Rainn Wilson

speaker

3,063 appearances 12 recordings 7 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 7 Jul

Rainn Wilson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Know Thyself · E131 - Rainn Wilson: Comedy, God & Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution · 21 Jan 2025 podcast

give in to that despair and cynicism you and so he's like now get out there and you know and do something about it you know and he like kicked me out of his apartment and it was a seminal point in my life i'll never forget that conversation i'll never forget what the sun looked like kind of dappling the cobblestones in the west village outside of his apartment as i came out of his apartment and words never rang truer than what i heard that afternoon

I was maybe 29, 30 years old, and I knew that there's not room in this universe for me to give in to cynicism and pessimism and nihilism. Of course it sits on us sometimes like a blanket and you have to kind of wrestle with it and figure out a way out. And I knew at that point I needed to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, frankly.

I'll share what is a uniquely Baha'i faith perspective on this.

So the Baha'i faith was founded in the mid 1800s in Iran, Persia. The prophet founder of the Baha'i faith was given the title Baha'u'llah, which means the glory of God. Baha'is believe that Baha'u'llah holds a station similar to those of the great prophet teachers of the ages.

Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Lord Krishna, the Buddha, Zoroaster, all of these great spiritual teachers come from the same source, the one source, what we in the Baha'i faith call the unknowable essence, God, for lack of a better word. this unknowable essence is so vast and so unknowable and beyond human understanding.

I compare it sometimes like we're like dogs trying to figure out the internet. A dog on a keyboard can't figure out chat GPT and how it works, right? It's a comprehension on a whole other level. That's like us trying to understand the divine. So we need these interpreters. We need these teachers to show us the path. So there's about 6 million Baha'is all around the globe.

It's fairly small as religion goes. It's pretty young, too, 150, 180 years old. But it is very widespread. Any country you go to, go to Barbados or Mongolia or Serbia, there's going to be Baha'is there gathering, serving, working in the neighborhoods. Hopefully. And Baha'u'llah's main mission was to bring about the unity of humanity. The teachings are all about unity.

It's all about we're all one human family. Prejudice and racism needs to go. Sexism needs to go. Men and women are two wings on the same bird, that we need the masculine and the feminine to move forward as a species. There's no inequality there, essential inequality there. That science and religion are also in harmony, that work together.

There are two ways of understanding the same ultimate reality. You can look at reality through a scientific lens. You can look at it through a spiritual lens. They both support and help one another. So all the teachings that Baha'u'llah brought are about building community, working in service. The highest form of worship is service to others from a Baha'i perspective. And

So going back to your question earlier, you talked a lot about old dogmas that don't work anymore. This is what happens. A great divine teacher comes, You look at, let's take Jesus Christ. Let's look at the message and life of Jesus Christ. There is nothing more beautiful on the planet.

You know, the red letter Bible, you know, they have the Bibles and the red letter is what Jesus actually is purported to have said. You can read through a red letter Bible and be so profoundly moved at his humility, kindness, sweetness, putting himself outside of what society deemed as okay to serve the servants, right?

To wash the feet of prostitutes and to be with lepers and to be with people of tribes that were not of his tribe. And His teachings are so inspiring and his words and his sermons, his prayers. And then what happens, you know, not to point any fingers or anything like that, but, you know, 300 years later, there's, you know, certain books of the Bible are thrown out.

Other ones are, you know, included this idea of like, you know, Essential sin is included and hell becomes very central or hell is kind of very obviously metaphorically, you know, related to in the Bible, but it becomes central. And then there's wars between Protestants and Catholics that kill millions of people.

I mean, huge percentages of the population of Europe were killed in wars between Catholics

of followers of jesus i mean it's it's astonishing and you look at the dogmas that have grown up and the mistaken beliefs that have grown up and now in contemporary america so much of christianity is about making lots of money and being very militarized and there there doesn't seem to be any disconnect between guns and jesus and

If you read the Bible, there's a huge disconnect between guns and what Jesus was saying, right? This isn't to point any fingers, but this is why these essentially pure spiritual ideas need refreshing every few hundred years. They need refreshing every few hundred, every few thousand years. So this is why new faiths come. Is there essentially the same message? the messages added to and moved on.

So as a Baha'i, we get to read the teachings of Baha'u'llah, right? His eldest son, Abdu'l-Baha, also a great spiritual teacher. We get to learn from them. We also read the Quran. We also read the Bible. We also read the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapadas of the Buddha. all of these are incorporated into one spiritual canon of truth, of beauty, and of wisdom. So how can we distinguish the dogma

from the beautiful truth that lies at the center of what these spiritual teachers brought. Muhammad exhorted his followers not to convert by the sword. Conversion by the sword was not allowed, actually. And very soon after his death, that became kind of the centerpiece of what it was to be a Muslim.

So humanity takes, warps, changes these essentially pure teachings, and we have to go back to the source. And all of those holy books I mentioned and countless more are there for us, that we have thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. We have said, oh, gosh, I hate what Christianity is doing today. And we throw it out and we miss not only the teachings,

but so many other great mystic teachers and Thomas Aquinas and mystics and other folks, Thomas Merton, that you can draw so much energy and strength from. So I think part of the struggle for young people that are spiritual but not religious is to say, hey, Are we sure we haven't, you know, tossed everything out?

Showing 2261–2280 of 3,063 · page 114 of 154