Authors@Google: Michael Krasny

>>presenter: Hello, everyone and welcome to another AuthorsGoogle event in the San Francisco office. Today, we are extremely pleased to have Dr. Michael Krasny. Dr. Krasny has actually been to Google before in both the Mountain View and San Francisco offices to talk about his first book, "Off Mike". And he is, as everybody in this room knows, and probably most people who listen to NPR across the nation, is the host of KQEDs award-winning Forum program, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on arts, culture, health, business, and technology. The Forum is actually KQEDs most popular local radio program that's produced in the San Francisco Bay area and broadcast nationally. Since 1970, Dr. Krasny has been a professor of English at Stanford--pardon me-- at San Francisco State University and he's also taught at University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University. He's also the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the S. Y. Agnon Gold Medal for Intellectual Distinction, the Eugene Block Award for Human Rights in Journalism, the Inclusiveness in Media Award from the National Conference of Community and Justice, and the Koret Foundation Fellowship. Over the years, Dr. Krasny has interviewed hundreds of thinkers, writers, philosophers, atheists, and believers. But despite discussing countless controversial issues with his guests, he has yet to find satisfying answers to life's biggest questions. This led him to write his latest book, "Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic's Quest", which he will be actually discussing here today. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Michael Krasny. [applause] >>Michael Krasny: Thank you and thank you for having me here. And try to get used to this face with this voice, those of you who know the voice through the medium of radio. It's nice to be back here, at Google, always interesting to me. I was saying just yesterday on the air, we had a program some of you may have heard from 9 to 9:30. It's one of these odd couplings that we sometimes do in public radio at your NPR affiliate. We spent the second half hour talking about sea otters, but before that, we talked about succession in high-tech companies. And it seemed to me to be one of those news stories whose time had come, because Mackwell, who was in town, but also because Steve Jobs going on temporary medical leave again, as many of you know. And because your own company, in April, will change hands as far as the CEO leadership and Eric Schmidt handing the baton over to Larry Page. I think that may mean some interesting changes, but we'll have to wait and see. I hope it's all to the good. What we do every morning, for those of you who are not familiar with the program, is talk about news issues and also talk to people who are news makers, and certainly talk to people who are part of whatever this zeitgeist is that's going on. That is, tomorrow, for example, I'll be talking with a novelist who’s originally from Sierra Leone and be talking about shifts in juvenile justice. This morning, we spent an hour talking about President Obama's State of the Union address and then talked with Belva Davis, who is an African American icon and legendary figure in the world of broadcast journalism who's been at it for even longer than I have. And that's what I do, day to day. I mean, my other identity is as a college professor and as a scholar, but I like when I write books to go into different territory. I mean, a lot of it's been scholarly territory; I did write a book that I spoke about here in Mountain View called "Off Mike", which is essentially a memoir about both talk radio and what I call "literary life," which amounted to a self-expose of wanting to be a novelist and failing and nevertheless, having the opportunity to interview some of the greatest novelists that are alive. This book was a very different kind of book and it was a book, frankly, that I didn't know I was gonna write and I was surprised that I was writing. I started thinking about what I believed or what I didn't believe and thought, "Can I really get it down? Is it something that I can explore? Am I gonna be doing what I do day to day on the radio, asking simply too many questions without having answers?" I had a friend – I have a good friend, who when he found out I was undertaking this questioning, skeptical attitude about what to believe as a magnum opus, or as a writing project, he shook his head and gave me a bit of pathos and said, "What are you writing -- another scholarly book that has no answers? Don't you know, Michael, that book's not gonna make you any money." Well, people want answers with books, it's true. But they also, I think, especially many thoughtful people and seekers and everything, are interested in the kinds of questions and the kinds of questions which maybe keep you up at night, or did when you were a college student. My publisher likes to call them "3 o'clock in the morning" questions and I realize that certainly, most of my adult life has not only been asking questions on the air, but reflectively and reflexively thinking about these questions and maybe ruminating and mulling on them perhaps more than one should divest one's consciousness to do. I began with a line from a British novelist that I particularly found compelling. Julian Barnes, the novelist, if that name means anything to some of you and it may, I hope, who said, "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." And I found that resonated for me in so many different ways because well, frankly, after talking to and reading the athiests, and there is, of course, a whole new viral strain of militant atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and others who have really taken that position rather forthrightly and presented a formidable opposition to organized religion as well as, along with Richard Dawkins, a very strong and scientific support for atheism. And I found myself thinking about my interviews with them and also thinking about interviews I'd had with leading theologians and people who had given themselves to lives of faith and who had done some pretty extraordinary things in light of their faith, or because of their faith, or with their faith as a catalyst. And I thought, "Is there some way between this kind of polarized debate that has gone on in our country now for well, generations, but certainly in recent years, particularly with the kind of intensity that had never before been seen?" And I started grappling with the larger question, "Is there a God?" And I found myself asking even tougher questions. "If there is a God, what's the nature of the God?" and "Historically, how has God, as a monotheistic or before that, in terms of polytheism, Gods been viewed? Are there things we can synthesize from that?" Because I like to think of myself as a synthesizer. And I began to ask questions that were even, in some ways, more relevant because once you start thinking about God, you find yourself thinking about good and evil. You find yourself thinking about these basic metaphysical questions: Why we're here? What we're doing here? What our purpose is here? Is there a reason for our existence? And it began to be more than contemplative; it began to be a quest. And I realized that I came out of really a long tradition of making this sort of quest in terms of what I began to see as Agnosticism. And Agnosticism is something that's almost made into a joke. I mean, people of religion make it into a joke because you haven't made the leap of faith if you're an Agnostic; you simply doubt and you don't know, or you say, "I don't know." And Atheists find it, in many instances, contemptible because you are hedging your bets and taking what Pascal, Blaise Pascal, the philosopher, called The Pascal Wager. Pascal, who was a mathematician, but also a philosopher, said, "The best thing to do is to live a good, virtuous life because there may be an afterlife. There may be Hell to pay literally, or there may be rewards in some kind of Divine sense. So, there may be nothing also, but let's just hedge our bets and do this wager and do it the right way and be good." Because, certainly, most of Scripture and most of religions have been teaching us to try to be good and compassionate, despite or notwithstanding, all of the dreadful and horrific things that have been done in the name of religion. And I had to grapple with that as well because I realized that there was a reason that gave birth to a lot of the strong, militant atrain of Atheism. It had to do with anger and indignation, and a great deal of rebellion against what religion had been. Particularly even recently, not only because of 9/11 associated with religion, but during the Bush Administration there were many figures like Jerry Falwell and others that young people particularly found themselves contemptuous of and who felt that they didn't really want to be identified with religion, was identified with the Crusades and the Inquisition and all these horrible things of carnage; many wars ongoing. And so, many people nowadays say, "Well, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious," or, "I don't have a religion, but I'm spiritual." And I thought, "What does that mean to be spiritual? What is it, in fact, that we mean by spirituality?" It's a signifier that the great Derrida, the deconstructionist, post-structuralist thinker, would call a floating signifier, because it's very hard to get a handle on what we mean by spiritual. A lot of people simply talk about spiritual-like, maybe George Lucas's the Force, or something that can't really be defined. It's a quest for maybe a higher meaning or more transcendent feeling. So, all of this began to be, to come into perspective and I found myself quarreling with people of faith and quarrelling with the Atheists, and finding not necessarily a middle passage, but at least finding some sense of a tradition of skepticism, which goes all the way back, not only to Western cultures, but to Eastern cultures, which simply questions. Einstein said, "The thing is to never stop questioning," and I began to really accept that. And I began to realize that the idea of a God, which is not palpable necessarily to me or which I can't make the leap of faith for, is by dint of history an idea that has taken sway of so many civilizations, both in the Western and Eastern world. Buddhism has, to some extent, negated God, but there have been Gods in Buddhism and there is the idea of Buddha as a God incarnate. Almost really every major religion has the idea of a God. And I had gone through a phase, which many young people do--I'm not a young person anymore, but when I was a young person certainly-- of being nihilistic and thinking nothing has any meaning. And I read "The Existentialist" and thought, "That makes about the most sense to me." Some writers, like Hemingway and Sam Beckett and others, spoke to me personally and it's a good pose to take that you believe in nothing and nothing means anything and we're all like Sisyphus, rolling that stone up a hill for it to catapult us down and life has no meaning and it's absurd and it's totally irrational. And this is easy to wear as armor for oneself. I thought, "No, I don't really believe that." I did at one time, but I do think life has meaning. I do think there are things in life that can provide meaning and what are those? You begin to grapple with them on an individual level. They're different to you than they may be to me, but nevertheless they're worth exploring in a universal way. And so, I thought, the real word that begins to apply to what I am is "Agnostic". And I once interviewed Studs Terkel, who said he was an Agnostic, he was a great oral historian and I said, "What do you mean you're an Agnostic?" And he said, "Well, I'm a cowardly Atheist." [laughter] Maybe Agnosticism is a form of cowardly Atheism. In fact, maybe Agnosticism has become a source, because it has indeed for a lot of jokes because of this kind of almost contemptuousness that comes, as I said, from both sides of the continuum, or the spectrum. Mort Sahl came up with the great line that some Atheists moved into an all-White, Christian neighborhood and someone burned a question mark on their lawn. [laughter] And there's also that *** Allen line about an Atheist and an Agnostic who got married and the marriage didn't work out because they didn't know what not to bring the child up in. Well, actually, I found myself saying, "What is Agnosticism?" Aside from the sense of a tradition that goes back, as I said, to skepticism and before, in Eastern and Western cultures, besides Socrates, who said, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing," and some of our greatest thinkers coming to that kind of conclusion, Agnosticism began to resonate for me in different ways when I began to study the Agnostics. And actually, there are three. I call them, somewhat irreverently, the Trinity of Agnostics. There are three major Agnostic figures in the 20th Century. One of them, of course, is Bertrand Russell, a name many of you know, the Nobel Laureate, mathematician, philosopher, who also called himself an Atheist depending on what his audience was. There was a man named Robert Ingersol who was known as the great Agnostic, who was a stunning orator and an attorney by profession. And there was also another Agnostic by the name of T.H. Huxley, who gave us the word "Agnostic." He was known also as Darwin's Bulldog and he was the grandfather of Aldous Huxley, a name probably familiar to more of you. But T. H. Huxley began to define Agnostic in terms of not having Gnosticism, not having secret knowledge, not simply knowing. And he said, "You know what? I'm an Agnostic. I call myself an Agnostic, but I'm open to knowledge. In fact, I want knowledge. I seek it. I welcome it. I would embrace it if I have an understanding of what these Higher Powers are, or these things that a priori, I can't determine, that are beyond the metaphysical realm, that is, above the physical realm, the material realm. I wanna know what those things are and I'm open constantly to the possibility of being convinced of what they are." And I began to realize that there were some extraordinary and very-- I shouldn't move away from the microphone-- significant analogies between Agnosticism and the paranormal because we explore the paranormal and we try to find out if indeed everything happens for a reason, as some people say nowadays, or some things happen for a reason, or