Stephen Engler And Studying Belief

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Thank you and we'll come back to another episode of Philosophy of Life. My name is Rosa Sanjide. I'm here with my co-host Yalda Natalia. Today's episode is quite special because we are stepping out our usual boundaries. The subject shaped humanity for thousands of years that we are going to talk about. Religion. For most of my life, I believe something very simple. If there is a religion, there must be a God behind it. The two were inseparable in my mind. Even when I learned that some tradition, like Buddhism, Taoism, approach spirituality differently and may not be centered around the idea of creator God. I still believe that deep down, religion itself had to originate it from something divine. But recently, after reading more about philosophy, religion became like an abstract in human history. Something changed in me. I begin to realize that religion may not be simply be something handed to humanity from above. I begin to realize that religion may not be simply be something handed to humanity from above. It may also be something humanity itself helped to shape it. Through culture, fear, morality, suffering, politic, identity, and our endless search for meaning. That realization did not necessarily destroy the idea of God for me, but it fundamentally changed the way I look at religion. Something evolved alongside our civilizations. And honestly, that perspective was both uncomfortable and beautiful because every new understanding has the power to break the old belief. And maybe that is how humans begin to grow. Today we are joined by Professor Stephen Angler from Canada, whose work explores religion, philosophy, belief system, and how humans begin to interpret meaning. This is an episode about understanding religion. Understanding why humans begin believing it, understanding why religion evolved, and understanding how philosophy changed the way we see the world. So with that said, we'll come in to another episode of Philosophy of Life. Before we begin talking about religion, philosophy, and evolution of belief, could you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your background, and the work you do?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

I'm a professor of religious studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. And uh I've been working here for about 25 years. I research religions in Brazil, especially spirit incorporation traditions, esoteric religions, and I work a lot with theory and methodology. And where I come from with my students is to say that what religion is, is a force that matters because people believe in it. So let's not even start asking questions about what religion is true or which is the best. Let's just ask what difference do religions make. I teach uh religious studies courses at a university.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

In Iran, where I come from, in order to learn religion, we have to go to specialty school. So for um regular traditional science, we have to go to regular university, obviously. But here it's a little bit different. This is interesting.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Yeah, that is pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Um Yeah, I used to work with someone who asked me if I could perform her marriage ceremony, and I said, No, I'm not a religious person. I I study religions. So I teach courses on the end of the world and different religions, on what different religions think about death and the afterlife. I teach courses on spirit incorporation, on science and religion, on what uh zombies and transhumanism can tell us about the religious-like views.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Do you have any preference which religion you rather you basically personally would would you like to follow?

SPEAKER_00 5:16

I was raised Catholic, but I don't like I if people ask me uh what's my religion, I usually say I'm an agnostic Catholic atheist, which is to say I'm trained to treat our religions the same, so I can't commit myself to one professionally. But I was raised Catholic, and that shapes who you are, because uh the values, the sense of community, and a lot of basic assumptions about what just makes up the universe come to you at a young age. But in the end, I haven't had the kind of experience that I see other people have that leaves me with a deep and profound commitment to a certain set of ideas. So I always say I'm I'm open to being converted. And a number of my students have tried to convert me, but it hasn't taken yet.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Yeah, I I was gonna ask it. It's it's um that's really interesting that you say that because um I'm fascinated that you mention uh that you're you try and keep yourself kind of like on the outskirts, and you just kind of compare the different uh religions and so on and so forth. Um you you've spent a lot of time in Brazil, is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

I spent about 10 years of my life there through many uh back and forth trips. I was an exchange student there when I was 15 years old. I had my 16th birthday there, was there for a year. And someone who I met at that point, uh like almost 25 years later, when I was back for a visit, we ended up falling in love. So now I'm married to a Brazilian and I'm much more highly motivated to visit regularly.

unknown 7:07

That's good.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

That's good. So um is that where your um interest in religion was sparked, or did you always kind of have that interest?

