We're Thinking About God All Wrong - Rainn Wilson

how much of that do you think is to do with them having the wrong image of God you you've you quote this Zen teaching pointing at the moon the finger that points at the Moon is not the moon what does that mean I don't know you tell me man I don't oh did I write that the yeah it's I have a chapter in the book called The Notorious god um uh and I I love this conversation I love a conversation about God I don't love a you know an old-fashioned YouTube debate about whether God exists

or not yeah you kind of opened the chapter by talking about how useless and fruitless YouTube religion debates are yes yes it's uh I wasn't going to mention that but well I know it's I think it used to be your bread and butter but I I greatly admire how you've expanded your vision to just have just big meaty beautiful conversations and challenge ing conversations too as one should and I hope you'll challenge me as well but just having like you know Richard Dawkins versus some priest and them fighting it out and you know there's a

lot of kind of angry 23 year olds at home going oh you landed a good point there oh yeah you got him Dawkins um it's kind of like Jake Paul vers just thinking um and and it doesn't really change uh the the atmosphere um but I do think so the finger pointing at the moon so um I think people often confuse that so when when I read that in your book I I thought of this I keep quoting this poem by CS Lewis and there's a point where he says thoughts are but coins let me

not trust in said of thee their thin worn image of thy head it's like people often worship their thoughts more than they worship the thing that their thoughts are supposed to be directed to and so you end up with these ideas of God and these pictures in your head and isn't it vinin who talks about the Fishbowl I don't have the quote right on the tip of my fingers something about like how l no no fly fly glass we're caught like flies caught in a glass and the glass is the limitations of our language to

be able to summate stuff that is you know beyond the Beyond and we are stuck like FES popping around in this fly glass because we our language is so limited to trying and encapsulate something that is kind of beyond our current consciousness's understanding it's impossible to comprehend just how much our language restricts our thinking I I only speak one language fluently semi fluently I like to think uh and I think that I think it was Gerta who said of language he who knows one knows none because without this comparison it's difficult to even recognize the

constraints that that you have in your language uh I did a podcast recently with a the guy's got a channel called magnify and he was talking about how the the English language for example is embedded with sort of accounting terms it's it's very sort of trade based because that was the society that this language evolves in and so when you apply it to religion it's Jesus accounting you know for for for sins and we're in in spiritual debt and these kinds of language oh interesting look at the way that religious language is is completely embedded

into the Arabic language totally and the original word for sin sin was a uh an ancient Greek term of archery did you know this oh like missing sin is missing the mark thek yeah like you you know you're you're doing this and like oh I I sinned I didn't hit the bullseye so sin isn't like this black mark on your soul that's going to damn you to hell for eternity it's you miss the mark and guess what that's what we do all the time as human beings is we miss the mark but uh again and

then that language got translated when it got translated into into Latin or or or whatever it was um it got translated kind of Mis misappropriated yeah as as so often happens I think the history of translation especially in religion is something that needs a bit more Focus because so much of our understanding of theology can be affected by one person's decision to to make did you have you ever seen um paintings of Moses with horns no a lot of the time if you see a painting of so Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses has horns on

it w if you go to the San Chappelle in Paris you see on the Windows there are pictures of Moses with horns wow and it's because there's this word I think it's Ken uh in in Hebrew which can be translated as like Rays as in like rays of light but it can also be translated as horns it's like the same word and so when St Jerome makes the Vulgate the Latin translation of the Bible he translates it literally as horns so there's this passage in in Exodus Moses comes down from the mountain and he did

not know that his head was Ken because he'd been speaking with the Lord so he did not know that his face sha is how most translations will happen but Jerome translates it as he did not know that his face was horned because he had been speaking with which doesn't make much sense because like five minutes later he has to cover up his face because of the effect it's having on people around him it's quite clear that that's what it meant because Drome translated it as horns you end up seeing all this religious art with with

