Davis Aurini - Atheistkult

Jan. 16, 2012 - Davis Aurini

25:28

Atheistkult

Whew - 26 minutes to describe the insanity that is Atheistkult! Links: Rationality blog: http://www.lesswrong.com Freedomain Radio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXY2Cmasohc The Irrational Atheist: http://www.voxday.net/mart/TIA_free.pdf And because my ideas don't come from a vacuum: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/2009/03/collected-writings-of-mencius-moldbug.html (Read the Dawkins got pwned series for a more in-depth argument about Atheist Christianity).

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	So, you figured out there's no God.
	You realize that the Bible looks more like something written by Bronze Age savages than something from he who is on high.
	You realize that the question, is there a God, makes roughly as much sense as asking, what happened before time began.
	Aren't you guys clever?
	Needless to say, this is my video on atheist cult.
	Now, as a precursor to this, yesterday I did a video on nihilism about rationality, about what it means to actually be somebody pursuing the truth who asks tough questions and won't accept platitudes for an answer.
	See, I want to start off with that, because that's what we need to establish, that atheist cult is not a rational movement, that they have a very narrow range of things that they criticize and they do with to great length, but they're not actually interested in understanding what the world really is.
	They have their own belief structure, and they are going to push that agenda to the ends of the earth.
	Compare them, for instance, to a community like Less Wrong.
	Lessrong.com, linked below, is a site devoted to understanding human biases and to trying to overcome them, trying to be as rational as possible.
	And 90 to 95% of the members there are atheists, but they don't really discuss it that often because, quite frankly, it's a boring question.
	Yes, there's no God.
	Good for you.
	Atheist cult, on the other hand, can't shut up about it.
	Now, if we're going to attack atheist cult, let's not attack the YouTubers, let's not attack the small guys, let's try attacking one of their strongest arms.
	I'm thinking particularly of the skeptic community.
	Granted, there are a few theistic skeptics, but the overlap with atheism and skepticism is huge.
	Now, you think with a group of people called skeptics that like to go on and on about the scientific method and falsifiability, that they'd be some of the most rational people around.
	Maybe they wouldn't agree with some of the things that we say around here, but we could sit down and have a conversation with them and either sway them to our point or be swayed to theirs.
	And they do a lot of good.
	They attack the crystal healing, the inoculation, paranoia, all this pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo that people are being tricked into paying for.
	They attack all of that, and that is a good thing.
	But overall, what you see isn't so much a devotion to the scientific method to rationality, to understanding what's real.
	What you see is status-seeking behavior.
	And the status amongst skeptics tends to be making fun of those silly southerners that believe in the healing power of prayer and believe all this nonsense and have all these conspiracy theories and so on and so forth.
	And so they just attack these people without thinking about it.
	They identify themselves as being part of the university intelligentsia, and so they attack anybody that seems to be an outsider.
	And the problem with that is that a certain number of these conspiracy theories are going to be correct.
	A broken clock is right twice a day.
	So yes, certainly there's no lizard people inhabiting government.
	I don't think so anyway.
	Almost definitely no UFOs visiting us.
	But if you follow the paleo diet, and if you study how the modern American diet was developed, you discover that yes, there are financial interests, and it's actually very dangerous for you to follow the common wisdom.
	Sometimes you do need to go against the common wisdom.
	Whereas these guys, the skeptics, completely follow the common wisdom because they want to fit in.
	It's just another troop of monkeys.
	Even the best skeptics make stupid criticisms at times.
	The example I'm going to use is Penn and Teller, who actually go against a lot of the stuff in the skeptic community.
	And I think if you gave them another 20 years, they'd come around to be properly right-wing.
	But every so often on their show, which is quite enjoyable, usually they say something that's just asinine.
	And the one example that really stands out to me is their criticism of cryogenics.
	Now, for those of you unfamiliar with it, cryogenics is the idea that at the end of our lives, if we freeze our brains, then 20 years, 50 years, 100 years in the future, if we freeze them fast enough and we contain all the data that's still there, they'll be able to go in, recover the data, and reinstall it into a new biological sim, or they'll install it into a computer, or what have you.
	So you don't have to die.
	You're basically in a frozen hundred-year coma.
	Now, to the skeptic, this promise of eternal life sounds like religion.