SPEAKER_00 7:19

I always had it. I uh when I was young, I my room was filled with books, a lot of science fiction, about a lot of science, a lot of history. And there was a little corner of religious books, and I always felt someday I'm gonna be ready to read those. It's like poetry, but it's deeper somehow. I'm not ready for that yet. And then I did two degrees in philosophy, and I felt like this is teaching me very sharp arguments, very sharp uses of concepts. But it really is a way of saying this is how we should think. And I was a lot more interested in how people actually do think, and that is a natural path to start looking at religions, just very profound but very different ways of making sense of life, the universe, and everything.

SPEAKER_02 8:07

Yeah, that makes sense. Um uh in while you when you spent time in Brazil, um, did that then deepen your interest or kind of like want to open those books up that you had in the corner of your room?

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Well, by that time I'd read those books and many more. But uh, what the what Brazil did, uh, because uh I first did a PhD in religious studies, and that was on early modern discourses of charity, and I was looking at how relationships with the poor coming out of the Middle Ages were framed in religious Christian terms in Western Europe. And 300 years later they were framed in national sort of economic mercantilist terms. That's what I did my PhD on. And then the visit to Brazil led me to a personal connection. I said, I better start actually researching Brazil. I speak the language after all. But then what I found in Brazil was what I learned in my PhD wasn't that much help at all. And that was the big and most interesting thing.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Yeah, you you it's it's interesting because uh Brazil has so many different um religions and and they like to kind of like intermix them. So it's interesting how you kind of, I don't know, almost accidentally, I guess, fell into that by going there as an exchange student and then you know learning about all of this. So um it what really interested me when I was kind of looking into um uh what you have done and your um teachings and and so on and so forth, is how um millions people, millions of people in Brazil, they kind of um and it doesn't matter from what walk of life, which is also kind of like neat, um they just kind of casually sit around and talk to spirits. And um like it's a you know, it's like in any ordinary like Monday or Tuesday. Um how do you think that became the norm in that culture and uh versus how like we look at it um where we are in the part uh parts of the world that we are in?

Brazil Spirits And Religion As Healing

SPEAKER_00 10:26

Well, there are different ways to look at it, when it's historically, so you find that even Catholicism in Spain and Portugal is much more focused on saints, and who are saints? They're they're like spirits in a sense. They're people who lived their life here, are at a different level. In addition, both West African and Central African traditions and indigenous traditions, all of which end up sort of mixing together, have similar beliefs. So the history comes together. But in addition, Latin American cultures are very focused on family and on community, partly as for the positive reason that that is just where else are we going to center our life? And they're much more opengoing and connected, like the majority of cultures in the world, not like sort of English culture, which is more shapes Canada more. And uh, from that perspective, then that predisposes you to think that the boundaries between life and death here and there are also permeated by your relationships with people. And in a way, that's the first useful way to think about spirits is not as disembodied ghost-like entities, but just forget about the line between life and death, which is just part of everyone's life, especially because reincarnation is such an important view for many of these religions. So the line between life and death is just a change of address. You're still having the same relationships with the same people.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

So in essence, you you look at the religion as a fundamental way, fundamental direction at least. And no, even though you said in initially that you are agnostic, but you are religion person because obviously you look at the religion in that fundamental way.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Depends on how you define religious. I in the in the kind of way that most people use that word, I'm not a religious person. I don't attend any religious communion community regularly. I go to lots of different ones regularly, so I don't have a social network that is defined by its investment in or belief in or practice of religion. And uh I don't personally feel that I've ever had a religious experience that has changed my the way I think or the way I feel or the way I relate to people. So, in that sense, I'm not a religious person. I understand religion well, but what I discovered in Brazil is you have to actually participate and talk to people on the ground in communities, and most especially let go of the idea that you know what religion means. Because in most places in the world, religion is really overlaps with healing. And a lot of people's motivation for going to religions is a sick child, a disease, emotional stress, financial stress. And so if you just talk to people and say, why are you here? What's this doing for you? You I found, and that's one of the reasons I say my PhD didn't give me what I imagined it would. I find you don't often sometimes you end up in places that are religious, other times not, but it's all religion.

