Cut Flower Society

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: The Fragility of Civilization Setting the stage—why we need to explore belief, society, and the consequences of a disconnected civilization.
• 0:29 The French Revolution and Atheistic Experiments A historical look at the French Revolution, Robespierre, and what happens when societies turn to atheism.
• 1:21 Religion vs. Secular Foundations Comparing the founding principles of the United States with a secular framework—why religious foundations matter.
• 2:40 The Role of Self-Regulation in Society How religion encourages self-control and what happens when people rely on government for behavioral regulation.
• 4:02 A Cut Flower Civilization Explained Exploring the metaphor of the cut flower civilization—what happens when the beauty is severed from its roots.
• 5:29 Truth Claims and Morality Diving into the eight most important questions and the impact of belief about God on truth and morality.
• 7:16 Cultural Relativism and Moral Dilemmas What happens when cultures decide what is right or wrong? An exploration of moral relativism.
• 10:03 The Infinite and Human Arrogance Discussing human arrogance, the concept of the infinite, and understanding the divine.
• 12:39 The Nature of God: Good or Bad? Addressing the questions about God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and whether God is inherently good.
• 15:10 Albania: The Only Atheistic Nation A deep dive into Albania under Enver Hoxha, what life was like, and the consequences of atheism on a national scale.
• 20:08 The Role of Religion in Personal Development Examining how religious upbringing impacts morality, personal behavior, and humility compared to a secular upbringing.
• 24:08 Religion and Hypocrisy Understanding why people of faith often face accusations of hypocrisy, and the inherent challenges of upholding high standards.
• 27:25 The Humbling Impact of Belief How belief in a transcendent power fosters humility, influences relationships, and promotes empathy.
• 28:16 Should Religion Be in Education? Discussing the controversial question: Does religion belong in early education, and whose responsibility is it?
• 30:05 State, Family, and Religious Education Exploring the role of state versus family in educating children, and the benefits of religious education for society.

Transcript

0:00

All the good we have. Some of the bad is dependent on that belief, and we cannot have a nation that does not have that otherwise. It's a cut flower civilization and eventually cut off from those presuppositions. It'll fade and die. If we look at the French Revolution, which was largely capturing Catholic property, and I may have mentioned this last time, they used value of of the churches and the churches land as collateral for their currency, and they worked for an atheistic view. It turned out really, really bad for everybody, including the people who started it. If you look at Robespierre, who was one of the lead instigators of the French Revolution, how did it end for Robespierre? The guillotine. Those atheistic revolutions tend to end badly, including for those who are part of that revolution. Let's begin by unpacking exactly what it looks like, what a society looks like when it's built. Almost like the United States on a, on a religious foundation versus one that is built on something without religion in mind. Yeah. So, there's considerable public debate about as to whether or not the United States was founded on a religious heritage. I think if you look at the 13 original colonies, each had its own state religion. John Adams said, about our government, that this government was, wholly inappropriate. It was only a would only work with a religious population. And the reason he said that is that it it requires the population to be self-regulating rather than the government required to regulate the people. And what religion has historically done as it has, trained its adherents, not in every case, but in many cases for self regulation, for self control, and without that internal, locus of control, without that internal self regulation, you're going to need a different kind of government to regulate the behavior of people. So, so the United States and some other countries who have an inherent belief that there is, a supernatural being to whom we are responsible and that changes the individual's motive or self regulation. It becomes internally focused not to please the government, but to please another authority, in this case a supernatural authority. God. That allows, a low. A low intrusive government to exist because it assumes people will self-regulate as soon as, as soon as people have no self regulation or, require an external source besides God to self-regulate, then the wheels come off the wagon. So? So the United States and some other countries who are founded on that have that benefit. If people do not have a God concept, the concept of supernatural, then they're not going to behave in the same way. That's not to say that atheists, agnostics are a different category. That's not to say that atheists don't behave in ethical, or even moral ways, but I can't remember which British