there's synchronicity, or there's serendipity, or there's psychic power that you have, telekinesis, all these kinds of things. None of them have been proven and there's, again, a strong skeptical tradition that says, "Show me the proof," essentially, where these things are concerned. And so, I began writing about the paranormal as well and I began writing about spiritual hunger, which I thought, is a real phenomenon because I think people, and especially so many of you who are young, want some sense of answers, want to be able to name or be able to find some sense of signifying meaning that will give you purpose, that will give you meaning, that will provide some elevation of spirit or of faith or of vitality or ignition in your life that you, perhaps, have been looking for or are seeking maybe even more than you know. And I found myself exploring some other extraordinary lives. For example, I was always curious about a man I interviewed many years ago by the name of Brian Weiss, who wrote a book called "Many Lives, Many Masters". And he was a Princeton educated – excuse me – a Yale educated MD, who had been in charge of psychiatry at Miami General Hospital and he believed that there were former lives. And he had every sense of conviction that former lives existed and he would take patients and take them back to their former lives; past life regressions. Which, as a skeptic, of course I looked on with some disfavor and skepticism, but I thought, "What makes a guy like this tick?" I wanted to figure him out. Bright guy, scientifically trained and so forth. And I had the same question about John Mack, who was a Harvard professor, whom some of you may know, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, in fact, of Lawrence of Arabia, was a leading psychiatrist and head of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard, who had taken all of these people who felt that they had been abducted by aliens, put them under hypnosis, and they were completely, utterly traumatized by something that they believed was alien abduction. And Mack was saying, "There must be something there." And again, I looked upon this with a high degree of skepticism; still do. But I wanted to know what made somebody as smart as Mack also tick. What made him search for this meaning which he looked for with these abductees? I also brought into this particular triad of subjects of interest, a man named Ian Stevenson, who spent more time zealously trying to recover data that proved, again, former lives because there was evidence he felt that people had died at a certain time and their souls had transmigrated and they had gone into somebody else's soul because there was this xeniglossy, which is a whole phenomenon where somebody can supposedly speak a language that they've never learned or they've never grown up in. And he had what he felt was incontrovertible proof of xenoglossy. The proof doesn't convince me, but I wanna know, again, what makes somebody like that tick because I feel that all of these men, brilliant men in their own ways. And Stevenson, by the way, was Head of Psychiatry at University of Virginia. You can conclude from these three cases that all psychiatrists can be mental cases, but I wouldn't do that. [laughter] That would be one syllogism. What I wanted to find out is, as I said, what motivated them? What compelled them? And I thought it was spiritual hunger, and I began to look at their lives, especially someone like Brian Weiss, who had lost a child at a fairly young age, and he and his wife were clearly in mourning and grieving that needed some kind of meaning. And frankly, why I call my book "Spiritual Envy" is because spiritual anchoring and faith can, and indeed often do, provide not only meaning, but wonderful consolation. Whatever you want to say skeptically or nihilistically or to downgrade or to derogate the idea of faith, or the idea of a spiritual anchoring, there are people who find consolation and there are people who get off of a life of recidivistic felonies. I used to do work at San Quentin with prisoners and I found that those prisoners who adopted a faith, in many instances, got out of a life of crime much more than they would have under different circumstances. I discovered through research and doing a number of programs on this, that there are many young people and people of middle age and even older, who are addicts. Addicts, in some instances, their whole lives, who are able to give up their addiction because of faith. I mean, faith doesn't necessarily move mountains, but faith and belief and spirituality can not only console bereavement, it can provide an antidine or an antidote--whatever you wanna call it-- or amelioration of some pretty severe and serious and complex human problems. So, I found myself, curiously enough, in this ambivalent situation about faith, because one has to concede the fact that religion has been misused and abused and people have done dreadful things in its name, but I also began to think of what religion or what has been done in the name of religion that's positive. And I thought of the Abolition Movement and the Civil Rights Movement and they were very tied to religion. I thought of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, which is essentially a Catholic movement, and the Catholic Theology Liberation Movement in South and Central America, all trying to ameliorate poverty and all dealing with social problems. And so, I wanted to give that kind of unbiased-- what I like to think I do as a broadcast journalist in my better moments-- view of faith, religion, spirituality, and what is behind them. And yet, this book in many ways, is a personal quest. It's a personal quest to try to find out why I lost my own belief and what happened, because I said Julian Barnes' line had such an effect on me. And I didn't know what was still stirring in me in terms of desire. And I have friends who say, "Who the hell cares?" The novelist, Jane Smiley, whom some of you may know, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who lives now in Carmel, said to me, "You know, Michael, I used to be an Agnostic, but now I'm an Indifferentist cause now I really don't give a ***." [laughter] Maybe there's something to be said for being an Indifferentist. But some of us can't just give that up, that search, or give up that desire to have a higher meaning or to have some sensibility that will make sense to us and will give order to our thinking or some kind of pattern to our thinking that makes maybe a more transcendent or higher and more elevated sense. I thought, though, rather than talk more about my book, I would read a short passage because the book is very serious and, as you can tell, it takes on some pretty serious questions. But Eric Idle of Monty Python once said to me in an interview, "There are two forces in this world. There's gravity and levity." Which I like to this day. [laughter] And I wrote a few things that I thought, I guess I'm a frustrated novelist, so I wanted to be a storyteller here as well, and I told some stories and a few of them, I think, are worth at least one, bringing to your attention because I think it's pretty funny, and it also gets to some questions about the paranormal and about where skepticism and Agnosticism play