AI Zombies And Thinking-Stopping Words

SPEAKER_01 13:58

I agree. Uh I'm on your sub stack and I read a few articles that you wrote that are good, they are very, very good as a matter of fact. Uh one of them is about basically your large language model. You wrote it what shingwai and to zombie. Although, do you think large language model you compare it to a zombie and regular life to singwai? Singhwai? Do I pronounce it correctly?

SPEAKER_00 14:31

Or yeah, that's a good title. But uh the comparison to zombies is comparison to uh philosophical use of the zombie metaphor, which is uh what's the difference? Imagine some science fiction scenario where you end up with a person who has an inner life of emotions and and uh a very rich, detailed inner life, and someone, an entity, a being who from the outside looks the same and seems to act the same, but they're empty inside. So the the philosophical zombie is asking, but what are the things that make a human fully human? And can we separate the zombie-like copy of us from the real us? What how would we make that distinction? And uh it's that sort of question about what people call AIs that that series of three posts was looking at. And the core idea of that post is that AIs are not artificial intelligence, except by some narrow definitions. What they are is uh mirrors. And if you can work prompts well, you can make those mirrors fairly flat so they reflect your ideas, so you can fine-tune your ideas. But it isn't a person, it's reflection of you. And that's one reason why a lot of psychological problems are coming out of uh large language module use, because they don't have a foot in reality like other people do. They have a foot in what we say to them, and another foot in like everything on the internet, and neither of those places lead to a real conversation. So that's what the metaphor of zombie is doing there, is say they may walk the walk, but and they may even talk the talk, but they're empty inside. They're a they're a reflection of us.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Yeah, well, there are some controversial ideas behind this. Some of them is uh Nick Bostrom. Nick Bostrom, who wrote uh Superintelligent back in 2014, warned us actually not developing AI. But who lessens?

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Yeah. Yeah, Bostrom's a very important figure. I'm disturbed to see his trajectory at Oxford where he was not considered philosophical enough. One of the reasons I left philosophy is philosophers can be very judgmental unless you have the precise, sharp discourse that they have, a certain sort of focus. And he was uh especially his simulation argument is something I think is a really powerful idea to think with.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Yeah, yeah. So which one of your article in Substack you most like?

SPEAKER_00 17:27

The one on conspiracy theories, because I've I think that's there's another one on zombie words. The two of those overlap, and there I mean zombie in a different sense. They're words that try to eat your brains. Words like cult and conspiracy theory and heresy are words that tell people stop thinking, don't think about this, don't look at this. This is not worth thinking about. There's nothing to see here. Move along, move along. And when words are trying to stop us from thinking, we need to double down and think harder. So I think the article on conspiracy theories was useful because it gives some practical tips on how to do a triage with conspiracy theories. Some are kooky because of the way the thoughts, the logic is working. Doesn't mean they're false, they're just not worth looking into. Most are in the middle where you have to decide whether it's worth the trying time trying to assess them. But some conspiracy theories have a good chance of being true, make perfect sense, are extremely important, and really a worse time looking at. And at that point, if someone comes along and says it's just a conspiracy, and they mean it's kooky and it's false, you have to be prepared to say, it's not obviously false and it's definitely not kooky. This thing just might be true. So I like teach working with my students to try to get them to think critically. And one of the most important steps is to understand when people are using language to disqualify certain ways of thinking, that you shouldn't think about ghosts or you shouldn't think about alien contact. You shouldn't think about those things without committing to the truth or false, the same attitude I have towards religions. I try to teach my students, don't go there in terms of is it true or is it false? Ask why would people believe that? What kind of evidence are we looking at? What difference does it make to people's lives when they do believe these things? And that it's a very, it's a much richer and more useful conversation. So I like those two posts for their critical thinking quality.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Do you think that um we're naturally really curious though? And we uh when someone tells us not to do something, we want to do it. You know, I don't you think that most people would, if they're told like, oh no, this is you know, this is a conspiracy theory, uh, don't don't look here. Um they're more inclined to look. Or even if they don't uh say it out loud or admit it out loud, maybe um inside they think like, huh, I don't know, I kind of feel like this is true. It's not a conspiracy theory.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

