“You Are Already an Atheist, Here’s Why” — The Daniel Dennett Speech that Proved Atheism to Me

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]He says, "The Pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter. And the fact that it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him."

[00:00:09]What goes through the Pope's mind about being rejected all the time? Does God have it in for him?

[00:00:16]Well, think about it. And I'm sure the Pope has thought about it.

[00:00:21]And he's a smart man. I suspect that the Pope is an atheist. Everybody sort of knows that everybody else knows that this is all just fun and games. Wouldn't it be great if we could get the God myth to be similarly transparent in our culture like Santa Claus and you know we could go on saying god damn it and God bless you just the way we talk about sunsets and sunrises and Santa Claus and nobody would take it seriously. Today I'm going to talk about how to tell if you're an atheist. In in my other role as a researcher on the conscious on consciousness in the brain, one of my favorite phenomena, but I've never actually witnessed it directly is Anton syndrome.

[00:01:05]Uh which is a variety of anosnosia. This is where a patient has a serious problem is completely unaware of it, completely oblivious of the problem. or variety of different cases of anosagnosia, but probably the most extreme is Anton syndrome, which is also known more uh informatively as blindness denial.

[00:01:28]Now, these are people who have been just struck blind. They've had sight all their lives. They have recently been struck blind by some cerebral accident and they don't realize it. They're blind and they do not know that they are blind. They deny it and they carry on noticing that they're having some problems, but they don't think it's blindness.

[00:01:56]Well, as I said, I've never actually seen it firsthand. Uh it's rare and it usually lasts only a few days or weeks.

[00:02:04]And uh I have a standing invitation uh uh or request to various people in the field who might get an Anton's case.

[00:02:13]Call me up, send me an email. I'll be on the next plane because I really want to see it firsthand. I have some hunches about how to think about it and how to interact with people that are suffering from Anton syndrome.

[00:02:27]It's hard to believe that it's possible.

[00:02:29]A lot of people I know I've had students when they hear about it first, they think I'm making it up.

[00:02:34]They just don't think it's possible for somebody to be blind and not realize it.

[00:02:38]Well, it is possible. And these people are not stupid.

[00:02:43]They're not insane. They're just victims of some sort of brain disorder.

[00:02:49]Well, now that's just to introduce my topic of today, which is a much more common affliction, atheism denial.

[00:03:05]I think I think we all know people who deny that they're atheists and we're not so sure that they realize what they really are. And that's what I'm going to talk about. And I've been talking about this recently with Linda Lascola. Linda and I, as many of you know, have been conducting uh some research on the curious and important and unstudied category of preachers with parishes who are secret atheists or non-believers.

[00:03:38]And we found, thanks in part to Dan Barker, we found five that we we actually found six that we interviewed for our first study. One of them got cold feet and we completely expuned all the facts about her from our study. We published one about the first five and now we're into phase two uh which uh we're just about completing. Linda's done a whole lot more interviews. We're going to be writing it up probably this summer or in the fall and uh uh probably publication in this calendar year. And let me just take this opportunity to thank those who've supported it. We always need more support. We don't have support for phase three yet, which will be a more grand study yet.

[00:04:23]But talking with Linda about what we were finding, and she's doing all the interviewing, and she noticed this pattern. We all noticed this pattern. We both noticed this pattern that many of our preachers, even though they volunteered for this study, didn't want to call themselves atheists.

[00:04:43]And in fact, we recently placed an ad in the National Catholic Reporter.

[00:04:50]We're I was surprised that they took the ad. Quite frankly, uh the Boston Pilot, which is the another publication, refused the ad and wouldn't say why, but the National Catholic Reporter published it just a few weeks ago. And I'm I'm going to point out one little passage there where it says mismatch between what they believe about God and faith and what their parishioners expect them to believe. We couldn't say atheist because they wouldn't accept that. But there's many pastors who are only too willing to acknowledge that what they believe in their heart of hearts is not what their parishioners think they believe. And that is a source of real anguish to them as as Dan Barker was mentioning earlier. Now, it's very hard then for some clergy to say that they're atheists. Now, in this group, that must seem pretty surprising, except we all know why, or we think we do. Isn't it obvious? Uh there are terrible connotations, at least in America, of the word atheist. And there's the cognitive dissonance.

