David Garth and Derrick Stone

00:01 My name is David Garth. I'm 78 years old here in Charlottesville, Virginia. I'm retired. This is Tuesday, May 24, 2022.

00:15 I'm Derek Stone. I'm 49. For a couple more weeks. I'm in Charlottesville, Virginia, on this 24 May 2022. All right, well, thank you both for coming into the studio today. So the first question that I want to ask both of you is, what made you want to have a one small step conversation? Why did you sign up?

00:39 Well, I like to talk and like to hear myself talking, but I'm also very interested in other people in Charlottesville who have had some of these same experiences over the last few years.

00:53 Well, yeah, I think conversation is pretty much the key to figuring out a lot of things that are happening. So I don't think I would normally sign up for something like this, but it seemed a good opportunity to maybe talk to somebody I would not normally have an in depth conversation with. Yeah, definitely. So the first step we take to try and get to know your partner better is to read out your partner's introduction, what they wrote about themselves. And so I'm going to ask each of you to take turns reading out what your partner wrote. And then once you've done that, if there are any immediate questions that come to mind that you want to pursue, you know, feel free to take a few minutes to ask each other those. So, David, if you want to start.

01:40 Derek, this is what you said about yourself. I was born and raised in a small logging town in southern Oregon. In 1998, I moved to Charlottesville with my wife, Sharon, where we raised two boys. Ive been a Baha'I all my life and spent some time abroad in my youth in service of my faith. August 12 was a wake up call for me, and I took an online course in anti black racism. I have continued to participate in the course as a teaching assistant. My day job is in technology, but I am an avid outdoorsman. My response to that, Derek, is that you and I have a lot in common, except in religion. So I look forward to exploring that with you.

02:33 Shall I? Okay. David, you wrote, I am a retired Presbyterian pastor with four kids and six grandchildren. The events of August 2017 changed my mind about how liberal I have been about race relations. So this actually immediately caught my attention. The expression, how liberal I have been about race relations. And I was sort of looking forward to asking you what you meant by that.

03:05 Sometimes in my teenage years, the issue of school integration came up here in this area, and I remember having a terrible argument with my parents. I took the side of we really need to integrate our schools. There's no reason not to. And they just insisted that that was the wrong idea. And I remember even breaking into tears that we just couldn't reach an understanding about that. And so from really, from that time forward, as I've learned more about myself and about race relations, I've thought of myself as a very open, liberal person, but I have realized that I have not listened very carefully or at all to what black people in this country have been experiencing.

04:05 Now, are you native virginian? I hear some kind of.

04:09 I was born in DC, but moved to this area when I was twelve.

04:13 You have a little bit of that southern accent, but I don't hear some of the Virginia pulling out of words. I was curious about that.

04:21 Well, spent almost all of my adult working life someplace else. Yeah. But came back here because this was home.

04:32 So when you had that conversation with your parents, how old would you say you were? Do you have a sense of that?

04:39 I'm guessing I was maybe 15, 1617 at the most. Yeah. Would have been in the late fifties when Charlottesville High School, Lane High School, actually closed down. And I knew about that because several kids transferred to Albemarle High School, where I was in school. And by golly, we've canceled the most important football game of the fall, which was this rivalry between Albemarle and Lane. And it was clear to me that the reason it was canceled. And then the following year it was moved to the afternoon because you certainly didn't want to have a school that was integrated with a dozen black people playing football at night.