I think only a minority of people are have the kind of curiosity that isn't hampered by the main problem with being human, which is our brains did not involve to think clearly in a complex information society. So we the the biggest part of education, I think, should be how to get past groupthink, get past uh confirmation bias, where you look for evidence that supports what you already believe. And the list goes on and on about cognitive biases. We just, most people, everybody, every human being with one of these brains has to work extremely hard to most of the time catch themselves from all the little tricks of bad thinking that we fall into. So it's quite the opposite in some sense. Most people will go along with the road signs that say conspiracy theory, road closed, don't go down here, don't look in this direction. Only a few people are free enough of groupthink and other cognitive distortions, or are trained well enough to say, well, first, do I really care whether we actually land on another moon or not? My personal view is I really don't care one way or the other. So I have to admit the possibility that the moon landing was faked. How could you prove it wasn't? Then away, how could you prove it was not faked? How but the most important question is why would I waste my time on it? That's not what I'm gonna bother uh looking at. There are more interesting conspiracy theories that are worth assessing.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

How about the truth? Do you don't want to go after truth?

SPEAKER_00 21:50

Truth? Well, I don't think the definition of truth that most people most people have is very effective. It's truth as corresponding. To reality is often a bit of a mugs game because you just don't have the evidence to decide. So people then take a stand, this is true or this is false, and neither of them have good evidence. So they're making their, they're they're taking and digging into a position because it's the position shared by their friends, or it just resonates at some level with other ideas they hold dearly, but none of those things are evidence. So most talk about truth is misleading because people haven't got a good enough sense of what kind of evidence they would need to actually prove that something's true. So if we divide all of the sort of knowledge that we can have in the universe into three groups, the true, the false, and the in the middle, 99.9% of the things we run into is in the middle. More or less true. Two plus two equals four, we can make a case that's absolutely true. Two plus two equals five, we can make a case that's absolutely false. But we landed on the moon. You're never going to get 100%. Even if you get people on the inside confessing, how do you trust their confessions? Most interesting and important issues do not allow you to arrive at absolute truth or absolute falsehood. What they are are challenges to work on your research and assessment skills so you can come to a more or less probable account. And then the big question is, and what does it matter? Just knowing the truth. I don't see any advantage in that. Like, do spirits really exist? Well, that's part of it. The truth can be relevant. Plus, there are other ways of defining truth that I think are more productive, but that gets a bit philosophical.

Evidence Truth And Why People Believe

SPEAKER_01 23:46

I agree the truth could be very controversial. Are you agree uh that most religion on the earth at least most religion I know about that have came to prove God to humanity?

SPEAKER_00 24:08

That's a minority of religions. Spirits are more common than gods. Smaller religions. But if you if you make a list of the number of people on the planet, Islam, Christianity, those are the big faiths. And those are the faiths where theology talk about God is central. And those are faiths with certain characteristics that most religions do not share. I just have an article just coming out in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, co-authored with a couple of colleagues, where we say, let's take Afro-Brazilian religions, African, esoteric, uh, European, esoteric influenced, and say, let's say those are the core religions. Because usually people, when they define religion, have Christianity or Islam in their mind. One God, creator, judge, a moral revelation that expects people to act a certain way. But those aren't the characteristics of most religions in the world. So what would religion look like if we use other prototypes, other examples as our basic idea of what a religion would look like? It was just a thought experiment, but you end up with a very different view of what religion looks like if you get away from the monotheistic religions. How about the doesn't mean they're less important, but it does mean it's a bigger palate.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

I was gonna ask, how about the things that maybe I don't know, um, maybe in all the time that you spent uh maybe in just doing your studies and spending time in Brazil since uh spirituality is very big there. Um what if did you ever see something that you just couldn't explain, though? And then that questions the truth, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:59

