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[man]: We are going on a journey this weekend.
[man]: Welcome, everyone.
[man]: The Search Weekend is about discovery.
It is about surrender.
[man]: Don't worry.
All of your questions will be answered.
[man]: I heard about Cursillo from a friend
who walked in my office one day
and said, "I'd like to show you something."
[man]: They've selected you.
You just can't sign up and go, so people sponsor you.
[man]: We had a young couple who'd been attending our church.
They went to the Cursillo weekend.
They came back very excited, but very perplexed.
[man]: "Just relax. Breathe.
Don't try to anticipate what's going to happen next.
Everything said in this room is completely confidential."
[man]: "Well, what is it?"
"Well, we can't really tell you what it is,
but it's going to be wonderful."
[man]: All the windows and doors and clocks
had been covered with paper.
[man]: In the Christian Church,
there are no secrets.
[man]: Why is the world so full of unhappiness?
[man]: Why is your life still so unsatisfying?
[man]: I felt exhausted, mentally unstable.
[man]: Some of these techniques
are using mind control, manipulating.
[man]: We have done some amazing work so far,
but I think we can go even deeper.
[man]: What do you know?
[man]: How did religion get started?
[man]: Something that you encounter as vast...
[man]: Without consciousness,
nothing has any importance for any of us.
[man]: Let's not be ashamed
of using the word "spiritual."
[man]: You can produce awe.
[♪♪♪]
[school bell rings]
["Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum begins]
[♪♪♪]
Julie.
Did you hear about that party at Sandy Point?
I was thinking maybe we could go together.
No, we have The Search this weekend.
I'm volunteering, remember, and you promised me.
There's gonna be other parties, Patrick.
This is special.
But if you really don't want to go with me,
I suppose I can just go by myself.
Hey, no.
No, no, no. I'll come.
♪ When I die And they lay me to rest ♪
[Patrick]: I was 17 in Grade 12,
and the kids were talking
about this thing called "The Search,"
this weekend retreat
where everybody had this spiritual experience.
♪ Spirit in the sky
I was pretty interested in that.
♪ Going up to the spirit in the sky ♪
♪ Spirit in the sky
♪ That's where I'm gonna go When I die ♪
♪ When I die
And they lay me to rest ♪
[Patrick]: I was born in the '50s,
and as a child growing up,
life really seemed very simple.
We had Catholicism and the Church.
It was all very clear what to believe.
My mom had seven kids in a little over 10 years.
[Patrick's mom]: Birth control
was not part of the Catholic religion.
[laughing]
♪ Prepare yourself You know it's a must ♪
[Patrick]: I think the main reason we were Catholic
was because my mother was interested in making sure
we had a moral upbringing.
My family had been Catholic for generations.
I had my first communion when I was six.
I was going to church all the time.
I was an altar boy.
That was the way we lived.
Well, I really believed,
back in the '50s and '60s and that,
that you had to be baptized.
I just knew intrinsically that has to happen.
There are many different religions in the world,
and thousands more that have come and gone
and gone extinct,
and oddly enough,
the religion that people tend to espouse
is the one that their parents espoused.
Why do you suppose that is?
Is it in the genes?
No, certainly not.
It's that they are sheltered in their youth,
in their infancy.
They're only taught one religion.
They're taught all the others are wrong.
[Richard Dawkins]: Having the kind of brain
which believes what you're told by your elders and betters
could have an advantage,
but the child brain has no way
of distinguishing the superstition,
which is just silly,
and the wise advice,
which is vitally important for them to learn.
[♪♪♪]
[choir singing]
[Priest speaking softly]
[Patrick]: Being an altar boy
was really quite an amazing experience
because when I was up on that altar,
it really felt like I was important
and I was doing something
that the entire community would appreciate,
and the priests made you feel like you were important.
It was a very uplifting experience.
At that time, early in my life,
that was a big thing.
[♪♪♪]
It's Friday night, you show up,
you've got your sleeping bag
and a little duffel bag with your clothes in it.
There were maybe 20 kids.
Hey, Ben.
There was my friend, Ben, who was there,
and we had played basketball together.
We weren't really good friends,
but I knew him well enough, and I thought,
"Well, at least there's somebody here that I know,
and I'll go through this weekend,
and we'll hang together,
and, you know, I won't be completely alone."
[Father Snow]: Hello, everyone.
Listen up.
I'm Father Snow.
Welcome.
We are going on a journey this weekend.
It's a journey from here to here.
The Search Weekend is about discovery.
It's about surrender...
surrender to God.
It is a real encounter
with the Holy Spirit.
[Patrick]: And the first thing I noticed when I went in
was all the windows and doors and clocks
had been covered with paper.
That was a little strange, but they said
they wanted everybody just to focus
on that weekend experience.
[Snow]: Now let me introduce you
to your spiritual advisors and helpers for this weekend.
We've got Father Green.
[Brian Janssen]: If you didn't participate,
you didn't know about it.
If you did participate, you couldn't talk about it.
In the Christian Church, there are no secrets,
so to come upon a secretive movement
among the Christian Church is really quite surprising,
so it piqued my curiosity.
The actual name of the event itself
is Cursillos de Cristiandad,
so it's "Little Courses in Christianity,"
and I'm suggesting that mm, maybe not so much.
It's little courses in having a cathartic experience.
And now let me introduce you to your youth leader...
Bruce.
Hi, everyone. I'm Bruce,
your Search youth leader for this weekend.
I said, "Hi, everyone!"
[teens]: Hi, Bruce.
[Bruce]: Aw, come on, people. We need energy!
Let's do it one more time.
Hi, everybody!
[teens]: Hi, Bruce!
[Bruce]: This is going to be a fantastic weekend.
Just go ahead
and leave all of your things right here on the floor.
If anybody's wearing a watch,
go ahead and take it off now and give it Monica.
Don't worry.
Everything will be taken care of.
All of your questions will be answered.
Now... follow me.
Come on! Let's go for a run.
[♪♪♪]
[Janssen]: The way that the Cursillo began
was actually in the 1930s in Spain.
The Catholic Church in Spain was really in trouble.
It was weak.
Young men especially were not participating in the Church.
It was considered effeminate to be a part of the Church,
and then there were inroads of Communism
and also other ideologies
that were denying the central tenets of the faith,
and so the Church was really in trouble.
Because of that,
Roman Catholic leaders suggested,
"Let's take a pilgrimage
to the tomb of St. James the Greater,"
and they created some weekend trainings
to prepare these folks,
and they found that the trainings
really had a work of revitalization
that made the pilgrimage almost unnecessary.
