Josh Hammer & Charles Murray: Faith, Reason, and America Today
Josh Hammer & Charles Murray: Faith, Reason, and America Today
Summary
Josh Hammer speaks with Charles Murray about the role of religion in American life, the personal journey toward faith, and the implications of taking religion seriously for society and culture.
Description
Episode Transcript
00:00:05
Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute will be joining us shortly. Until then, I thought I would just talk a little bit about today's topic, which is a very timely topic for the Thanksgiving holiday, may I end, but before I forget, I want to wish you and yours a very, very happy Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is my personal favorite holiday of the year. And among the reasons why it is my favorite holiday of the year is because this notion of thankfulness and gratitude is itself actually a deeply religious
00:00:35
concept. The notion of gratitude, well, think about what you're actually grateful for. What is it that we are grateful for this time of the year when it comes to the Thanksgiving holiday? What was George Washington thinking of when he issued his famous Thanksgiving proclamation in the first months of his presidency? Well, he was grateful to the almighty creator, the king of all kings, for having blessed
00:01:06
this then fledged this then fledgling republic of the United States with victory over the British in the war that had preceded it, and had blessed this land more generally with amazing people of industrious work ethic, who had ample resources, and had all the opportunity in the world. We were grateful for God, essentially. It's very difficult to think of this time of the year, Thanksgiving, and then the short lead up to Christmas.
00:01:33
This really is the time of the year to think about religion. And perhaps, I try not to get overly appreciative, but perhaps, if you are someone for whom religion is not a particularly important part of your life, it might be time to think whether or not you might consider actually being a little more involved in your local church or synagogue. Whether you might actually dust off the old family Bible,
00:02:00
and just crack it open to look through the scriptures, the Psalms, the books of Moses, if you're a Christian, the Gospels, whatever it is. It might be that time, honestly. I thought that I would just tell you a little bit about my own journey before we bring on Charles Murray. My own journey is, well, I think it's interesting, at least. I write about it a little bit in my book that came out this year, Israel and Civilization, but the shortened version is essentially this.
00:02:30
In America, there are tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, men and women of good faith, who arrive at their political beliefs through the prism of their religion.
00:02:43
We're talking here about the minority of Orthodox Jews and the much greater numbers of evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics, and so forth, who were born and raised in a religious setting, and then are able to deduce their sentiments and thoughts about public policy and law and culture and deciding all that, based on their formative experience of being born and raised in a religious household with a religious worldview.
00:03:11
Well, personally, I actually did something of the opposite. I've been on the right my entire life. I was that guy in middle school and high school who was defending Bush-era Guantanamo Bay waterboarding policies against 25 liberal classmates. That was literally me. I was that guy. I've never been on the left. But he also was not raised in a particularly religious household.
00:03:34
So what happened was, around the time that you, if you're an intellectually curious person, you start to do the readings, so to speak, you start to get a little more curious, late teens, early 20s. Around that time, you start to read up on what it means to be a conservative. At least that's more or less what I did. And you start to come across some similar names who, in some instances, said a lot of similar sounding things.
00:04:02
You come across men like Edmund Burke, the great 18th century British statesman and the godfather of modern conservatism, as he's often referred to. Russell Kirk, his 20th century analog of sorts, his intellectual descendant on this side of the pond, one of the founders of the modern post-World War II conservative movement.
00:04:22
You find men like the great, late British conservative Roger Scruton. What is the common denominator here? What is the common peg that really ties a lot of this together? They all placed a strong emphasis on this notion of an intergenerational chain of transmission. That is the crux of the conservative mentality.
00:04:46
That you are here to conserve, to actually inherit, and to pass down your customs, your way of life, your values, your principles, your practice, your nation, your family, and your civilization's belief, ultimately, in God himself. So if you're an intellectually curious, young Jewish man, as I was, or if you're a young Christian as well, you ought to ask, well, what am I doing?
