This podcast is sponsored by TalkSpace. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself? Talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? TalkSpace. TalkSpace makes it easy to get the support you need. With TalkSpace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, TalkSpace is here for you. Plus, TalkSpace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code space80 when you go to toxpace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at toxpace.com. Save $80 with code space80@talkspace.com. This "Quire Cast Podcast" episode is brought to you by The Wisdom of Hobbits. By me, Matthew J. Distafano. In this hopeful, yet at times poignant homage, I focus on everyone's favorite half-ling friend, the Hobbit. A charming people, this shire-based race has captivated and thralled and enchanted the hearts and minds of millions. And though they're not a religious society, I argue that spiritual truths love kindness, generosity, hope, and even compassion can be found within their familiar, yet still relevant and didactic tales. Available now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you get your fine, fine books from "Quire Publishing." (upbeat music) - Welcome to day two of "Quire Week" right here on "Honoring the Journey." Today, Eric Rayton, we're gonna be totally getting to know this guy, like you were gonna love him. So so fun, such a great guy and so many amazing stories to tell. Can't wait to introduce you to him in a minute, but first of all, just wanna remind you of Theology Beer Camp coming up in October. I will be there with Kelly Strickland. You may have heard her a few episodes ago right here on "Honoring the Journey." And you wanna save $50, "Journey2024" is the code and you can find all of that information in the show notes. If you're interested in finding community online, of course there's religious rehab, which you can find out more at my website, LeslieNeeseCoaching.com. But also, there is a place online through choir, called the "Quire Links" and it's a Facebook page. It's a private one and you get free books, you get to talk with the author of the books and everybody in the page is going through deconstruction. So you also find community connection and a lot of really great books. If that's something you're interested in, just check it out. It's Q-U-O-I-R-L-I-N-G-S, "Quire Links." And I am actually the tour guide. So you can be a part of that with me. I would love to see you there. You can find out more about the "Quire Links" on our show notes right here on "Honoring the Journey." And now, here we go, day two of "Quire Week." (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello, welcome back to "Honoring the Journey." I'm Leslie Nees, your host. And today I am joined by my friend, Eric Rayton. And Eric just wrote a book and it came out in February. And I'm so excited for him to tell you a little bit more about it. But I also wanna hear about his journey. So you're an author, I know for sure. What else do you do in everyday life, Eric? - Okay, so my day job is as a philosophy professor. - Oh, of course. - I teach philosophy of religion and ethics at Oklahoma State University. And I write books and articles in philosophy of religion mainly. But I've also been writing short stories for many years. And so Eden sang to grief is my first novel. - Oh, interesting. So this is the first go at a novel. You are a big time philosopher. That's exciting to me. I used to be afraid of philosophy when I was deep in religion. I was like, don't everybody said, don't study philosophy, it'll just confuse you. But now I'm obsessed with it. I would love to know how you got into this line of work and how you became a professor of it. And why are you so bent towards the philosophy of religion? - Yeah, a bit of context. I grew up a child of two agnostic preachers kids. So my father was a Lutheran preachers kid and my mother was a Baptist preachers kid. My mother became spiritual but not religious, we might say. And a kind of religious pluralist finding value in all different religions, but not identifying with any one religion herself. And my father just became a more, he was a geology professor, a scientist. And it was much more of a classic agnostic. I don't know what the truth is beyond the world of facts that I have before me. And my teenage rebellion consisted in going more conservative than my parents on religion. I got to college, a friend of mine invited me to this charismatic evangelical group that met on campus. And they were speaking in tongues and all of this. And I ultimately, that wasn't for me, but there was something there that I really was, I was looking for. - You were drawn to something, but it wasn't the language. It wasn't the language you couldn't understand it was. - Yeah, no, it wasn't because it sounded like the people around me were just like talking gibberish. And then there was some guy up front who was translating according to his whims. It didn't feel authentic at all. But there was something I was looking for spiritually. And by the time I was majoring in philosophy in college, I, this is gonna sound weird, but I became a philosopher and a fiest sitting alone, reading the history ideas in the university library. Because I started, I don't remember exactly what the trigger was, but it started me thinking. And I basically came up with my own variant of an argument for the existence of God that has some resemblance to the classical cosmological