Episode 26 - Faith and Music with David Bazan

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[Music] so if you're the kind of person that prays or sends thoughts or whatever you do send them to mike he's doing well he's recovering but guy like science mike we need that brain to be fully functional so anyway he's taking a break today but we have mr david bazan in the studio hi hi oh in the studio it's just my living room he was touring through town through the area and he was gracious enough to stop by maybe for some of our listeners that might not be aware of your stuff maybe we could just start with some of your story yeah i know you're a pastor's kid as well yep uh specifically me music pastors pastor yeah get us going so how how how does your when you think of your early walk of music and your early life of faith how were they intertwined especially with a dad that was a music pastor well you know i mean i grew up in phoenix arizona and we lived a half a mile from the church that we went to and that my dad worked at and the school that i went to was a part of that church all of every single person in my from like kindergarten yeah kindergarten to sixth grade okay um every single person in my extended family is uh christian and the same kind of christian that we were pentecostal assemblies of god so yeah i mean it was just a complete bubble that i lived in um but it was great yeah you know in that context and certain kinds of evangelical christianities specifically i feel like there's this push for your faith to be fully integrated in your person in your identity and it's not some separate kind of ornament you know to your life it's like the fundamental thing and so that was the mindset that i kind of grew up with was that like this is you know it just permeates everything and and i enjoyed that i mean it there's a like a feeling of fidelity to it that just yeah it just made you feel good it was and bad too i mean you know there was guilt and separation from god because you're a sinner and like all this stuff but that you know could tend to plague somebody like me at that point but uh i listened to only christian music that was all i was allowed to listen to i think i got a couple of with a couple of minor exceptions as a kid my aunt got me a single of caribbean queen by uh get out of my dreams and in my car oh billy ocean oh yeah yeah but yeah so just like the christian bookstore was where i went to buy records and the first record that i ever bought of my own volition was carmen the champion and i was like fucking psyched so psyched because what had happened is as i called the christian radio station like every day and just said play the champion he's like kid buy the record like go by the record and i was like oh oh yeah okay i'll do that you know and so in my way and in that totally backward little subculture of you know ccm like i curated for myself like music that i found some meaning in and i was kind of always still searching and always searching and by the time but not right were you playing or no this was like uh in seventh grade i started playing drums i had played a little piano as a kid my dad gave us lessons and i played clarinet but in seventh grade i started playing drums so still seventh eighth to ninth grade it was mostly christian music except i discovered the beatles in eighth grade that was absolute turning point you were born again it's true it's true it's truly a born-again kind of thing because there still is just not there's it's rare that somebody comes along that's functioning on the level that the beatles were functioning on harmonically and just the inventiveness and melodically and so that was like a little blip but it wasn't until um 10th grade that i was that the floodgates were kind of open i asked my dad if i could get a columbia house like did you have a subscription deal and he was like um okay i think it's time like it's fine so i then i started buying the cure and you two and um fugazi and just it's just everything became available then um but before that it was all christian music and i was playing drums in church hadn't picked up a guitar really yet ninth grade i guess is when i started learning chords from guys around the church so was it for church music that you started learning it was for curiosity but i it was used first um the first time i ever played guitar in front of anybody i was leading the two and three year old sunday school class you know if you're happy and you know what clap your hands yeah and then shortly after that in 10th grade i started writing songs of my own i had already decided in ninth grade that i wanted to play music for a living but i was picturing myself as a drummer giving lessons playing like weddings and you know combo jazz combos and you know just kind of piecing it together like my drum teachers that i had in every town that we had lived in they all had figured out a way to sort of make a living as a musician and so that was my blueprint and then when i started writing songs i thought that this is what i want to do i just want to write these songs and drive around and sing them you know [Music] i didn't know you were pentecostal yeah so we had that same thing my dad my dad was not only the pastor but the music pastor oh yeah um i started playing guitar in the twos and threes yeah we called ourselves the heavenly sounds uh-huh that's awesome probably played some of the same songs i would imagine for the two or three and then i graduated to the other children's church age and finally the big church yeah but yeah i mean i can remember the christian bookstore and the tape section yep see man yeah and it was a shelf it was about 10 feet of shelf space and there's only about three feet that was you know not twilight paris or whatever else was you know you have petro praise on that part yeah as deep as i thought i was digging i really missed like there was that whole la like the 77s and adam again and daniel amos and like all these bands that i would have loved but i didn't i didn't get exposed to them till way later kind of got into christian thrash metal for a little bit because i was just looking for something something with some bite yeah with some kind of something to it um that was thinking for itself and that that music seemed like it was i don't know that i think it really was but oh but i also remember i went to berean christian bookstore in phoenix looking for a scattered few record that's a like i guess maybe an la band and they have this record that i really loved back in the day and i probably still would enjoy it now called sin disease and um the guy informed me that they did not carry scattered fused music because the last time they came to phoenix they played in a bar and so they're boycotting you know them and i just thought i didn't have i didn't know enough about the world to understand all everything that was going on there but i just thought that's that's really uptight man like it was just it was a bum it was kind of like the the sounds like the message is getting lost in the music buzzkill it was just like is it really this it's this rigid it's this narrow i don't know if most people know how much darkness is in the christian music industry where it's like these it it's almost conspiracy theory like where it's like these men in the shadows trying to like keep them in their in their bubble so they don't see don't let them see it's like you know what i mean like we had this fear yeah but it gets weird like we had this radio station recently they wanted to play one of our songs it's a large christian radio station and they had some listeners complain about us they said they liked the message with song but then they which is basically like it's it's as if it's us or them it's us for them and so it's to me about as christian as i can be at this point right right that's that's pretty to me that's pretty jesus yeah no other it's yeah um but they sent this whole thing that they wanted us to sign that's a belief statement oh my gosh and not only just like