Dave Rubin and Peter Boghossian dissect critical thinking, arguing that faith often replaces objective analysis, fueling extremism when reason is discarded. They apply the "horseshoe theory" to link far-left and far-right tactics, noting how safe spaces suppress dissent, inadvertently empowering figures like Donald Trump. Discussing Boghossian's book The Manual for Creating Atheists, they critique agnosticism as a "wiggle room" for unwarranted beliefs and highlight how covariant belief systems resist revision. Ultimately, the dialogue asserts that honest inquiry and an open marketplace of ideas are essential to counter dogmatism, even if it creates uncomfortable environments where false beliefs must be scrutinized. [Automatically generated summary]
I'd like to believe that critical thinking is woven into pretty much everything we do here on The Rubin Report, but today's show is going to have an even keener focus on this all-encompassing topic.
At the end of the day, whether we're talking about politics, religion, or current events, it all boils down to critical thinking, the definition of which is, quote, the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment, end quote.
Can we really look at the world the way it truly is, not the way we want it to be?
Can we set aside our faith-based hopes to analyze real-world problems?
Or is faith actually a part of the problem as opposed to being the solution?
Each week I try to have conversations that exist in this space without resorting to ad hominem attacks and strawman arguments.
That guiding principle is fully based in critical thinking and moral reasoning.
Joining me this week is Peter Boghossian, philosophy instructor, critical thinker, and author of a manual for creating atheists.
Peter's book is a really incisive, clear take on why critical thinking is important, how faith-based thinking can be dangerous, and also relates what you can do to spread ideas based on fact and reason Yes, I did say help there.
Help is exactly what I believe is needed in this situation.
and relatable style on topics that many are afraid to touch on, even with the people closest
to them.
He gives the reader the very tools to help people trapped by faith-based thinking.
Yes, I did say "help" there.
Help is exactly what I believe is needed in this situation.
When your beliefs aren't based in reason and critical thinking, it creates a space
where extremism can creep in.
This of course isn't beholden to one religion or ideology.
Anytime you throw reason and fact out the window to trade it with ideas that aren't provable, you create the very breeding ground that extremism needs to spread.
It's not a coincidence that in places where gays, women, and minorities are treated poorly are also the places where religion has often been a substitute for clear moral thinking.
By the way, we here in the West could do a much better job of this ourselves.
I know we're more focused on Islamic extremism on this show, but there are all kinds of extremism in the world.
You can't deal with any of these ideologies with half-truths and by shooting the messengers.
You must deal with them by looking at them head-on and tackling the ideologies with better ideas and moral clarity.
We live in a time when religious extremism is on the rise.
I'm going to guess that we probably don't have many religious extremists watching this show, so I don't know how much of an effect I can have on those people.
The people that I can have an effect on, however, is you guys.
People out there from every walk of life, from all over the globe, who want to do the work of finding out what brings us together, not what tears us apart.
I firmly believe that critical thinking is the solution.
Critical thinking doesn't care about your race, your sexuality, or your nationality.
It is a roadmap to solving serious issues and combating superstitious thinking that has led to many real-world problems.
Much of the right in America is led by Christian religious ideology.
Much of the left, while not guided by religion, has become as dogmatic in its beliefs.
Between the two is where most clear-minded, free-thinking people live.
It's what my guest on next week's show, Ali Rizvi, refers to as the New Center.
I think by letting go of our superstitions and focusing on real solutions, we can change the world for the better.
Either that, or we can leave it up to the zealots.
After all, the world is what you make of it.
Peter Boghossian is a philosophy instructor, critical thinker, and author of a manual for creating atheists.
He's also an anti-regressive warrior and can back it up with some jiu-jitsu.
You know, every week I feel like I'm connecting with people that I know in the digital space, mostly through 140 characters, and I put you in that group.
Yeah, well we're obviously going to talk a lot about those values, and I think it really is cool that this group of people have come together.
You were sort of in this a little bit before me and connected with Sam and some of those other guys, but now Rogan and Christina Hoff Summers, all these people who don't necessarily agree on everything, don't come from the same walks of life or the same socioeconomic stuff or whatever, that we've all sort of come together because we have these base principles that we want to put out there.
And so I think that that's a helpful heuristic, a helpful way to look at some of these issues.
And for me it was, you know, rather than give a genealogical account about how this came to be, for me what's always interesting is When I look at the mean-spiritedness, the anger, the tactics of the regressives, they're just so fundamentally contrary to what my values are and for the sort of person that I want to become.