[00:05:54]They're supposed to be people of God.

[00:05:56]And probably one of the biggest is what's known as the Concord fallacy or sunk costs. When you've invested most of your life in something, turning away from that and deciding that that was not a good investment, it's very hard to do.

[00:06:12]The tendency to throw good months and years after bad is very hard to resist.

[00:06:21]Now, we atheists don't feel this way. We don't have any difficulty saying that we're atheists.

[00:06:30]But in fact, I'm today I'm going to be talking to two audiences. To this audience here today and also to the audience that I anticipate in due course once these talks get out on the web. And I think in fact there are a few quiet secret Christians in attendance here.

[00:06:49]And I'm talking to them too.

[00:06:53]So I'm talking about us and those who are curious about us. I'm talking to us and those who are curious about us.

[00:07:02]As you know, we atheists are a happy lot.

[00:07:06]We're deeply moral, but we don't have a mountain of artificial guilt.

[00:07:12]We do feel guilty about our misdeeds, but we don't consider them sins. Daniel Dennett starts with Anton syndrome because it shows something uncomfortable about the human mind. People can be unaware of their own condition. In medicine, Anton syndrome is a real neurological disorder where a blind person may deny they are blind because the brain is damaged in the visual processing areas and fills in the gaps.

[00:07:36]Dennit uses that idea to talk about belief.

[00:07:40]Some people may reject the word atheist because it carries shame, fear, or social cost even when their actual beliefs no longer match Christianity.

[00:07:50]His research with Linda Lola found clergy who privately no longer believed what their congregations expected them to believe. Even the Bible admits doubt exists inside faith. Like Mark 9:24, I believe, help my unbelief.

[00:08:06]That tension is exactly the point.

[00:08:11]>> Well, how about you then?

[00:08:14]Might you be an atheist out there? Might you be an atheist?

[00:08:18]There's an American comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, whose main shtick is, uh, you might be a redneck.

[00:08:29]These are redneck jokes. He's the chief, he's the poet laurate of redneck jokes.

[00:08:39]You might be a redneck if you've been married three times and still have the same in-laws.

[00:08:50]You might be a redneck if the centerpiece on your dining room table is an original signed work by a famous taxiderermist.

[00:09:03]And there's a lot more. Uh you can find them online. They're pretty pretty good.

[00:09:09]One of the things I like about them is that although he's making fun of rednecks, it's a sort of uh affectionate fun. And I don't think the rednecks mind. Interesting fact. So now I want to sort of follow in Jeff Foxworthy's shoes a little bit and say, "Well, you might be an atheist if you're reflective enough to be curious about us."

[00:09:37]So if you're listening to me now somewhere, you might be an atheist before you quick move to another website.

[00:09:52]I'd like to point out that you might be an atheist if you're afraid to listen because of what you might learn about yourself.

[00:10:01]That pretty well covers everybody. I think so. Let's get down to some details.

[00:10:09]Richard Dawkins in the Christmas issue of the New Statesman reported on a wonderful survey that he recently completed. that is to say uh uh he his foundation had this done by professional surveyors. Uh he points out that the census of 2001 seemed to show that over 70% of uh British people were Christian and the Dawkins Foundation commissioned a survey done by the Ipsos Mory group in accordance with its strict rules. So this was a carefully done survey and this is what they found that percentage that describes themselves as Christian had dropped from in in the UK from 72 to 54%.

[00:10:54]Plus or minus two. That's a very significant drop.

[00:10:58]You could read about it in Richard's article. I don't know how much it was otherwise publicized in England.

[00:11:05]More interestingly, of those 54% census Christians, that is these are the ones that are identified by this methodology as Christians, half of them hadn't attended a church service at all in the previous year. 16% hadn't attended in the past 10 years.

[00:11:23]Further 12% had never done so.

[00:11:28]So, this has paired the group down quite interestingly, I think we'd have to say.

[00:11:36]Even more important, only 44% of the census Christians, less than half of that 54% claim to believe that Jesus is the son of God.

[00:11:48]Now, I want to highlight that and I want to I want to amend it very slightly.