christian beliefs but then like expanded to like it got it got weird i mean it got to like we believe that people are only born male or female oh right and there's no no in between i was like i actually am related to somebody that was born yeah with yeah with ambiguous genitalia i had to decide that's real that's a real like it's just a fact it's a fact yeah you're testing me to say you're denying hermaphrodites yeah like what and well how did this how did this issue make your statement of beliefs that you have anyway so it just gets real weird out there that that's a that's a very extreme version because they're not it's not a denomination it's a it's a commercial endeavor it's a radio station [Music] that's yeah that's very intense i'm sure you're in the same have the same feeling but that's one of the things that i just thought that that particular strain of hyper pious christianity just all it never made sense to me because usually the people that were participating in were missing some like massive aspects of scripture like you're saying with the the song it it that does reflect a very christ centric notion like from the gospels and when i was i from high school i was reading the bible a lot and seeing things in the bible that just were not represented in the culture that i was in and my dad being the music pastor there was times uh i think in seventh grade was the first time on fourth of july weekend they had like color guard and in the church and they had you know we were singing these patriotic songs and i remember afterward at lunch i my dad was like well you know what do you think of that and uh i was like um i think you're getting things mixed up a little bit like those don't those those things don't go together church god and country those aren't related in any way and he was like huh that's interesting you know let's talk more about that and so there was an earth there was a sense early on that like there's a version of christianity that is kind of pure and based on scripture that the people in the culture that i'm a part of are just barely paying lip service to and so you know that was a lot to think about forever until i was 28 like my thinking was more just like reform the church like just be better um and so and in that sense you know you hear it all the time and it's just the laziest thinking i think that there is that bad christians are not a reason to not believe you know people humans acting poorly speaking for the church or as agents of christianity that's not a reason to not believe it never was for me that was a reason to find the pure version of the thing to like figure out how to do it right and so the impulse that i was telling you about were like people who are just too uptight like i didn't want to be around them i could do that and still be christian you know but then later on um as i started to really evaluate some of the premises of my belief system things started to fall apart and went so that was that mostly in your 20s when did that all start yeah late like um 27 28. and how long did that last took a couple years for it to be maybe a year for it to be really complete once the once the domino started going it yeah i think it probably took about a year so what were some of the first dominoes like hell hell was yeah hell was a big one from i mean hell was just something that didn't see it seemed tacked on from a pretty early you know pretty early on it seemed like wait that that doesn't seem divine to me that seems like made up by some dudes it just didn't fit all the way and then you look into sort of the exegesis of hell and it's kind of dubious like it's not it culturally it gains steam in a extremely profound way but the source material doesn't support it to the degree that it eventually kind of emerged is what it seemed to me at the time so i started looking more deeply into that and inerrancy i started to really think now wait why why why is this a must like but then when it really started to kick in it was after our daughter was born and i it really called original sin and the narrative of the garden into question kind of put it in sharp relief for the first time and i thought the intentionality of me making this kid is so much less than ostensibly the intentionality be behind the creator creating adam and eve in the world and yet there's not a goddamn thing you could that she could do at any point in her life that would cause me to want to be separate from her and never yet alone set her on fire for eternity yeah exactly in one fell swoop the thing just evaporated i just thought that doesn't make any sense no being that would act that way toward their creations do i revere or do i love or do i am i compelled by like that's just again it just seems like patriarchy bullshit and so that was when it really started to kind of fall apart for me and then so without that narrative like what it where does g where did jesus fit in like as the as the answer to what again like he died on the cross because there was nothing there was no because it was just it just seemed like didn't have a framework yeah there was no it wasn't an answer to to any any kind of question that was how i you know thought of it then and so yeah i just i just kind of realized well yeah it's just time to get in the get in your little raft and just be tossed around on the waves for a while just you don't know what you think about anything so you it you know and it was tempting to try to find some other solid ground because obviously people are pretty invested in grilling me about about this thing and so at the time i decided that i needed to get comfortable pretty quick with just saying i don't know you know people wanted an answer for it she's like i don't believe it that's why i don't believe it like it doesn't sound true to me doesn't seem realistic and then once i started really i mean in the background your your unconscious mind is it's cataloging everything and sometimes the things that you believe they really resonate with what's going on in the back in the background with what your sort of gut is telling you about the way that the world actually works and when i stopped kind of believing in christianity everything just started to make more sense it was like oh it's just difficult to get something right there's a hundred thousand ways to get something wrong and it's hard you have to have information you have to have discipline you have to have imagination to do a thing right and that was way more believable to me than like magic you know you were all bad and hurt each other because of a spell that was cast on everybody she's like no it's difficult to do things right it just it just is a fact it's harder to do something right than it is to do it wrong that's why we don't do things right you know because it requires so much coordinated effort on so many fronts to get any single thing right you know and so this things like that started to emerge and i still don't really know what the nature of invisible reality is i mean or i don't even have obviously no one knows but i don't even have a working hypothesis in most most days [Music] so when you were going through all that were you walking that through with anybody did you feel alone i wasn't walking it through with anybody um i would talk to my friends and you know there was a lot of i mean there's a lot of smart people around um both christian and non-christian in my life um and so yeah i definitely the way that my brain works like i'll read one chapter in a book that has some idea that kind of grabs a hold of me and then i'll mull that over for six months and like really work it through and the same thing with conversations like i could just kind of get sent off kind of just spinning and kind of mulling a thing over after somebody just says you know a phrase or we're talking about something and an idea that i just had not considered before comes down the pike that that was that was how the the process went so yeah there was a there was a solitary component to it my wife is not interested in