00:05:14
What am I doing to actually pass down my own tradition, my own inherited way of life, my own customs, my own folkways, my own values, my own lifestyle, my own belief, my own holy book? Not my book, but the book that my people read as the holy book, as the word of God. What are you actually doing? So that was actually my slow path towards becoming an observant Jew, which is something that has just happened over the past handful of years.
00:05:44
I did an interview about a month and a half ago that came out for an Orthodox Jewish publication called Mishpacha Magazine. My dear friend, Ellie Steinberg, did a lengthy profile of me. And the quote in the article basically says that I found Orthodox Judaism from Edmund Burke, which is kind of a funny way of putting it. I wouldn't have necessarily thought of that myself, but it's more or less accurate.
00:06:08
And I look forward very much to finding out how Charles Murray found religion himself and why he is now, per his new book title, taking it seriously. But if I may, just one other thing that I would like to say on this. I suspect Charles and I will get into conversation here about the instrumental importance, the utility of religion for the American people. And I'm not going to doubt by that. It is extremely important.
00:06:37
John Adams, America's second president, famously did say that America was made for a religious and moral people. And is wholly inadequate for any other. Of course, John Adams said that. It's one of the most well-known quotes of the American founder. It was presumed.
00:06:55
In the background that this country would be religious, that therefore our constitution, which makes and leaves ample room for the meeting institutions of civil society. You had to have a religious framework for all this to work.
00:07:12
What I don't think you hear enough about, and again, this Thanksgiving season is the right time to really think about this, is the sheer meaning and joy that you will find in your life when you start to dive into the scriptures. When you start to engage with the liturgy in your local house of worship. When you start to feel these things that perhaps you didn't even know you could feel.
00:07:43
You start to fill this void that perhaps you didn't even know that you had there as a void in the first place. So I think it's easy to talk about religion as the instrumental undergird of a free and flourishing society.
00:08:01
It is less popular, but it's probably even more important in today's day and age of declining religious rates, of tragically increasing drug overdoses and rates of depression and mental disorder and suicide, God forbid.
00:08:18
It is less popular, but it's never been more important to talk about religion as not just a societal tool, but as a source of genuine, honest to God, literally honest to God meaning in your personal lives. So when you're sitting over that Thanksgiving dinner table tomorrow, and don't get me wrong, I enjoy the parts of the Thanksgiving holiday that you enjoy.
00:08:48
The turkey, Dallas Cowboys, the proverbial, loud, ranting uncle, all that. I enjoy that too. We all do. But perhaps, perhaps, devote at least a little bit of time to thinking about how it is religion, how it is the biblical inheritance that undergirds all of this.
00:09:14
That's certainly what George Washington was thinking of when he issued his famous Thanksgiving proclamation in the first few months of his presidency. And that alone will ultimately save this country moving forward. Well, one of the benefits of being a listener or watcher of The Josh Hammer Show is that we bring on a great variety of guests. Sometimes we bring on popular commentators and shock commentators and shock radio personalities and this and that.
00:09:43
Every so often, we also bring to you a genuine public intellectual, a real, genuine public intellectual, not someone who is just winging it by the seam of his pants, such as yours truly. And that brings us to today's guest, who is indisputably one of America's great right-of-center intellectuals for decades now. And that is Charles Murray. So Charles Murray is the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at AEI, the American Enterprise Institute.
00:10:08
You likely are familiar with one or more of his many fantastic and highly successful and much-discussed books over the decades, including such works as Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart. Most recently, he is the author of the new book, which I have right here in my hand, Taking Religion Seriously. It's the new book from Encounter Books. That is Roger Kimball's publishing imprint. Out from Encounter Books, available everywhere books can be purchased. So Charles Murray, welcome to The Josh Hammer Show.
00:10:37
It's a real pleasure to host you, sir. It's a pleasure to be here. So let's start right at the beginning. You are not known as someone who is a thinker, pontificator, writer, or any of the above when it comes to matters of religion. That's just not one of the things that most people associate with Charles Murray, right? I think you'd probably be the very first to say that.