	And the skeptics don't like religion.
	And so they knee-jerked the reaction that this cryogenics must be complete pseudoscience preying on the naive and foolish.
	And their attacks on cryogenics are utterly weak.
	If you go to the Alcor site, it's very quick, very easy explanation.
	They actually go into a lot of detail, but first of all, no, there's no ice crystals forming in the cells.
	Two, you have until about six hours after death or so, probably, to freeze the brain before the data is too damaged to be recoverable, too decayed.
	They have done this to rat brains, where they've frozen the rat brain and then dethawed it and demonstrated that, yes, there is still usable data inside the brain.
	And then there's just the fact that we're constantly pushing back what the definition of death is.
	It used to be that when a heart stopped, it was considered death.
	Now we will try and restart the heart.
	There's surgeries performed where they cool the body down to five degrees, stop the heart, and perform brain surgery for half an hour and then revive the person.
	It's a dangerous surgery, but it works.
	The theoretical basis for cryogenics is completely legitimate.
	And all these criticisms are addressed by the cryogenicists.
	Now, whether or not we'll ever awake is another question, and they certainly don't promise that.
	But the frozen brain still contains the data.
	And yet the skeptics, and go ahead, look up any skeptical critique of cryogenics, they attack problems that were solved in 1985.
	If they did a minute's worth of research, they would realize that they're talking out of their asses.
	But they are interested in criticizing these wacky, crazy scientists who are believing in woo and crystal healing rather than actually reaching the truth.
	And on a general note, my experience with skeptics Is that they are remarkably ignorant people.
	Now, I don't consider myself particularly well-educated.
	I will break open history tomes written a hundred years ago to see what people thought back then, rather than what they think now.
	I'll work through economic textbooks.
	I'll study Bayes' theorem and I'll break out a pen and a piece of paper to work through the mathematics myself on it.
	I have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics, but I actually consider myself incredibly ignorant on these topics.
	If I'm anything, I'm a possibly a Renaissance man.
	I know a little bit about everything, but I'd never call myself an expert.
	Skeptics, on the other hand, when I talk to them, are just absolutely oblivious to the realities of any of this.
	Economics, science.
	These aren't the low-level skeptics I'm talking about.
	I'm particularly thinking about one who has a radio program in Edmonton that I met.
	Just remarkable levels of ignorance.
	And yet the arrogance to go out there and proclaim what is true and what is false.
	I know some of you guys in this channel here have criticized me for doing the Schrödinger's Cat video.
	Schrödinger's Cat actually confuses these people, these harbouringers of truth and lighthood and all that.
	And that's one of the strongest branches that's not obsessed with bashing Christianity in the atheist cult.
	And they're just remarkably ignorant.
	Remarkably status quo, status-seeking.
	They really don't impress me as great minds of our generation.
	And see, that's, I think, really the final nail in the coffin is just how unreasonable atheist cult is.
	Now, Fringe left some comments in my last video about the fact that I might have to argue with some of these guys and their propensity to use personal attacks, to constantly shifting the goalposts.
	In fact, I'll link to the bottom.
	On Freedom Main Radio, there was an anti-statist who was talking to a bunch of Mensa members about anti-statism.
	And he's just describing the evening.
	There was only like one lady out of the 20 or 30 of them that would actually have a rational conversation without using biases, using manipulation techniques to control the conversation.
	That would actually deal with them honestly.
	And atheist cult, if you disagree with them on something, they tend to be just as bad as the fundamentalists in attacking you.
	So with all that said, what can we definitely say about atheist cult?
	What are their features?
	Well, first of all, they are very high IQ.
	They do tend to be on the right side of the bell curve.
	Now, I have met a few low IQ pro-Atheist cult that love to chant out the most idiotic slogans they can find from the third of Dawkins' book that they made it through.
	But generally atheist cult tends to, they tend to have IQs above 100.
	However, as much as we talk about the importance of IQ around here, IQ is not the same thing as truth-seeking.
	And in fact, a lot of high-IQ people are very, very good at deluding themselves.
	And that's what we find with atheist cult.
	Very high IQ, not very concerned with truth-seeking so much as they are concerned with winning the argument.
	The second thing we notice about them is their obsession with Christianity.
	They attack it constantly.