existential anything still not no she i mean she grew up christian and maybe is marginally a christian now depending on one's definition of it but nothing of the existential discussion or concerns ever entered her framework she's just not is not interested in that and so it wasn't was it hard for her no it's odd because she had stopped wanting to go to church just on her own like around 2000 i guess and then she would kind of go sometimes but it wasn't that interesting to her and then we moved out to the country and we both didn't go for a couple years and then she got pregnant and wanted to go back to church so i i said okay well if i don't really want to but if if this life inside of you is stirring up something that you want to like reengage with christianity that's fair i'm i'm down with that but on the other hand if this is just the only way you know how to do family um i feel like we can think a little bigger about it so she went through that for five years i guess kind of going to church and having me come along and then really not wanting me to come along because if i'm there like i'm engaging in it in a way that we get in the car after church and i say dude whenever he said that like yeah that's totally true but then his conclusion it doesn't make any sense like why that doesn't necessarily follow from what the premises that he you know gave and she's like dude shut up like i don't want to i don't want to talk about it i just want you to come with me sit in the pew be nice you know i was like can i drink before and just like sit there and kind of be drunk and she was like no i don't think you should do that it's just like well what do you want you know what do you want from me she's like why don't you just not come for a little while let's see how that feels like okay that sounds good and so then when our son was born coincidentally she hasn't been back so yeah i mean she has been on her own kind of because no aspect of the existential concerns really appealed to her she has had to sort of figure out what is christianity even what is it even mean to her and she's really quiet and all of that is happening like a thought process that would take me days and days to like kind of hash out i think just occurs to her in a split second she's like yeah it sounds good i'm not gonna really think about it too much you know so which is a trip but yeah so we weren't you know i wasn't really bouncing a lot of that stuff off her she could see the the effects of the turmoil that i was in and i guess that's one thing to bring up is that it was it was so painful yeah during the aftermath both during just just the processing all of that the information and yeah kind of doing the math yeah again and again and losing god you know losing that was it just totally a gradual process or was there like a moment that you kind of let go there were a couple there were a few moments it was a very gradual process but there were a few moments one of which i was at a in church with her and it was christmas time and we were singing all of these really rad old hymns christmas carols and i was doing the work like you know one stanza of lyrics i would sing and i and i would think to myself i believe that that's real and then the next stanza you know i was doing like a line item veto of these songs and like really really doing the work just sitting there and engaging and like wrestling with it and it was cathartic and it felt like it felt right to me and then i sat down and the guy who was speaking spoke and i i hated him i hated every moment of it was just so unserious to me it was like pandering and it just was the epitome of what i wasn't interested in and um i'm sort of wrestling with this and then he says okay now we're gonna take communion and i thought oh fuck i can't i can't take communion like i've just i'm so not in community with this like i've just sat here and judged it so negatively for 30 minutes and so it was the first time i hadn't been to church you know more or less for years but i had never not taken communion and i just as the they started passing out the elements i just stood up and left i just thought i can't i just told my wife i was like i'm gonna be in the car and what i did was i walked down to a bar and um had a shot and a beer and kind of had my own little communion ceremony and it it was and then we went to lunch and i just i stayed in the car and just sobbed for like 40 minutes i was devastated it was gradual but there were these moments where there was big shifts and that was one of them and i think i continued to kind of wrestle with it for a long time and in some ways i still do i mean you know god rid me of god it's a powerful idea and was it just the false deity that i was shedding and there's a real deity that looks totally different in the in the nooks and crannies somewhere in the the dark matter you know i don't know it feels impossible most of the time but sometimes and so that process it was always the way that it went you know so yeah it was it was very it was very painful the loss and the grieving and all that stuff were really pretty real and profound it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists um then i felt a lot of peace uh afterward which was i was grateful yeah yeah i i've some i experienced some similar things as well sorry the listeners of this have heard my story but i'll give you please um forget them tell me [Laughter] so i had very you know similar thing i think when you've seen behind the stage your whole life when you've got you've been in the bubble your whole life and then you start seeing stuff outside of it you start putting the pictures together it's terrifying right especially depending how much of your life is built on that platform yeah um and then you start like tearing up the platform that you're standing on yeah that's terrifying that you're still yeah and that's really a good picture of it because it's just totally destabilizing you don't know where the bottom is going to be yeah and what what of your life is going to fall away and for me it was pretty much everything yeah like my whole life i didn't have i really didn't even have non-christian friends right i just was in this was you know uh in my late 20s as well that really my seeds of doubt started earlier they started kind of in i just had a very long deconstruction yeah process i'd take one board up and then like try to ignore the fact right but i was always thinking about it i just was wanting as hard as i could to keep those boards nailed down but over years finally just i couldn't i couldn't hang on anymore the other metaphor that i had used on the podcast when i told the story before was uh holding on to this i felt like i was holding on to this branch and this river i was like 16 or yeah whatever i started i was just holding on and uh i couldn't anymore like i had lost yeah feeling in my hands i like i just couldn't hold anybody so i just finally let go the end of 2012 stopped believing yeah and by that the pain had been going for years and we've sung a lot about that pain in our music even our christian music and then for me it was a great sense of peace yeah when i finally let go and like it was a strange somehow it felt almost like an act of devotion absolutely i think it's a it's a deeper fidelity i mean that was the thing that i was that i was so terrified to because when you're a christian especially a particular kind like fidelity is really an important part of it that you feel like and to me it felt yeah it it felt like a true it felt like a true faithful response to the data you know and that's i hope none of this comes across as incorrectly but that's one of the things i loved about kershaw branches um and at the time i would have been still like holding on to my faith but even at the time it felt different than say a dawkins critique of christianity might be there i think there's something about going through the inside uh zizek this philosopher has says this thing about like there's no atheism that's as profound as the one