And I do see that horseshoe, that far left and that far right.
In the left, the regressives seem extraordinarily angry and eager to smear those people with racist, sexist, homophobe, etc., if you don't buy into certain—even if you ask questions, as opposed to buying into something.
They've made any kind of discourse almost impossible.
Yeah, well we've talked a little bit about that, and Sam said something, Sam Harris said something about how it's almost like scorched earth, loosely quoting what he said, because the tactics have been so bad.
But before we get into all that, let's talk about you a little bit so people can understand where you come from and all this, and the book that you've written, which I just read this week, The Manual for Creating Atheists, it was wonderful, it was what I try to do here actually.
Yeah, so I think the best way to jump off on this is let's just define some terms.
And I've done this in one incarnation or another a few times on the show when we've talked about religion and atheism and agnosticism and all that, but why don't you just give me some basic definitions, which is sort of how you start the book.
So the way I define atheist, and I think it's right, these are placeholder terms, I'm willing to revise those.
I don't have, an atheist is a person who doesn't have sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God, but if they were given that evidence, then they would believe.
So inherent in the term atheist, or the way that I use it, is a sort of open-mindedness.
Right, which is funny to me, and that's the way you describe it in the book, because there seems to be a certain subset of people that think that atheists are actually the most close-minded people.
But that's not the way you're defining it, and maybe that's just sort of the personalities that have been publicly attached to atheism or something.
We can understand why someone would think that, because the word theist is contained with the word atheist.
And just as theists tend to have these dogmas where they latch on to religious propositions, faith, faith, propositions to faith, so too one would think that atheist does.
But again, I think that the faithful have constructed these narratives to make it As if there's some kind of a parallelism, a symmetry of belief.
Look, we believe these things, you guys believe these things.
We have beliefs that are predicated on no evidence, just like you do.
I don't think that people who are honest with themselves and have a minimal level, you know, basically enough intelligence to tie a shoe, I don't think that it's possible to come to that conclusion.
If we've defined something, and you're right, it's important to define words, and those can be placeholders for later on, because if someone says, I'm an agnostic atheist, I'll say, well, what do you mean by that?
And I can challenge or what have you, but if not, it's like two ships passing each other.
Like, we don't know what the conversation is about.
And there was a lot of that in the book where you're talking about, you know, people with faith and people without faith, or non-believer versus believer, however you want to define it.
They're talking about two different things, and that sometimes makes the conversation really kind of crazy.
Right, well that's why your description of it felt decent to me.
You know what I mean?
It certainly, as I said, I didn't talk about it until three months ago, it's never, I don't think it will ever be something that defines me.
What defines me are my thoughts and my, the breadth of all the things that I am, but that's just, to define yourself by something you don't believe in actually doesn't make that much sense, right?
So how do we help people to become more reflective about their beliefs?
How do we help people to become less dogmatic about their thoughts?
And, you know, maybe that's why, like, for me, even the sexuality isn't part of an identity,
but maybe that's because it's a dominant, heteronormative opinion, you know?
So, I mean, I don't know.
What I do know is that people think that having certain beliefs makes them a better person.
Dan Dennett talks about this in terms of belief and belief.
And part of the problem is once you start thinking that your holding beliefs makes you a better person, you're much less likely to revise those because it moves from the realm of epistemology, that is knowledge, to the realm of morals.
Yeah, and it's interesting in terms of the regressive left and the idea of race, when people talk about race.
That is just so charged and so politicized that they have made it almost impossible for a sincere inquirer to ask a question without being smeared or labeled in some way.
And we've lost the ability, we've lost the ability In an academic context, to ask sincere questions, the only way to solve any problem, the first step is to be honest about it.
If you're not honest about it, you're not going to solve it.
And you've written about this, and Douglas Murray was on Sam's podcast, other people have spoken about this, I've tweeted about this, I wrote about this, if you do not allow questions, then extremists are eager to come in with answers.
And so that's one of the consequences that we see.
And we see this in a religious landscape, especially with Islam now.
I feel to me it's more germane in the sense that The left, the regressives, have taken over academia.
They have literally hijacked the institutions, and now they're institutionalizing these policies which are really rather extreme.
Any classical liberal would be horrified with their speech codes, microaggressions, trigger warnings.
It's horrifying.
And they're basically robbing a generation of people of the possibility of being able to think clearly and critically, and they're ever increasing the threshold—people's threshold for what they consider to be offensive or the types of conversations they'll have is continuously dropping.
