Welcome and Book Club Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host for today, John Dehlin. It is May 19, 2023, and we are super excited to have with us a very, very special guest, world renowned author Michael Shermer, founder, I Believe, and editor of Skeptic magazine, but also author of a new book which we're so excited to be covering today as a part of the Mormon Stories Book Club. Rebecca, do you mind holding that book up? The book is called Conspiracy by Michael Shermer. There it is. And we are joined, I am joined today by Rebecca Biblioteca, who is the host of Mormonish Podcast and a person that makes this book club happen. Hey, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:00:47] Hey, John. Hey, Michael. How are you guys today?

Michael Shermer [00:00:50] Very good.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] Yeah. Thank you, Michael. We're so honored to have you. Michael, before we jump in, we have just a tiny bit of housekeeping to do. Rebecca, do you mind taking it away and doing our announcements for this morning?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:01:03] Yes, let's talk about this. So today we're very excited to be talking about Michael Shermer's book Conspiracy, but I wanted to quickly go through what is coming up next in the Mormon Stories book club. So the next book that we're going to be reading is called Unexpected and it is by Chris Thomas. Chris Thomas was the sort of accidental family spokesperson for the Smart family in the early 2000s during the entire Elizabeth Smart ordeal. This is an absolute amazing book. I have already read it. It talks about his role as being the media liaison. It talks about the politics, everything behind the scenes. So we're going to be reading this next. Grab a copy. It's available, audio Kindle, hard copy. And we'll be putting out the date soon. Now on the back burner for the Mormon Stories Book Club. We are going to be reading a new book by Dan Vogel, which is called Charisma Under Pressure. John is holding the book up. I don't have my copy. Charisma Under Pressure, Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831-1839. This is by Dan Vogel. It's a longer read, so kind of on the back burner. Be working on that.

John Dehlin [00:02:17] But buy it now. Please buy it now from Signature Books. We want to sell this book out, so please buy it now.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:02:26] Yep, absolutely. And also sort of on the back burner because we had so many good books coming out. All of a sudden we have Vengeance Is Mine, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath by Richard Tur and Barbara Brown. So please grab all the. I know we're telling you a lot. Grab all these Books. It's summer, summer reading. And we will give you the dates of the livestream meetings coming up. We're really excited.

John Dehlin [00:02:49] All right. Yeah, we can't wait. Please buy those two books. I'm going to just repeat the titles right now. I'm going to ask Maven to paste links to these right now in the comments and in the show notes. Charisma Under Pressure by Dan Vogel and Vengeance is Mine by Richard Turley and Barbara Jones Brown. We'll hope to have both of all those. Hopefully at least two of those three authors on Mormon stories at some point. But let's buy it out right now if we can. They're both offered by signature books. And again, Maven's going to put that link in the comments right now and in the show notes. All right, Rebecca, I just want to thank you so much because today's interview wouldn't happen, wouldn't happen without you. You do such great work and I'm just so, also, your mind is so sharp, so thoughtful. You're so well read. I'm honored to have you as my co host for today.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:03:36] Oh, thank you so much. This is going to be an absolute pleasure.

Introducing Michael Shermer and Skeptic Magazine

John Dehlin [00:03:40] Okay, so, Michael Shermer, I am so excited to have you here today. You know, it's not often that we have a world renowned guest on Mormon Stories podcast. Occasionally we've done it. We've had Bart Ehrman on, for example, we've had Tara Westover who wrote the book Educated, you know, so we've had some great, great authors over time. But I'm gonna go and read your bio, Mike, if that's okay. Dr. Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. He's the host of the podcast the Michael Shermer Show. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know you had a podcast, Michael, but now I'm glad I know and I'm glad my listeners know. He's a presidential fellow at Chapman University where He teaches Skepticism 101. I want to take that class. For 18 years, he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American, I would say one of the premier scientific magazines, slash, journals. Is it a journal, Michael? Do you consider that a journal or,

Michael Shermer [00:04:35] well, Skeptic or Scientific American? Well, there's a magazine, Scientific American Journals. Journals are pure scholarly academic publications. And magazines are for the ones you find in Barnes and Noble and bookstores.

John Dehlin [00:04:48] Got it.

Michael Shermer [00:04:49] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:04:50] More of a magazine. He writes a weekly substack column, which is. I'd love to hear about that. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers. Why People Believe Weird Things, which is where I first heard about him. The Believing Brain, why Darwin Matters, the Science of Good and Evil, the Moral Ark, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. Reflections of a Scientific Humanist. Follow him on Twitter ichaelshirmer. And of course, There's a Neil DeGrasse Tyson quote here. Michael Shermer is a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality. Love it. Love Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And. And I'll just say one of my personal heroes is Carl Sagan. And I would say you are helping to carry on the legacy and the spirit of Carl Sagan.

Michael Shermer [00:05:37] Well, there he is right there.

John Dehlin [00:05:39] Yeah, yeah.

Michael Shermer [00:05:40] Above my shoulder.

John Dehlin [00:05:41] And I'll just say I've got a painting of him too.

Michael Shermer [00:05:45] All right.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:05:46] I didn't get the memo. I love him, but I don't have a painting.

John Dehlin [00:05:49] There's my Carl Sagan painting right there.

Michael Shermer [00:05:51] Oh, nice. Who did that?

John Dehlin [00:05:53] I'm a huge fan. Okay, so, Michael, we're here to talk about this amazing book, Conspiracy. We want to talk about conspiracy theories and skepticism within the context of religion, if we can, and even more narrowly within the context of Mormonism. But we'll get to that. I guess. I want to start by giving you a chance to kind of fill in any other details you want about your bio, and then I want to jump right into a little bit about your story and any other welcoming, welcoming things you want to say.

Michael Shermer [00:06:31] Oh, well, okay. Well, so here's what the magazine looks like. It's an actual print magazine. There are still those around. This is our latest issue on economic matters. We've done issues of the of late on trans matters, abortion matters, race matters, nationalism matters. And economic matters is our latest one. Next one's on energy matters and we're doing education and then expanding from there. So we're really shifting away from debunking UFOs and Bigfoot and aliens and astrology and all that pseudoscience stuff and moving more toward controversial hot button culture war issues. Because they could use a dose of skepticism, critical thinking, rationality applied to understanding what the issues are, not that we know the truth. Because a lot of these subjects can't be resolved ultimately, like the abortion issue or immigration or whatever, but, you know, at least we can apply the tools of reason and rationality. So that's my day job, the Skepticism 101 course. You said you wanted to take it. Actually, you can, because during COVID Pandemic, the campus Chapman University shut down. So I've recorded all my lectures and so if you go to skeptic.com and you'll see a little thing that says skepticism 101, just click on that. You can actually watch my lectures there. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:49] And you also. I actually bought one of your. Is it one of your lecture. Lecture series? One of your courses. Was it from the great courses on.

Michael Shermer [00:08:00] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:01] On. What's the app that I use? Audible. Right, yeah.

Michael Shermer [00:08:05] Audible.com.

John Dehlin [00:08:06] yeah.

Michael Shermer [00:08:06] Yeah. It's a great deal. Audible. You can buy an entire teaching company course which used to cost hundreds of dollars. You buy it for the cost of a single book credit, like 9.95. $9.95 for an entire course. This all the time. It's great. Yeah. The company's called Wondrium now instead of Teaching Company, but same content they stream online. They're one of the sponsors of my podcast, in fact.

John Dehlin [00:08:30] Love it. All right, Michael, well, let's begin. If it's all right, I would love to hear just a bit about your background. This is Mormon stories. Our bread and butter is just letting people kind of tell their stories. We've got a bunch of questions we want to ask you. So we won't be able to spend the full two hours today on your story and your background. But. But I would love to hear a little bit about your. What got you into skepticism, whether there's any religious themes interwoven into your story. And then we'll. And then we'll jump to some of. Some of the questions. Is that all right?

Shermer's Personal Journey to Skepticism

Michael Shermer [00:09:03] Yeah, sounds good.

John Dehlin [00:09:05] Let's jump in.

Michael Shermer [00:09:06] I don't have any Mormon stories for you. Or even any Foreman stories. Former Mormons, right? Is that the expression?

John Dehlin [00:09:13] Nice.

Michael Shermer [00:09:14] Nice.

John Dehlin [00:09:15] Yeah.

Michael Shermer [00:09:15] There was another one, too. There was Foremans, and there was something. X. Exmos.

John Dehlin [00:09:20] Xmos. Good, good. Look at that, Rebecca.

Michael Shermer [00:09:22] He's pulling out.

John Dehlin [00:09:23] He's pulling out the XMO jargon.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:09:25] He's got it. He's got it.

John Dehlin [00:09:26] That's impressive, Michael.

Michael Shermer [00:09:28] But we do deal with religion periodically and. Skeptic. It's part of my day job. I've written several books in which I include discussions of science and religion and science and morality. And religion and morality. And I guess it comes down to, you know, sort of truth claims. What. What is actually true? What should I believe? And so knowledge is defined as justified, true belief. Well, what's justified? Well, we have to have some justification for what we believe. So rational arguments, empirical evidence, something to go on that takes us out of our head. So it's not just my opinion versus your opinion. So that's kind of what I've been doing for the last 32 years, 31 years now. We started Skeptic Magazine 1992. So we just apply that principle to all claims and, you know, and just see how far we can go. So I'm interested in pretty much everything religiously. I was not raised religious. My parents were, well, I guess secular, but they, they hadn't really given much thought at all. Neither of them went to college. It's not their thing. I went to church a few times, a Presbyterian church in La Cressana where I was born and raised.

John Dehlin [00:10:38] Is that California?

Michael Shermer [00:10:39] Okay, yeah, Southern California. And so, but, but it was the kind of thing where, you know, my mom dropped me off, like, okay, you have to go do this now. Okay, yeah, but that didn' last long and, and then, but in high school, this was 1971, a bunch of my friends were getting into the whole born again movement. And this was kind of the early stages of the evangelical movement. It was non denominational. It was just, you know, you and Jesus just read the Bible directly. You don't need to go to church. And this was kind of the, the hippie days of, you know, long hair, guitar playing, gold chain wearing, sandal wearing, type Christianity and, you know, singing Kumbaya and all that stuff. And so I went to a few of these sessions with the people and it was big fun. It was, you know, interesting to read the Bible. And so I became Born Again at the, at a Presbyterian church in Glendale, mainly because my friend, my best friend, his whole family went and he had a really cute sister, so that didn't hurt either. And I thought, well, I could spend time, more time with her because I get to go to the church with her. All right, so we all went, but, you know, I take things seriously. And the preacher did a call up, you know, as they do at the end of the sermon, like, if you want to accept Jesus, come on up. And I'm like, okay, I'll do it. My friend was like, what? Oh my God, you're doing it. So I went up there and accepted Jesus as my savior and all that. And then I remember going back to high school the next day and I told my friend Frank, who had been pushing me to get into this, I said, I did it. I became a born again Christian yesterday. I accepted Jesus into my heart, the whole thing. He goes, well, where'd you do that? I said, at the Presbyterian Church in Glenda. Goes, oh, no, that's the wrong one. What? I love it. Turns out he turns out he was a Jehovah Witness. And it's like, oh, okay, Jehovah. I don't even know what that is, but whatever. And. But anyway, so I got into that. We went to this place called the Barn in La Crescenta, which was this kind of a converted house into this little mini church type thing. But then I. It was time to go to college. And so I went to Pepperdine University, which was a Church of Christ school. It was, you know, they had just opened the Malibu campus. So I was a member of the first four year graduating class from the Malibu campus of Pepperdine University. And there it was required to go to chapel two days a week. And we had to take at least two courses in religion, but I took a bunch more. I took Old Testament, the New Testament, the life of Jesus, the writings of C.S. lewis. Those were my four main courses I took. We read everything C.S. lewis wrote. I was totally into all that. And I did the born again thing. I want, you know, door to door evangelizing. If you're an evangelical, that's by definition what you're supposed to do is evangelize, tell people the good news that, you know, is a way to eternal life. You know, John 3:16, For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son that you may have eternal life. Okay. Wow. And so I graduated, and then I went to grad school in experimental psych at a state university, Cal State Fullerton. And there no one was religious, or maybe they were, but it, you know, they just didn't talk about. It was irrelevant. Irrelevant to what we were doing. And by then, I kind of fallen away a little bit, was taking courses in psych and social psych. And then for fun, I took course in anthropology, and I kind of went through my Joseph Campbell stage of, you know, comparative world mythology. And I just got to thinking, what are the chances I got it right and all these other people that believe just as fervently as I do, you know, are wrong? I mean, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they're right, maybe nobody's right. Maybe it's a different kind of belief. And, you know, the Joseph Campbell stuff, the hero with a thousand faces, you know, the hero's journey and Jesus kind of the hero's journey. But there's a lot of them, you know, a thousand of them. So what are the chances that that one is the right one and all the others are wrong? Or that they're all socially constructed psychological beliefs that have no purchase in physical reality? And at that point, I kind of just abandoned it slowly. I Used to wear this. Again, this is the 70s, you know, guys would wear these gold chains. And I had one from my girlfriend that had a little ichthus fish, you know, the little fish symbol with the Greek letters standing for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. So I just took it off because I thought, yeah, this is, you know, I'm kind of feeling hypocritical wearing this thing. I really believe this anymore. And I think much to the relief of my family and friends, because then I quit evangelizing. I think they were getting sick of hearing me talk about this at family dinners and stuff. So. And. And then there was an incident where after graduate school, my girlfriend at the time was in a car accident and she was paralyzed. And you know, so that. It was horrible. The first several months she's in traction in the IC unit and it was just awful. And, you know, I prayed for her. And nothing happened, of course, and it wasn't like a big test, but it was kind of the final straw. Like, you know, what if there is a God? He's all powerful and all good, you know, this beautiful young woman does not deserve this suffering. It's just. It's just wrong. And you know, of course nothing happened. And I thought, you know what? I just think probably there is no God and just bad things happen. That's just the way it goes. There's. There's no explanation. There's no deeper explanation. And so that was pretty much the final straw. And then that takes me into the 80s. I was a professional bike racer for a decade, and I wasn't into any of the religion stuff or anti religion stuff. That wasn't a thing. And when we started skeptic in the early 90s, science and religion was not really a big thing except for like the creation as evolution controversy. There was court cases about that. The U.S. supreme Court held a case in 1987 about this Louisiana law that required public school teachers to teach creationism, which is a violation of the First Amendment because it's favoring one religion over others by the state. Anyway, so we kind of covered some of that. It wasn't really until the late 90s, early 2000s that the kind of culture, culture wars over science and religion really took off. And that's when I started writing more about it. And so I'm not, you know, I'm an atheist. I'm a skeptic. I don't think there is a God. I wouldn't put a zero on it. You know, there's a, you know, in Bayesian reasoning, there's a category called Cromwell's Rule that you never assign as Oliver Cromwell. Me thinks that might be mistaken, that. That you never assign a zero to anything. You know, the UFOs may be aliens. So. Okay, I'll give it a one. You know, 99. Probably not aliens, but 1%. Okay. So it's not impossible there's a God. There might be. Or Jesus was resurrected, maybe. Probably not, but, you know, that kind of thing. So that's how I think about those issues.