At that time, a very important figure named Eduardo Bonnin,
a psychologist,
was employed.
He interjected a strong psychological component
to the Cursillo movement,
and because of his influence,
the Cursillo is what it is today.
It eventually came to the U.S.,
and in 1981,
the Roman Catholic Church said
that it was introduced
in almost all of the 160 dioceses
in the United States in America,
so in this less than 40 years,
30 years, really, it had a phenomenal spread.
I don't think there is a place on Earth
where it does not exist.
[Bruce]: Please, have a seat on the floor.
Come on in.
[Janssen]: It has also moved its way
into virtually every Protestant denomination
in the United States,
Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians.
So we'll have a brief prayer,
then I'll lead a meditation
before we begin our weekend
of exploration and enlightenment.
[Bruce chuckles]
Just relax.
Breathe.
Let's all hold hands.
[Patrick]: It was very quiet, and they said,
"We're gonna start with a meditation."
I thought, "This could be an interesting weekend."
Remember, it's important to just experience this weekend.
Don't try to anticipate what's going to happen next.
Just go with the flow.
We know you have lots of questions,
but all will be revealed soon.
[Patrick]: I was looking forward
to this encounter with the Holy Spirit.
I was in it.
[Sam Harris]: In many religious contexts,
people are in some social context
that has taken them out of their comfort zone,
and they can have what presents
as a truly rarefied state of consciousness.
Then you imagine that it has been delivered
from some invisible agent, right?
It's grace that is showering down,
or you've been touched by something unseen,
and there's a lot of beliefs
that seem to get justified by those haphazard experiences.
Although we are at the centre of all God's creation,
we feel...
dissatisfied,
anguish,
hollow.
We seek happiness in false values
that activate new, insatiable desires.
Why have we failed?
Why is your life still so unsatisfying,
frustrating, and unfulfilling?
[Harris]: It is possible to have
an experience of profound meaning
in anything.
Awe is a matter of attention.
It's not a matter of the object being attended to.
Consciousness is fundamentally mysterious.
Understanding consciousness...
it's got to be one of the most important things
that there is to do.
Without consciousness,
nothing has any importance for any of us.
Consciousness in the end for each of us is all there is.
We experience the world and we experience the self
in virtue of being conscious.
When we suffer, we suffer consciously.
When we experience pain and pleasure,
that's part of our conscious experience.
It's only the fact
there is something it is like to be you or me,
rather than just be a kind of robot
with no inner universe at all.
That's the central mystery,
and it's also the most familiar thing
to each of us.
Let us give up our old ways,
our sinful ways.
Let's open ourselves
to the new light of enlightenment and love.
Peace be with you.
[youth]: And also with you.
[Dacher Keltner]: We define "awe"
as the moment when something that you encounter is vast
and kind of makes the self feel small,
and also, it involves a sense
that your current knowledge structures...
your concepts, your ideas...
can't make sense of what you're encountering, right?
And so it initiates this process of inquiry.
[Harris]: We tend to interpret our spiritual experiences
through the lens
of whatever religious culture we've been indoctrinated by.
It's not an accident
that when a Christian begins to feel extremely expansive,
let's say, you know, in church,
he or she will interpret
that sudden change in the contents of consciousness
or in their emotional life
as data in favour of the truth of Christian doctrine.
I've spent a lot of time on meditation retreats,
and, you know, I was meditating
and having this kind of
classically self-transcending experience
where Jesus had supposedly delivered
the Sermon on the Mount, by the Sea of Galilee.
If I had been a Christian having that experience there,
I would've interpreted it as data, you know,
confirming the truth of Christian doctrine
but because I'm not a Christian,
there's no temptation to do that, right?
I know that this is something
that is the kind of experience I can have anywhere.
Doesn't have to be at the Sea of Galilee, right?
It's just a matter of paying close enough attention
to the nature of consciousness.
It can't be a matter of
Buddhism or Christianity or Hinduism
being the only true religion,
because each of these expansive experiences
are being had in every religion
and in no religion.
Atheists have these experiences.
So there has to be a deeper layer here.
There has to be something universal
about the nature of human consciousness
that we can come to understand
in terms that are not merely a matter of, you know,
one or another religious culture.
[Seth]: Through the ages,
people have reported things like out-of-body experiences,
that they've left their bodies and are floating above them,
and even floating around the town or the city
or the landscape,
and some point they come back into their bodies again.
These experiences happen.
There's absolutely no reason to deny
that people have experiences like that.
But then the explanations that are often offered
for these sorts of experiences,
we should be more skeptical about,
so it's not the case
that there's an immaterial soul that leaves the body
through the ears or through the top of the head
and goes flying around.
There's a danger to dismiss the experience
along with that kind of explanation.
I think that would be a mistake,
and so what we should do instead
is to figure out what in the brain
would generate the experience of being outside one's body,
and the conditions under which that might happen,
and some researchers are beginning to find out
some very interesting things about this.
There are particular parts of the brain
that are implicated
in locating the first-person perspective in space.
I think of consciousness as a material phenomenon.
[♪♪♪]
God loves us.
He sent His only son to forgive the sins of this world.
[Patrick]: After the meditation session,
then we get up and we do this thing
called the "Stations of the Cross."
You walk along the hallway,
and there's all these pictures of the crucifixion of Jesus.
It was quite an emotional experience.
Man is a wretched sinner...
yet our Father still loves us.
Why is there so much strife and unhappiness in the world?
Why are you unfulfilled?
[Janssen]: I think from time immemorial,
there have been Christians who have been going on retreats.
The interesting dynamic of this one
is the strong psychological component of it.
We want you to look at your life
and think about how your life is going...
and isn't there so much more?
We will now listen quietly
as we walk together through the Stations of the Cross.
[Janssen]: Some of these techniques
that are used on the Cursillo
are recognized techniques by psychologists
as ways of manipulating,
of, um, using mind control.
[Kathleen Taylor]: For the first time,
neuroscience is getting to the stage
where it's starting to look as if we might understand
the underlying brain mechanisms of what's going on,
for example,
when we experience strong emotions,
when a message is repeated again and again
and learned in the brain,
when uncertainty and cognitive dissonance
challenge our ideas about what we thought we believed,
and when we're isolated
and our environment is controlled.
People are isolated on this weekend retreat
largely to take them away
from their normal support systems
that continue to reaffirm their identity,
allowing people to make commitments or decisions
that they probably won't keep or wouldn't make
in another context
because they're isolated.