through christianity basically jesus on the cross saying my god why are you forsaking me right that's sort of coming to the end it's it's a little different than like there's science or there's right faith right there you know this is the the simple dualities right don't believe superstition or myth just believe truth right and science and that's some of the critique that some people love are against level against christianity and there's a lot of that you should listen people should listen to about the dissonance within the song itself within the faith itself that calls you forward into like if you're gonna how you can't have a religion that says both god is love and you know like love your enemy and all these things and have hell in it right and not create some dissonance within the song itself right you know what i mean so like the path that follows the thread that's inherent in the path right that calls into question the things that maybe should be called in a question there's something deeply faithful about it or something like that that's what i felt in cursive branches it was it was somish you know what i mean it was like this is with and that's why i hope doesn't come across in the wrong way it's a it's a very i mean there is a reverence to the whole endeavor that is i guess when i think about it it's kind of unexpected i didn't realize that that it was there there's like an earnest sort of attempt to take all of this seriously and to do justice with it um that indicates a deep caring about the outcome and about the the cult subculture itself you know and also there is the whole other layer like i am not a believer but you should be able to do to do that a project like cursive branches not music but just like deconstruction and really looking deeply into things and still be a christian i mean the cultural moment that that we're in where that's just not allowed is just bullshit it's the the biblical tradition is so much richer than that and it there's so much more dissonance than evangelical christianity allows to take place um and so even though i'm not a believer i just think like well there's a sense in which a buddy of mine walked from i think to amsterdam to istanbul like just to be a freak i mean just he was on a journey uh just personally and he ran into some guy over there and the guys they barely spoke you know that enough of the common language but the guy says you are you are christian i am muslim and my buddy is like no i'm not a christian he's like yeah you you are from the united states you are western yeah you are christian and it didn't don i mean my buddy just really pushed back yeah for a minute but then he understood what he was saying and it's just like there's a cultural tradition that we're all partaking in that is christianity and it's not it doesn't have to be christianity in the narrow uptight kind of sense it just is the language of our moral system that's western society it's western and so in that sense like yeah i'm totally comfortable like in that sense i also am christian and it was it was really freeing to like let go of the branch as you say but also just realize like i'm still in this river that is you know christianity not in the sense that i believe that there's an afterlife or anything like that but that we're all trying to solve these moral problems that continue to plague our society and we're doing it with through the lens of judeo-christian philosophy and we're in a long line of people doing the same thing and you don't have to be a christian to be i mean we're all doing it you know mad men is doing it and breaking bad is doing it like these all these things and i'm not trying to pull a u2 like they're a christian band but like the scope of what this conversation is people just get so uptight about the definitions and the categories of things and it's just it's silly because you let go of that branch and i was really defensive for a while and couldn't really see myself in i didn't understand where i fit or where i landed and then i realized oh i'm christian like i'm a christian i just don't believe in christianity i don't think that any of it is like metaphysically true but you know i can talk to you about the ethics of jesus and how that relates to the world and you know there are some guys who had stopped being christian eight years ago or whatever would not still be talking about this or be doing a podcast about christianity they'd just be like fuck this and then and then they're just doing something else but i'm this is still what i'm interested in yeah but it's so much of its language isn't it i mean you i hear you say i'm not a believer i'm not or but i am a christian like this is all these are just totally arbitrary believer in what where at this point what we're trying to do is the liturgists is kind of post that right experience that we had of deconstruction what's what now because there is like um you know mike and i have had experiences that are hard to put into yeah to parse into language and stuff but then you know i was yesterday i was on downtown denver and this um sorry krishna guy gave me some material and i started reading through some of it just curiously and just the language i was like i think as if i can understand what they're saying i love a lot of what they're saying right the language and the gods and the myths that they're talking about i don't even know right so it doesn't speak to me but i can hear the myth the christian myths and the christian stories and i know what they're talking about and you can move forward through that in a way that i i'm sure if i had the heritage of being hindu or that i could move forward through different things you know what i mean yeah um so is there anything of your of your christian past or anything is there anything that now you're trying to is there anything that you're trying to reclaim like when you say something like you know it's not original sin it's just being it's difficult to do well to be good in the world oh is that maybe a good definition for original sin maybe maybe so yeah and that that but it's but it but the the ramifications of it are are truly natural i mean i guess that's the thing that you know there growing up christian there was this kind of this distinction between natural revelation and special revelation and that there was common grace the things that sort of just were built into the system that everybody benefits from or is wounded by but then there was this other distinction this special way that god kind of spoke into the world and more and more i just feel like the natural explanations of things are so profound and there's again i think that it's true what you're saying about words like my buddy tim walsh he's really gotten into buddhism and so he talks a lot about the divine and that the divine is in everything and it's like well if the divine is in everything and i agree with him to a certain degree but like what is that word even good for like what does it mean like that all of this is deeply meaningful and transcendent okay you know is that all we're talking about when we say you know the divine um but so yeah i look around the world and it just seems like it i don't need an i don't need a hidden layer this is what is here on the surface is so meaningful and it's so profound and there's enough data to know how to live and how to move forward but for but for me some of that come i mean there are statements of faith that i sort of rest on and after i stopped believing in that context i heard again the mlk i think borrowed it from somebody else but it was it's large it's often quoted as an mlk quote that the moral arc of the universe is long but that it bends toward justice and i heard that and i just thought it was it was scandalizing to me because i thought oh my god do you is that do you affirm that or do you not affirm that like that was a big and it took me months before i really knew how to relate to that statement and in the end i thought i do believe that i do i perceive that to be true like when i look at history when i look at my life when i look at the way that culture you know seems to be going at any given point in time it does seem like that that's true and that's an part of my um creed i guess i mean you know it's one of the few the few things that are kind of in it i don't really spend too much time trying to understand how that relates to christianity one of the differences is that the christianity that i experienced such a huge component of it was that god would eventually supernaturally make things right and that all the wrongs would somehow be righted later that was one of the things that i really grew to resent about christianity is that i thought that it really led all these people off the hook for trying harder to make justice happen now here and to take responsibility for those outcomes so i don't i don't know if i'm answering your question but the other thing is that the biblical tradition like i like reading about people struggling to understand immortality or mortality and morality and the divine trying to contextualize that like when i'm reading you know the old testament that's what i see i don't see anything divine going on or anything supernatural i just see people trying like you know a bunch of terrible people in a lot of ways trying to figure out how to live and that record of that however distorted it is is there's data there to understand and it's fascinating and i think it's helpful it's helpful to me and so yeah i don't i don't relate to the christian tradition the way that i used to but i still find it important and interesting to me but then if somebody's like yeah i have no time for that it's just like yeah fine those are krishna guys like they're not ever gonna kind of cozy up to the biblical tradition the way that guys like you and me would but that's just kind of the luck of the draw or experience like where you're born we could grow we could grow up islam or you know buddhist or whatever and hopefully figure out a way to relate to it that is you know similar to this where it's like yeah you don't have to sign on the dotted line you get you can reserve judgment about things that you don't know the answer to did you hear mike's axioms on his did he just go through his axioms on this i don't know if i if that was on there or not those are fun that's actually what kind of made me interested in the tradition again yeah is after you experience deconstruction there's the question of what now right so how much do i throw out is there anything worth reclaiming and that's you know i guess what we've been talking about but so i met mike and i was kind of telling him at the time when i met him i was like i don't really believe anything right now and he told me about his experience and he said and he knows very well the natural explanations of all that right that's why he he knows he could very well have been hallucinating he's all very aware of it which is hilarious and i got that on the podcast too but he he clearly made there was a choice that he made like this this is the most meaningful way to think of it for me and so but but how he uses the language i think one of the things we do why we try to incorporate science in this conversation is i think we would both feel the same like why do you need some other unhid a hidden magical layer yeah to all of this what if it all is the magic yeah it's all magical it's all it is the thing it's all the miracles so i feel like um what is his his axioms oh yeah that's what i was gonna so he so he came up with these axioms that that he told me and at the time when i was talking to him like i missed some of my spiritual practices i missed some of the transcendence that i would feel about the wonder the mystery of god the mystery that i would feel during communion the some of the weird stuff i i missed some of the like magic of it you know but at the same time i wanted to be intellectually honest so he told me these axes god is at least the natural forces that created and sustained the universe as experienced via a psychosocial model in human brains that naturally emerges from innate biases even if that is a comprehensive definition for god the pursuit of this personal subjective experience can provide meaning peace and empathy for others prayer is at least a form of meditation that encourages the development of healthy brain tissue lowers stress and can connect us to god even if that is a comprehensive definition of prayer the health and psychological benefits of prayer justify the discipline jesus is at least a man so connected to god that he was called the son of god and the largest religious movement in human history is centered around his teachings even if this is all jesus is following his teachings can promote peace empathy and genuine morality [Music] the bible is at least a collection of books and writings assembled by the church that chronicle a people groups experiences with and understanding of god over thousands of years even if that is a comprehensive definition of the bible the study of scripture is warranted to understand our culture and the way in which people come to know god well to me the the i guess it's an axiom that that i admitted uh that the moral arc of the universe is long but that it apparently bends toward justice it has a similar effect that there is the meaning the meaningfulness of justice is kind of built into that it's like okay it it it assumes that right outcomes just outcomes are better than unjust outcomes and that it's all sort of somehow heading that way but for me it puts me in the middle of it not at the center of it but just like one tiny aspect of this kind of flow but also it has the the effect of the aggregate of all of our behaviors is what is what the sort of harvest ultimately is what the yield the sum total is and so how i act like i can't change the world from my position but i can act in such a way that will feed into the aggregate and be a good outcome it suddenly i'm thinking about those things and it requires patience and of the long view and a steadyness that to me is really helpful and but it's also all based on a belief that my actions can be meaningful not directly but in some with with everybody else's um and so then suddenly you're a part of this massive organism yeah too and so that's that's really when he said that i i on on pete's uh podcast those are all the different things that went into my head and i immediately thought of that that mlk quote and that's that's some form of that for is that the function that that is taking for me and and but also it doesn't assume very much about the mechanism by which that is taking place it doesn't assume some creator or something that this is just an outcome that we hope is perceivable you know but what i love about the depth of the tradition for thousands of years is that and one of the things i read more after my deconstruction was that i my all my words were handed to me on a very narrow stream absolutely love the whole thing so like there's a whole side of the globe the eastern people that would be very slow to ever say what god is oh yeah a lot of people that would say like well of course god doesn't exist right it's not a concept that you apply to god you're like um and so that's that's like how you define how you navigate through these words there's this uh guy robel who i just i know him too okay uh he just did this talk that i heard him a month ago or something he says everything spiritual too to her but his kind of his idea that kind of what you were talking about the the bend of the universe towards justice he he i think he was kind of calling that spirit moving towards so he was saying like whatever it is in the universe that makes atoms join together into molecules and molecules join together into life and life continue to evolve into more complex more connected more depth more beauty in some way of reality like that's spirit and i kind of like that i like that like idea that the spirit is what whatever that direction is yeah of the universe and what is the mechanism