John Dehlin [00:17:20] Perfect. Wow, what a great. What a great whirlwind intro. Rebecca, any. Any quick question jump out for you?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:17:28] Yeah, I just, I. I love the idea. For one, I'm wondering if you have seen the movie Jesus Revolution, because what you described to me, as far as your background, is exactly what that means. Movie portrayed just a whirlwind of Christianity and everybody diving in. And then a little bit later you're like, huh, not so sure, you know, and your skepticism sets in. So I love your description.

Michael Shermer [00:17:50] I don't know. That's. That film. What's the story?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:17:53] Yeah, it's about a preacher back then in the California era in the 70s, that was baptizing people and just sort of a freedom of religion, not really denominational. Exactly what you described. You'll have to check it out. So did you ever. Did you ever encounter Mormonism or Mormons or anything like that?

Michael Shermer [00:18:12] There were Mormon families that lived in Southern California that I knew. Some of them, they, you know, they were wonderful people. I do recall some evangelicals thinking and telling me, oh, that's a cult. But I knew some of these people. I thought, you know, they're not in a cult. It just doesn't seem like that at all. However you define that, you know, So I never really bought into that. And I don't even today think Mormonism is a cult, even though I know some Christian denomination.

John Dehlin [00:18:38] Whoa, whoa, did you just say you don't view Mormonism as a cult?

Michael Shermer [00:18:42] I don't, because. Well, we have to define these terms. What do you mean by.

John Dehlin [00:18:46] Well, what do you mean. What do you mean by cult?

Michael Shermer [00:18:48] Well, usually it's a cult of personality. There's a single leader who is inerrant and must be obeyed and cannot be disobeyed and so on. Now, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know that much about Mormonism compared to you guys, but could you leave the church without dire ramifications? The fundamentalist Mormon Church. Yeah, but. But the regular Mormon church.

John Dehlin [00:19:08] Okay, Michael. Michael, we need to spend some time together, my brother.

Is Mormonism a Cult? Defining the Term

Michael Shermer [00:19:11] Okay, well, let's explore this. I mean, okay, so maybe I'm wrong, you know, like Mitt Romney. I think of, you know, a typical modern Mormon, Mitt Romney. He's not a cult leader. He's not in a cult. Right? Or am I wrong about this?

John Dehlin [00:19:23] Well, we, let's, we could talk about that, but we don't want to.

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:19:27] We don't want to again.

John Dehlin [00:19:29] We don't. We don't want to. Maybe we'll have you up for a follow up episode to talk about that, but we don't want to squander our, our time with you, with us talking. We want you talking.

Michael Shermer [00:19:38] I, I don't mind that. I like to learn. I already know what I think I want to hear from you guys. Well, I mean just compared to say like a Jim Jones's Jonestown and all that stuff, you know, that no one joins a cult, they join a group that they think is going to be good. And you know, he was a real pioneer in integrating the Christian church in San Francisco from Indiana where, where it was churches, Christian churches were segregated, black and white. And he was one of the first to integrate them and then move to San Francisco where it was more tolerant, liberal. You can see pictures of the crazy Jim Jones with major politicians like Jerry Brown, the governor, he was Harvey Milk, the mayor of New York who was assassinated for being gay and so on. He was a real pioneer in that. And then, but then, you know, slowly but surely things went down the rabbit hole where you, you know, there was sexual exploitation, financial exploitation. You know, he started, they started investigating him. That's when he took off for Guyana. Right. With his followers.

John Dehlin [00:20:37] Yeah.

Michael Shermer [00:20:37] There it shifts from being, you know, kind of a fringy liberal Christian sect to a cult now. I guess we could say that when Brigham Young took the group to Utah after the death of Joseph Smith, maybe there it shifts to being more cult like or. I don't know. I mean, you think culture defined by sociologists as, you know, they're, they're, you know, they're kind of marginalized away from mainstream religions. Sometimes they're called new religious movements. But where it becomes dangerous, cult like is where you can't leave, where you have little contact with outsiders and you get a little information from other people about the way the world actually is. You're only streaming information from the group. And you know, then the controls over your life, what you eat, how much you sleep, those sorts of things become more draconian. You know, that's when it shifts from sect to cult. And so is there that Is, is that your sense of the modern Mormon Church?

John Dehlin [00:21:46] So I'll, I'll, I'll give you a really, I don't want to squander our time, but I'll give you, since you like dialogue, I'll give you my quick perspective. The framework that I like to think about cults within is Stephen. The easiest framework is Stephen Hasson's bite model. Basically. Does, to what extent do they control your behavior? Does the organization control your behavior? To what extent do they control the information that you receive? To what degree do they try and control your thoughts? And then to what extent do they use emotion to manipulate you? Now I'm gonna pause that for a second and go to my understanding of Joseph Smith. If you look at Joseph Smith and what he did, he absolutely had a totalistic control over his membership. He, you know, he took over 30 women to be his wives. 14 year old girls, mother, daughter pairs, sister pairs. He definitely claimed to be God and Jesus mouthpiece on the earth and you were not allowed to criticize him. And if you tried to defect spe ill against the organization or defect from it, you would be defamed and smeared and potentially fear for your life. And so in that case, I absolutely think early Mormonism during Joseph Smith's day absolutely qualified as a cult. And the only difference between in my view, Joseph Smith and like Warren Jeffs or David Koresh or Jim Jones is that he was martyred before the apocalyptic event happened where a large amount of his followers were killed. But it certainly reached the point where he raised a militia, started marching the militia throughout cities in Illinois and the governor got involved and there very well could have been some sort of armed conflict that would have led to thousands of Mormons being killed. And that actually almost happened in Missouri before it almost happened in Illinois. Now Rebecca, do you want to give a quick. Do you agree or disagree with my character of Joseph Smith's Mormonism?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:23:52] No, I absolutely agree and I would push it forward even to Brigham Young's time in Salt Lake where if you wanted to leave, you actually might have been in danger of your, of your life being taken. There was all kinds of nuances there and it was basically run sort of like, if I could call it a mob state. So yeah, there's, there's all kinds of things there that maybe now is not the time to go into, but it is very interesting.

Michael Shermer [00:24:12] Well, yeah, that's all good. I agree. But is it that way today? So I don't even know who the current leader is, but okay, like that.

John Dehlin [00:24:20] So the way again, I like to think of it and I don't want to sound like, oh yeah, the Bible. I don't want to sound like a disciple of Stephen Hassan, but this is just a really convenient way to talk about it. Stephen likes to talk about this influence continuum. There's kind of a continuum, a continuum of harm from destructive and unhealthy to constructive and healthy. And so I guess he would say there might be benign cults and then more destructive cults. And it's on a continuum. And I would definitely agree with you that Mormonism falls more in the, you know, it doesn't quite reach the level of Scientology, even Jehovah's Witnesses and, you know, Jonestown in terms of its destructive, unhealthy place on the continuum. But in some sense, I would say that's part of the genius of Mormonism because by being what some would call a nice cult or a less severe cult, they're able to have Senate Majority Leader in Harry Reid, a major presidential candidate in Mitt Romney, Senators and members of the House of Representatives, members of the judiciary branch. It's their moving a little bit left on that continuum that allows them to be a $250 billion church and have all the influence that it has.

Michael Shermer [00:25:42] But I saw that 60 Minutes piece Sunday. Unbelievable. Bigger than Harvard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously there's some, but that would be more legal ramifications of being a 501c3 non profit religion, not paying taxes on that money. I, that could definitely be challenged less on theological grounds and more on legal ground grounds. I was going to say Steve Hassan's bite model. I think he, I, I think it goes too far. Personally, I like Steve a lot. I just had him on my show, you know, for his, his book the Trump, the Cult of Trump. So, you know, we got into this and, and I just point blank asked him, do you really think 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are in a cult? I mean, like, we think of cult members like me bug eyed. And you know, he said, yes, I do. It's like, come on. No, I mean, maybe the nut jobs at the January 6th insurrection or the people that show up at his speeches that are with the ranting and chanting and signs, okay, some of those are maybe in a cult like position for Trump, but most people just vote their tribe. I'm a Republican, I don't like Trump, but I'm not voting for Hillary, so I vote for Trump. I think that's, that's what most of the GOP is. They just sort of Fall into line. That's how the game is played. And so there, you know, I don't think the cult model, the bite model actually fits at all in that sense. Anyway, that's just my thoughts on that.

John Dehlin [00:27:15] Well, I would love to further this conversation. And we try to avoid being too political on Mormon stories because we don't want to alienate half our audience. And Steven and I have had long debates about how you useful it is to frame bipartisan religious frameworks in a cult context. So I share some of your concerns about the utility of that discourse.

Michael Shermer [00:27:38] But I mean, I know a lot of Republicans, a lot of my friends are Republicans. They're conservative, they voted for Trump, they don't like him at all. They're not in a cult. They don't believe his nonsense ramblings. It's just that they're Republicans, they're never going to vote Democrat. And I think most people are like that. But if you want to move it away from politics, we can talk about Nexium, the Nexium culture. Oh, you know.

The New Atheist Movement and Critiques of Religion

John Dehlin [00:27:58] Oh well, we've got a big list of questions but let me just ask you really quickly.

Michael Shermer [00:28:02] Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

John Dehlin [00:28:03] So when, when I first learned about you, it was sort of during the post 911 aftermath where new atheism kind of emerged. There was Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris and you and Dennett and others. I just wanted, can you spend a few minutes talking about your experience in that new atheism kind of movement and how you feel like that ended up shaking out for our American culture more broadly? I know that's a pretty, pretty big question, but do your best in a couple minutes.