atheist it is. It might have been Richard Dawkins. You said I like living in a Christian culture. And what what he's saying is, I don't like the beliefs, but I certainly like the consequences of the beliefs. And what he's what he's appreciating is the benefit of a cosmology or, a theology, an idea of how the universe works that gives him all these benefits. He just doesn't want to believe those things. And I didn't invent this phrase, but I'm. I'm I love it so much. I'm borrowing it, which is, it's a cut flower civilization. And a cut flower civilization says that you're going to have this beautiful flower cut off from the wheat's the source of supply. It will be pretty for a little while until it withers. And if we eliminate the source of that self-control and that self-regulation, then we have a cut flower civilization. The beauty that was created by that worldview will then fall apart. A society, the makes people in a society make truth claims. They make claims about what is true. And in my work, I ask my clients what I call the eight most important questions. And I'll, I'll, I'll talk about the first two, the other six, maybe another day. But the first question is, what are you going to say about God? And when I'm in a business that's publicly traded and HR departments freak out when I say that, and it's not that I'm interested in people agreeing with me, but what you're going to say about God, the, the, the existence of the supernatural has downstream effects on all of the other questions. The second question is, what are you going to say about truth? This truth exists. And the and I'll show you why. The first question is the most it's the first question. So if if you make truth claims like two plus two equals four, who says which if if you know, literature was the central question in the book, 1984 that Winston Smith had to, to struggle with. And when he was in room 101, he decided, well, maybe it doesn't have to. If enough people believe it, it doesn't have to be four. It could be five, or it could be anything else that the state says. So all his claims, many people who are atheists go back to math. They go, math is math. You know, physics is physics. And it you can't get around that. Those are the truth claims. And that's fine. Some atheists will land there. What they argue, though, is that truth claims about fact are different than truth claims about morality. So what they'll say is two plus two always equals four. But we go by cultural or morality votes about whether eating children is okay. And if everybody in a certain country or a certain region thinks eating children is okay. I use this example because it's pretty dramatic, then it must be okay. And so if you're in, you know, whatever land and they eat children and you're there as a guest, you know, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. I'm not saying the Romans eat kids. But whenever you're in this mythical country that eats children, then you're going to think it's okay to eat children, which is, you know, in my morality, horrific. It's like Jonathan Swift, modest proposal. Did you ever read that? I've never read that. So no. I'm full. There you go. There you go. Now, I after the. Thank you. People ask me what where did you learn about that book? It's like because somebody told me that it was good, so I had to read it. And now I'll have to read a modest proposal. Thank you for. Thank you for introducing me to that. Now, I'm curious about a modest proposal. What is a modest proposal about? It's almost exactly like that. It was a proposal. And if you know anything about swept teeth. Satirical. So it was a quote unquote proposal, about how to solve the hunger crisis in Britain at the time. And that was literally his proposal was that this is not such a bad idea to, you know, there's an endless supply of children. So, and the, the public, the reading public just blew it all out of proportion. Didn't understand the concept at all. He was trying to make a point about how terrible the government was handling the crisis. And they, you know, people as people do, they took it seriously and said, how dare you suggest such a terrible thing? But it's it's a really great example because Britain that I mean, in all its history, obviously was a very religious nation. And so what is satire to that nation may not have been presented as satire to another nation. They might mention. I mean, fine, they may be, you know, 200 years from now, somebody may read it as a prescription, rather than a satire. But let's, let's what it gets out is who decides what morality, what's good or what's bad. And if if we say 51% say it's bad and 49 say it's good, then it's bad. Is that really a good measure? Because the winds of public opinion change. Human beings are so fickle. So what's good and what's bad changes with the time. Is there such a thing as a morality that transcends time? For that to be true, truth claims have to lean on something else. Truth claims about math and physics have to lean on something else. What is that thing that they lean on? Which is what are you going to say about God? You mean isn't self-defined? Well, if if you're arrogant enough to believe