00:10:59
So the question that I think the people watching this who are broadly familiar with your work might be interested in is the most obvious question of all, which is why and above all, why now? Why at this stage in your career, after having written so many other works and other areas that have reached so many people, why did you decide to broach this particular third rail topic, if you will? What sparked it? And ultimately what galvanized you to put your thoughts down on paper like this? Pure accident.
00:11:28
I was giving an interview on video to a couple of colleagues of mine at AEI. It was sort of a recap of my career for the institutional history. And it went on for a couple of hours. And sometime around the end of the second hour, we wandered onto the subject of religion. And I started to tell Nick Eberstadt, who was the man who was doing the interviewing, that the ways that I had evolved over the years toward a kind of eccentric Christianity at this point.
00:11:58
And when they turned off the camera, Nick turned to me and he said, that ought to be your next book. And, you know, one reaction is, but I'm not an expert on religion. The other reaction was, I think there are millions of people just like me. We have, well, let's put it bluntly, we're overeducated in many cases. And we have never had much interest in religion. We aren't militant atheists.
00:12:26
It just hasn't been an important part of our lives. And that was true of me from the time I went to college until my mid-40s, late 40s. And subsequently, over the last 30-odd years, I have been slowly evolving. And I said, you know what, the way that that happened to me would apply to an awful lot of other people like me. And the idea of doing a book suddenly became very attractive.
00:12:56
So talk to us through your personal experience, though, a little bit more. I think that is really kind of lurking in the background here of that otherwise quite humorous, perhaps, answer. What was happening in your soul, in Judaism, we would say, in your neshama? What was sparking in there? What was kind of, you were not particularly interested. It's not that you were a Dawkins or a Hitchens-esque militant, a new atheist or anything like that.
00:13:19
But there's something that sparked some sense of the transcendental, something that really got you ruminating about this there. What happened in the life of Charles Murray that really sparked all this? My wife. I was married to Catherine in 1983. And in 1985, we had our baby girl, Anna. And Catherine came to me after a couple of months.
00:13:43
And she said, you know, the love I feel for Anna is so powerful that I have a hard time telling where I stop and she begins. And then she said something else. She said, I love her far more than evolution requires. So for background here, you should know Catherine is Oxford and Yale educated. She's overeducated like I am. And so she understands evolutionary biology. She understands women are hardwired to love their babies.
00:14:12
She said, no, there's something more going on here. And she was a conduit for some larger kind of love. And so that led her, I'm talking 1985 now, to start seeking a religious tradition that she could thrive in. And she ended up with Quakerism. And as the years went on, she became deeper and deeper into the spiritual side of Christianity and Quakerism specifically.
00:14:40
And I watched her in all of this, and I had two reactions. And one was, I could not say that my wife was kidding herself or deluding herself with this newfound religious belief she was developing. She's just way too smart and way too self-possessed and too realistic to be doing that. I had to accept that something very important was going on that I couldn't follow it.
00:15:06
And the second perception was that I think spirituality, the ability to take in spiritual insights is akin to any other human trait. It varies from low to high. And I use the analogy with music. I like music, but I can't appreciate it the way that some people can. And I can't enter fully into it, be moved by it.
00:15:35
It's just not nearly as powerful. It's not because I'm not listening carefully. It's because I don't have a high score in that kind of trait. Well, similarly, I have a very low score when it comes to spiritual insight. And so I had to use another set of tactics, strategies for trying to follow my wife. And so I use the skill sets that I do have, which involve looking at some of the empirical issues.
00:16:02
And so the book is really about a man who's not naturally given to spiritual insights, doing his best to literally take religion seriously, the same way I would take any other topic seriously that I wanted to investigate. So we're chatting, folks, with Charles Murray, who is the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a prolific author over the decade.