[Taylor]: Once you've isolated people,
the next step is to control their environment.
By doing that,
you're controlling what goes into the brain.
[Janssen]: Giving up control is another part of the weekend
where you do not know day or night.
No one tells you what's coming.
The event itself prides itself
on its quote-unquote "surprises."
By "surprises," they should say
"very intense psychological shocks to your system."
Every minute of the weekend is programmed.
It is following a very carefully written script.
All of the leaders know what the script is,
so they're completely in control for those 72 hours.
[Taylor]: The third thing you do is
you have to weaken the beliefs that they come in with,
and you do that by using uncertainty.
[Patrick]: I remember I went back to my bunk,
and my bed had been made,
and there was a little Bible sitting there on my bed,
and it was like,
"Who put this stuff here? Who did this?"
You're constantly in this state
of really not knowing what's going to happen next.
[Janssen]: The uncertainty is counteracted by the fact
that the leaders are absolutely certain,
so whatever sense that you are feeling
of, "Boy, I don't know about myself anymore..."
well, these people are coming across as they know,
and they know about themselves,
and they know what you should do as well.
This book is the rock
that the Church itself is built upon.
It is God's word.
[Janssen]: We live in a very complicated world,
and there are complicated dynamics,
and a lot of times,
we can get overloaded with the lack of simplicity.
When you read from the Bible...
you read a message from God Himself.
When the Bible speaks,
God speaks.
And when people start offering,
in a repeated way, simple answers,
we really tend to want to gravitate toward that.
[Snow]: This is what we believe.
This is why we are Christians.
[Taylor]: And it doesn't actually take very much
of that kind of dreadful, grinding repetition
to really drum in a new message.
So repetition is very important.
Praise be to God.
[teens]: Praise be to God.
[Janssen]: Psychologists have clearly noted
that you will slip into a state of suggestibility,
a hypnotic state,
by constant repetition, repetition,
repetitious movement,
uh, dancing,
um, clapping, chanting.
[chanting]
[singing]
[Dennett]: One of my favourite features of religion
is unison chanting, unison singing, unison rituals.
You can have a religious community
where there's, say...
uh, a five-minute chant or song.
♪ Jump for Jesus
♪ Raise your hands up high
[Dennett]: And if you ask individuals in a group
to do the whole thing solo, they couldn't do it.
Put 'em all together in a group, they'll do it perfectly,
because they'll drop out when they don't remember,
and so you get this group memory.
Very powerful,
and it doesn't just preserve the text.
It enhances collaboration
and paying attention to what your neighbour's doing,
sort of almost subliminally,
and that creates a good group adhesion,
good allegiance.
So there are many features of religion
that, if you think of them
in these sort of engineering terms,
make really good sense.
It wasn't that clever ritual designers
figured this out, said,
"We've got to have this group chanting."
No, no.
It's that groups that had it survived,
and those that didn't, didn't.
[Harris]: Many people have speculated
that there are evolutionary forces
that have given us religion as it is,
that there's a so-called group selection advantage
to being religious,
and otherwise,
we wouldn't see this as a kind of cultural universal.
I think the jury is still out on this.
I think group selection
is certainly a controversial idea
in evolutionary biology,
and there are other ways
to explain religious superstition and taboo
as a kind of cultural universal.
[Patrick]: So we said the rosary just about every night,
as I recall.
I can remember the kids all getting home from school.
James, Susan, and Dean
really didn't have to say the rosary
because they were too young,
and we all got down on kitchen chairs
and read through the rosary.
I think the reason we said the rosary
and said prayers
was because somewhere there in my life,
I knew,
"the family who prays together stays together,"
and I... maybe for my own benefit
that I didn't walk out the door,
we said the rosary.
[♪♪♪]
[Patrick]: I've been keeping bees
for about 12 years now.
Honeybees are in trouble these days,
and hobby beekeepers are actually important
for the survival of these bees.
Also, the honey isn't too bad. [chuckles]
I get about 25 litres of honey per hive.
It's a pretty amazing feeling when I start working with bees.
I lose all track of time.
It really gives me
an incredible sense of accomplishment,
but also, it's... it's a mystery.
I suddenly realize
this is an incredible work of Mother Nature.
One thing I remember when I was young,
probably six, seven years old,
I had questions for my mom and dad all the time.
I was like, you know, "Why is the sun so hot?"
"Where did we all come from?"
"What is everything made of?"
And finally my mom bought me this science book,
and it answered a lot of the questions
that I'd been asking for all these years.
There was this picture of Albert Einstein,
and I'll never forget
because he seemed to understand how the natural world worked,
so he really became my hero in a lot of ways.
But then somebody said,
"Albert Einstein doesn't believe in God,"
and for me, that was a shock.
The thought of no God had never even occurred to me,
so that was the first time when I realized, "Wow.
There's this conflict between science and religion."
[Harris]: It's an amazing project
to convince a kid
that this universe has been structured
by an invisible being,
and you're gonna go to school, and you're gonna learn science,
and all of this is going to be set
in increasing tension and opposition
with these other beliefs
that we've given you as early as anything else
that now no longer square with what you're coming to know,
and you have to resolve this incompatibility some way,
uh, and if you resolve it the wrong way,
you're gonna burn in fire.
[Bruce]: What do you know?
I mean, really know?
What we know may be based on shifting sands.
Man has a feeble mind.
God's love and God's power
is something that we really know because we can feel it.
Right?
Agnosticism has to do with what you know.
It comes from a Greek word "not knowing."
If someone were to ask... someone were to ask me,
"Is there a superior being in the universe?"
I'd say, "I don't know. How can I know?"
So I'm agnostic when it comes to what I know.
When it comes to what I believe,
"Do you believe there's a superior being
in the universe?"
"No, I don't. I absolutely don't."
And so, atheism is about belief,
and agnosticism is about knowledge,
and I'm both an agnostic and an atheist.
Today, we're going to talk about creation.
It has been suggested that creation myths
might have some sort of advantage in social cohesion.
You identify your tribe as the one
that has this particular creation myth.
Um, or I suppose creation myths
could be just a kind of psychological by-product
of the desire to understand.
[Harris]: The ground upon which religion is standing
continues to shrink, right?
So it used to be
that we didn't know anything about anything,
and yet we felt the need to tell ourselves stories
about, you know, where everything came from
and what was happening.
