 Daniel Dennett of course is Daniel Dennett and he's no introduction his talk is can churches survive the new Transparency his limerick is this in the way that the Pope is in errant It can slowly become quite apparent if you open its drawers its windows and its doors a church can become almost transparent Please welcome to the stage Daniel Dennett. Thank you. It's a delight to be back here And can I have the house lights up some I I like to see faces Hello, we have some house lights. Ah Wow, there's people out there good, okay So thank you very much. I'm delighted to be back at Tam If If this beard of mine Weren't real. I think I'd want to wear a fake beard Because it would be so much fun to dress up like my heroes Yeah, Charles Darwin and James Randy are definitely two of my heroes and What I'm going to talk about today is a Darwinian look at revolution at religion in the 21st century back in 1989 Steven J. Gould Published a famous book called wonderful life where he drew to the attention of millions of people who otherwise had never heard of it The amazing events known as the Cambrian explosion now here is my favorite diagram of The great tree of life. This is Len Eisenberg's wonderful diagram. You can get it from his website You can get t-shirts and posters. It's a it's a beautiful teaching tool and The Cambrian explosion is Responsible for most of what you see there on the left you see the beginning of life you read this the Present is on the outer edge So time radiates out from the center You see the the beginning of life about three and a half billion years ago with Archaea and bacteria and then you have the great eukaryotic revolution and that all the colored things Fanning out to the right. Those are all eukaryotes. We're eukaryotes and At about 530 million years ago. There was a sudden that is over a few million years Radical explosion of creativity by evolution. That's the Cambrian explosion and you can see it in the slide as That flat area underneath the red The very little time passed and all these different life forms made their appearance in very short period of time So that's the Cambrian explosion one of the most exciting and productive events in the history of evolution on the planet Among the life forms that were created were these Amazing different creatures which emerged in very short order This is a scientist drawing of a few here is a an artist's rendition of some of the same Drawings and when I found this on the web and included it in my slides this morning. I thought wait a minute I wish I had a slide of Davies mural from the movie last night Which I think would be an even better version perhaps than this of the wonderful diversity of life In the Cambrian explosion His mural would serve as well. I asked him what the title of it was and he said it's tonight. We fly Well, it could also be called the Cambrian explosion But I guess his title is better than mine anyway, but in any case what cause or what triggered the Cambrian explosion? Well, nobody knows for sure. There are a number of theories and one of them is particular interest to me and that's from Andrew Parker But a zoologist in Oxford and in 2003 he published a book called in the blink of an eye Now here's what he had to say The cause of the Cambrian explosion was that the ocean For chemical reasons that are not quite certain The shallow ocean where all life was there were no animals on the on the land at that point The ocean became more transparent and this enabled the evolution of eyes Eyes evolved very fast and once you've got eyes it changes the game because you can see at a distance and be seen and the arms race of predator and prey hiding and seeking camouflage and armor and all sorts of predatory devices evolved very swiftly as a result of the fact that there were now all of these Creatures that could see each other and that this was the main trigger of the Cambrian explosion Now it's a controversial theory. It isn't believed by all, but it isn't refuted by any stretch of the imagination But in any case right or wrong it inspired me To draw an analogy between that theory and what's happening today But first let's look at what what happened a few hundred years ago. It's a threadbare Remark often made that Gutenberg and the printing press changed the world in dramatic ways forever by making the dissemination of information drop by orders of magnitude in cost and increase in Fidelity and sure enough a little bit later we had Luther and Even at the time There were people who were arguing that it was those darn printed books that made all the difference And they certainly did make a big difference well That was then and this is now and I want to suggest that the more recent expansion of Media is going to have a much more dramatic effect In the 20th century we get radio television telephone transistor radios very important for their mobility and their Autonomy you might say and then of course the internet and everything that follows in its wake 21st century we have the internet and we have the social media Facebook and Twitter and all the rest and they are burgeoning There's new social media emerging every few weeks And they're Exploding as you all know now. What difference does this make? What my claim is is that the Cambrian explosion was triggered by the old transparency that's Andrew Parker's hypothesis We're now inaugurating the era of the new transparency and it's going to be even more tumultuous and it's going to occur at a pace Unimagined before in the history of life on this planet This is Deb Roy. I chose a picture of him from from the Google bunch of pictures where he was Speaking at Ted because I wanted to tell