00:16:27
Most recently, he is the author of Taking Religion Seriously, available everywhere books are sold via Encounter Books, a wonderful conservative book imprint. So I think that there is this notion that you hear this from the new atheists, right? And to be clear, the new atheists are kind of a dying breed these days, right? I mean, they've really kind of been overtaken by this new militant paganism, frankly, as I often describe it, coming from elements of the woke left.
00:16:53
So the Dawkins-Hitchens-esque Bush era, 2000s era, new atheism is something of a dying breed. But one of the things that they like to often mock religious people for, and I get the very strong sense that you disagree with them on this, and I do too, is they like to argue that it's just all just totally irrational, right? And this is kind of how you get these old arguments about the so-called Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster,
00:17:20
of the kind of trying to mock the idea of the monotheistic deity. They say that you don't need God when it comes to anything from the origins of life to the creation of the universe to the Big Bang there. I mean, there's so much to unpack there, and then perhaps we'll have a couple of further questions there. But I guess just taking at face value, as someone who is a social scientist by training, who clearly deeply believes in empiricism there,
00:17:45
how do you respond to the notion that belief in the transcendental theological belief more generally there is inherently irrational? Okay. First point is, I think that the Enlightenment threw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm a big fan of the Enlightenment, of logic and reason and empiricism as a foundation for increasing knowledge.
00:18:09
What happened, however, with science is that it was not just a powerful way of acquiring knowledge. It was the only legitimate way of acquiring knowledge. That very quickly became kind of dogma among scientists. And by the 19th century, at the end of the 19th century, you had what William James referred to as scientism. It was a kind of religion by that time.
00:18:35
And like any religion, there were certain heresies that you would not explore. So that when people like William James and some of the leading scientists in Britain founded the Society for Psychical Research, they were viciously attacked by the scientific establishment because that's not the kind of thing we do. Well, Josh, the problem with that is there is one hell of a lot of very impressive,
00:19:06
not quantitative, but qualitative evidence of things that we'll just call supernatural. And in the 19th century, that still had to be qualitative. In the 20th century, there was a lot of quantitative work done on what's now called psi phenomena, ESP, clairvoyance, and the rest of it. And I would say that whereas the quantitative work is inherently limited because so much of these phenomena seems to occur under situations of high stress,
00:19:36
the work that has been done is good enough that the binary yes-no question has been answered. Are some psi phenomena real? And I don't really think that's empirically up for grabs anymore. Well, if that's true, I think it's important to say there are realms of knowledge out there that we have not been exploring. And it's about time we do.
00:19:59
And it's also about time that we start paying more attention to qualitative data that do not lend themselves to regression analyses, but are persuasive as data. Now, once upon a time, this notion of a conflict between science and religion was non-existent. On the contrary, if you look back at many of the great mid-millennium scientists over the past, call it, four or five hundred years, people like Isaac Newton come to mind.
00:20:25
Isaac Newton, frankly, some historians estimate that based on the entirety of his writings, he wrote just as much, if not more, actually, about scripture and theology as about the physical world itself. It was axiomatic, frankly. It was entirely self-evident to Newton and men like him that in studying the laws of the universe, they were actually trying to use their human faculties per Genesis 127, that spark of the divine that's in all of us,
00:20:52
trying to use their human faculties to try to make sense of the world, which they had certainly assumed to be the ultimate creation of a creator. At some point, you're entirely right that you do have the rise of this all-encompassing belief system of materialism, scientism. The two, in my mind, are kind of inextricably intertwined.
00:21:16
I'm curious if you could kind of just walk us through that descent a little bit from the more traditional view of science and religion as being entirely compatible to this very, not just modern, frankly, post-modern notion that there's some sort of conflict there, when to many of us it seems like there's really just no conflict going on at all. I will just say, as a footnote for people who want to learn more about this, I recommend a book called For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark, who's a fine historian,
00:21:47
and he recounts this story in great detail. But you start out with the fact that it was the church, the Catholic church, that is portrayed as the great enemy of science that opened up the whole scientific project, starting with Eclinus, who explicitly took Aristotle and converted that to religious terms, and said, God delights in us exploring his universe and discovering its truths.