05:35 Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Growing up on the west coast, sort of my sense of what racism was is very different. And I think I can relate to what I thought I heard you say there about. It seemed important to you and then at one point you realized you weren't listening to black people or you hadn't heard their perspective. And I feel like I can really relate to that because where I grew up is in Oregon, and you couldn't live there if you weren't white until like the twenties or something. I mean, it was very different. So what we have is more of the overt racism, and here in Charlottesville, it's more quiet. You don't talk about it. You know, one thing I noticed when I first moved here, which was 1998, was, you know, people who were not white didn't look at me and didn't smile at me unless I smiled at them first. And always they smiled at me when I smiled at them. And I just was ignorant. I just didn't know, like, how it was different here as opposed to, like, the town where I grew up. There was one black family in that town and one black family, you know, south a little bit. And so they were. They had a lot of pressure on them. I can't imagine what it would have been like for them. But people were just openly racist to them, and they had to basically deal with that. And that that's not what you saw here. But what you didn't. What you also didn't see was, you know, anybody in prominent leadership positions who was black, you know, so it was. I think I had kind of a similar experience where specifically, the riots in Charlottesville made me stop and think, okay, I think I'm wrong about this. Like, I have been an advocate for race equality, and, you know, I just was missing it. I didn't understand exactly what was going on. And that's, you know, basically how systems were racist, are racist, and advantage towards white people. So, like, you know, I might have said, I don't see color, and I can't believe I've ever said that, but I might have said it in 2015, for example, or in high school. But so then it makes me wonder, what was it that made you question, at some point, you realized you weren't listening to black people? What was it that made you think about that?

08:23 Well, when 2017 happened, I marched with the safe group that left the First Baptist church on Main street and walked toward downtown. But I went with the group that went to the safe park, not with the group that actually confronted the racists at the Lee statue. That event frightened me in ways that I had not been frightened before. The next year, I went on the pilgrimage to civil rights sites. And I was so pleased to go on that, particularly to realize that the group that was going was half black and half white, roughly almost 100 people. And then when I got back, I realized I have never been with that many black people, never been with any black people on a. For a whole week. And I started going back in my memory and realizing that of all the black people that I have known and worked with all of my adult life, and even as a child growing up, I really didn't have any black friends that were close.

09:52 Yeah.

09:52 Real connection with them when. Well, the first stop on the pilgrimage was at Appomattox. And we heard a wonderful 45 minutes presentation about the military movements and the significance of Appomattox and how the civil war was over. And we got back on the bus, and Jelaine Schmidt said, okay, what did you hear about black people? Did this official speech tell you much at all? About hundreds of thousands of black people who were freed because Lee surrendered to Grant? And I thought, who'd have thought of that? What a stupid person you are. As someone who has studied history, you know, I just haven't been paying attention. Yeah. And it really has caused me to, basically, for me personally, to be a lot more involved in the issue of reparations, both thinking about it for the city and the country, but trying to figure out what I needed to do personally myself.

11:20 So I want to jump in here because I think it would be great to return to this conversation, but I want to kind of think back now and talk a bit about your formative years, because we always try to know where people come from. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about people who are influential, you can feel free to ask each other that question and read it out loud. So, yeah, if you want to tackle that. Are you saying this is the question? Number two. Number three, I think. Number three, yes. If you want to read that out loud, who has been the most influential portion in your life? What did they teach you? Yeah. Boy, that's a. Yeah, go ahead, please.

12:02 There are too many, you know.

12:05 Yeah, I feel.

12:06 But I guess as I've thought about my own life and particularly about my religion, I was raised Presbyterian. The person who was most influential to me in terms of my faith was my aunt Phoebe, who grew up and lived in the house where I'm living now, and she taught me to be a very conservative Presbyterian.

12:35 Is this your dad's sister or your mom's sister?

12:37 My dad's sister. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

12:40 And when you say conservative Presbyterian, what do you give me some more? Because I don't want to assume what you mean by that.

12:48 The Bible is the word of God.

12:49 Yeah.

12:50 And we learned in the Westminster catechism that it was written by holy men, inspired by the Holy Spirit. And as I got a little more sophisticated, I thought we learned that the Bible was the word of God, inspired and authoritative in every respect of life. Yeah, yeah.

13:15 And that's your belief? You hold still?

13:19 No, no. I've had to give up a lot of that. You know, I went to seminary, and that began to enlighten me about where the Bible actually came from, the criticisms. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, that has changed. The Bible is a. I would want to say for myself as a part time theologian, that the Bible is essential to the christian faith and essential to my faith.

