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Episode 19 - An Interview with Daniel Dacombe & Dr. Hugh Turpin
87 Plays2 months ago
In this episode, Humanist Canada's Daniel Dacombe sits down with Dr. Hugh Turpin, an expert on Catholic Ireland and its disaffiliation from the church. They'll discuss Ireland's complicated relationship with the Catholic Church, the Pope, and more.
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Transcript
The Pope's Visit to Ireland: Cultural Phenomenon or Religious Event?
00:00:01
Speaker
A fair number of those kids were conceived in the tent ground ah in the Phoenix Park for people coming to see the Pope. you know it was It was treated almost like a ah
Podcast Introduction: Reason, Compassion, and Secularism
00:00:12
Speaker
rock festival. you know
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the Humanist lens.
Interview Setup: Daniel Dacombe and Dr. Hugh Turpin
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to The Conversation. In today's episode, our own Daniel Dacombe sits down with Dr. Hugh Turpin, an expert on Catholic Ireland and its disaffiliation from the Church. Let's begin.
00:00:56
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Humanist Canada podcast. My name is Daniel Dacombe, and I'm a humanist. I'm also a husband, a father, a former Christian, a PhD student, and a member of Humanist Canada. I'll be your host for this episode, and I'm very pleased to welcome our guest for this week, author and anthropologist, Dr. Hugh Turpin.
Dr. Turpin's Research on Secularization and Identity in Ireland
00:01:16
Speaker
Hugh Turpin is an anthropologist. He uses mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to study secularization, atheism, and religious disaffiliation. His primary focus is on how secularization manifests in contexts where national identity and religion are tightly intertwined. He's held postdoctoral positions in Queens University Belfast, the University of Oxford, and Brunel University London, and is the author of Unholy Catholic Ireland, Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality, and Irish Irreligion. Hugh, welcome to the show.
00:01:46
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. I realize having done our introduction and having started our episode, I did not confirm if I'm pronouncing your name correctly. This is a great time to check in after we already started recording. Did I do all right? ah Perfect. Yeah, no no problem. All right. I'm i'm really glad about that.
Catholic Upbringing in Ireland: Personal Reflections
00:02:03
Speaker
um So on this podcast, we generally like to start out by inviting people to tell us their origin story. ah Would you tell us a bit about yourself and the the the place and the time and the religious landscape that you grew up in?
00:02:18
Speaker
Certainly, yeah. So right, I'm 43 now. forty g three no um um'm Irish. and So I would have grown up, I suppose, and had my formative years in the 80s and the 90s in Dublin. um So oh it was a profoundly kind of liminal time. you know um Ireland was shifting. It hadn't quite reached the kind of speed of change that had started to to develop in the late 90s and the 2000s.
00:02:45
Speaker
But I would have had a kind of what was a fairly, I think, a fairly typical Irish Catholic upbringing at that time in that Catholicism was sort of a social matter and an institutional fact that you deal with in the world around you. and But I didn't really have much relevance to to my private life or my family's existence, really. So, I mean, my dad You know, that my my mother and my father would both say that they are Catholic.
00:03:18
Speaker
In Ireland, that can mean they're culturally Catholic. it's and It's almost like an ethnic designation where you get people who say that they're born Catholic quite, quite commonly. And that just shows you how much these two things are alighted. And as I was growing up, you know, I was aware of kind of profound intergenerational differences.
Generational Differences in Religious Belief
00:03:37
Speaker
My paternal grandmother was an extremely religious woman who would go to my house almost every day, you know? But her son, my father,
00:03:47
Speaker
you know He was essentially an atheist. He he didn't believe he he mocked it quite openly i you know in the house. and But still, we were brought to mass on Sundays and always went on Christmas, which I remember being a kind of excruciatingly boring ordeal.
00:04:05
Speaker
You know, my toys were there at home. I wanted to play with them, but instead I had to sit down, kneel down, stand up, listen to this guy droning, all that kind of stuff. So my my my experience of Catholicism was it's something that was sort of to a certain degree dialed in, um but that you kind of had to do it. It was never quite clear why. It had something to do with keeping my grandmother happy, something to do with intergenerational relations, had something to do with school as well. You know, as I as i got older, my parents first sent me to a Protestant school.
00:04:35
Speaker
which was probably fairly unusual. And in retrospect, I kind of think it was probably because they didn't want me to be subjected to a Catholic, a Catholic, ah what you might call a state school in Ireland.
00:04:49
Speaker
You know, I mean, they they were milder than they would have been during my parents upbringing, but there was probably still a fear about a certain level of of of cruelty almost in those schools,
Education and Religious Expectations in Ireland
00:04:59
Speaker
you know. But then um when I was about 10 or so, they moved me to a ah private Catholic school.
00:05:06
Speaker
um but was kind of a different environment. The religiosity became a bit more intense then in school. and We had older teachers who would have been formed, and you know, in Christian brother schools in the 1950s and 60s and they would have been more stern and more obsessed with religion. It seemed that we'd kind of gone backwards in time slightly when we moved to that school. Still though, you know, there was this feeling that that poism was just something you kind of went along with, didn't question. You could market, you could subvert it, but you wouldn't do that in front of everybody else publicly, that kind of thing. right And you know then to speak about my mother, you know she was from the west of Ireland. and
00:05:50
Speaker
she um She was educated in a ah boarding school run by nuns. I'm the whole thing quite oppressive but has never really been able to shake it off either. It's sort of a sort of slightly reluctant fusion with with with Catholicism to a degree. She says she doesn't believe in God. Sometimes go to the church to light candles.
00:06:17
Speaker
And for the saints, you know, they're approachable, they're modest, they're human, they're not stern and judgmental. ah You can have a kind of relationship with them and ask them to help you with stuff that's bothering you.
Public vs. Private Catholicism in Ireland
00:06:28
Speaker
So, you know, this is very ambiguous kind of somewhat tormented relationship to religion there.
00:06:33
Speaker
um And you know that was the kind of home I was brought up in, and and many, many people of my generation were brought up in that context in Ireland, where the church still had a lot of sway, but it was losing power and losing respect. And a autism but sort of we we had sort of divided consciousness. you know It was a public thing, but it didn't really stretch much into your private life at that point in time.
00:06:56
Speaker
you know, kind of halfway along the the gradient of its decline, I suppose, which really began, I'd say maybe you could even trace the decline of Irish Catholicism back into the the late 60s, maybe. and But it was a gradual, gradual, gradual decline. And then, you know, I was ah at the kind of somewhere in the midpoint. Yeah.
