Hey everybody. This was a live episode of Religion on the Mind that we recorded back at Theology Beer Camp in October.

And we'll be back there again next fall.

You can already sign up in Kansas City for 2026.

The only other thing I'll add is that Matt Brake, my buddy, was in attendance at the session

you're about to listen to.

And he had some follow-up questions and sort of topics. So we recorded another conversation

in response to this episode. That will be coming out on Thursday as a patron-exclusive episode.

So if you want, you can get a little one-two punch about the naturalness or not of religion.

Welcome back, everybody, to Religion on the Mind, the podcast that focuses on the overlap of psychology and religion and spirituality. My name is Dr. Dan Koch, and I have recently received my, quote, the degree has been conferred, unquote, email.

Thank you. Thank you.

It feels really good, actually.

I'm surprised, and I shouldn't be, because I know my own ego.

Today, we are coming to you live from Theology Beer Camp in St. Paul, Minnesota,

and I am joined already on stage by Myron A. Penner, philosopher, good friend of mine. Hello, Myron.

Hey, Dr. Dan.

Still going to be a while until I'm a licensed psychologist, so I still got some stuff to look forward to.

So we were supposed to talk with Myron, myself, Sarah Lane Richie, who's not here because of illness and Phil Clayton.

And what we're going to do instead is Myron and I are going to have the first half of our conversation up here, sort of get into this basic topic, this basic question of the naturalness

of religion. And then around halfway through, Phil is going to join us and just kind of be a conversation

partner and we'll see where that goes and we might have a little time for some audience questions

I'd love that so let's start here the question the title of the talk of episode is is religion

natural to humans?

...