argument for God's existence, which is argument from causes. And the search for an ultimate cause. But it was more about less cosmic and more microscopic. And I won't get into it beyond that. It's just that I was thinking about the nature of reality and how things are made up of parts and that we think of these holes as having their properties because of the properties of the parts. But then why do those parts have the properties that they have that you can't go on forever in this way. And ultimately you have to have something that just has those properties essentially. And I was thinking about this alone in the library. - In college, right? - You were in college at the time? - Yes. - You were a real wild one, I see. - Right, yeah. - Yeah, just a wild creature, yeah. - And you're out in the library studying God and philosophy. - Yeah, and I was, and it dawned on me that I was, yeah, this is the sort of thing I wanna think about for a living, if I can. - So cool. - Yeah, but it also dawned on me that that I believe there was more to reality than meets the empirical lie. That what we encounter with our senses is just the empirical skin of the world and that there is something behind it, more fundamental and mysterious, that really matters and connecting with it really matters. - So that was sad. - I'd like to read that. Like it's the outer shell of the inner reality. That's so good. - Yeah, and then I went on to graduate school in philosophy and one of the first people I met ultimately became the co-author of my second book, The God's Final Victory, which is an argument for the Doctrine of Universal Salvation and the critique of the Doctrine of Hell. He's one of the first people I met. He stormed into my office like my first day as I was setting up to introduce himself, stuck out his hand and turned out in this quite secular philosophy department that I was in the University of Buffalo Philosophy Department, which at the time was the home of Paul Kurtz and his Center for Inquiry, which is basically an atheist think tank. Now, of course, not everyone was part of that, but it gives you a sense this was a pretty secular department. John who walked in and I realized that we were the two God-guys and our kid, everyone in the-- - That's a lot to carry on your shoulders. - I was not a philosopher religion yet. I was an ethicist. Ethics was what I was interested in. I was particularly interested in non-violence and arguments about the justification of violence. I was skeptical about most justifications for violence and thought that we haven't fully tapped the potential of non-violence and a lot of the reason why we think violence is necessary is because we haven't cultivated our abilities at solving problems non-violently, the way that we've cultivated our abilities to solve problems violently. - So true, oh my word. You need to publish this right now 'cause the world isn't methane, so methane. - A lot of that ended up in "So Eden, Sancti, Grief." It's a novel, but it really reflects a lot of these philosophical passions. I wasn't conscious as I was writing of how much of these ideas were finding and weaving themselves into this story, but it became very much a story about violence versus non-violence, how to resolve human conflicts non-violently, what causes us to resort to violence, that sort of thing became a major theme in this book. - Could you give me like a little synopsis, not that ties it up and tells us everything, but that makes us wanna read your book? - Oh, okay, yeah, so it's a science fiction parable and I'll say a little bit more about the roots of it, which aren't about my violence and non-violence work, but more my philosophy of religion stuff. But the story is these two young people, Caleb and Sally, wake up in this vast greenhouse in a star-rich corner of the galaxy that obviously is nowhere near home. And they have no memory of how they got there. And they meet each other, which is a huge relief 'cause they thought they were alone and they like each other and they fall for each other. But other people start waking up in this place too. And some of them start having Caleb and Sally particularly, but some others too, start having visions. And these visions basically convince them that the Earth is gone, the Earth has been destroyed. And they are what's left. Not everyone of the refugees from Earth believe that. Many of them aren't having these visions and not everyone who has the visions interprets them the same way, right? One of the big questions. - That's a little familiar there, Eric. I don't know. - Yeah, it's also our thinking. We've been rescued by benevolent aliens, right? Others think the aliens have destroyed the Earth and have now kidnapped us. Others think these aliens are neither benevolent, nor malevolent, but they're powerful and they need to be appeased. And as the survivors of humanity interpret their ambiguous circumstances differently, some of them very confident that they have the right interpretation, we get battle lines, we get conflict, we get the potential destruction of this last seed of humanity, right? And Salem and Kaleb and Sally are caught in the middle. They just want to be left alone, but they get sucked in. And there's also commentaries on patriarchy and rape culture in the story. And what I would call toxic capitalism. There's a, not only is this greenhouse full of different ecosystems, it's a vast greenhouse. And any sort of natural thing that humanity might need, but