As I mentioned, I've never had that kind of experience. I've talked to many, many people who had experiences that just blow me away. But all I can say is that I'm told they have this experience and their belief that they lived through this changed their life. Whether it's true or not, I can't say because I haven't had anything to measure it by, no similar experience. I've heard of lots of wonderful experiences. When I go to Umbunde, uh, for example, there is uh, let me search for an example here. There's one case where I know a doctor personally, and he's a very good doctor. He is greatly respected in the community for his medical skills. But people find him a bit not open and talkative and socially. He's not very Brazilian. He's almost more canadian, almost more Canadian in a sense, down to the facts, let's get this done. We don't have time to waste on idle conversation here, people. Let's just deal with the issue. So he's as a doctor, he's considered to be not very open, approachable, caring. He's good. He gets the job done. He's one of the most respected doctors, but not as a person. But this person, this doctor is also a medium in Umbunda. So once a week he goes into a trance and a very highly evolved, positive, charitable spirit was coming down to help the people to turn up to talk. He lends his body to the to a series of different spirits. And his kabuklo spirit is also known as a great healer. But every time you go to a ritual with this uh medium and the kaboklu he works with, you know it's going to go long because everyone else is finished, and he takes so much extra time with every patient, and it's so engaged personally with the people. But it within the religion, that's not the doctor who's doing this, it's the spirit in the doctor who's doing this. But I couldn't help but be struck by that contrast between a great healer as a doctor who's known as someone who is not very approachable, and a great healer, a spirit working in that person who is seen as the opposite.

SPEAKER_02 28:25

Yeah, that's very interesting. I uh I mean uh if I think um if someone was listening right now and I they might feel like the more modern world is like a um hollow. Although I I actually the question I should probably be asking is whether you think that people are drifting away from religion and spirit spirituality, or do you think now the newer generations are actually more interested in quote unquote returning to um religion?

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Yeah, very important question, very complex. I mean, two gestures towards answers because it's so complicated. On the one hand, the question is not so much are the numbers changing, but is the experience of being religious changing? And it has certainly changed in much of the world. It's become more individualized. So people think their personal view is more important than what a religious leader might tell them. It's become more commodified, not in the sense that it's got a price tag attached to it, but in the sense that, like a commodity, it's all just different uh brands of the same stuff, as if any religious experience in any religion is a religious experience. So that making religiosity then allows people to shop around. Well, I'm reading a Hindu thinker this week, but last week I was reading the Tao De Ching, and I go to this place, but then I used to go to that place because it's all just religion, it's all just spirituality. So the religious experience has been cut off from a number of things, but especially from a sense of community and a sense of tradition. One of the most important things that religion has done throughout most of history, up until like, you know, the last couple of hundred years or 300 years, in some parts of the world, the most important religion gives people is a sense that there's something more important and bigger than them that constrains them. So when a Sunni Muslim, their alarm goes off, and five times a day it's time to pray, to pray. Salat is not when they choose to pray or how they choose to pray, it's what they are told to pray, it's what the tradition demands. So that experience of knowing that your will isn't the only thing that matters in your life is very important. And religious community, Catholicism is a good example, the network of saints, the networks of priests, the network of godparents show that the sacred is part of a community. And you don't get to just do what you want, whether you're in the family or in the parish or relating to people in a capacity where you're performing charitable works, you are beholden to the other. Caring for the other shapes you. Your own will, your desires face limits. So you are when you're raised in a tradition, a lot of people focus on what are the ideas, but if you're raised in a fairly conservative, more conservative, more traditional religious tradition, you grow up knowing that the best way to be human is to accept a shape that is imposed on you. And it's never a perfect shape, we can criticize any religion, but that is lacking in modern religiosity. That was the first point. The second point is look at what's happening as social media and the gaming of various aspects of life and the commodification of a tension where a dollar sign is attached to every single moment that companies can get a hand on. It's sort of fracturing the individual self. People used to complain that you know the family was eroded by capitalism, and then individuals were floating around and plugged into the job market. Now capitalism is inside our heads, and different parts of our personality are being commodified and organized and sold off and manipulated. So many people feel that fragmentation. So ironically, religion is a place where some people are looking for a greater sense of unity, of a deeper meaning, a place of peace, a place where we can try to fight back against this uh rabid attempt to divide us into uh quantifiable and marketable bits.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

