Of Beverly Hills to the conversation of the year. We are delighted to be partnering with the bucs to bring them to speak about his newest book god a human history. Before we bring him out, i want to give you a little context about what the conversation is here at the temple emmanuelle. We started the Program Last Year in response to help civic fabric has been tearing and the idea that it has been harder and harder to have conversations with people when we disagree, especially on issues that are important to us. So we were lucky to have the family come forward and to help us formulate the conversation. All of whom have been significant partners helping us shape this event. We are lucky to have them and events like this. You might be wondering what it is but a conversation about god has to do with Difficult Conversations and what i will say is i think that youre good at a lot of things but one of them isnt necessarily the ability to talk about god. We dont often talk about what we do believe for what we dont believe and i would go as far to tell our prayers are in hebrew so that we dont have to think too hard about what it is we are actually saying when we pray. I think its because the whole idea is deeply personal what we believe and what we dont and it feels vulnerable when we have conversations about those deeply held beliefs but i want us to try. So before we bring him out, i want to take 30 seconds to think of a moment in our own lives when you have had a transformative experience. You may or may not use the language of god. If tha that isnt a language tht speaks to you, thats fine but i want you to think of a moment of purpose or connectedness that you have experienced in your life because im going to ask you to share that moment with somebody sitting next to you. Take 30 seconds to think in silence. And when you are ready, make eye contact with somebody sitting next to you or maybe somebody you know or dont. Take 30 seconds to share that experience. [inaudible conversations] if you havent switched for the other person to speak, switch now. [inaudible conversations] go ahead and finish your thought with a sentence and focus your attention back up here because i would imagine maybe that felt like a bit of a risk. Maybe it felt a little uncomfortable or difficult. But we are incredibly lucky that over the next hour and a half, we ar are going to be guided through this conversation by an extraordinary person. An internationally renowned writer, scholar, producer, commentator. And his number one bestselling books last year, the life and times of jesus of nazareth caused a lot of conversation in the public sphere about religion and was translated in a dozen languages around the world. Hes a recipient of the genes choice award and served as a professor at riverside and holds a phd for sociology of religion from santa barbara. Personally, im a fan of the work he has done through the Production Company focused largely on content and topics about the middle east. One of my favorite documentaries was produced by their studios called the square about the early stages of the arab spring. Needless to say, one of the most prolific and important voices on religion in the public sphere so please join me in welcoming doctor reza aslan. [applause] i drive by this temple all the time and its one of the few that ive never actually been inside of. We are delighted to welcome you. We are going to talk for about 45 minutes and then for those of you that are interested in asking a question, you have cards on your chairs and pencils and we will have people coming through to pick up the car. Also you can call me reza. Im like the useless kind of doctor do think can help anyone, so when people say doctor, i get nervous and think what if something goes wrong and people ask me for help and i am no help. Thats fair. Im going to be asking some very personal questions. Okay im ready. [laughter] league of you start off the book discussing your own religious journey in your life and it is an interesting nonlinear journey and i think it gives good context with why you wrote the book. Would you mind sharing with the audience a little bit . I was born in iran. Its basically the way people are culturally religious with the exception of my father. He was a devout atheist. One of those that had a pocket full of jokes. When the revolution happened, i think my father basically thought maybe we should get out for a little while and lay low until things settle down. Obviously they did not settle down and that was 40 years ago. When we came to the United States is is 1979, 1980 at the height of the crisis so it wasnt exactly the best time to be a premium or muslim in america as opposed to now when its fantastic [laughter] everything is great now. I think that kind of pushed us to just strip our lives clean of religion, certainly islam. My mom would occasionally prey and sometimes theprayand sometif the cultures and holidays, but for the most part, back then being muslim was like being from mars and i spent a good part of the 1980s pretending to be mexican. [laughter] which tells you how little i understood america. [laughter] it didnt help at all. I think it was something about my childhood experience that left this lasting impression on me. Despite the fact i grew up in a fairly nonreligious household, i was always fascinated by religion, by spirituality and pathologies and i was looking for a way to kind of express that. When i was 15 i went with some friend to a personal youth camp. I knew it was a youth camp and christian but i didnt know what any of it meant to be honest with you. Thats essentially where i first heard of the story. He died for our sins and anybody that believe in him would never die and would live forever. I never heard anything like that before in my life. I immediately converted to this evangelical brand of christianity and then spend the next four, five, six years preaching the gospel to every one whether they wanted to hear it or not. I comforted my mother. Then i went to college and decided i was going to study religion for a living. I always wanted to be a writer. I dont remember ever wanting to be anything else. There was never another option but i am also an immigrant. When you are an immigran immigro cant tell your parents that you want to be a writer. It doesnt compute. I remember a conversation