[00:11:58]Only 44% of census Christians say they believe that Jesus is the son of God.

[00:12:05]And I'm sure you share my suspicion that great many of those who say that are thinking stovoce.

[00:12:15]Well, in a sort of metaphorical and symbolic way.

[00:12:21]Yes.

[00:12:23]Uh, they don't literally think that Jesus is the son of God. How could you believe that?

[00:12:35]It's interesting that 56% don't bother with a symbolic or metaphorical dodge. They just say, "No, I don't believe that."

[00:12:45]So, we're pairing it down a little bit more. So now I want to ask you out there, do you believe that Jesus is the son of God?

[00:12:59]>> If not, you might be an atheist.

[00:13:03]Now, every Christian out there knows that there are lots of Christians, literalists, fundamentalists, who would say something stronger. They'd say, "You're an atheist." Not, "You might be an atheist." But you see, I I'm more tolerant.

[00:13:25]I only say you might be an atheist.

[00:13:30]Few more questions. Do you believe that God literally listens to prayers and intervenes in people's lives? If not, you might be an atheist.

[00:13:42]Do you believe that God is on our side in war or in football games? Or if not, you might be an atheist.

[00:13:57]Do you believe that God created all creatures great and small?

[00:14:01]If not, you might be an atheist.

[00:14:07]Well, I know what some of you out there are thinking, not in this room, but in the wider world.

[00:14:14]You don't believe any of that nonsense, you know, about son of God and taking sides in football games and all that, but still you say you believe in something divine.

[00:14:30]Not a personal God, not a God that makes the creatures and that answers the prayers, but still something divine.

[00:14:39]A sort of benign force.

[00:14:42]I think I get it.

[00:14:48]May the force be with you. But you know, I believe that Star Wars is a fantasy.

[00:14:55]How about you?

[00:14:59]Oh, I got to tell a little story.

[00:15:02]I do some radio interviews and once with a with a Christian radio station, the interviewer was just beside himself talking with me and he said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that you don't you you don't believe that there's there's some force that governs the whole universe and protects our lives and all the rest?" And I said, "Oh, I do. I do." And he got very excited. He said, "You do?" And I said, "Yeah, I do. I really do. I call it gravity."

[00:15:44]A lot of people wear the Christian label, but when you ask what they actually believe, the foundation starts cracking. In the United Kingdom, an Ipso survey found that only 44% of self-identified Christians said Jesus was the son of God and savior of mankind.

[00:16:00]That matters because Christianity does not present Jesus as a vague symbol.

[00:16:05]John 14:6 says Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. Matthew 21:22 says prayer can be answered if people believe. So when someone says they are Christian but rejects Jesus as divine, rejects answered prayer, rejects creation, and treats God like some abstract force, they have already walked away from historic Christianity.

[00:16:29]They may still like the culture, the music, the holidays, or the community, but the belief system has collapsed.

[00:16:36]Religion keeps the label alive long after the actual belief is gone.

[00:16:43]Doesn't make me a theist. At least I don't think so.

[00:16:53]Here's another common dodge. Not a dodge, a common response.

[00:17:00]What God is is is a concept.

[00:17:06]It's a concept in people's minds.

[00:17:10]It's a concept that enriches their spirits and inspires them.

[00:17:17]If you believe this, you're definitely an atheist.

[00:17:30]God is not a concept.

[00:17:34]The concept of God is a concept.

[00:17:41]A cup of coffee is not a concept.

[00:17:45]The concept of a cup of coffee is a concept. The elementary philosophy I have a term for this. It's called a deepity.

[00:18:02]A friend of mine when his teenage daughter many years ago, nice smart alec girl and dad was in in the habit of uttering pronouncements at the dinner table. MIT professor and one day he issued forth one of these wise tidbits and his daughter said, "Wow, dad said a deepity."

[00:18:32]He told me about that. I thought the term was just so great. I I'm going to appropriate it. So, what's a deepity? A deep is an apparently profound observation that is ambiguous.

[00:18:44]And I mean that quite literally. It has two readings. On one meeting it's obviously false, but if it were true it would be very important and on the other it's trivially true.

[00:19:01]And so when you hear it you you sort of see oo I think that's true. It is it's trivially true or at the same time whoa it's some that's a deepity.

[00:19:12]I want to give you one of my favorite examples of a deepity when I teach this concept to my students. Are you ready?

[00:19:20]Everybody's sitting down.

[00:19:24]Love is just a word.

[00:19:29]Oh wow.

[00:19:32]Love is just a word. Think about it.

[00:19:37]Whatever love is, it isn't a word.

[00:19:40]You can't find love in the dictionary.

[00:19:52]Put the quotation marks around it. We philosophers are sticklers about this.

[00:19:55]It's called a usement mention error. And you get love is just a word. That's true. And it's trivially true.

[00:20:08]Cheeseburger is just a word.

[00:20:12]Word is just a word.

[00:20:16]So that's a deputy.

[00:20:19]Now the idea that God is a concept is a another great deputy. I believe the concept of God exists.

[00:20:30]And I'm an atheist.

[00:20:33]In fact, I believe that thousands of concepts of God exist. Does that make me a polytheist?

[00:20:42]No.

[00:20:45]I'll go go a little further. I even agree that the concept of God helps some people lead better lives. I agree that does happen. Don't ever forget it. I just think that there are better ways to help people lead better lives.

[00:21:10]Here is where religion starts playing word games. When people say God is a concept, they are not defending God anymore. They are quietly admitting they are talking about an idea inside the human mind. And yes, ideas can comfort people. Stories can comfort people.

[00:21:27]Music can comfort people. Community can comfort people. That does not make the story true. Christianity makes claims about reality, creation, prayer, sin, heaven, hell, resurrection, and a God who acts in history. Hebrews 11:1 even defines faith around confidence in what is not seen. But evidence does not work that way. If all religion has left is the concept helps people, then it has moved from truth claim to coping tool.

[00:21:57]That is a massive retreat and people should call it what it is.

[00:22:05]You heard earlier from Dan Barker about the clergy project and the first graduate of the clergy project is a former Pentecostal minister named Jerry Dwit.

[00:22:23]and he gave a wonderful talk at the Reason Rally in Washington. It's available on a website. I'll leave this up for a bit if you want to check it out. Listen to it. It's great fun. And about halfway through this and it's all in evangelical rolling musical cadences. He's still a he's a brilliant preacher really. And he describes the five stages of his theology. And first he believed that God loves everybody, but he couldn't reconcile that with the fact that God sent a lot of people to hell.

[00:22:59]So he changed his mind and decided that God saves everybody.

[00:23:04]But that didn't seem to square well with what he thought he knew. So then he decided that God is in everybody.

[00:23:12]Now that seemed more defensible and he clung with that for a while. And then he got the idea that God is everyone's internal dialogue.

[00:23:25]And then as he memorably says at this point he was just one good book away from the fifth stage. God is a delusion.

[00:23:43]And so now he's using his skills as a preacher to carry the word that God is a delusion.

[00:23:53]So this is the website for the clergy project. Dan Barker played a big role in getting it organized. Linda and I helped and Richard Dawkins Foundation helped by providing the technical help to set up this website.

[00:24:09]Now that it's going.

[00:24:12]Yes. Thank you, Richard. Thanks, Dan.

[00:24:16]Now that it's going, as Dan said, you have to be a preacher or a former preacher to be in this. So, Richard and I are not preachers or former preachers, nor is Linda. So, we're completely outside. We have no access to their discussions, their debates. They are self-governing. they do their own thing now. We've launched them and wish them all the best and as Dan says they have they have now over 200 members and every now and then somebody in the group sends us an email about how they're doing. They're doing very well. uh without any advertising.

[00:24:58]They have picked up these new members and they're being very careful about not they're not sending out brochures or or big blanket things to all the clergy in the world.

[00:25:10]They want the clergy to hear about them and come to them. In fact, one of their main problems now is that because it's it's all confidential, of course, but in order to get in, you have to prove to the members that you're legit.

