Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, “Noam Chomsky: God, Morality, & Consciousness” (2021), on “God is an idiot”

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
3 min readJun 18, 2024

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Prof. Noam Chomsky: If you want a personal experience, there was one that gave me an insight into the nature of religion. If you don’t mind a personal story.

Curt Jaimungal: Please share.

Peter J. Glinos: We’d love that. We would absolutely love that.

Chomsky: Well, we visited. My family lived in Philadelphia. My father’s family, which was extremely orthodox, lived in Baltimore. And we would go to Baltimore for the holidays just to visit. And I remember when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, we were visiting on Passover. And I noticed that my grandfather was smoking. So I asked my father, “How can he be smoking?” I knew the Talmudic law, which says there’s no difference between the holidays and the Sabbath, except with regard to eating. So on the holidays, you’re allowed to cook a dinner. You can’t do that on Sabbath. So my father said, “Well, he just decided that smoking is a kind of eating,” and then I did get an insight. Religion is based on the assumption that God is an idiot…

Glinos: [Barely holding back laughing].

Chomsky: that you can fool God very easily.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal, “Noam Chomsky: God, Morality, & Consciousness” (2021)

Jaimungal seems like a nice gentleman, though a bit fake, if you look closer. Peter Glinos seems more genuine and spontaneous, authentic. Looking at the interview, this section stands out.

It projects Chomsky’s straightforward description of a personal story within a Jewish context. A prodigy child wondering about the prescriptions God gives to men and then seeing how human beings simply dispense with those.

As Chomsky notes here, as I have seen, and I am sure as many of you have seen, individuals who believe in a God — no matter declaration of devotion — delimit the absolutes of God for personal benefit, to fit subjective needs and whims. Which is a way of saying, atheists respect the God concept more, in some sense, in their disinterest rather than theists who consider “God… an idiot.” They continue:

Chomsky: And if you think about it, it’s true. Nobody can live up to the prescriptions that are told. So everybody finds ways around them. Actually, Pascal, later learned, had a wonderful passage about that in the City of God on the Jesuits and how they find ways to give interpretations that are the opposite of what the text says. And they live by the interpretations. And that’s correct. I mean, if you think about it, it’s completely impossible to live up to the prescriptions. Well, the Catholics have a way out of this. You go to confession every whenever, periodically, and you tell the priest all the terrible things he did, and he says, “Fine, you’re okay.” Jews, it’s a little harder. You have to wait once a year. Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, you say all the things he did, make them up if they weren’t any. I mean, I have Catholic friends who tell me that when they were kids and went to confession, they couldn’t think of anything to say. So they had to make something up. “I took a toy from my little sister,” or something like that. But every religious faith has some means to avoid keeping to the letter of the prescriptions. So, okay, essentially it means they’re based on the assumption that you can get around God’s prescriptions by one or another device. That was an insight, I have to say.

Even if you simply feel it through, it’s a fact. People want to think they can trick a God because, at somel level, they — themselves — do not believe in God and consider that God more idiotic than them. “God is an idiot.”

And that’s also true. Everyone finds ways around them. I remember Fr. George Coyne. He did an interview with me. He was a Jesuit. He was an intelligent person.

The idea of the sophisticates of a community reading a passage to make them more workable in a particular period and culture does have an intuitive appeal, specially if this does not have to be known to the laity. The books are being to them, not by them, after all.

The Jewish context seems a little more difficult, nonetheless. It seems akin to praying in order for God to change his divine plan. Why change it for one prayer? Why make a prescription in a text for interpretations to work around it? Because either God is an idiot in religions or does not exist in the versions given by religions.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Written by Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Scott Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight Publishing & a Member of the Canadian Association of Journalists in Good Standing: Scott.Douglas.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com.

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