[Ehrman]: This is a world
that was living before the Enlightenment,
before the development of anything like modern science.
The authors of the New Testament,
many of them appear to have thought
that the universe consisted of three layers.
There's where we are now, here on Earth.
Below us is where the dead live,
and there's a level above us.
And when you look up, you see the heavens,
and they understood that was a dome,
and the dome had stars in it,
and above the dome was water,
and above the water was God.
They had no idea that we're in a solar system
and that we're revolving around a sun,
and that this is one
of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy,
and that there are two trillion galaxies
in our universe,
and there might be many universes.
No conception at all of any of that.
It's a mistake to think
that when they are imagining the world,
they're thinking what we're thinking.
[Dawkins]: People enjoy stories.
It gets handed down from generation to generation,
modified, perhaps improved with the telling.
There's no very great problem in understanding
why different tribes have creation myths.
What I suppose is significant is that they're all different,
and you'd expect them to be all different.
And there's no reason why any tribe's creation myth
should be regarded as any truer than any other.
Indeed, none of them are true.
Let's talk about life.
"And God made the beasts of the Earth
according to its kind."
[Harris]: Many people won't admit
that there's a conflict between science and religion,
but they will easily recognize
there's a conflict
between believing things for good reasons
and believing things for bad reasons.
[Dawkins]: Evolution is a fact.
The evidence for it is as solid
as the evidence that the Earth orbits the sun.
We know that it happened from comparative anatomy,
from comparative molecular biology,
comparative biochemistry.
Do not ever accept a belief
on the grounds of tradition or holy books
or that kind of thing,
or private revelation.
Evidence is the only reason to believe anything.
[Harris]: It's not that I have a categorical animus
to religious claims.
It's just that they're so reliably put forward
on bad evidence.
That's why we have this distinction
between religion and science.
If Jesus showed up on the White House lawn
and announced himself
and proved his divinity with various miracles,
which would be trivially easy for him to do,
I mean, he did it the first time around...
then belief in him
would not be a matter of having bad reasons.
It would be a science.
You know, the Christians would be proven right.
[Bill Nye]: Ladies and gentlemen,
boys and girls,
skeptics, non-theists,
and especially the believers who may be here,
as we stand before this shrine
to one of history's
most thoughtful critical thinkers,
Abraham Lincoln,
I cannot help but feel that we are at a critical time,
a turning point in the history of humankind.
Critical thinking, reason, and science got us here.
[man]: I speak against phony atheists.
I like atheists who actually believe that atheism is real,
and if that's true,
then all we are is just a collection of elements
on the periodic table,
and none of the elements on the periodic table
can feel love or morality or justice.
So when they use words like "good," "bad,"
"evil," "moral,"
"love," "right," or "wrong,"
they're not being consistent with their atheistic world view,
so I'm here to tell them either quit being a phony,
either come to Christianity where you belong,
or really believe it.
Be a real atheist and actually live your life
as if you're just a sack of chemicals.
Your life has no meaning.
You start at nothing, you end at nothing,
and everything in between is meaningless nothingness.
That's what I'm looking for out here,
is atheists who actually believe.
I respect them.
[man]: Yeah, we gotta go, brother.
They're gonna arrest us if we stay here.
[Monica]: The Bible isn't a science book,
yet it is scientifically accurate.
The Bible and the Big Bang do not contradict each other.
[Bruce]: Okay.
Thank you, Monica.
We will now break for a silent meditation.
We all have a lot to think about.
[Patrick]: By Saturday night, you know,
I was really starting to feel somewhat disoriented,
because it was just one thing after another
after another after another.
I was under a lot of pressure
from the leaders and everyone around me
to make this spiritual connection.
[Janssen]: Everybody was saying,
"When I went on the Cursillo,
it was the greatest experience of my life."
It reinforces this idea
that "I'm here for a purpose, I'm on a mission,"
and I'm much more willing then to participate.
I feel peer pressure, really.
So I better pay attention what they're doing
and go along with them.
[TV host]: The gentleman in the elevator now
is a Candid star.
These folks who are entering,
the man with the white shirt,
the lady with the trench coat,
and subsequently one other member of our staff,
will face the rear,
and you'll see how this man in the trench coat...
[audience laughing]
...tries to maintain his individuality...
[laughter]
...but little by little,
turning just a little bit more...
to the wall.
It's difficult to simply argue for the truth,
and extremely easy to convince people,
"You should believe certain things
because then you'll be part of the group."
Because then you'll feel certain emotions
like warmth and connectedness, and so on.
In a way, that's what mind control does.
It just uses language,
what it was actually, I think, originally meant for,
which is to persuade people to be part of a group,
not necessarily for rational reasons,
but simply to be part of a group,
because that's what we evolved to be.
You define a group membership,
and you say, "If you want to be part of this group,
you believe these things.
You shouldn't associate with the other group."
You appeal to emotion.
That persuades people.
[Patrick]: When I was just lying there,
I was really beginning to question myself,
"What do I really believe?"
I realized I hadn't thought about it that much.
"Is this stuff really making sense?"
[Janssen]: They want you to go
into a very deep, dark, introspective place
where you are then destabilized,
questioning yourself,
questioning everything you believe,
and they want you to dwell down there.
They want you to really feel it deeply.
[bell ringing]
[Patrick]: Then suddenly,
it seemed like the middle of the night,
when all of a sudden, this bell is ringing...
and there was this loud Christian music playing...
[♪♪♪]
And I was actually a little afraid.
I thought maybe the school was on fire or something,
but they rush us into a classroom,
and they started talking about the Rapture.
They talk about Armageddon and the end of the Earth.
They talk about Heaven and Hell.
[man]: John described "an eternal Hell,"
the final resting place of the unbelieving...
where you were in conscious torment.
[Dawkins]: Teaching certain ideas, such as Hell,
can be genuinely terrifying if you believe it,
and many people do believe it,
and even believe it right into adulthood,
right until the moment they die.
They remain terrified of this ridiculous idea
that they're taught in childhood,
that they'll fry in Hell.
[Harris]: I still hear from adults who are atheists
but who are still trying to shake this fear of Hell
that had been drummed into them by their parents.
We need to continue to look into ourselves
to see how we have failed to love others.
Why do we only love our self?
And how have we failed to love God?
It's imagined
that there are still some few questions
that religion is the only plausible authority on...
...things like morality and what life means,
but more and more, that is becoming untenable.
I think when people cite scriptural authority,
one has to note
it isn't just a matter of interpreting the Bible.