Cultural Catholicism and Its Parallels
00:07:16
Speaker
I think it's so interesting how the way you're describing the but cultural Catholicism and how it was you know It was so married to the ah to the the people that you grew up with and grew up ah under, even if it wasn't necessarily you know a set of beliefs that were being strictly held to. ah The way you're describing it is so much more similar to how some of the individuals I've spoken to ah
00:07:42
Speaker
who come from different cultural backgrounds where their religion and their culture are much more tightly intertwined as well, as opposed to, you know, I grew up Protestant. And, you know, for me, thinking about religion, even growing up when I was more religious, it was, a you know, this was a set of beliefs that people held or didn't hold. Sometimes, you know, I talked to individuals in Canada from indigenous communities and their religious ah systemology and their ah cultural ah you know, their cultural landscape are all just kind of married together. There's very little distinction. Asking what do you believe is a is almost not even a relevant question sometimes because it's so ingrained into the into the culture the the culture and the religious ah perspectives are kind of one. I think it's so interesting how different that is from probably many of our listeners who grew up
00:08:35
Speaker
in Protestant environments might say. It's very different indeed and also the Irish situation it's a cultural thing like you described as well but there's also almost a kind of, m it's a bit like a kind of a power system, a political power system, an ideology almost like, I mean some people have compared Catholic Ireland at its height, you know it's a little bit of an extreme comparison but some people have compared it to like a Soviet block Eastern European country, you know, like the right kind of Marxist ideology, but that's, that's waning, but people kind of pay lip service to it in public, but kind of subverted behind closed doors and that they don't really believe in it, you know, that kind of feel to a certain degree as well. Not, not for everybody. I'm saying that, but there also would have been a large number of very, very devout people as well. truly They were very much a thing too. And there still are a fair few.
00:09:23
Speaker
both have very kind of peculiar features and it's it's not very, it's quite different to the kind of Protestant culture I'd say that that you're describing.
Ireland's Colonial History and Religious Identity
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah and breaks to mind too some ah a conversation I had with ah a friend who spent a lot of time in Ireland and ah we were discussing the the history of colonization in Canada and the history of colonization in North America And um they off-handedly said, well, because Ireland is a colonized nation too. And i that took me aback a little bit because I thought, well, hold on a second. We're all you we're all generally, but like my my father's family, many of them came from Ireland and from the Protestant sections of Ireland. And ah I just thought, well, but we're all we're all from the United Kingdom, isn't, well, I would we be thinking of Ireland as a colonized nation.
00:10:16
Speaker
And then I id thought about it for five more minutes and thought, no, that's that's a very, that's a very colonizing way of thinking about it, isn't it? Yeah. You know, here, here I am speaking English. why i'm just working Right. Yeah.
00:10:32
Speaker
And, um, and I know that a lot of Canadians will say like my, you know, my family all came from Ireland. And so we're basically Irish. And I, I think that's probably not true, but oh it's also probably a lot of things that people who are Protestant would be more likely to to say. And you ask, well, where did your family come from in Ireland? And they couldn't tell you.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah. not Not one bit. I i know that for what I've been told from my grandmother and my my father, their Protestant
Dr. Turpin's Academic Journey: From Philosophy to Anthropology
00:11:02
Speaker
ancestors came from ah you know from dairy in that general area, which as a lot of people know these days is a pretty central place in a lot of the the conflicts that were occurring. Yeah, very much so, yeah.
00:11:19
Speaker
So you grew up in this Catholic environment. You went to first a Protestant and then a Catholic school. and And now you're an anthropologist who studies religion and religious disaffiliation. um how did those How did you get from A to B? what When did you ah become interested in going into the social sciences?
00:11:42
Speaker
and It was a long journey for me. and you know when I ah did my undergrad in philosophy and and you know came out of it not really knowing what to do. I enjoyed it. I wasn't a particularly diligent student. Then I went away to Japan and worked as an English teacher for a few years, quite a few. And I suppose I sort of became interested in in this very, very different culture I was seeing.
00:12:11
Speaker
and um Then I wanted to get out of English teaching because most people that get into English teaching, it's a kind of limbo when they want to get the fuck out, you know, at some point. So, it's right um yeah. So I decided to go back and study. What am I interested in now? What have I seen? what is I was interested in this question of cultural differences and how deeply they permeate our ways of thinking and experiencing.
00:12:32
Speaker
um You know, I remember before I went to Japan, I kind of thought, well, there are all these different social norms, but I'm sure underneath the surface, they're exactly like me. and No, not not not so much, you know, there were some different assumptions. And um so I wanted to kind of probe this more. So um I went and did a master's in anthropology. And over the course of that master's, I am came across the sort of cognitive anthropology and cognitive science of religion.
00:13:00
Speaker
and became interested in that approach. and And I suppose around the same time, you know, I was aware that there were these sudden rapid, seemingly rapid changes in
Clerical Abuse Scandals and Their Impact on Ireland
00:13:11
Speaker
in religion in Ireland and that nobody had a satisfactory explanation of. and um And, you know, it was sort of personal for me as well, because I i i was like the atheist boy in the class when I was 12, you know, um at the openly atheist boy. This is right. Half of them were probably atheists, but like they they wouldn't have had a word for it. Right. But, you know, I remember getting flack occasionally about it, you know, a turban, you're just an atheist because you think it's cool, you know, and and this kind of stuff wasn't really like that. ah Some of it may have stemmed from dinosaurs, you know, that old hoary story. It may be true. In my case, you know, I don't know where it came from. I do think it it may maybe to do with what I described earlier on, that it was so transparently social in nature that I never really
00:13:57
Speaker
thought it was about beliefs, I don't know if I ever really believed, but yeah so but then I was seeing that there was all this kind of change taking place in Ireland and and it was becoming much more normal for people to describe themselves as atheist or or say that they were no longer Catholic or these kind of things. I could sense the country changing and it seemed like an interesting object of study and also like most things that people focus on a lot of the time have some kind of connection to their own pasts and experience. So both an intriguing social scientific question. and What was the nature of this change?
00:14:32
Speaker
Why now? Why so fast? And it linked up with my own biography. So yeah, I suppose that's why I ended up going into that. and so i am I ended up enrolled in a PhD program ah run between Arhus in Denmark and Queens in Belfast, specifically cognitive anthropology of religion. And um yeah, ah my my subject of study was um the relationship between Irish secularization and the clerical abuse scandals that had been a repeated fixture of the news for decades at that point, yeah.
