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July 1, 1996 - Bill Cooper
57:18
Leonard Peikoff #2
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Time Text
Yet any of the tail, yet any of the stars, yet any of the group needs to prepare their senior men.
The End I'm Pooh.
And I'm William Cooper.
You're listening to The Hour of the Time.
I'm Pooh.
And I'm William Cooper.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands.
stand, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you, my dear.
You're welcome.
Okay.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want to remind you of a couple of things.
Number one, the Area 51 trip, the first lecture begins on Thursday the 4th at 1:00 PM.
If you're planning to be there, it's okay if you're late.
But try to be there before 1pm on the 4th so that you don't miss anything.
Now, if you're somebody who just decided that you'd like to go and you have an RV or a camper or you have a sleeping bag and a tent or something like that and you just want to come and camp out because there are no beds left.
I can tell you right now, there are no beds left.
You can show up and as long as you pay by cash Our postal money order, you can still attend, but you have to camp out.
Now, you can purchase meals at the restaurant at the Little Alien, or you can get the special rate on meals even if you do camp out.
So, that should take care of that.
For all of you who may be coming and don't know how to get there, all you've got to do is make your way to Las Vegas.
I don't care if you walk, crawl, drive, or fly.
It doesn't make any difference.
Just get to Las Vegas.
Once you're at Las Vegas, take Highway 93 North out of Las Vegas.
Stay on Highway 93 until you come to the intersection of Highway 375 and Highway 93.
Take 375 West.
You'll go up over Hancock Summit, down the other side across the Tickaboo Valley, up over another little summit called Coyote Summit, As you go down the other side you'll see Rachel, Nevada on the left.
Just a little bitty town made up mostly of mobile homes.
And last time I was there, the Little Alien was the last building on the left.
So, hope to see you there.
Also, Oklahoma City, day one.
Oklahoma City, day one.
The book.
It's very close, ladies and gentlemen.
You're going to get it a lot sooner than what we thought.
But I can't give you any dates.
Because if something goes wrong and I gave you a date, then you're going to be angry with me.
Just be prepared to get the book sooner than what we thought, if nothing goes wrong.
And maybe quite a bit sooner.
Now, all of you who have not purchased the book, you need to do it now, because this is a limited printing.
We're not rich.
We can't print 100,000 copies.
We can't print 10,000 copies.
We're only printing 5,000 copies of this book, and an awful lot of them are already gone.
If you have not ordered your copy yet, you better do so now.
It's 800 pages.
It tells the truth about the Oklahoma City bombing.
It will blow your mind.
It's going to be a big hurt on the people who really did it.
And even if you purchase a copy, It's the greatest thing in the world for a gift.
You can purchase them now for Christmas gifts, for birthday gifts.
I also strongly suggest that you purchase a copy for your local law enforcement officials, that you purchase a copy for your local library and donate it, and that you purchase a copy for each of your senators and representatives.
And don't wait thinking that somebody else is going to do it.
So what if they get two or three or four copies of the book?
If they do, that many more people are going to read them because they're not going to sit around and nobody's going to throw this book away, I guarantee you.
So, think about that, folks.
You need to buy copies of this book for your local law enforcement people, for your local library, for your college or school libraries, for your representatives in the House, and for your senators.
And you might want to purchase a copy for the governor of your state.
But think about this, folks.
And you can get a copy of the book right now, $30 postpaid.
That's $30 postpaid right now.
And I'm going to tell you, as soon as this book comes off the printing presses, ladies and gentlemen, it's going to cost $5 more than what it costs now.
Okay, this is a pre-publication special price for the listeners of the Hour of the Time and the readers of Veritas newspaper.
So, and I'm not talking about an autographed copy.
I'm talking $30 right now, post-paid, for a copy of the book.
As soon as they come off the press and they're available to the general public, they're going to cost five bucks more.
So you better get your copy now.
And I mean right now.
Send $30 to Harvest.
