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Ok and youre in a strange how do you envision god our guest on todays program says that we are born with an inbuilt need to humanize our version of god and i brain is actually hardwired to decern commentator our little scholar reza azlan will be joining us im a link of the law and ill be bringing reza your comments and questions keep those coming to me with hash tag stream and of course were live on you tube theres a chat after one side one of our producers is moderating typewriting there what you want us reza and ill bring not to and now for those of you who arent familiar with reza aslan here he is on our front but mike he hasnt in november what conclusions have you arrived over your life and your career dare i say over whether religion is a force for good or evil a positive or a negative its both i mean religion is both a force of good and evil because religion is a manmade institution and human beings are both good and evil and so i dont know why it would come as a surprise to learn that the religious institutions that we create can also be responsible for profound acts of good and compassion and positivity and for equally profound acts of violence and bigotry and hatred two very different versions of religion there are lots to talk about with the acid and joins us from the u. S. City of houston rezzes on a book tour for his latest work god of Human History. And also with us in this frame rate on your coma is an associate professor of anthropology at Rollins College and tyrone decent is a reporter at Pacific Northwest magazine welcome to the stream actually one i want to start with the very first line of the book god of Human History when i was a child i thought god was a large powerful older man who lived in the sky a bigger stronger version of my father but with magical powers reza those are your words so now that youre older and perhaps a little more jaded how is your understanding of god changed well it has changed i mean the god that i believe. God its not a godly personality or with emotions or where human motivations but i do want to say that that child that image of god that i have is a image of god its you know children who have been study by. Psychologists and content of scientists about their views of god almost universally described god in these kinds of superhuman terms as a sort of a super human being with Human Emotions and occasionally with even human limitations. Human history of god reza there are so many stories just packed for you from the earliest times where man had some kind of sense if there was another force outside of himself when he decided that there was right up until current day out of those stories which is the one that you read all relish and joy telling and tell it to us. Well so one of the things that i do to describe prehistoric spirituality which of course is a very difficult topic to discuss and to dissect is i take the adam and eve story in the bible and i pretend that i dont believe were actually our homosapien ancestors and so i take you through what their Spiritual Life would have looked like specifically in the first chapter i walk you through their journey into one of the spectacularly painted caves that dach the landscape of europe in asia but can be found as far afield as australia. Indonesia even here in north america obviously theyre much newer in north america and what im trying to do is explain to you that what was taking place inside of. Me likely a spiritual exercise that the caves themselves were meant to be a kind of subterranean sanctuary that we did it very well controlled religious experience something kind of the kin to going to the stations of the cross and so this is kind of my way of melding you know what we know about the Scientific Evidence or our ancient ancestors and the biblical view of adam and eve as the first humans so weve got a question here at twitter at lolla marseilles in the book reza talks about the faith impulse being embedded in us as a product of our evolution but hes also said that faith is ultimately a choice could you clarify that as it seems like a contradiction. Right so the religious impulse the impulse to believe that we are more than the sum of our material. Bodies that there is an immaterial aspect to us what sometimes is with virtuous substance dualism the idea that the mind in the body are separate and distinct yeah that is a that is a cognitive impulse i think the evidence indicates that that is a function of our brains what we do with that of course is a choice whether we choose to actually continue to believe to explore that impulse that is a choice and i made that statement specifically to address this conversation that we sometimes have a useless constant conversation as far as im concerned about whether we can disprove god or whether a faith has a rational aspect to it and the answer to all those questions is no you cant prove or disprove god the least of time to even have the kind of. And thats the faith the experience the religious impulse however you want to define it is not a rational thing its an experience or. It is in many ways an emotion like any other emotion it has everything to do with our person your Life Experiences how late to the world around you frankly like any emotion so yes it is an inbred inborn impulse but what we do with it is a choice how we choose to explore it its a choice whether we choose to ignore it or not the choice and the thing rachael entire i will start off with and i looked at a number of polls that reza talked about in the book and you have up to the question about the focus. That yes i noticed in the book you did spend a lot of time talking about the three big monotheistic faiths. Is that how the empire to humanize guide arose within those religions and how they developed as a result but what about some of the other faith traditions that dont think you need a deity at their center let alone an anthro. One yeah so the last third of the book the last three chapters do deal with the monotheistic faiths primarily because the very idea of monotheism is such a new phenomenon i mean in the hundreds of thousands of years that you can say with some measure of confidence that we can see evidence of religious expression the idea of god is barely twenty five hundred years old and but that doesnt mean that it didnt arise occasionally it did it just was repeatedly rejected sometimes violently so precisely because of what im talking about with regard to this humanizing impulse human beings are more than comfortable with the existence of contradictory conflicting emotions and characteristics within themselves they are not so comfortable with that in a single got it just made more sense to the mind to have it got for each one of our actually each one of our emotions and so thats what i wanted to explore and why i focused the last third of the book on those three religions however i do talk about taoism and particularly buddhism its important to understand that the idea that buddhism is. A nontheistic religion is a misunderstanding