00:15:10
Speaker
And those ah those scandals are not just a subject of academic investigation or even criminal investigation. Now we've got films oh yeah detailing them. And ah and some I think in some ways those films may have done even a better job of educating the general public about what was happening, at least outside of you know Catholic Ireland, outside of places like Boston, I guess, in America.
00:15:38
Speaker
ah Just telling people what actually happened and how widespread the problems were and and what the cover ups were like and I'm thinking about that. Oh, that movie of Michael Keaton spotlight, I think, yeah which i I watched and thought was very good, but i was surprised how many people I met who watched it and said, well, I had no idea.
00:15:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, you know, it ist yeah that's going on for a while. Yeah, and it comes up, it comes up still, you know, it's a it's a real bone of contention sort of um to what degree were people aware of and complying with what was going on, allowing it to happen, to one degree with genuinely oblivious, which people, you know, how wide does the rot spread, that kind of thing. And it's really, really been a feature of the Irish situation as well. I mean, if you think about how these scandals developed, the first one, it seems just so innocuous now, around in like 1993 or something.
00:16:35
Speaker
Bishop Eamonn Casey, a sort of flamboyant cleric who used to appear on TV moralizing, was found to have fathered a child with an American divorcee. You know, oh shock, shock, horror. But within a few years, you know, it was pedophile priests that were coming out. And then it was it was kind of institutional complicity, hiding them, moving them around, refusing to confront the issue. And, you know, it even spread further because there was the issue of kind of Stuff like Magdalen laundries, mother and baby homes, and the industrial schools, kind of institutions run by religious orders that were systemically abusive and couldn't have operated without wide levels of public awareness and complicity and possibly even approval. and so you know that That's the sort of pattern that's happened over the decades and Ireland has began with this little kernel.
00:17:25
Speaker
And it just sort of spread and spread and spread and spread. It's larger and larger scandals and government reports about them. And then you often the pattern was that there would be a a documentary, you know, journalists would expose something. Then the government would be like, oh oh, no, we have to do something. We have to be seen to be doing something. They commissioned a report and the the cases would flood in. The testimony would flood in.
00:17:47
Speaker
um So yeah, it's a kind of expanding circle of contamination about the Catholic past and that's taken place over the course of like two and a half or three decades in Ireland. So it's it's it's very sustained and it's produce almost a new default way of viewing the past, which some people say is is too monolithic and too dark because the past is a complex place. There were many strands to Ireland in the 50s, 60s, 70s 80s.
00:18:13
Speaker
And it wasn't all just rain and pedophile priests and scary nuns. The contemporary image many, especially younger people would have of the Catholic past is almost like a kind of totalitarian hellscape.
00:18:29
Speaker
yeah right And I think that the many Canadians as they're listening to this episode will probably be um
Comparative Scandals: Ireland and Canada
00:18:38
Speaker
having bubbling up in their awareness, the Canadian Residential School scandal, which was run not just by the Catholic Church, although several were run by the Catholic Church with the full knowledge and blessing of the Canadian government, but also the United Church of Canada and Anglican Church and many others. and the the systemic abuses and horrors that occurred there were things that when I was ah you know in and middle school, when I was in high school, we never heard about, even as those schools were still open while I was in school. i'm yeah You said you're 43. I'm 42. We're of an age, basically, and i I did not hear about those things, the residential school existence or the
00:19:23
Speaker
the many, many abuses that occurred there and until a documentary came out in 2012 here in Canada and is called Eighth Fire. And it was by indigenous journalists who ah produced this documentary. And I watched it with my wife and we looked at each other and said, gosh, I never heard about this before. But now I've got two children in the school system and the residential school ah and ah you know abuses and all that, it's very well known, it's very well acknowledged and now we're starting to unpack the our own horrors in the past. In Ireland there was like a particularly influential one states of fear documentary that investigated the industrial schools which are this kind of network of institutions for for
00:20:08
Speaker
orphans and young kids that were considered trouble you know they were sort of interred there and the abuses are hideous but it was wasn't until the 90s you know that the people started kind of looking at talking about this or even it maybe a little later and yeah it was funny you know because I i heard nothing about them either when I was in school it was just and I was aware that these things had existed they did shut down I think in the the 70s but the Magdalen laundries kept going right into the 1990s. Fewer and fewer of them, but the last one closed in 96. And yet and of us none of us were aware, you know, in my school or anything like that, you know, but there must have been people around that knew. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the last Canadian residential school ah was still open when Friends was on the air. So that's. That's incredible. It's astonishing.
00:20:58
Speaker
um You mentioned a bit about you know going to ah a Protestant school and then
Religious and Cultural Distinctions in Ireland
00:21:05
Speaker
going to a Catholic school. And ah we we both sort of mentioned Protestant and Catholic Ireland.
00:21:10
Speaker
ah This may be something that not a lot of our listeners know much about. So for people who aren't Irish or who haven't seen every season of Dairy Girls, ah do you think you could give us a bit of an overview about what that what the distinction is in Ireland in terms of Catholic and Protestant? Where did that come from? Why is the country divided into those categories? Sort of like a brief history lesson.
00:21:37
Speaker
umll I'll try my best. I'll probably, um I'll try my best. So thanks we need to to establish that there's Ireland and there's Northern Ireland. Right. um So when the country, you know, achieved independence in 1920s, it was partitioned. And there was a civil war about this for for a year or two. And and so the North was basically the southern state consists of 26 counties and um is but was but and still remains by a long margin majority Catholic. ah The northern state was um kind of split between and a Protestant majority and a large Catholic minority. The Protestant majority were descended mostly from settlers um sent over from Scotland, ah England as well.
00:22:26
Speaker
and um Northern Ireland was a Protestant controlled state and over time the demographics shifted so that Catholics and Protestants nearly had the same numbers but Catholics were sort of um subordinated really. um So I mean that's the main difference, so there were Protestants in the south as well, um somewhat different you know they were the ascendancy they were sort of ah upper crusty sort of Protestants whereas there was a lot more kind of not not exclusively up across the, there were others as well, but that population really dwindled after Irish independence. There are still Protestants, of course, in Ireland now, but but fewer.
00:23:05
Speaker
and And then I suppose in the North, ah there was the troubles, you know, the period of violence in the 1970s through to the 1990s of essentially sort of simmering the borderline, not quite civil war between the Catholic and Protestant communities.
00:23:25
Speaker
um organizations like the IRA on one side and that the UVF on the other.