also there's a village. There's even a library full of books. There's a building full of tools and turns out musical instruments and anything that you might need. But one of the first things that one of the chief nemeses in this story does when he comes upon the village is he appoints himself shopkeeper, not leader, not king, not mayor shopkeeper. And he institutes a token system so that anyone who wants any of the things that are in that storehouse need to earn tokens to buy them. And who is, who are they paying him? So he basically takes control of the resources and sets himself up as the one in charge by being the one in control of the resources. - This sounds incredibly familiar, Eric. I can't imagine wherever you would have found this incredible plot. But I love this because it takes it out of what's familiar and puts it into something a little more fantasy. And I don't know why, but that seems less terrifying. - Yeah. - To imagine it rather than to experience it. You know what I mean? - That's part of what I think the science fiction medium that I'm using is so good for. - Yeah. - It allows us to take things that we are wrestling with in the real world and locate them in a different context that enables us to distance ourselves from them and think about them more. - That's so good. Yeah, the eagle eye view rather than like actually in that moment, that's good. - Yeah, or it's, this is something we do in philosophy. When we engage in thought experiments, what makes for a really good thought experiment in ethics say, you have a real problem that people are wrestling with. You create an artificial for the environment, a thought experiment in which people are confronting a similar problem, a problem that is similar in relevant respects, but is different enough from the original problem that the biases and the assumptions and the community allegiances that impede us from having, if you will, a pure moral intuition about the case are removed. And so you can have a kind of pure moral intuition about the case without all of that baggage. - Yeah, which we all in have, yeah. - So that's what part of what I think is really useful about fiction too, fiction, not just science fiction, but other forms of fiction. They provide us an opportunity to inhabit real, hopefully if the author's done their job, there's gonna be very similitude, right, to reality. It's gonna resemble reality. The people are gonna be real authentic and the circumstances are gonna be maybe fantastical, but the human responses are going to be understandably human and are gonna reflect and the human condition and hopefully illuminate something about the human condition. - That's so interesting. I didn't really, I never really studied philosophy in school or anything, but I have always been so fascinated with it 'cause I love thinking, I love thought. I'm an over thinker. If somebody could give me some sort of a template on how to think without thinking forever, like waking up at three in the morning and then all of a sudden your brain turns on and you can't turn it off, I always assumed philosophy would probably be good with helping with that, or would it make it worse? - I don't know if philosophy helps to keep you from waking up at three AM and thinking about things. In fact, it may actually not be more harm than good on that front. - Yeah, that's true, okay. - Start thinking through something in a systematic way and suddenly you're wide awake. In fact, at a dead time, I do not read any philosophy because then I won't be able to fall asleep. Then my brain is just going. - Really, that's interesting. Okay, that's good to know. - Yeah, I only read fiction at that time and that sometimes, anyway. - Well, can I ask you a question? As you were growing up, was there a book or a movie or something that you feel really took you in this direction or of a thought kind of direction? Do you remember this as a child? - One thing that I do remember in terms of, there are lots of books that have influenced me, but in terms of altering the trajectory of my life in ways that I can recognize now in hindsight, the movie Gandhi and especially that scene in South Africa where Gandhi is, I don't know, burning these identification cards. I don't remember the details, but something that Indians were required to, but he was engaged in this nonviolent protest and he was being beaten down by officials, physically beaten down. And his response was to just keep getting up and keep burning these things. Every time they knocked him down, he would just get up and keep burning. - I remember the scene, I do. - And it was this sense that can't stop me from intending. If there's something that I think is right, coercive power can't, a court of power only wins, right? If out of fear of that coercive power, I change my course. I don't pursue what I think is right anymore. Here was someone who was, who just kept doing what he thought was the right thing. And the coercive power became, in that case, it was exposed as bullying, as the wrongness. - It's just aggressive. - Yeah, the impression. - You remember how old you were when you watched this? - I don't, so what year did it come out? That would tell me. - It was then, I believe late '70s, early '80s, right? - Yeah, it was somewhere around there, that I graduated high school in '84. So it was before then, at some point. But I remember after watching that, I don't know how long, but not terribly long after that, I should point out the