Religion's True Purpose

0:00 So religion that makes you look inward, that makes you look at yourself, that puts things in perspective and makes you realize that there's something much larger than the benalities and the daily things that you go through. There's something so immense about life itself and the mystery of death that it takes you out of the benalities of your everyday existence. And so I think it's a huge need that people are craving so so deeply right now. my thoughts on religion and its role in the world today and whether there is an important role for it and what it should be doing. My parents were Jewish and so I had to go to Hebrew school and all that and I was kind of slightly put off

0:46 by organized religion because it didn't relate to anything personally. It wasn't like my experience. There didn't seem to be anything especially spiritual about it. But later in life, I found that that was something that I really really miss. That's actually something very important for all of us to experience. Namely, the sense that there is something much larger than us as an individual. There's some force. There's some power. You can call it life itself. You can call it the energy of the universe. You can call it God. Whatever it is, but there's something that transcends us. And it's also the subject of a lot of the book that I'm currently writing. And so this feeling that you are part of something immense that it's actually an amazing

1:32 that life itself is this insane phenomenon is a religious feeling because it takes you out of yourself. It makes you feel like there's something much greater than your personal ego. That there's something transcendent in life. Okay? And so I'm not somebody though that likes to preach morality, as you may probably guess by my book, The 48 Laws of Power. I find kind of telling people what they should do is very counterproductive. I like to think that people are adults. They have to make their own choices and that if your parents didn't raise you in the right way, all of my trying to tell you how to behave is going to be worthless. And then the other thing that I believe that sometimes religions don't teach but they

2:18 should and some religions at their core do actually teach and Christianity teaches is tolerance for other people. We are not perfect. Human beings are flawed creatures. We are flawed animals which is the subject of the laws of human nature. And so recognizing that we are flawed and that we are not perfect and there is something much greater than who we are can build a sense of humility. So religion that makes you look inward that makes you look at yourself that puts things in perspective and makes you realize there's something so immense about life itself and the mystery of death that it takes you out of the benalities of your everyday existence. And so I think it's a huge need that people are craving. so so

3:04 deeply right now. It is why I am writing my book on the sublime because we are creatures that are conscious. We're aware of our mortality. We're aware that someday we're going to die. And it weighs on us all of the time. And so it has been the source of spirituality of a need for believing that there's something greater than our individual existence. And today so much of that spirit has been crushed out of us by the sheer benality of our daily life. The sheer benality of social media. All the stupid trivial things that we are immersing with. All the trivial information that is flooding our brains. And I believe that the role of religion, the role of spirituality is to take us out of that, to make us aware of

3:51 something much greater, something much more important, something about the fact that we're all facing death. I'm reading a book right now that I'm going to be using in the sublime book. It's called Miracle in the Andes. It's a beautiful book. It's about a famous story of a plane crash in the Andes. And it's one of those insane survival stories. But the young man that wrote this book, he came from a religious background, but he he he didn't believe that God was watching him in this experience, but he sensed it. He sensed the presence of something really powerful in the struggle of life and death and in the mountains and in this insanely

4:36 imposing struggle that that he and his friends had to go through. And so he found a different form of spirituality and different kind of religion in that. The other only other thing I would say is I I'm Jewish. I have read the New Testament and I'm very familiar with the New Testament and the story of Christ which has always attracted me since I was a child. But I'm deeply disturbed by how this religion of love, this religion of acceptance, this religion of love thy neighbor as thy love thyself. And uh the sense that we are flawed individuals, we are sinful is completely bastardized, is completely perverted. Many of the forms of Christianity that I see today, this

5:23 incredible religion of love and acceptance has turned into something very polarizing and full of actually a lot of animus and a lot of hatred. And I wish somehow this religion could turn back to its origins which celebrated not wealth and not becoming the most richest person in the world, but the poverty that the po that the weakest that the meakest shall be the ones that get into heaven. this kind of sympathy for those who have less than us. This is sort of the source of my book. Uh, one thing's in my book. I wish the religions of this world would go back more to their origins, to how they were thousands of years ago, to when they were more pure and really were about something much greater than our individual lives and our daily political struggles.