00:23:32
Speaker
That came to an end, I think it was 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. and So the North has been at peace since then, but, um you know, religion, because of these things, religion isn't just religion. It's not just about belief, not even mostly about belief. It's about sort of ethnic or almost tribal identity as much as it is about belief. and People, for these reasons in Ireland, you know,
00:23:57
Speaker
saying you're Catholic is is saying you're not British because the Protestant community in the north, many of them would identify as British, whereas the Catholic would tend to identify as Irish. um So these kind of the there's it there's a degree to which yeah religious and national and ethnic identity are all very, very intertwined and tightly combined and because of this history. no yeah i mean I could go on about it almost indefinitely. I just don't know how far to go back. Right. Yeah.
00:24:27
Speaker
I know that the the period of time that is sort of euphemistically referred to as the troubles ah was something that we learned about growing up. we had My family had Irish friends who came over and would kind of discuss how things were were going and ah some of the things that had been happening. And so at a young age, getting kind of exposed to it, but not obviously fully. I don't think anybody in my family was interested in teaching little kids about you know, bombs in the street and so on. But there was, yeah, that there was a ah a period of time where ah for the rest of the world, I think, looking at Ireland and thinking what, you know, what's causing this issue? Aren't you all just Irish is sort of the the attitude that you hear. But the way you're describing it
00:25:17
Speaker
You know, it's not just a not just religious differences. It's cultural, ethnic and tribal. I think you said that's a very interesting. But some some people have described it as, you know, the kind of the last burning ember of the European wars of religion, you know, wars that convulse the continent from the 16th century onwards. You know, it's it's yeah, that's one another way of seeing it.
00:25:41
Speaker
But others would see it as a tension between indigenous and and settlers, you know, there at this stage, I think, to call the Protestants settlers would be pretty offensive given they've been there for as long as they have. Great. Yeah.
00:26:00
Speaker
Right. ah So we're ah we're talking about Ireland's change.
Shift in Religious Sentiment: Past and Present Papal Visits
00:26:08
Speaker
And one of the I think one of the examples that has popped up when I've done any research ah on on Ireland and on Ireland's you know secularization ah has been the crowd sizes at the Pope visits.
00:26:25
Speaker
aye which I thought ah sort of blew my mind. And unfortunately, this is a podcast, we can't show photos, but looking at the photos of it just really, really kind of floored me. And I wondered if you wouldn't mind ah talking a bit about that in the in the context of the massive shift that was occurring. Yeah, well, in 1979, John Paul II visited Ireland. and And, you know, it was it was was He was greeted with this sort of euphoria. and I think something like altogether something for like 1.2 million people turned out to see him. and The biggest gathering was in the Phoenix Park. and um you know Ireland was a poorer country at the time still and I was going through an economic slump at that point in time. and
00:27:12
Speaker
you know People really, they they just love turning out and and cheering for the Pope and he he arrived and he kissed the runway in Dublin Airport and and you know people went wild. They went wild. It was so so much like a celebrity coming to visit them. um yeah Huge crowds turned out. But even then you know even then, there was something about it that was indicating that you know secularization was starting to happen. There was a reason the Pope had been but sort of dispatched himself off to Ireland at this point in time. you know They were sensing, I think,
00:27:41
Speaker
that a shift was imminent and they were trying to war up Catholicism. And they did succeed to a certain degree in shoring up Catholicism because there was a kind of bump in Irish religiosity, I think in the two or three years after the Pope's visit in quantitative data. And a lot of kids born and after the Pope's visit were were Chris and John Paul in his honour. The thing that the um David McWilliams, this popular economist, points out that a fair number of those kids were conceived in the tent ground ah in the Phoenix Park for people coming to see the Pope. you know it was It was treated almost like ah a rock festival. you know There was a sense that
00:28:23
Speaker
that people were there for the party because it was a weak time you know and here was the Pope and here was a load of colour and noise and crowds and fun so there was a kind of element of it if it not quite being the pious occasion that it appeared to be and and then decades later in 2018 Pope Francis paid a visit and, you know, he he went to the same places, the Phoenix Park, and just a fraction of the same amount turned out to see him. You can see these aerial photographs and just the difference between the packed out 1979 Phoenix Park and the Phoenix Park is is huge. It's one of the biggest and urban parks and in Europe.
00:29:02
Speaker
and And then, well, it was a particular part that he talked in, I suppose, but still pretty big. um And yes, so, far so, so many fewer people went to see Pope Francis because he kind of arrived after, after um all these decades of scandal. And there'd been a new scandal just before he came involved in institutions called mother and baby homes. So specifically, there was, you know, people a local historian had, Catherine Corliss had reported that she thought there were infant remains interred in this site, which had been a place where where women who got pregnant out of wedlock were kind of institutionalized and their babies were usually given up for adoption. And i yeah, they they investigated the subterranean structure thought to be a sewage tank and they found the remains of something like 790 children, you know, so there was this outcry
00:29:55
Speaker
And so Francis arrived with his tail between his legs, kind of oligized and that kind of stuff. And it was a very, very different feeling. And a lot of people well in surveys, you know, asked why they didn't go. A lot of them said it was the abuse crisis, but even more said they just didn't really care.
00:30:13
Speaker
you know, it was a rainy day, they're just not bothered. You know, the Queen had visited earlier, you know, ah Obama I think had visited earlier, maybe Trump, you know, they turned out, oh yeah, if I've done enough big gigs this year, I'm not interested. So yeah, there was a sort of a mixture of antipathy and apathy by the time that second papal visit came around.
00:30:37
Speaker
And it seems it seems like the the decline that you're describing ah from the data that you've ah they investigated and that others have investigated can be directly linked to many of those scandals, whether with the clergy abuses or the you know the systems that were put in place that oppressed or that ah caused significant harm, it it all seems to be ah but all seems to be connected.
00:31:07
Speaker
It's connected, but I would be cautious about making the connections too direct. um So even though Ireland in the 70s and 80s was profoundly religious, be certainly compared to elsewhere in Europe, especially Western Europe,
00:31:24
Speaker
and Religion had been starting to decline.
Secularization and the Role of Scandals
00:31:27
Speaker
you know and the Up to the 1960s, it was very much a kind of fortress Catholicism, an attempt to keep external influences at bay. But there was a shift towards the end of the 60s and the 70s where they started courting foreign direct investment. They started opening up the economy. It became more, somewhat more culturally open. you know TV was having more of an effect on people's lifestyles and thoughts. So they were starting to secularize.