you if you haven't seen his Ted talk it's a great keeper one of the best Ted talks of all times in my opinion about his Amazing brave and ingenious experiment with his own first-born child where he wired up his house With closed circuit TV in every room fish eye camera in the ceiling of every room and basically recorded his son's life Whenever the kid was awake Doing anything that was recording going on so he has a complete record of what words he heard How many times he heard a word before he tried to say it himself? How many times before he? Could speak the word and could understand and it's a goldmine of wonderful data well along with that Deb had to create software to analyze That Tsunami of data they had to build a special data farm for it And he and a graduate student did and that software turned out to be so good that analyzing what was going on in recorded video that they spawned a company called bluefin Which began to monitor? 24-7 all the channels and the cable networks and Twitter and Facebook and the rest and Make these data analyze data available to people who wanted to buy that data and That's mainly what his talk was about. Well, Deb and I have been friends and colleagues for a number of years We had a debate Tufts about the future of this and I was a little less rosy than he was about it and we got to talking about it and decided we should do a joint paper on this and I'm happy to say as of a couple of days ago Our paper is now coming out in Scientific American. I'm not sure when but pretty soon So what I'm going to be doing now is sharing informally some of the themes that are in much more detail in the paper that he and I have done So the new transparency The great change in our world triggered by this media Inundation can be summed up in a single word and that's transparency We can now see farther faster cheaper easier than ever before and we can be seen Both facts are of tremendous importance here as they were in the Cambrian explosion Think about Snowden This is an anonymous citizen Who is suddenly catapulted into One of the most powerful and influential positions in the world All on the basis of the information that he has access to thanks to this new transparency Nobody quite knows how to handle him Or the issues that he raises And nobody knows What will follow that will that his that his Appearance is the harbinger of and I predict he's the first of many oh In case you wonder what my own view is of Snowden. I think he should get the Nobel Peace Prize But I know some people that disagree violently with that. I respect their opinions. They're wrong, but I respect AJ Johnson, I like to quote. She said the internet is the best thing to happen to atheism since Darwin. I Think she's right. Why? She tells us Atheists African-Americans or otherwise know that we are not alone That's key, but that's just a part of it There's also what I'm going to call the recursive Hall of Mirrors This is Knowing That you know and that others know that you know and you know that they know that you know and so forth This is a phenomenon which has always been possible, but is now going explosive Let me give you one example Let's go back to say 1975 the year. I'm just picking this date As an approximate date Back in 1975 there there must have been many thousands maybe even a million people Around the world who knew of a priest who had sexually abused the child But almost nobody knew that fact Millions knew that but almost nobody knew that millions knew it Think about today Hundreds of millions of people know that hundreds of millions of people know that thousands of priests have sexually abused children That creates a whole new epistemological environment in which the enrolment Catholic Church has to exist and It hasn't figured out yet how to do that and The effects are showing I'm going to give you one dramatic example This is from the Boston Globe Not so long ago Archbishop in Minnesota denies touching minor And here's what the archbishop had to say He said that he normally stands for these photos with one hand on his staff and the other hand either on the right shoulder Of the newly confirmed person or on a stole that hangs from his chest And then he adds I do that deliberately and there are hundreds of photographs to verify that fact All right now Stop and try to imagine an archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church Saying anything remotely like that back in 1975 On the face of it. This is a stunning and Stunningly ineffective way of acknowledging a problem and trying to deal with it and That's independently of whether you think this is unfair the fact is that this man has a very very big problem and His opening attempt to solve the problem is not making it Clearly any easier for him That is the effect of recursive transparency It's not going to affect just churches it's going to affect all kinds of organizations back in the Cambrian many life forms when extinct a Few marvelously innovative ones survived all which are going to go extinct who knows but it's going to affect Everything mutual knowledge changes the epistemological environment in which all organizations must survive and it changes them in a way Which is quite remarkable? It gives the individuals in those organizations a kind of power that they never had before and it's a kind of power which is Potentially deeply destructive to the organizations themselves Snowden is just a vivid example of this. It's not just churches governments armies corporations clubs In every case where you have a group of human beings banded together for some purpose Some organization those human beings now have at their fingertips powers That