Hi there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

What gets a wolf or a pigeon up in the morning?

No offense to wolves or pigeons, but it's probably not the desire to make the world a better place.

As far as we know, humans are unique in the freedom to decide what's

worth doing with our finite time on Earth. But as my guest today argues, we often steal

that freedom from one another or sell it off without even realizing it. Our finite lifetime,

the one thing we have of real value, is devalued by capitalism, and for those who have

it by religious faith in eternal life,

or eternal everythingness, or eternal nothingness. It's a long story. These ideas are better

expressed in a 400-page book than in a 60-second intro. Happily, philosopher Martin Hegelund

has given us that much-needed book in this life, secular faith and spiritual freedom.

Martin is a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale and the Guggenheim Fellowship

recipient, and I'm delighted to have him here with me today.

Welcome to think again.

Thank you so much, Jason. I'm delighted to be here.

So your book surprised me because you started out with what turned out in retrospect to be clearly

necessary groundwork in attacking the idea of the eternal in religion, faith in the eternal

in religion, but then end up laying out a framework for society.

I think we should start in the second part, start by talking about value.

Yeah.

Because it seems to me that this is in some sense the core idea of the book that we talk about values and what we value and what's important to us and how we can't seem to agree on what our values are as a society, etc.

But the way that we define value in our society is the problem.

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