littlest kid in my grade, even in high school. And I was sometimes picked on, right? And I remember after having watched Gandhi, I was in gym class, and I was playing ping pong with a friend. And at the next table over, there were, these two guys were playing ping pong, and one of them was one of the guys who sometimes would be really bully, and let's call him Mike. And their ball flew past me, and Mike turned to me and said, "Eric, get my ball." I was playing in middle, playing my own game. I was in the middle of a point, so I ignored him. And then he said, "Didn't you hear me get my ball?" And I continued to play. And I was thinking, I had this vision then, right? But I'm gonna be like Gandhi, right? - Oh, I love this, it's so cute. - He's going to come and do something to me, and I'm gonna rise with my ping pong, and I'll go and battle, and start playing again, and it'll knock me down, I'll rise again, and none of that happened. - Okay. - He just went over to me after a minute, and waggled his finger at me, and said, "After gym class, you're gonna get it." And then class ended, and we were all gonna go back to the locker room to change, and I knew that's where it was gonna happen, and I had seen Mike throw kids in the shower once they were fully clothed. Wait for them to get dressed, and then drag them, and just toss them into the showers that they're soaking wet for the rest of the day. And I anticipated that this is what would happen, right? - You accepted your fate. - Yeah, and then I was thinking, what would Gandhi do, right? And I was like, if I just refuse to get dressed, and to stand there naked until the bell rings, then I'll just look stupid. He'll feel like he won, and I'll be late for class. But if I put on my clothes, he then drags me, and tosses me in the shower fully clothed, there's nothing I can heroically go back to to prove that he didn't have any power over me. And so I felt like at a total loss, and I said to myself, I just have to get dressed. And as I was fully dressed, sure enough, here he comes, lifts me bodily off the floor, and for probably the first time, I'm looking him in the eye face to face. He was a lot bigger than me, right? We were face to face. And something about that moment humanized him, right? Up until that moment, all he had been was a bully, a monster, a thing, right? And then in that moment, I saw a human face. I was confronted by a human face. And so I just said, "Hey, Mike, how are you today?" - Oh my gosh, that's so cool. - As I was dangling in his crib. - Oh my, he was, I think he was surprised by this. - He was disarmed, he was completely disarmed. What do I do now? - And he put me down, and he patted my head and said, "You're all right." And that, it was the fact that what I had vividly remembered from Gandhi didn't fit in that moment, that forced a look outside of a script that's been handed to me by someone else, right? And there was, I think, at the root, I think even thinking about Gandhi and Gandhi's story was important because as I was confronting my bully, I related to him in a way that was surprising and human because I saw his humanity, right? - Thank you, it's not yours, too. - Yeah, yeah. And I think that's when we reveal our humanity to others, of course, we make ourselves vulnerable, and that doesn't always generate a response. It's an invitation, it's giving up coercive power, right? It's just inviting the other to relate to us in a new and different way. Years later, anyway, I was working on these issues as a grad student, and because I was working on these issues, violence and non-violence as a grad student, my dissertation director, who was a Quaker, invited me to participate with something called the Alternatives to Violence Project, which goes into prisons and teaches conflict resolution, non-violent communication, and more importantly, the spirit of non-violence. And one of the stories in the Alternatives of Violence Project community that is often told is a story, one of the founders of AVP, I believe her name was Marge Swan, I think that's right. She was one day walking home from the library in, I think, New York City with an arm load of books when someone started aggressively coming towards her and she realized that she was about to be attacked. Who knows whether she was mugged or what, but just as this person was almost upon her, she turned and dumped her arm load of books into his arms and said, "Oh, thank God, you arrived, my arms are about to give out." - Oh, wow. - And the guy stood there holding these books, I'm really surprised, right? - What do I do with this? - And he started chatting with him, and he started carrying her book, walked her home or to the apartment building where she was and she took the books back and said, "Thank you so much, I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't come by." And he said, "Lady, that's not what I've been meaning to do." And he then walked away. And she surprised him with an invitation to have an impact that was positive rather than negative. A lot of people, one of the reasons why they resort to violence is because they, there's often this lack of a sense of self, right? They're looking for significance, for meaning, for being evidence that they matter, right? And the way that they pursue that evidence, the way they try to show that they matter to the world and show themselves that they matter is through destruction, through violence, through harm, and posing their will through making the world and those around them trying to fit that, the world under their thumb and thereby make the world as small as they are. But if you invite them to have an impact to matter in a more positive and constructive way, you create the opportunity for them to discover, right? Another possibility, another avenue. - Do you think people are brought up that way too? Maybe it's been modeled and they just don't know any different. And you mentioned how you and Mike locked eyes and had that moment of humanity. I wonder if, when you're a bully like that, not a lot of people do lock eyes with you. They avoid you, they run away and that feels powerful, but it's also very isolating, I would think. - Yeah. And I think that's, there's a similarity between my experience, although the stakes were much lower with Mike and Mark Swans with this unnamed assailant in that there was a script that Mike was playing out and there's a scripted response before the thing. - Fear. - Right. - Fear. Yeah. - And likewise for this assailant and our scripts are generally when we're just playing out of script, it's not one we've written ourselves, right? It's one that's been written for us, through our experiences, through our upbringing. And to some extent, we're just applying this thing we've learned and implementing it in our lives and we expect others to fall into their roles. And what happens when you break out of the role? And... - Glitch in the Matrix. - Right, yeah. So one of the things that's going on here is that nonviolence involves very often doing the unexpected. But it's also about invitation rather than coercion. Rather than meeting coercive power with coercive power, you meet coercive power with an invitation to do something different. That does make you vulnerable, it doesn't always work, right? Not everyone who meets their bully eye-dye and say, "Hey, how are you today?" is going to avoid spending the rest of their day with wet clothes. Because you're not guaranteeing dry clothes by an invitation, right? You're inviting it. But it's amazing how... I think it's only to the extent that we are willing to be vulnerable and take risks by inviting people to throw away their old scripts and try something new that we really have hope of changing the patterns of human interaction that can be so destructive, right? - Eric, you are making me think so much. And I don't know if you're doing this intentionally. I don't know if this is something you've set out to do. But I am really thinking about my deconstruction journey. And when I made myself vulnerable and started speaking out after years of being submissively quiet. And when I say submissively quiet, it's 'cause I didn't want to rock the boat. I didn't want anybody to get upset. I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I didn't want to make anybody afraid for me. I didn't want to be on the prayer list. So I just kept my mouth shut until I just couldn't anymore. And coming forward and doing this, it feels like I looked my bully, which was my religion in the eye. And I said, "How are you doing today?" Here's a different way of looking at it. When it has not been received, there have been many times I have been thrown in the shower. But when it works and it opens up a door and it breaks down a wall and it opens up lines of communication, it is worth every shower that I get thrown into. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? - Absolutely, yeah. - Did you mean to do that? Or are you just brown? (laughs) - I didn't mean specifically, but I do think that these ideas have a fair bit of reach. And there's a profound interconnection between meditation on non-violence and what it takes to be a more non-violent person and more non-violent society and what healthy spirituality looks like. And what it takes to nurture a more healthy spirituality. And the forces that drive us apart and that magnify violence and conflict have a lot in common with the forces that make religion toxic. - So the control in the fear, that's all very, it seems covert when you're in it. And then when you get out of it, you're like, man, that was just obviously controlling. And once you're out of it, it's not very covert. You're like, whoa, you just don't see it 'cause you're so used to the script. You're so used to being submissive to what you've been told. And always be a puppy phase. Hi, Molly. - Molly. - Molly wanted to say hi. - Oh, what a cutie. We digress, sorry. We'll get back to the good stuff here in a second, but that was good stuff. So tell me how like your, what did your religious background look like? What did you, I mean, I know your parents weren't necessarily religious. - Yeah, so yeah, so they were not religious, but one came from a Lutheran background and came from a Baptist background, both pre-truced kids. And they decided that the kids should know about this stuff. And they took us as a kind of middle ground that took us to a Methodist church growing up. And so I was attended Methodist church growing up. And then I at some point, when college decided there really is more to reality than meets the eye, don't believe in materialism as a metaphysic, just it seems hollow to me. And I started this search for religious faith and the faith community that could support me in that journey. I explored various denominations. I now think of myself as a kind of universalist Lutheran heretic, but. - You can start a religion with that one. - Yeah, but I mean, there's lots of sort