what what is the question mark at the center of it all and that that's it's a question mark what do you mean it's yeah that's what it's going to stay yeah and maybe god is what brought me back to like starting to use the language kind of for the first time in my life it there was always in there was always an answer that sort of filled that blank whenever i would kind of it was posed to me or i would come up in my head but now it is just a i mean it's you know it's something to really trip balls about like and i like that to me you were talking about the wonder of certain aspects of the church service and the religious life and now i find myself like contemplating space and these things and it's just like or the ocean i mean it's there's so much wonder to be to be found i understand i understand what you're saying in that the appeal of rob's definition of it i don't even know that if there is such a thing as some sort of independent intelligence at the center of all this stuff i don't think that they're that they need the credit that christianity asserts that jehovah requires they're not jealous and these processes that have been set in place they're natural they work naturally you know i get i get still get hung up on what are we talking about when we're talking about christianity and should am i just redefining language so that i have less pain to deal with socially or and that might really be the case or or is a healthier way of engaging in moving forward in christianity have seasons where like what's been handed what's been handed down we have this language is it the metaphysics that really was the point right first place is that what jesus was after getting us to have a metaphysical concept of the universe of magic and not magic or if that was the case why do you just tell stories and stuff like that so like if the point was more and which to me at this point my ties to christianity would hold on to the hope that the point was to sort of follow the ark towards justice and if there is if there is a god if there is any sort of intelligence if there whatever it is it certainly can't be defined in the ways that i used to because that leads me to to dark places sure in my head in my heart of how i see the outside or how you know i can't see the outsider like that i can't right the guy that handed me the all right christian the thing is somebody that's like totally like the opposite team that you're going to burn and i'm on the right right i can't see the world like that but on the other hand to me it's kind of because of my faith i think on some level that i can't see him like that i think that's right that yeah because and there are contradictions within the system of especially evangelical christianity but also all of these questions that that we're asking the answers that have been supplied and this the institutional forces that have evolved and developed and are sort of in place they don't necessarily follow from any one of the gospels i mean this is all through the filter of constantine and rome and like the big the big shift and the crystallization of what christian doctrine really was according to the council of nicaea and all this stuff and then you get catholicism and 1500 years of that and and then you know then you have martin luther and like all of these forces influence what seems like transcendent christian doctrine you know and it's just not that way like you know without the book of john the divinity of jesus is just not really that big of a feature in the other three gospels john is the one that really lays it on and insists that you know that he's god it's it's pretty vague in the other three and so that alone is fascinating when jesus was crucified all of the different accounts have it at a different time that's not that doesn't mean that that the stories aren't true or that something but the it what it does mean is that what we've ended up with 2 000 years later yeah it's it's all these constructs that are based on language but even deeper than that it's based on these cultural struggles that have happened and that yield these outcomes a way to control the population i mean that is such a major force in the development of christian doctrine sure a way to control people's behavior so that there's relative harmony like i say that i don't think that it means that that those things aren't true but it those questions i think are are really valid and the amount of outside the box thinking that one can do and still be on pretty solid ground or i mean you could just go for it you could go forever sure because the culture has defined and distorted or potentially distorted it's but it's defined so much of what we perceive about jesus and at the time i didn't have the capacity for it but a movie like the last temptation of christ comes along and it is a it is a it is so squarely part of the biblical tradition it's it's insane yeah and yet it's rejected because the cultural moment that we were experiencing at that point just could not handle it yeah i hadn't seen that until last year and i was like this is incredibly christian i felt like it was like christian yeah it's because of that that i still am intrigued by yeah the the tradition like the fact that it's built in the prophets are in the bible yeah that's interesting to me the fact that the people that are calling out the bullshit of the thing are in the thing yeah yeah i mean so and the fact that it keeps changing and the god of exodus the the what people the concept of god is not the same as knowing the hebrew word it evolves and so that's what makes me interested like okay now what we know about science now that we know that adam and eve couldn't have been the parents genetically of the seven billion people on earth now because the genetics and the dna don't line up no they could because eve and adam lived centuries apart from one another in terms of like dna exactly yeah they they couldn't have lived in one place six thousand years ago that's it's now that we know that from science what do we do with the story well in the way that it evolved even within that document that is the canon or whatever you and i and anybody having these conversations are not special we're not on the forefront of anything but we're doing by just having this conversation the exact same work that keeps the thing evolving you know you're sitting in your time and place and looking at all the factors and saying what seems most believable to you in that sense we're very much a part of the biblical tradition the christian tradition that's one thing about judaism that's so fascinating is that they don't in a lot of cases it seems like that they so thoroughly embrace that fist shaking at the heavens and the the really relentless questioning of certain things be a part of the tradition that it's not unwanted human society that started you know that there's this stream through judaism and and the early followers of jesus into like christendom through western society through the catholic church through martin luther through that big stream that has had this major societal effect i think is still evolving yeah um and i i don't think anybody that was born into the into it is not influencing where we're all going i agree in some way yeah to be able to do one's faith in the full view and sort of influence of the marketplace of ideas is really a it's a high calling i think and i think it's something that everybody can do because it also it also kind of it allows your faith to be what it really ought to be which is faith not this weaponized assuredness about the outcomes of the universe there's a humility to it that is epitomized in the big lebowski when he says yeah well that's just like your opinion man i mean that's all any of us really like have when it comes to sort of competing ideas and i that kind of faith i think is beautiful and humble and profound it's just like and it is the thing that i think the in each and our different ways that we're both doing when you let go of that branch you're just in the river