It's also relying on an argument from authority.
"Ah, well, the Bible says..."
Or, "The Koran says..."
A lot have travelled down that route,
and I think that arguments from authority are worthless
unless you've also got the argument
as to why you can rely on that particular authority.
[Dawkins]: The idea
that you have to have religion to be moral
is a preposterous
and actually deeply immoral idea.
If you've ever read the Bible or the Koran,
you will know that if you got your morals from there,
you would be a deeply horrible person
to be avoided.
You would be in favour of subjugation of women,
you'd be in favour of slavery,
you'd be in favour of the death penalty
for trivial offenses like breaking the Sabbath.
The other rationale might be
that people are moral
only because they're frightened of offending God,
or they want to suck up to God.
The idea of the great spy camera in the sky
that's looking at everything you do
and even reading your thoughts,
so that if it wasn't for that,
you would do all sorts of wicked things,
and it's only the fact that you are policed by God
that leads you to do good things.
What a deeply immoral reason for being moral.
Our ethical views today are a long way
from what they were a few thousand years ago.
Nobody today would live with Old Testament ethics.
It's barbaric.
Uh... were the churches responsible for the changes?
No. They were dragging their feet.
It was secular, political, educated communities
of people talking together and persuading each other
that there were better ways of doing things.
This has been one of the triumphs
of enlightened, reasonable, informed thought
over the last few thousand years,
and so I think it's demonstrable
that religion has played largely a regressive effect
on the improvement of human morality.
[Bruce]: We're to break for one hour
of silent meditation and contemplation.
Please observe complete silence,
and we'll meet back here when the bell rings.
[Patrick]: They wanted us to make a decision.
Are we going to commit to this new life,
or were we going to go back and revert to our old ways?
Let's pour you some tea here first,
if I can,
without pouring it all over the place.
Do you want a little honey in your tea?
No, thank you.
This is honey from my hive, Mom.
Too bad.
You don't want any? Oh, geez.
No. I've never drank tea with sugar or...
You don't put milk in it either, do you?
No.
Why don't we just talk a little bit about...
...when you were growing up?
I mean, how religious was Grandma and Grandpa?
Like, Grandpa wasn't religious, was he?
No. No.
Well, my mom saw herself as an Irish Catholic,
very traditional.
Well, she really wanted, I think,
to raise us as good Catholics.
When I was five,
I went and made my first communion.
Do you remember that?
Oh, God, yes!
Because to make your first confession,
you needed to know what your sins were.
Right.
And I started to manufacture sins.
Like, "Should have I said that?"
Or "Should have I thought that?"
Or "Was that an impure thought?"
Right.
...over everything.
Did you, like, I mean, as a kid,
did you believe that God could hear your thoughts?
Probably.
I don't think I ever really had the concept of...
uh...
...the love and fear of God,
because the "fear" part
kind of throws off your "love" part.
You know what I mean? -[laughs] Yeah.
You know? Anyway, when I was nine,
I went to 13 First Fridays in a row
because that was a clear path to Heaven.
I never had to worry about that again.
Well, those were...
Sin, or whatever you did in your life,
you were guaranteed Heaven.
So that was kind of your ticket to Heaven,
and then it didn't matter what you did after that.
The day that I got our 13th time,
we went over
to the Daylight Theatre in Saskatoon
and snuck in somehow
to a condemned movie called "Dragonwyck."
Yes?
-Condemned by the Church. -Oh!
Because we had it made, we were in Heaven forever.
You bought your golden ticket, or whatever.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Even if you think you're a compassionate person
whose job is just to spread love in this world,
if you believe in Paradise,
really believe in Paradise,
well, then, any real world concern
that seems not to...
I mean, it must count as nothing compared to Paradise. Right?
Like, what could nuclear war mean
if the good people go to Heaven and the bad people go to Hell,
and God wants it that way?
This is something you see with Muslim suicide bombers.
[explosion]
It is impossible for them to kill the wrong people
because the good Muslims that they kill inadvertently
go to Paradise,
and they're gonna thank them for it.
The bad people go to Hell, where God wants them.
There is no downside.
Everything works out the way God intends it.
This is a very common intuition which I have never understood,
and you hear of this from religious people all the time,
which is, "If there's nothing after death,
then what's the point?"
Like, why not just start killing and raping
and let's just all die tomorrow, right?
Like, the only thing that could make this circumstance precious
is that it never end.
Now, that's the opposite of the intuition I have,
which is one of the things
that makes this incredibly precious
is that it ends.
This is the only situation you can be sure of.
You can't know what happens after death.
Certainly there's no reason to be confident
that you get everything you want after you die.
This is the opportunity to make the most of, right?
This is the only opportunity for beauty and creativity
and love you know you have.
[Seth]: The experience of being a self
seems so continuous,
seems so unified,
and seems so central to us
that it's really, really very difficult
to appreciate that it's also a perception,
that it's also a construction that's generated by the brain.
Of course, this is why people, from time immemorial,
have thought in terms of concepts of soul.
At one time, people even tried to find evidence
for the existence of the soul
by measuring people as they died.
The Scottish surgeon MacDougall
was very famous at one time for weighing people,
and he noticed this change of 21 grams
that apparently happened at the very moment of death,
and so that became the weight of the soul,
21 grams,
and he also did experiments on dogs
and found they didn't change their weight
as they died,
and that made perfect sense to him,
because, of course, in that view,
in his world view, dogs didn't have souls,
and it made sense that only humans did.
Now, that experiment didn't stand up.
People did try to replicate it and completely failed,
but of course, it's the wrong thing to do.
There is no reason to think there's an immaterial soul
that leaves our body at the moment of death.
[Harris]: The difference between thinking about consciousness
and thinking about spirit or soul
is that, in the latter case,
you are making a claim about an underlying dualism.
The religious idea
is that this thing we experience as consciousness in ourselves,
the fact that it's like something to be us,
it is...
a property of a person
that can lift off the brain at death and go elsewhere.
That is a picture of mind and matter
that has very little justification at this point.
It's not that it's impossible.
It's not that we know that it can't be true.
We haven't proven it to be false,
but there's very good reason to be suspicious
of that picture of what a conscious mind is.
[♪♪♪]
I think we will one day very likely
be in the presence of computers that seem conscious to us,
that we will have built,
and we will know how we built them, and...
uh, we might be able to, you know,
integrate our own brains with these computers
and change our conscious experience,
and then the information- processing basis
of our own mental life
will seem even more salient to us,
and there will be very little temptation
to imagine that somehow
souls or spirits crept into these machines,
and now when we turn them off,
they go elsewhere and may go to Paradise,
but most people are common-sense dualists,
where they feel that this thing they are
as a matter of experience
can't just be identical
to the body that they experience.