of themes, especially themes of grace in Lutheranism that I think I really resonate with. And there's in the traditional Lutheran theology, it's pushing up against universalism and then running away from it. But I see in Lutheran theology, a implication of universalism that has not been widely or universally accepted among those who were facing it, facing the implications of their thinking and saying, "I can't go there." That's not right. - Peter, and it lacks control. If we're honest, it's a scary thing to think, come from so much of it. And not that there's a lot in Lutheran, I just every religion in general and there's so many good things about so many religions. But there is this underlying keep and check. We call it accountability. - But the idea of the good news, the gospel, right? The good news that the history has been, how do we turn this good news into bad news and still sell it? - This podcast is sponsored by TalkSpace. You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? TalkSpace. TalkSpace makes it easy to get the support you need. With TalkSpace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, TalkSpace is here for you. Plus, TalkSpace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a zero-dollar copay. No insurance, no problem. Now, get $80 off of your first month with promo code space80 when you go to talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com. Save $80 with code space80@talkspace.com. - Good news. And Madison Avenue is the mastery. It is the master at this. But I think religions have been doing it for a long time. If you look at classic head and shoulders ads, head and shoulders dandruff shampoo, the commercial starts out by trying to make you afraid that you have dandruff, you don't know it, and you're losing out because of it, right? They're these ads where you hear people in their heads quietly judging someone for having dandruff. And then the person who has been judged or rejected because of their dandruff is seen washing their head with head and shoulders shampoo, and then they have a new scene where they're accepted and embraced, right? - Yeah, oh my goodness, it's brilliant, brilliant marketing. - Yeah, and it's what I call manufactured discontent. You didn't know to be worried about this, you didn't know you have a problem, but they come in and tell you, you've got a problem, you didn't realize you got a problem, but first, let me sell you on how bad things are for you. - Yeah, yeah. - But fortunately, we've got the fix, right? Now that we convinced you that you've got a problem, you didn't know you had, we're gonna make you pay for the fix and you buy it, and now you are back the way you were before, except out some more money, right? (laughing) - Yeah, maybe you're not very well put. - Because sometimes you might run out of head and shoulders and then suddenly you're anxious. - You're gonna drift again, right? And now you're gonna be rejected and hated by the world, yeah. - And a lot of religion follows this model, right? It seems to think we've got to sell ourselves, and this is how you sell, rather than sharing good news, convince people that things are really bad for you, and then say, but if you pay us enough, your obedience or whatever-- - Your soul. - Yeah. - Your soul. You can buy this fix, right? The day-- - And it's not always money that they're getting. Sometimes it's your time or your attention. - Your money, your time, your attention, your obedience, your conformity. - Your servanthood. - Your silence. - Oh, yeah. It's amazing how often your silence is what you have to pay. - That is-- - Yeah. - But yeah, so we went off on another tangent, but that's-- - This is welcome to honoring the journey, Eric. That's what we do here. We riff, that's what we do. - But yeah, my journey was an exploratory journey where I landed in terms of a faith community was roughly Lutheran, but with a strong universalist conviction, strong sense of the value of the rainbow of religions. One of the, going back to my mother, when she rejected her Baptist origin and she became part of the story of that rejection, she was part of this tiny Baptist community in Scandinavia, right? And when the family immigrated to the United States, my grandfather had this vision of being part of the Great Awakening on the West Coast because some evangelists from America had come to Norway and talked about how great it was, this Great Awakening that was about to happen and Ulf, my grandfather's name, should move there and be part of it. And he took it seriously and he moved the entire family. And at that time, my mother was early 20s and could have stayed behind. She was at a music conservatory studying piano. And, but the family was like, no, you've got to come with us. We can't do this without you. It turns out they were right. They couldn't do it without her because when they landed in California, there was no work for a Norwegian Baptist minister with broken English, at least not initially. He eventually became the chaplain of the Norwegian Siemens mission in San Francisco. - Wow. Who knew there was a Norwegian Christian? - I mean, it's, it's wonderful. But I did a pilgrimage when I was in San Francisco to the Norwegian Siemens mission there. But at first, they were trying to make ends meet and my mother became a piano teacher, going to people's homes and basically helping to support the family that way. But this was the Bay Area in the late 50s, early 60s. And she was going into the homes with all sorts of different people. And suddenly she was no longer in this insular Baptist community where she was the preacher's kid, the eldest child of the preacher who had to be perfect at all times. Instead, she was in this cosmopolitan area, going to the homes of all kinds of different people. In fact, and this is something that I didn't realize until a few years ago when I was, I was sitting at the kitchen table, visiting my parents, reading the newspaper. And I was reading about the Grateful Dead concert that had been in Niagara Falls. 