their role. It's also a story that I simply like to tell, so I included it and it's a short enough story that I'd like to read it to you. But mainly I wanna read it because it's funny. And I begin by saying a funny and revealing story comes to mind. This is about a quarter of the way into the book. [reads] "I had an accountant named Bob Steiner, who was also a magician. I like saying my accountant was a magician. Steiner became rather well-known in the world of skeptics and debunkers, and he appeared many times on television and radio as a bogus psychic. In fact, he worked with the famous magician, James Randy, and he and Randy exposed a phony faith healer named Peter Popoff, who used an electronic device that fed him information through an earpiece. Popoff's wife would tell him, through the earpiece, people’s ailments as he approached them in the audience and he would amaze everyone by noting, supposedly with help from God, what they were suffering from, or where they were in pain, or what they had been diagnosed as having; all information acquired ahead of time by Mrs. Popoff. Steiner happened to mention to me that he was doing a television show for the Fox Network based on the life of Harry Houdini. He informed me that they were going to do a séance, in which they would attempt to get Houdini to speak from the dead because Houdini had debunked many séances and swore he would communicate from the afterlife, if one existed. [laughter] "It all sounded like good entertainment to me, and when I asked Steiner who was producing the show, he told me it was a fellow named Ken Ehrlich. Now, Ken Ehrlich had, at one time, lived three houses away from me in Cleveland and we had belonged to the same college fraternity. My sister had been his babysitter when he was a child and our parents were friends. He had gone on to be the producer of the Emmys and the Grammys, and Ehrlich had no way of knowing I knew Steiner. Steiner had impersonated a psychic on many occasions all over the world as part of his debunking crusade, and he was good at it. When set against others who claimed they were real psychics, he inevitably got audiences to believe in the superiority of his psychic powers. Then he would reveal that he was a skeptic-- [laughter] "and a magician impersonating a psychic. I asked him when he was planning to see Ehrlich, and he told me they had a meeting set up for a week later in Beverly Hills, and I proceeded to reveal to him many facts about Ehrlich that few people, except those from Ehrlich's past, could know. [laughter] "When Steiner met with Ehrlich, then Erlich's assistant producer, Steiner went almost immediately into his psychic role, insisting right off to two skeptical men that he possessed paranormal powers. To the assistant producer, he made general observations of that sort – of the sort that anyone might buy into, and then he told Ehrlich that he had never before felt such powerful psychic vibrations as he felt with Ehrlich. He started off by saying he saw a diamond and couple of older people. Did that have any significance? I had told Steiner that Erlich's grandparents name was Diamond. I had also told Steiner – excuse me -- I had also heard from my mother, a few months earlier, that she and my father, who were still friendly with Ehrlich's parents, had attended the bar mitzvah of his brother Steve's son in Cleveland. Steiner asked Ehrlich if he had a brother, and when he did, Steiner asked if there was a recent celebration or ritual having to do with the brother's son. All this was pretty surprising to Ehrlich. [chuckles] "But he deduced that Steiner must have talked to his wife.’You spoke to my wife, didn't you?' Ehrlich asked. Steiner looked Ehrlich right in the eye and sternly said, 'I swear on everything, including my own life and the lives of my children, that I have never met or talked to your wife.' Whereupon he asked Ehrlich another question gleaned from my supply of information. Had Ehrlich dated a girl in college with a peg leg? [laughter] "Ehrlich became, according to Steiner's description, highly agitated-- [laughter] "exclaiming that his wife did not know about this girl who, unfortunately, had come to be called 'Peg Leg Betty.' [laughter] "Steiner told me he felt compelled at this point to let Ehrlich know the truth, because Ehrlich was begging. Then Steiner blurted out, 'Mike Krasny says hello.'" [laughter] A little bit of a quasi-charming story and funny, but also revealing in the sense that one can always present paranormal or parapsychological as being real. And one can always make people believe in ways that they didn't even think they could believe, or would believe. They might have think -- they might have thought, as many do, that they had a strong enough skepticism to be a bulwark against that, but that was the point of that story. And the point of this book is to really illuminate, educate about Agnosticism; to talk in ways that are going to be catalysts and have been catalysts, I'm proud to say, to many really wonderful conversations about the nature of spirituality, about the nature of meaning in life. And I can tell you this because I am at that stage of life now where, unfortunately, I can be called an Elder, and have been. I discovered that whether you believe in something or not, maybe is less important than how you guide and what you do and what you accomplish and what you set out do to and what you make of your life, of course. And I know that sounds trite and it sounds like a platitude, but lemme put it into a context. When the great African American playwright, August Wilson, died, I was very moved to read that a reporter who had talked to him only weeks before his death--and for those of you who don't know, he's the author of "Fences" and "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", and a number of works that won him a couple of National Book Awards and Pulitzers, both--he's a man who was, by the way, I admired and was a tough interview; a little bit surly and strong-minded in ways that were almost slightly combative at times, but nevertheless, I gleaned a lot from the few times I got the privilege of interviewing him. The reporter who talked to him before he died was talking to him about life and life's meaning and he knew that the death sentence was hanging over him. In fact, he thought he had a little more time than he had left. He was dying of pancreatic cancer--the severe kind. And he said, "You know, my life, when I look back on it, has been so filled with blessings and that's what I have to say as I know I'm on death's precipice, as I know I'm going into what Dylan Thomas called 'that good night of death.'" And I thought whether you believe in blessings or not, if you can say that toward the end, then you're saying a lot. You're saying an immense and abundant sense of what life can mean and what life ought to mean. And so, the realization that, for example, to say to yourself at a certain stage in your life, "I've lived a good life,' whatever that means, and one hopes it means a virtuous life, one hopes it means a noble life, one hopes it means an ethical life, but to say at a certain point that you lived a good life, that you've made some kind of contribution that's meaningful impact, that you've been a good, decent, loving, compassionate