were simply not imaginable a few decades ago and The question is how are they going to use them and how are? Organizations that want to maintain their viability and their and their Security and their robustness and their health that want to survive. How are they going to deal with this? That's the great arms race that is beginning to unfold and nobody knows How it's going to work out a? Way of looking at this is by looking at cells and biology The minimum conditions for a light for a cell to be alive say a bacterium About as simple as they get is this got to have a metabolism It's got to capture energy to go on living and do whatever it's doing It's got to have a reproductive system that have genetic system of some sort And it's got to have a membrane to keep out the bad and let in the good This is about as simple a schematic as you can have for life Well, organizations have the same three requirements They've got to capture energy. They've got to be funded. It costs money or time or energy or all three for any Organization that hold itself together It's got to have a reproduction system Not genes in this case, but I'm going to call them means socially transmitted information packets And it's got to have a membrane to keep out the bad and let in the good You don't want to have an organization that is completely transparent No matter how benign your organization is You want to have an organization that distinguishes the rest of the affairs of the world From the affairs that go on the governance the planning Let's just take a simple and uncontroversial case Your organization wants to build a new headquarters It wants to keep its budget and its plans to itself Otherwise it will be taken to the cleaners by the people that bid for the job Simple as that So I'm going to look at four different kinds of social cells and look at their difficulties in their prognoses and You'll see some similarities along the way the Japanese tea ceremony debutante petillions Ponzi schemes and churches What do these have in common quite a lot in fact? Let's look at the Japanese tea ceremony. It's been going on for hundreds of years. I've participated in it once was suitably reverent and awestruck and Impressed with the the rituals and the costumes and the decorum and the serving of the tea It was a is it religious? Well, it's not really religious, but it's very ceremonial and it's very traditional and What pays for this? This is an elaborate production How what supports this and the answer is a whole system of support that supports it There are schools or circles where young women mainly a few young men Went teenagers they join it the way you might join the 4-H club or or the boy scouts or the girl scouts And you get trained and you go up through levels sort of brown belt black belt type levels Higher and higher and you pay you pay for all of that training and you are an apprentice to the system and this goes on for some time and this was a way for socially Ambitious Japanese families to advance the social standing mainly of their daughters So there's the funding in the recruitment which is a elaborate and competitive process because there are different schools and circles And there's a hierarchy where the the teachers at the top Are the ones that they're the ones that don't pay. They're the ones that get paid and below that is our all the the paying recruits There's a membrane you not anybody can get in is that there's a clear entry and exit conditions and teachers bequeath their Circles to other teachers whom they've trained and so forth. So there's there's quite an elaborate Meeting of the three conditions for longevity And here's a question Is the Japanese tea ceremony going to survive in a less socially stratified Japan? I rather doubt it It's not clear. I don't think anybody knows but a lot of young Japanese women whose Parents might want them to do it don't want to do it for obvious reasons they To infatuated with the internet and everything that they can find there a lot of Japanese parents would rather not because it's very expensive But they want it they do it if they do it because they think they owe it to their daughters So you have a lot of unwilling participants in this Hierarchical scheme well, what if it did go extinct was it a good institution in the first place I Don't know the answer to that question. Maybe at one time this served a very valuable and useful purpose Today it's less clear than anybody would shed any particular number of tears if the Japanese tea ceremony Simply quietly went extinct except for a few Museum and reconstruction or something like that Well American equivalent of that would be the debutante coutilien And in my own lifetime, I've seen a striking change in the way debutants are treated in American In American society meaning society with a small s newspapers used to report the debuts and coutilians with the same sort of Formal attention to detail and respect that they treat weddings and funerals not anymore There's a certain snarkiness a certain They're treated as sort of quaint customs now at least in some newspapers So maybe the the debutante which is of course Coutilien which is a very expensive proposition and many Reluctant debutants Participate only because their mothers and fathers insist on it Maybe it's on its way out There's funding and recruitment There are chapters I went and studied this when I was looking at it and found that there is a quite an organization of chapters of of that train up coutilians and debutants and If you go to this website debutante coutilien htm you you find that they Are now stressing Their volunteerism patriotism and involvement in community