So at any rate, I wondered if that – I guess kind of how much of a catalyst that was for you to leave versus – Like the more fundamental theological, if that's the right way to put it, like the really basic questions about the fundamentals of Christian theology that were kind of preoccupying you when you were younger.

Yeah.

I was really shocked by that moment too when that conversation came up about family planning because, and I attribute it partly to my parents.

I mean, what you're saying is true.

Like, he seemed like a very liberal, that's how I understood, you know, very liberal, very, like, intellectually rigorous priest.

And I attributed, I mean, that shock to maybe my ignorance of how politics and Catholicism work together and what the fault lines were and what the hierarchy of that particular, you know, church was.

So there were two things that happened during that conversation that were pretty crucial to my not converting.

You know, is there a way to, you know, in terms of how things have developed since some of your previous writings, given what you say in this book, is there a way to connect these things at all?

And I feel like if we fast forward a couple centuries, maybe we'll get to a place where this will be something that people know about only third hand, right? They will not have actually experienced this disenchantment But I guess the question that you raise in your books is the extent to which we really are disenchanted, or do we continue to find enchantment in things like technology, right? Is technology filling the same role that religion once did, or is it a shabby simulacra offering up only kind of a dim echo of what we got from religion?

Yeah, I was fascinated with the disenchantment thesis when I first came across it, which was many years after I left Christianity.

But I felt like on a very personal level that it was describing what I went through individually, which is basically what the West experienced over many centuries.

I think I experienced in a couple of years of leaving the faith and just realizing like, oh, all of this meaning and purpose and telos that I had associated with Christianity.

Life is an illusion and the world is just a series of mechanistic relationships that we can describe with science.

And yeah, there's been I mean, there's been so much debate about the Weber thesis and a lot of people say, well, we've never been disenchanted, actually.

Or I don't know the idea that it's a sort of romantic view of the house of the past, which Weber acknowledged himself for.

How are they similar? Do you see religion as a temptation in a way? Something that you have to kind of, you know, resist? How are they similar and how are they different?

Tell, tell us what's on that card.

There's a card, um, yeah, it's actually still here above my desk, and I wrote on it this single quote from Simone Weil.

It was from her private spiritual writing that she composed during the last years of her life.

And the quote is, "We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will." So I came across this quote when I was in something of a life crisis around four years ago.

I had come back from a relapse into drinking after I had been sober for 11 years and was really spiritually confused as well, and had-- was just delving into-- I came to S- to Weil's work kind of late.

I had read her political writing much earlier and just didn't get around to reading her spiritual writing till, till much later.

And I, I guess the thing that struck me about that quote was the futility of will or what we would today call willpower, right? This, this idea that you can fix something in your life, particularly your inner life, so I'm thinking about things like addiction, compulsions, obsessions, or even things like creativity or belief in God, uh, that you can, you can solve those things through brute force of some kind just by sort of willing yourself to do it.

Scale is like will.

And I think the point you make in the book is that you can't get at wisdom through will.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, that's the most frustrating thing, too, right? Because everybody wants wisdom, [chuckles] I think.

Uh, most people do.

I certainly do.

Um, but yeah, you can...

You understood what, why you wanted a drink and what it, why it overpowered everything else, but you'd arrived there in supremely intellectually.

Like, the one disguises as the other one, and it's so vexing.

I mean, I certainly felt that when I was writing the book.

Like, there would be times where I was writing about drinking, and I would go back and read it and was like, "This was written by my alcoholism." Like, there's, like, moments where I'm kind of romanticizing drinking or, you know, I'm downplaying the consequences.

And yeah, I did, I, I had to do a lot of revision for this book for precisely that reason, where, you know, I think anytime you're writing about an addiction or any kind of self-deception, like, you're an unreliable narrator.

And the idea was to go back over that and try to weed out the half-truths, the lies, all of these things that were not the truth, essentially.

And I mean, there's limits to what you can do 'cause, you know, I don't have access totally to the truth and can't see everything about myself.

But I do think there's a process by which, like, writing about this, I was able to bring those selves into harmony a little bit, which is not to say that I obliterated the doubleness.

What did it feel like to surrender to this thing that you'd organized your life around not surrendering? Like, what was the experience of drinking again after having not had a drink in so long?

Uh, so maybe we can start out with you reading a little excerpt from the book for us.

Okay.

I'm gonna read, um, a couple of pages from the first chapter.

This is not the very beginning of the book, but it's, it's pretty early.

Occasionally, over the years, when I've mentioned that I left fundamentalism or that I gave up drugs and alcohol in my late 20s, someone will remark that I must have a strong will.

I understand why they say this.

Renunciations supposedly require a lot of determination.

Uh, so this book covers a pretty wide swath of your life, um, but what was the first seed of it for you?

You've had some interesting experiences.

Yeah.

So I was-- I guess the first thing to say is I, I grew up in a very religious home.

My parents were evangelical, uh, fundamentalists.

And, um, so that was a big part of my early childhood.

I went to Moody Bible Institute to study theology when I was in college.

Uh, Moody is one of the oldest and most conservative, uh, evangelical colleges in the country.

So add your thoughts on that.

So, you know, you were saying that it always felt to you like that they were sort of missing the point in a way and that, you know, the world was not imbued with meaning in the way that that it had been or that you had seen it as being when you were a fundamentalist Christian.

I think that science can certainly provide wonder, you know, and it is true that I've felt wonder countless times when reading about biology or physics or you name it.

It's not designed to provide meaning.

And I think that that's a good thing, right? It's not supposed to be like, and this is what everything is for.

And this is sort of the narrative story and why our lives have meaning.

And I think that that's the thing that religion provides and to some extent philosophy.

And my sense when I was writing the book is that there's this sort of trend that I find misguided, which is to look for meaning everywhere.

I've found that having a name for this kind of writing, synthetic text or slop, makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing.