https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=E104RsU8dWc
because I’ve been listening to the Sam Harris discussions with Jordan. They keep leaking if you guys want. If you haven’t seen them, I can give you the links. And so the last one in Dublin leaked again. And, you know, Sam keeps saying like he does want to recover something. Like he wants to recover ritual. He wants to recover attention and beauty and story and all that. But it’s like he just doesn’t like the fact that he can’t believe in the things scientifically for some reason, like that somehow he doesn’t want to believe in what he calls bullshit stuff. Right. He seems really worried about falling into a… It seems to be the only thing… Whenever he hears about stories about religion, he’s always really, really scared about fundamentalism. Yeah, that’s because he’s a fundamentalist. That’s what… No, I’m serious. He is… There’s a conversation. If you listen to Sam Harris’ podcast, he did a conversation with Eric Weinstein, where Eric Weinstein basically makes him admit that the reason why he’s like that is because if he was religious, he would be a fundamentalist. It’s a pretty amazing discussion, actually. And Eric Weinstein actually makes him visit the places in his mind where he can imagine himself as a Taliban or as an ISIS fighter. And Sam, he basically says that, yes, he does have that in him. He actually has sympathy for ISIS. He has sympathy for the fundamentalist type religious person. And that’s why, in a way, he’s kind of fighting that because he doesn’t see… He struggles to see another way to be religious or he struggles to see a hierarchy in religion. He struggles to see that the saints, the fathers, the scholars of the church have never believed in these things in the same way that the peasant believed in them. But he didn’t spend his time trying to debunk what the peasant thought because there’s no purpose in that. Because there’s a hierarchy in this stuff. And he doesn’t mind that the peasant thinks of it in a very, very crude and very immediate, let’s say, non-filtered way or whatever, or wherever you want to see it. Because it doesn’t matter in that person’s life. It has the same effect. Yeah, that was quite funny in his discussions with Jordan. Like, when you look at the Bible, St. Harris will say that it’s a book you just can’t argue about. There’s nothing you can say about it because there’s only fundamentalism that’s possible. And for the last 2,000 years, theologians have never stopped arguing about how you read that stuff. There’s a super rich tradition of how should you read those things? I think there are several instances of people that were excommunicated or maybe tortured or whatever because of the way they saw the book, for sure. But there’s just so much argumentation to be there. And you only see things to look at the fundamentalists and not the rich tradition of people who argue about that. Yeah, I know. And to me, it’s the most infuriating. And I think it’s also one of the frustrating things to me is you always wish you could be there and like, oh, I wish I could say this! Because even in the last discussion in Dublin, Sam starts talking about… It’s always this idea that we don’t have this secular extremism. And it’s like, what are you talking about? I mean, even the French Revolution was exactly that. I keep thinking, you know, because he talks about how he wants to keep attention and ritual and all this stuff. And I said, you know, they tried to do that during the French Revolution. They tried to create a religion of reason and they had like the goddess of reason and they tried to have… they had processions and they had all this. And that was… and it happened in… mired in blood. Like it happened soaking in the blood of the Catholic peasants who refused to participate in their sacrilege. And so it’s like during the French… they found… They found in the south of France, they found entire churches that were burned down with people inside the church, you know, hiding from the revolutionary soldiers because they wouldn’t submit, you know, and people… they found the corpses of people holding on to their rosaries, you know, hundreds of people just burned down by these soldiers. It’s like, what do you mean? You know, and it feels like he has such a naive vision. He has such a… he has such a twisted vision of history, which makes it so that he can say that whatever it is that he wants to do, it’s never been tried. And that’s always a really nice place to stand in, right? It’s like, well, you know, no one’s ever done this before. And if they did it, it would be awesome. Like there would be no problems and everybody would love each other and everybody… And it’s like you… you know, and you see that with Protestants too. Protestants have that same thing. It’s like they split off the church and then they feel like they can just take the backpack of all the sins of Christianity off their back and say, well, that wasn’t us. Like, oh no, we’re a clean slate. We’re fine. We’re good. Like we just follow the Bible and we’re doing our thing. It’s like, you know, you have to keep that backpack on. It’s like I want to put… I want to keep on my back all the horrible things that Christians did. All the inquisitions, all that. I want that in my backpack. I don’t want to take it off because if I do, then I’m going to… Then there’s way more chance that I’m going to do it again because I’m naive and I don’t understand it. It’s just part of human nature to engage in those kinds of things. You know, and it’s like, I’m sure that it’s not Sam Harris that will be burning down churches. I’m sure it’s not him. He’s not the one. But if we institute his program, it’s going to be other people that are going to do it. It’s going to be other people that are going to be doing it. You know? That’s what I think. And it’s the same with like… That’s why… One of the reasons why we have kind of this weird social justice extremism is just because it’s taken up all the space in society. It’s taken up so much space in society that those types of people that are extremists in their nature, that’s just what they are, it’s people. Now they’ve taken on that… They’ve taken on that mantle. Do you see what I’m saying? It could be anything. Some people in society that are extremely narrow-minded and extremely kind of action-oriented and us-them mentality, and those people will take up whatever is there. If there’s an opening for crazies, crazies will come. That’s right. And there’s always an opening for crazies. Because that’s just how it is. Anyway, so have you listened to it? Have you listened to the one in Dublin yet? I think I listened to maybe two thirds of the first Dublin discussion. Okay. I listened to the second one. Like you said, there were points in the first one when I got irritated. But I kept listening to it, one only, two because there are moments when I want to say something. Yeah, I know. It’s like you wish you could just like, come on, man! Like what I just told you earlier about the fact that Sam Harris doesn’t think you can argue about theology. I just thought that was completely ridiculous. There’s obviously tons of books about it. I mean, it’s like, from the beginning, there’s been, it’s like, no one has ever agreed on everything. And the whole thing, it’s so weird, like the whole thing about finding some weird law in Leviticus about stoning your son who disobeyed. And it’s like, no one does that. No one. Jews don’t do that. Christians don’t do that. It’s like, weird, like I don’t know. And they haven’t done that for 2000 years. Like seriously 2000 years. Like Jews even who follow the law haven’t been doing that for at least 2000 years. And so, I don’t know, like I seriously, I don’t know where, where. Anyways.