activities. This is very clearly protective coloration they're trying to establish to a increasingly skeptical outside world that they're not just a silly Indulgence of the rich, but they're actually doing some education and training of the young women that they are putting through this ordeal Yeah Will debutante coutilien's go extinct. I Think maybe they will Farewell debutants Except maybe in Texas Where they take it more seriously notice the deep those are those are Texas debutants practicing their bows Ponzi schemes Charles Ponzi did not invent the Ponzi scheme nor did Charles Dickens who wrote about it in Martin Charles Chuzzlewood, it's probably been reinvented hundreds of times. I don't have to tell you about how a Ponzi scheme works It's a pyramid that Ultimately built investors How do they reproduce? It's not clear whether they're just sort of spontaneously reinvented or whether probably not people Create Ponzi schemes because they've read enough about them to get the specs out of the out of the Culture and then they can tinker them with them as they choose And they can start innocently this is very important A business can start perfectly innocently and get off to a pretty good start But it just can't quite meet its commitments the first year So it raises a little bit more money so that it can keep its investors happy And before you know it it's turned into a full-blown Ponzi scheme and there's no sharp line that divides the criminality from the bad practices from the reckless practices from Innocent but bold business practices. There's a gentle Transition into the full-fledged toxic variety In other words, they're rather like pitcher plants Very inviting on the edge once you fall in you're never going to get out Ponzi schemes depend On a membrane of silence Depend on the members not talking to each other or to the press and very often the members of a Ponzi scheme the victims Even when they suspect that they're victims they don't blow the whistle They become complicit Involuntarily complicit in it because they think they can still maybe get their money out So again, it's a scheme which can which although it Victimizes Some innocent people tends to turn all of them a little bit guilty before it collapses in the end They tend to thrive on the innocence of those involved So now we turn finally the churches So they have energy capture reproduction and membrane Energy capture is obvious There's proselytizing there's extracting offerings. There's their tax-exempt status very important part of their energy capture and Then there's the role of television and the internet which of course for churches is a two-edged sword we've heard a lot about The way clever televangelists and others have used the media But there's another side to that which is in some ways. I think more interesting So that's the energy capture. How about reproduction? I've said enough about this on other occasions I don't think I have anything new to add about how churches spread how they make new new Parishes how they grow and multiply and divide and so forth, but I do want to talk about the membrane In fact, I want to talk about two membranes. There's one between the church in the outside world Just like every organization And then there's another between the congregation and the clergy and one of the reasons for that membrane is that one of the jobs of the clergy is to protect the congregation From information from the outside that might be harmful to the ongoing Thriving of that congregation But in order to protect the congregation from that dangerous information the clergy have to encounter that information and Then they have to keep what they've learned more or less secret from the congregation and this creates a really Unfortunate and I think toxic membrane between the clergy and their congregations Linda Lascola and I have been researching this now for a number of years Linda is a wonderful interviewer. Some of you have met her. She's spoken at Quite a few meetings in the last few years She's a professional interviewer who joined forces with me Because she thought we could find and we succeeded in finding closeted non-believing clergy that were still practicing that still had Congregations and with the help of Dan Barker and a few other people we found our first half a dozen and She interviewed them and we published the results of that. Oh, this is the new book. I Have to flog the book. I feel like a fool for not having brought copies Do you you can't buy it in a bookstore? You have to buy it from Amazon? you can get either the Print-on-demand paperback, which is very inexpensive or you can get the Kindle which is even less expensive But that's the only way you can buy it now this book is The second phase of our study The first phase of our study Well, I'll get to that in a minute The first phase of our study was a report on the first half a dozen actually five clergy, and I'll say more about that in another slide Here's how these membranes get started Much like the pitcher plants that starts with great innocence in Sunday school and in Sunday school children learn all about Bible stories and the like and they see the wonderful life that one can lead by doing good and doing what What Jesus asks us to do and so forth and in many communities children imbued with the spirit of goodness decide that the best thing they can do with their lives is go on into the ministry and So when the time comes they go to seminary and When they get it to seminary they discover That there are things about their church that they never learned in Sunday school and these are the initiation rights You might say it of seminarians and we know quite a bit about