and it's not the crisis that you thought it was you're just floating in the fucking river and then you kind of get acclimated there and you're like okay well what's next and there are people holding on to various branches and you're like yo man that seems like a cool branch you know are you you know are you yeah like yeah how do you like it i don't like it oh dude let go like it's fine like everything's fine we're all still in the same river we're all just doing this thing you know and somebody says yeah well what really is true is blah blah and you go oh cool i don't know about that but do you want to get a beer like you seem great and i just i just feel like the the nature of real faith is that like you perceive the world to be a certain way and you have these hypotheses and you interact with the world according to those things and you're hopeful that you're not like way off but you're also gracious with other people about their ideas even if you just can't get with them you can't you know and so having richard dawkins be a part of your congregation and that sense feels like yeah that sounds great in the way that christians would hear it i think is like oh that's just so dangerous like everything is just going to get eroded to the point where you don't believe anymore and it's like maybe yeah but if but if you're following the direction and the faith is that the direction of the river is good right that the there's no other direction well but maybe the evil the the things that that make you angry that when you want to write a song about something the things that cause us to get bad about how religion acts maybe that's because it's trying to like block the river race right it's trying to move upstream it's trying to like stop the natural thing is for atoms to cooperate yeah into becoming molecules if one atom says no i'm gonna do this thing or i'm these molecules behave in a different way than than the natural direction becomes cancer right like and as we try to separate ourselves from the people that we are intrinsically connected to because of beliefs or because of um these dogmas instead of becoming a way of connecting us to one another and loving one another they become ways of separating from one another it's precisely it's walking against the natural way that things ought to be but that's a faith statement to me because maybe maybe there's no direction anything yeah i think that's true there are just things that we all i mean they're just things that we have in common though like and they're natural things they're like when i stopped being christian you know i was talking about the kingdom of god a second ago and like i would just compare notes with people and like well do you you know do you kind of care about social justice or when you think about the kingdom of god like tell me what that what does that mean to you and they would inevitably talk about social justice and be like dude me too yeah i called something a little different but like you know let's just like lock arms and we'll do this job together then we'll die you'll go to heaven i'll go to hell and everything's fine like but for right now we can just be like bros you know you know yeah because no one fucking knows what's gonna happen oh yeah so if he if this guy insists that he knows great okay so with all of this and how you've changed and and has it affected your i mean obviously what you've been writing about but how you create art fundamentally what you're trying to do with art fundamentally has any of that changed the how i create art has probably changed but not directly because of the shifts in my sort of thinking what i i think from it's hard to find a friend on the project has been the same which is just explore what seems interesting and what i think about the world or just the perceptions that i have you know like gone it's hard to find a friend there's a lot of writing about you know the bible and about um there's like fully two bible stories like just directly written into song there's a song called secret of the easy oak which is probing you know the validity of church life or what i don't know just the alienation that you that you feel when you're trying to really seek ye first the kingdom of god and dot dot dot um and i don't really perceive that as being different at all from cursor branches i mean the data that i'm working from is kind of different but the pros that the impulse is the same just to really get to the bottom of something that is meaningful to me does it help you to figure out even what you're thinking by writing about it oh yeah i didn't i didn't want to write branches like it was i when i set out to write that record it was i wanted it to be like a spoon record like i wanted to i wanted to write songs about shirts and you know um teeth and stuff like this you know but what came out was all these tunes about can the pot say to the potter why have you made me this way i couldn't deny that when i played those songs at the house shows that i was transported for the three and a half minutes that i was playing them and i loved them more than i loved any of this i mean i just connected with them so much so i finished the record accordingly and then i played those songs i thought i was over all of that stuff i thought that i had broken with christianity and i was just gonna go about my my life and my subconscious had a very different idea about it and so i wrote that record and then i played those songs like 200 times between that and strange negotiations and it was two or three years of catharsis and therapy that i desperately needed to do one way or the other i could have gone and seen somebody probably and come at it from a different perspective but instead i wrote that record and played it a bunch and those songs changed dramatically for me over time in terms of what i thought they meant and what they ended up meaning to me like we were talking about earlier with your subconscious just weaves so many things into it if you allow it to and allow room for things that feel like i don't know what that means exactly but if it belongs there it feels like it should go there so in that sense i you know i feel like the process has been the the impulse for working has been the same you know it is cathartic it is therapeutic to to do to do this songwriting and singing and music and you know maybe not everybody wants music to function in that way for them as consumers or as creators of it but for me it's served that function and do you have any function that you hope it serves for the listener no i can't i almost don't have any idea what it could do for the listener except that if i'm doing the process the way that i feel like it should be done it there's been evidence that that's helpful for that people enjoy that or something like that but i almost can't even care like it can't be a factor in in what i'm doing but then you know with something like branches specifically i just thought this is so narrow like believers are going to be offended and are mad and will be mad and non-believers will be bored like why are you writing about this like get get over it real niche audience yeah totally like a dozen people like literally i told my manager like dude i'm so sorry like i can't stop writing about this shit and he's like it's fine i think it's a cool record we'll just put it out and see what happens and then you know it sold really well and there's like a everything is way more nuanced and complex than i thought it was in terms of people uh it was one of the 10 best records of 2009 in christianity today what yeah it made their best of list my dad sent me that link and he it just was the link and then he wrote uh dot dot dot like that's amazing his version of what the fuck yeah you know um and you know there were a lot more people in that gray area than i thought yeah um and but doesn't that make christianity like that's kind of a good job because i agree yeah yeah i just think and people would tell me that like you know this record is a part of my devotional life