of what buddhism is certainly in the there are about a branch of. There is no conception of the in the way that we understand it in the west but in the much much larger mahayana buddhism not only is there a very clear sense of an idea divine beings or supernatural beings but those supernatural beings are all without exception understood in humanistic terms indeed much of the sort of the. A logical underpinning of my little understand the buddha himself as essentially sure dharma in human form so how we think about the divine thats not the issue or how many gods there are issues issue it is that we have a compulsion to use ourselves as lens to understand the world and that in the divine and so we just jack our own natures our own personalities even our own body upon the god let me show you this image here from the Seattle Times rather afghans intriguing book explores questions about god tyrrell. If you had had a writer to hand at the time what would you want to ask. And go ahead and do it now. When i when i saw that the title of the book actually and the Human History i started to think immediately of my own experience i dont practice any religion now but i grew up in the south of the United States in kentucky and i remember deeply humanized version of god that i got in sunday school and you know the booming voice of the priest the baptist preacher god is almost like a friend in a way not just your savior not just this spirit that you go to but someone who comes down to you into the pews and you know and so i started to have all these memories in which the first part of god being this old guy in the sky i mean i completely understood you talk about how god becomes meaningful in a very personal and intimate way with people because its such a part of religious tradition where i come from you know god have you ever met god and that idea that its a person who you have to come to know almost like a next door neighbor and and maybe trace that back to god origins if you will. Yeah thats really a really great question you know in many ways that this is of the book is that if you could look at the entire history of human spirituality as one interconnected and remarkably attempt to make sense of the line by giving the divine Human Emotions human personality human strengths and weaknesses human virtues and vices until of course in the person of jesus christ literally becomes a human being and. You know i truly believe i mentioned this in the book a truly believe that the reason why christianity is the largest most successful legend in the history it will very likely will need to work on is that it gives it fully abandons itself to this unconscious impulse to humanize god christianity says god its not human like god is literally a human being if you want to know what god is like then just imagine the not perfect human perfectly kind perfectly compassionate perfectly loving thats god that is a very easy thing for people to do regardless of what culture they are from i mean this idea that this utterly inexpressible ineffable mysterious thing can be known so easily simply by imagining him as a person is enormously appealing theological ive you know it was appealing to me but thats partly why i became a christian in high school for a lot of years precisely i think for that reason i dont was referred to it as it feels like scratching the economy to it that we all have. And you can understand why people are drawn to it you know your story is hilarious my story is Something Like that when i think in an evangelical christian when i was fifteen years old my meat pastor gave me a card like a Baseball Card with jesuss image on it and on the back it said jesus in my pocket and he told me just to put in your pocket and this way you know jesus was your best friend somebody who you can talk to like somebody new with me on the streets will always just be with you. And you can see. People drawn to that. I personally believe that its a its a limited way of thinking about the divine which is why ultimately christianity and and try to create a much more. Conception of the divine but i completely recognize why or so well were typically if your best friend is telling you to do good there but if not this is a common base but this is a politician who doesnt agree with that concept he says the more human beings try to compare god to a human being the more confused they actually become no one can know or understand god so thats one persons perspective but i want to move over here to this comment we just got live on here to the last how does a human for trail of god impact our daily lives and reza you mentioned that we often project our own image but whats the worst Case Scenario of that actually happening the worst Case Scenarios happening right now in alabama where you have even general pastors essentially ignoring or excusing pedophilia and child molestation because they believe as you know one one gentleman recently said that its better to have a child molester and then a democrat that person is talking about is really in god as just a construction and so we dont just give our our. Emotions and attributes to god our politics to god we give our our by and our bigotry to god and when we do so we create an enormously dangerous situation where we create a god who looks and acts and thinks and feels just like we do but without any of our human limitations and no wonder that religion can be as i said at the top a show of force for both good and for evil wrote an op ed for the Los Angeles Times the dangerous cult of donald trump using code in a pejorative sense to help a little bit more for us. Yes i do mean called in the pejorative sense as its sort of connotation as insulated group of individuals and to a charismatic leader who takes upon himself some measure of divine or Prophetic Authority and that is unquestionably how a large swath of white evangelicals understand donald trump i mean youre talking about someone like Franklin Graham who before the election positively compared donald trump to abraham and moses and even frank in media a high old pastor one of the main evangelical supporters who not too long ago said that he believes trump is receiving the divine downloads from guard people like Robert Jeffords who currently his chief evangelical adviser who openly explicitly set that in a political contest between donald trump and quote a candidate who expresses christs values he would choose donald trump and by the way its not just a cult its a doomsday cult. Its a cult that is currently facing what any objective observer would recognize to be the slow deterioration of the trunk presidency and thats very dangerous because ive hung out with a lot of cult members and i can tell you that cults dont deal well with reality that the only thing more dangerous than a cult leader is a cult leader facing martyr and were starting to hear it already from his followers Pat Robertson just. Four weeks ago warned that anyone who. Is disobeying. So speaking of trump and of course the news of the day this is a tweet weve got several like this asking for