00:31:49
Speaker
So what they were saying they were Catholic believers and how they were living was starting to peel apart for for a couple of decades, really before the abuse scandal started to erupt. And this new norm was being established, really, this cultural Catholic norm, where you know you went along with it in official moments, but you really kind of ignored it in private. So that was the the baseline into which the abuse scandals were introduced. I think it's important to bear that one in mind.
00:32:16
Speaker
um Another factor is the abuse scandals basically arrived at a point in time where the Irish economy was kicking off into overdrive with the Celtic Tiger. The country was suddenly becoming a lot more rich in its newfound role as a kind of tax haven for American mega corporations. So, I mean, a lot of shifts were happening around then and the scandals came into this and they've had a wide range of effects and their effects vary depending on the person. So, I mean, I know it's it's tempting to say Ireland was very Catholic and they were all Catholic believers and then they got the bull pulled from their eyes by these scandals and they all stopped doing it. it Some people did. Some people instead who were very devout. They kind of privatized their devotion. They were alienated and disappointed by the church, you know, but they couldn't stop believing or stop saying they're Catholic, but they found their own private ways of being Catholic.
00:33:06
Speaker
other people who were sort of just didn't like the church anyway. They were already pissed off with it and told what to do. You know, he's judged and gave it the middle finger and said, ah, look, you bunch of hypocrites. Look what you've been up. And they could they could break the connection. And there are whole ways it kind of it ruined the church's reputation as the nation's kind of moral conscience and guide ruined it completely. ruined And it probably never will. No, never will recover. and But yeah, you just have to be hesitant about making the claim that Ireland went from a devout Orthodox believing society to a to a secular one overnight because of these scandals and their effects. It was more complex.
00:33:51
Speaker
Mm hmm. More of an more of an accelerant as opposed to a cause and effect. Yeah, exactly. I think accelerant is an excellent way to say it. I mean, another factor to consider as well is that the clench of Catholic Ireland had to be loosened a little bit for the scandals even to come out in the first place or for people to interpret them the way they did. So, um you know, there's yeah, an accelerant. That's a good way of saying it. And probably what wasn't helping was the fact that the church was and continues to spend millions of dollars every year to try to ah fight the consequences in courts around the world. Yeah, that consistently looked awful. ah Very, very bad look indeed. Yeah.
00:34:36
Speaker
undermines the and runs the moral authority argument a little bit. I i do have a ah few Catholic friends, and one that kind of made the offhand comment of, well, the world needs the church to sort of be the you know be the arbiter of what's right and wrong. Otherwise, we wouldn't know what's right and wrong. And I thought, well, that sounds like a great idea. Do you do you think the church is going to start anytime soon? Because it certainly doesn't look like they've been doing it for a while. Yeah. Yeah, it really is the case.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yeah, but it's an important one as well that it happened at the point in time where, you know, because I've described, for example, my own mother's relationship to Catholicism, she found it oppressive, so she dialed it down and she got older. She didn't want to immerse us in what she'd dislike, but she couldn't quite decouple from Catholicism. But the result was that I had much less exposure to it growing up. And so that means that For me and others like me and my generation, our image of the church is primarily formed not through religious socialization. It was formed through what we saw on television and what we saw was documentaries and news reports about scandals. um but you know That formed the image and the image is also
00:35:48
Speaker
um less varied than it might be for someone older because they probably would would see the church as a kind of um an institution with lots of different individuals within it some are good some are bad that kind of thing when you're having a more media-related image it can be it's it's darker it's darker and more homogeneous and that probably contributed as well yeah yeah so even even in the environment that you were raised in where you had a ah nominally catholic mother and a openly not believing, but still Catholic father, and the the exposure that you received to what the church actually was, um wasn't as balanced as probably it had been in previous generations, or even as one sided in one direction is one side in the other. Yeah, it could have been one side in the other direction. I mean, it wasn't yet. It was it occupied a far smaller part of my life, no far less relevant to my life than it would have been to older
Comparing Irish and Indigenous Canadian Experiences
00:36:41
Speaker
generations. And it was far more negative, that image, far more negative. Yeah.
00:36:46
Speaker
I know I've sort of returned or circled back and made this comparison in the past, but it just it it's still striking to me how how many similarities there are between the Indigenous communities in Canada and the experiences of ah that you're you're describing. And I think about one Indigenous elder who I had the the privilege of working with during my ah during my career in public health.
00:37:12
Speaker
And she was raised by ah by her mother who was indigenous but also Catholic, ah you know, grew up in a residential schools. And her mother had pushed her and pushed her to, you know, you've got to get connected to our indigenous heritage, to taking her to to ceremony and and things when it was allowed.
00:37:31
Speaker
ah because it wasn't allowed for many decades in Canada. You weren't allowed to practice Indigenous culture in any way, and no gatherings allowed. We weren't allowed to do potluck gatherings, like getting together for for food in groups of larger than two or three. And even though her mother was very, very Catholic and was never able to shake it, was never able to ah get away from the the fear that she felt about trying to leave the Catholic Church, she still pushed her daughter into going in the direction of ah learning more and more about their cultural heritage. ah I think that the the overlaps are just very interesting. They are very interesting. And you know, I think about it now. and Canada has an interest in comparison for the residential
00:38:19
Speaker
institutions you mentioned are one. yeah Another one is and French Canada, Montreal's Quiet Revolution in the 60s. If you kind of take that and take the and the other experiences you're talking about there and mount them on to one another, yeah you have it what's an image of of of something quite like the Irish secularization experience, sort of this rapid attempt to break the link between Irishness and Catholicism and all this abuse and scandal and and ambivalence and darkness.
00:38:49
Speaker
more large one situation yeah Yeah, most of the French Catholics I know still describe themselves as French Catholics, even if they're atheists. yeah that It's a remarkably sticky set of ideas.
00:39:05
Speaker
It's sticky, but it may not be because of the ideas. It's sticky because the um it's the identity, it's the sense of belonging. It could be like stuff like the ritual and the yeah done these things. These things have been part of my past. When you say it it didn't happen to me, even i I don't know what to call myself, to be honest. you know i A decade ago or so, I would have been much more strident in calling myself an atheist. but you know, these days I kind of think, well, you know, like certain aspects of like my consciousness and my my cultural background have been formed by the church. So I mean, in a sense, I'm a cultural Catholic too, even though I would never tick the box in any place where it might give the church power. Right. In a private moment, I might have to admit that. Yeah, I'm a bit of a cultural Catholic. Yeah, that was very well put.
Credibility Enhancing Displays in Religion
00:39:52
Speaker
Thank you.