Michael Shermer [00:28:37] Yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon. As I mentioned in my short bio, you know, even as late as the 1990s, you know, being an atheist was not a thing. The numbers were still pretty small, low single digit percentage. And it was not even a point of discussion. Like what's the ripe as atheism? Agnosticism. I mean there was in, in academia and, and you know, in theological discussions or philosophy, you know, what is an agnostic? Exactly. And you know, what, what does it mean to be a theist? And arguments for and against God's existence, you know those have been around since Aquinas, but, but it became a social movement in the 2000s. You know, you mentioned Dawkins. Dawkins was really the trigger of this. The God delusion sold more than all those other books combined. Harris and Hitchens and Dennett and others. And, and, and he's Such a, I wouldn't say charismatic. He's not charismatic in the kind of preacher sense, but you know, he carries a lot of weight as a, you know, world renowned, world class scientist, an Oxford don, that British accent, the whole thing. Hitch was a little more edgy in his kind of investigative journalist, activist style. So. But I think Dawkins sort of carried the intellectual weight for people who didn't believe in God but never said anything. They just kind of kept their mouth shut, sort of like people do today about hot button issues out of fear of being canceled, which is a real thing. And so he, he kind of enabled people and then, you know, as did, you know, Sam and Hitch and Dennett and, and again others. And, and then it became, there was a cut. The first cut was how militant are you? So I wrote one of my Scientific American columns on Richard's book and the new atheism phenomenon. And I said, oh, this is all great for us, but you know, let's not take it too far. You know, if you just tell people they're complete morons to believe in God, you're just going to alienate them. And Dennett had published a piece in the New York Times promoting this new concept called the br. A couple that had invented this word, they didn't like the word atheism. They said atheism is too pejorative. You know, it carries a lot of baggage in people's minds. We need a, a cheerier, happier word. And so, you know, it's like the homosexuality movement, but we now call the LGBT LGB movement. Really? This is before the T, you know, they said, you know, they're gays, right? It's a happy word, we're gays, gay pride, gay march, you know, and so on. So we need a happy word like this. So the word was brights that came up with this couple. So Dan actually got this published in the New York Times where he said, let's, let's start a movement. We're now going to call ourselves the Brights, not atheists. And forget all that agnostic atheism, non theism, skepticism, forget all that. We're the brights. And so it's like, but the problem is, is that language doesn't work that way. You can't do it from the top down by fiat and say, this is the words we're now going to use use. They, they just start changing from the bottom up. Like who Invented the word 9, 11? Nobody. It just, people just started using it and then everybody was using it and it's like the pronouns, the popular, you know, gender pronoun thing now, you know, no, no, there was no like top down decree. We're now going to start doing this. Just everybody started doing it. Not me, but, but lots of people. And so it's kind of like that. So it never really took off. And then people were making fun of, you know, the brights. So who are the other people? The dims. And a lot of the brights would go, yeah, they are pretty dim to believe in God. Okay, so that was the first cut, right? That you gotta, you gotta really be militant. You gotta be like hitch, like get right in their face and hitchhike would even say, oh yeah, just, just lay it right out there. And. But a lot of us didn't feel that way. And so I got a heap of hate on me, even though I'm an atheist, from atheist going, you know, no, you're wrong. Shermer, you gotta, you gotta attack these people. All right, so that was the first cut. Then in the late 2000s, maybe 2009, 2010 or so, there's another cut. The atheist plus movement. The plus was social justice. Well, what is that? I, I surely I believe in social. I'm woke, you know, woke in the original African American sense of being aware or you know, awake to the discrimination and bigotries of the past. And we should do something about this. I wrote a whole book on this, the moral art. But social justice means something else, means far left woke, progressive politics. And that if, if you're a real atheist, you'll also be a social justice warrior. And, and boy, that, that eliminated, you know like 80% of the people that would have been part of that group right off the bat because they politicized it. You know, Here are the 12 things you gotta believe on abortion, immigration, you know, gun control, climate change, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, but what if I tick for eight of the 12? Oh, you're out. It's like, okay, yeah. And I actually have a some thoughts on this. And I think this happens to most social groups, you know, Marxist, you know, thought amongst themselves about who is the true Marxist. Are you a Stalinist, a Leninist, a Trotsky is, you know, and so on. And feminist groups splintered over this. Who's a true feminist? And even Ayn Rand's objectivist movement, you know, splintered. You know, libertarians fight amongst themselves objectively. Who's the true free market capitalist? You know, you know, you have to, you have to believe in no taxes or anarcho capitalism, no government, you know, and it's like, no, no, hang on, we don't want to go that far. Oh, then you're out. And so Ayn Rand famously kicked people out of her group. You know, she had like an inner circle of people that were kind of developing her ideas from Alice Shrugged called Objectivism, and let's get out there and have lectures and seminars and tapes and pamphlets and a magazine and we'll get a social movement going. But she ended up kicking almost everybody out of the group because they enjoyed the wrong music or they saw the wrong movies. And it's like, what? And so I actually think most groups do this. You know, Freud called this the narcissism of small differences. And you know, Republicans and Democrats, of course they'd like to do that, but they realize it's a duopoly and they have to capture as many people as they can or they won't win. So they try to do workarounds. And so even though in the primaries the candidates hammer each other and you like, like they just can't stand each other. And then the moment one of them is nominated, then everybody circles the wagons and they get behind the person and so on. So that's, that's how it normally works. So anyway, that's what happened with the atheist movement, where it is today. I don't know. You know, we had, let's see, in 2018 there was the intellectual dark web that consisted of, you know, myself and Eric, Eric Weinstein actually coined that term and his brother Brad and Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, you know, and a bunch of others. And that's kind of splintered because it was never really an organized social movement in the first place. And I think that's pretty common in terms of like the percentage. It's the highest it's ever been. That is people who don't believe in God. The so called nuns is huge. That is no religious affiliation. They're not necessarily atheists, but they don't belong to any religion. And most of them don't believe in an anti anthropomorphic God. And that's about a third of all Americans now. So that's huge. And, and probably. Well, no, sorry. About a quarter of all Americans, about a third of millennials, and then probably we don't have good data on this yet, but probably about half of gen zers. So Millennials are born 1981 or after. Gen Zers are born 1996 or after. And, and that's probably going to be about half. So that's remarkable. I mean, that has just happened without any, you know, direction. You know, Dawkins didn't create a cult and have people join. Nothing like that happened. It's just, you know. And so sociologists of religion have been exploring the different theories about why this has happened. You know, politically, socially, culturally, economically, what has happened to cause this huge shift. And of course, religions are scrambling to get their members back. You know, Catholic Church, many of the mainline Christian churches have shrunk. Pentecostalism, by contrast, is increasing, particularly outside of the United States, South American countries. Pentecostalism is pushing Catholicism out of a lot of these countries. It's remarkable. 600 million Pentecostals in the world and growing. So that's interesting. But in the west, in the United States, it's not that people are branding themselves as atheists as a thing. It's just that they're quietly going about their lives with no religion, no belief in God, nothing. And I think that's super encouraging. I'd like to take some credit for that. But it's probably 10,000 things that happened that kind of pushed people away from religion, or maybe two dozen or I don't know what the number is, but big forces like that.

John Dehlin [00:37:33] So let me, let me ask you what's wrong if you had to summarize what's wrong with religion? Like, what's wrong with believing in a. In a higher power? If it makes you feel loved, if it makes you feel more secure, more comfortable? What's wrong with believing in Jesus if it makes you want to live a better life? If it makes you want to be a little more charitable or ethical? You know, do. Do you see it as success if less and less people become religious? Or are you open to the idea that. That maybe. And this is going to lead into our discussion of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, but do you see it as a win when people become more secular, less religious? Or do you think there's an important social place for people having, let's just say, some of the more benign religious beliefs?

Michael Shermer [00:38:24] Both for sure. I think it's a win in the sense that back to talking about knowledge as justified true belief, we should believe things that don't need to be believed in to be true, that is, they're actually true. You know, Philip K. Dick's famous line, reality is that which, when you stop believing, believing in it doesn't go away. And religious dogmas claims beliefs are in that realm. You have to believe in them for them to be true. Otherwise, you know, they're not true? You know, was Jesus resurrected from the dead? Just take that one. I mean, 2 billion people accept that claim. Did they really believe that? I mean, that this person, Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter from Nazareth, was really alive, he was really a human person and then he was crucified, dead for three days and then he was resurrected and he is now in heaven with God or he made some apparitions to his disciples afterward and Mary and so forth. Did that really happen? Okay, so of course a lot of evangelicals say, yeah, yeah, it really happened, happened. And then I asked them, does it have to be literally true? I mean, could it be in a kind of Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson way, mythically true? Could it be, you know, just kind of a mythic truth or a literary truth or it's psychologically true? No. Most evangelicalists today say no, no, no, no. If it didn't Happen, I mean, C.S. lewis said this. If it didn't happen, there's no point in being a Christian. So then I ask, well, why don't Jews accept it? I mean, you claim you have good arguments. You claim you have evidence. Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Okay, then why don't Jews accept it? They don't. And you can't say, well, they just don't understand the arguments. Yes they do. They know the arguments. If they looked at the evidence, they'd accept Christ as they're saved. No they won't because they've looked at the evidence and it's not very good. That's why you can't say rabbis are not knowledgeable about the Bible or theology or the arguments for and against Jesus resurrection. Okay, so all religious claims like that I see can be test for me. I want to believe what's actually true, not what has to be believed to be true. And, but I'm in the minority position. Most people I think don't give it that much thought. And so to that extent, if they're abandoning religion, it's probably for social, cultural, political, economic reasons, not having nothing to do with all the stuff I just said about, you know, believing things based on justified true belief. And, and so I, it'll never be zero. I know lots of people that get something out of religion, religion and you know, and not just religion, just something else. You know, they do this or that to make their lives better. I'd say, okay, you know, that's, who am I to object if somebody says I really needed this? I'll tell you a story. I met Isaac Hayes, the great Grammy award winning singer and songwriter. Theme from Shaft and All that stuff. And then he kind of reemerged and became chef on South Park Park. Remember that?

John Dehlin [00:41:32] Totally.

Michael Shermer [00:41:33] Yeah. Hey, children. And by then he was a Scientologist. And so as it happens, he's friends with my, One of my best friends, Michael Coles, who lives in Atlanta, which is where Isaac was living. And Isaac and my friend Michael Coles became friends. So. And I used to go back to have Thanksgiving dinner with Michael and his family every year. And one year there was Isaac Hayes at the dinner table. It's like, oh my God, Isaac Hayes sitting right across the does for me. And you know, of course I know about Scientology and so on. So I asked him, you know what, why Scientology? What? You know what? How. I didn't, I wasn't challenging nothing. I would just say, tell me about this. What do you get out of it? And he said, well, Michael, I'll tell you. You know, I was at the top of the game. You know, I was a millionaire. I had everything you could ever want. And I lost it all. You know, just typical sex, drugs and rock and roll kind of thing, right? And they got him back on his feet. You know, they helped him recover and get away from alcoholism and drug abuse and all that stuff. And. And they rejuvenated his career and he. So, you know, I'm not going to say Thanksgiving dinner. You know, it's a cult. It's just like, okay, you know, this guy's just told me his life has turned around because of religion. I'm not going to bash on that. And. And a lot of people have that story, right? In a much smaller way, they're not Grammy award winning singers, but just, you know, I was down and out, I was depressed, I had anxiety and hated my job and, you know, my wife left me or, you know, my husband. Husband won't love me anymore, whatever. And then they do this and their lives get better. Okay, that's fine. So to answer your question, there's nothing wrong with that. In the same sense that a lot of our beliefs that we hold are kind of faith based. Just take like democracy or the economy is going to be stable, or that fiat currency will be valuable tomorrow as it is today. I think just walk around the world engaging in it without giving too much thought to these things. You know, I, you know, my scientist friends think, you know, we're all determined, but I think, you know, free will is a useful fiction, you know, otherwise why would I bother to get out of bed and make choices to get through the day? And, you know, there's a lot of things like that. I think religion is something like that. You know, there's a lot of mythic truths that we hold. You know, in the conspiracy book I talk about these proxy conspiracisms, you know, they're, they kind of stand in for something else. Whether they're true or not is sort of beside the point. It's, you know, it's just something you hold for some other reason. And I think religion is a lot like that. But again, if, you know, the predictions that without religion people, you know, would not be good is not true, you know, and European countries are way ahead of us on this. You know, Post World War II there, rates of religiosity plummeted. You know, they're like 10%, you know, that, that attend church, not 50 or 60%. And, and they haven't collapsed. You know, their societies are actually quite a bit better. Their cultures, their politics, their economics, their social system. By almost any measure, abortion rates, STD rates, out of wedlock, pregnancy rates, suicide rates, child infant mortality rates, and just on and on, homicide rates, crime rates, all of those are lower in the secular European societies, lower than America. America, the most religious still of all the say, top 20 industrial democracies, our country is the worst. We're like rated last by those measures. And so whatever religion is doing, it's not making society better. And without it, you can still be nice to people. People and, and why? Because it's good. Just be good for goodness sake. You don't have to have some promise of a reward in the next life. Why do you need that? Isn't it better to treat people well because they're people? Because they're like you?

John Dehlin [00:45:27] I love it.

Michael Shermer [00:45:29] I think more and more people have inculcated that those ideas just, just absorbed it. Just, you know, it's just happened from the bottom up without anybody like giving a lecture about it or having an official program. It just happens.

John Dehlin [00:45:44] Love it. Love it. Michael. Okay, that was a wonderful introduction. Rebecca, will you hold up his book really quick? Now it's time to jump in. Now it's time to jump into your amazing book Conspiracy. I want to ask every viewer and listener right now to go purchase this book. We're going to have Maven put it in the show notes, put it in the comments, go to Amazon, buy this book. We want 10,000 of our listeners at minimum and viewers to buy this book so that Michael Shermer can say he had a good experience on Mormon Stories podcast. I also wanna very quickly thank Kathy Downs for her super Chat. Those donations help keep us alive. Any of you who wanna donate to support Mormon stories can do so through the Super Chat feature. And we really, really appreciate it. Okay, Michael, before we start talking about religion and conspiracies and conspiracy theories, I think we wanna begin by having you define the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Is it okay if we start there?

Conspiracy Theories and Religious Belief

Michael Shermer [00:46:45] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:46:46] All right, let's jump in.

Michael Shermer [00:46:47] So a conspiracy is two or more people plotting in secret to do something to a third party or person without their knowledge or consent. A conspiracy theory is a theory about that. That is the claim that this is actually happening. And then a conspiracist is somebody who thinks that these things are happening again, whether they're true or not. So it's really a signal detection problem, as I presented in the book. That is to. There are conspiracies for sure. These happen all the time. Watergate was a conspiracy. The assassination of Lincoln was a conspiracy. The CIA program MK Ultra to conduct mind control experiments on citizens, US citizens, without their knowledge or consent. That's a conspiracy. Tuskegee Experiments by the U.S. department of Health on African American Americans not treating them for syphilis to see what the effects are, without their knowledge or consent. That's a conspiracy. You know, much of activities of the CIA and foreign countries to rig elections, assassinate foreign leaders that we didn't find out about till later, that's a conspiracy. So you know, Volkswagen cheating the emissions standards in Europe, that's a conspiracy. These things happen all the time. Insider trading on Wall street, for example. And so it's reasonable for people to think, think there might be more conspiracies. So which ones are true? You know, that 9, 11 was an inside job. Is that the conspiracy, like Watergate or Sandy Hook was a false flag operation or, you know, whatever you, you happen to believe. So there's conspiracy theories and there's lots of them. You know, many of them are true, many of them are false. Which ones should I believe? And that's what my book is really about. How do you know, and you know what makes a conspiracy theory more or less likely to be true?

John Dehlin [00:48:39] Okay, Rebecca, pull out your questions. I'm going to have you ask question number 10. We asked the Mormon Stories Book Club to put some questions together. Rebecca gathered them. What's question number 10, Rebecca?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:48:53] Yeah, we did. We always ask our readers throughout the month as they're reading to just jot down questions and then give them to me so that I can talk to our wonderful guest. And more than one person you can probably anticipate this question. This was very high on their list. The question is, is religion itself a conspiracy? Many of our readers had that on their mind as they read through your book.

Michael Shermer [00:49:14] Oh, interesting. Yes. So I guess we're back to the discussion about Steve Hessen's bite model. To what extent, you know, is there a spectrum? I would see it as more of a spectrum that, you know, most religions, I would not say the Catholic church is a cult and you know, again, it's, you know, can you leave. Is the leader in errant. Well, maybe, I guess in terms of the Pope. But, you know, it doesn't attempt to control people's lives as much as, say, Jim Jones or David Koresh or maybe the Mormons, I guess, or at least the fundamentalist Mormons. And so there, I'd say it's a spectrum. Most, most religions, I think, are fairly benign, you know, and, and there are rules about to what extent they're supposed to get involved in politics. They shouldn't be doing that. If they do, they should lose their non profit status and have to pay taxes and. Or be a political organization, not a religion. Okay, so there's already rules about that sort of thing. So I would say, you know, it depends on the religion. Religion and, and what exactly they're doing to determine whether they're a cult.

John Dehlin [00:50:23] Okay, so.

Michael Shermer [00:50:24] Or a conspiracy, I guess. Yeah, it was conspiracy. Well, so again, to what extent are religious leaders doing stuff in secret without the consent or knowledge of the, what, their board of directors, their congregants? A little bit, I guess it would depend.

John Dehlin [00:50:40] So, Michael, it's interesting that you brought the cult framework back in because I want to narrow in on your definition of conspiracy. So maybe I'll just give you an example. You talked about the idea that Jesus was a carpenter, but then he was killed, but then he resurrected three days later. Forget Jim Jones and abuse and cults. That's like a theory. That's like a conspiracy, I guess. It's not a conspiracy theory. Or is it not a.

Michael Shermer [00:51:10] It's not a secret. Right? I mean, this is the whole point. It's. Everybody knows the story. That's the whole point of evangelizing, getting out there and telling people, John 3:16, you know, they're on posters at football games. John 3:16, for God, so love the world, he gave his only begotten son Jesus, you know, so on that. That's not a conspiracy because it's right out in the open. You know, the Scientology Xenu, the galactic warrior story that you don't get to hear about until you've paid a hundred thousand dollars. Scholars in classes, that's a conspiracy theory. Okay. Because it's secret. And so there, I would say is the difference.

John Dehlin [00:51:44] Huh. Okay, so like if whether or not God and you know, God resurrected his son after three days or whether or not an angel appeared to Joseph Smith and gave him golden plates that he could then translate, you're saying that doesn't necessarily fit within the rubric of a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory.

Michael Shermer [00:52:09] It's just a theory, okay? It's not a secret. It's right there on the first page of the Book of Mormon, you know, the affidavit, you know, signed by the 13. You know, I heard it too. I saw it. Whatever those guys said. Yeah, it's not, it's not a secret. Yeah. Conspiracies often involve, they almost always involve some kind of secrecy about power. Who has it, who doesn't, who's getting unfair advantages over other people, that, that kind of thing. That would be a conspiracy. So again, back to, you know, some political examples of, you know, what the State Department or the CIA or National Security Agency or the FBI does. Homeland Security, you know, when, when stories come out about what they were doing to say US citizens spying on them, collecting phone data, things like that. Congress never approved of that. We didn't know where they were doing that. That in fact it was illegal, legal. Some of this was illegal, maybe or maybe not. You know, but that would be a, that would be a political conspiracy theory. So for religious political conspiracy theories, it'd have to be something like that. So I mentioned the 60 Minutes piece Sunday on the Mormon Church and the 250 billion dollar. You know, that might be a conspiracy theory in the sense that, you know, it was apparently quite secret. Not many people knew about this even within the ranks of the Mormon Church. Certainly the US government would have some interest in, you know, how that money is being spent because there are rules about getting donation, tax free donation. The people that give money tithe to the Mormon Church, they can deduct that from their taxes on, for the irs. So, you know, how's that money being used? You know, you're not supposed to fund political campaigns, for example, that would be illegal. And so whatever it is they're doing, I forget the details. Funding some mall or something. Funding a mall. If that's a for profit, then that would probably be illegal. And so that would be a conspiracy.

Mormon Susceptibility to Conspiracy Theories

John Dehlin [00:54:01] Okay, Okay. I think we need to talk about how Mormons, generally speaking, orthodox Mormons, tend to be Very well attracted to conspiracy theories like Covid conspiracy theories or vaccine conspiracy theories, or New World Order type conspiracy theories. I want to save that till later. So in that sense, it very much ties to your book. But I really do. Here's the problem I'm struggling with. Michael Shermer, as I read through your book and I learned about Popper again, Karl Popper. Right. And his rules of falsifiability, as I learned about E. Cree, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And then as you go into your baloney detection kit and your conspiracy detection kit, those things absolutely seem to apply to all sorts of Mormon doctrine, Mormon theology, Mormon truth claims. And so I guess I'm getting a bit hung up on whether or not we can talk about religion or Mormonism or Christianity within the framework of conspiracy or conspiracy theories, because so much of your discussion about skepticism really seems to apply. So I don't know, Rebecca, if you can help square the circle, but I'm ready to jump right into him describing Popper and falsifiability and talk about how those tools apply to Mormonism and religion, whether or not we should still try and keep this purely within the rubric of the discussion of conspiracy versus conspiracy theory. What would you say, Rebecca?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:55:38] Well, I know that a lot of our readers, of course, having most of them been raised LDS and then found their way out of the church, they obviously had the sense that they didn't have a good sense of critical thinking. Like that had basically not been anything that they'd been able to develop throughout their lifetime. And so I think that may be why when you mentioned Mormons tend to fall for a lot of these conspiracy theories, I myself personally was raised by conspiracy theorists who were also professionals and scientists. So it was always a strange kind of a juxtaposition for me. But, you know, I was raised to think the moon landing never happened and that Area 51, the aliens were there. I mean, this was just something I was raised with at the same time I was raised with Joseph Smith, saw two personages. So for me, no wonder I never really had a handle on what was going on until much later in life. It was very confusing. So I think a lot of our readers, one question that they all brought up, and I think, I think this is in light of all the Lori Vala stuff going on. Is religion dangerous in a sense? Is there a sense that these religious beliefs can somehow lead to harm? I don't know if Michael wants to weigh in on that a little bit. The idea that the critical thinking is absent because of being raised in a high demand, high control religion. And then can that lead to actual harm? If you're familiar, I'm sure you are with the Laurie Daybell situation.

Michael Shermer [00:57:03] I don't know that, that. When is that?

Rebecca Biblioteca [00:57:04] Oh, okay, well, maybe we don't have time to get into that.

John Dehlin [00:57:08] It's basically a mother who had weird Mormon beliefs who ended up likely conspiring to kill two of her ex husbands, the lover, two of her own children and.

Michael Shermer [00:57:19] Yeah, yeah, that's a natural story. Yeah, of course I know that story. Yeah, yeah, okay, so that would be an example. But we don't want to generalize and say most Mormons are likely to kill their kids and their spouses or whatever, you know, because of the counterfactuals. How many have that background and they never do anything like that? Like that. Most Mormons don't kill their kids. Right? Most people don't kill their kids. So I think the, the edge cases like that don't tell us very much at all. Unless, you know, mental illness or drugs or, you know, some weird thing like that. Yes. The consequences of believing in a secret satanic cult of some kind are dangerous. You know, like the pizza gate I talk about in the book. You know, most people don't really believe that Hillary Clinton is running a secret satanic pedophile ring out of a pizzeria in Washington D.C. one guy did, Edgar Welch, he went there with his gun to break up the pedophile ring, which is what you would do if you really thought there was a crime being committed and no one was doing anything about it. But most people, I think, hold that as more of a proxy conspiracy theory, as I call it. That is it's a stand in for something else such that if it's not true, it doesn't really change their core beliefs, which is that we don't like the Clintons, we don't trust the Democrats. Those libtards are bad, evil people. They're trying to destroy America. And so if you believe that, detailed conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's the. I believe it or I kind of think it's possible. And then if I take you to the pizzeria and go look, they don't even have a basement. There's, there's no pedophile ring on. It's like, well, maybe not this one, but something bad is happening somewhere because those Democrats. Right. So it's a stand in. So to that extent, I think that's how the average person believes these things. More of a proxy for something else. The people that take it literally, the Edgar Welch's or the woman who kills her kids, you know, there's probably something else going on there they really believe. But maybe there's other mitigating factors again, mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, drugs, alcohol. You know, that kind of thing fuels a lot of these, these sorts of things, you know. So like for example, if we look at the people who went to the Capitol Total on January 6, the insurrection, we know who all of them are now. You know, we have every single one of them. You know, they posted on social media. Here I am taking selfies. It's astonishing. I don't know what they were going to do if they got in there and took over the Congress. You know, we're going to sit down and read through bills and vote on them. Oh, right. They're there, you know, for. This is my 1776 moment. Oh, you know, so you know, to a certain extent they sort of believe, believed what the boss told them, that is the election was rigged and stolen. They're stealing your country. We're going to go down there and you know, be strong and so on. But most of them were not mentally ill. These were not deranged jobs wearing tinfoil hats. Right. They just were regular people. And that's how I think about that.

Critical Thinking Tools for Evaluating Truth Claims

John Dehlin [01:00:09] So, Michael, there's a. Rebecca, would you mind reading question number eight from the book club? And then I'm gonna, I'm gonna follow right along that as soon as you, Rebecca, read it.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:00:18] Yeah, I was actually just going to bring that up. I think that fits in perfectly right here because like I described being born into Mormonism, I never really felt like I developed any critical thinking skills. Pretty much the opposite. So several people I voiced this question in the book club. Being born into a high demand, high control religion takes away your critical thinking skills from day one. What are the steps that someone could take to regain or to learn those skills now at this point?

Michael Shermer [01:00:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:44] And Michael, before you answer that, I'm going to maybe challenge you a bit, which I think you value and respect. And in Mormonism, you're never supposed to challenge anyone. Contentions of the devil. So I'm breaking out of my Mormon mold to actually challenge you a little bit. So when it comes to someone like Lori Valo or Chad Dabel or this Pizzagate guy that stormed into the pizza joint with the guns and shot somebody. Of course, of course, your point is well taken and I agree with it that you can't take these extreme fringe violent cases and generalize them to you know, qanon believers in the case of this one guy, or Mormons in the case of Lori Valo and Chad Daybell. But what I do, you know, you've probably heard the quote that sometimes it takes religion to get good people to do bad things. If you're raised from, from a child from infancy to believe that there are spirits in the world and evil spirits and good spirits, and if you're raised to believe, you know, that God's looking over us and that God can give us special powers and that our emotions can be interpreted as God's will, and then you're taught that, you know, a Mormon scripture, like in one Nephi chapter, chapter three, verse whatever, that it's better that one man should perish than that a nation dwindle in unbelief. And you start to be indoctrinated from a very young age that you can believe your thoughts or emotions as from God, that sometimes violence can be justifiable in extreme cases, and also just generally to believe in a supernatural world where there's demons possessing people. You know, I can see how those, those indoctrinating beliefs from infancy can prime people to be vulnerable to certain types of behaviors, like, oh my gosh, I'm in love with this woman. You know, how do I deal with that? Oh my gosh. But maybe her, her ex husbands or children are possessed by the devil and maybe it does make sense. Maybe we do have a great work to do. Maybe, maybe God wants us to, you know, prepare the world for Jesus's coming. And maybe these ex husbands and these children are getting in the way of God's eternal plan. And maybe they do need to go. Can you really say that religious indoctrination can't make a relatively good person more likely to do something evil if they start to be be indoctrinated with the wrong types of beliefs, especially around interpretations of their thoughts and feelings.

Michael Shermer [01:03:33] Yeah, that's a great, that's a great lead up to. Here's how a social scientist thinks about these issues. I would say what you just described is a necessary but not sufficient condition to lead to violence. That is to say, the counterfactuals of the millions of people who believe all the stuff you just said and they never commit violence. So there has to be other causal vectors at work. So that's a necessary but not sufficient condition. What other things are going on in that particular person's life? The person who actually committed violence, what else is going on there? Because millions of people that believe the same stuff that, that Person believes, you know, in Jesus or Mormonism or whatever, you know, they don't commit violence, so why not? And so there obviously has to be other factors at work. What are those? Well again I mentioned mental illness or you know, drugs and alcohol or you know, under the sway of some very persuasive person, you know, like a cult leader or a lover or something like this. You know, there's a whole bunch of those kind of mitigating factors which allows the counterfactual examples to continue and, and realize, okay, there's many things at work here. No human behavior has a single cause. None. Everything is multi causal. And when you ask why for anything, the answer is always going to be over determined. That is say we're probably going to come with up, up with more explanations than are necessary, but it's not just going to be one. Right. So I agree with you that the moment you go down the path of abandoning critical thinking and rationality in one area, well I'm just gonna have this logic type compartments and over here on Sundays I'm going to believe in the, in the invisible man in the sky and the zombie Jesus and whatever, but it's not going to affect my daily life life. Well that's probably true most of the time, but then it makes you more susceptible to other cultish like influences or extreme political ideologies, that sort of thing. With those mitigating circumstances it's more likely to happen. So I would say, I would agree with you. I think it's better to not believe any of that stuff at all because there's no justification for it. So why believe it? And if the answer is well if it makes you feel good, well you know, drugs makes people feel good, but that doesn't mean you should do them. So you know, why not find some alternative that makes you feel good or helps you get through the night or helps you deal with grief? You know, there's professionals that teach people how to deal with loss, death and grief. You know that cognitive behavior therapy is the most tried and true tested successful psychological therapy there is. You know, try something like that and to see if that would help rather than believing in something that there's no justification for believing in it.