that both from other books and also because Linda in addition to interviewing all of our pastors about their seminary experiences also interviewed a number of seminary professors about their experiences and It's one of the most interesting parts of our study Carol Tavis was just talking about drinking on campus and Most colleges and universities now have a dean or somebody like that Who's really maybe a whole committee that's really responsible for trying to to control and protect The situation of what to do about young freshman coming in and getting drunk and getting in trouble Seminaries don't have that problem particularly but they do have a problem of how to deal with the hurt and frustration and anger and shock of first-year seminarians when they start taking their first courses in Biblical texts and textual criticism Here's a line we picked up from several of our pastors you can't get through seminary and come out believing in God If you still believe in God when you come out of seminary you weren't listening so they go to their Bible study classes and The professors there are honest scholars and they're interested in the historical questions of how this book got put together and The the factionalism and the editorial Skullduggery and the the the disputes and the apocrypha and all the rest of that and the mistranslations and This is deeply shocking Deeply shocking to many of these students in the seminary The lucky ones are so shocked. They say I'm out of here. I'll do something else with my life The unlucky ones are the ones who Say well I'll figure out how to I'll find an accommodation somehow. I can do this and they stay in and There they just slid down into the pitcher plant Now there's quite a literature on this some of this you may know Bart Ehrman's book misquoting Jesus is an excellent source on the topic and Jack Good's book the dishonest church is all about this second Membrane the membrane of hypocrisy and double-talk the two ways of speaking that exists between The clergy when they're talking amongst themselves and in the seminaries and to their congregations So we published our first study back in 2010 online and in the on faith website that was then run by the Washington Post and it occasioned a lot of discussion and Among the interesting things about the discussion were the dogs that didn't bark big Name defenders of religion major spokespeople like Martin Marty and Marcus Borg and John Selby Spong Several dozen others wrote comments on our first study And what was amazing is that nobody expressed any surprise or skepticism In other words, they all know that this is a big for a huge phenomenon And interestingly enough they weren't angry at us at Linda and me They were angry at the pastors that had spoken with us And I remember all did they condemn them and I remember thinking at the time. I know this anger This is the anger that pen and teller had to deflect when they began explaining How magic tricks were done and some of their fellow magicians were furious that they were We're explaining more than they should and That's a that's a solved problem now people appreciate what pen and I'm happy to say but pen and teller had done But magicians in general are furious if you explain a trick to uninitiated person and this seems to be the sort of anger that we encountered on that occasion and Outgrowth of that study Nothing we had planned for but it happened when some of them that we were in the study Got together and they formed the clergy project and it got funding from the Richard Dawkins Foundation and Linda and I helped Get that set up, but we're not members neither is Richard so We're not members. We don't have any access to what goes on. This is a confidential closed membership only Internet community of clergy and former clergy only Who have lost their faith? It now has over. I don't know how many but it last I heard which was some months ago is over 550 members and growing So anybody has any doubts about whether whether there are clergy who are Continuing on with their professions even though they've lost their faith They should know otherwise. There's nobody has any idea what the numbers are really nobody nobody knows if it's 1% 10% 60% 80% Nobody knows and probably nobody's going to know But look at some of the effects that we're now seeing in Ireland a generation ago There were three priests for every parish Now three parishes for every priest Basically an order of magnitude decline in the priesthood and the priesthood is old. They're not getting in the new recruits this diagram shows that the Non-religious there's a pretty big group. It's listed at 16% about the same as Hindu and it's the fastest growing group in the world all over the world There are now about 149 million atheists in the world Twice as many atheists as Buddhists 40 times more atheists than Jews More than 50 times as many atheists as Mormons Those are Phil Zuckerman figures Just recently in the Washington Post. I read this story about 41% of masters of divinity graduates expect to pursue full-time church ministry only 41% that's down from 52% in 2001 and from 90 something percent a few decades ago So even though this and the seminaries are having problems many seminaries are closing and even those that are going are Finding that many of their graduates are not going on in the ministry and many of the current occupants are People doing second-careers. They're taking correspondence courses They're they're hedging their bets. They're not making the commitment of your so that churches are facing a very serious shortage in staffing Not just Catholics, but across the board Now who do you suppose said this we are