	They will go to great lengths poring through the Bible, taking notes about any little inconsistency they can find here, there.
	They'll produce all these videos repeating the exact same arguments.
	They'll create trite moral arguments criticizing some passage in the Bible that was written by a semi-literate person and didn't even go into motivations.
	They're absolutely obsessed with the Bible.
	And yet they also have some of the most facile criticisms of it.
	Vox Day actually wrote a book, which is a free download.
	It's only 150 pages.
	I would recommend reading it.
	He's a Christian.
	But he really points out the intellectual vapidity of Dawkins and Hitchens and these criticisms of atheism.
	Criticisms of Christianity, that is.
	The atheist really does attack Christianity as if people, as if Christians believe there's a guy with a beard up in the sky watching down over them.
	And maybe a few Southern Baptists believe that, but generally Christians are a little bit more astute than that.
	And it's not even that they're strawmanning.
	It's that they're just very philosophically naive.
	And the third thing we can notice about the atheist cult is as much as they talk about being oppressed and being such a small minority in America, they're actually pretty mainstream.
	They regularly show up on talk shows.
	They're extremely politically correct.
	They are the mainstream.
	So those three things about them.
	First of all, high IQ but not truth-seeking.
	Incredibly critical of Christianity without being critical of any other modern delusions.
	And extremely mainstream.
	So you know what they are?
	They're a sect of Christianity.
	They are the latest sect of Christianity.
	And these intellectuals are the vanguard of it all.
	They're the loudmouth proselytizers.
	Now, I'm going to have to justify that claim, won't I?
	I might have pissed off a few of you atheist cultists out there.
	Now, Christianity.
	Christianity is the bedrock of our modern civilization.
	And I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but our modern civilization, our modern myths, the way that we organize ourselves socially, is entirely based upon Christianity.
	No, it's not based upon the Ten Commandments.
	It's not based upon the Bible.
	It's based upon Christianity, the theology.
	I'll give you a few examples here of modern values, of mythical religious values that we hold that directly derive from Christianity.
	First, you have the concept of equality.
	Equality is a Christian concept unique to the Christian religion, that each soul has equal value and is judged before God based upon the decisions that they made.
	You don't see this particular idea in other religions.
	It's a uniquely Christian value.
	And the Christians, they used to, the old Christians anyway, 200 years ago, they only considered that equality to be of the soul.
	Obviously, the intellects were different.
	Obviously, the physical body was different.
	But it's this idea that led to the French Revolution, that everybody should be an equal participant in the country.
	And nowadays, atheist cults embrace this value to the point where they absolutely demand that everybody be equal intellectually, everybody have equal opportunity emotionally.
	So if somebody has a personality disorder, it's not their fault.
	We have to medicate them.
	So on and so forth.
	Equality is one of the basic fundamental values of our society, and it's directly derived from Christianity.
	Another one, fraternity.
	This was not quite so popular nowadays.
	You won't hear it put that way, but the idea of nationalism, that we're all in it together, and certainly all the revolutions 200 years ago were based around the concept of fraternity, which again comes directly from Christianity.
	Rather than being subjects that are supposed to obey the priest, which you'd find in something like Islam, where the Imam is a moral and political authority that if you're not an Imam, you should obey.
	In Christianity, everybody is equal.
	It's only God that's above everybody.
	Everybody else is on the same level.
	They're all brothers in the love of Christ.
	Fraternity is a Christian value.
	And finally, freedom.
	The idea of political freedom that is another myth of our current civilization stems directly from Christianity.
	In fact, you see this in the abolitionists, the ones trying to get rid of slavery back in the 1800s, is that they argued that God gave us free will so that we could choose virtue or vice.
	And because of that, slavery is wrong, that the slaves should be given the choice.
	They should be free to make their own choices because that's how God intended it.
	All of these are Christian values.
	And it's Christianity which devolved into the modern system.
	Now, I'd like to address a couple of arguments against that that you might have.
	Democracy, I would say, is largely a product of Christianity, and the obvious counter-argument would be: what about Rome?
	What about Greece?
	Those democracies did not resemble our own in the slightest.
	They were democracy, yes, in the organization of how politics was performed day to day, but the society themselves had very strong roles dictated by their religions for what a man was supposed to do, for what a woman was supposed to do.