that my devotional life never had a component where doubting was sort of something that i engaged in and now with this record like i i have a means to do that and i just blew my mind yeah i and and also my subconscious is so much smarter than my conscious brain because i thought that i was making a record that just like nails in the coffin of christianity like fuck this nonsense not interested this is all garbage and what instead i made was a record that was way more nuanced than that did not draw concrete conclusions about anything just posed all these questions and did some like if it's this way then i'm bummed or i don't like it or whatever but it didn't ever assert fully i assumed that i was just making an anti-christian record yeah and it just wasn't that way and it wasn't until people started talking to me about how they understood the record that i realized what was really there to consume it's really internal yeah the process do you ever do co-writing um i have um a couple a few times yeah is that hard because you're right from such a personal subjective place no the scope of each thing is different because you're doing for different projects yeah different projects and so you just kind of put on a different yeah the context reveals something to you about your own musical impulses and you realize like oh i write the way that i do because i'm the originator of all this stuff but against this kind of guitar riff like what are you what are you saying like d i've never sang like bon scott in annie pedro the lion songs but this kind of calls for some kind of like bluesy rocker kind of thing and so then suddenly you're singing differently or whatever and we i just did that thing i was telling you about yesterday where i had to come up with all these lyrics and um i won't know how i feel about it all for a few days i'm sure listening to it because i don't totally know what's there but in that situation you're just really leaning it's like a marriage in a way where you're just like okay well we're just gonna sink or swim together me and these collaborators like i'm not judging the stuff i just like this guy did this and then i'm gonna do this and we're gonna sink or swim together like that's yeah what happens like rather than just judging it and i don't know how to describe it but yeah the collaborations that i've been a part of have been so fun um and on the stuff that we're doing now like i mean i'm doing all the lyric writing or whatever but we're collaborating in a musical way in a way that i've never really done on my own stuff maybe with walsh a little bit but this is even more extreme than that and it's been so good have you done about much collaboration with i write with lisa and my wife um but co-writes can be hard for me sometimes i mean i've had great sessions but there's been times like i remember one session in particular where the person was obviously only caring about how the listener is going to perceive it right really aiming for a certain demographic specifically and kept bringing that up like well but this what would this demographic think of it i'm like i don't care yeah right can we just write us on if you like like what about this demographic the two of us like that's the demographic i care about we could leave here today psyched like excited a cool song with a song that no one might ever it just might always be a blip like a you know maybe it would never go anywhere it's just like an oddity always but like that feeling that you get when you've worked all day and you come up with a mix or a rough that's just like dude this is so cool yeah that's exciting yeah and there's some even as a as a listener i like that as an artist to create that it's amazing it's kind of the best thing of what we do right but even as a fan of a different artist like i don't want you pandering to me like i don't want you it is it really is i want you to write what's true to you and what's meaningful to you and you're writing what i think you what you if you're writing what i think you want me to hear yeah that's it does feel disrespectful and somehow doesn't it yeah it's just it and it comes up when people ask for certain songs it shows and it's just like look there's some songs i'm just not gonna play and it's it's not out of it's not disrespectful to you it's actually kind of out of respect like this thing only works if i am not faking it yeah at all and if i have to play this song that i don't like like i just have to be in a pretend headspace for a few minutes and yeah the show suffers for it and your perception of me and what works about this because i've never done that before if i start doing that now it's going to change and you're not going to it's not going to be good for you anymore it's going to you know yes you will get to hear me play that one song that you like but you'll lose the whole project yeah is that like peter the lion stuff people request usually only certain i mean certain songs like i'd play tons of pedro songs but not all of them um you know and some for real you know like religious reasons and others because i just think they're dumb like [Laughter] it's like that was a dumb song that i wrote and some people still liked it but that's i am not ever playing that so to answer the question kind of completely i i believe what you said about it that like you write for yourself you write for what turns you on the most and then however that plays out in the world that's just how it does and if if you're really doing that some people are going to connect with it like unless your taste is just so bizarre but if you like the beatles at all or any normal music and you really go for it and try to make something that freaks you out it's going to be accessible to somebody and it probably you know our experiences are all unique but there's tons of overlap and so if you're writing about whatever it is there's other people that care about that and are gonna do this you know we're gonna respond to it first time i prayed to speak in tongues [Music] i saw it [Music] thank you for doing what you do like thank you for writing how you write it's more i think because you're an artist like that there's an element of it that makes it feel like more than entertainment to people and i think that's i'm sure you hear that from your fans how even hearing from christians like how it becomes part of their devotional life yeah that's it's because when you're writing from your soul and your heart like that from the depth of who you actually are connects things yeah and in that way it's spiritual to me like it's very um and i hope you don't take it as an insult i mean in the best sense of the word everything i would love about christianity yeah you're in that street like you you uh you're calling us to truth to look look at things honestly to look at and to love and that's the whole thing to me like i agree so i i'm grateful for what you do thanks and that's not a i mean i would have been offended by that um six years ago or you know just like ah don't you know but now know that yeah that's and it kind of even deeper in line with what we're talking about yeah like however people interact with this thing like how could that be how could that be offensive no thank you for being part of the uh podcast first of all man thanks for having me i'm glad that this worked out i mean so so great is there anything you want to share with people about what you're doing where you're going to be what you're recording or we're working on a record now that um come out in may or june um if you're curious about any of the stuff the website of my name is where you can go and there's soundcloud things to listen to that would give you a glimpse into what the record is gonna kind of be like all the bizarre monthly stuff is up there if you're looking for a starting point and you like the idea of like lament and some of the stuff we've been talking about grocery branches might be a good starting place absolutely amazing record all right thank you so much thank you dave for coming yeah