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Kall: We don't have much time. I just need to give a station ID. This is Rob Kall, the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, 1360 AM, WNJC. I'm here with my guest, Dr. Stephen Larsen, author of The Fundamentalist Mind: How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All.
The end of your book is about 'natural religion.' What's that all about?
Larsen: That's bottom up if I ever heard it, Rob. I like the title of your show, Bottom Up, because I think that... well, it has to be a two-way street; it always has to be a dialogue, and....
That's what's happening with this latest election, by the way. My daughter lives in Williamsburg (Virginia) and she was just sitting around, people hugging each other in the streets, and weeping, and really, really hoping for something brand new. Now, these are people who also want an end of the old regime, they want an end of the last eight years. No wonder people want paradise; you long for heaven after hell, right? (laughs)
Kall: (laughs) Yeah, really. I've been saying that we've all gone through post-traumatic stress, living under the cloud of the Bush administration.
Larsen: And many people who are smart enough, if you travel around the world and meet intelligent people of all countries, they're so sympathetic for America right now, they go, "Oh, my God, how did you get yourself into that one?" I think many of them are cheering and going, "Oh, you're about to redeem yourselves." Well, it's a scary moment and everybody's heart is thumping a little hard in their chest here, but I think we have a.... I think America is made up of idealistic and practical people and the way that this last election turned out showed that all those people that have been peace marching and emailing and moveon.com (http://www.moveon.org) and the thousand-one little points of light or trickling rivulets or whatever you want to call it, have really formed together and made a kind of a stream of 'things have gotta change, we're in danger of becoming the scourge of the world, a Baby Huey out of control, and everybody's frightened of this not-so-smart Baby Huey,' with good reason. So, you find out that American presidents, for example, Ronald Reagan, was really a rather firm believer, he spent a lot of time with Falwell and Robertson, rather firm believer that the end of the world might just happen in our time.
Now, here's the sinister part of it: God might kind of a little bit sort of detached or lazy, He might just need a little help. So, we visualize the Star Wars initiative as being the only thing on a grand enough scale to bring about Armageddon; you know, the great battle on the plains of Megiddo that everybody keeps visualizing, where the...
Kall: Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second now. We went from natural religion, where you talk about moving towards the synthesis and some hope for our wayward species, towards Megiddo and Armageddon. Let's move back towards the natural religion side of this. (laughs)
Larsen: What's the matter, you don't like Megiddo? (laughs) I don't like it, either.
Kall: (laughs) Hey, last week, we finished that chapter on apocalyptic thinking and moved into a more hopeful mode. So... natural religion. What is natural religion?
Larsen: Well, people said, "Oh, you should call it spirituality." I said, "No, that's tripe." I want to call it natural religion because I believe there is a natural religion, the Native Americans had it when we came among them and they were innately respectful for the natural world, for the environment. That didn't mean that they were primitive polytheists, they also had the idea of Wakan Tonka, the great sublime God Above All; there was also a sky god, Tarhuyiawahku, for the Iroquoian's. Back in those days, they had a chance in America, if anybody bothered to read the books that were being printed by the hundreds and thousands, people could have read New England Transcendentalism, or read the works of Swedenborg, and realized there is a kind of a religion in which Biblical Christianity is not alien to the natural world, but the natural world is a metaphor of the spiritual world.
At the same time, people who weren't bothering to read were in these revival tents all over America preaching the end of the world to scare everybody's pants off so they'd reform themselves. It's there's quite a dichotomy there in about the 1840's in America.
Kall: We've got to wrap. How would you like to finish up talking about your book? Do you have a web site that you want to talk about?
Larsen: Well, yes. We have symbolicstudies.org (http://symbolicstudies.org/site/), which is the wonderful not-for-profit creature that my wife Robin has designed. Then we have also stonemountaincenter.com (http://www.stonemountaincenter.com/), which is my therapy center for neurofeedback and psychotherapy and basically holistic health. We have wonderful people that are joining us there now. And I encourage people to get The Fundamentalist Mind or look me up on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Stephen%20Larsen&page=1), there are a few books you can buy cheap on Amazon.
Kall: You have some amazing additional books that you've done that I've enjoyed over the years. What are a couple of the names of them?
Larsen: My first book, published by Harper & Row, 1975, was The Shaman's Doorway: Opening Imagination to Power and Myth , and then there was The Mythic Imagination: The Quest for Meaning Through Personal Mythology, which was 1990, and then.... Or actually, I should say, with my wife Robin, the Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, a big master work of Swedenborg's life and works, then I did a book on Swedenborg's spiritual psychology, and then the Joseph Campbell biography, A Fire in the Mind, that we published in 1991.