13:54 Wow.

13:54 And I'd probably stop at that point.

13:56 Yeah. I mean, that is a fascinating subject. On the one hand, if you accept that creation is not an accident and that the divine force organizes everything, then you would not dare to say that the Bible was not the word of God. Obviously, God can make the Bible. If you accept that there's a God and God created everything, God can obviously create whatever he wants. And I'll use that in the English, the proper english gender neutral term. Whatever God wants to put in the Bible, he will have put in the Bible, and no human being could change that. And at the same time, we also know that it was transliterated so many times and so many people copied it, and it was influenced. I find that a fascinating and frustrating subject that we get. We're given an existence that is both sort of perfect and horrible at the same time. We got to figure that out for ourselves.

15:01 Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, just out of academic curiosity, I don't know much at all about the Baha'I faith.

15:15 Yeah, well, that's perfect. So I can't get it wrong. I can tell you whatever, and you won't know.

15:20 Well, let me ask the first question, that since we're talking about the Bible, is there any such document in the Baha'I faith? And what do you think about it?

15:31 Yeah, well, I'm sure you know, the Bible offers the three proofs of a true religion, right? That it's manifestation, and that the manifestation brings a book, a holy text, and that it stands the test of time. You shall know him by his fruits. Right. So Baha'is have a manifestation. Baha'u'llah, who came in the 1860s, middle of 19th century. Actually, the first prophet of the Baha'I faith is a man that we called the Bab, who declared his mission in 1844 and then after him. So he could be thought of somewhat like a precursor, announcing that Baha'u'llah is coming. Baha'u'llah's the manifestation, the prime manifestation of the Baha'I faith. Baha'u'u'u'llah wrote copious works, thousands of words, and we have some in his own hand, which is a significant change from any previous religion. He affirms that the religions that passed the tests were of God, that existence is a continuum of manifestation, and God updates his message roughly every thousand years or so. A new messenger comes and brings a set of teachings, some which are always true, that there's one God, and that our purpose is to know and to love God, for example. And some things which change over time. You know, for instance, in the Old Testament, as I'm sure you know, one of the rules is that everybody has to carry a spoon around with them to do their latrine stuff. They have to leave the village and go to the bathroom in the woods, and they must carry a spoon. Well, that law doesn't apply anymore. We have indoor plumbing. So Muhammad did not renew that law. He had some other laws, other things that, you know, prohibition against drink and pork and some other things. And those, some of those laws have been abrogated for today. So this is this idea of sort of progressive revelation that as humanity matures and learns new things, a new manifestation has to come and renew some teachings. So Baha'u'u'llah's primary holy book is the Kitabi Akdas, the most holy book. And that is a mystical work. It's not very long, but it's very challenging because it's written in sort of an arabic style that is very condensed. And of course, we have translations in English and lots of other languages.

18:19 But, yeah, well, that's all very helpful to me. Just as a I was. Everything you have said is helpful for me to understand because I've not heard it presented so clearly. And I guess my first reaction is that it's very much like a liberal Presbyterian might talk about the holy book and about other religions as well.

19:00 I mean, I think that's one of the essential truths of it, is that if, especially if a religion believes in their word, their holy word, that they, they're generally in agreement. You know, Christ, for example, said, Moses was a messenger of God who came before me, and I've come to renew his message. Someone who is Muslim would say, mohammed came and renewed the message of Christ, and Christ came and renewed the message of Moses. And those essentially agree. There's one source, even though they appear differently and they've been interpreted differently. So Baha'is completely believed in the Bible as the word of God and as Jesus as the son of God.

19:53 You would.

19:54 Oh, yeah.

19:55 Okay, see, that's surprising to me. That is surprising to me. I didn't know any Baha'is until I got involved with the clergy collective. I'd heard the word, but I had no idea what it was about. And I would have assumed that anyone who took the Baha'I faith seriously would really be completely different in their beliefs from my beliefs as a Christian.

20:32 Yeah, probably not.