You definitely surprise me. So uh I actually thought always religion related, I mean, not always, I know Buddhist and all those Eastern religions are not related to the God. However, I thought most religions are trying to prove gods. And for me, especially at my life, I'm devoted, I mean I'm all about God. But then again, you show me a different way if you look at the religion, and that I didn't see. I must be blind.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Another difference is we can put it a different way, it's uh repackaging the same tension between your value, a very valuable view that an important part of religion is what our ideas are, are the our ideas about what is bigger than us and how do those ideas shape us. But on the other side, a different part of religion is practice, ritual. And some religion, Hinduism's a good example, there are very philosophical parts, very theological about the nature of God. But the main thing is practice, ritual. And a lot of religions believe the religion's gonna work, the ritual's gonna work when you do it. You don't have to believe to do the ritual, you just have to do the ritual. And if you think about, well, why ritual? What is ritual? If I I always brush my teeth starting on the top left outside, why? I don't know why. Is that a ritual? No, habit is not ritual. Ritual is more than habit because I can choose to change to brush my teeth. But a ritual, like tradition, like community, is something outside you where you're giving your body over to a set of motions that you're doing, not because you choose to do exactly that at this moment, but because you choose to let the ritual run your body for a while. So it's another place where we learn that our own individual choices are constrained and have a higher purpose. So if we focus on ritual, then we see that, well, yeah, God and ideas of God is important in some religions more than others, but ritual is also very important. Even within Christianity and Islam, people often don't focus enough on the ritualization. And that's another point where modern religiosity doesn't really do the healthy things it used to do, because people choose the rituals they do, they choose the books they read, they choose the beliefs they want to uh hold. I ran into a I like, you know, I like talking to Uber drivers and taxi drivers in different cities I end up in. I was in uh Phoenix, Arizona once for an editorial conference, and the driver, yeah, I was talking to my he's he's coming from uh Serbia. I thought, well, maybe he's Muslim, is he Muslim? He's a Muslim. And then I started to say, well, what kind of mosque you go on? I'm assuming he's gonna say he's a Sunni. So, well, I don't really go to a mosque. And I said, Well, uh how do you live your faith? Well, I just read the Quran and some parts of it speak to me and some parts of it don't. I'm thinking, that's not a typical Muslim attitude, but it is this more modern, individualistic thing. But notice, he's it's not just that he's choosing the ideas, he's also leaving out the rituals.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

What would you say to um to someone that thinks religion is the way to control people or to keep people uh from rebelling, from you know, from just various things and just to make sure that people um quote unquote behave uh because they're they're because of their fear of um either the unknown or their God or you know, uh some or the afterlife. Um what would you say to someone like that?

SPEAKER_00 37:28

I'd say they're about a century out of date. Religion used to be one of the most important ways of social control, for better and for worse, usually for better. I mean, I people often focus on religion and its association to violence, but that's much less central than the acts of caring and charity that are part of everyday life in almost every religious context. So for better, religion has often been a place. But in the last hundred years, both because the economy has changed so that power and money is focused at very, you know, very high level, very powerful nodes. Think of the global economy and global distribution of power as a network. You know, some the richest person in the world 2,000 years ago could impact maybe a few hundred thousand people. The richest people in the world today can influence an entire planet, billions of people. And that's not a statement about individuals, it's a statement about a network of power that has certain nodes. And I'd say about 100 years ago, not coincidentally around the time that Antonio Gramsci was writing how the way you persuade people is by through the education system, not just through the police and the army and explicit violence, but through the media, through propaganda, that is the source of control in modern society. So what people believing everything they hear or read that's called the news, that's much bigger control of people than religion is today.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

I agree 100%. Uh do you want to share with us why you come up with uh your Substack? So many good stuff in there, but why do you think it was necessary to get it done?