Because in truth,
you don't experience the body with any fidelity.
I mean, you simply do not experience your brain.
When you talk about spirit,
what are you talking about, then?
What do you mean by that?
Do you... have you ever really thought about it, or...
Yeah. I think of it all the time, actually.
Well, then what do you mean by it?
I think that what connects me
to Grant and Eva
and Bev
and... and the tree.
We're all connected in a kind of a way.
Obviously, our bodies are just bodies.
We grow old, we die, and that's it, and...
but there's still the spirit that you started with
that can't really just... just...
"It's dead now."
You know, no matter what.
You know what I mean?
So you're talking about sort of connectedness
of all life and everything.
Yeah, connectedness of all life.
And why are we kind of connected?
Because we have a spirit.
-Right. Okay. -The spirit.
And I believe that when you die, spirit doesn't die.
That's what I really believe.
[choir harmonizing]
[♪♪♪]
[Keltner]: Five years ago,
my students and I here at Berkeley
started to do
the largest study of awe that's ever been undertaken.
You know, we've studied awe in 30 different countries,
and the first thing that really struck me
about what we discovered
is that awe comes from many different sources.
The central sources of awe, first, are other people.
People you admire.
Seeing a child be born,
and you're just awestruck at life.
[♪♪♪]
The second main source of awe is nature,
and then the third main source is spirituality,
and fourth is art and music.
When you read the classic accounts of awe,
for 2,000 years,
people thought of awe as a religious thing.
But prior to the written word,
there is evidence in hunter-gatherer societies
that they feel awe towards nature,
that they have a sense
that their spirit is located in nature,
that they feel awestruck by clouds, right?
Or growths, or rainfall.
It's pretty sound to say
we had these awe-inspiring experiences
that brought us together in hunter-gatherer societies
in communities,
and then as our culture developed,
religion came in and said,
"We'll take these pieces and put them into the church."
[♪♪♪]
[Dennett]: How did religion get started?
I think it started with an instinct
that we share with other animals,
which is an orienting response, or a, "Who's there?"
But in us, with our echo-chamber minds,
we don't stop there, we don't just go back to sleep.
We think about it...
and pretty soon,
we're imagining little invisible agents
that we sort of maybe got a glimpse of,
and all the leprechauns and imps and elves
and fairies and dragons
and all of those imaginary things
get elaborated in our minds,
and we talk to each other about them.
Pretty soon, the village all knows about the tree god
and the talking rock and the fish that flies.
Some of these go extinct
because they're not interesting enough.
Some of them are unforgettable.
So each tribe, each little community,
has its resident population of imaginary creatures.
That's a sort of polytheism.
Gradually, that turns into monotheism.
Well, what's religion for?
It's not for anything.
It just happens because it can,
and these ideas reproduce
because they're exploiting susceptibilities
in the human brain, in the human cognitive system,
fear and curiosity and the capacity to tell a tale.
And so all of this lore grows up,
and then it gets domesticated.
[♪♪♪]
People begin to realize that it can be put to good use.
It can be used to keep children in line.
"God is watching you." "Big Brother is watching you."
[bells chiming]
It can be used to hide behind.
"Don't blame me.
I don't make the decisions.
The guy upstairs makes the decisions.
I am simply God's representative here on Earth."
Everything said in this room is completely confidential
and will never be repeated again.
We will now pray together.
Please repeat after me with, "Lord, hear our prayer."
Dear Lord,
please forgive me for my deceitful ways.
I have lied and lusted
and had unclean thoughts.
Forgive me, Lord.
Please help me to see and hear your words
so I might find my way home.
Lord...
[teens]: ...Hear our prayer.
[Patrick]: It was later, in the afternoon,
we went to another one of these very intimate
personal confessions,
and at this point, I noticed a lot of people
were really starting to break down.
People were crying.
[Taylor]: You'd want to associate positive feelings
of love and belonging and security
with the new environment,
and negative feelings
of anxiety and fear and repression,
and all the rest of it, with the old environment.
[♪♪♪]
[Janssen]: When I attended,
there was this very dramatic talk
about a man who was, uh, just vicious with his family,
and then he went on the Cursillo,
and he wept the entire time,
and now he's a new man,
and tears were starting to fall,
and the people around me,
they have this emotional movement
that is building.
[Ben]: Lord, please forgive me.
[voice shaking]: I am lost and confused.
I know you know my thoughts...
...and I am sorry for who I am.
[Janssen]: There's huge dangers there.
They're gonna go too far down,
and they're going to have a break.
[Ben]: I have lust in my heart for someone I shouldn't.
I am trying to control my desires.
Please.
Okay.
Thank you, Ben.
Okay.
Lord...
[teens]: ...Hear our prayer.
[Janssen]: They are in a world of hurt
because of the Cursillo method.
[Bruce]: You all have made a big commitment
to this weekend, so...
we have a decision to make.
Are we going to move forward, or go back to our sinful ways?
[Janssen]: I fear that there is a lot
of psychological work that's being done
under the guise of spiritual work,
and I wonder how genuine it is.
[bees buzzing]
[Patrick]: When I'm working in the hive,
I sometimes feel this sense of mystery.
How do they know what to do?
They only live for six to eight weeks,
yet each bee knows its role in the colony.
Some are guard bees.
Some go out foraging.
Some are making honey.
I should actually try to find the queen.
It's really quite amazing.
Somehow they have this intelligence.
As individuals, they know what to do,
and yet collectively,
they're all working for the survival of the community.
[Keltner]: People think of Darwin as, like,
you know, it's bloody in tooth and claw,
and it's survival of the nastiest,
and it's brutal.
I think his philosophy is more aptly put
to be "survival of the kindest."
You know, I'm going to quote almost verbatim
from Descent of Man, from 1871,
that "sympathy is our strongest instinct,
that those communities with the most sympathetic members
will get along better
and rear the greatest number of offspring."
He writes a lot about connectedness.
He writes about astonishment, sympathy, love,
different kinds of love,
and gets close to awe,
and talks about how they're really community-based emotions.
Religion is structured in a way that captures these emotions
and then ritualizes them within a shared space.
I was raised without religion,
and when I was growing up, I would...
I would do things like
I'd be part of a collective gathering
and we would sing, and I would tear up,
and I'd feel connected.
