Charles Murray

And that, by the way, Emily, happened a lot during the course of writing this book.

It's not that at discrete moments in time I would say, I changed my mind about this.

The Big Bang, that was an exception.

Rather, it is that I realized 15 years later that I think differently than I did before.

And in this case, I came to believe that Jesus had a special relationship with God that is extremely hard for human beings to describe, but that

I would feel a reverence were I to encounter Jesus that I would not feel for anybody else, even though I'd feel the utmost respect for other great religious leaders and teachers that he occupies a special place.

And I evolved from a position where I considered him a great teacher but not divine to that substantially different opinion over 20 years maybe.

Well, you know, what happened to me I think probably happened to a lot of people.

I know it happened to my wife.

It may have happened to you at some point.

And that is you go off to college and you want to be a member of this tribe.

And you get there and you learn.

Smart people don't believe that stuff anymore when it comes to religion.

And you don't learn that through courses and lectures.

You learn that through the ambience, the zeitgeist, the milieu in which you live.

I went off to Harvard.

and none of my friends were religious, none of my professors were obviously religious.

The topic was very seldom discussed, but if it did come up, it was just treated dismissively because smart people don't believe that stuff anymore.

And so I bought into a kind of secular catechism

that looking back on it was so unreflective.