So, for me, it's personal only in that I have to deal with this every single day, and I—right?
And labeling a sort of criticism against that type of crazy is very different from people For whom I feel sympathies for these impulses they have.
They have very decent impulses at base and we need to be careful that because they're so insincere and dishonest that we don't disregard their whole message.
The onus falls upon us to think Clearly about that, and to really, okay, privilege, I got it, you know, this gender thing, you know, but to really take a step back and separate the message from the messenger so that we don't discount the whole thing.
Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, everybody who had, I think, Nick Cohen on here, and other people have given genealogical accounts of how we got into this situation, but I think the thing that people really aren't thinking about or talking about that much are, what are the implications for these things?
I mean, what are the philosophical—what does this—excuse me, what does this—I notice we're both speaking quickly.
And that's the kind of craziness that you get when—I mean, so it's—again, the issue of how we got there is extremely interesting and valuable.
I'm interested in—recently, my work has been focusing on what does that mean for one's intellectual life?
Like, what does that mean for one's ability to reflect on issues?
What does that mean for one's ability to make decisions about things that really matter?
Not Halloween costumes.
I understand that some people think that matters, but that's just evidence of an inability to show moral triage.
You know, to indexically prioritize, some kind of a hierarchy to identify one need as another need and show why that's important, and the way that you do that It's through reason and rationality.
That's how you get there.
And the way that you—so, when you attack safe spaces and when you attract true warnings, you're actually—this is the key thing—you're actually doing them a favor, because you're giving them an opportunity—you're giving people an opportunity, if their values are true, like if their values are morally correct, And I do believe that there's such a thing as being morally correct, and obviously they do as well.
That I believe that these guys, actually Joe Rogan fought me on this when I said this, I said I believe these guys like with the Affleck thing on Real Time with Sam Harris and all that, I said well his intentions were good.
You know what I mean?
He was intending to try to protect the other.
Joe basically was like, nah, he's a Hollywood guy, and then he's just protecting his own internal... He's an actor.
He's an actor, and that's it.
He's out for number one, fine.
But I guess that's probably what really is perverse about what's going on on the left, because by taking kids, by taking college kids whose thoughts aren't fully formulated yet, and then putting this thing on them, they think they're doing everything for good intentions, but then they're going to walk out into the world realizing the world doesn't really react that way.
And if they're listening to this and they're just dumping on you and hating you and hating me, I think it's perhaps a nice, helpful heuristic to think about it in terms of standing for the flag.
An example on the right.
The people on the right are big on respect for the flag.
They've made their own things sacred.
But I don't think that's important.
I think what's important is to teach people why they should stand for the flag, what our values mean.
And that's why they're standing.
It's not an icon, but I think that the same property holds on the left.
They have to start being honest and realizing that if their values really are true, then they have to subject those values to scrutiny.
And then we have to create spaces, we have to create environments where The marketplace of ideas, we can have a discourse and a dialectic about these things.
So when I talked about this with Milo and the college thing, you know, he said that what this really is about, this isn't about left and right, he was saying that this really is about authoritarians versus... That's the horseshoe.
In this case, it's the rise of the victim, the victimhood culture.
They have certain questions, certain ideas can't be questions, can't be challenged.
The churches are safe space.
University campuses are safe space.
And so here's what's super interesting.
When I did a talk a few years ago, I don't know, five years ago, I don't even know, it's on YouTube, Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and other delusions just say no.
And I'm pretty sure that the Islamists know that they're never going to treat these women any better, right?
So what is that?
What is that?
I'm sorry to cut you off, but what is that?
What are they doing?
So they just view—so these feminists for whatever, they just view the other as more oppressed than they are, so they just have to give them their cred?
That is a comp—I have thought about that a long time.
I think it deals with the color of people's skin, oppression.
I think it deals with— You know, this whole third wave feminism that I still don't understand.
I don't know, I cannot explain to you, and I've thought about it extensively, how this cohabitation, not a marriage, but how this bizarre Relationship came to be.
And then, so that, and all of this, and all the stuff that we're talking about in this discussion, it shows again why, that if you don't help the reformers, the actual reformers who are trying to change, make things better for women and gays and minorities.
Unquestionably.
If you don't help these people and you keep framing these people as the problem, well what do you do?
Yeah, I'm just going to say that extreme—I think my tweet was something like, if you have—create environments in which you can't ask questions, extremists step in with solutions.