H-A-R-V-E-S-T.
We'll only take money orders.
That's all.
Nothing else.
Or cash, if you want to risk sending cash.
You know, they got these guys in the post office who hold letters up to the light, and if there's cash in there, sometimes it turns up missing.
If we get it, your cash won't turn up missing.
But if we get an empty envelope, don't blame it on us if you sent cash.
Okay?
But if you want to send cash, that's okay, we'll take it.
But money orders only.
We will not accept any personal checks from now on out, ladies and gentlemen.
Money orders.
Only make them payable to Harvest and specify that you want Oklahoma City day one.
Send it to Harvest at P.O.
Box 1970.
That's P.O.
Box 1970.
Eager.
E-A-G-A-R.
Arizona.
That's PO Box 1970.
85925.
Eager, E-A-G-A-R, Arizona. 85925.
That's Harvest, PO Box 1970.
Box 1970, Eager, spelled E-A-G-A-R, Arizona, 85925.
Also, if you're a CAGI member or an Intelligence Service member, the conference is coming up sometime during the last half of August, right before school starts.
I think it begins on the 16th, but don't take that for set in stone because I've got to look at my stuff again.
If you're interested in attending the CAGI Intelligence Service Conference, send us a postcard right now with your return address stating that you want information on the CAGI Intelligence Service Conference and state on there whether or not you are a member.
And if you are, whether you're a CAGI member or an Intelligence Service member.
And because you get special prices for people who are not members, we try to make the price prohibitive.
Because to tell you the truth, if you're not a member, we'll accept you if you can pay the price.
But we really aren't thrilled that you're going to be there.
But we'll treat you just like anybody else.
I'm not kidding.
You will not be treated any differently or be discriminated against or anything if you're not a member.
But if you want to come, the CAGI Intelligence Service Conference is going to be in the last half of August.
It will not be held here.
So make sure you get your postcards to me as soon as possible so that we can get a letter out to you telling you what the prices are and all that kind of stuff and where it's going to be and, you know, all the places to stay.
You know, the big package that we normally send for the conference.
So, that's coming up last half of August, and it looks like we may be able to seat 100 people comfortably, and if we have to go above that, we can arrange it so that everybody's comfortable, but you won't be as spread out as you might have been otherwise.
So, that's another thing that you need to take care of right this moment, ladies and gentlemen.
The CAGI Intelligence Service Conference for members, single members, is $150.
For family members, for the whole family, it's $200.
If you've got, if you're a single member or you're not a member, well, we'll talk about that later.
But single members, whether you're CAGI or Intelligence Service members, it's $150.
For families who have a family membership, it's $200.
And that's for mother, father, and anybody over 17 years old who executed the oath if you're Intelligence Service.
If you're CAGI, you don't have a family membership because there's no family membership available for CAGI members.
OK, folks, don't go away because I'm going to start the second half of the Dr. Leonard Pykoff tape over again tonight, just in case you missed any part of the second part.
And it's going to go all the way to the end.
So don't miss it because it's a pretty exciting speech.
He's hit a lot of nails right on the head.
Now, remember, he's not attacking the Christian right.
He's merely pointing out some truth about it.
He doesn't like the left, the secular left either.
He doesn't like liberals either.
He is an objectivist.
He doesn't like conservatives.
He doesn't like liberals.
He doesn't like the Christian right.
He doesn't like any of it.
And what he's doing tonight is giving a speech, the second half of a speech, which you already heard the first half, about, in particular, the Christian right.
If you're listening very carefully, or I should say the religious right, because he's really talking about religion, not specifically Christians, and if you're listening very carefully, you'll hear that he is certainly no friend of the liberal left either.
So, don't go away.
We'll be right back with the second part of Dr. Leonard Peikoff's speech, and it'll go until it ends or the broadcast ends, one or the other.
Now let me touch on a new point.
Thank you.
Some of you are probably wondering here, what about communism?