[00:25:23]and they don't want journalists or troublemakers trying to get into the inner sanctum of the of the clergy project. So the vetting process is quite is quite careful and laborious and that's a bottleneck. Now at this point there isn't funding to provide job retraining which is what we would love to have for them but there is support that they provide for each other moral support and help and advice and it seems to be working out wonderfully and one of their members when we raised the possibility of trying to come up with funding for uh retraining for instance sort of a safe place where people could get retrained to go out in the world. And this one uh former uh preacher said, "If you promise free training, you'd have 10,000 members tomorrow."

[00:26:19]So, it's a really interesting problem.

[00:26:20]And one of the interesting things about it is that when we published our first study, Linda and I, when we post about about clergy who don't believe, we expected a lot of church leaders, religious leaders to condemn us for making a mountain out of a molehill or making the whole thing up. There was very little of that on the web. They all know they all know it's true.

[00:26:45]There was hardly anybody who questioned the fact that this is a phenomen. nobody knows is how big it is.

[00:26:54]The clergy that we interviewed, that Linda interviewed, they really all think that they're the tip of the iceberg, but they don't dare ask their fellow clergy.

[00:27:05]They're like gays in the 50s without gayar.

[00:27:11]They don't dare raise the issue with other clergy they know whom they suspect are just as much non-believers as they are. And well, they should be careful because one of the things that came out a few weeks ago is that one member of the clergy project took a brave move and told his best friend, not not somebody in the clergy project, but his best friend, a parishioner in his church that he joined the clergy project and he didn't believe his best friend. Next day he'd lost his job.

[00:27:47]So it's serious.

[00:27:51]Now those of you out there, are you an atheist? How can you tell?

[00:27:58]How do you tell wishful thinking from genuine belief? And this is not easy.

[00:28:04]In fact, science has dealt with this problem. Everybody falls prey to it. And science has developed what you might call a technology of disciplined belief.

[00:28:14]They do double blind experiments. they have multiple coder interpreters who don't know the hypothesis to do the interpretation of your data. I'm thinking for instance of psychological experiments when you have say videotapes of subjects and you want to understand what they're doing. You have peer review, you have replication studies and so forth. Religion, you will notice doesn't have any of that.

[00:28:37]Scientists know the anguish of confronting awful facts just like everybody else does. They confront cases where they find it hard to believe their own data. Or even more anguishing, they sometimes find cases where they find it hard to believe that their colleague might have faked data.

[00:28:57]But there's nothing like this in religion.

[00:29:01]It's just the opposite.

[00:29:04]Fake it till you make it.

[00:29:07]And think of the case of Mother Teresa.

[00:29:11]After her death, I was amazed. Actually, the Catholic Church agreed to publish her diaries, her letters with her with her her confessor. And what they reveal is a woman who for years was basically an atheist and tortured, tormented by the fact that God didn't talk to her at all.

[00:29:31]I'll tell you my own suspicion.

[00:29:35]If you look out in the world of the clergy and you see clergy who redouble their efforts to help the poor, to to sucker to the sick, to be to be doing good works, those are probably the secret atheists atoning for their hypocrisy.

[00:29:51]The ones that are playing golf still believe.

[00:30:02]What about the poems?

[00:30:05]Might he be an atheist?

[00:30:08]Well, you know, the late Andy Rooney, American commentator and worldclass keragin, uh had a nice quote. He says, "The Pope traditionally prays for peace every Easter, and the fact that it has never had any effect whatsoever in preventing or ending a war never deters him."

[00:30:31]What goes through the Pope's mind about being rejected all the time? Does God have it in for him?

[00:30:40]Well, think about it. And I'm sure the Pope has thought about it.

[00:30:47]And he's a smart man.

[00:30:49]I suspect that the Pope is an atheist.

[00:30:53]He's a sophisticated man, a company man, a bureaucrat.

[00:31:00]But I don't know. I don't know if he's an atheist. Nobody knows. In fact, I doubt that the Pope knows.

[00:31:08]That's the thing about religious belief.

[00:31:10]>> This is one of religion's biggest weaknesses. Even some of the people selling it for a living stop believing it behind closed doors.

[00:31:18]The clergy project exists because current and former religious leaders have lost belief in God, but still need private support, community, and help leaving ministry. That should tell us something. When a belief system punishes honest doubt with job loss, shame, and exile, it protects the institution more than the truth. Science has peer review, testing, replication, and correction.