Could this—so really, could you think that this atmosphere that Trump is taking advantage of— I sense a palpable fear right now in America that I haven't felt before.
I really do.
I sense that people are feeling like everything is screwed up.
We have this terrorism stuff.
We don't know what the answers are.
There's this refugee thing.
We're all children of refugees or descendants of refugees here, unless you came over as a slave or an American Indian, right?
If you were actually indigenous to this land.
And I just have this sense that people don't know what's going on.
And then when you shut down the people on the left, then of course Trump.
Okay, so I really wish that every single person listening to that would put the rewind button and listen to that again.
So if you're one of these people who thinks that you're doing the world a favor by triggering Protecting people who are—you know, you want to protect the sensitivities of others.
Again, not a bad impulse at all.
But the consequence of that is that people become less capable of making discerning, rational judgments, particularly in the moral sphere.
So the consequence of those things is that Donald Trump is right there with the answer.
And I just read a piece about the number of people who support Trump who won't admit it is far higher.
Which is terrifying.
And we know that the way—we don't want to create adversarial relationships.
I mean, if—so, I think that part of this problem—I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, necessarily, but part of this problem is we have to engage Trump's arguments on his own terms.
And part of that is, if the idea is that this is going to make America safer, I think that's what we should—we shouldn't appeal to patriotism.
I don't think there's any reason to think that, first off, it's not even constitutional, any of the keeping people out based on religion, or any of that stuff.
You know, I was just at a restaurant with my buddy there before we came here, and, you know, I don't eat, I try to eat only cruelty-free meat, so I won't eat anything that's cruel.
So we've now extended the umbrella of rights to animals, right?
So that is constantly extending.
So the next step for some people is to extend that to ideas.
And you're saying the next version of that will be with ideas, so we're going to sort of take, we're going to put on even softer gloves when it comes to ideas, because even that should be held in some sort of special way.
Yeah, because people, as I said in my TAM talk, ideas don't deserve dignity, people do.
And it's kind of become a meme, but it's true.
It's that It's just the next kind of radical taking that idea and extending it further on.
And the problem with that is that you do a disservice to those people holding beliefs, because you don't respect their beliefs to engage them enough.
That's the other thing that's really not talked about.
This whole enterprise is really one of disrespect.
They're trying to engender these values of respect, but not listening to people, not engaging people, people's ideas, Even, you know, you've talked about in your show the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Yeah, well that was one of the things, you know, when we launched the show on Ora, Sam was the first guest, and he said that they're always looking, that these people are always looking for something in you.
Not that you've said this opinion, or that you've shared this idea, but if they can somehow link together something that gets them to where they want you to be, you're out.
Think about Discharging that impulse that you have.
Think about the kind of person that you are.
You know, it's difficult for me to say without being overly harsh, and it's an example of a time when someone ought to be overly harsh, but that makes me feel really sad for somebody.
Yeah, well, that's very much how I feel out of all of this, because, look, I can barely speak when I'm saying it, because this situation has cost me friends and relationships already, and I've only been talking about this stuff for a couple months, and I see the way people have turned on me, and I've gotten into debates with friends and said, Can you point me to where I've said what you're accusing me of?
Someone who exists in the world that we exist in, that's a public person, who I no longer talk to anymore, who's been a good friend of mine for the last couple of years, said that my whole show now is about bigotry to Muslims.
I mean, I've given up, basically, because after being called a bigot repeatedly and saying, actually, no, and can you point me to any—I know I'm not a bigot.
You know, Douglas Murray said something really interesting on Sam's podcast.
He said, I have no time anymore for people whose intentions are not good.
You know what I mean?
So I know I'm not a racist, so if you want to call me a racist or call me a bigot, it actually, since I'm not, it actually, I don't like being called a racist or a bigot, but it doesn't really have any meaning because it's just a word.
If I was secretly a racist and you were calling me a racist, I suppose I would struggle with it a little bit more, but I'm not.
So that's the hard thing about, that really is difficult about dealing with people who are insincere.
And I think a lot of those attacks on Sam like I in philosophy this thing called a hermeneutic of charity you want to give everybody a charitable interpretation and you want to say okay these guys actually believe this stuff you know but over time you just have to grow up yeah I mean I I hate to say this I mean I don't hate to say this because it's I should have woken up to this conclusion long ago.
I mean, maybe their cognitive software has somehow been hijacked by this moral—this idea that they think that they're defending the downtrodden and, you know, this—you know, we need to do this as an example.