as a human being that you can know the infinite, then yes, it could be self-defining. See, I, I took a course in comparative religions in the History of religions, and I love this one quote, which is but it's a Hindu quote which is the finite mind cannot understand the infinite. And I love that. And what happens with modernity? What what happens with humans is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. We think we're so smart and so arrogant that we can understand the infinite. And so, so we think we can create these new ways of doing things without understanding, that they're, they're based on, they're leaning on something else. And that's something else. That truth claim is leaning on a God concept. Now, if you're an atheist, you'll go, well, that's just a convenient, you know, it's a convenient, human belief that's functional. Okay. We don't have to have that argument today. But if you do believe in a supernatural, then you believe then then then you start asking questions like, is it the cosmic well of souls? Is it just the the, the, the universe of souls all together with a cosmic unconsciousness? Or is it a being separate and apart from the collected souls of all humanity that precede us? Is it is it separate and apart? And you have different ideas about that. But if it if the supernatural is separate and apart, then is it? Then you have questions about is it an all powerful supernatural being? Is it all knowing? Is it ever present? Is it eternal because it lasts forever? Then you get to the imponderables about does this supernatural control everything? Or like the watchmaker, wind up the watch, sit back and watch what happens. And those are, you know, interesting debates, all with which lean on this concept that there is a separate entity that is somehow knowable. Then you got to answer the questions, is this knowable, being good or bad? And you can, you know, you believe either way. But if it's all powerful, all knowing and omnipresent and bad, maybe totally screwed up, it, you know, it, but. Well, and I think our world would reflect that. Right. Well, maybe our world does reflect that. I don't believe that. I believe in a knowable good God who is omnipresent, omniscient, eternal, and all powerful. There are people, Rabbi Kushner. When bad things happen to good people. He argued that God is basically good, but not all powerful, that that was his essential conclusion. And there are other people who I respect tremendously who believe that, you know, I don't. But but it goes back to the truth claim. The truth claim leans on the existence of a separate entity that defines the truth, called. And so it's not that I define the truth claim. I don't define what's good or bad. And and atheist could say, well, Roger, you're you're just resting on traditions that have been around for, for tens of thousands of years and then are adapted. Okay, that may be true. And yet they all of those lean on something, they lean on this belief. Yeah. And so as a nation, it's necessary for self regulation to have a God concept. And, you know, in the West, it's a monotheistic god. The well from, from the Near East, from, from the, from the Middle East to the West. It's a monotheistic god. There are pockets of monolithic ism around the world, but largely whatever has come out from Israel through the Roman Empire and spread to the world is largely a monotheistic religion. Again, pockets elsewhere. But largely that pathway and what we would call Western civilization. It's all been touched with this view of this worldview. And so everything in that Western civilization is dependent on that belief. I think we don't start very well either. Well, they don't start well. They don't end well. I think one place we can look is in history. And at least in modern history, there's only been one nation who declared itself an atheistic nation. You know, it's one. It was the national religion was atheism from the 1940s up until the 1990s. I don't I would say China, but they are deeply religious and Confucian tradition. Mao Mao attempted to get rid of that, but it's pretty tough to get rid of it, because it runs so deep out there. It runs so deep. Yeah, it's Albania under the dictator Enver Hoxha. Albania was the only atheistic, declared atheistic country in the world. And if you don't remember what Albania was like, it was cut off from the rest of the world. They actually reject Stalin because he was too Western, too liberal. When you see Stalin as too liberal. And so they became trading partners pretty much with North Korea. So those were the two most repressive countries in the world. Well, how how did you end up for Albania? Awful and awful. It was one of them, as an atheistic country cut off from the rest of the world. They were under the under the notion that the rest of the world wanted to invade Albania because it was so good, and that there were American paratroopers waiting to to parachute into Albania to get their rich natural resources. 