John Dehlin [01:06:21] Right. Okay, well Michael, this is great. Let's go ahead and jump right into kind of a, kind of baloney and conspiracy detection 101 and let's start with pauper and falsifiability because I think that's a really important foundation for everyone to understand, if you don't mind.

Michael Shermer [01:06:40] Yeah, sure, right. So the general framework here doesn't, doesn't have to. It can apply to conspiracy theories, which I do, but apply to any claim of any kind religious, otherwise. So you mentioned Carl Sagan. You're a fan. Okay, so I, I like to, in a different book, talk about Sagan's dragon. Sagan's dragon is that this is just thought experiment. You know, I have a dragon in my garage. Would you like to see it? Oh yeah. Super cool. Yeah, I love dragons. You know, so you take your friend over there, you open the garage door and you look inside and there's this empty garage, some paint cans, a ladder, a couple bicycles. It's my garage, bunch of bicycles. But there's no dragon. And so your friend says, well, where's the dragon? And you go, well, it's an invisible dragon. Oh, huh. Okay, well I got an idea. Let's put some sprinkle some powder, some flour on the ground and then we'll see the invisible dragon's footprints as he walks around. And I say, well actually this invisible dragon hovers above the ground. It levitates like a foot above the ground around. Huh. Okay, well wait a minute. It's, you know, it's a dragon, it's alive. So I have one of these thermometer things that they use during COVID you know, you point it at the forehead, it gives you the thermometer, the temperature reading of the person. We can do that with the dragon and we'll see where it is with our little heat detector. Well, see, this is a cold blooded dragon. It doesn't give off any body heat. Well, what about the fire? You know, because this is a fire breathing dragon, we'll use the heat detector for the fire. Well, this fire breathing dragon breathes cold fire. It doesn't give off any heat. Okay, so at some point you have to ask what's the difference between an invisible, levitating, cold blooded, cold fire, non detectable dragon and no dragon at all. So that's Sagan's thought experiment to apply to anything. You know, if it's constant hand waving for wide, it can't be detected, tested, falsified. At some point you don't have a, a justified true belief. You have a faith, you have a dogma, you have something that for which there is no reason to believe in it at all. And that we can apply to any particular claim. Now the principle, the ECRI principle, also from that Carl made famous, although somebody else said it, it actually goes back to Hume. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So ordinary claims require only Ordinary evidence, extraordinary claims. You better have a lot of evidence, right? So if I tell you that, you know, I'm going to, here in Santa Barbara, going to jump on the 101 freeway, I'm going to drive south and I'm going to take the 23 up to the 118 freeway, the Ronald Reagan freeway, I'm going to go into, into the Valley, Simi Valley, and so on and so forth, you'd go, yeah, okay, whatever. I take his word for it. I don't know those freeways. But fine. And that would be the end of it. But if I said, you know, right at the junction of the 101 and the 23, you know, it was late at night and this bright white light came over my car and all of a sudden all the electricity went off. My car stopped and these aliens beamed me up into the Mothership and they took me to the Pleiades, where I met the aliens and they gave me a message to give to the Biden administration that we have to stop polluting our, our, our planet because we're destroying a. Nuclear weapons are bad and whatever, right? At that point, you go, okay, hang on, Shermer. Okay, I'm with you on the 118 freeway and the 101 and all that stuff. I don't need evidence for that, you know. But the part about the Pleiades, how do you know? How do I know you're not losing your mind, right, that, you know, did you grab something from the dashboard of the spacecraft that you could bring back? I could see? Well, no, you know. Did you take any pictures? Well, well, no, you know. Do you have any evidence? Well, I swear, I really swear, I went, sorry, you know, that's just not going to be enough. Like with the dragon, I feel the dragon in my heart. I feel the love of the dragon. Sorry, that's just not going to cut it. You know, we have to have more evidence because it's an extraordinary claim, and I actually apply that to the resurrection of Jesus. You know, 100 billion people have lived and died before the 8 billion people alive today. How many of them have come back from the dead dead? Not one, but maybe one Jesus of Nazareth. Okay, so it's a one in a hundred billion claim. So it's a hundred billion to one odds that this actually happened. And is the evidence, you know, matching that extraordinariness? No, it's not even ordinary. The evidence is, is paltry. Right? So there's no good reason to believe it, because the evidence, so you can apply those Principles. They're pretty simple. Simple, you know, is. Should I believe claim X? Well, how's the evidence for it? And what kind of claim is it? Is it the kind of thing that could happen so it's reasonable and you don't need a lot of evidence for it? Or is it really so unusual you better have a lot of evidence? You know that. This is my complaint about UFOs and UAPs. You know, why don't you believe Shermer? It's like, because the evidence is so crappy. Oh, but look, look. Look at all the photos. Yeah, they're all blurred, blurry. The grainy photos, blurry videos. You can't quite. Yeah, but the pilot swears he saw it. I'm sorry. He could swear all he wants, you know, but it's an extraordinary claim. We're being visited by aliens or it's this super advanced Russian technology. Sorry. You know, that's an extraordinary claim. I need a definitive. What kind of evidence? The Chinese spy balloon. That kind of evidence, you know, photographs where you can clearly see every detail of the balloon and the equipment bay it had beneath it. And there's our fighter jet above it, photographing from down below, there's another fighter jet shooting it down. There's the Navy people in the ocean, dragging up the debris from the ocean. There it all is. That's the kind of evidence I need because that's an extraordinary claim. So you can apply to anything.

John Dehlin [01:12:37] Okay, that's really, really good. Okay, so in your book, you have two criterion. I don't know if that's what you refer to them as for trying to detect truth from error. I've got the Baloney detection kit. Is it balona or baloney? How do you pronounce it these days, Michael Shermer?

Michael Shermer [01:12:57] I think it's bologna, but I think baloney detection is fine.

John Dehlin [01:13:02] So there's the baloney detection kit and the conspiracy detection kit. I want to start by talking about the. The baloney detection kit. And if it's okay, what I've got here is the. The list of these 10 questions. And, and I can make them bigger if that's helpful. But I. First I want to ask you, kind of get your consent. Would it be okay if we tried to evaluate some basic Mormon truth claims by. By. By this framework? Or does that make you uncomfortable?

Applying Skepticism to Mormon Truth Claims

Michael Shermer [01:13:35] No.

John Dehlin [01:13:35] Okay, so let me lay out, let's just say some basic Mormon truth claims. And here it would be. It would be that in 1820, God and Jesus appeared to Joseph Smith, a farm boy in upstate New York. When he was 14, that they sent an angel with golden plates, who was a Native American resurrected Native American being, to deliver golden plates to Joseph, which was a, a record of ancient Native Americans talking about Jesus and Christianity, that Joseph used a stone and a hat to translate those golden plates into what now is the Book of Mormon. And that Native Americans today are the descendants of the dark skinned Lamanites that God cursed with dark skin for their wickedness. And all of this comes out of sort of core, more mainstream Mormon theology. And so let's just now say we're going to introduce the, the baloney detection kit and we're going to apply your some or all of your 10 questions to that core Mormon theology that, that I just laid out to you. So go ahead, Michael Shermer. Do you want to go through each one individually? How do you want to do it?

Michael Shermer [01:14:52] Just, I'll, I'll just pick, pick a couple.

John Dehlin [01:14:54] Okay.

Michael Shermer [01:14:54] I mean we know the context of this. During this kind of great spiritual movement of that time on the east, east, east coast of the United States in which there were a whole bunch of these spiritual movements. There were. Joseph Smith wasn't the only one. There are a lot of people that were doing those kinds of activities, you know, that kind of translating the word of God through their, what we would call channeling something like that, you know, the, the seer stones that put the stones in the hat, put your face in. You know, he wasn't the only one doing that. And when you do that, you can claim anything you want because no one else can test it against like Sagan's dragon. Let's put the questions back up because I can't.

John Dehlin [01:15:32] Absolutely, absolutely. Here they go.

Michael Shermer [01:15:35] You know. So does the source make similar claims? Yes. I mean Joseph Smith was, whatever his personal problems were, you know, he made a lot of claims like that, you know, most of which were really far out. Right. So have the claims been verified by somebody else? Well, of course there is that. The affidavit of other people, his buddies,

John Dehlin [01:15:52] who, the three witnesses and the eight witnesses that all signed a document saying.

Michael Shermer [01:15:57] But how reliable, how reliable are those? I mean, it's a little bit like the biblical accounts of, you know, people that said they saw Jesus after he was crucified. You know, you know, post death apparitions are not that uncommon amongst people who really follow somebody or you know, a family member or something like that who passes, you know, they, they see them again. Not really. It's just in their head. Right. So that or the, you know, the 500 people that saw Jesus after his death? Well, no, we don't have 500 independent accounts. We have one account that says there were 500 people.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:16:31] Right.

Michael Shermer [01:16:32] So that's very different from the claim being verified by somebody else. Does this fit the way the world works? Well, no, you know, the world doesn't work that way. You could easily test somebody and just put, you know, just some text in an opaque envelope and say, okay, tell me what's in this text. You can use, you know, all the magic stones you want. You can use psychic power, you can use Einstein's equations of general relativity, whatever you want, but, you know, you're not likely to be able to read through an opaque envelope, you know, unless it's Penn and Teller that are doing a magic trick. Right. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim? Well, you know, most of those, the tenets you just talked about with the Native Americans, those are absolutely false. That has been tested, we know, through the Human Genome Project and extensive genetic population drift research showing where the Native Americans came from and when. You know, roughly speaking, they probably came to North America from Siberia, you know, around 19, 20,000 years ago, maybe slightly older. There's this one site in New Mexico, it's about 23,000 years ago. But, you know, nothing at all like the Mormon story. And we know who they are. These are not like a lost descendants of Israel or lost tribe is nothing like this. They're not the, the people of Ham and so on. We know who they are. We know who everybody on the planet is. All populations. We know where they came from. In fact, we're all from Africa. If you want to go back far enough and, and you know, tracing migratory patterns through genetics and language and archaeological evidence and so on, you know, we know how that works, right? So most of those Mormon claims have, have not only been tested, they've been falsified, they're, they're not true, you know, in the moment. For the problem for religion is if you claim you have absolute certain truth about everything in your book, then when you're confronted with contrary evidence, what do you do with that? Most religions spin doctor around it or they quit talking about it or whatever. But in fact, this is the problem with religion. It has no mechanism by which you can alter your dogma, because your dogmas are based on the idea that God told us, so we have the final authority. But what if what God told you or what, however you think it came to pass, that you're wrong? You know, that that's not who the Native Americans are They're not who you think they are. You are wrong. And what do you do with that? Well, in science, you just go, but okay, I was wrong will alter our theory. And even though scientists don't always do that quickly, you know, because they want extra verification or they're hanging on to their theory or whatever. Like the Clovis first hypothesis about when Native Americans first came to North America. Those days keep getting older. Fine, but most people accept the older dates. Now, let's see. Does the new theory. Catherine? No, read it, read it all the

John Dehlin [01:19:27] way for, for our listeners, does the

Michael Shermer [01:19:29] new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory? Right, so, okay, so in this particular case, the Mormon origin story, you know, the problem is, is that, you know, it's going up against science, like, and science is just saying, well, we don't know for sure. This is our current theory about migrations into North America. There may have been more than one. Here's the evidence we have so far. This could all change next week with the turn of the spectrum Spade. We may find some new fossils or new tools that date back, you know, 50,000 years or so. My friend Graham Hancock, the alternative archaeologist, he thinks, you know, that, that people were here maybe a hundred thousand years ago. Okay, well, what's your evidence for this? Well, his evidence is not very good. So most archaeologists don't accept his theory about perhaps even Neanderthals in North America and so forth. And, you know, he, he's unhappy that, that mainstream archaeologists don't accept his theories, but that's just the way it goes. You know, it's an extraordinary claim that people didn't come to North America first around 20,000 years ago, but in fact, they came here 100,000 years ago. That's an extraordinary claim. You better have really good evidence. The evidence isn't very good. It's not. It's not 100% not true. Could be, but, you know, that's the problem. You know, I just. And again, it's, you know, it's one of these stories that's so frustrating. So it's so full of human psychology and, you know, how people act and behave. You know, he was very much a pro, Joe Smith, very much a product of his own time. You know, the whole business about the, you know, polygamy stuff is just such a typical guy thing. Right? You know, John Krakauer writes about this and under the Banner of Heaven, it's just the funniest passage. You know, basically he goes, he's already having an affair with this woman down the street, right. Typical male, you know, he just, he just wants to sleep around, have a lot of partners. And, you know, the religion says you're not supposed to do that. Okay, how am I going to get around this? Right? Oh, I know. So, honey, I've been talking to God and you're not going to believe this, but he says I have to marry so and so down the street. I know. I couldn't believe it either. I don't want to do it, but you got to do. Man's got to do what a man's got to do. And, and you know, and she's like, what? In that case, I'm going to have multiple husbands. I'm going to go take on a lover. Oh, well, we talked to God about that. He was very spec. This is only for the guys. Just like, dude, really? She's buying this. Come on. And you know, so then he gets the. The other guys, they heard the voice of God and they're telling their wives, and it's just the whole crazy story, you know, bring him young. He was monogamous, and I'm not going to do that. He tried it out like, hey, this is pretty fun. Okay, yes, I talked to God, you know, and then the more, you know, then Utah wants to be become a state of the Union in 19, what, 1896, I think it was. You know, and the federal government says, you're not doing that with the polygamy thing. You can't be a member of the state of the United States. Well, we got another revelation from God. We were talking to God and he said, you know, I've been rethinking the polygamy thing. And I'm thinking, you know, maybe monogamy is the way. Okay? And then, you know, blacks can't be part of the Mormon, you know, higher hierarchy. You know, until the civil rights rights movement in the 60s and 70s. Well, you know, we've been talking to God. He says, you know, blacks are actually not that bad. It's okay to have. It's like, come on, you know, women are getting more freedom of the women's movement. It's like, it's. It's a cultural phenomenon. There's. There's no higher God talking to anybody.