Isn't it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy?
And yet, doesn't it lead straight to totalitarianism?
The short answer to this is, communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite.
Despite all its anti-religious posturing, communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion.
It agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, It then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of the so-called dialectic process.
Reality, they claim, is a stream of outright contradictions which is beyond the power of bourgeois reason to understand.
The Communists deny the very existence of man's mind.
Claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the illogical, predetermined churnings of blind matter.
They do reject God, but they hasten to replace him with a secular standard, society or the state, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, transcending and dwarfing all individuals.
Man, they say, is a mere social cog or asset, whose duty is to sacrifice everything to and for his transcendent Master, the State.
Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think by and for himself.
Every man must accept the decrees of society's leaders.
He must accept them because that is the voice of society, whether he understands it or not.
In other words, Communism, fully as much as Tertullian, demands faith.
from its followers and subjects.
Faith in the literal, religious sense of the term.
On every count, the conclusion is the same.
Communism is not a new rational philosophy.
It is a tired, slavishly imitative air of religion.
And this, by the way, is why, so far, Communism cannot come to power in the West.
Unlike the Russians, we have not been steeped enough in religion.
In faith, sacrifice, humility, and therefore in servility.
We are still, even now, too rational, too disworldly, and too individualistic to submit to naked tyranny.
In other words, we are still being protected by the fading remnants of our Enlightenment heritage.
But we will not be so for long if the new Reich has its way.
Philosophically, the New Right has the same fundamental ideas as the New Left.
Its religious zeal is merely a variant of irrationalism and the demand for self-sacrifice.
And therefore, it has to lead to the same kind of results in practice, namely, dictatorship.
Nor is this merely my theoretical deduction.
The New Rightists themselves tell it to you openly.
While claiming to be the defenders of Americanism, their distinctive political agenda is pure statism.
The outstanding example of this is their insistence that the state prohibit abortion, even in the first trimester.
A woman, in his view, has no right to her own body, or even the most consistent new right of add to her own license.
She should be made to sacrifice.
To sacrifice her desires, her life goals, and even her very existence, at the behest of the state, in the name of a mass of protoplasm, which is, at most, a potential human being, not an actual one.
Another example.
Men and women, the New Right tells us, should not be free to conduct their sexual or romantic lives in private, in accordance with their own choice and values.
The law should prohibit any sexual practices condemned by religion.
And children, we're told, should be indoctrinated by state-mandated religion at school.
For instance, biology texts should be rewritten under government tutelage to present the book of Genesis as a scientific theory on a par with or even superior to the theory of evolution.
And, of course, the ritual of prayer must be forced down the children's throats.
Is this not contrary to the Constitution, the state establishment of religion?
You may ask.
And of a controversial intellectual viewpoint?
Not at all, says Jack Campbell.
I quote from him, "...if a prayer is said aloud, it need be no more than a general acknowledgment of the existence, power, authority, and love of God the Creator." That's all.
Nothing controversial or intoxicating about that.
And when the students finally do leave school, after all the indoctrination, can they then be trusted to deal with intellectual matters responsibly?
No, says the new writing.
Adults, adults, should not be free to write, to publish, or to read according to their own judgment.
Literature should be censured by the state according to a religious standard of what is fitting as against obscene.
Is this a movement in behalf of Americanism and individual rights?
Is it even a movement in accordance with the principles of the Constitution?
I quote Mr. Kemp.
Quote.
The Constitution establishes freedom for religion, not from it.
Unquote.
A sentiment which is shared explicitly by President Reagan and by the whole New Right.
What then becomes of intellectual freedom?
Are meetings such as this evening, for instance, deprived of constitutional protection?
Because the viewpoint I am propounding certainly does not come under freedom for religion.
And what if one religious sect concludes that the statements of another are subversive of true religion?
Who then decides which, if either, should be struck down according to the standard of freedom for religion, not from it?
Can you predict the fate of free thought and of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if Mr. Kemp and associates were to get their hands fully on the courts and the Congress?
What we are seeing is the medievalism of the Puritans over again, but without their excuse of ignorance.
We are seeing it on the part of modern Americans who live not before the Founding Fathers' heroic experiment in liberty, But after it, the New Right is not the voice of Americanism.
It is the voice of thought control, attempting to take over in this country and pervert and undo the actual American Revolution.
But you may say, aren't these New Rightists at least champions of property rights and capitalism, as against the economic statism of the liberals?
To which I reply, no, they are not.
Capitalism is a separation of state and economics, a condition which none of our current politicians or pressure groups even dreams of advocating.
The new right, like all the rest on the political scene today, accepts the welfare-state-mixed economy created by the New Deal and its heirs.
Our conservatives now merely haggle on the system's fringes about a particular regulation or handout they happen to dislike.
In this matter, the new right is moved solely by the power of tradition.
It does not want to achieve any change of basic course, but merely to slow down the march to socialism and freeze the economic status quo.
And even in regard to this highly limited goal, it is disarmed and useless.
If you want to know why, I refer you to the published first draft of the recent pastoral letter of the United States Catholic Bishops.
Men who are much more consistent and philosophical than anyone in the New Reich.
The bishops recommend a giant step in the direction of socialism.
They ask for a vast new government presence in our economic life, overseeing a vast new redistribution of wealth in order to aid the poor at home and abroad.
And they ask for it on a single basic ground.
Consistency with the teachings of Christianity.
Some of you may say here, but if the bishops are concerned with the poor, why don't they praise and recommend capitalism, the great historical engine of productivity which makes everyone richer?
If you think about it, however, you will see that valid as this point may be, the bishops cannot accept it.
Can they praise the profit motive while extolling selflessness?
Can they glorify the passion to own material property while declaring that worldly possessions are not important?
Can they demand that men practice the virtues of productiveness and long-range planning while upholding as our model the lilies of the field?
Can they endorse the self-assertive risk-taking of the entrepreneur while teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth?
Can they unleash The creative ingenuity of the human mind, which is the real source of material wealth, while elevating faith above reason.
The answers are obvious.
Regardless of the unthinking pretenses of the New Right, no religion, no religion by its nature, can appeal to or admire the capitalist system.
Not if the religion is true to itself.
Nor can any religion liberate man's power to create new wealth.
If, therefore, the faithful are concerned about poverty, as the Bible demands may be, they have no alternative but to counsel a redistribution of whatever wealth already happens to exist.
The goods, they have to say, are here.
How did they get here?
God, they reply, has seen to that.
Now let men make sure that they are distributed fairly.
Or, as the bishops put it, quote, the goods of this earth are common property, and men and women are summoned to faithful stewardship rather than to selfish appropriation or exploitation of what was destined for all, unquote.
For further details on this point, I refer you to the bishops' letters.
Given their premises, their argument is unanswerable.
If, as the New Right claims, there is scriptural warrant for state control of men's sexual activities, then there is surely much more such warrant for state control of men's economic activities.
The idea of the Bible, or the Protestant ethic, as the base of capitalism, in other words, is ludicrous, both logically and historically.
Economically, as in all other respects, the New Reich is leading us admittedly or not, to the same end as its liberal opponents.
By virtue of its essential premises, it is supporting and abetting the triumph of statism in this country, and therefore of communism in the world at large.
When a free nation betrays its own heritage, it has no heart left, no conviction by means of which to stand up to foreign aggressors.
There was a flaw in the intellectual foundations of America from the start.
The attempt to combine the Enlightenment approach in politics with the Judeo-Christian ethics.
For a while, the latter element under the impact of the 18th century spirit was on the defensive, so that America could gain a foothold, grow to maturity, and become great.
But only for a while.
Thanks to Immanuel Kant, as I have discussed in my book, The Ominous Parallel, The base of religion, in other words, faith and self-sacrifice, was unleashed again at the turn of the 19th century.
Thereafter, all of modern philosophy embraced collectivism in the form of socialism, fascism, communism, welfare statism.
By now, the distinctive ideas at the base of America have been largely forgotten or swept aside.
They will not be brought back by an appeal to religion.
What, then, is the solution?
It is not atheism as such.
And I say this even though as an objectivist, I am an atheist.
Atheism is a negative.
It means not believing in God, which leaves wide open what you do believe in.
It is futile to crusade for a negative.
The Communists, too, call themselves atheists.
Nor is the answer secular humanism.
about which we hear so much today.
This term is used so loosely that it is essentially contentless.
It is compatible with a huge range of conflicting viewpoints, including, again, communism.
To combat the doctrines that are destroying our country, out-of-context terms and ideas such as these are useless.
What we need is a specific, consistent philosophy in every branch, and especially in the two most important ones, epistemology and ethics.
We need a philosophy of reason and rational self-interest, a philosophy which would once again release the power of man's mind and the energy inherent in his pursuit of happiness.
Nothing less will save America or individual rights.
There are many good people in the world who accept religion, and many of them hold some good ideas on social questions.
I do not dispute any of that.
But their religion is not the solution to our problem.
It is the problem.
Do I say that, therefore, there should now only be freedom for atheism?
No, I am not, Mr. Kemp.
Of course religions must be left free.
No philosophic viewpoint, right or wrong, should be interfered with by the state.
I do say, however, that it is time for patriots to take a stand.
To name publicly what America does depend on and why it is not Judaism or Christianity.
There are men today who advocate freedom, and who recognize what ideas lie at its base, but who then go on to counsel practicality.
It's too late, they say, to educate people philosophically.
We must appeal to what they already believe.
We must pretend to endorse religion on strategic grounds, Even if privately we don't.
This is a council of intellectual dishonesty and of utter impracticality.
It is too late indeed.
Far too late for a strategy of deception, which by its nature has to backfire on all that has, because it consists of sanctioning and supporting the very ideas that have to be exposed and uprooted.
If you agree with my analysis this evening, then I say it is time to tell people the unvarnished truth, to stand up for reason and against any aversion of faith or mysticism.
Thank you.
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Don't go away.
We'll finish up with Dr. Leonard Peikoff's speech in just a few seconds.
any aversion of faith or mysticism.
It is time to tell people, in logic you cannot have both.
It is unreason, one form of which is religion, versus America.
Take your pick.
If there should be any chance for the future, this is the only chance there is.
Thank you. Dr. Peekoff on behalf of the Fort Hall Forum we want to thank you for your excellent presentation and
As with all of our speakers at the Fort Hall Forum, Dr. Peekoff has agreed to answer questions from our audience.
Under our procedures, I will call on those of you who raised your hands moving from my left to my right, and I will repeat the question for the benefit of our audience here and for our radio audience.
for my benefit and for the benefit of the audience here.
Would you please keep your questions brief?
Question is, what is the alternative to Reagan?
I could tell you very easily what the alternative is.
I wish I could tell you who.
The alternative to Reagan would be at minimum somebody who did not attempt to hitch his bandwagon to the new right or to the philosophy of religion.
Someone who counted on whatever fading remnants of the old American heritage are still left in the culture.
Something like Reagan was when he fought for Goldwater before he had presidential aspirations and became a professional religionist.
But if you ask me who today would qualify as that, There's nobody.
I can only say the last candidate that Ayn Rand voted for happily, although not that she was in by any means agreement with him, but at least she didn't shudder at the prospect, was Gerald Ford.
But primarily because he did not stand for a great deal.
Thank you.
Questioner asked whether since in Scandinavia they have institutionalized religion, whether you view that as an example of what the new right would like to accomplish in America.
I do not know the situation of religion in Scandinavia.
I don't understand your reference to kings.
Is that an analogy, or what?