99% of the people in the United States couldn't identify Albania on a map. Just so that, you know, for those of you who don't know, look at Italy. You know, the heel on on the boot. Go east across the Adriatic boot. There's Albania. I mean, it's a tiny little country with Enver Hoxha passed away. Fortunately, there was a quiet revolution. And, they became more of a democratic country. Fortunately, there wasn't much in the way of bloodshed. But if you talk to people who lived in Albania during Emperor Hodges reign, it was a totalitarian state, worse than the worst of Stalin. That's the consequence of an atheistic, government. Interesting. Wow. I would love to do more of a compare and contrast on that. That is because that's so recent in our history too. Like, yeah. Oh, yeah. Died in the late 1980s. His son took over for a few years, but they were pretty much done by about 1992, 1993, I think. Wow, you just couldn't get in there as a Westerner. You were just unable to. It was people in Albania didn't know what the rest of the world was like. They only knew what their dictator told them. Well, it sounds like a pretty scary existence as an Albanian. Yes. So go talk to some people who lived there in, in that era. And it was pretty, pretty horrible. So that wonder what their legal system was? It was, it was, it was a police state. I, you know, they would come and and they would say, you criticize the government, you're going to prison. That that's how it worked. And I said, I went to visit Albania. And they said, I asked, you know what did they bring guns? And they said they didn't need to bring guns. I said, did you ever think of escaping escape to where? Maybe because the rest of the world was in their minds, worse. So. So they had created this idea that the the dictator, the president was a God figure. They didn't have television, they didn't have cars. There were no stoplights in Albania because there were no cars. There were no buildings above five storeys because there were no elevators. I mean, like, the list could go on. That's the consequence of an an atheistic worldview, an alloyed atheistic world. The interesting how even in an atheist state, something is set up to be God. Well, it goes it goes back to the place I believe displaced Pascal. Is that, there is a place in the heart of every man to a God shaped box in the heart of every, every man, that there's something that wants to fill that and worship. So, so there, there then becomes, you know, the atheists will argue that it's an adaptive feature of the human psyche and the and the religious will say, there's just how we're created. Yeah, interesting. I don't have to do some more history research on Albania. That is really cool. But so let's shift a little bit and look at the role religion plays, even just on a personal level, because, we here in the United States see a little bit more of a war on, just religion in general these days. It's taken out of our classrooms. It's not, taught as a universal anymore. And more and more people are either just not going to church, ever in their lives or are just stopping going to church and don't really practice what in theory, they were raised to believe. Yeah. But I would still argue that even being raised on religious principles, plays a huge role in personal development. And I wonder what you see as the, the benefits of being at least relate, raised with religious principles or raised without any kind of, of religion in your life at all. Well, I guess the first preface I would give is, there are lots of ways that people practice religion badly. I'm not defending any of those, so let me just get that out of the way. So if, if, if you want to if you want to argue with me about bad religion, you know, I'm with you. There's lots and lots of bad religion. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who sincerely and earnestly, practice their faith and live it out. Nor second prefaces. Nor am I talking about the the imperfection of human beings to fully live out their faith. The the the constant, criticism of the religious is that they're hypocrites. Yeah. Aren't we all in? Well, in my life, I have decided who in my life was the least hypocritical person in the world. And that person was Larry Flynt. Do you know who Larry Flynt was? No, I don't. Larry Flynt, was a resident of my home, hometown and home state. Who was the publisher of hustler magazine? And it he said it's just sex. And Larry lived a pretty reprobate life. Completely consistent with his values. Larry was not a hypocrite at all because his uncle was so low. Anybody could cross it. It's all just sex. It's all okay. You know, whatever you want to do is okay. You couldn't call Larry a hypocrite because he had no standard against which to measure his behavior. I have higher standards than that, and I fail all the time. So. So of course, I'm a hypocrite, which is I have standards of behavior that I think are right. And I'm either unable or unwilling all the time to achieve them. Yes, that's the measure of the hypocrite. If you think you're if if you're self righteous, that adds a little bonus hypocrisy to it. But all of us who have high standards for our behavior and fail either through will or through weakness to meet those are, of course, hypocrites. So people with strong religious worldviews are clearly and always going to be hypocritical because