i had with my mom in which i said think what i want to do is become a writer and her response was who is stopping you from writing . [laughter] you can go and be a doctor and then you can write, nobody is stopping you. So i thought i will be in academic. I had the experience thats pretty mucthat prettymuch everyo to college when you suddenly realize that everything you thought you knew was wrong. Every assumption you have become everything you learned up to that moment. But i was still looking for some way of continuing to study religion. They are in trouble they are troublemakers. Why dont you explore that and i knew nothing, nothing about islam at all so i began to study islam and dove into the way in which it defines god which is the opposite way that christianity defines god. It essentially says that if you want to know what god is, imagine the most perfect human being, thats god. And that just stopped working for me after a while. What i was looking for was a different metaphor and the metaphor that i found was the concept of divine unity and this notion that everything is god and then there cant be any separation between the creator and creation and i thought yes, that works for me. I also had an emotional conversion and intellectual conversion to islam but i do want to Say Something that is very important and i should get it out at the beginning because it comes out anyway when you study the religions of the world it becomes very difficult to take any one of those religions all that seriously and becomes very difficult to take a truth claim of any one of those religions because these are essentially different languages for the same emotion and sentiment and so what im interested in is the emotion and sentiment but its how one expresses it to me is irreleva irrelevant. So its both being a believer and a scholar of religion. When i pick up a book i am expecting one of two things, either a religious apologist telling me body and how i should believe in god or an atheist telling me that its all baloney and absolutely ridiculous. You had an interesting quote at the beginning but says i have no interest to prove the existence or the nonexistence based on the choice. What was it like for you walking the line as a believer and a scholar did you feel your self getting pulled . I should mention that is unusual in the field of religious studies. Most people go into the field of academic religion. Those that are going there in order to become ministers of one sort or another. Most people that enter the field of religious studies do so from a religious background. It is rare that with no religious instruction at all because ive been going to spend my life studying the religion of the world doe that does not hapn that often. For those of us that do often we come at it thats how we enter it. When you start studying religion from a historical and literary cultural social logical perspective. This perspective is how you were introduced as a set of doctrines and beliefs what happens is that your personal faith starts to crumble because so often and this is true of their faith is in the religion not what the religion points them to so when cracks start to appear in the truth claims of this religion, the whole edifice crumbles. I often think to myself had i been a more progressive christianity i would still be christian today, but i converted to christianity that is predicated on the literal bible like that is the foundation of the fundamentalist evangelical christianity that it is literally true and it is absolutely without error. It takes about five minutes to realize it is full of adverse as it should be when you consider the text that was compiled by dozens of hands over the years and they do not in any way diminish the defined value of the text, not at all and its ludicrous to think that the claims are predicated on whether the facts are correct or not but that is the religion that i was told. When i discovered that was incorrect, the whole thing crumbled because my faith wasnt in god is just this religion. Without taking away the rationale for us reading it can you walk us through this trajectory of the evolution of Human Experience and this dichotomy that you pointed out between the dehumanized notion of god. The basic argument of the book is that you can look at the entirety of the human spirituality going back to the evolutionary past to the origins of the religious experience of two today you can look at the entire process as one long connected ever evolving and remarkably cohesive attempt to make sense of the divine by humanizing the design and human personalities and motivations and by essentially transforming god into a human of course i dove into the person who becomes literally a human being. Whether we like it or not we do not have much choice in the matter. It is an impulse we do it without thinking about it. When you tell an atheist okay fine you dont believe in god, then describe what you mean by god. Its interesting he always says to people i dont believe in the god that you dont believe in. The question of does god exist or do you believe or not, we all assume we mean the same thing. Its so funny how we dont actually bother to think about the fact that this word of it is the most variable in all of the languaglanguages when we simply. Obviously you mean the same thing that i do but even with atheists, they do this thing we can talk about the reasons we do it and have a conversation about what it is that compels us to do that and why and we could also talk at length about what to do about it but i want to emphasize this is not a good thing, it isnt a positive thing to humanize because while it is true what it does when you construct one who acts and feels and acts just like you do it allows you to have a relationship to actually commune in that divine version of your self, but what it also does is that it infuses it and create a god who becomes nothing more than a mere reflecting back to you your own ideas, the things you love and of the things you hate and that is extraordinarily dangerous. I love that video that you did, god doesnt hate gay people, you hate gay people. Religion has done a lot of good in the world and a lot of bad in the world and i think that there is a dichotomy in this conversation that we have that religion is a good thing or bad thing and the reason it is both