person, as opposed to saying, "Good or evil? What's the difference? What's -- what does it matter in the long run?" I mean, cause a nihilistic view and a view of say, what Dostoyevsky gives us in The Brothers Karamazov, "If God does not exist, anything is permissible," is a legitimate intellectual view. There's no gainsaying it, right? If you believe that God should be involved in our human affairs, for example, be that kind of omnipotent God or a God who is entering into our lives, then you have to wrestle with some very considerable questions, such as evil and why it exists; the question we call theodicy in philosophy. That is, how can God allow for carnage? How can God allow for horror, child molestations, children being beaten and so forth, like in Karamazov? Regardless of what your own answers are, what a sense of compromise you may come to, it seems to me, and I wanted to make this case, in a polemical way that there is a case to be made for living a good life, that there is a case for choosing goodness. And in many instances, it's very hard to even decide what goodness is 'cause you know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You know that sometimes when you choose to be good, it turns out to be not good at all. And sometimes when you choose to be not good and your own free will is involved, goodness comes out of it. So, it's always a challenge, especially with the big questions in life. I remember interviewing the Nobel Laureate, Issac Bashevis Singer, and I said to him, "Free will in your work means so much. Free will seems to mean everything. Do you believe in free will?" And he said, "I have no choice." [laughter] But I think maybe we don't have any choice but to believe in free will and to believe that choice is ours in many instances. Certainly, you can feel that life is being shaped for you, determined for you in forces that don't allow for your own existential authenticity or genuineness, but to a great degree you have choice, you have will, and you have the power of decision-making. And that means the power to decide whether or not to do good, or to be compassionate, or to be loving, or to give service, or to do something that has a mission to it that makes life a better place for all of us. Thank you. [applause] I wanted to be brief because, obviously, this is a topic that I can go on and on and on about. But I found that when I give talks, there are not only questions about the conversations that I like to think the book and its content starts, but there are usually questions or comments about the work I do in radio, which I'm certainly welcoming because the last time I was at Google, the last two times at Mountain View and here, there were a lot of questions about what I try to do in the way of public service day to day. So, whatever's on your minds is certainly welcome. What I said was, if any of you have questions or comments about anything I've said related to my book, I'd be certainly delighted to entertain them, hear them, welcome them. These ideas about spirituality and about search for God and all have, it seems to me, been, as I said earlier, catalysts to more questions and more conversation and I welcome it from you. But also, if you have questions or anything you'd like to raise about. The Forum program and I do on a daily basis, that's welcome as well. So, you have free will here. [laughter] Yes. >>audience #1: Have you done much exploring in-- >>Michael Krasny: Pardon? >>audience #1: Have you explored many spiritual schools of thought? Have you pursued practices of Buddhism or Islamic traditions or anything of that nature and do your explorations get closer to the answer? >>Michael Krasny: Did everybody hear the question? Have I explored other spiritual roots and the answer is most affirmatively, I made a lifetime study of religion, theology, philosophy because it happens to be -- some people like to listen to U2, I like to listen to and read theology. I'm quirky that way, I guess. But, a more important segment of your question is, have I tried some of the practices? And yes, because I think there's a lot to be said for meditation. I think there's a lot to be said for many of the Buddhist practices. I've gone to Spirit Rock; Jack Kornfield's a personal friend who was nice enough to write some wonderful words about my book and I've looked into just about every major spiritual form of transformation and investigation. Have I embraced any of them? No. Have I taken any as an anchor of faith? No. Do I think that they can provide meaning in people's lives? Absolutely. Yes. >>audience #2: So, I have a question. It sounds like this book is primarily about an individual’s faith in God and lack thereof, but it seems to me, I am British, so I come from a country which basically gave up on Christianity about 40 years ago. And I grew up going to church once a month because my parents-- >>audience #3: 400 according to the Pope. >>audience #2: Yeah. Right. But the church doesn't form a big role in Britain because of-- >>Michael Krasny: No. No, many fewer Brits go to church than Americans by far, by disproportionately. >>audience #2: There's the state and the trade unions and so forth, which provide a big social staple structure of people who belong to. Whereas, the States, I have friends from Tennessee and so forth, and their parents, their families, everyone belongs to the church because it's kind of like the only safety net they have. And so, do you address that or have you addressed that there's this double-sided thing – there's being the individual spirit you have but it's also this big social role that the churches play across the world in Islam and Christianity. >>Michael Krasny: Well, it's a very good question and I'll come at it from a couple of perspectives. One is that churches, mosques, synagogues, houses of worship really do provide community for people. They also provide tradition; they provide heritage. I mean, one of the things, I guess one of the quarrels I have with the atheists is they wanna throw the babies out with the bathwater, and there are things, obviously, that organized religion does provide people. The Evangelical woman is still extremely strong in this country about, believe it or not, one out of six Americans identify with that movement and consider themselves, even a larger number then, that believe in Heaven and Hell, certainly believe in God, believe in Jesus and the Resurrection and so forth. And what you find is the younger generation -- there's a new book out in fact by Robert Putnam, who wrote "Bowling Alone"; he was on Forum, you can listen to the program--this is not a plug-- but it's on iTunes and it's on the Web and so forth; you can download it. But Putnam’s really a good thinker and he did a lot of research, a lot of deciduous research talking to younger Americans who have been more eclectic, taking Buddhist practice or taking forms of spirituality of one sort or another without necessarily joining a congregation, or belonging to any kind of congregation or organized religion. That seems to be part of the pattern in America, but the pattern is still very entrenched with religion. By contrast, in the UK, or much of Scandinavia, which has become very Agnostic, by the way, I mean Denmark, particularly, but also