[00:31:43]Religion often rewards certainty, even when that certainty is fake. Even Mother Teresa's private letters revealed decades of spiritual darkness and a painful sense that God was absent. If God is real, loving, and personal, why are even his most devoted servants left begging in silence?

[00:32:03]>> We don't really know what Rick Santorum really believes, and neither do his children.

[00:32:13]How could they? Well, they say they do. That's what is known in religious circles as professing.

[00:32:22]It's what Catholics are required to profess. Cardinal Ratzinger before he was pope wrote a very interesting document on the requirement of good Catholics to profess. Meaning to say it even if you don't believe it.

[00:32:38]And for that reason alone, if for no other, we cannot take the Pope's utterances at face value.

[00:32:46]reminded of the little child that guest in somebody's house says to the hostess, "Thank you very much for the really delicious meal. I enjoyed it so much. My mother told me to say that."

[00:33:03]His father told him to say that.

[00:33:08]There's a theoretical problem. I can't resist being a philosopher here. My one of my heroes, Quine, in his book, Word and Object, raises the issue of radical translation.

[00:33:19]In radical translation is when you go to some remote place and and there's no bilingual to help you interpret and you encounter people, they're speaking their language, you don't know their language, they don't know your language, and you have to figure out, you have to make a dictionary, you have to figure it out.

[00:33:32]It's possible, it's hard, it's interesting, and it raises interesting technical problems. And what Quin wanted to point out about this is that you must use what he calls the principle of charity which is to maximize true belief.

[00:33:46]Quoting the maxim of translation is that assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of language. He gives an example. Certain islanders are said to speak of pelicans as their half brothers. Hm.

[00:34:04]Can they really think of pelicans as their halfb brothers or are we mistransating a term here? What do we really want to say about this? We suspect mistransation.

[00:34:15]What do we do? Well, we check this by probing by fing follow-up questions to see how it comes out. And that introduces a sliding scale where polite curiosity at the outset turns to insulting challenges down the road. You then have a diplomatic problem. Your informant says, "But I really mean it."

[00:34:40]And so you say diplomatically, "Okay, okay. You really mean it." You idiot.

[00:34:49]>> You don't say that.

[00:34:51]And this apparent agreement has to be disingenuous and it happens all the time when people talk about religion.

[00:35:02]Doubt persists on at least four fronts.

[00:35:04]Am I still mistransating? Is he really an idiot? Is he lying? Or is he perhaps is his tribe exploiting the principle of charity for dubious ends? This is not unknown. is a common enough feature in illness for instance where uh brain damaged patients have a brilliant capacity to deflect uh uh probes that they that are embarrassing to them. It seems to be something that's built right into us as one of our natural talents.

[00:35:34]And this inconclusiveness when we try to find out what people really believe is made more difficult because of what Quin talks about as the web of belief where he thinks of all beliefs as sort of fastened to the world at the periphery with concrete sensory information. You know, you can figure out what the word for rock and table and cat are because you can see the things that they're referred to. Once you get to theoretical abstract issues, it's a little harder.

[00:36:03]Example, the anthropologist says to the native, "Do you think this water is drinkable?"

[00:36:10]Yeah, that's the proof. All you need. Do you think the bridge is safe? Yeah.

[00:36:17]But when it's religious beliefs, as we move into the theoretical abstract center, there's more and more opportunities for alternative paths.

[00:36:27]And this is a real practical problem for anthropologists.

[00:36:31]And one anthropologist Rodney Nem put it very movingly in his book, a book called belief, language, and experience. And here's his confession.

[00:36:44]I realized I could not confidently describe their attitude to God, whether this was belief or anything else. In fact, as I had glumly to conclude, I just did not know what was their psychic attitude toward the personage in whom I had assumed they believed. Now, this is after Nem, a trained, experienced, distinguished anthropologist, had spent years studying these people. This was the conclusion he reached.

[00:37:14]He missed an important point.

[00:37:16]He thought of himself as an outsider, but he didn't notice that his the children were the same way. We're all outsiders.