on the verge within ten years of a major collapse Evangelical Christianity was that Was that the word of oh James Randy or or some notorious atheists? No It was a word of Michael Spencer who was a spokesperson for the evangelical community writing in the Christian Science Monitor Within two decades and generations Evangelicalism will be house deserted of half of its occupants In the Protestant 20th century evangelicals flaunt flourished, but they will soon be Living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century the era survey of 2008 Showed that whereas people labeling none were 8% in 1990. They were 14% in 2001 15% in 2008 not today. It's even higher now The nuns are the only group that have grown in every state of the Union We can observe that in 2008 one in five adults Does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990 So in less than two decades we have a doubling a Doubling of this number That's a very fast growth Then there's the notorious 4% prediction that Laurie Goodstein wrote about in 2008. This is a study By good social scientists commissioned by the evangelical churches If current trends continue only 4% of teenagers will be Bible-believing Christians as adults now that's a tremendous attrition rate a tremendous attrition rate it takes 20 years To raise an evangelical and a few minutes to lose one and that seems to be happened So as we move from muddy water to clear to transparency This is going to spell the end of many things. I think Assad notwithstanding and his days are numbered It's going to mean the end of dictatorship It's simply going to be impossible for that kind of an organization to sustain itself without policies It's all unbelievably brutal that they will simply not be executed. I do not think And I think we're going to see a similar effect on religions with the more authoritarian ones having more and more difficulties and The rule is going to be transform or die. Well now how are they going to transform into? Good question Well, let's see The evangelical churches according to some of their own critics and counselors Are going to be transformed as the mega churches are into social clubs country clubs focus groups yoga groups play groups babysitting financial advice They're becoming social clubs and Interestingly in the process some of these are deliberately now watering down the religious message that they Teach and that they expect their congregations to adopt and to adhere to Somebody put it all you have to be is you have to be one with Jesus What does that mean anything you want it to mean so you eliminate? Churchianity, it's a term they've used from the design. You don't call them pews You don't call it the apps and the nave you just get rid of all that church lingo Because that's not going down very well anymore. So we're getting a sort of Christianity light At what point does it cease to be Christianity at all? Well, there are people that are deeply concerned about that But then there's others who think that it doesn't make much difference now Many of us I hope recognize That there are right now Many good works done by many good people in many churches and that there is a an infrastructure of community and involvement of loyalty and helping each other That is a great and noble tradition and it will be very bad to see that go away and It would be nice to preserve that if at all possible just without the belief. I like the comparison with the Baker Street irregulars Who are they they're an organization of Sherlock Holmes fans? Did they believe Sherlock Holmes was real? No, they're not idiots the fictional character But they love the stories and they love knowing all the details and they meet and they have Ceremonies and they have a great time being devotees of Sherlock Holmes. I Can imagine organizations that were Like the Baker Street irregulars with regard to Jesus It's a great story. We love to tell the stories and know all the details sing the songs No, of course, we don't believe it If we had that we might almost have succeeded in turning churches into entirely benign organizations I sometimes have enjoyed joking teasing with Richard Dawkins and saying Richard you want to Extinguish churches. I think you should take a more evolutionary approach. We don't have to extinguish them We just have to encourage them To evolve into more benign forms After all the dinosaurs never really went extinct Their feathered descendants are fluttering around in trees all over the world If we can just turn the dinosaurs into birds will be fine Friend of mine once talked about the church militant and the church triumphant becoming the church social and the church bizarre. I Love the pun the church bizarre is a problem some people Apparently craves stronger fair and it may be that as the more benign forms of churches wane in popularity those that Need stronger fair will become a bigger force and will raise considerable problems But we can watch this closely and see what we can do to Guard the access paths to these One thing is they may not be able to get away With the mantle of good works that the other churches have used for centuries to protect themselves As I like to say if the mafia had only opened a few more daycare centers and nurseries They might still be going strong But maybe this won't work. I have no promises about that or predictions So biologists tell us that we're in the midst now of one of the great Extinctions one of the great mass extinctions of all time many species are going to go extinct and are now Many will adapt rapidly to new environments new opportunities and challenges. That's Animals and plants the same thing is happening socially. I think