It's OK to do this because we're serving some—you know, there's some utilitarian calculus, like, oh, it's going to be in the greater good.
I don't know what goes through their minds.
But that's the problem with dealing with someone who's insincere.
I think that they think, and maybe I'm probably giving them the leash that they wouldn't afford me, right?
But I do think they think, as Majid said, they think that they're in a war.
So they're going to use whatever tactics they have.
What I find particularly odd about it is that now that we live in a digital age where everything is recorded and you can be quoted, you know, talking to this person about this or this person about that, Even when they're confronted with new evidence, or confronted or exposed as frauds, they just double down even more, which is incredible.
But that's, again, part of the regressive left, right?
They don't want to have conversations.
They want to end those conversations.
And ironically, they turn that against us and say, well, look, you guys are the ones who don't want to have conversations.
And look, the whole problem—this is the schism in liberalism, right?
And it was made naked on the Bill Maher Show with Ben Affleck and Sam.
And this is something, again, to solve these problems, we need to be on it, we need to be forthright, we need to be honest, we need to create environments where we can talk about the problems.
And almost, if you were to, again, create a list of how not to solve your problems, these people have it.
You know, what's amazing to me also is that I never mean to go this deep into it.
I really wanted to focus more on atheism.
And I'm happy, we're going to go there now, and I'm happy to do this, but what I think is particularly fascinating about this is that everything else that we talk about, and that we're going to talk about, is so related to this.
That's why this whole situation has been so bananas, because this schism has exposed something that I think people didn't really realize.
But let's just leave that portion there, unless you want to give me a closing statement on that, and then we'll come to atheism.
I just think that we—this is not a very hopeful time right now, you know?
I mean, we're dealing with very serious ecological issues, and we have people who are apologists for big oil companies and denialists, you know, denying anthropogenic global warming.
And again, I actually do think those people should be given a seat at the adult table.
Anybody who has a view different from my own, as long as they provide evidence, is welcome to have a conversation.
I think that there's something that's morally damaging about what the regressives are doing, and I think people have had enough.
I have had way more than enough.
And I think now, like, your show has really caused this catalyst, almost this cascade, of people who also feel the same way, and their like minds are gravitating.
And they've really robbed us of any idea of hope that we have, because we look at the
presidential campaign and it's just holy moly.
I mean I look at the Republicans and I think, wow.
Like, any one of those people would be an unmitigated disaster.
No, no, no, but I do—we'll just keep going, because you're hitting on it, that this thing is so— It's so powerful because I watch the Republican debates and I think, I could never in good conscience vote for all of you people.
But now part of it, there is a piece of me that when I see this regressive group, when they all like Bernie, now there's a piece of me that's like, do I like the same guy they like?
It's crazy though because I do want to keep going with this because I feel each week I feel like I can get away from this a little bit, and then something else happens that brings me back into it.
And we've talked about it in a little more of a lofty way, which is nice also.
Not so much the nitty-gritty of it, but in sort of a bigger sense.
Alright, so let's get to some of these.
And this is all going to relate back to it, so I want to talk about new atheists.
There's an attack on new atheists.
As I understand it, new atheists pretty much are just atheists who are finally speaking up about atheism.
It may be a little more.
You define it, I think, a little more specifically, right?
In the book, there's a little more about that they're actually trying to shoot down some ideas where an old atheist maybe just removed themselves from the discussion.
There's a template that you can use, and people have gone around—Anthony Magnabosco has gone around videos on YouTube who implements the—uses the scientific method.
What is your confidence in this belief?
Gives an intervention based upon the book.
Now, what is your—and then a post-test.
Pre-test, intervention, post-test.
And it's amazing the down moves that people make in only five to ten minutes.
So we know that this works.
We know that this is effective.
We know that these sorts of very civil, very engaging... And that's the other thing.
You never have to worry about anybody saying they don't want to talk about their faith.
Everybody loves to talk.
It's like the one thing that people will... the one commonality among people of faith.
So, speaking of talking about it, you also hit upon how people are very selective in what they believe.
And if you get them to admit, well, I don't believe that this or that happened, right?
I don't believe about chopping off hands or chopping off heads.
That's the crazy part.
But I believe in this other stuff.
But I think what you were saying is that, basically, if you can get them to sort of start admitting something's not true, that's sort of how you pull the string, right?
To then leading to getting them to admit some other stuff, probably.