your opinion on this from him it says what are the Global Implications for trumps declaration of jerusalem as the capital of israel but before you answer that another person sent us this on twitter simple says quoting you in an interview with mother jones obama has been the single worst president in modern American History and dealing with the Israeli Palestinian conflict so my question to him after trump Statement Today is obama still the worst president ever in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Well i dont think a bomber did anything to actually promote the Israeli PalestinianPeace Process on the contrary he continued a long standing policy in american diplomatic and Foreign Policy circles to essentially give the israelis a blank check to do whatever it is that they want to it is important to understand that our chief negotiating principle with regard to that is that it should only be settled through negotiations between both parties and whatever you think about what donald trump has done you have to understand that that is ludicrous that is pretending that both sides are on equal footing as i like to say you cant have a negotiation over how to share a pizza when one side is eating the pizza so i am not a believer in the idea that negotiations will settle peace but certainly throwing a bomb into the mix which is precisely what donald trump has done despite warnings from our greatest allies despite warnings from his own National Security adviser despite warnings from secretary mabus his own secretary of defense but hes done so precisely to appeal to one group and that is the group that i was just referring to a few minutes ago which is his white evangelical you know the Israeli Palestinian conflict not as a conflict over land or politics or territory but as some sort of cosmic battle for the end times right on terror and i just want to get your thoughts when we described reza as an author a commentator a scholar i want to play you a clip of him talking to the speaker of the house in the United States paul ryan but i just wanted to get a sense of how do you see him and the way he uses his platform before i play this clip right kewl. When i think of fraser as a great public intellectual i think people who have the education and the knowledge to write well for the public about subjects the public might not know a lot about is that its a wonderful thing to be doing in the media and in his books time. Art i agree i think that its important to bring scholarship into the Public Square to be a good storyteller obviously resit been involved in a number of heated discussion about his work and about his perspective but i think that kind of discourse involving religion bob and spirituality as a as a Political Tool and or is really important let me play this clip then i think you might want to think of this is maybe a little bit of activism and im really curious about this reza have a look im old enough now that i pretty much only judge people based on their relationship with their kids and you seem to have a beautiful relationship with your kids you wonderful family and so i feel like i could maybe reason with you when the big top is on fire you dont complain to the clown you complain to the manager if youre the manager and the big top is on fire reza is part of what you do about calling people out do you feel that because you have this background in decades and decades a looking face look at religion looking at how people can be better people that you also have this ability to say listen im using my name to call this out to call you out. I think that its. Not just a responsibility and mean its a duty. You know i got a lot of well positive and negative comments about how i have my show on c. N. N. Canceled because of my criticism of donald trump and people ask me all the time whether i regret it i certainly regret losing what i thought was a great show i regret the fact that dozens of people lost their jobs as a result of it but i think that history is looking down at us at this moment that every single one of us is going to be judged by how we respond to what is nothing short of an extension crisis in this country you know we in the United States do pretty good job of rallying together when we when we are attacked by enemies abroad we have an enemy within right now systematically dismantling not just our democratic norms the very values which this country whats founded and if you have a voice and youre not using it to shout at the top of your lungs than you didnt serve the joke the history so reza with that said i know there are people that want to hear more just like that your opinions this is us a bill is on twitter who says my question to reza is does he have a no show in the works. Im not allowed to talk about it but im working on something just give me a beat. I had heard he say that this is the last book god to Human History that youre going to write about religion why. Well two reasons one because i think in many ways its a combination of of the previous work so i mean i really feel like this is pretty much all i have to say my other works were much more about religion but its history with. Religious characters and this is much more about faith its much more personal. And its an appeal more than anything else to me to people with your beliefs to sort of to think differently about god to think differently about. And you know i feel as though that there are other forms in order to spread this message to a much larger audience i think of myself first and foremost as a storyteller and i want to tell different kinds of stories we refer to him as a kind of stories over what time were going to have to take it online because were like thirty seconds left on this show i got enough time though to say tyrone and right reza thank you very much for being part of the show and what happened you know into this arena who says to me think this the state of the heart the soul as such the symbols only which are just a means of human beings to learn about their faith and express themselves and we all need a home at the end of the day and so doing so our hearts and souls language is just a worldly aspect of that thank you very much of i guess and a community of course many have and of course things are online communities are participating today on twitter periscope and get to see you next time. So. Slightly easier to be a writer for than. It. Was something you really did you see if you like kids. Building a new life on an entity beach. Living off the sea and then not. A dream shared by so many but so few make it a man its. A Family Business led by a mark of a woman with a flair for cooking and disaster when if. My team is yeah i didnt catch it at this time on aljazeera. Zero. Where ever. The International Campaign to abolish Nuclear Weapons has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in an exclusive interview with the winning delegation from the Award Ceremony in oslo al jazeera asks whether banning the devastating weapons could finally lead to complete disarmament on al jazeera. This is aljazeera