Transcript for interview with Jeff Kripal on Comparative Religion

An Interview with Jeff Kripal on World Religions

0. Introduction

Johnathan Bi: Two years ago, I witnessed a Christian miracle, but I still did not convert. I didn’t convert at the time, not because I thought it was fraudulent. I think the miracle was genuine, but because of the existence of other genuine miracles in competing religious traditions. But they can’t all be right. So who has the ultimate truth? I’ve been tortured by the question of which religious tradition has the right God ever since. And my guest, Rice University’s Jeff Kripal has given me the most compelling response yet. After years of talking with every scholar of religion I could get my hands on, it is these sets of interviews that I find most compelling by far. And if you are at all curious about the religious question, I cannot recommend Jeff’s work enough for both scholars and seekers. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events that I host across the world, then please join my email list at Johnathanbi.com to be kept up to date. Without further ado, Jeff Kripal.

Johnathan Bi: So, Jeff, I come to you asking for advice as both a scholar and a seeker. And to give you a bit of backstory, I was raised Protestant, like many teenagers, grew away from the faith. And in college, I was working through personal suffering, this worldly suffering about desire. The classic growing angst of a teenager.

Johnathan Bi: And I got into two religious traditions, René Girard’s Catholicism, who problematized desire socially, and certain sects of Tibetan Buddhism who problematized desire ontologically and phenomenologically. And my first foray was to solve just worldly problems, okay? So I wasn’t really interested in the metaphysics, the next world, but what it did do was it convinced me that there was something here. This is not as the modern scientists or materialists say, just complete voodoo, right? Now, my second foray into religion was actually about last year when I read one of your colleagues, Carlos Eire’s book on They Flew, on a historical argument for levitation that I couldn’t find a materialist explanation for. And because of that, I actually witnessed an orthodox miracle myself. So it’s this icon, orthodox icon, yay big of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. It’s in Taylor, Pennsylvania. And it oozes oil, myrrh, infinitely, and I saw it do that for 15 minutes as the priest or the father took it out and proceeded to anoint everyone in the room with it. And my metaphysical worldview was completely blown out of the water. And then to much of my Christian friends’ chagrin, I did not immediately convert to orthodoxy because I felt like that was the wrong conclusion to draw. Witnessing this one miracle gave a lot more credence to the other miracle traditions that I was familiar with, right? Whether it’s the Buddhists, Hindus.

Johnathan Bi: And I feel like my problem with religion is the exact opposite of many moderns. They don’t think that there’s anything here. I think there’s too much here to decipher. And my problem, I framed it as what Sextus Empiricus calls equipollence. It’s not when I think a tradition like Christianity is wrong, it’s that there’s an opposing and mutually exclusive orthodox claim that I can’t determine between. And so my problem is not whether to take a leap, it’s whither to take a leap. So that’s the problem I’ve been stuck in. What do you got for me?

 1. Against Western Monotheism

Jeffrey Kripal: Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the club. That’s my problem. I believe too much as it were. One of the things that I grew up Roman Catholic in the American Midwest and the claim was always that, well, the Catholic Church is right because miracles only exist in the Catholic faith. And that’s just not true.