Moses having these these devilish horns and I mean that's a that's quite a sort of trivial example but you can imagine that happening theologically it's not just like the painting of Moses but your conception of God is completely altered by the fact that some concept has been translated wrong and sin is a great example of that I mean shifting your perspective on sin from being this this punch that you've landed on God or this this wrong that you've committed that you can sort of do an evil Giggle and it's God who's kind of upset about

it to rather being it's you missing the mark for yourself can can transform the way that you interact with the world yeah just by that one word I think yeah there's uh one of my favorite stories from the bahai faith is the son of the of the founder bahah Abdul Baha uh he came to the United States a little over a hundred years ago and toured around for about a year and um when he landed and he was everyone he was on the front page of the papers like the Persian Prophet has landed and they

have pictures of him he's got a big beard in a turban and stuff like that and this um journalist said uh Abdul Baha bah believe in Satan and ABD Baha thought about it and ABD Baha was like yes and they said oh what what how do bah view Satan and Abdul Baha said Satan is the insistent self and I love that so much because obviously bahis don't believe that there's a red devil man with scales and a pitchfork in a in an evil place like trying to tempt us but when you think about the insistent

self and you think about the universality of religious faith and religious belief the ego and the the Allure of the ego of lust and passion and power um is hardwired into our DNA as well it should be because we are part ape we're part you know we're part animal we're maybe we're mostly animal and that's that's how we survived um was to have our own self-interest to spread our seed to seek power protect ourselves and but that is the ego that is so much of what Buddhism is about about um the the the the need

the clutching the the the the the you know the need to possess um that this is a source of great unhappiness so this idea that that Satan is not something outside of oursel but something in our s and it's not an evil power but in fact um something that we all Wrestle with uh speaks to every uh spiritual tradition who was it uh bahas Abdul Bahar Abdul Bahar there's there's a quote from Abdul Bahar on your book okay page 98 for those following along at home um people have pictured a God in the realm of

their mind in the realm of the mind and worship that image which they have made for themselves consider then how all the peoples of the world are bowing the knee to a fancy of their own contriving how they have created a Creator within their own minds and they call it the fashioner of all that is it's people worshiping their thoughts rather than worshiping the thing that their thoughts are supposed to point to yeah I think that so Thomas aquinus uh famously thought that all religious language was analogy and so God is Not powerful God is

Not is not knowing God is not you know any of these things because these are human Concepts that we used to sort of analogously think about the way that that that God kind of operates but he's obviously not powerful in the way that a human is powerful being able to lift heavy things and and influence people and stuff like that it's a it's a totally incomprehensible notion but we use these analogous terms but now if you ask the philosophers even you know how do you define God they'll say oh he's an all powerful all loving

you know uh all knowing and and and perhaps pointing at the Moon Yeah pointing at the thinking about the finger the pointing at the finger itself you know which is probably the wrong way of thinking about I I think a lot of um David Bentley Hart seems like someone that you've you've read yes and I'm pretty sure that one of his biggest critiques of the new atheism movement is that they're just thinking of the wrong kind of God they've just got the wrong picture of what God is supposed to be I mean what what do

you think God is supposed to be well that's the ultimate question isn't it um well yeah because you could go even further than that and you can say that to exist is a quality of the physical world you know this this pen exists does God exist does God have the same quality that this pen has right right you know you can't say that God exists but again that's that's how trapped we are by Language by language yeah so yeah I I love David Bentley Hart uh the experience of God uh his book is is uh

as a seminal book for me and that really illumined a a new way of thinking about God and I have a chapter in there I referenced before the notorious God and I'm actually doing a uh a documentary I'm going to start next year doing a documentary called The Notorious geod I'd love to interview you for for it are you up for that that sounds like great fun okay and but this idea that God is much closer to an experience than a being with superpowers yeah so Jesus said God is love and and the hippies were

right in a way like can God be closer to something more akin to music than to a dude you know uh David benley Hart calls him like a demiurge that's this old idea of like a god with superpowers on a on a cloud like striking you and giving you favors and like and and having opinions and whatnot can God be closer to physics and Beauty than to any kind of being you know that's the that's what so many people are striving to understand through psychedelics you know I'm not I'm not a huge fan but I'm

also an addict so I can't do them so maybe if I wasn't I'd enjoy them who knows but um but that uh reaching for something Beyond again that reaching for something uh Transcendent and when I experience God the most um I experience God in nature I experience God I think the closest I've ever come to God was at a radio head concert and I saw radio head at the Hollywood Bowl and song after song after song from In Rainbows came up and I was just like my face was melting and I felt one with the

world and I just felt love and abulance and joy and I was just absolutely mesmerized and transformed and and I was like this is a religious this is like the most religious experience I've ever had if you enjoyed that clip you can watch the full episode with rain Wilson by clicking the link on your screen to support the show and get early adree access to episodes subscribe to my substack at Alex o con.com thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one