Do you believe in God? Josh Lieb | Big Think

Do you believe in God?

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Faith in the face of evidence to the contrary.

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Josh Lieb:

Josh Lieb is the former Producer and Show Runner of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. His credits include stints as Executive Producer of NewsRadio and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He won 7 Prime Time Emmys as a producer and writer for The Daily Show. In 2009, he published a young adult novel, I Am A Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, which was a New York Times Bestseller.

Lieb was raised in Columbia, South Carolina, and graduated from Harvard, where he was an editor of The Lampoon, the college humor magazine. After graduation, he found work writing for Twisted Puppet Theater, The Jon Stewart Show, and NewsRadio. He subsequently worked as a producer or consultant on shows including The Simpsons, Drawn Together, Sirens, Nikki, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Lieb's tenure at The Daily Show lasted from 2006 to 2010, during which he also served as Executive Producer of “The Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” and as co-editor and co-author of Earth: The Book.

In 2013, he wrote and directed a series of comedic shorts to raise money and awareness for the charity Water.Org. Stars featured in the shorts included Matt Damon, Jessica Biel, Sir Richard Branson, and Bono.

Penguin/ Random House released Lieb's second novel, Ratscalibur, in 2015.

In October 2016, NBCUniversal announced an exclusive writing deal with Lieb.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Topic: Religion in a Modern World

Josh Lieb: I mean I’m terribly conflicted. I mean awfully . . . You know I . . . In a way I can’t help but believe in God despite all the evidence to the contrary, which makes me very angry at God. And so I . . . I’m . . . In a way I’m always fighting it. But you know, and again, 200 years ago it would be very easy to be a religious person, and to live my whole life, and that was that. And it . . . and it . . . and it . . . I think it would be blissful. I think it’s much harder for all of us to live today. You know the world is too much with us. That said, I . . . You know I don’t say “that said” as much as I say it . . . as I said it in the past half hour. I’m saying it “that said”, I . . . I think if there is a God, I think He’d be rather forgiving of anyone’s lack of faith right now. It’s, you know, much easier to believe in God when you believe the sun goes around the earth, and we’re . . . it’s flat, and you know that the Bible is literal historical truth. It becomes . . . When you know those things aren’t necessarily the case, it becomes harder to believe. It may be God chose us now, to live now because our faith deserves to be tested a little bit more. I don’t know. I think that’s bullshit. But I . . . You know I think God is probably charitable enough to go, “Well you didn’t believe. Why should you?”