Norway and Sweden, and to a lesser extent Finland, these are countries that go through all the rituals with religion, christenings and confirmations and so forth, but they've abandoned religion for the most part. I mean, obviously Russia has abandoned religion, or did under the Communist regime. The Chinese have abandoned religion. Religion is not the global force it once was, but in many ways, of course, it remains an extraordinary global force when you think of Islam and when you think of Gnostic and Evangelical Christianity and Arden Christianity, and particularly as I think you suggest, in this country. But when you're talking about the generation divide, you're talking about something that's, I think, quite real. And how young people reconcile the strong faith of their parents with what, for many of them, is a breaking away, is, I think, an individual matter. Because you hear young people saying, "Well, I'm getting married and I'm having a priest, even though I think this priest may have buggered somebody." I mean crazy things like this. [laughter] I mean, there's all this ambivalence. In other words, "I'm disdainful of religion, but at the same time, I wanna do something for my parents, so I have a priest marry us in a same-sex marriage." No. [laughter] The sense of being fastened to the past and wanting to please your parents and not wanting to commit what, I'll harken back to a great existentialist who is a nihilist, Jean-Paul Sartre, not wanting to commit bad faith. That is, not wanting to do something that goes against your own authenticity is, I think, a battle. It's a battle again of free will and decision-making. I hope that provides some light. >>audience #2: I was more wondering about could you have Agnostic church? Like, if you wanna be Agnostic but you wanted to belong, how would you set up an Agnostic church? >>Michael Krasny: There are Agnostic places of worship; there are Unitarian churches. You know the joke about the--I write a lot about the Ten Commandments—the joke about the Unitarians is that they call them the Ten Suggestions. [laughter] There are many forms of secularized worship now and they're becoming, Kinderschules in the Jewish religion, for example, which abandoned any idea of monotheism, but want that sense of heritage and want that ongoing tradition that is imbued with Jewishness as opposed to Judaism, which is very rooted in monotheism and belief in God. There are Agnostic societies. There are, in fact, AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, used to say "I believe in a Higher Power. I'm subject to that Higher Power's power, all that," there are Agnostics and Atheists who felt uncomfortable with that. So now, there are Agnostic and Atheist chapters of AA. So, yes. The answer is yes. Yes. >>audience #3: [ ] often religious compared to [ ] in a pejorative way, but one of the things I found interesting about what you were talking about is that you brought religion and paranormal activity together through the pursuit of skepticism and that our skepticism as it relates to those two topics is very similar. How did you find having discussions about paranormal activity, what religious folks did and were you able to navigate that without triggering that sense of "Oh, you just think this is all psychics and whatnot"? >>Michael Krasny: Well, really deeply religious people are extremely suspicious of the paranormal because I have some friends, in fact, who went around teaching yoga, and this isn't the paranormal, but it’s a good example. They were teaching yoga in elementary school classes in places like Idaho and Nebraska and parents were, the same kind of parents who were really concerned about kids using Ouija boards or maybe getting a little bit too into Halloween or Black Sabbath or things of that sort, these are parents who feel that their kids' souls are at risk here. I mean, whether it's yoga or whether it’s the paranormal, they do feel that way. And I think you have to have a sense of, at least sensitivity to that, or respect that as much as you can. There - what I found in this debate is there is a dogmatism on both sides that I don't like. That is, people of religion can be terrific people; they go out and they do missionary work and they try to help the poor and lift up the struggling peoples of the world, sometimes in ways that have been dastardly, to be sure, but sometimes in really significantly merciful and kind and decent ways. But too many of them are off the scale in their dogmatism, and are unwilling to be open to those of a different turn of mind or belief system. And the same has become true for many of the more militant Atheists. When I interviewed Salman Rushdie, for example, who has become an Atheist, he said, "I'm an Atheist but when people say public policy, I believe fetuses are life, for example, therefore I don't believe in abortion. I believe that all these abortions are a Holocaust of human life." He said, "I have to recognize that that comes out of a faith-based belief. That's policies. I don't feel contemptuous toward their belief, but I embrace the idea that God does not exist; the absence of God." And by the way, Stephen Hawking just came out with a new book where he said, "I'm no longer an Agnostic; I'm an Atheist because the Big *** probably had gravity before it." And I thought, "Steven, you may be the most brilliant man on the planet, but you still gotta ask the question, how did gravity get here?" Anyway-- [laughter] if you talk to exceedingly religious people, or exceedingly strong Agnostic – I mean Atheist believers, Bill Maher is a good example by the way. Bill Maher, if any of you saw "Religulous" or if you listen to him or see him on his show, he's really very contemptuous toward religion and it’s that dogmatism, I think Maher is a brilliant comic and I have a lot of respect for him, but it's that dogmatism that I enveigh against, that I am on my own hobby horse enveighing against because I don't think it's healthy. Look, this is a republic that believes in freedom of religion, even though the Puritans came here and they burned witches and they punished Pagans and Indians and all of that because they didn't conform to their religious beliefs that they came here to practice and believe in. But nevertheless, it's a cornerstone of American belief. And when I look back at the Founding Fathers, and when I do that, I get very uncomfortable because I begin to think, "Krasny, you're sounding a little like Glen Beck"-- [laughter] and Heaven forefend, if there is a Heaven. But our Founding Fathers, for the most part, I mean, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and everything, they were deists. They believed that God maybe created the Heavens and the Earth and then He went MIA, or She went MIA, or something went missing in action. And then it became up to us to make this shining city on the hill and this republic into a great and ideal place. And one of the things that's been the cornerstone of that ideal has been freedom of religion, freedom to practice and be whatever you wanna be, or not be. There were always village Atheists and they were, in some instances, really tarred and feathered and all that. There were never village Agnostics. I tried to trace that. I thought maybe, it was actually almost