[00:37:25]The Penan children face the same problem that he did. And in fact, if you were raised in any religious tradition, you faced this problem when your elders, your parents, whoever it was told you what the what the creed was. And you had to think, wait a minute, do they really believe that? And you may have faced the fact that it's very hard to tell.

[00:37:49]And that's true of religious belief in general. It's almost impossible to find good evidence for the sentence X believes that P where P is a proposition of religion.

[00:37:59]It's so removed from any concrete consequences.

[00:38:05]Nem then was simply being more self-critical than most. And the upshot of course of course is that when it comes to religious belief, if we want to try to catalog it, we are confronted with a thicket in a swamp full of fog, which is brilliant. It's a brilliant defense. It's a yielding passive but more impenetrable barrier than any fortress. A wall you can challenge, but when you got to sug through the swamp and the brush and the fog, oh, forget it.

[00:38:39]Well, it's brilliant. I just said, who designed it that way? And the answer is nobody designed it that way. Cultural evolution did it because creeds that are too easily discovered and interpreted are not long for this world.

[00:38:53]This is an adaptation of religious beliefs to be impenetrable in this way, which maybe leads you to think, well, if it's so difficult, why bother?

[00:39:04]Well, that's just what they want you to say.

[00:39:07]Don't even try. Walk away.

[00:39:10]It's very much like the unwitting deflection by parents patience and the willing deflection by con artists.

[00:39:16]There's a lot of people in the world who don't want you to explore further.

[00:39:20]And this leads to a policy of don't ask don't tell. And that's what we're confronted in most cases today. You just don't ask people about their religion.

[00:39:31]And I want to propose a slightly different principle.

[00:39:35]Don't ask, tell.

[00:39:38]Let me explain.

[00:39:39]>> Religion survives by hiding behind a vague language. Ask someone what they believe and suddenly the words start shifting. God becomes mystery. Faith becomes personal truth. Heaven becomes hope. Prayer becomes connection. That is not clarity. That is escape. Real claims should be testable, explainable, and open to challenge. If someone says a bridge is safe, we can inspect it. If someone says water is clean, we can test it. But when religion makes huge claims about God, souls, heaven, hell, miracles, and eternal punishment, the evidence disappears into fog. That fog protects bad ideas from being questioned. Christianity asks people to build their lives around claims it often refuses to define clearly. That is a serious problem.

[00:40:34]In breaking the spell, I advocated a policy that was actually discussed a little earlier today um by Lesie Canald and several people on the panel. The idea of having compulsory religion religion education education on comparative religion on different religions. I think this is a key move to uh moving to a better and more tolerant world. Quebec leads the way in this. By the way, they have a curriculum covering all major faiths found in Quebec culture, including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Aboriginal beliefs. And this is obligatory.

[00:41:16]Started in 2008.

[00:41:19]Recently, some parents sued. They did not want to subject their children to facts about other religions or for that matter their own religion.

[00:41:29]It went to the Supreme Court of Canada and they lost. There is no right in Quebec to keep your children ignorant of religions.

[00:41:43]This is maybe one of the few places in the world where the idea that keeping your children ignorant is child abuse and is to be forbidden by the state.

[00:41:58]But all is not well in Canada. Alberta has got a a bit of a problem right now.

[00:42:03]They have a new education act and under it, homeschoolers and faith-based schools are not be permitted to teach that homosexual acts are sinful as part of their academic program. Well, you may think, well, that's good. But no, I don't think it is actually.

[00:42:19]Here's what the spokesperson said. What they want to do about their ideology elsewhere, that's their family's business. But a fundamental nature of our society is to respect diversity. And we will command them to teach this.

[00:42:30]Well, you can't do that. You can't command respect.

[00:42:34]What Alberta should do is let the parents go ahead and teach that tripe to their children, but oblige them to teach about how other people don't teach that tripe to their children.

[00:42:51]So, here's why I think telling works.

[00:42:55]We're in a brand new age for religions.

[00:42:57]For millennia, religions did not have to worry about the the flock acquiring lots of information about other religions or about their own religion.

[00:43:11]These religions evolved culturally in a world of easy to maintain ignorance.