of those things if they are nothing more than the reflection that is good or bad about us. Then we construct a religion of ourselves and then we wonder why our religious institutions are so flawed it because they are human inventions. At the very least we can get people to be aware of that cognitive impulse. The metaphor of language if you think about religion as a tool in a language that can be used for evil you are not going to get rid of language you have to grapple with religion as though it were a language and. I preached this constantly they are not the same thing. It is mysterious, individual, it isnt a rational thing, it is experiential. That is the best way for me to describe what it is, its an emotion like anything else and our emotion are not rational things, they are based on our experiences and connections with each other, we are, how we define ourselves. They are mysterious things, but we need a way to express this set of symbols and metaphors we can communicate to ourselves and what kind of people and there are throughout the world a set of languages already you can if you so choose, you dont have to, but if you choose to find one of those that resonates with you and use it to communicate the experience and all connections with other people that have the same emotions. If ruffled a few feathers. Some in the Christian Community had to critique it and ignoring the fact finishing islam as well some took issue contextualizing that is about the sensitivity that religion has and it can get very upsetting. With this book have you happened upon any sensitivities that have been surprising or have there been points of interest people have emotionally connected to . I feel like ive had enough time to process the response and i can make certain conclusions about and one of them is that the negative response to the book didnt come from christians or even conservative christians actually, part of the reason it was such a big seller is because many bought it and discussed it in their churches. But negative reaction came from one particular group of christians and that was the rightwing christians who in many ways have the sam had the y is the mainstream of different politics and this is important to understand not just the context about what happened in the book that helped us understand what was going on right now. They are recognizing jesus as a poor jewish peasant from the back roads of galilee whose entire message was predicated on the contrary it on the reversal of the social order. They didnt say the rich and the poor should come together and hold hands. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Those that are wealthy now will become poor. Those who are fed will become hungry. Those who rejoice will reap. It was an extraordinarily radical revolutionary idea in jesus time and still is today. The problem is that jesus has been detained by most christians would rather think of jesus as a middleclass Business Owner who really hated taxes. Im not making this up, that is literally his book. [laughter] that to be was fascinating to see that. We are seeing precisely the Political Division within american christianity that exerts itself in the phenomena and now with roy moore in alabama being openly offended by christians who are shrugging off pedophili[inaudible] i got a glimpse of that years ago and then i think for a large part of why people respond the way they tend to respond to my books is not because of the according controversy i promise not controversy, im not avoiding controversy, but its for the purpose use it. You said. I think we have to understand that religion, regardless of where in the world youre talking about. It is far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices. That is not to say that the beliefs and practices dont matter. Of course they do but when someone says i am a jew, muslim, hindu, buddhist, they are making first and foremost an Identity Statement about who they are, how they understand their place in the world, how they define their relationship with other people. Its not just these are the things i do and these are the things i believe. So, when someone feels as though some aspect of their religion is being criticized event without a negative intention, it is the fact that their identity is suddenly under siege so its not just jesus didnt want you to drive a really nice car instead of arguing about the text and theology as some people feel i am attacking who they are as a human being but it comes with the territory and strangely, i kind of mentioned this backstage i havent had that with this y yet. It could deteriorate very quickly but so far i think its because when i started telling people what the is about usually what happens is people start to go yeah like i guess i do do that and that is a thing. It takes them off guard a little bit. Seeing how this is going to go you do have note cards you can write your questions on and we have folks that are starting to go around and gather so take a moment we only have a few more moments where we will begin conversations before the end. You described a little bit about this perspective on god and towards the end you bring back your own experience and how you arrived at the notion that islam so i am going to weigh in a little bit on what that is and you rightfully point out there are threats of this from other religions. Im going to put you on the spot and ask you to speak about the tradition. At the end of the book i essentially make a argument for the view of god that is dehumanized and not a divine personality who is essentially the animating force of the entire universe and i do talk about how this was. The whole first three chapters are about the divine and i make an argument about how that is actually the original way in which the idea of god was understood as the Creative Force of the universe itself and we have a term for that it is a new word about an old idea that just basically means all is god and god is all and as the belief we were describing earlier that there can be no division between creator and creation, that they are fundamentally the same thing and what we think of as the universe is nothing more than the selfexpression of the divine. First i should say the reason i make the argument is first and foremost it provides a deeper spirituality in mind in my view a more Spiritual