In what way is religion instituted?
I would be surprised if you mean Sweden, because they're pretty left, and usually that goes with not being too explicitly religious.
But I do not know the situation, so I can't comment.
During this part of the question-and-answer period, there is a short period of technical difficulty experienced.
The questioner asks, if I can recall the four, who do you consider the most dangerous?
Jesse Jackson?
Louis Farrakhan?
The New Right?
And the Catholic Bishops?
Who is the most dangerous?
And who is the least?
Thank you.
Well, I don't have an enemy's list with rankings.
But my criterion of danger is philosophical.
I don't know.
The more philosophical a man is on the wrong premises, assuming he has some influence, the more dangerous I regard him, because I believe that philosophy is what shapes the course of history.
Therefore, it's self-evident on the list you gave that the Catholic bishops are the most dangerous.
They are by far the most philosophical of the people you mentioned.
Most of the others probably couldn't spell philosophy.
A demagogue, which is what Sarah Cannon and Jesse Jackson is, is no danger at all to a country that is philosophically armed.
And when the country is philosophically disarmed, it makes no difference because there are so many hundreds of demigods.
You better run rather than waste time counting who is worse or who is better.
So the issue comes down to who's most philosophical, and certainly the Catholic Church is the most philosophical religion in history, which is the one reason why I respect it more than any other religion and fear it more for the same reason.
Thank you.
If someone dropped a bomb on Berlin under the Nazis, I would take it as self-evident that the only question at issue is, why did he not drop more?
And that is exactly my attitude toward Libya.
The grave flaw of Mr. Reagan is that, like everything
else, he came back with a, quote, measured, moderate, diplomatic, inoffensive, middle of the road, pragmatist response.
He waited until I don't know how many people were killed and shot, drowned, or whatever else took place.
He consulted with every ally until they finally all left town.
And then when there was nothing whatever left to do, he got a few weak bombs and dropped them.
And is now apparently trying to smooth things over.
Now, it is not up to me to make foreign policy.
It is very easy for a speaker on a podium to say what he would do.
I know what I would do, but I'm not going to say it.
But it would certainly not leave any question of whether Mr. Qaddafi is still alive after it was over.
Now, more broadly, what you can do with terrorists, you cannot do anything with terrorists if you yourself what you can do with terrorists, you cannot do anything with terrorists if you yourself are having
Thank you.
Obviously, the only thing that could be done is to break off relations with Soviet Russia.
Diplomatic, economic, and every other kind.
That would, in itself, change the entire direction of our policy, petrify the hand-wringing Europeans, turn the Soviets explicitly into the craven thugs that they actually are, and give us a chance.
But that could not be done.
Except by someone who believes that it is evil to turn the other cheek, that if someone slaps you once, you should not turn it 490 times more, that if he takes your coat, you should retrieve it and not give him your cloak also.
In other words, in foreign policy, as in domestic policy, this country cannot survive on the teachings of the Scripture.
And our foreign policy is a tremendous example.
As bad as our economic policy of where the Bible has brought us.
Thank you.
I'm a 77-year-old old-time board member.
And I'm a board member.
And Dr. Currie, I have a question.
And I want to tell you to take my hand and tell you why.
I found a religious phenomenon which has produced 400 and 80s and 40s with numbers than any other religion on the face of the earth.
It has been an important part of every movement of social reform for this country in the tribe.
It is the religion of common gifts to be supported and three of the presidents of Alton White, the American, the American, and the great many others who might have spoken.
I'm talking about humanitarian and originalism, who's leading in the spiritual group.
One of us.
The speaker.
And.
The speaker.
Dr. Peekoff to comment upon the fact that the Unitarian Universalists have produced many great thinkers and great persons throughout the years, including Thomas Jefferson, and that as a religion they are devoted to the and that as a religion they are devoted to the search for truth.
Every religion has produced great people because everybody so far has been religious.
So the question is only are they religious because of or despite?
