Russ Roberts: preference

Transcript context

…What are nonreligious people missing, in general? Well, we live in a very interesting time. I think it’s increasingly hard for a highly educated person to believe in God. It’s a cliché that with the Enlightenment, a lot of people lost faith. They replaced that faith with a belief in science, in the belief of humankind’s ability to manipulate the world in godly ways. And yet, religion has not died. I think David Foster Wallace says it best. Everyone worships. We, as human beings, like things that are larger than ourselves. We like belonging to causes that are more than just our daily lives. His advice is to pick one of the bigger . . . actually, any actual religion, rather than, say, beauty or money or fame. He says if you worship those, you’ll find yourself deeply disappointed as you get older. Adam Smith would say the same thing in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. When you ask what are people missing — for me, a lot of religious belief in the modern age is two things. It’s an ability to embrace a little bit of agnosticism, a little bit of intellectual humility, to say, “I don’t fully understand.” It’s not easy to fully embrace a belief in God in today’s age. That makes most people uncomfortable. They tend to either be . . . Fundamentalism is very attractive, and then there’s nothing. Those two extremes are very attractive. The in-between, which says, “I’m not sure there’s a God, but I want to use religion as a way to express my sense of awe and wonder, being a human being alive in an extraordinary universe” — that’s a tough sell. That, I think, is the easiest sell to a thoughtful person in many ways. It’s a little bit like, for me and my experience, having an ear for music. Some people don’t have an ear for music — it doesn’t speak to them — or for art or for bitter beer. It just doesn’t appeal to them. It doesn’t make their neurons fire in a particular way. I think religion may be like that as well. I think there’s some people who are very prone to it, who find either transcendence or belief easier to embrace than for others. I would never say someone’s missing something by not being religious, not leading a religious life. I will say that, in my case, religion is a lot like marriage, and I say this as someone who is very happily married now for almost 30 years. If we were doing this in front of a live audience, wild applause. If you ever mention how long you’ve been married, if it’s more than a year, people applaud because it’s such an achievement, I guess. They don’t realize it could be my wife’s achievement, not mine. At any rate, any one day, you might wish it were otherwise. Any one day, as a religious Jew, there are days I wish I could have shrimp. There are days I wish I could watch the game on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon on TV. There are times I wish I didn’t feel different. But over a lifetime, it’s a very powerful enricher of the texture of everyday life. I would say that’s true of marriage and religion. Any one day, you might sometimes think it’s a hard deal. ifferent. But over a lifetime, it’s a very powerful enricher of the texture of everyday life. I would say that’s true of marriage and religion. Any one day, you might sometimes think it’s a hard deal. Most days, it’s good or great, and then, more importantly, over a longer period of time, it’s deeply satisfying. I think in today’s world, those two institutions are struggling because for whatever reason, people are more interested in today. If I say to you, “Forgo this pleasure today, and you’ll have great pleasure tomorrow,” that’s a tough sell in today’s world. In my case, I don’t look at my cell phone for 25 hours over the Jewish Sabbath. What? It’s crazy because on any non-Sabbath day, I look at my phone compulsively. Really, why would you give that up? How can you give that up? Yet it’s been a good trade for me. That’s all I can say. I can’t say whether it’s good for other people. A lot of people, I think, find the Sabbath idea very appealing, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s really hard to keep it with any regularity. Again, I would emphasize, you don’t have to embrace fundamentalism to have a taste of the transcendent in your life, and I think it’s an important part of being a human being. Recently read a book on neuroscience by Robert Burton. I think there are three ways that we stimulate our brain’s love of the transcendent: psychedelics — mushrooms and LSD; direct brain stimulation — you can give someone an out-of-body feeling of being part of something enormous through a brain stimulus, according to Burton; and religion. The value of religion is it’s better than a knife, and it’s probably better than mushrooms, at least if you’re worried about some of the side effects. I just think it’s part of being human, and if you struggle to make that leap of faith, which I think everyone should struggle, you don’t have to make the leap of faith. You could just say, “I’m open to the possibility that the reason there’s something rather than nothing is because some force started it.” Then you need to choose a religion — you need an institutional framework for experiencing that. That works for me. Might not work for you.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.