[00:43:21]But the new transparency of information brought about by technology, by cell phones, by the internet and all the rest by by transistor radios uh is the first really drastic change in the epistemological environment that religions have had to face in several millennia. And every religion is going to have to adapt or go extinct and deny their children all the benefits of the technology. I don't think any but a few really crackpot fanatic religions have the stomach for that. I love this cartoon.

[00:43:56]Aren't you a little old to have an imaginary friend? Is I'm with him.

[00:44:02]Children are great at puncturing the balloon of hyperrespect.

[00:44:11]Now, let me say a little bit finally about why I think asking is ill- advised. It antagonizes people for no good reason. There are many good reasons actually that one might prefer not to be asked, such as I don't want grandma to know.

[00:44:24]I don't want to lie. Or even, I just don't want to think about it or justify my refusing to think about it.

[00:44:32]I think we should largely let people alone and not confront them because it almost never works. Sometimes it works, but you have to wait till they want to be confronted.

[00:44:45]Let me illustrate this in a curious way.

[00:44:47]Here's a few facts. Did you know that polar bears do not run wild in Florida?

[00:44:51]That jet fuel is unpalatable?

[00:44:54]That cell phones outnumber Cadillacs in the US? I'm sure that's not news to any of you. But nobody ever told you those things. Nobody ever informed you of those things. It's just, you know, enough to know that those are true.

[00:45:08]A lot of what we know, we know without ever having been told that. It just sort of flows out of everything that everybody knows in other regards.

[00:45:18]Telling gently all the time, gentle exposure to mountains of facts is builds up a great foundation of knowledge that arms children against propaganda.

[00:45:37]A teacher that casually drops a fact in here or there says simply, "Oh, the people who still say they believe in heaven and hell, doesn't make a point of it, just goes right on."

[00:45:48]Or mentions that Walt Disney didn't believe in God. Goes right on. Just let these little nuggets drop there. Don't make a deal of it. Just go on. Just go on. Let those things settle and percolate or little facts about evolution.

[00:46:04]What I think we want to move towards and can move realistically, practically is towards something like the Santa Claus myth, which I think it's not I don't think I don't want to abolish the Santa Claus custom. If it's bad, I think somebody would have figured out by now that it is. I think it's relatively benign compared with say the boogeyman or the devil myth, which I think are really vile and should be uh extrepated as best we can.

[00:46:34]Santa Claus is, we might say, semi-transparent in our culture.

[00:46:38]Everybody sort of knows that everybody else knows that this is all just fun and games. Wouldn't it be great if we could get the God myth to be similarly transparent in our culture like Santa Claus.

[00:46:53]And you know, we could go on saying, "God damn it, and God bless you, just the way we talk about sunsets and sunrises and Santa Claus, and nobody would take it seriously."

[00:47:05]And that's a key, too, because humor, as we saw last night, brilliantly, is it's a great dissolver of taboos.

[00:47:12]And I think it's an interesting fact.

[00:47:19]It's an interesting fact about the world we live in that nobody complains about God and heaven cartoons like this.

[00:47:30]There's this whole genre of you know the lawyer goes to heaven and meets God or St. Peter meets him at the pearly. We tell these jokes. No, it's pretty clear that we're not offending anybody that nobody takes offense.

[00:47:46]Everybody's ready to joke and laugh about that. The idea of God in heaven and sitting on the throne, that's already that's already a fossil. That's already gone in most quarters. Let's just make sure it's gone in the rest of the quarters where the nighted people still don't see it that way. Thank me, it's Friday. I think that's and then I particularly like this one.

[00:48:17]The way to weaken religion is not by yelling at people across the table. The stronger move is exposure. Teach children what different religions actually claim. Let them compare Christianity with Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, ancient myths, and modern science. Once people see that every religion claims certainty, but none can prove its supernatural claims, the spell starts to break. That is why some religious parents fear broad religious education. They know belief is easier to protect when people only hear one story.

[00:48:51]The internet changed that. Science, history, evolution, and open information have made it harder for religion to hide behind fear and tradition.

[00:49:01]And yes, we should be able to laugh at it, too. No idea should be protected from questions, evidence, or humor. So, here's the question. If Christianity is true, why does it need fear, childhood conditioning, and protected language to survive? Comment your thoughts below and do not forget to like and subscribe for more commentary.