20:35 Who knows?

20:36 Well, I mean, I think I harkening back to where we started with race. You know, I am kind of an american and raised in american culture. And I have to say, you know, there are certainly, I've been influenced, my parents were Baha'is, but I've certainly been influenced by the culture I was brought up in, too. So I think that's a piece of the equation, too.

20:59 Yeah.

21:00 Well, Derek, just continuing off of the influence question. I know. I don't know if you got a chance, you want to get me. Wrote me back into the original question.

21:06 Come on now.

21:07 I like your answer a little bit that there's so many people, you know, one of the things I do, this isn't necessarily a Baha'I practice, but I say a prayer at night for several of my ancestors, my grandparents, and, you know, our influences are those people who came before us and the things that they gave us. And, you know, when I think about what my faith has been sort of taking it from the same angle that you did. When I was a child, I believed because my parents told me. And then when I was a young man, I believed because my friends believed, you know, and now it's a little different. I believe because of the things I read, because of the holy texts, but I think also the foundation of who I am came from, you know, my grandparents. And so I thank them for which, you know, my family, if you look behind them, before them, it was all criminals and ne'er do wells, but.

22:17 So you have a history.

22:19 That's right. But they've changed, you know, so I'm grateful to them for the way that they made my life better than my, you know, that's, I guess, my point. I have a hard time picking a single person.

22:30 Yeah. You know, and my thinking has evolved so much. You know, I, sometime in middle age, probably my forties, I guess, and then into my fifties, I began to have real difficulty identifying myself as an evangelical Christian. And particularly over the last ten years, I have real question about the people who call themselves evangelical can possibly put that word together with the word Christian. That's just a real problem for me. Yeah. And continues to be.

23:16 Yeah. That does seem to be the question of the hour, isn't it? Who says what truth is and how do you know what, you know, by golly, yes, that I think it is. I mean, I'm going to get us off track and someone's going to get upset. But I do think that that is the revolution that society is going through right now is a revolution of what is truth. And I think just like we, even those of us who devoted our time to racial unity thought we were doing the right thing, but realized we didn't know because we didn't have everybody's input. We didn't have everybody's perspective. I think that is the same sort of a. That is the same thing that's happening with all these other things. Like, we have to define what we agree on truth being and what is justice, and we can't let some people define that for everybody else.

24:10 Yeah.

24:11 David, you kind of alluded to this just now about reconciling faith with ideology more broadly. So I'm curious, you know, how would you. You've kind of mentioned this already, starting to talk about it, but not setting faith aside, maybe actually incorporating it. How would you describe your own values? Thinking more about, like, the political and cultural landscape that we're in? I would like to hear from both of you.

24:37 It was a tiny little question. I have been able, somewhere in my head and in my heart, to reconcile my political views and my, what I would call my cultural openness with my own christian faith, because I think that the question that you raised, Derek, about what is truth or what is true is so essential to my faith in God. God is true.

25:20 Oh, man, you just hit the nail on the head there. I love that. Yeah.

25:23 Yeah. But in order to do that and work that out anyway, what it means is I think I have had to, to acknowledge that, for example, where our conversation started about the Bible, that there's a lot in the Bible that doesn't measure up to truth, as I understand it, at least. And there are things that happened in the Bible because God told people to kill or to do fascinating subjects, awful things. Those things are not. They do not reflect the authentic word of God, if you will, to put it in the older language. And so, yeah.

26:18 So I think that's.

26:19 That's where I start.

