan Peterson, to me, has obviously always been religious, but more and more he's
being open about his religion and he's talking about potentially converting to Catholicism.
I know he was going to Orthodox churches for a while.
I think his wife just converted to Catholicism.
So as these folks do, he's talking about his wife on his podcast and her profound conversion
to Catholicism.
Then you have Konstantin Kissin, who's the guy from Trigonometry, like the main guy from Trigonometry.
Annoying as he is, he's recently come out and made a video called The Atheist Delusion.
And the thing that all of these folks have in common is they all have this COVID grievance Anti-vax either like overt or adjacent, anti-woke, you know, the left and quarantine measures and vaccines, this is all evidence of creeping tyranny.
And one of the things you hear in the Russell Brand and Brett Weinstein conversation is this thing, and we're going to have to talk about this a lot, I fear, in the next few months.
This trope that has emerged coming from people who are on the right or who are kind of, you know, mouthpieces for the right, like a lot of these alternative media figures are these days, which is that what's happening on the quote-unquote left, meaning the Democrats and Biden and like any of the sort of, you know, centrist parties in Europe and, you know, maybe in countries like Australia and New Zealand, what's happening there is much more scary than Trump.
Or the phenomenon of populist strongmen around the world.
It's much more scary because they're ushering in this soft tyranny through like, oh we're taking care of you by making you do social distancing and wear masks, but actually it's a cover for something.
And so Brett and Russell go off down this You know, complete conspiratorial, batshit crazy kind of rabbit hole where they're just talking about it all as if it's obvious.
They're talking about they the whole time.
They're talking about the WHO and, you know, all of the stuff that I was just mentioning, as if this is obviously the real tyranny that we should be afraid of and how they, and this is something Brett loves to do, that he and his fellow small inner circle of podcast guests are actually the last kind of stand against The awful, awful leftist tyranny that's coming.
It's very interesting if you think that one thing that Brand and Weinstein, which they disagreed on a bunch of things, but one thing they definitely agree on is that the tyranny of the Biden administration is much, much worse than anything Trump could ever do.
And it's almost as if using that Christian language throughout leading up to it, Almost was like a sort of audience that they're catering to.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I mean, Russell actually has a moment where he's he he makes a kind of milquetoast critique of Trump where he says, well, you know, a Trump is it was a little clumsy.
I mean, apologies to any of our Trump Fans who are listening.
He actually says that.
He says, I know there's Trump fans in the audience or something like that.
And so he's sort of like being, oh, you know, I'm sorry that I just said Trump.
Trump's administration was kind of clumsy and harmless, but the Biden administration really, really dangerous.
And here's the thing.
And maybe this is a good note to end on because you and I have been covering this a lot.
They actually reference, without naming it directly, Project 2025 and Christian nationalism say, oh, there's this narrative that's emerged from left-wing media.
That there's this terrible Christian nationalist thing that Trump is ushering in.
No mention of like the details of what that means in terms of, for example, a woman's right to choose or for example, LGBTQ rights or, you know.
health insurance covering contraception or any number of different things,
prayer coming back into schools, book bannings of anything that doesn't fit with like
Christian morality.
No mention of any of that, but he's like, this is, this is the specter that they're trying to raise and it's
sort of anti-Christian.
And he says, but, but what, what is it really that we're doing over here?
Like, I'm okay being a Christian, I'm okay that you're not, you're okay with me being a Christian, and we'll just get on with it.
And that's what they're really afraid of, that we'll form this alternative alliance.
And it underlines something that I said in my bonus episode this week, which is that Russell's trajectory includes at some point a turn where he starts to see conventional Christianity As the truly rebellious outsider thing to do.
Yeah, I caught that.
Yeah, because that is the narrative, right?
White people, white Christians are oppressed.
Yeah.
Final thought, if your metaphysics or your beliefs are creating suffering in other people, I would just really question them because that doesn't seem very in the spirit of religion to me.