00:39:53
Speaker
one of the things that initially led to this conversation happening um was ah a previous interview we did with Dr. Will Gervais, who I think you knew from Brunel, that he and I had been talking about something ah called credibility enhancing displays, which for the the benefit of our listeners is essentially ah referring to a ah a practice or a, ah it's ah an evolutionary, a cultural evolutionary theory ah that indicates how people tend to transmit their ah their belief in something through acts that are very hard to to fake. ah and sort of the the classic example well the The examples that I've seen in more than one textbook are, you know you and I are both living in a tribal society. I tell you, these berries are safe to eat. Well, what why am I saying that? Am I saying that because they actually are or do I
00:40:49
Speaker
ah Do I have some reason to eliminate you as a rival? and Maybe they're actually poisonous. Well, a hard to fake credibility enhancing display is if I eat the berries. And then it's very unlikely I'd be doing that if it was bad for me. And the ah this is the the basics of that ah concept ah in cultural evolutionary theory, but it also gets applied to the ah to theory of religion as well. And I was wondering if you wouldn't mind going into that a little bit for us.
00:41:15
Speaker
I'll try and I'll go ahead and get applied to the theory of religion. I'll maybe also talk about how it's also been used as part of the explanation of the process of secularization as well. And the idea with the theory of religion is that um no one can tell whether or not there's a God or which who which person's version of God is is is true. and you know it's It's an empirically unverifiable proposition. So we we kind of have it confirmed for us by social behaviour around us rather than by direct experience. So and these beliefs are more likely to catch on and spread if people around you are acting as though they and they really, really do hold to these beliefs sincerely.
00:41:56
Speaker
Now, so this is from credit theories perspective, ah this sort of explains why successful religions are ones that make a lot of costly demands of their adherence. So it's a very, very time consuming rituals or, you know, celibate elites or other things, you know, that people wouldn't really be doing unless they sincerely believed in the religion in question. That's kind of where it comes into us. Now, there are problems with this, you know,
00:42:22
Speaker
and A big glaring one is that there are all sorts of reasons why people might might might engage in religious actions, you know, these things can be kind of mandatory it's not very easy to back out of them a lot of the time if you live, especially in a somewhat theocratic society, or one where it's very socially normative.
00:42:42
Speaker
know, so there's a bit bit of a Protestant streak to the CRED idea as well, you know, that it's all about belief and sincere belief. And can you tell from the people around you that they sincerely believe by their actions because they've, have they freely chosen to believe in this? Right. Yeah, well, yeah, you know, so there's that aspect to CRED theory. But and and that's why, you know, in recent years, I've been kind of thinking, maybe it's not so brilliant a theory to apply to the Irish case in particular. But Anyway, yeah, there's that. But then it gets linked up to the idea of secularization because one of the kind of most ah reliable findings is that the more people become existentially secure, society has become existentially secure, free from worry and threats to to one's life and wellbeing and from from poverty or ill health and sickness, sir.
00:43:31
Speaker
any of these things war that the less religious people become. and And, but we don't know what the connection is what's the mechanism influencing these two things. And be with creds would be that as people become more secure. They, this is my supervisor john landman's idea they they um firstly they they don't need to turn to God for help and succor to the same degree that they would have before, so they're less likely to perform crowds for these kind of instrumental reasons, and also they um they they don't need the the support of their co-religionists so much anymore, so they're not they're not likely to perform crowds in a kind of signaling way to try and indicate
00:44:12
Speaker
and that they're a good group member and require the help of these p the you know these other co-religionists that kind of goes down so as societies get more wealthy people just kind of relax a bit and do less and you get then the generation that comes after that is exposed to to fewer creds and are less likely to accept religious beliefs they may not you know rebel against them they they may just like that they just don't really stick um so that's how it's how it's linked to secularization. I mean, obviously, then there's also you can spin the idea in its head and talk about the possibility of a credibility undermining display acting as a parent. And then we have like Catholic scandals being a particularly salient example of that. Yeah. Yeah, the the credibility undermining displays was the the piece that popped up in my conversation with Will, where he said, actually, there's this there's this guy you might want to talk to. And he wrote a book called Unholy Catholic Ireland. Oh, my yeah.
00:45:11
Speaker
And I thought, well, that's an interesting title. y ah Why unholy but still Catholic? But what you've been describing in this conversation is exactly the reasons why you were raised by an an ostensibly Catholic family that wasn't really engaging in a lot of those displays, those creds. ah ah Like you said, still Catholic, still very ingrained because it is just it is more than those truth
Dr. Turpin's Book on Social Change and Religion
00:45:42
Speaker
propositions that people are saying that they do or don't believe, but your father still went to mass sometimes. yeah right that's That's very interesting. Is that where the where the inspiration for the book came about?
00:45:54
Speaker
Partly, yeah, partly it did. um Really, i was I was trying to tie a lot of things together to understand how different things we've just just mentioned, like the sort of social and economic changes, the scandals, and new positions I'm seeing around me of kind of strong, strident, moralized ex-Catholicism.
00:46:14
Speaker
and ah devout Catholicism, but also the huge middle sway of cultural Catholicism. How do these things relate to each other? How did people within these positions perceive each other? and ah Were were the the appeal of these positions shifting because of these kind of kind of influences on society? And there are interesting kind of interactions that you see, and one is that from from from a particular point in the mean that The typical disaffiliation narrative that I got was and was not one where someone was was a devout believer and then dropped out of it. it was more that you know They'd gone along with it out of habit and then they kind of ah kind of
00:46:58
Speaker
sort of found themselves questioning it and realizing, oh, I never really believed at all. I never really believed at all. And the next time the census comes around, I'm not going to tick that box saying I'm a Catholic. But what you get from that is this position of strident opposition, sometimes not just to divide Catholicism, even more to cultural Catholicism, because the idea is, and this is where you sort of see a kind of sublimated, almost kind of Protestant influence coming in through sort of atheism, which is a kind of an end in many ways of Protestant discourses and influencing people's stances. So um the idea would be that at least a devout Catholic actually believes, you know, whereas a cultural Catholic is supporting and the Catholic Church's control over schools,
00:47:44
Speaker
they're They're refusing to disaffiliate because they don't want to upset their their their grandparents or their parents. They want their to get baptized. They want them to get confirmed so they can get the the money and the party that happens at confirmation and maybe a new icon and all this kind of stuff.
00:48:00
Speaker
And um the idea being that they're kind of irresponsibly supporting the status quo. but yeah A number of kind of ex-Catholics I talk to explicitly define themselves in opposition, not to the devout position so much as the cultural Catholic position. The reason being um the Catholic Church after independence had a huge degree of influence in Irish society and it had ah if it controlled the education system, continues to control most of it.