And I remember some of my early experiences
of, like, going to a religious ceremony,
and they had it all right there in one place.
You go in, you see the stained glass windows.
You sing together.
You embrace people.
And I'd be tearing up and have these goosebumps,
and I had no sense of what the content was,
but it was the way that it embodied these emotions
that... I think
that's what religion came into human history to do.
[Ehrman]: To my surprise,
when I left Christianity, the greatest loss that I felt
wasn't a sense that I had lost God
or that I had lost faith.
Those were losses,
but the greatest loss that I experienced
was a loss of community.
Christians,
at least in the form of Christianity I was practicing,
Christians got together every week.
We worshipped together, prayed together, sang together.
We would share our lives.
We would support each other.
We would eat together.
There was community,
and when I left the faith,
I left the church,
and that community wasn't there anymore,
and it was probably the biggest void in my life.
I was raised sort of "cafeteria Catholic,"
where my family didn't go to church a whole lot.
I grew up in Utah
as a fully-believing and active Mormon.
I spent two years on an LDS mission.
I was born in the U.S.
My family's from Pakistan, though.
My name is Mohammed.
I'm the founder and president
of Ex-Muslims of North America.
I was raised a Maronite Catholic,
which is like Lebanese Catholic.
Got a Master's degree in geology,
and through all that,
stayed as a believing Mormon
until I was 45.
As I grew, it stopped making sense.
I had more questions,
and any time I came up to anyone with questions,
the answer was always,
"Well, we don't talk about that."
I ran across DNA evidence
that counteracts the Book of Mormon,
and started really...
considering what that meant.
Then I read the Bible,
and that didn't answer any questions.
And about two, three days later,
decided that the foundational beliefs
of my entire life were wrong.
I personally met somebody
that had never met another brown atheist,
and she didn't believe me for a while,
that I'm probably lying, that we don't leave religion.
She had already left.
She thought she was the only one.
The pushback that I got from my family
is actually what made me push harder.
It can't be overestimated how hard that is,
as an adult, to do that,
when all of your adult decisions...
you know, how you raised your children,
who you married, everything,
is surrounded by the church.
Siblings haven't told each other
because they were afraid of how the sibling would react
and they would tell family
and they would lose their family.
We had husbands and wives that didn't tell each other
because they were concerned
that, in Islam, if you're an atheist,
your marriage is null and void,
that if they mention it, they'll be divorced.
The big thing for me is
I've always considered myself relatively intelligent,
and to find out
that I was fundamentally wrong about everything I thought
was very, very difficult,
and led to a lot of problems between my wife and I,
who was still, at that time, a believing Mormon.
That was sort of my downfall,
so it was less a peak and then a crash,
and more of just a slow roll away, I think.
Mormons believe
in the burning in the bosom, you know.
When you get the goosebumps and all that,
and that's a sign that you believe,
and the last five years,
since I have really started to investigate
neuropsychology, particle physics,
cosmology, all of that,
I have far more wonder than I ever did before.
There's enough numinous wonder in the universe.
Look up at the night sky.
Go outside of the city.
You don't need to believe in fairytales.
And the fact that when I die, it's over,
is actually kind of restful to me.
I feel more wonder now than I ever did before.
[crowd applauding]
[whistling]
[cheering]
[Dennett]: I think it's very important to realize
that many, many people in the world
need to contribute to a cause,
which is what will give them happiness.
If we can do that without the valorization
of irrationality and myth and falsehood,
that would be a great thing.
More and more young people
are less and less interested in religion at all.
The fastest-growing category in the world
is no religion at all.
It's growing faster than Islam.
It's growing faster than the Mormon church.
If a society has a strong social safety net,
if it provides security and health and food
and has a low crime rate,
religion vanishes.
In the countries that are terribly poor
and corrupt
and where they have despotic leaders,
where people are basically quite miserable,
that's where religion flourishes.
[♪♪♪]
[door closes]
[Patrick]: It's the final evening.
We're all together.
The candles are lit,
and it's very, very quiet,
and each person gets their little bundle of letters.
[♪♪♪]
[Janssen]: The unknown and unsaid part of this
is the palanca, another Spanish term.
"Palanca" means "lever"...
And I think it's a lever really to open up people
who are emotionally closed and unwilling.
[Patrick]: "I've prayed several rosaries for you
in hope that God will touch you.
You are, and will be, in my prayers."
They're from people I know.
Some are classmates.
"St. Jude, pray for us."
Some were from people I didn't know.
I got one letter from Julie...
And it was really very powerful. It was really emotional.
These were very personal letters.
"I trust our Lord met you...
where he needed to.
He always does.
If not me, then who?"
[Janssen]: They give this
at the very point where you're feeling most vulnerable,
and so it reinforces this idea
that "I'm here for a purpose. I'm on a mission."
[Patrick]: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
On your own intelligence, rely not."
The folks who were involved in this,
I know many of them.
They're dear people.
They're very warm and genuine people,
so again, I'm not suggesting that they are these monsters
that are trying to manipulate people,
but the question is often asked,
"Well, is it just a cult?"
And I will say, "No."
There must be a charismatic kind of leader,
an almost God-like figure...
a David Koresh,
or a Sun Moon, who is nearly divine,
or Jim Jones, who is worshipped.
Don't find that in Cursillo.
Nothing like that at all in Cursillo.
Second part is some kind of exploitation.
Financial exploitation...
so, "Join the Moonies, renounce all your property.
or, actually, give all your property to us
and go sell flowers for us," for example.
So financial exploitation.
None of that in Cursillo, not a trace of it.
The third element of a destructive cult like this
is manipulative mind-control techniques.
Oops.
The Cursillo movement is up to its ears
in these kinds of manipulative mind-control techniques.
[♪♪♪]
[closes door quietly]
[Bruce]: Go into the whole world
and proclaim the good news!
This is the Holy Spirit.
Can you feel His love?
-[crowd]: Hallelujah! -[Brian laughs]
[Patrick]: And then suddenly, bang!
The door opens, and all these people burst in.
[♪♪♪]
[Patrick]: And everyone is crying
and laughing and hugging each other,
and it was just this incredibly overwhelming experience.
♪ Hallelujah
♪ Hallelujah, my friends
♪ Celebration for all creation ♪
[Janssen]: And you shoot through the roof,
and you have this joyful, tingly kind of euphoria.
"Catharsis" is an emotional washing,
but the catharsis comes
when your emotions are just so overloaded
that you either weep or laugh.