26:20 That is a. Was one of the first real. Specifically what you're just talking about. As a young man, maybe 19, I remember reading judges for the first time. And, you know, probably, like a lot of people, I committed to reading the BIble start to finish, and I had read it, didn't quite get it, and then I went to a Bible Study and we started on judges. And I remember being awestruck because if I was reading this correctly, for example, one of my favorite judges is Ehud And here's this. The Jews are being persecuted by this king who is corpulent. And ehud sneaks into the bath. You probably remember all this far better than I do, and says, or goes to the bath and says, I have a message for the king. And the guards are like, well, you can give me the message. No, no, no. This is only for the king's ears. So they let EHUD into The. To the bath. Ehud takes a knife and stabs it so far into this king that it disappears. And the king dies. And ehud comes out and is like he wants some time to think about this. And I'm gonna. He wants you to just wait until he's ready. And I'm gonna go ahead and go because I've delivered my message. And they're like, yeah, that's fine. So while he. While they're waiting for the king to come out of the bath, ehud goes and lets the jews escape. And that story was so different from anything that I thought that the Bible should have. It floored me. And I think this is sort of like, I can't assume that what I think is true or what should be recorded as one of the liberators of the jewish people in judges. This story is. It just boggled my mind, and I realized, good. Yeah, well, it just. It was me putting on what I thought it should be rather than what was actually written down there, which I sort of gets back to what is true. And I don't know.

28:34 See, you know that story much better than I do because much of the book of judges, even as I went through seminary, I just ignored the stuff that didn't work, you know?

28:49 Yeah.

28:51 Certainly can't reflect the love of Jesus, and so I just ignored it. And then the older I got and the more I had to preach from the Bible week after week, I had to realize that, yeah, it's completely different from what I believe is most important about Christianity.

29:17 Well, so this is sort of a fascinating subject, but I did kind of want to get back to the question, too, because that is a pertinent question, which is about reconciling faith and politics and ideologies. And this is something the Baha'is have been thinking about recently. I'm sure other religions have as well, which is that an ideology arises when you put the ideas in front of the people. And if you accept that God creates religion to make people happier, to make them better, then you would not sacrifice the people for an ideology. Or put another way, if you're sacrificing people for your ideas, that's not religion anymore, which is at least how I try to look at if somebody is saying, Bible says this or Quran says this, and therefore people must suffer to make this true, or I can't accept somebody else's truth, then that's not a religion. Anymore. That's an ideology which is not what the religion is supposed to be about, you know, which is, you know, a tough position to have these days. We're so divided. But yeah.

30:39 And goodness knows, that's a good. A good distinction, I think, between an ideology and a religion. Yeah. Because it is very, very difficult for me to. Well, to reconcile truth with faith in the political context that we have today. I cannot understand on the issue of abortion how someone can claim to be pro life when there are so many instances where saving the life of a fetus, much less saving the life of a fertilized egg, is worth giving up the life of a young woman. But that's the logic of the conclusion. If you ban all abortions and you arrest doctors who perform abortions, then basically you're saying that young women who, their.

31:49 Lives must be sacrificed to this principle.

31:51 Yes. Yes. Which doesn't make any sense at all to me. I think of myself as pro life, certainly in the sense that we need to protect life, but the emphasis needs to fall on the lives of people who have been born.

32:14 I like that very much. I think that we have probably a similar feeling about that, that in this case, a unilateral law is harmful, that every case is different. And it's probably, it's just a mistake to put that rule in front of, you know, everybody who's, you know, potentially suffer from that. That's a tough one. But mentioning, you know, abortion obviously is very relevant topic right now.

32:48 Yeah.

32:49 Are there other. I know you've also mentioned, you know, racial justice. Are there other issues that you found yourself thinking about more or that maybe you've changed your mind on from when you were younger? Well, so let me just challenge before the, which is these subjects like abortion are not coming up because people are passionate about the issues. I think we should not be foolish about that. They're just hot issues and someone can use them to their political advantage, so they get stoked. So this is. I think we should object to that stirring up of the masses on these issues. I don't know.

33:36 I think what you're saying is that at least in the political sphere, there are politicians who are using issues like abortion and slavery, the two that are most common, I guess, right at this moment, they're using those issues to their own personal advantage, to give them advantage politically, not because they are pro life or I pro abortion or anything else.

34:11 Or say, rather than slavery, say, the white replacement theory.

34:17 Oh, my goodness.