Yeah, and a lot of that is you have to create conditions, and again, this isn't me, there's a long body of literature, there's a long line of literature about how to change the behavior of people who don't want their behavior changed.
It's from drug and alcohol counseling, it's from motivational interviewing, cult exiting, this is out there, but nobody has really synthesized it.
No one has brought these disparate elements together.
So, I was partly thinking this when I was reading the book.
What would you say is the problem?
If there's the average person that's a believer that uses religion for community, you know, celebrates some holidays, whatever the religion might be, but isn't doing anything, you know, not the people that are beheading people.
But if you're just some average person that doesn't necessarily take your faith seriously, but you get some sense of community, whatever it is, do you see an inherent problem in that?
Or is that just for you?
It's like, well, you're just sort of deluded, but all right, go with it.
And so, if I think that the Patriots are ordained by God to win the Super Bowl, or whatever it is that they do—you know, again, I don't know anything about sports.
So, I think that the problem is that people make objective claims, and they live their lives accordingly, and this is all you got, man.
This is it.
This is it.
So, wouldn't it be better for those people to be invited to see reality for what it is?
Wouldn't it be better to give those people an opportunity to flourish?
Because if your beliefs, if one belief, it's like, you can look at it as like an architectonic structure, like a big building, right?
If one of your beliefs on the bottom level of that building It's contaminated, like a base belief, like Jesus rose from the dead.
Then all of the beliefs that flow from that, or stem from that, become suspect.
So what's the harm?
The harm is that if you want to enable yourself to flourish, and you want to enable your community to flourish, you have to align your beliefs with reality.
Because if you don't, then what you think is objectively moral, the right thing to do, will actually be leading you away from flourishing.
So almost in a way, you then systemically, you have to constantly be compromising.
Because no matter how much new evidence comes in to prove something else, you really have to skirt around it because you've built sort of your base in things that aren't provable.
Words that have, words that are anathema to belief revision, like sin, like sacred.
And that buttresses or protects those beliefs from being revised.
So there's a whole mechanism to keep this, that in almost, like I talked about in the book, it's almost, if you look at it epidemiologically, how these things spread, like memes, they spread mimetically.
When you really think about that, the harm is that literally billions of people are living in ways that they think is just and kind and right, and it's not.
And nation-states are created around that.
And we are in a very serious problem with technology, the instantaneous flow and access of information.
We are in a problem that we can no longer afford not only to ignore that, but to disallow—there we go, the rest have left us again—but to disallow conversations about those things.
We—look, a shocking number of people In this country—and I'm ashamed to say this, but that doesn't—don't shoot the messenger—do not want Muslim immigration.
Right, so—and, of course, we're back to it, but so— No, but it's OK.
But the point being that—so then if you were to take someone like Sam, who's having extremely difficult, complex, thought-out conversations about the difference between Islam and Muslims and Islamism and violent jihad and all those things, and if you put him in the same bank as Trump, there is nobody left.
I think that for me is why I've taken this thing on.
Because I saw this guy, I told Sam to his face, I didn't even know who he was before that.
Believe it or not, I didn't really know.
I didn't follow him on Twitter, I had never read any of his books, I had maybe heard of him.
But I watched that thing and I thought, Jesus, here's a guy trying to tell the truth on some pretty controversial things, and look at the way he's being bombasted.
—So that's the danger of what's going on in the colleges, really,
because you're—we're using Sam as one example of this.
But if they can breed that ideology in the colleges, now it goes to what you were saying before.
You worry about the future, because now you're going to bring up all these people
with all this idea.
So is some of this, though, that to have these conversations?
First off, people, we view things on Vine in six seconds, 140 characters, and I'm really happy to be doing Long Form again, and I really do believe it's coming back, and I get emails every day saying that people are digging it, so we're on to something.
But it's part of it that to have real discussions about real things, And especially when you do it from the religious angle and atheism and all that.
Well, you have basically Bill Maher and Dawkins and a couple other people that are really in the limelight of it, and that you're putting too much on a few people.
And that's sort of the reverse of how this should go if you want to have real open discussion, right?
For example, I'll defend Bill Maher related to this, and people say, well, he's sort of a dick about it, and he's throwing it in everyone's face and all that.
And I'll always say, well, I grant him a leash on this, because he's fighting the good fight, in my view.
He's fighting something that's so hard to do, and really using reason to explain complex things.
So if he's a little bit of a dick about it, All right.
But I do know is that that reaction is more typical than ever now, and we need less of that reaction.