00:48:25
Speaker
and also from 1983 there was an anti-abortion law and the in the constitution and so on so it had this level of institutional control even though the populace had kind of liberalised quite a lot and and this created a kind of tension dust that pitched cultural Catholic ex-Catholic and devout Catholic against one another in a kind of three-way struggle. Both Poles, the ex-Catholic and the devout Catholic, are kind of trying to pull up the cultural Catholic, either trying to make them more secular arm or more Catholic in this kind of influence battle over the shape of society. So that was a thing we wanted to look at a lot in the book as well, to understand those positions and why people take them and how they view one another. yeah
00:49:07
Speaker
not Holy Catholic Ireland. I mean it's a bit of a pun. First, Holy Catholic Ireland is kind of what Ireland, Ireland's self-image in the past was at a particularly pure Catholicism. It may be poor, it may have been backwards, but it was spiritually superior.
Cultural Catholicism: Maintaining or Challenging the Status Quo?
00:49:24
Speaker
That was Holy Catholic Ireland. I mean as it transitioned into the society we see today that rides itself kind of on its you know, it's its elites, its official elites pride themselves on their there cosmopolitanism, their progressivism, their right economic sophistication ah for masterminding the transformation of Irish society. It's not like that at all. And the past instead is viewed as this inverted empire of abuse. That's one meaning of unholy Catholic Ireland. The other one is all the people that
00:49:55
Speaker
you know, are not really holy, even though they are nominally Catholic, as you pointed out. yeah So there's there's a number of ways of reading the title. yeah but one of the ones that stuck out to me when I was reading the description was, well, certainly people would describe those ah those priests who were committing all those abuses as unholy. Oh, yeah. and And isn't that a really interesting angle as well? So that ah stuck out to me as well. Lots of different ways you could read that title. And I i think that a lot of Canadians who are
00:50:28
Speaker
thinking about our own circumstances and our own secularization journey will probably get an awful lot out of your book when they pick it up. I hope so. I hope they pick it up. It's in my cart as we speak and I regret not being able to read it before this interview because I think I would have had a lot more insightful questions, but I'm actually kind of hoping that you might come back for another conversation once I have read it. ah sure yeah i'd love to That would be ah really interesting to me. One thing that you said that ah really poked me just now was how the
00:51:07
Speaker
the more ah the more atheists ah sort of more atheist activists, I guess, maybe in Ireland, it would be a good way to to describe them, ah how they're pulling at the cultural Catholics and they're bringing in, ah like you said, a pretty a pretty Protestant worldview or pre-Prostinent way of thinking about belief and and and behavior. And you were describing ah how they're ah you know going after the people in the middle of the cultural Catholics and saying, well, at least the real Catholics believe. And I thought, gosh, the Richard Dawkins is showing when they say that.
00:51:42
Speaker
That's true. I mean, i this it it didn't tend to be like a, it was something people would say to me when I interviewed them. It wasn't like a an official line of attack by any organization because it would have been too inflammatory, really, and counterproductive to pursue that line of attack.
00:51:58
Speaker
no But, and also, you know, I was doing a lot of this fieldwork in the 2010s, the kind of late 2010s, and ah new 80s and was starting to fade off a bit, but it it was hitting a nerve in Ireland because of that history, the abuse scandals and stuff, you know, so was it was popular ah way of looking at things then. But yeah, I mean, it it is quite a Protestant-centric way of seeing things. It is kind of fixated on belief.
00:52:27
Speaker
and consistency of belief and authenticity and these kind of things. Whereas the Irish Catholic traditional thing, you know, it it's so varied, it's hard to kind of nail it down, but a certain current of it is almost pagan, you know, you kind of yeah go through the rites and rituals almost like they did in ancient Rome or in Shinto, Japan or something like that. and You don't have to really, well, you see, that's the thing I say, you don't have to, we're talking about the 80s and 90s here.
00:52:54
Speaker
I mean, you certainly had to pretend you believed even if you didn't, and you certainly had to go along with things and and appear to be be devout. Are you were considered?
Secularization as a Colonizing Effort?
00:53:04
Speaker
And I think it's interesting, too, that the the push for secularization can still sometimes be a colonizing effort. And I'm thinking of a ah book by a political scientist from India. Her name is Navidida Menon, and she wrote a book called Securization as Misdirection, about how it is you know it is a very Protestant, very Eurocentric way of thinking to push secularization as this is the new thing that's gonna save us all from how you know how bad religion was, but it's still baked into sometimes those colonizing efforts, that settler mentality, ah that we've got something that is gonna fix everything, you just need to believe what we believe.
00:53:51
Speaker
Well, gosh, we've heard that before, haven't we? We have. All right. It's true. It's true. But in the Irish case, it's it's also gets complex because the um there are real, real factors that would antagonize secular people as well. You know, like having to send your kid to a ah Catholic school where they're, they're going to get possibly indoctrinated or that kind of thing. You know, you can see it also, there are structural factors that bump to this conflict too. So it's not, you can't purely say they're they're being kind of mental colonists or anything like that. right it's it's ah it's ah That is a kind of interesting observation, definitely. Yeah.
00:54:31
Speaker
Well, i I know earlier you mentioned that we could probably go on for ah for quite a while about any number, any single aspect of the you know of the history of the advancing or accelerating secularization in Ireland, I think your overview has touched on some really interesting things and some really it's really challenging things for people here in Canada who will have a lot of overlap. Like we mentioned, there's overlap in terms of what the church was getting up to here in Canada and overlap with our French Catholic communities and then also overlap now with advancing secularization and how we're
00:55:10
Speaker
we're working through all these things as a nation, knowing that actually just becoming secular isn't going to fix anything if we're not also committed to fixing social problems in an equitable and decolonizing and creative way. um I think that books like yours, and i ah yeah I hope that we can schedule something in the new year when I've had a chance to to read it hopefully over the Christmas holidays. And I don't know when this episode is gonna actually land, but we're in the middle, we're in the beginning of December right now. um I hope that when you come back, we'll be able to talk in a bit more detail about ah what might this look like in Canada. We can shake our crystal balls and and try to make some predictions that'll turn out to be completely wrong, but at least they'll be interesting to listen to. um So what was the question of, you know, will it Willis?
00:56:01
Speaker
Will there be a backlash? I think that's a big question in a lot of people's minds right now.