	They had differing castes within the society.
	A Roman citizen was not the same thing as a freedman, was not the same thing as a slave.
	The Greeks, for instance, were more than happy to raise young boys as homosexuals, so they'd be a vicious army.
	Just generally, these are not similar values.
	To call our entire system a democracy, and then to call Greece or Roma democracy, you're comparing apples to oranges there.
	There's only a couple of minor comparisons between the two.
	And as for how religions create societies, you would never see a Western-style democracy arising from an Islamic country.
	Islamic countries have the Imams, are political and religious heads, and no one has absolute control.
	There is no super-imam.
	There is no Pope in those countries.
	Iran, the president answers to about a half dozen, a dozen different imams.
	Western-style democracy is not going to happen there.
	Not organically.
	It can be forced onto it, but it's not going to happen organically.
	China, with Confucianism.
	Confucianism itself lays out a hierarchy of society.
	It has no concept of equality within it.
	It's not going to result in democracy.
	It's all about structures from the God and the emperor all the way down throughout the society.
	India is similar, where it has distinct castes and distinct roles.
	If you've read the Bagavad Gita, it's about how even if you don't want to go and murder your loved ones and family, if you're a soldier, it's your duty.
	And ultimately, God just wants you to do your duty in life, regardless of how it feels to you.
	These are very different concepts than Christianity, which is about us all being equal and about achieving grace through God.
	And certainly not judging, saying one is worse than the other or anything like that, but they're different.
	And they're not going to result in a Western-style democracy.
	Democracy is a Christian invention.
	Now let's cut back to atheist cult again, because they believe in this leftist ideal of democracy, this modern society that we've developed.
	They believe in that.
	That is their religion.
	But how can they be a Christian without believing in God?
	Well, from day one, Christianity has been becoming more populist.
	Let me rescind that.
	It started out populist, became a state-controlled Catholicism with the Pope at the top, and then it's becoming more populous since then.
	It went from Catholicism, where only the priests could interpret the truth of the Bible.
	It was all kept in Latin, to Lutheranism, where they translated it to the vulgar tongues, and everybody could read the book now and understand God.
	And eventually Protestantism, where they threw out the Virgin Mary and all the saints, and instead had a direct relationship with just Jesus, rather than the more polytheistic sense of Catholicism, where they have many different powers within the structure.
	And as time goes on, you see less and less of a relationship between the practice of Christianity and the words explicitly written in the Bible.
	Theology becomes more important over time.
	And so what you have with atheist cult is that they just threw out God and Jesus.
	They still believe in everything that a Christian believes in, but they threw out God and Jesus.
	And this is why they are so angry at Christianity.
	The same reason that the Protestants and the Catholics were at each other's throats back in Britain.
	See, if you're just an atheist, if you're a right-wing lunatic like us here, you don't really care about Christianity.
	You know, I've no reason to go argue my teeth out against Jainists.
	I don't really care.
	Atheist cult, and this is what you see, they don't argue against other religions, they primarily argue against Christianity because they are close enough to them to be a threat.
	It's an ideological war.
	And one final thing, let's compare atheist cult Who believe in absolute equality between people, that believe in political correctness, that believe in all of these foundational myths of our modern era, to a group that's actually deeply rational and is atheist, but actually challenges these questions.
	And I'm thinking again of the Lesser On community.
	One of the big focuses of that community is whether or not we can build a super intelligent AI that's friendly.
	And one of the big discussions is ethics.
	What are our ethics?
	This evolutionary heritage that we have that creates our ethical code.
	Is it even internally consistent?
	And what sort of ethics should a super intelligent entity have?
	Now, atheist cult, if you try and discuss anything ethical with them, will just knee-jerk back to good old-fashioned Christianity and refuse any discussion beyond that.
	They will get very, very angry with you if you even try.
	So that's atheist cult for you.
	They're intelligent enough to be good speakers, but they're not particularly deep thinkers or theologians.
	They are very angry and very unreasonable because they're religious fundamentalists.
	They don't believe in a God, but they believe just as strongly in their pseudo-scientific, allegedly scientific worldview with all the foundational myths of our civilization in it.
	So that's what they're all about.
	I don't really know what else to say.
	It's a little bit funny, isn't it?
	Anyway, take care, folks.

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