Here's one way that we may want to think about getting less of that reaction, and I'm not being facetious when I tell you this, I'm being incredibly sincere.
Virtually every time I speak to someone, not every time, you know, if they're a professional apologist, then that goes out the window.
Virtually every time, excuse me, when I'm speaking with someone, I always think to myself, maybe they know something I don't know.
And if you can just attempt to hold that in your head, and I have found, in conversations with religious people, it's been very helpful.
I will admit to you, I almost cannot do that any longer with the regressives, because they make a slip of the tongue into just some monstrous, heinous act, or I always feel that it's personal, like it's deeply personal, like there's something There's something in me that they need to cleanse or something.
Well, it's interesting that the more I try to bring this towards atheism, the more it comes back to this.
Because it seems to me that the attacks that they've done on the new atheists, where they use it as a pejorative now, you're a new atheist, it's some sort of evil creature, even though I don't know anyone really that identifies as a new atheist.
I don't think.
Maybe Sam does.
I'm not even sure.
But they've just muddied the water.
You were just saying you don't identify as an atheist.
So, yeah, I mean, you can attempt to smear me, you can attempt to... But the irony is, Joe and I talked about this, it's like, I have never heard a person use the word intersectional who wasn't just a nasty person.
Who wasn't just a really, just mean-spirited, angry person.
I think part of the problem is also that when people have made the choice to make the leap of faith, right, whatever the religion that they've jumped in, in a certain way, even though I think in their eyes they're doing something very lofty, in a certain way you're doing, you're just, I view it as sort of like you're giving up sort of.
You're like, the world is a pretty fucked up place, I don't know the answers so I'm just going to leap So is that part of why it makes the rational person's argument to them very difficult?
Because you're arguing against something that's not rational in its most pure form.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, I haven't thought of this so literally until just this second, but years ago, I think in 1997, so I was 21, I went to Egypt and I was at Mount Sinai, which is supposedly where Moses got the Ten Commandments.
And I hiked up the mountain.
It's a long hike.
You're supposed to do it at night.
I did it during the day.
I ran out of water.
I mean, I was basically delusional.
My stomach was messed up from I ate some bad pigeon in Cairo.
I mean, I was, if I was, if there was ever a moment where I was going to have a spiritual awakening, like that's where it was.
Cause I was compromised in my body.
Right.
And I remember, I'm not kidding at all.
I mean, I remember going to the top of that thing and thinking like, if, if there's something here, You gotta give me a sign, right?
Like, if there's something here, and this is where Moses supposedly saw the burning bush and got the Ten Commandments and all that, then you gotta give me something!
So that's an opportunity—I'll tell you what that is.
That's an opportunity for your friend to reflect, to sincerely reflect about The moral priority that she or he has given this one issue, and to ask yourself, well, does that seem—just as an outsider, as an outsider, does that seem that this one issue should trump everything else?
I try not to characterize people whose beliefs are so far afield of mine that they have mental disorders.
And I find—I think I find that the type of people who go into religion are the sort of people who tend to be imbalanced anyway, and they find a nice community for that, a way to discharge those bizarre beliefs.
It's the same thing with the regressives.
Uh-oh, are we supposed to keep talking about— Keep going, keep going.
Yeah.
It's that they find this wonderful social justice warrior place where they can be behind their keyboard and angry and smear people, and they get all the hate and they get all the rage.
And it's very difficult for me to rein myself in and not write them all off as people who have mental disorders.
I wonder, so for you, even before the regressive thing took hold so much, this discussion, a discussion about, you know, free thinking and critical thinking versus faith and things you can't prove.
How exhausting is this for you on a day-to-day basis?
Because I do find that it can be extremely exhausting, that at the end of the day I can have trouble shutting off my mind or I'll wake up at 6 and I flick on Twitter and then I immediately see craziness before I've gotten out of bed.
And I just had another complaint filed against me.
The ways that I can't—and it's not that the administration has said anything to me.
It's the culture in which we're—the academic culture now is you just have to be extremely cautious about what you say, particularly in regard to Islam or particularly in regard to—there are certain things.
You don't have to be conscious whatsoever if you want to criticize big pharma.
Right.
Yeah, that's the other thing.
Like, in class, you can say, fuck, shit, you can say anything you want, but don't use a pronoun wrong, or don't say, you know, don't slip, again, 49 with the retarded word.