00:22:11
In many ways, the church underwrote the scientific revolution in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. And it's not just scientists who were religious, but also all the great artists, whether they're composers or visual artists or sculptors, devout believers for the most part. And so a first proposition I just put out to you there is,
00:22:37
if you have those people who are able to accomplish such great things so far beyond the rest of us, maybe they don't have to explain their view of the world, that their work speaks for them. And so the Enlightenment just simply said, well, no, that's irrelevant. And as you indicated, they didn't do it systematically.
00:23:05
Subsequently, you have a long line of people from the 18th and 19th and 20th century, with Richard Dawkins being only the most recent. Carl Sagan in the 20th century was an important one, who tried to portray a conflict between religion and science, and they pretty much succeeded as propaganda. It does not stand up to close examination. So I don't want to go on too long in this response.
00:23:35
Just making a couple of points. The conflict is new. It is oftentimes poorly explained or simply misleadingly explained by a lot of the anti-religion people. And they're, in contrast to what they would have us believe, there are serious empirical challenges out there right now to strict materialism. Charles Murray has been one of the right leading public intellectuals for a number of decades now.
00:24:04
He's with the American Enterprise Institute. You've probably heard of a number of his books, but his most recent book is called Taking Religion Seriously. Right here you see what it looks like from Encounter Books. Charles, there's been a lot of talk about empiricism, and I want to kind of ask a very direct question, because I'm just very curious for your answer. And the question is, what is the best empirical argument for the existence of God? One of Dennis Prager's favorite arguments, I'm not entirely sure if this is an empirical or just a logical one,
00:24:34
it's probably a logical one more so, but Dennis has always liked to say that his preferred answer to this question, if I'm not mistaken, is the something out of nothing argument. But I'm curious if that resonates with you, or if there is something a little more, given your social science pedigree and your training, and your fondness for the empirical inheritance there, is there something that stands out to you as to be the most empirically sound justification for believing in the eternal, the transcendental, in the creator?
00:25:03
The thing that changed me, where I suddenly found myself thinking something I could never make myself believe, was the story of the Big Bang. And a little book called Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees, who was a astronomer royal in the United Kingdom. And he's not religious. He was making the point in Just Six Numbers
00:25:28
that the chances that we'd live in a universe that permits life to exist is one in trillions. And you could also look at the work of Roger Penrose, the Nobel laureate in theoretical physics, and at all the rate, what I'm saying is not scientifically controversial. It's as if there were a couple of dozen settings for the Big Bang and the first trillions of the seconds of the Big Bang, which, if those settings hadn't all been finely tuned,
00:25:58
we would be in a universe of black holes and no galaxies, no planets, or we would be in a universe of radiation with nothing but radiation. Things had to work out in an incredibly unlikely way. Well, if you say one in trillions, you've basically got three alternatives. One is, the one that the physicists came up with, we're just one of millions of universes.
00:26:25
And I will give some citations for advocates of that theory in my book, and I invite people to read them. I don't find that a plausible explanation. As a non-specialist, I look up in the night sky and I say, are we supposed to think there are millions of these out there? And I can't do that. Second alternative is to say, well, it's a one in a trillion chance, but here we are,
00:26:54
and so what's the point in worrying about it? To which I say, if I were put in front of a firing squad of 100 expert marksmen, and they all missed, in one sense, I'm here, I'm alive. In another sense, you'd say, which is more likely, that they all missed by accident, or that somebody directed that they all missed? And for me, the plausible, parsimonious, conservative, scientifically conservative conclusion
00:27:23
is that the universe is intentional, that it has an intention, and if there's an intention, there must be something that corresponds to God. God is not a wise old grandpa with a flowing beard up in the sky. The atheists do a very bad job of steel-manning their arguments against the existence of God.