34:18 The people who are touting that they aren't, they may not be racist at all. But it's a terribly effective way to get white people out to vote if you think. If they think they're going to lose something, which is awful.

34:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The political issues, and I think the other big political issues that come to my mind immediately anyway are climate change, for one, and war. The more I see on television about what is happening in Ukraine and the more I learn about what has happened during World War Two, when soldiers discovered Auschwitz and other prisoner camps full of jews, it's hard for me to justify any war. And that is one of the things that my mind is changing about. I can't say that I'm 100% anti war, but I certainly, through most of my adult life, I simply accepted the fact that, yes, there are some times when we need to go to war because there are interesting, are things that have to be protected. And by golly, there are a lot of things that are not protected in a way that I can live with.

35:45 So you brought up two great subjects. Great in terms of richest things to talk about. One is the way that the world is treating Ukraine differently. And the entire world seems to be uniting to stand against Russia, who is basically taking by power or attempting to. Doesn't seem like it's going to go the way they expected, but what a significant change in the world, acting in some unity to put this oppression down. I feel like that is something that we have learned in World War one and in World War two, that we need some type of global security. And I won't say new world government. That is not what I mean. I know that's a hot button term, but we need some kind of united nations with some teeth that when the Putins of the world decide that they can take their neighbor or China, you know, that everybody can work together to resist that rather than, you know, I don't like the idea of war either, but I also cannot call myself a pacifist because I can't see, I don't want, would not want my sons to go to war, but I can't see telling them they have to live with oppression either. I mean, that's tough. That is tough.

37:14 And I were perhaps straying from the subject at hand. But, you know, I find myself agreeing with people who are beginning to say, wait a minute, we can't keep supporting Ukraine indefinitely because Russia is so large and Putin is so determined that at some point we're going to have to deal with the fact that if we're protecting Ukraine, we may have to attack Russia, which is a horrible idea. But unless Putin changes his mind for some reason or another, I think Putin is determined and Russia is determined to take over Ukraine.

38:14 Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, period. I can't see how that's going to play out. But, yeah, it's hard to.

38:22 Anyway. But anyway, this is a fascinating conversation that you and I, who are supposed to be on opposite sides of something.

38:31 Or other, we agree about everything.

38:34 I want to bring us back, though, just to say something about myself. Before I got involved in the Charlottesville clergy collective, I would have assumed that I had so little in common with the Baha'I faith that we would not have anything to talk about. We would not have much common ground. And I'm grateful for the folks who got the clergy collective underway. That gives me an opportunity to learn more about a lot of other faiths, really. But right now, the Baha'is.

39:20 Yeah, right.

39:23 Thank you.

39:24 So we're at the 40 minutes mark, so I'm gonna pivot a little bit. I feel like oftentimes during these conversations, you'll address some of the points that I want to bring up. So I'm gonna try not to repeat anything. But one theme that we try to address in these conversations is thinking about, like, when people feel misunderstood, or where they agree or disagree with people who are typically like minded. And if you've in your experience as. Whether it's members of your faith communities or just people more generally, if you find there are times where you feel misunderstood by people who are different than you, but then also if there are times where you have conflict within people you identify with culturally, religiously, whatever the shared bond may be. So there's kind of two questions in there. I'll let you kind of. So what should we be saying about if we feel like there's times when we feel like, or do we experience times when we feel misunderstood? That's the first one, yeah.

40:30 Well, I have a quick illustration that comes to mind. One of my very closest friends, who is also a presbyterian minister and is roughly my age. We were together on Sunday afternoon, and we began talking about sin. And her question was, what should the church be talking about? And I said, I think we need to be clear in the Church of Jesus Christ that racism is a sin and that there are a people who don't tell the truth are an offense against God. And she said, no. Talking about sin has turned off so many people that we need to talk about what's wrong in the world, what's unjust in the world, what's immoral in the world and not talk about it in terms of sin. And I just feel like, as an old presbyterian minister, old school, that sin is grounded in God in a way that ideas of right and wrong are not necessarily grounded in God. And I'm old fashioned enough that I think believing in goddess is very important.