an institutional phenomenon of the village Atheists, but nevertheless, Agnostics were looked on with less scorn than Atheists, and they were a little more accepted. But people of strong faith, and this is in our own American literature, people of strong faith looked down upon them and still look down upon them. Yes. >>audience #4: I just had a brief comment on that end, both on the side of Atheists and the church [ ]. I have a belief, after years of listening to you on the radio, what you look like. [laughter] I am struggling with this man, who does a wonderful Michael Krasny impersonation, but I believe he looks much different. So, it's kind of neat to illustrate that. >>Michael Krasny: Have you come to the conclusion that I'm far more handsome than you had anticipated? Yeah. [laughter] That's, that's always the reaction. [laughter] >>audience #4: Not the face for radio. >>Michael Krasny: Well, sometimes it's a face for radio, actually. Or, it feels like a face for radio, but that's, that's kind of you. And I like that as a metaphor because you do have these notions in your mind. I mean, some of you have a picture, probably, of God, or you did when you were a kid; flowing beard -- whatever the case may be. If there is a God, and I'm not saying there isn't, it's hard to prove it negative. But if there is a God, he, she, it may look nothing like you imagined, in the same way that you experienced this phenomena of looking at me. For example, I found myself also exploring the notion of extraterrestrial life because I thought to myself, "Here again is something we don't know." We don't know what's out there in interstellar space. We don't know what's out there in the small planets that look like Earth or beyond our galaxy; there's an infinite number of galaxies. Like Carl Sagan used to say, "Billions and billions." We may even -- I'm interviewing Brian Green on Monday, both on the air and at the Herbst Theatre, and some of you may know his work, the string theorist, physicist from Columbia and he's always been saying. His new book is, in fact, making an argument about parallel universes and all of that, and they may exist, but we don't know. I mean, that's what Agnosticism says ultimately. We just don't know. Nancy Reagan said, "Just say no to drugs," Krasny says, "Just say no, I don't know," to some of these questions." But we always thought that if there is life out there, that it's life as we perceive it; it's life, somehow, existing in oxygen or some kind of atmosphere like our own. But there may be life out there or some kind of life as we don't know it. I mean, as a mystery to something that we can't even conceive and that, it seemed to me also, was a good metaphor for just what you were saying about you have an image in your mind of aliens. John Mack, who I mentioned before, the Harvard professor who thought all these people were actually being abducted aboard spaceships and everything, he didn't see the kind of data and research that was done that showed that a lot of these people who describe these aliens and everything had these pictures in their minds once these sci-fi movies started to come out and proliferate. No accident, I think. These movies were being made. There was an image of a certain kind of alien. And people had that image in mind. There may be aliens out there, but you don't know what they look like, right? You have no idea what they look like. Now we're told, and this is why God has always been so anthropomorphic, we're told that we were made in the image of God. We're told that when you look in the mirror, you can see, in fact, the image of God. In fact, Voltaire said, "God created man in his image, and man returned the favor." It's a good line. But if there is a single God, and by the way there's an argument to be made that maybe the polytheists were right, maybe there are many Gods. Maybe there's God with a pitchfork in the ocean, Neptune, Poseidon, Apollo driving a chariot in with the sun. There's a new book out by Professor Dryfus, whom some of you may know, he co-authored with the Head of Philosophy Department at Harvard [ ] where they make the argument that we need to bring back a lot of that polytheism. A lot of where we've gone wrong is with monotheism because this God is such an angry God and a vengeful God and there have been so many things done in the name of war and aggression in His name. And it was always His, His hegemony and so forth. And I found myself thinking that this anthropomorphic idea of a god may have nothing to do with, if there is a God. What that force may be. That force may play no role whatsoever in our lives. It may just be a primal force that began to create out of some great Sargasso Sea of netherness, what we now call our very small, little, blue planet. Human life may be just one of those strange accidents that came about, but you always find yourself going back to those questions of, "Well, if there was a Big ***, what was before the Big ***? If there was gravity before there was Big ***, what was before gravity?" And these are questions that, right now, we don't have the answers to, and we may never have the answers to. However, I don't know how many of you know Tyson, who is the host of NOVA, but he said to me in an interview that, he said, "They're just new frontiers, Michael. That's all they are. They're just new frontiers that we have to explore and that eventually we'll gain knowledge about. We just don't have the epistemological chops right now, but there's always, where science is concerned, the possibility." Yes. >>audience #5: Do you find the presence of religion in certain theories in science, like the string theory or multiverse? >>Michael Krasny: Well, I do in string theory to some degree because I think, and Bryan and some of the other string theorists would probably say as much, I think it requires a certain leap of faith. I mean, if you're gonna believe the hypotheses behind string theory. I did something a number of years ago, it was really quite a--I write about it in the book—quite an extraordinary experience. I was asked by a fellow named Phil Clayton, who is a philosopher, to be an interlocketer, an interviewer at Harvard at the Trinity Church there, for those of you who know Harvard. And it was a conference on science and the spiritual quest. And what they did was they got a hold of some of the major scientists, both biological and physical scientists, internationally of our era, who had some sense of faith, belief, spirituality, or who were doing research that seemed to bear out. And in most instances, those were the scientists who came. And these are a pretty brilliant group of people. Now, most scientists are either Agnostics or Atheists. That's just a fact. [phone beeping] But these scientists presented data, they presented phenomenological research, they presented all kinds of things that suggested that there may be like, the Tao of physics type of thing, if you read Fritjof Capra's book, those sorts of things. A deeper possibility of something spiritual behind what we can't discern or make sense of. I wasn't convinced. I remained the perennial, the inviolable skeptic and that's where I remain. Yeah. >>audience #6: Thanks for coming. Quick question, when you were raised, you were raised in a severely