second of the new thanks to the new pot transparency Now we can study this dispassionately as As possible and steer trajectories where we can There is a lot to deplore and a lot to applaud in these developments But the main thing to realize is they're going to happen very fast and we should be on our toes to identify the signs of Direction and See what we can do to steer things into benign directions Well, what works when you try to steer things? It's amazing. What works? Almost anything can be the trigger of moving somebody away from their religious belief. I Want to talk about two comically unanticipated effects Robert Wright published a book called evolution of God a few years ago and just more recently Nicholas Wade had a book called the faith instinct Both of them had the opposite effect than the one that the authors intended. I think they were so transparent in their special pleading for religion that a lot of people saw through them and Would have no part of them neither neither right nor way this particular popular among Religious groups on the basis of those books. Thanks for nothing say those churches I've mentioned the role of mutual knowledge If you ask yourself Why do advertisers pay so much? For an ad at the Superbowl The answer there's a good reason whether they fully appreciate but one good reason for an ad at the Superbowl Is that when people watch it? Is they're not just watching an ad They're watching an ad knowing that millions and millions and millions of other people are watching the very same ad and that makes a difference and This came out in our study Linda study in we had one a Mormon Bishop and a turning point for him He was on the edge and a turning point for him was watching the Mormon episode on South Park and that was before the book of Mormon came out When he saw that Mormon episode, how many of you have seen that? Brilliant stuff when he watched that He realized this is being watched by millions and Enjoyed by millions Who share the attitudes apparently of those who made it? suddenly this was a transformative perspective for him and it was the power of Of transparency That woke him up There was an interview between Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg and Weinberger said that he had a friend who was an orthodox Jew and an atheist an Orthodox rabbi Watched that on YouTube and this gave him permission to be an atheist He's one of our study participants. Well, how about a new role for churches? I think I've run out of time, so I'm going to be very swift on this if you want to know my Suggestion about this you can watch my latest Ted talk Which is a follow-up to Danny Hillis's Ted talk on plan B This is what to do if the internet goes down Which it probably will Danny thinks and think of the chaos that will result I've been thinking the same thing. He came up with plan B Which you can see that on Ted and that is he's now in the process of Organizing and get building a separate standalone dedicated internet just for vital services But in addition to plan B, there's my plan C What we're going to need is panic absorbers if the internet goes down it might only go down for a day or two What we need I think is let's say 48 hours of calm For the people to get it back up and running Because if the internet goes out everything's going to go down radio television cell phones it's going to be Thrust we're going to be thrust into electronic darkness and that's going to be terrifying to many people So what we want to do is to have local organizations Where people have been thinking about just this prospect and they've planned for they're not Stockpiling food and water. No, no, no, they're just planning for who's going to need some help How are we going to reestablish some form of communication so that we can keep track and inform people a place where people can go and get their anxiety Quelled partially for 48 hours to see if we can get out of trouble. Otherwise, I think if you think about it, you'll realize If we had an internet breakdown for for for 24 hours there would be the most awful chaos of looting and people heading for the hills with their wives and families and and It would be a just think ask yourself. What would you do? What would you do? If you went to turn on your radio or television in the morning It wasn't there and your computer didn't work your cell phone didn't work and your radio didn't work You couldn't find any news about anything. What would you do? multiply that by 300 million and you realize what the problem would be My suggestion is you go to your local lifeboat Your panic absorber where there are people who've been thinking about this. They know what the situation is They tell you what what was going to happen. They reassure you you find your local community all around you But where are we going to put those things? and Suppose you're from out of town and you want to know where's the nearest lifeboat Well, I suggest a Good place to look is all those buildings with the steeples I think that would be great if we could start a movement to get churches to form committees to plan Sort of like the Swiss army. They never go to war, but they're well-planned Or like a volunteer fire department and communities Could churches could sort of Compete for who has the best Lifeboat completely secular completely valuable a wonderful community service Local taking advantage of the infrastructure the community the Mutual knowledge of the individuals within the groups. It would be a great task for Congregations to put for themselves for their communities and for the future and that's my one of my suggestions for how we could turn Dinosaurs into birds. Thank you