Are they great because of or despite their religion? - Okay.
The one you mentioned, I like to remain on a high plane of discussing only philosophy and religion in a broad sense, and not go to a particular denomination.
But since you mention it, I'll have to tell you my own ignorant understanding of Unitarianism, which might explain why, if you're correct, why your particular creed has There are so many distinguished children.
I once worked, actually, for a man who was a Unitarian, a professor of philosophy in Denver.
And I asked him to explain to me what Unitarianism was.
And he said, well, the best way I can tell you is when I went the first week, the minister gave a sermon to the effect that there is no God.
When I went the second week, he gave a sermon to the effect of the evil of faith.
And when I went the third week, he said, we're going to have an open discussion.
Where do we go from here?
In other words, Unitarianism, I do not regard as a real religion in the sense that I was defining it.
It's an attenuated form of philosophy that is somewhere, it's like soft atheism, as I understand it.
Now, I hasten to say there may be many versions of it that I do not know, but that's the best in my understanding.
Philosophy, if I can just summarize, philosophy is not synonymous with religion.
Any belief in a code of values, a view of life, is not synonymous with religion.
I've tried to define what I meant by religion, and the essence of it is faith, supernaturalism, and self-sacrifice.
Anything less than that, I do not regard as a real religion.
Questioner asks, why is agnosticism?
No solution.
If atheism is no solution, agnosticism is one step less than that.
The atheist at least says there is no God.
The agnostic contradiction of the question is, who knows?
I don't know of any issue in the world that is important, that is advanced by people saying, my view of it is, I haven't any idea.
Agnosticism I do not regard as a reputable position.
It's appropriate if you're in your teens.
You have not yet studied the question.
If you've taken a couple courses in philosophy and you still don't know, then I would say you have a serious question to ask yourself.
Why not?
What is preventing someone from deciding this question?
It's cut and dry.
The arguments that have ever been offered in the entire history of thought are sold in paperback at every bookstore.
Every consideration that would be required to reach a judgment is there, and if you don't reach one, to me there's no basis for such a thing as agnosticism.
And here I may make the point that the onus of proof is on he who asserts the positive.
If someone says there is a convention of gremlins at this moment studying Hegel on Venus, I do not consider that it is reputable to say, I don't know, maybe.
The next questioner asks how the new right defends their stand on capitalism.
I.
All right.
I would suggest if you want to see what a new right attempt at defending capitalism is, read anything by a man called David Stockman and Ronald Reagan.
And his argument, he has a whole book, I can't remember the title of it, but it was a bestseller a few years back, and his argument was that capitalism rests on faith, self-sacrifice,
And that a capitalist is a man who does not demand evidence, who does things blindly, and harms himself for the sake of others because he realizes that in the end all of our minds are merely drops lost in the infinity which is God.
And that individuality is really unreal.
This is interspersed with political polemic in favor of a particular law cutting one regulation by one tenth.
This is considered to be the most philosophic defense by the new right of capitalism.
I think it's beneath discussion.
What is an individual to do to stem the tide of mysticism on society?
Well, I could say that an individual can't do anything because no one person can change the course of history.
On the other hand, I could say an individual has to do everything because that's all there is.
There is no such thing as society.
So it comes down to this.
I do not believe, I would be inconsistent if I preached egoism and told you to sacrifice your own desires and become a crusader for a cause that you don't believe in.
But if you do agree with what I was saying, with Ayn Rand, and you do want to make a change in the world, the only thing you can do is fight educationally.
Don't worry about politics, because there's nothing you can do directly on politics.
Politics is a consequence.
They could not have the American Revolution before they had John Locke and all of his heirs to create the intellectual climate.
And we're never going to have a second American Revolution until the universities change.
And the universities cannot change until the philosophy departments do.
So if you have any influence, any voice, any money, Put it where it will fight the philosophy department and give someone who has a half-decent brain a chance to get in.