John Dehlin [01:23:00] I love it. Love it. How was that? Great. Rebecca, to hear him riff on it

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:23:04] just sounds so clear right there, you know, And I would tell you, Michael, that there are. Are. There's a phrase that Mormons use. Doubt your doubts. Whenever critical thinking does start to kick in, you're told from the top Doubt your doubts. If you feel a doubt, the, the, the thing that you need to do is to doubt that. And there's an even newer phrase now that says looking for answers is not the answer. And even the idea that the more clear the evidence seems, that means Satan may be behind it, you know, the more clever the evidence. So I might ask you, Mike, Michael, because we, we all have conversations as post Mormons, you know, with family members that are still in the church, friends, and you do have these conversations and you run up against that, you butt up against. Well, you know, I don't acknowledge that because I just, I doubt that what you're saying, you know, you try to use critical thinking and, and you come up against that, doubt your doubts. So, and then you also come against just emotion, then they will inevitably just say, but I know, I feel sometimes breaking to tears. Are there any ways to, I don't know, continue conversations, especially with family members, when all they can really do is kind of cry at you, you know, and you still want to have a relationship and you want to explain, we can get along, we can find a common ground. Is there anything in your experience where you can just continue the dialogue in that way?

How to Talk to Conspiracy Theorists

Michael Shermer [01:24:17] Yeah, I have a whole chapter in second to last chapter of the conspiracy book on how to talk to a conspiracy theorist. But really it would be how to talk to anybody about anything that's controversial or may make things divisive between you. And the first point is not to lecture at them, not to tell them that what they believe is utter nonsense. It's to ask questions, to be respectful, to listen. Try to steel man the other person's position. That is to say, instead of straw manning it, where you just kind of reconstruct their beliefs in a way that's easy to knock down. Try to steel man it such that you're repeating in your own words what you think that they actually believe to the point where they say, say, yeah, that's what I believe. So before you do anything, before you try to debunk or counter or rebut anybody's claims, just see if you understand what it is they're saying. And that's actually hard to do. Most people have a hard time recounting what somebody actually believes, or the person, when they hear how it sounds, will think, well, that doesn't sound so good. Let me try to modify it this way. And they'll reconstruct their claims to sound more rational or more logical. Anyway, that's all fine because, you know, if we're not talking about the Same thing. Then we're just talking past each other and there's no point in having conversation. So again, and look at the person in the eye, nod, listen, actually listen. You know, where you respond to what they said and you're not just nodding to wait to get in your next point where it doesn't matter what they say because no one likes to be ignored. People like to be respected and listened. If you can find some common ground, like, oh, I totally understand, like in your case, you could say, well, yeah, I was a Mormon, I, I believed all of this and now I don't. And then just, but don't tell them why. Just let them ask, well, what happened? You know, or just, and then, then you can, then you let them ask you the questions. What they're really asking is, could this happen to me? And, but don't say that. Don't say, yeah, this could happen to you. You should join me. No, just say, well, here, you know, here is my journey. You know, I, I believed all this. And then, you know, I read this book or I, I kind of thinking this through, what's the likelihood of this really happening? And you know, and then I, and then I, you know, I dropped this part and I dropped that part and I discovered nothing bad happened. And you know, just kind of walk them through. I do this with like climate change people that, you know, I was a skeptic. Climate change skeptic in the 90s and early 2000s, I thought, I don't know, they've made all these predictions, nothing bad happened. Peak oil, end of the rainforest, none of that happened. You know, I think they exaggerate a lot of this. I don't know. And then, you know, this new studies came out, I started reading it and then I changed my, in mind. Oh, wow. So by giving the pathway, you can kind of show how somebody could reason their way to change in their mind without it being bad. It's just perfectly okay. And, or gun control, you know, I was raised with guns, I own guns, you know, but I just kind of feel like after looking at the carnage and the number of public shootings and all this stuff that maybe we need. I just could be kind of rethinking it. Maybe we need some slightly more gun control measures, immigration, abortion, whatever. You just find some common ground where you make the person feel like, okay, so this person was like me and now they're different from me, but they're. Maybe I should listen to see, you know, how this happened. Because maybe what happened to me and then you make it Clear that you have to take it off the table, that this is going to have to change their entire identity. Identity. Because people aren't going to give up their identity. You know, if, if being a Mormon is absolutely the most important thing in their lives, you can't just say, well, just give it up tomorrow. They're not going to. It's not going to happen. Right. It would be a slow process. People convert to religions overnight, but they rarely deconvert overnight. Takes a while, usually quietly, usually without anybody being told, they just stop. In my case, I just stopped believing. I just quit talking about it. And that's usually how I what happens. Right? There's no, like the scales fell back on my eyes or whatever. And so something like that.

John Dehlin [01:28:18] I love it. Thank you. Great question, Rebecca, and great answer, Michael. Okay, so Michael, I've got two really, really big questions to ask again. Rebecca, if you'll hold up Michael's book, Conspiracy. We want everybody to buy this book. Please buy it right now on Amazon. Michael Shermer, Conspiracy Also while you're at at it, please please subscribe to and follow the our YouTube channel on Mormon Stories podcast. YouTube YouTube channel that really helps when people subscribe. Please share this. Please like this episode. And of course, we always appreciate your super chat donations when you can offer that. So Michael, one quick question and then a little bit more of an involved question. I would say that Mormons, orthodox Mormons and Utahns, orthodox Mormon ut Tetons, I would, I would guess that they're in the 90th percentile of a large population of people that tend to believe in major conspiracy theories. Now that's just my, my opinion. I don't have data for that. But if we were to pull the religious backgrounds of, let's just say the, you know, those who stormed the Capitol when, you know, after Biden was elected or on Inauguration Day. What's the date of that whole debacle? If we were January 6th, if we were to pull the religious background, I bet Mormons would be overrepresented in that group. That's my belief.

Michael Shermer [01:29:44] Interesting. I have not seen any data on Mormons and conspiracy theories. There probably is. I'm not sure how I missed that. These conspiracy theories are more political than they are religious. Although religious conservatives, therefore they're kind of mixed politics and religion there often it has to do with perceived threats to the religion in the, you know, in the past. I'm often asked, you know, is this a new phenomenon? No, it's not new at all. You know, you look at what People were concerned about in the 1890s. It was the Mormons, in part, and the Catholics that. The Catholics and the Mormons and the Jews, of course, always the Jews were influencing American politics. So. And this was true all the way through the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, all the way up to, you know, when President Kennedy ran in 5960, you know, he had to give that speech, which he promised that he wouldn't because he's Catholic, that he would not let the Pope in the Vatican, you know, influence American foreign policy or domestic policy or anything like that. You know, and because that was a concern like, oh, my God, he's a Catholic. Oh, no. I mean, now we have, what, six United States Supreme Court, Court justices or Catholics. So these things are very fluid. But that's the kind of thing that somehow outsiders, religious, outside now, within religions, the perceived conspiracy is always against them. By who? By, well, the Jews or the federal government or the, you know, the Zionist occupied government. Israel is secretly running the United States government. They're going to harm our religion, religion, whatever. You know, those are fairly common. I think in the case of more recent ones, COVID 19, vaccines, masks, those kind of things. Again, I think it's a mix of religion and politics. I think this idea that, you know, Anthony Fauci and the CDC are just nudging us ever closer to taking our freedoms away, and if they can get us to wear masks, what else can they get us to do? You know, that's a. That's a fairly common conspiracy theory. Not, not just amongst religious, but also conservative religious people in particular. You know, then you can throw in some, you know, sort of satanic type things, you know, the. This is, you know, end time signs, that kind of thing. But that's getting more fringy. So, anyway, that's my thoughts on that.

John Dehlin [01:32:03] Yeah. So I guess what I was going to ask is, do you have any data that show that people who are religious are more or less inclined to believe conspiracy theories? Theories.

Michael Shermer [01:32:16] No, they're not. It's the direction, it's the directionality of the conspiracy theory. Which ones you believe will in part be greatly influenced by your religion, by your race, by your gender, by your politics. It's not that blacks or whites are more or less conspiratorial or Catholics and Jews are more or less conspiratorial. It's. It tells you what kinds of conspiracy theories you should believe in. And so blacks think, you know, that the government, government was planting crack cocaine in inner cities or invented AIDS to Decimate the black population. Whites are more likely to think the government's trying to take away the second Amendment and take away our guns and lock us up in FEMA camps. You know, those sorts of things. And so different religions, different races and so on believe different conspiracy theories, but it's always about power. Who has power, who doesn't, and what are they, the people with the power going to do to us, the people without the power. That's the common element. There's.

Political Bias, Belief, and Conspiracy Theories

John Dehlin [01:33:13] Okay, and then just a mini question now that you jarred it from my brain. Before we go into your rubric for evaluating conspiracy theory. There's probably a perception that political liberals are less inclined to believe in conspiracy theories than political conservatives. Are there significant conspiracy theories that political liberals in the United States tend to glom onto?

Michael Shermer [01:33:41] Oh, sure, of course.

John Dehlin [01:33:42] And if so, what are they?

Michael Shermer [01:33:43] And political liberals are just as conspiratorial minded as political conservatives. Well, look at the collusion, the Steele dossier and the collusion conspiracy theory that the Trump and that Trump was conspiring with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. Not true. You just saw the story yesterday that, you know, the big investigation, how the FBI really mucked this up. They really did a terrible job and they even cited, you know, confirmation bias and hindsight bias and, and their inability to, their hypotheses to evaluate counter evidence to their claim that there was collusion going on and so on. That's a total liberal conspiracy theory. Right. You know, liberals are more likely to suspect Big Pharma is up to no good or Big Corporate America is up to no good, whereas conservatives think it's more like the government, government agents are up to no good. The deep state, you know, QAnon, that's more of a right wing conspiracy there. So we know from tons of studies liberals are just, just as conspiratorial minded as conservatives that the line is conspiracy theories are for losers. The losers in this case being whoever lost the election tends to think that the other side cheated. And you can go back in history and look, every time a Democrat loses any election, they always think the Republicans were up to no good. They had some shenanigans, there were some voter inconsistencies in this particular district and so on. And then they normally, they dropped, drop it and just focus on the next election. The thing that Trump did that was different is he didn't drop it. He still hasn't dropped it. He still claims it was a rigged election. Normally they, you know, the losing side gives up after a few weeks Concede the election and then move on. So that's what's unusual this time.

John Dehlin [01:35:24] You do mention in your book the Sackler Family and the Opiate Epidemic as a legitimate conspiracy. Is that, Is that right?

Michael Shermer [01:35:32] Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They knew that these drugs were addictive and they covered it up. That's a conspiracy. You know, that's not that unusual, right? I mean, a lot of the pharmaceutical companies do that. So when liberals say, you know, I don't trust Big Pharma, that there's good reason for that, right? So I put this under the rubric of constructive conspiracies. That is to say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there aren't after you. As the line is, that is enough. Conspiracy theories are real. That that is there really was a conspiracy, that it pays to believe more are than actually are true. That is to say, err on the side of making a type 1 error assuming a false positive, assuming there is a conspiracy theory when there isn't versus assuming there isn't a conspiracy theory conspiracy when there actually is. Because that can be far more harmful. You know, so that's in our cognition, our evolved cognition. I argue that we make more type 1 than type 2 errors. We assume more things are true than actually are true. This explains a lot of things, right? Superstitions, magical thinking of all kinds of.

John Dehlin [01:36:30] It's such a. We're already getting comments of, like, people that are mad. If you take a position on one side or the other of the political spectrum, there are people that are already saying, like, I'm sending his book back. I'm never gonna buy his book. He spoke out against my pet conspiracy theory and called it illegitimate. You know, it's gotta be a difficult space to be in if you care about.

Michael Shermer [01:36:49] Well, here's how I respond to that. I just wanna know it's true. Don't you wanna know what's true? I mean, why would you wanna believe something that's not true, true, and just leave politics, religion, ideology out of it. Just ask for each and every claim, is it true or not? And then put some percentage on it. You know, maybe 50, probably true, 90 true, 10 true. It's probably not true. It probably is true. You know, don't, don't, don't go to extreme. 0% or 100? Because nothing in life, right, is 0% or 100%.

John Dehlin [01:37:20] Why?