00:27:51
They insist on putting it in terms of caricatures like Grandpa in the Sky. Well, there are very few seriously spiritual people who think of God in that way. And so that's the one thing that moved me off dead center, moved me way off dead center. And I'll just briefly mention the evidence on near-death experiences needs to be taken seriously. The evidence on terminal lucidity, whereby people who are suffering for advanced dementia
00:28:21
and their networks for organized thought have been destroyed, who for a matter of minutes or a couple of hours before they die are back in their full personality, with memories, with recognition. Those bodies of evidence say to me the idea that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain has some explaining to do to explain away those phenomena.
00:28:48
Now, in my own book early this year, Israel and Civilization, I devote some ink to the notion of spiritual but not religious, of this broader notion that we can deduce norms of morality, dare I even say objective norms, without actual revelation, without actual religion, whether it's in the Jewish or the Christian traditions. I actually got into a lengthy exchange with Coleman Hughes of the Free Press on Coleman's show. We spent basically an hour
00:29:18
essentially debating this very question on Coleman's show back in May or June. I'm curious for your general take onto that conundrum. I personally am, as I've indicated already, I think I'm very skeptical. I am very skeptical of the spiritual but not religious notion of the folks who claim to either vaguely believe in something, but then kind of object some of these specifics of revelation, or perhaps on a slightly related but slightly different note as well,
00:29:47
then claim to be able to objectively discern right from wrong, but also then reject that there is an ultimate source of right and wrong. I'm curious for your thoughts on these somewhat eternal, recurring pressing questions facing mankind. And I guess really even more so than that, I would be curious how your perspective on that has changed. After Catherine, after that comment that you shared earlier about loving the child
00:30:15
more than evolutionary biology, has your perspective on all this changed over the decades? With regard to moral principles, point number one is there are lots of secular humanists who are virtuous, fine people. For sure, of course. As virtuous as any religious people. So in terms of operationally, can you be secular and be an ethical person? Absolutely yes. For sure.
00:30:42
Speaking now as a social scientist rather than somebody who's interested in religion, I have great worries about the staying power of secular humanism and the principles they come up with. And I will cite for you in defense of my doubts what's happened with the whole issue of assisted suicide, which started out as something I supported. and that it seemed perfectly reasonable.
00:31:12
Somebody who really wants to dive and has good reasons for that belief, it's okay to help them. Well, it might have been a good idea to begin with, but the way it has degenerated is very, very scary. And where you have all sorts of stories coming out from Canada and from the Netherlands and other places where we're on a slippery slope here in sticking to a strict ethical set of principles about assisted suicide. And that's true
00:31:41
of a great many other moral issues where over the last 30, 40, 50 years we have seen drastic shifts from what was thought to be the right thing to do. Abortion, obvious example. All sorts of things having to do with bringing children into the world. And so, from a purely practical standpoint, I think there is some utility in thinking of these as absolutes,
00:32:10
moral absolutes. But I'm also impressed by the argument which says if you don't posit some kind of objective, universal, and religious basis for this moral code, you are driven inevitably to questions about, well, why is murder wrong? And you give an answer to that and then you say, but why is that wrong?