And the sign of success will be if some of these institutions in Boston, which shall be nameless, were to give one out of a hundred faculty slots to somebody who advocated something other than what is now being advocated, that would be enough and the world would be safe.
But the problem is, they will not do it.
That's what an individual can do if you can do it.
Thank you all very much.
For additional information...
Ladies and gentlemen, you've just finished...
That is, if you were listening.
You've just finished listening to the tape of a speech and a question and answer period afterwards by Dr. Leonard Pykoff, who wrote a book called The Ominous Parallels, which I think is an absolute necessity for anyone which I think is an absolute necessity for anyone who wants to understand what's happening to the world and to this country today...
Must read.
Absolutely must read.
It's called The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Pykoff, spelled P-E-I-K-O-F-F.
And if you can, get your hands on that book and read it.
We've gone through portions of his work on several episodes of The Hour of the Time.
It is, without any doubt, and pardon the expression, illuminating.
The lights will come on in your head when you read that book as you're watching what's happening in the world around you.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree with everything that you heard during that speech which began last Friday night and of course ended tonight.
And I'm not going to go into what I believe or what I don't believe.
I think each individual person has the right to determine what is important about what Mr. Pykoff said during that speech Friday night and tonight and to be able to put that to good use.
I also would like to clarify one of the findings of my own research when speaking to so-called, quote, atheists, unquote, during my life.
That is, when they talk about they don't believe in God, they're usually, when you can pin them down, they're usually talking about that they don't believe In the God of the Bible who is dressed in white robes and sits on a cloud and causes bushes to burn and talks to people and is vengeful and terrible and would do something like what was done to Job.
Job was a good man who did everything he was supposed to do and God still made everything go, you know, just ruined everything for him until Job openly challenged God and argued with Him.
And won the argument, I might add.
And they have, I think, good intellectual arguments for not believing in that kind of a God.
When you sit down and talk to these people about what they do believe in, they do believe in the laws of physics that make, of course, the universe work and planets spin around, suns and suns spin around, galaxies and galaxies around, whatever they spin around, and that there are Definite causes and effects, which taken as a whole, always equates to God.
I don't care who it is.
And I like the way that Dr. Stephen Hawkins put it.
You know, he started out in physics not believing in God, and he was stricken by this terrible illness, which I'm not trying to equate to anything here, I'm just telling you the truth.
And now he wheels around in a wheelchair, And he makes himself understood.
He has one of the greatest brains in science today.
And is almost physically totally and completely helpless.
But yet, the more he has studied physics, the more initially he came to not believe in God.
And then eventually to believe that there must be.
And that doesn't mean that someone who believes in God is a Christian, or is not a Christian, or is a Buddhist, or is not a Buddhist, or any of these things.
Those are things that come about after you have decided whether or not you believe in God.
But Mr. Pycoff's assessment of religion and communism and socialism and the liberal left and the religious right, as he calls it, is intriguing.
And some of his points are absolutely on the mark, ladies and gentlemen.
You'd have to be a blithering idiot not to understand what he's saying, the dangers With all of this, he equates the religious right with communism.
He says they're both the same thing.
And when you watch, like I've been warning you on this broadcast for a long, long time, when you observe these people really at work, one thing stands out clear, unless your head is muddled and you're not a clear thinker, is that they don't really want freedom at all.
And if some of these people who claim that they're patriots ever got into power, I gotta tell you folks, they'd be worse than if some of these communists came to power.
Really, you know, they're both extremely bad.
It has nothing to do with freedom, with liberty, with individual rights, or any of those things.
They want to tell you what to believe.
They want to tell you how to live.
And they'll burn you at the stake if you don't.
If they're in power.
If you don't believe that, you just look at all the good works of the Catholic Church and then go back to the Dark Ages and see what happened when they ruled the world.
And I'm going to tell you, if they ruled the world again tomorrow, it would be exactly the same.
Good night, ladies and gentlemen.
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