42:08 Well, at the risk of misunderstanding you, one way that I could hear that is there is a tendency today for people to sort of reject the notion that there is a good way to be, and it's our responsibility to bend ourselves and make ourselves in a good image. There's a very common camp that says, I say what's good. And so the rest of the world needs to bend to the way I feel like I need to be. And that reduces my responsibility and makes me maybe makes me feel better and gives me some individual moral authority. But it's not exactly the way religion has worked. Religion usually says, listen, you're this wonderful thing that's part spiritual and part animal. And some of the things that you come with are good and some things you need to master. And I think that is a tough message for any religion. So you think that you were misunderstood in that scenario because the word sin was a hot button issue, do you think?

43:29 It certainly was for her? Yes. Yes. And it was just the reason it sticks with me is that we are such good friends. And it was a very friendly argument, but neither of us could let it go. I mean, she was getting into the car to drive back to North Carolina, and we were still arguing about whether we ought to talk about sin or we ought to talk about wrong. And I've thought about that and worried about it in my head, continued to worry about it, because I think, anyway, that's a tough issue I can identify. Well, I guess in terms of understanding you and your faith, what is the importance of God for the Baha'is? Or is that a term that doesn't work?

44:34 Well, you mean the term God or.

44:40 The reality of God? I will say from my presbyterian point.

44:44 Of view, I guess, personally, God to me is both everywhere and nowhere. So it's the most manifest of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden. So we don't have necessarily direct access to what God wants. And I think we puzzle that out from what we get in the holy writings we have. We have manifestations at times. So, for instance, reading that story of judges, it kind of seemed like the Bible was saying they wanted a stealthy assassin or God wanted a stealthy assassin, which is sort of a fascinating thing to think about when you're 19. But also we have other holy writings. So Baha'is don't have clergy. We are expected to read the writings for ourselves and determine what it means, but we also. So we all have the right to read that in our own way. What does it mean? And we also have people who are authoritative, so that if you and I disagree on something, we can go to our, basically an administrative structure that says, okay, this is what, this is what the meaning is. This is what we should do for the purposes of preserving a single Baha'I faith. There aren't different sects. There aren't Baptist Baha'is and Presbyterian Baha'is. There's only Baha'is. And that's because we have this authoritative, authoritative chain. But we also have another tool, which is consultation. And this is a method of discussing things. That is, it is a very serious discipline among Baha'I's. And it involves a few things, like when you, when you are going to consult with somebody, you set forth honestly what you think and then you are detached from it. So you don't try to hold on to a position, and you don't try and defend it or associate it with a personality. Right. So you have to be detached, you have to put the ideas out there, and everybody has to contribute. And also you try to, as much as you can, get everybody to agree. But if you can't, then the majority decides. This is sort of the, some of the foundations of consultation. You also have to be kind of in the right spiritual frame of mind. Your interest has to be in the truth. So the problems where if we needed to figure out how to divvy up the water from our town well or whatever can be solved with this, because you're not going to have a holy text that says, in the town of Charlottesville, there will be one well and one gallon will go to the farmers. But you can have these tools like consultation, where everybody gets to have a, a say and then everybody decides, oh, well, let's see, the farmers are probably the most important, so they should get their water first and then the hospital. And you have this sort of consultative decision making process.

48:06 Yeah, I like that idea. And it has pretty clear parallels, on the one hand, with the Roman catholic faith, with a pope, on the other hand, or kind of in the middle somewhere, with the Presbyterians, who have learned groups, but also have an administrative structure that does have decision making responsibility about, primarily about matters of faith. But that structure also makes pronouncements about cultural issues like abortion. Doesn't mean that every Presbyterian has to believe it and has to fall into line. But it does give us some administrative structure, to use your words, which I like for making a somewhat authoritative position clear. And so my question, then, to you. You talked about an administrative structure. Does it apply only to questions about God and the Baha'I faith, or would it ever make decisions about the water supply in Charlottesville?