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Well, I don't know. Sometimes I think that the kind of stuff we're talking about now is important, and if more people were thinking like this, it would make a difference. So that's part of it. Maybe more people will be prompted to think ideas outside the normal way they think. A lot of it was just that those are ideas that I think are valuable, but I don't have time to work them up to the level of detail and sophistication that would make it into an academic publication. And a lot of it I think is just uh more useful in a uh slightly more accessible way. And uh, but also because some of those are readings I give to my class. So some of those are written sort of as readings for the courses I teach. Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Um we're going towards and uh do Yalo, do you have any other question?

SPEAKER_02 40:16

Um I think uh I think I've I've asked everything I wanted to ask. Um you've actually answered a lot of things that I was going to ask about, so that's good. Uh it's been a great conversation. Um yeah, I don't have any more questions, but if you have anything else to say, we'd be happy to hear about it.

Healing Stories Placebo And Closing

SPEAKER_00 40:38

I I think I think sort of practical stories from people I've uh talked to are interesting. It's been fairly abstract what we talk about. So let me give you three examples of how I think religions, the religions I study in Brazil, are useful in people's lives. And they don't depend on the ideas being true, they depend on people's commitment to believing in a certain community. So Cardicist spiritism believes that God created all souls equally, ignorant and distant. And lifetime after lifetime, we we reincarnate, often in different social relationships with the same fellow travelers. And that's what spirits are. We're all spirit, currently we're spirits in a body, but there are a lot of spirits outside a body. So Jesus, for Cardasist, was a spirit who was so advanced he didn't need a body anymore, but he came into a body just to teach, to help. But one of the things that that belief that we're all just on the same reincarnational journey, one of the things it gives people is comfort with death. So I've never met a group of people who is more totally comfortable with the idea that their loved ones are going to die, have just died, because they're they know that they'll be with those people outside a body, inside their bodies again. They'll be journeying through lifetime after lifetime with these people. So it's really beautiful. Another way, uh, say in Umbanda, people get explanations for why they feel the way they feel, or for why they lose their keys all the time. Oh, there's a spirit attached to you. And there are rituals that they don't kick out the spirit with force, they talk to the spirit gently and persuade the spirit that they've been attached to this person, and they, the spirit who's obsessing, not possessing, but obsessing a person. They'd be better off if they just stopped hanging around and bothering this person. So get on with your own life. That's the one of the coolest exorcism ceremonies I've ever seen, because it's not force out the spirit, it's reason with the spirit and show them that it's in their best interest to get on with their own spiritual evolution. But what that does is it gives you a way of thinking about parts of your personality, you might say, that are dysfunctional for you. You always get angry. If you can objectify that cause of anger as a spirit and deal with it ritually and have a way of talking about it, you are pushing it away by saying, that's not me. And that's very effective psychotherapy, to be able to objectify and change yourself by taking the part of you you don't like and saying, it was never part of me anyway. So it's very useful in that sense as well. Plus, some people, uh, for example, someone I interviewed who's in a Neo-Pentecostal church, and there they do believe in exorcism and the spirits that they are kicking out of people with great force, the power of Jesus, are the same spirits in these other religions just down the block, except they flip the value judgment around, and the spirit that is a healing spirit on that side of the street is a demon on this side of the street. But people still have. The experience of healing. So I saw I know someone who has the demons exercised from her every three or four months. And that's her way of dealing with increasing anxiety and stress. And she starts to get upset at the people in her family. She feels like she can't control her emotions. She goes in and the pastor calls on the power of Jesus, and those demons are cast out. And she's cool. She's tranquil. And then you know it builds up, she goes back. So that's part of her dealing with what's the diagnosis? Well, for her, the diagnosis of what is one of exercising spirits. So they're just those are just uh three examples where these different religions that deal with ideas of spirits in different ways all are useful for people and coming from very different directions.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Could be called religion as psychological remediation.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

I think I see that there's a yeah, psychological power. Yeah, there is a psychological power. I was gonna say, uh, is there, do you think, a placebo effect by any chance? Do you believe that there might be a placebo effect or because obviously there is a big um psychological power involved?