Canada's Unique Secularization Path
00:56:06
Speaker
It's what's going on with your southern neighbor. so ah Well, we're all just yeah it's it's interesting. We're all ah watching with curiosity and bated breath what ah you know what the new year will bring, what the next four years will bring.
00:56:22
Speaker
We're all hoping that nobody remembers we have oil up here. Lots of you know complex feelings, I think. But ah Canada, at least, and this is a ah conversation we had and on this podcast with ah Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme, who's a sociologist, also went to Oxford, and ah she made the comment that Canada decoupled its ah it's political or or national and religious identities in a way that the United States never managed to.
00:56:50
Speaker
or at least manage to a little bit less. So I think that there's some some hope there won't be as much spillage here, but gosh, ah that is also wishful thinking that I'm ah speaking out into the universe over here, which is that's the closest to prayer I've gotten in many years, but that's ah but something at least.
00:57:10
Speaker
ah The name of the book is Unholy Catholic Ireland, religious hypocrisy, secular morality, and Irish irreligion. is ah Where's the best place for people to pick it up? Will that just be Amazon or is there other places? Don't send them to Bezos. Not to Bezos. Okay, where can we go by? Maybe the publisher's website. You can get it at Stanford University Press. they You can just get it directly from them. Or, you know, get it from should go on get it from Amazon if that's easy for you. It is on there as well. yeah Well, then I will encourage our listeners to to do so. And this is a great time for it because we're going to have lots of time to read and think about the future of planet Earth over the next few years. As we watch what happens in the world's biggest economy, ah that is going to be maybe, like you said, having some backlash, having some swinging towards a more religious future. We'll have to see what happens.
Future of Secularism: Political Alignments and Social Impact
00:58:03
Speaker
Uh, we sometimes like to finish our recordings, our podcasts by, uh, you know, I've been, I've been picking your brain and throwing questions at you, uh, the whole time. And I thought we'd end by asking if you had any questions for me or us at Humanist Canada and about the things that we were discussing or, or other topics that you're, uh, wanting our listeners to think about. I suppose, um,
00:58:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's only kind of nebulous. It hasn't fully formed in my mind, but it's something I've been wondering about lately. and There's been a kind of strong association between secularism and liberal or left wing kind of port and politics and political stances and moral stances and that kind of thing. And this is connected to humanism.
00:58:49
Speaker
and Do you think there's going to be a change in the future? Do you think think we're going to see the emergence of more right-leaning secular stances as well? You know, I'm thinking of kind of tech libertarianism, is that kind of stuff going to spread or kind of nostalgic for a cultural Christian, but basically atheist, is that going to spread? You know, what what do you think is going to happen in the future? Is humanism going to lose market share in secular people, do you think?
00:59:13
Speaker
Well, that's a really good question. And I think um from where I'm sitting, I think it's already started. ah You have a lot of the a lot of A lot of the emerging voices on the right don't really bear much resemblance to anything traditionally religious. You think about Joe Rogan, who I'm not convinced Joe Rogan believes in anything besides Joe Rogan, ah but he attracts a ah massive population of um young men who are almost certainly not all religious, but are attracted to something.
00:59:49
Speaker
ah You look at Jordan Peterson, who's a Canadian psychologist, ah ostensibly religious, but you know in in any way that really matters, the things he's describing are are secular. Ask him if he believes in God, you're going to get half an hour of I'm not even sure what to call it, wax. Yeah, psycho bubble. His interview with, his interview conversation debate with Sam Harris was ah truly wild to behold that I still don't know what he was saying some of the time. And you have a lot of people attracted to something there and it's not necessarily the secularization. It's not necessarily anything religious. And I think that what many of them are probably attracted to is as power.
01:00:34
Speaker
or the perception of power or the display of power, maybe display of power and confidence. A lot of people attracted to, you mentioned like tech libertarians. I think Elon Musk was a good example there, the example. ah They're attracted to something that's power, confidence, and the ability to tell a convincing story. ah The convincing story that, you know, hey, you out there who feel lonely and disenfranchised, it's not your fault. You don't need to change. Everybody else needs to change. They owe you, your old girlfriend, your old,
01:01:04
Speaker
success. And this is a you know this is not a particularly ah connected story to Christianity or to anything else. It is a religious story, though, ah and ah religious in a way that it it gives people something to believe in or some sort of overarching worldview that makes sense of their current disenfranchisement, or at least their perceptions of it. i I do think that we're seeing something emerge. I'm not quite sure what its final form is going to be. I worry that the
01:01:38
Speaker
and you know You even see that with some of the the new atheists ah former new atheist celebrities who have trended more and more right as the you know as the years have gone on. yeah and I think that that may be because ah people will tend to be attracted to power and that might be where that's going I don't know if humanism is going to lose market share. I i don't have ah faith in much these days, except i I try to have faith in in people since we've consistently you know been working towards, a I hope, a brighter and brighter future.
Conclusion: Embracing Humanistic Values
01:02:17
Speaker
you know People make fun of religious people for believing in things that they can't prove. I kind of want to believe that one day we're going to have a future like Star Trek.
01:02:26
Speaker
So really, it's more delusional than me or them. i'm I'm trying to hold those beliefs lightly and with as much humility as I can. It's a little hard sometimes. But yeah, I think that that is happening. And and those who are interested in secularization or interested in things like humanism would probably do well to to pay attention to who were who we're alienating and who we're mocking if we're having you know mocking conversations. and that's why I'm so gratified that you and I could ah could talk like this that the guests we have on, we're not here to make fun of religious people. We're not here to talk about how they're all stupid and how we're all smarter than them. We're actually just talking about what data can show.
01:03:10
Speaker
and and what we can learn about our species. And I do genuinely hope that trends will swing in the other direction, that we will swing towards more open, more understanding, more defaulting to compassion as opposed to defaulting to might makes right. And and I'm not Joe Rogan and certainly we don't have his audience, but I would love to see you know generations of young men be attracted to messages like that. Okay.
01:03:39
Speaker
Well, I don't know if that nebulous answer fit the nebulous question, but i I hope our listeners will think that over and and send us ah send us their thoughts. ah Dr. Turpin has been an absolute privilege to have this conversation. um I'm so grateful for your time and I hope that everybody else will ah be just as interested in reading your book as as I am and as I will, and I look forward to our next conversation.
01:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, me too. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much. okay
01:04:14
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Voice of Canadian Humanism. We would like to especially thank our members and donors who make our work possible. If you feel that this is the type of programming that belongs in the public conversation, please visit us at HumanistCanada.ca and become a member and or donate. You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.