00:32:38
And I am very sympathetic to the notion that humans share a lot of impulses that are best explained by positing an underlying moral code that is out there, not explained by evolutionary biology, theology, and the best explanation for it, I think, is C.S. Lewis's in Mere Christianity, where he says this code of behavior
00:33:09
is God's way of revealing himself to us and puts a lot of emphasis on agape, the altruistic love. And so, short answer, I think you and I are pretty much on the same page here. That's a wonderful quote from C.S. Lewis, actually, very much as well, right on point as C.S. Lewis often was. Charles, what is the most important thing that religion can do for an individual and for society? Is the most important thing personal meaning? Is the most important thing a more instrumental significance when it
00:33:39
comes to building those Tocquevillian little platoons of civil society? Is it most important when it comes to trying to explain and justify or rationalize this love that we have for our children or our parents or grandparents? What are the most important roles played by religion on an individual and a societal basis? And those are two different bundles. For sure. So, I will, as a social scientist, I will go full bore on the
00:34:08
defense of the importance of religion as a foundation of a free society. I think the founders were absolutely right in saying you cannot have limited government and a lot of personal freedom unless you also have a lot of self-government within the individuals and religion is the best way to foster that. Okay, but that's all practical. That's all social science. What about me? And for a lot of people discover,
00:34:38
and oftentimes it happens in a moment of personal crisis, a God-sized hole. You've heard that phrase before. I have lived a charmed life in some respects that I've never hit the depths of despair. I have been spared many of the kinds of agonies that other parents and children have to go through. But on the other hand, it's also true that in my 40s,
00:35:08
30s and 40s, I would still often have moments of existential dread when I contemplated my own extinction. You know, I'm gone, gone forever. You put those aside very quickly because we can't stare at our own mortality too long without shying away from it. I haven't had those moments of existential dread for most of the last 20 years. And the reason I haven't is
00:35:38
not because I have an ironclad belief in personal immortality, although I believe that an afterlife is something greater than 50% of a probability. I can't help it. I'm an applied statistician. I have to think in terms of probabilities. But I do have this sense of thinking I live in a meaningful universe. I have a sense of that concept,
00:36:08
Christian concept, that I think has counterparts in Judaism of God's grace and forgiveness and love in ways which don't have any strong effect on my day-to-day behavior or my presentation of self, but do have a very important part in my personal
00:36:38
satisfaction with thinking about my life. That's very vague, but it's kind of a vague effect that gets to start the sentence over again. The human condition is something that all of us wrestle with in all sorts of ways. I've had a lot richer way of thinking about the human condition since I started on this meandering path. As someone who has only become
00:37:08
particularly religious and observant over the past handful of years, three to five years myself, I fully concur in that. I could not possibly concur more fully stronger. It is just a wonderfully fulfilling thing. It does tend to fill a void that many folks probably did not even realize was a void they actually had all along, frankly. I guess on that note, Charles, it's a perfect transition, if I may. Let's get you out of here on this. You've been very generous with your time. What would
00:37:38
your message be to those who, like you, just didn't really give any of this a whole great deal of thought? they were not militant atheists, but they were not daily or weekly or even monthly church attendees either there. It just wasn't a particularly important part of their life, if it was part of their lives at all. What would your message be to those folks from the perspective of who, again, was essentially one of them for a very long time
00:38:08
and only recently has, per your book title, started to take religion seriously? I think that the book is pretty good in conveying that central message. This stuff is fascinating. So, you don't have to start out with this saying, okay, I'm going to begin my spiritual journey and I'm going to discover God. All you need to do is say that a lot of very smart people have thought about this for a lot of time
00:38:37
and there is lots of material out there which you, being like me, in your curiosity, you are going to be rewarded in one sense just because you're going to enter into bodies of knowledge that you haven't encountered before and that will be fun for you to explore. But the second aspect of it is I'm also saying to them, I don't know how it's going to work out
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for you, but for me it worked out with not just learning lots of stuff that I'm glad I learned because it was really fun to learn it, but also it's going to shape the way you look at the world and it's going to shape it for the better. Well, a hearty amen to that. Charles Murray, one final time folks, is the F.A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He has been a prolific author over the decades, most recently the author of Taking Religion Seriously, which came
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out in October, available everywhere you purchase your books. That's been the topic of today's conversation. Charles Murray, you are an American treasurer. Thank you for your time on The Josh Hammer Show. We wish you a very happy Thanksgiving as well. And a happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Thank you very much. And thank you, as always, for watching The Josh Hammer Show. We certainly wish you a very happy Thanksgiving. We'll be right back coming this Monday. The Josh Hammer Show is a member of The Trust Project.
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