Michael Shermer [01:37:20] Because I'm not God and neither are you. I'm not omniscient and you aren't either, right? Or there is objective truth. But I don't know what it is, and you don't either. So we have to work to try to figure out what to believe, and it's hard. It's not. It's a. You know, just, you know, drop the whole, I hate this guy. I love this guy. I'm not gonna buy. Just drop all that. Just ask yourself, do you want to know what's true?

John Dehlin [01:37:43] I love it. Okay, so what I want to do. What I want to do is pick a conspiracy that's really prominent right now. Now, and run through your 10 points of evaluating a conspiracy theory, and this is it. Right. Starting with patternicity. Is. Is that right?

Michael Shermer [01:38:03] Sure. But I. We can. We can simplify. Okay, so let's have a hard time remembering 10 things. So here's the question. It's a signal detection problem.

John Dehlin [01:38:10] Well, can I. Can I pick the conspiracy theory we're talking about?

Michael Shermer [01:38:13] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:38:13] Okay, so let's. Let's evaluate the conspiracy theory that. Let's just say the Democrats conspired to overturn the election of 2000. What? Of 2018 or 2020. What was it? The Biden election?

Michael Shermer [01:38:33] That's 2020.

John Dehlin [01:38:34] Okay, let's pick that.

Michael Shermer [01:38:36] There is no conspiracy theory.

John Dehlin [01:38:38] Okay, so.

Michael Shermer [01:38:38] Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You mean Trump's conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged by the Democrats?

John Dehlin [01:38:45] That's right. Let's. Let's evaluate that claim. Or that conspiracy theory. Yeah. By your criteria.

Michael Shermer [01:38:51] Okay, Right. Okay. So in general, what we want to know is, is the conspiracy theory true or not? That is, was there really a conspiracy? Okay, so first of all, how many people would have to be involved in the conspiracy to pull it off? You know, in the case of rigging an election, you'd have to have lots and lots of people, probably hundreds, because, you know, there has to be multiple districts and precincts, and, you know, there's like, four different key states, and in those states, there's dozens and dozens of counties, and you have to flip the votes here and there, and somehow you have to, you know, get this to happen without flipping the votes in the wrong direction. That these voting machines, somehow you have to be able to figure out how to break into them without anybody noticing or, you know, rewriting the computer software to throw votes in one direction or the other. And then the counterfactuals. Well, how come the Democrats, if they rigged the election for Biden to win and steal it from Trump, how come they lost some seats in the House? How come they didn't bother to rig up the election so that they, you know, could clearly control both the Senate and the House. But they didn't, they lost seats. So what happened there? And so forth. And then, okay, so you'd have to have dozens, hundreds of people would have to be involved. Not one of them, them wants to go on CNN or 60 Minutes and tell their story. Not one of them goes to a major book publishing house and says, I have the story of the century. You know, I know the person this guy was dating, he told me the whole thing and how it worked. And here's it, here's what he said and here's the paper trail. I got the receipts, I got the phone recordings. He told me the whole thing. I secretly taped our conversation. Here it is, right? There's nothing like that. There's, you know, constant, like WikiLeaks and you know, the recent leaks of classified documents. There's nothing in there about rigged elections, Nothing. You know, you would predict that if we had a real conspiracy afoot, there'd be some paper trail. You know, if you. People have to be paid, you know, even criminals have morals, they want to be paid for their work, right? You can't just get people to do this for nothing. And, or there has to be some, you know, emails, texts, some form of communications and you know, with cell phones now, right. You know that even if I just do that with my phone, you know, that motion is controlled, it's recorded somewhere. You know, they know everything you're doing. And you know, the 2000 mules claim about the cell phone, you know, that's been debunked and so on. And you know, how many elements would have to come together just right for the conspiracy to be pulled off. The more elements you have to have that happen at just the right way, the less likely the conspiracy theory is to be true. And it's not that, you know, you can't have some voting fraud, some voting shenanigans here and there that does happen. But you know, the grant, you know, the grander the conspiracy theory, the less likely it is to be true. We're going to do this in, you know, multiple states and in dozens of counties and no one's going to talk. What, what? Everybody signed an NDA and non disclosure agreement. What I mean, and no non disclosure agreement in the history of the world has ever been breached. I mean, come on, you know, you're, you're spinning up the story from something small, like maybe one little thing happened right there which can be true to this grand conspiracy where you have to have hundreds of people, everything is coordinated, it all Happens in perfect synchrony. I mean, look at Watergate. This could not be simpler. Just go in there, break into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, steal their stuff and come out. They couldn't even pull this off, right? So, you know, that's normally how it goes. You know, people find out, people talk, people can't keep their mouth shut, people are incompetent. You know, stuff goes wrong, chance accidents, contingency, you know, and then there's a paper trail somebody finds. This is how we find out about fraud and conspiracies in business and in government is whistleblowers. There's always whistleblowers. You know, there's some, you know, secretary, there's a grad student, there's, you know, some underling sees what's going on and then blows the whistle that for whatever reason, I mean, this happens all the time, it's a daily story and you know, nothing like that has come forward. You know, and then the counterfactual. So if it was true, and you know, the Justice Department is run by the Republicans. Attorney General Bill Barr was appointed by Trump and he was a self proclaimed Trump supporter, voted for him twice. And he said, all right, I'm going to look into this, you know, and when he says I'm going to, he means the Department of Justice, which has unlimited resources, they could do whatever they want, want and, and they looked into it and he would be motivated to find something because he's a Republican, right? He supports Trump. If he could, this would be the biggest, you know, if he discovered that the Democrats cheated, stole the election, you know, he would have told us. And he came on and said, nope, didn't find anything, you know, no conspiracy was afoot, end of story. Of course, for Trump, not the end of the story. And then the, you know, the hardcore trumpets have got to spin doctor that, well guys, he's, he's on our side, he's one of us. You know, how do we justify that? Oh, well, he's on the, secretly on the take or whatever. This is like Sagan's dragon, you know, the invisible, you know, undetectable source of somehow influence that nobody knows anything about. You know, there should be a paper trail who influenced him, who gave him money, where, how did this happen, you know, and, and so on. And it just goes right down the line for this. I mean everybody, every one of the 30 lawsuits was thrown out of court. Most of the judges were Republicans who would have been motivated to say, yeah, I think you have a case there. Let's take this further. Let's at least look into it. They didn't even have enough evidence for any of those courts to even look further into the case. They had so little evidence and nothing. You know, there was that story of Rudy Giuliani and the other attorney who actually got it right there in front of the judge. And the judge is going, you know, where's. You said you were bringing the evidence. Where is it? Did you bring. Oh, we left it at the hotel. It's like, you know, this is not what you do if you're, you know, if you're exposing the biggest conspiracy in the history of American politics. Right. Oh, I left it at the hotel. Yeah, right. Sure you did. Yeah. So again, what would be true if the conspiracy was true? And, and you know, there's a bunch of them right there. It just didn't unfold. And that's the end of that story.

John Dehlin [01:45:17] I love it. Did you have a follow up to that report, Rebecca?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:45:20] Well, I will admit that a family member who's a conspiracy theorist took me to 2000 mules and I walked out of it going, oh, my gosh. And then I got home and did a little more research. So, you know, maybe that's, that's the answer. Like you say, just.

Michael Shermer [01:45:34] Yeah. I recommend going to Isaac Saul's S A U L. Isaac Saul's website called Tangle T A N G L E. He did like a 10,000 word analysis of 2000 Mules, Danish d' Souza's documentary. And he just takes it apart point by point. There's nothing in that film. Nothing. He's got nothing. Zip, Nada. It just, it's a, it's a nothing burger, as they say.

John Dehlin [01:46:00] I love it. I sometimes, I love my viewers and listeners and sometimes they frustrate me. A. Jensen writes. And this has to do with Mormon stories how? I could say, so crazy to me that people don't understand, number one, that so many Mormons believe in conspiracy theories that bringing an expert on to help people evaluate whether or not a conspiracy theory is true. It's weird that one of my viewers or listeners can't understand why this directly relates to Mormonism, you know, but anyway, you know, it clearly does. And so anyway, Michael, this has been super, super helpful. Really quickly, we have a friend who's joined us. He is a podcaster. His name is Carrie Schurz. He runs a podcast that we all know and love called the Backyard Professor. He says he's read almost every one of your books and we promised him we'd give him a Chance to ask you one question. So, Carrie Schurz, welcome on Mormon Stories. Carrie, we love you.

Michael Shermer [01:47:00] Thank you. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:47:01] Hi doctor,

Michael Shermer [01:47:03] I do have a question about the historical Jesus. Now, I know in the last, I'll say 15 years or so the mythicists have made inroads because of various different authors. David Fitzgerald is a big one, Richard Carrier, Robert Price, etc, and, and in

John Dehlin [01:47:29] studying some of the other biblical scholars

Michael Shermer [01:47:32] on the scholarship, how the historical method is done, they have been rebutting him. So rebutting those guys. So my question for you, just as a general observation, is I love how you help us study a subject to see whether it's valid or not. Where do you stand on the historical Jesus issue? Where do you unwind? What's your take on just the person Jesus? I know Richard Carrier is adamant about. Nope. But even he is beginning to somewhat change. Others have gone otherwise. So that's my question.

John Dehlin [01:48:12] Thanks, Carrie. Thanks for the question. And please check out the Backyard professor podcast, everybody. Thanks, Gary.

Michael Shermer [01:48:18] Yeah, it's a good question. I, I am very well of the debate. You know, I'm not super steeped in the minutia. These guys, when you read their literature, they, they go on for, you know, 10,000 words about some little point right there. And I'm not that deep in it. I've read the mythicist arguments for the claim that Jesus never actually existed. And then I've read the counters to those and to me, the counter arguments that there actually was a person named Jesus of Nazareth, not that he was crucified, not that he was resurrected after being crucified, but that he probably really existed. Here I, I lean on Bart Ehrman, who is the most knowledgeable person that I've read on the subject. And he rebuts all of the mythicist claims to my satisfaction. He does anyway, obviously not to theirs, but. And so that's what I think, again. I think there probably was somebody named Jesus. It's possible. Again, I don't assign a 0 to any claim or 100 for that matter. And so it's not. It's possible there was no Jesus. I think it's probable there was. I mean, Yeshua is not an uncommon name at that time. And the Romans crucified practically anybody and everybody for the most petty thieves, the most petty crimes. You know, the two people on the, on the cross next to Jesus were both, you know, pickpockets, just petty criminals. So that's not unusual. The unusual, the extraordinary claim would be that he actually rose from the dead after Three days. That's where my skepticism kicks in.

John Dehlin [01:49:46] I love it. Thank. Thank you, backyard Professor Kerry Schurz. And thanks, Michael, for answering that really quick, quickly. We also want to thank Alex Ward for their Super Chat donation. We want to thank Mike Iverson who says common sense and common courtesy. Thanks, Mike, for that super Chat. And also Kathy White, who gave us the question about Purdue pharma and the opiate crisis. Couple questions for you, Michael, and then Rebecca, I'll let you ask maybe one or two more before it's time to go.

Michael Shermer [01:50:12] Remember, I gotta go. I gotta go in four minutes.

John Dehlin [01:50:14] Okay? Okay. Okay, really quickly, how do you handle people who claim, you know, you've got number 10 on your baloney detector test? Personal beliefs driving the claim. What do you do when people say that your atheism is what drives your interpretation of sort of religious. Religious beliefs as an example?

What Drives People's Beliefs and Worldviews

Michael Shermer [01:50:35] Because atheism isn't even a thing. It's just a lack of belief. I also don't believe in unicorns and so on. There's a lot of things I don't believe. Ghosts, haunted houses, aliens visiting us. You know, I'm an atheist about all those things. I'm an atheist about most of the gods that you also are an atheist about, you know, Zeus and. And Aphrodite and any of the Greek gods, the Roman gods, or even in the claims of, like, Indian gods, God men. You know, who's the. The fake here? Who was raising people from the dead and performing miracles? Oh, Satya. Sai baba in the 1930s and 40s. Right? His followers. Followers, millions of them, claim they saw him raise people from the dead, they saw him perform miracles and so on. But nobody believes that. Christians don't believe any of that. Nobody, nobody in the west believes that, you know, so why not? You know, so apparently people are just as skeptical as I am. And so atheism has nothing to do with it. It's just, what should I believe?

John Dehlin [01:51:32] I love it. Okay, I have to get this question, and then Rebecca will give you at least one more. A lot of people told me I shouldn't have you on because you have made at least some criticisms of transgender topics. But I do want to give you a chance to at least, number one, specify whether you believe that there is some value or relevance or credibility to the transgender experience. And then if people want to say you're kind of anti trans, how would you respond to that question as well?

Michael Shermer [01:52:02] Okay, well, first of all, we have a whole issue of skeptic on gender dysphoria and all the issues around trans, issues related to science and medicine and so on. So, you know, I just want to know what's true. And in this case, there's a lot of science behind some of the claims and the science is quite mixed in other claims. My main focus though is I know some trans people. I, you know, of course there's, there are people who are trans. There are people who are truly gender dysphoria. That's not what we're talking about here. We're about talking, talking about one, conflicting rights issues. Right? So should a male to female trans be allowed to compete against biological women in women's sports? The answer is no, they shouldn't, because they're not women. They are men. These are post puberty men who have all the benefits of going through puberty with all the testosterone changes and so on that cannot be mitigated by puberty liberty blockers and things like that. And so, and the NCAA is now coming around this, the international body that governs NCAA swimming is realizing this is the case and so on. And I'm a defender of women's rights. And in many of these cases, women's rights are being violated, you know, to allow, you know, this Will Thomas, the Penn State swimmer who declared himself to be a woman and grew her, is her hair long and, and is, you know, already a male and did the required NCAA swimming one year of testosterone suppression and then entered women's swimming meets where she was once ranked in over 400th in the, in the country, is now number one, beating women. She's eliminating women and ruining careers. She's walking around in a locker room room naked with his full junk on display for women who are naked. Changing. Five years ago, liberals would have been outraged. They would have been incensed. They would have been apoplectic. Arrest him for sexual harassment and indecent exposure. Now what a liberal say, oh, he's stunning and brave. No, he's not. Okay, That's a completely separate issue from people who identify as trans, are not trying to hurt anybody. They're not violating women's rights or anything like that. This thing is morphed into complete insanity. You know, if you think that men can menstruate, you've lost your mind. No, they can't.