they're unable to meet those high standards. Makes sense. Absolutely. And I'm wondering so Albania and Larry Flynt obviously know very interesting that it'll be a long day of research for me, which will be a lot of time on Albania. Maybe after the election. That that's really interesting. I. I wonder if there is a obviously just even being raised with religion in mind. Yeah, these people the opportunity to think a little bit more about their lives, about why they do things, why they believe certain things, what exactly they believe versus somebody who was not even raised with that question in mind at all, about whether God exists, about, why we should live according to the laws of our nation and why those laws exist. And, so when one's personal development, do you see a difference in morality and, a difference in how they interact with coworkers, with government, with all these different things in their life between one person and another? I, I hate to paint and such a broad brush. I mean, it's a broad question. That's a broad question. I would say one of the people in my life who I admire for his ethical stance and who was a man of his word, is also an atheist. And I, I have tremendous respect for him. And it's probably coupled with I don't know how he does it on his. So so there are, of course, people who don't agree with my religious worldview that had an extra dose of self-discipline or personal self-control. But for the average run of the mill person, religion does have a benefit. Of course there are people who are Herculean in their in their moral code who don't have a, a religious or a god worldview. And I, I know one, actually, I know several, but one comes to mind easiest. So so on average, what I would say is that what religion does is it helps those who need a little help get over, get over that hurdle. I think what what the belief in a transcendent, supernatural figure God does for people, if they're if they're really introspective enough, it provides them a level of humility to know how small and insignificant they are. A it's hard to be arrogant when you take in what how massive the universe is and even even in small things. You know, if you stand on the shore of the ocean and realize, oh my gosh, I'm nothing. And or if you're next to a large animal like an elephant, it it reminds you, oh, I, I really am tiny. It doesn't really matter what I think about myself. So, so all of these, these interactions with things that are larger than us will cause us to have humility, which is a good quality. Which helps us to treat others, I think, with greater dignity and with great, greater love. Because of that. Are you saying that those of us who are religious are the ones who need the most help, or who would otherwise need the most help? Again, I don't want to pay with a broad brush. I know, I'm kidding. Well, I grew up in the church, and there are plenty of them there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Thank God for forgiveness. Yes. So here's here's where I think we'll end up. This is a fairly controversial question nowadays. Do you think religion belongs in education, especially early education? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it does. And and then you have the debate of whose responsibility is to educate the children. Is it the responsibility of the state to, may or may not have the same religious worldview of you, or is it is it it is early education the purview of the family? If we look back at the founding of our country, there was no such thing as a public education. It public education didn't exist. That was a transformation, because the state had a legitimate, interest in an educated populace. The state does have an interest in an educated populace, but perhaps they're not the best people to be running that program. So I think, the family is the primary is the primary, group that has an interest in the education of their young and their children, and that benefits everyone else. So, yeah, I think I think if you're if you're a person of religion, then a religious education makes sense to pick pick the kind that you want. You know, if you're Jewish, there's the yeshiva. If, if you're Christian, there are parochial schools. There are religious schools, you know, so so there's the opportunity for this kind of education everywhere. And even if it isn't five days a week, there are other days of the week that that religious education can happen. Is it in the state's best interest to make sure that there's some kind of basic, education about religion at all, for God's sake, for for law abiding citizenry safe? I think so, I think so. That then comes the thorny question of then whose religion is it? And. I yet, I then it requires the state to admit that there's a God. Well, it requires the state to admit that there's a benefit to religious education. Not that there is a god. I mean, I, I could find a benefit. You know, I think atheists could believe. Yes, there is a benefit to our society of people believing this. So let's it's an efficiency or effectiveness, argument that it may not be true, but it works. And those of us who do have a faith would argue it is true. And it works.