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Well, of course there could be there. And there's also a social affirmation. That's a big part of the function of community that people lose when they're off just reading self-help books on their own. The community reflecting back to you this belief helps makes it uh true. But even more importantly than that, I think one of one of the key ideas is that belief is rooted in things we don't really understand. My favorite example is uh where does hypnotism come from? Well, now it's it's framed as uh not entirely well explained, but a psychological thing that can be worked, you can go into hypnotherapy, so it's science, right? But where does it come from? Out of esotericism, comes from a mesmer. But where does the belief in spirits come from as dead people? In the Middle Ages, it they weren't usually associated with trance states in the same way. It starts when mesmerism gets pepped up by Swedenborgian and that different and esoteric tradition. And they believe that when people go into a trance, it's dead people speaking through them, and then that influences the development of spiritualism, the seances and the people sitting around a table. And that then in France turns into spiritism, which then turns into umbanda in Brazil. So you can see this historical thread, and what's at the heart of it? Something that's found in cultures around the world, a belief that something, different cultures will give it different names, uh, a jinn, which is a bad thing, or a positive spirit, which is a good thing. But we could say that the idea of what psychologists call a dissociative trance state. People are in sort of out of themselves, but they feel like the words coming out of them aren't really their words, the actions aren't really their words. That experience seems to be something that is common in the majority of cultures, and that some people don't, you know, I've never experienced that, but a lot of people have that. And so the interesting thing is maybe there's something about the human mind we don't understand. And what we have is different sciences, different psychological theories, different religions, different traditions of various sorts, interpreting that basic, shared, common characteristic of the human mind and putting it in a vocabulary that gives it handles. So if you describe that in a different way, it gives you a different sort of handle on that experience. Maybe it's just part of the human brain, it's a natural, evolved capacity. But no one's got the monopoly on describing what's going on. What we have is a bunch of different competing stories, and some of them turn out to be very useful for people in dealing with problems in their lives.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Thank you, Stephen. I I learned a lot. I mean, it was wonderful. So again, thank you for accepting our invitations. Uh, before we want to go, um, what would you recommend Stephen today to a Stephen when he was 18 years old? Would you be taking religion again?

SPEAKER_00 48:46

Well, the most important things in my life became important through the choices in my life, so I wouldn't really change anything. I've got the the wife I have, the kids I have, the job I have, because of the choices I made. You know, I I I wouldn't change anything because of the possible butterfly effect, you know. This is good. It's not nothing's perfect, but I wouldn't mess with anything.

SPEAKER_01 49:10

That's great.

SPEAKER_02 49:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

Thank you again. Maybe in the future we should get more focused. Now I know exactly where where your direction is. I should have read more your substack.

SPEAKER_00 49:25

Yeah, maybe mention to people, it's called religioning. Religioning substack. Religioning.com.

SPEAKER_02 49:32

Yes. Uh that that was yeah, that was definitely what I was gonna say. Maybe you can give yourself a shout-out as to where they can find more information about uh your uh writings and your research and your experiences. And you said religioning.com?

SPEAKER_00 49:48

Religioning.substack.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

Substack, okay.

SPEAKER_01 49:53

I put them in the show notes.

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for the invitation. Great conversation, and yeah, let's talk again sometime.

SPEAKER_02 50:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 50:04

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 50:05

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 50:07

Absolutely. It was nice talking to you.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

Thank you again, Professor Engler, for being here with us today and for sharing your thought, your experience, and your perspective. What I personally found fascinating about this conversation is that religion may not be as simple as many of us believed. Perhaps religion is not only about God, perhaps it is about humanity itself. About our fear, our hopes, our need for meaning, our attempt to explain suffering, morality, death, existence and unknown. One of the most important things philosophy teaches us is that growth often begins when certainty breaks. And maybe that is not something we should fear. Maybe every new understanding reshape us. Maybe every difficult question expand us. And maybe wisdom is not about holding into old beliefs forever, but having the courage to examine them honestly. That doesn't mean abolishing faith. It just means become conscious of how deeply human interpretation shaped the world around us. As always, this podcast is not here to tell you what to believe. It is here to encourage reflection, to ask questions, to explore idea, and to examine life more deeply. Thank you for listening for another episode of Philosophy of Life. Until next time, take care of yourself and keep questioning.