John Dehlin [01:54:33] So you're, you're, you're okay with, with respecting someone's chosen name, their, their pronouns and their chosen identity, whether it's male, okay, Whether it's man or woman. It's just when it gets into things like sports where you, you have strong spaces yeah.

Michael Shermer [01:54:50] Bathrooms. Okay. Locker rooms.

John Dehlin [01:54:52] Got it, got it.

Michael Shermer [01:54:53] Prisons.

John Dehlin [01:54:53] Okay, that makes sense.

Michael Shermer [01:54:54] Rebecca, now, now the, the open ended question is, you know, the, the recent spike of several thousand percent in one cohort of teenage girls and, and no other cohort, not women, 20 to 25, 25 to 30 and so on, has come out as trans. There's a huge spike, several thousand percent. Why is that? So there's 200 hypotheses. Can social contagion, which I think is the right one, or liberal, tolerant society, some more coming out that are actually trans. So that debate is continuing and we're getting more evidence of that. So anyway, okay, let's wrap it up. I got one minute.

John Dehlin [01:55:27] Okay. Rebecca, one, one last question for Michael.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:55:30] Oh, I don't even think we have time for a question. I think Michael, go. I'm just going to say thank you, Michael, and thank you for helping us think more about thinking critically. I think that's what all of us, the post Mormon world can learn a lot from you. So thank you, Michael.

John Dehlin [01:55:44] And Michael, how can people support you? How can people support your work?

Michael Shermer [01:55:47] Really quick, go to skeptic.com and you can subscribe to the magazine, join the society and so on. Really, please. We're not anti trans. Not in the least. We are pro women's rights and we want to know what's true. That's it. All right.

John Dehlin [01:55:59] All right. Michael Schumer, thanks for joining us today on Mormon Stories podcast. Bye bye.

Michael Shermer [01:56:03] Bye bye.

John Dehlin [01:56:04] Rebecca, I got some criticism of people sort of mocking me for asking you to read numbered questions or to hold up the book. Like the only reason I asked Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:56:15] No, no, no.

John Dehlin [01:56:16] The only reason I asked Rebecca to hold up the book is because I don't have a copy of it here.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:56:19] Exactly.

John Dehlin [01:56:20] It's not. Cause I'm trying to demean her in her role.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:56:23] No. And I don't have the other books, otherwise I would say, John, please hold those up. That's exactly right. Not at all.

John Dehlin [01:56:29] Yeah, I do. You know, that topic of transition transgenderism is a very volatile one and I do kind of feel bad that we. But I also didn't want to not ask it. But I know that the things that he said are highly controversial, highly polarizing. But I think that's what he stands for is open discussion and evidence based discussion. And so I guess I'm glad I asked it. Even though there's a of lot, a lot that could be discussed about that topic. Right?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:57:03] There is a lot. And maybe you'll have to have him back on again, but yeah, those are things that. Discussions that go around Skeptic magazine. And so I think you are absolutely right to bring it up. And I would like to, now that you've said that somebody was wondering about why we're reading questions. John and I obviously this morning collaborated on all of this, and we had so many excellent questions from our book club readers, all of you out there. We thought, how in the world can we work all these in? So we very carefully went through an outline and tried to match questions to topics so that we could fit all of your wonderful questions in. I think we did a pretty good job. And at the last minute, we're just like, let's use a numbering system. So that's our own little secret way of communicating, and that's why it kind of came out that way. But yeah, we definitely wanted to make sure that all of you were heard in this because we value your opinion and your questions as we read. That's what the Mormon Stories book club is all about.

Reflections on the Conversation and Book Club Wrap-Up

John Dehlin [01:57:53] I love it. Really quickly, Rebecca, do you have any. Now that you've. We've spent almost two hours with Michael Shermer. I do want to give you a chance to share any reflections, any thoughts, any feelings, any reactions to Michael Shermer. I want to give you a chance to. To give them. Or to his book or any points from his book that maybe we didn't cover.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:58:14] Well, no, I. And I thought your question. I was extremely interested in your question about our morning Mormons more susceptible to this. Because in my background, you know, I was raised by scientists, yet there was this huge component of all kinds of conspiracy theories that I was just raised with. So it wasn't until I got older where I started thinking, is this right? And for me, like, I kind of touched on with Michael, I was told, you know, there wasn't the moon landing and Joseph Smith saw two personages. So you can only imagine, imagine everything in my mind in Mormonism kind of became this strange gray area, which is why I always say to everybody, I've been pimo since birth. I never really quite bought into all of it. And it wasn't until I got in my 50s that I started to realize I'm an atheist. I think I'm a comfortable atheist. And so reading people like Hitchens, Dawkins, Michael Shermer, it just kind of helps you find your place and kind of put how you feel in a framework. Do you sort of feel that way, John? And that's why I appreciate authors like this and books like this and reading in general. To try to help you figure yourself out on the other side of Mormonism. I mean, that's kind of my personal mission statement.

John Dehlin [01:59:24] Absolutely. And I'll just add one of the most important books I, I could never mention it enough that I've ever read is the book called the Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:59:33] Carl Sagan.

John Dehlin [01:59:34] Those of you who know Michael Shermer had a painting of Carl Sagan over his shoulder. I had my nephew paint a painting of Carl Sagan. He is one of my secular. He's in my secular pantheon. Is that a word?

Rebecca Biblioteca [01:59:50] I think so. It is now, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:59:54] But. Yeah, just learning the basics of critical thinking of the scientific method and then how to apply critical thinking in the scientific method and, and even healthy skepticism. Learning to become comfortable with skepticism and then learning to apply evidence, science, critical thinking and skepticism to your worldview. For me, it's not that, you know, somebody early on, Rebecca criticized me as like hating religion, as like wanting to take people's faith away that could not be further from the truth. I don't identify as an atheist or an agnostic, although I think everyone in the world is technically agnostic. I'm not trying to destroy religion or take people's beliefs away, but I do believe that there's a value in rooting our worldviews in reality to the extent that we can. There's a cost to that because sometimes I think there's a little bit of depression associated with a more realistic worldview. There's kind of this idea of blissful ignorance that I think has some empirical backing. But generally speaking, I think we're healthier and we're safer when our worldviews are more rooted in reality and evidence versus not. And we're certainly less susceptible to deception and fraud and that sort of thing when we have a more realistic, scientific evidence based worldview.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:01:21] Yeah, no, I agree with that. And one of the questions I would have liked to ask him, although we didn't have enough time, was about the book Sapiens. Noah Harari, you know, what do you. What, what do you think he feels about the idea that a myth, a mythology, a collective way of thinking like that binds people together, helps you accomplish things and is a productive thing? I don't know. I mean, what's your opinion on that? I wanted to ask him. I was just curious if you saw the benefit of that, the mythology bio, binding people together.

John Dehlin [02:01:48] I think I remember him referring to that in the book and he may have even lightly referenced it when he talked about Joseph Campbell and myths. Because I Asked that question from my good friend Jerry Johnson out of Bremerton. You know, just this idea of is there value in a benign superstition or in a benign belief? I wish I could have asked him more. Jerry's question about like, let's say someone believes in Reiki or energy healing or the power of crystals, as long as it's not trying to treat cancer with essential oils. But let's just say it gives them a little bit of hope or a feeling of control or a little bit of happiness. Is it so bad? We can also apply that to Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens and his idea that this sense of a myth, which, you know, currency is a myth, is tend to $10 worth. Is a piece of paper that says 10 on it really worth the equivalent of $10, or is that just true? Because we all agree that it's worth that. I think that it's undeniable that shared myths make culture more efficient and allow us to cooperate on larger and larger scales. I have to believe Michael Shermer would be 100% in agreement with Yuval Noah Harari and. And the book, the wonderful book Sapiens. That's a great question, Rebecca.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:03:09] Yeah, and I think also I was gonna to follow up that question. I was gonna talk about the idea of the nuns, of course, which are people that are leaving religion. They don't affiliate with anything and therefore the loss of the collective myth. And what does that mean? I mean, I've read that, you know, the Bible used to be you. You could. You could say eye for an eye and everyone knew what you were talking about. You could just use that in conversation. People don't read the Bible anymore. They're nuns. They don't know what that is. They don't have a collective vernacular. They don't have a collective myth. And, you know, does that mean we're sliding into, I don't know, complete anarchy? These questions are interesting.

John Dehlin [02:03:44] Yeah. Well, Rebecca, I have so much. I have so much respect for you and I have so much gratitude for you. You're the one who landed Michael Shermer in terms of getting him to do the interview. You're the one that makes this book club happen. So all praise be to you. You and making this show possible.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:02] Oh, thank you so much. And I'm really excited about our three books that we want to be working on going forward for the summer. I think that's going to be great. Do we want to mention them one more time?

John Dehlin [02:04:11] Yeah, let's redo that introduction. Go ahead.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:13] Okay, we've got Unexpected by Chris Thomas, which is his story as the media representative of the Smart family during that whole era. And this is the one I'd suggest you. You get first. It's a quick read, an awesome read, and we'll be doing that in the, you know, month, month and a half kind of time frame. And then of course, we have. John, will you please hold up your book?

John Dehlin [02:04:35] You. You're. You're a misogynist.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:37] You're so.

John Dehlin [02:04:37] You're such a misogynist.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:38] I am.

John Dehlin [02:04:39] Oh, wait.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:39] Terrible.

John Dehlin [02:04:40] What's a man hater? What's the word for man hating? Anthrogilist. What's the word?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:46] I just know it's a song from Hollow Notes that dates me.

John Dehlin [02:04:48] Misanthrope. What's a man hater? Yes, you're misanthropic.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:04:54] I have no idea. Anyway, so this is the wonderful new book by Dan Vogel. Now it's a longer read, so this is kind of more Back burner. Take it on your cruise with you, your summer on the summer. Sit in the lounge chair and read it. This is Charisma Under Pressure. Joseph smith, American Prophet, 1831-1839. So that's going to be a little longer. And then we have the amazing by Rick Turley and Barbara Brown. And this is, is a second part to their original book about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. And this is called Vengeance Is Mine, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its aftermath. So it kind of picks up after the massacre into all the politics and the court and the trials and things like that. So really fascinating reads.

John Dehlin [02:05:31] Yeah. And please viewers and listeners, you know, if you value this type of programming, there are just a few simple things you can do to keep this stuff alive. Number one is subscribers to the Mormon Stories podcast, YouTube channel or the Facebook page. Number two is to like these episodes. Number three is to share them. Number four is to donate. So through the Super Chat feature here on YouTube, you can donate or you can go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, become a monthly donor. And then the other ways you can support what we do is to buy these books. So please buy Michael Shermer's book Conspiracy and support good literature and, and good writing. Please purchase that now. And then also please purchase the Elizabeth Smart book right Now, Unexpected by Chris Thomas. And then while you're at it, purchase these books from Signature Books, Vengeance Is Mine and Charisma Under Pressure. We want Signature Books to thrive. And you purchasing those books, books not only gives you some excellent books to Read. It also supports, you know, good literature and good reading, which is what the Good Book Club and Mormon Stories Book Club is all about.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:06:47] That's it.

John Dehlin [02:06:48] All right. Well, Rebecca, again, you're the best. Thank you so much for joining us today and I can't wait to do this again next time. And also, do you want to tell them about Mormon ish really quick?

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:06:59] Oh, that's true. I do have my own little podcast called Mormonish Podcast. We just dropped an episode today about church versus state politics. B.H. roberts, if you heard him mentioned in conference, we kind of debunked that. So that's really fun to do with my co host, Landon Brophy. And then of course the Good Book Club, which is a virtual read, another virtual reading group for posted nuanced Mormons that we run. And we're reading a book on Genghis Khan meeting on Sunday. So you can find information about that. Just find us on Facebook, Instagram, wherever people go. That read.

John Dehlin [02:07:30] Love it. And I went ahead and looked up the word for man hater and it's misandrist.

Rebecca Biblioteca [02:07:36] A misandrist. Now we know.

John Dehlin [02:07:39] Now we know. Now we know. All right, Rebecca, you guys take care. You guys support Mormonist Podcast and thank you for supporting Mormon Stories Podcast. Also thanks to Carrie Schurz. Please support the backyard professor and Mormonism live and radio free Mormonism and all the good Mormon themed and post Mormon themed podcasts out there. Thanks for supporting Mormon Stories Book Club. Thanks again to Rebecca, thanks to all of you who joined us today. Thanks to Maven and to Julia who helped with the moderation today. And mostly thanks for all the amazing comments and suggestions. I wish that we had time to incorporate all the amazing comments, but we really appreciate the Mormon Stories podcast community that participates so actively on these live streams. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks, everybody. Take care. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories and we hope to see you again in a month or two with another episode of the Mormon Stories Book Club. Take care, everybody. Thanks so much.

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