“Richard Dawkins Is an Idiot”
The Link Gets Deep With Deepak Chopra
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During a break at the press conference before the Second Global Conference on World’s Religions after 9/11, The Link managed to sneak in a few questions with best-selling author, public speaker and physician Deepak Chopra. This is a transcript of the brief conversation.
The Link: How can the message you’re presenting at this conference about social media and spirituality apply to the youth?
Chopra: I think only university students and their generation and the next generation can do anything to change the problems in the world today, which are huge. I don’t think we are addressing the real issues. Religion and discussion of religion by itself is not going to do anything until we address the big problems. Poverty, social injustice, global warming, ecological devastation, conflict in the name of God. These are the big problems, and I think scholarly religious discussion is not going to do it. We have to look at everything in the context of what’s happening today. The explosion of technology, the Internet, social networks. We have to change this conversation; it’s an ancient conversation right now. Modern capacities and ancient habits and ancient conversations spell the doom for our species. We will have destroyed 14 billion years of creation. The human species is very special. You’re made of stardust. You’re a combination of stardust and consciousness and light and gravity and all these forces, which I believe are divine forces, but we’re still talking in tribal terms.
The Link: What do you think the role of organized religion will be moving forward in the 21st century?
Chopra: Nothing.
The Link: You think it’s doomed?
Chopra: I think in its present form, it’s doomed, yeah. The religious experience, as I said is totally different. The experience of transcendence, the experience of what we call platonic truths. The experience of love, compassion, joy, equanimity. The experience of the ineffable, immortal part of ourselves. God is much more magnificent, but religions made God a male, tribal chief. I believe in the magnificence of an eternal, divine consciousness, but it’s not squeezed into the volume of a body in the span of a lifetime of an ethnic male guy in the sky. That person doesn’t exist.
The Link: One last question. I saw the video where you had a conversation with Richard Dawkins…
Chopra: Yeah, he’s an idiot.