'Cause my parents live in Buffalo, or lived in Buffalo, and that had happened. And my mother walks in and she says, "It's so sad about him." I guess he made it big. That's a pretty famous band, isn't it? That one that you're reading about? Like the Grateful Dead? Yeah. The musical music is totally her thing. Yes, they were pretty big. Yeah, Grateful Dead, yeah. She says, "Yeah, I was so sad about him." And he was just so talented. And then when I heard he died, it was just so sad. And I'd be like, "Wait, who are you talking about?" And she said, "Rhett Midland, he played the keyboards for that band." And I was like, "Yeah, he was the longest running keyboardist for the Grateful Dead." I was his piano teacher. Oh my word, you've got to be kidding me. What a fun story. She was a piano teacher for the longest running keyboardist for the Grateful Dead. So this is the world in which she suddenly finds herself. And she starts making friends with Jews, with Hindus. And she has this thought, "If I'd been raised Jewish, I'd be Jewish today. If I'd been raised Hindu, I'd be Hindu today." So true. How then can I think that they're damned, right? We're failing to be Christian or my particular brand of Christian, right? So she then reacted to this and became a sort of agnostic spiritual, but not religious pluralist. But she was not, she did not identify with any religion. But she talked about the beauty of all these different religions. And, but one of the things that she and I went back and forth about when I was younger, relating to that was that if everyone followed her path, there would be no religions, right? And so I was saying, you talk about the beauty of this rainbow, right? But unless we have the different bands of color, we don't have the rainbow. And although I appreciated so much of my mother and her journey and her story, there was this sense that I had coming out of that upbringing and my own searching through different religions that I wanted to find a religious home, right? Where I could identify with a community and be part of shaping one of those bands of color, if you will. And so that, that was dimension of my, of my journey. And that's thought provoking, honestly, Eric, 'cause it's such a, it's a dichotomy of sorts because when you're in the religion, you can only see that color. You know what I mean? You have to be out of it to see how beautiful all the colors are. But if you're out of it, you're not in it. So I don't understand that we're supposed to do this. - It is, it really is a challenge, I'm sure. Here, I was, maybe this is the first time you will have a guest who talks about Hegel on your show. The 19th century German philosopher Hegel pompous ass, but an impenetrable writing style. It just takes hours and hours to interpret one page. But I took a course on Hegel as a graduate student and I read, I spent the hours and hours needed to understand the opening of his phenomenology of spirit. And what I gathered from that investigation was a methodology for pursuing the truth that really struck home for me. And the method was one that sought to steer a course between the kind of traditionalism where you just ascribe to this teaching that has been handed to you, it's the truth. And then you just, if you deviate from it, you're a heretic, right, and this sort of thing. And what he thought was the extreme of the enlightenment. He was a product of the enlightenment, right? But he thought the enlightenment went too far in the following. He thought what the enlightenment said was think for yourself, which is great. But always think from a perspective. And if we just, we have to become self-conscious of what that perspective is. Or we become dogmatic adherence to the perspectives that we are unaware of, right? - And they're convinced that it's not a perspective. - Right, we don't recognize that we have a perspective, right? And he thought that much of the enlightenment they didn't, they were throwing off the tradition and the teachings and the perspectives of the tradition and thinking that now they didn't have a perspective, now they were just being objective. And he was saying, crap, right? You are not being objective. There's no, you have a perspective. And what you've accomplished by throwing off of the tradition and starting afresh is that the perspective that you've got is a perspective that hasn't been tested by thousands of years of refinement intergenerationally by communities. And so it's just this new baby perspective. And so what he said, what we need is, neither the enlightenment nor blind allegiance to tradition. What's the alternative? You put on a perspective, self-consciously aware of the perspective you're putting on and then you live it out critically. You live it out critically, aware of the contradictions that emerge because your perspective, when you live out a perspective, you are living it out in the world and the perspective is