Does Facing the Serpent Lead to Redemption? | Richard Dawkins

let let's concentrate on the resurrection for a moment now unfortunately see this is part of the problem part of the problem with discussions like this is that the mode of approach that's taken by the mythological tends to Circle and wander like it doesn't because you have to shine light on the problem from multiple perspectives that's why it's often encoded in image for example or in drama it's not the same tack as a purely propositional and logical argument so it's more difficult to make but let me tell you a story that I believe Bears on the

res Resurrection you tell me what you think about it because I don't this is a very difficult story to account for it's going to take me about five minutes because it's it's complicated but there's no way around it I don't think so there's a strange scene in the gospels where Christ tells his followers that unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in there can be no hope for the Redemption of mankind unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert okay this is a very strange thing for someone to say so you

need to know what the story of The Bronze serpent in the desert was and what it signifies and I think we can understand it psychologically I really do believe this and so and the concordance of that story which was generated Millennia before with Christ's utterance is something I just cannot imagine how anyone put those two things together especially given the lack of explicit understanding about the relationship so let let me detail it so there's a scene in Exodus in The Exodus story where the Israelites are doing their usual fractious foolishness and whining about the fact

that they're lost and boning the loss of their privileges under the phoh and complaining about the power dynamics of their leadership and just generally being followers of Cain let's say and God the cruel God that you refer to decides to send among his suffering subjects poisonous snakes to bite them which seems a little over the top you might say but in response to that I would say there's no situation so terrible that some damn fool can't make it infinitely worse and so that's what happens to the Israelites so they're being bitten by these poisonous snakes

and the leaders of the people who've wandered from God go to Moses and they say look we know you've got a pipeline to God and you know there's a lot of snakes and they're doing a lot of biting and maybe you could just ask him to you know call off the serpents and so Moses who's not very happy with the Israelites either decides that he'll go talk to God and God says something very strange he doesn't say to hell with the Israelites more snakes is what they need and he doesn't say well I produce the

snakes so I'll get rid of them he says something very very peculiar he says have the Israelites gathered together all their bronze and make a giant steak and put a serpent on it a bronze serpent which is the symbol of healing by the way that even the Greeks use that is symbol of Theus it's a very old symbol very widespread it's still used by physicians today and then he says put it up where the Israelites can see it and if they go look at it then the Serpent's poison won't harm them and I read that

and I thought that's exactly what psychotherapists discovered as they all converged in the 20th century on the utility of exposure therapy as Curative and that's the pharmacon a little of the poison that hurts you cures you it's the same principle that's used for vaccines by the way so what we saw in psychotherapy is that if you get people to voluntarily confront the things that are poisoning them so to speak that hurt their life that frighten them and disgust them they become braver and more well adapted it isn't that they become less afraid because that's been

very carefully tested it's that they learn by watching themselves expose themselves to the things that they once fleed from that there's more to them than they think and that that generalizes across situations and it's the same mechanism that underlies learning as such because children when they learn put themselves on the edge of ragged disaster and that's where they advance and so what God tells the Israelites essentially in this dramatic um en Endeavor is that it's better for them to face the Terrors that confront them than to have than to be shielded from the Terrors or

for them to hide from them that they'll be better people if they face what's right in front of them even if it's poisonous and so it's like okay that's pretty damn interesting and quite remarkable and then that symbol is used for example by the Greeks to symbolize medicine as such but then there's this additional weird twist which is Christ identifies with that bronze serpent you think okay that's a very peculiar thing for anyone to do what is exactly what exactly does that mean well so then you might say well what's the most poisonous thing that

you could possibly face if you if you dramatize the idea of poison itself if you wanted people to face what was worst so that they could become strongest and the answer to that is the most unjust possible painful death and the ultimate confrontation with malevolence and that's what's dramatized in the passion story now does that redeem everyone maybe maybe maybe the idea is that if we were courageous enough to look death in the face unflinchingly and if we spent our time putting our finger on the source of evil itself it would revital us Revitalize ourselves

to a degree that would be unimaginable now as a biologist you know you could think about this too because I don't remember the philosopher said it I think it was Whitehead but that might be wrong we let our ideas die instead of us right so human beings have evolved so that we can undergo these deaths of our own ideas and the Rejuvenation that emerges in a in consequence of that that seems to be something like Evolution towards what towards the the process of sacrificial logos as the thing that redeems human beings and that makes us

biologically unique too because we can die in idation and Imagination instead of dying in actuality does that fundamentally redeem us does that Deliver us from death and evil maybe like the job isn't done obviously Rich the story that we've just heard the Old Testament bronze serpent it's it's it's rhyming with the with the New Testament uh Christ depicting himself as that bronze serpent I think from Jordan if I may as Richard suggests um from what I've heard you say before on this same story there's something about that um that Harmony between that New Testament Jesus

and that Old Testament story which is so profound and so impressive that it's difficult to imagine it having sort of naive human authorship what do you make of that story and of that assertion well it doesn't impress me I mean I I don't understand why you would say that has I I don't think Jordan actually said it had divine inspiration maybe he did um not divine inspiration necessarily but more than just as I say naive human authorship not like someone just sat down and wrote at minimum it's a it's a staggeringly brilliant literary move especially

given the fact that that relationship hasn't been explicated before do you think for example if you were looking in Scripture for something which would identify this as a as a god-given text maybe you as a scientist would look for some scientific information it might have told you the shape of DNA or something like that but do you think Jordan actually thinks yeah we can perhaps get on to that but do you think that a literary uh Brilliance of a similar kind or or a similar intensity that if the Bible is not a scientific text you

might be looking for something which some scientific fact which it couldn't have Otherwise Known is it possible that some kind of Genius moral move or literary move could also that this is this is something more impressive you more or less ask me whether what what would impress me and and and I'm a naive literalist and so I would say um if if any Prophet had said something like um the the world is just one object in um rotating around the Sun something like that they never do I mean it's it's always there some kind of

moral lesson which leaves me cold H well why is it that there is no I mean they say that God meets you you're at right and there are some people who just care about scientific truth that's that's what they know that's their profession why is there not anything in the Bible for them oh I think the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the community is a remarkable uh and scientifically valid hypothesis I think that it's precisely akin to the uh what would you say to the process of cortical maturation I think they're the same

thing because as we mature we move farther away from the immediate gratification of our of our self-centered emotional and motivational needs to a ethos of care that brings our future self into the picture and a wider and wider array of other people and I think that's associated with cortical maturation in fact I think the purpose of the cortex the purpose a purpose of the cortex is to bring the dynamics of the shortsighted underlying motivational and emotional systems into the kind of Harmony that allows for communal existence and the protection of the future at the same

time that the present is what would you say cared for and and attended to that there's a kind of Harmony there there's also a pattern there it's not arbitrary at all and I think we know this biologically is that the number of ways and I think we already alluded to this the number of ways that a society can organize itself so that each individual can harmonize their own future with the present and do that simultaneously with many other people that's a very there's a very limited Universe of possibilities there [Music]