♪ Hallelujah
[Patrick]: It was a shock to the system.
♪ Celebration for all creation ♪
I was gonna start crying.
I felt right away this sort of adrenaline rush.
♪ Hallelujah
There's Julie, and I hug her,
and I'd actually been looking for her
throughout the whole weekend,
but I hadn't seen her at all.
♪ Hallelujah, my friends
♪ Hallelujah
[Patrick]: And then for some reason,
I thought to myself,
"Wait a minute.
This isn't the Holy Spirit."
This felt like it was staged.
I kind of felt cheated.
♪ Hallelujah
♪ Hallelujah, my friends
♪ Celebration for all creation ♪
♪ Hallelujah, my friends
[Patrick]: As it turned out,
The Search Weekend
was the last chapter of my life in Catholicism.
The final emotional moment of the weekend,
the moment that fell short
of a real encounter with the Holy Spirit,
made me see clearly
the fundamental deceit of religion.
I realized how the Cursillo method
produces an intense emotional experience
and artificially connects it with the concept of God.
Belief can be manufactured
by inducing and manipulating moments of awe,
and once I realized this,
I was able to start shedding the burden
of years of indoctrination.
Julie and I broke up shortly after that weekend.
She was part of the world I was leaving behind.
I often wonder if she kept her faith,
but I've never looked her up.
For her and many of my friends,
the Search Weekend was a conversion,
their born-again moment.
My friend Ben had an extremely emotional experience
at the Search.
I felt like he was trying to unburden himself
of something,
but never quite got there.
Three months later, at our graduation,
a friend ran up to me and said that Ben had committed suicide.
I can't say what part
the Cursillo played in Ben's death,
if any,
but I believe
that the intense emotional journey he went through
was delivered recklessly, and without adequate support.
♪ Hallelujah, my friends
The experience of that weekend was a turning point in my life.
It was at a moment that the Catholic religion,
which was the fundamental belief system
in my family for many generations,
probably hundreds of years,
finally lost its grip.
[♪♪♪]
I've experienced
several transformative moments of awe over the years,
and these moments have stayed with me
and shaped the way I experience my life.
Very early one morning,
I went out fishing with my father-in-law.
It was very quiet and dead calm.
The water was flat.
Suddenly, we were surrounded by a large pod of orcas.
They were only a few feet away from the boat.
We could see those whales looking right at us...
...and then they were gone.
[Keltner]: Awe is this compass.
It tells people,
"This is your purpose, right here."
When people feel awe in nature, it tells them,
you know, "This natural process is where you should be."
There is this universal structure to awe.
The self is connected to something vast.
It opens up the mind.
But what the self connects to really varies.
[Dennett]: This is our life right here.
The idea that you've got one life,
and that it is unbelievably precious,
uh, and that you should
think about the possibilities
that have been made available to you
thanks to the efforts of others.
If you want to feel gratitude, for heavens' sakes,
yes, I feel so grateful that I'm alive,
but I'm grateful to all those people
who, before me, have made it possible for me
to have such a spectacularly interesting life,
and I can't repay them,
so I can pay it forward.
I can try to make the world a little better
for the next generation coming along.
[Keltner]: I recently went to Bhutan with my daughter.
It's a sacred place.
Hiking up at 10,000 feet,
we were fortunate enough to be in this Buddhist temple,
just with Buddhist monks.
They were chanting 2,500-year-old chants,
and I was awash in awe.
You know, just currents were moving through my body.
I was crying. Goosebumps.
My daughter and I embraced,
um, and it... and it changed my life.
[Janssen]: I'm a runner.
I love to run in the mornings,
and on a fine spring morning
when we've been through a winter, you know?
And suddenly, there are birds singing,
I break into hymn
because I see the goodness of God
in the creation He's made.
[Dawkins]: I have very large numbers of moments of awe.
Let's not be ashamed of using the word "spiritual."
Only the other day,
I was at the Grand Canyon in the dead of night,
on the edge of the canyon, I lay on my back
and looked up at the Milky Way,
and was filled with a great flood of emotion,
and thought to myself,
"The light that is entering my eyes at this moment,
I'm looking at a scene 100,000 years ago,"
and then the next morning,
I looked down into the canyon,
and was looking at rocks two billion years old,
so I'm looking back in time both directions.
Human life span, how petty, how trivial that is,
in comparison to the time spans that we can now understand,
that science gives us the ability...
privileges us with the ability to understand.
This is wonderful.
Science is wonderful.
We live in a golden age of science.
[Seth]: There's this misconception about science
that it drains the beauty and the awe out of everything,
and I certainly feel differently,
and I've felt differently about that in my own life,
and I remember from being a kid, being out in nature,
I grew up in a small village in the English countryside,
and from then on, really,
being out in nature is the experience
that generates for me
the most powerful experiences of connectedness with the world,
and probably the states
of highest emotional contentment.
Now that we understand at least a bit about the universe,
that we're not only looking out into space,
we're looking back into time,
that makes the experience more inspirational,
more wonderful, more emotionally powerful.
[Ehrman]: About four or five years ago,
I started a meditation practice.
When I do that,
I find that I have a very similar moment of awe
that I used to have when I was very religious,
and frequently,
when I'm thinking about just how complex the human is,
the human body, the human mind,
the words of scripture come to mind...
the psalmist who said,
"O Lord, I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
[laughs]
And it's just this sense
that this is just quite amazing that we exist,
and that we are who we are.
[Harris]: What we're all hungering for
is an honest conversation about what makes life worth living.
All of human knowledge has to be brought to bear
on that conversation.
There is no job that is just a matter of science,
or just a matter of politics,
or just a matter of philosophy,
or just a matter of religion.
I mean, we are all in the business
of making claims
about what matters and why it matters,
and how to safeguard it.
What I'm finding worth doing
is having more and more conversations
that don't respect the boundaries between disciplines,
and where you just get,
you know, smart, well-informed, courageous people
thinking out loud.
[♪♪♪]
[Patrick]: You still pray.
You told me you still pray.
[Mrs. Payne]: Three times a day, dear.
I'm certainly not praying to God.
Right.
God has nothing to do with my life, really.
I pray for you every day.
I pray to St. Jude.
Then I have a little prayer I say by Kahlil Gibran.
"Look to this day, for it is life.
In its brief span
lie all the verities, joys, and expectations
of our experience.
For yesterday is gone, and tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well-lived
makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, unto this day."
[♪♪♪]