I don't do that anymore, but, you know, the things that are exhausting to me are the Mechanisms that are in place that prohibit the free expression of ideas and not necessarily that I don't have tenure and I'll never get tenure, not necessarily that anything, it would be a career ender, but it is a theft of my time.
It is now I have to constantly deal with it and I have to have it in the back of my mind.
And then, oh, if I say something else, I have another complaint and then I'll be the guy who gets all these complaints.
So it's working within these.
And, you know, the other thing I was thinking about last night, Is that what this does, in essence, is it pushes the whole system towards mediocrity.
It pushes the whole system, because then people are afraid to voice controversial ideas or opinions or give sides that students wouldn't hear.
They want to be the people who don't get complaints filed against them.
So they take the easy courses, you know, and what they're not talking about is like, for example, nothing to do with the regressive left, but—or and—cognitive disability and its challenge to moral philosophy.
We read a great book about that.
We're not talking about the status—Peter Stinger has really interesting stuff about this philosopher—of what should the status of cognitively disabled people be.
And he says they should be more equivalent in treatment to—I don't want to mischaracterize him—but to basically pigs and cows.
I think that that's an important conversation to have.
And the whole system is then being pushed towards mediocrity because professors don't want to deal with it.
They don't—they just can't—they stomach or handle all these ridiculous student complaints, so they just don't teach it.
It was like the best thing that ever happened to me.
The moment after this guy, I won't say who it is, this person told me this, I wrote an article.
I'm like, well, okay, well, since I'm never going to get tenure and I know that there's nothing I can do independent of my accomplishments, I'll never get promoted.
It just felt, it was the most freeing feeling ever.
I left his office and I wrote a little piece Something like what should the role of the educator be?
And I said that the role of the educator should be to change students' beliefs if they're not in alignment with reality.
Seems to me totally uncontroversial.
My colleagues freaked out about it.
The piece went viral.
This is brief chronology, and this is how I got in touch with Sam Harris.
And then some guy from—Paul Pardee from Philosophy News said, you want to do a podcast?
I'm in the podcast.
Sam Harris tweeted, we need more educators like Peter Boghossian.
This is how I got in touch with Dawkins.
Dawkins tweeted it.
And that just started this whole cascade.
But I have never felt more free to talk about anything that I want, knowing that I could be fired at any instant.
Well, I love it because it shows you the importance of ideas, which is really, that's the big thing here that everything else is couched in, right?
That you had an idea, you shared it, and then your idea was shared by people that you respect and admire, who you credit in your book for helping you get to this place, and then they Spread an idea.
Because many people—every day I get email, people saying, why don't you sit down with one of these guys?
And there's, you know, there's a list of the public ones that I could sit down with, right?
And I know some of them personally.
What could we do?
If they've been exposed repeatedly as liars, as they have, and as repeatedly with bad intentions, so then for you, for you, someone that deals in the moral landscape without religion, right, and deals in critical thinking, What should the decision process be for me?
My friend Jerry Coyne said this to me, a very evolutionary biologist, a very useful piece of information.
I'm trying to say this without giving this person any identity, but here's what I think you should do.
I'll give you the piece of advice you gave me.
People are going to criticize you no matter what.
So if someone says to you, hey, I'm going to donate to charity, I'm going to do this, the question I think is, do you think that this person is sincere and honest in their engagement with you?
Not what would I get out of it, not what would they get out of it, not even what would it do to further the discourse.
But is this a sincere person who's willing to sit down and talk with me and look at the evidence, and are their beliefs defeasible?
Are they willing to say, you know, hey look, Dave, I came in here, I thought this, I had a conversation with you.
But equally important, you have to ask that of yourself, right?
If that is absent from that discourse, it's just a farce.
So why would you?
You should never listen to someone on Twitter who's going to say, well fuck you, get your own show.
You're not held hostage to the irrationality of others.
And I won't bring any of those cards, and we'll just see what happens.
But the beauty of this is that this This is big, and this is what a lot of people have wanted to talk about, and I like the fact that I'm able to talk about it with people that are dealing with it in different ways.
So at the academic level, and the religious level, or belief level, and then people are dealing at the political level, and all that stuff.
They're particularly not easy when, again, a lot of the arguments that people on the regressive have, they really should be taken earnestly.
You know, treating people, not treating people differently on the basis of skin color, I mean, these are really important things, and we need to be sensitive To how we behave.
We need to be more kind and more just and more compassionate.
The way to do that is not through the regressives.
The way to do that is by being honest and sincere with ourselves and having these sorts of discourses, having these kinds of dialogues.