crashing up against the reality I know not what. And the imperfections of the perspective manifest in cracks or fissures or contradictions, things that just don't work, right? When you try to live it out. And then the question is, what do you do? You modify the perspective to eliminate the contradiction and then you live out the modified perspective until further cracks emerge. - So you've told it loosely. - So you're wearing the perspective loosely, right? You're wearing it, you're trying it out, you're actually inhabiting it and living it out, but critically, run self-consciously, aware that the truth is not your perspective and the truth is what it is and it's going to make itself known by the failures that arise in our efforts to live out the perspective. And then we just continually revise and revise and the problem with traditionalism is that they refuse to do the revision, right? And the problem where they resisted it, it saw often happened in spite of everyone's effort, but there were these huge struggles against every revision, right? Every modification at every stage. And the problem he thought with the enlightenment was that although they took on a perspective, they didn't acknowledge that they had done so and so weren't able to live it out in this light critical way. - So it's just basically impossible to not have a perspective and be able to survive in this world. It's impossible. - It's impossible to not have a perspective, but you can become aware of what your perspective is and you can own it. - And is that maybe, I'm sorry, but this is like so good. I'm trying to think instead of pointing fingers at people who have a different perspective, invite them like you were talking about with Mike, invite them into, instead of being angry that they don't believe like you, just invite them to share their story and their perspective and then see what happens. I don't think that means that nobody has a perspective. I think it means we all just can coexist and respect other people without the ex, I think respecting without expecting is so important in human relationships. And I think it's very hard to do and I think a lot of it is fear of losing your perspective or it being challenged or it being wrong and especially if you lose it and the ramifications are hell. - Yeah, the threat of hell is the ultimate threat and what it has been invoked to do is to shut down the critical reflection that allows reality to reshape our perspectives. And when the threat of hell is serving that function, it prevents us from recognizing that there's a difference between our perspective and the truth. But when we refuse to recognize the distinction between our perspective and the truth, then our perspective about God becomes or what we worship instead of the truth about God. And so we become idolaters. - When it becomes about theology, not about love. - But yeah, your point about sharing our stories and our perspectives with one another, if I'm living out my perspective and it's crashing up against reality and being refined and being refined, someone else is doing the same with their perspective. And because reality is huge and we're small, the dimensions of reality that they're crashing up against are gonna be different from the dimensions of reality that I'm crashing up against. And so their insights into the truth are gonna be different from mine and I can only accomplish so much in uncovering the truth if I just do it on my own. But if I do it in conversation with others and learn from the lessons of others and incorporate those lessons to the extent that I can into refining my perspective, then I am, it's like I'm putting my foot on the accelerator of the terrible metaphor, the car towards truth, I don't know. - Yeah, sometimes it's hard to think of another one, but yeah, that makes sense. This has just been such an intellectually stimulating conversation, thank you. And I'm excited about your book. I love the whole concept and what you're trying to do with it. So I can't wait to hear what people are gonna say about it. I know it's gonna be really good. And so I appreciate your time today, Eric. And I'm gonna put all your information in the show notes so people will know how to contact you. They will know how to get your book. I'll put a link in there to Amazon. And I do wanna say if you do read his book and you love it, please leave a review on Amazon so that he can grow. His voice can get out there 'cause I think it's an important one. It's one that I think a lot of us need to hear. So thank you, Eric. Is there anything else you wanna say to our listeners? - I don't think so, except one thing, which is that in addition to hearing other people's stories is a way to expand truth. There is this thing called writing that enables us to gobble up the stories of people we've never met. And that is almost magical. - Yeah, that's beautiful. So read as much as you can and even get your story out there whoever you are. Listen, maybe even it's just a journal, something that I think getting it out is sometimes incredibly therapeutic, even if you're the only ones being it. And I think a lot of books start out that way. I know mine did. I started to write just for myself and then all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute. (laughs) I think this might help somebody. I don't know, we'll see. Thank you, Eric. You've been a complete joy. I appreciate your time. - Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) You