religious family – sorry if I missed this in the beginning – were you Bar Mitzvahed and was there an acute reason, person, or incident that led you to change your religious past or was it over a period of time? >>Michael Krasny: Now, how did you know I was bar mitzvahed? [laughter] You could probably guess that I was circumcised, too, wouldn't you? [laughter] Yeah, I was brought up in a Jewish faith and I was brought up in a way that answered questions for me when I was younger. And told me that there was something higher to believe in. It was conservative Judaism, which is more, in some ways, specifically observant than reform. You know, the old *** Allen joke about the reform: My rabbi was so reformed, he was a Nazi. [laughter] Dark humor. [laughter] I'll tell you what happened 'cause I write about it in the book. It had nothing to do with my later change and shift in beliefs. In fact, I think I went through probably something that many people have gone through. There's nothing even that unique. I just had an intellectual springboard in my life where I was reading people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Darwin and Bertrand Russell and I realized that I'd become a doubter. I didn't have that faith that I wanted to cleave to, that I wanted to hold fast to. And I missed it because I think it is something to cherish, because it gives you comfort and hope and certainty and can give you real purpose. What happened to me when I was a boy though, I write about. And I've never talked about this and I'd never written about this. It's funny, I interviewed Belva Davis. You all know who she is this morning? Belva Davis was the first black journalist on the West Coast to be an anchor. She does "This Week" in Northern California for KQED television. She's an icon; she's a legendary figure. She's 77 years old and she's a remarkable woman who has been a kind of Walter Cronkite, a trusted figure in broadcast journalism for many years and has written a memoir. And she wrote this memoir and decided, although she had never talked about it, that she wrote about being molested. Because it was important in telling her story. And I was never molested, but when I was a sixth grader, I was a young kid with a lot of extroversion and desiring; maybe I was even ADD, I don't know by today's standards. I probably could've used some Ritalin; had a lot of energy. It's all, I think, been channeled in better ways than it was when I was younger, but when I was younger, it was being a class clown and acting up and acting out. And I had a teacher who happened to be a Brit, who had taught at the private schools there, and some of the stories about them are unfortunately true. And when I would act up, or when I would act out, on a number of occasions, he would take me, literally by the ear, or by the scruff of my neck, take me across the hall into the boy's room and beat the hell out of me. I mean, we're talking about slapping and kicking and on a couple of occasions, at least, I remember one quite vividly and then I remember there was another one when he put my head into a toilet. I mean its dreadful stuff. When you tell it as an anecdote, it almost sounds funny or farcical, but when you're a kid and you're going through that kind of stuff, it's horrible, traumatic. And I wasn't a stupid kid, so I decided, I announced to my teacher one day and to the class, like Richard Nixon did when he said there was a new Richard Nixon, I said, "There's a new Michael Krasny." It had nothing to do with Nixon; that would be later. And I was gonna be a good boy and not act up and I became my teacher's helper and started cleaning the blackboards and sweeping and doing all these kinds of things. Trying to be a good boy, trying to actually win his, to curry favor with him so he wouldn't beat the hell outta me. And what happened was, he asked me to take a can of yellow paint to a sixth grade classroom, right across the hall, the other side of the hall. And it was a big can of paint and I tripped and the paint went whoosh down, like a small miniature river down the hall. And he used to come out and also, aside from beating the hell out of me in the bathroom, he would go into the bathroom to have a smoke, came out of the room to have a smoke, saw me standing there looking forlorn with this yellow river, grabbed me and gave me the worst beating I ever had and made me mop up the river. And I went home. As a kid, I kept the tears in because if you cry and anybody saw you cry, you were a sissy and that was the worst thing to have to withstand. Again, if there's a Heaven, Heaven forefend that any one of your fellow boys in this working class neighborhood I grew up in should see me cry. But I went home and there was a little, wooded area and I went into the wooded area and I started sobbing. And I remember exactly what I said. I said, "I was being good and God, you know that I was being good. Maybe nobody else knows. Maybe he didn't know 'cause he'd beat the *** outta me, but You know that I was being good." And that's how strongly I believed in God. I believed in God with that kind of fervor and that absoluteness of belief, that I felt His presence. And to lose that because it made sense to me that I couldn't put into perspective that kind of God any longer, years later. I mean, I could remember even just a quick, funny story, when I was about 14; there was a guy, a character in my neighborhood who had – who invited me over to look at ***. [laughter] Which, a 14 year old kid can be a turn on, obviously. Especially a testosterone-driven kid, and he had all this ***. Nowadays, you just go on the Web. You have to do everything you can to protect your children from going on the Web, it's so ubiquitous. But at the time, it was pretty verboten and interesting. [laughter] And then he said to me, "You have to swear on your mother's life that you won't say anything about what I'm about to show you." And, being a curious kid and of course, interested, I thought, "OK." He said, "Go ahead, swear on your mother's life." "I swear on my mother's life." "That you won't say anything about what I'm going to show you." "All right." Well, this kid, who we called Tweezer-- [laughter] -- so the nicknames, the etymology of some of these nicknames have been lost in antiquity. Tweezer had a mother who you would call now, a MILF. [laughter] And does everybody know what that is? OK. Tweezer actually had photographs taken by his father, of his mother, naked. He showed me these photographs and I wanted to tell all the guys in the neighborhood that I saw Tweezer's mother in the buff. But I thought if I do, my mother'll die. [laughter] Because I'd sworn and I'd taken this oath on my mother's life. And I never even breathed a word of this story until my mother was laid in the ground, until she died many, many years later, because that kind of belief can be that strong. And it's not a belief, in other words, that God is there and God is rewarding, but God is punishing, too. And to lose it, I'm not so sure it's a bad idea to lose the punishment side of it, but to lose the reward side of it, well, that's another story. The toughest loss me for was the loss of the belief that simply, that presence was there. And that's what I grappled with. Thank you again so much. [applause]