49:38 Yeah, I mean, we also have an administrative and the learned and the, you know, the people who study the text and can advise them. Then there's the local assemblies, spiritual assemblies, like, but we would refer any matter to the assembly. And in America, there tends to be not huge or there are not a lot of communities where there are a large body of Baha'is. But, like, in Las Vegas, there's some 700 Baha'is or so. Last time I visited. They do marriages. They settle property disputes. They have some handle, like, community affairs, and in places elsewhere in the world, they are like a government. They work like a government. They handle all kinds of the needs of the community. So, you know, I think we're coming towards the end of our time. We just totally blew off your second question. Oh, no, that's okay. It's okay. We don't always get to every one of them. I have one last question, and I'm gonna say, maybe give yourself each, like, a minute to respond, because I know it could be a whole other hour, but I feel bad throwing it. It's like a grenade at the last minute. You know, we. Part of why we wanted to work also with the clergy collective was to encourage people across faith to have these dialogues and see what connections could be forged. How do you respond to people who reject the notion of God or religion? Like, what is your. How do you respond to that? I'll give you just a minute each, and then we'll kind of ask a couple closing questions. Only a minute. Just. Just to kind of start talking about it. And, of course, I can continue after we're done recording.

51:30 I would say that all my life, all my adult life as an ordained Presbyterian minister, I have been able to be open to people and accepting of people who don't believe in God. And that's okay. I disagree. I like to think that I can argue with them productively without attacking them, but I still reserve the right for myself to believe in God the way I understand God, which is in part through the words of the Bible, but also with some strong philosophical, what I would call philosophical or interreligious understandings. I know that's vague.

52:37 No, I think that's a solid answer. You know, I think, first of all, I guess I have to appreciate anybody who's on their own journey like that someone may not see God in their daily life, and I get that. I guess first thing I would say is, I generally don't believe in the same God that other people don't believe in. Most of my life, I've learned that God is not what I thought it was, you know, and I would say it would be foolish for me to say, I know what God is, and I can explain it to somebody, or this is one way I feel about it, because it's. I can't. It's too much. And, you know, if somebody doesn't believe, or, you know, lots of faiths refuse to label God. And I appreciate and respect that, that there is something that's so great it can't be labeled or named. And that's, I would say, probably closer to my actual belief than, or divine organizing force than somebody who sits up in the clouds. I think that's just me putting my own thoughts on it. I think also, I know I've got a minute, but I. Religion has not been a good friend to itself by telling people, don't question, don't use science to evaluate religion, and that has forced people to recognize religion as superstition.

54:16 I agree completely. We have not been a good friend to ourselves and the things that we believe about religion.

54:25 Yeah. So just a couple of closing questions. Um, thank you for sharing your thoughts. By the way. I thought that was very succinct. Um, but, you know, this is the last couple questions there, major, mainly, is there something you respect about your partner, that you've talked to them about their views or experiences? Um, and then is there anything that surprised you? So I'll end on that note.

54:57 Well, having had a lot of schooling, I really respect, Derek, your ability to not only formulate your thoughts, but to do it in a way that is very broadly based in terms of your own experience and your reading, your understanding not only of your faith, but your understanding of other people's faiths as well. And that continues to surprise me about how many open and admirable people there are in the world who don't believe the kind of things that I do. So thank you for this conversation.

55:49 Likewise. Well, I will say that I'm humbled by anybody who's a. Devoted their life to service. I think about, what would it be like to be a young person and think about, am I going to devote my life to my religion? And I think, I can't imagine that sort of calling and deciding whether to pursue it. I admire that greatly. Anything that surprised me, I'm surprised that we actually seems like we agree on just about everything. Feels like it, anyways.

56:31 Yeah. Yeah. I value this kind of conversation much more than I would have ever been able to value an evangelistic conversation with somebody who didn't want to be a Christian and wanted to argue about it. Thank you for making this possible.

56:57 Yeah, of course.