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Dec. 15, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:59
14 The State and God - Part 1

Inevitably, Libertarians have to address the question of religion...

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Hello, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
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Well, here's podcast number eight, I guess it is, and thanks so much for struggling through, if you did, the last couple of podcasts.
Naturally, I was going on this trip, I went, I drove to Kingsville to do a presentation, and then I flew to Washington to talk at a conference, and of course I thought, well, with all that traveling and so on, there's just no way I'm going to get a chance to do any podcasts, and then, so I didn't pack my fancy-schmancy headphones, which make me sound a little
Better than what you heard and so naturally of course Because I didn't pack them I ended up having lots of time to do Podcasts so I had to use the microphone that was built in I mean, I'm no audio engineer.
which isn't that great and picks up every background noise waveform known to man.
And so I had to sort of futz with it to try and get it to get rid of the background noise without destroying what I was saying.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm no audio engineer.
I sort of did my best, and I hope it was comprehensible.
Now, in my last podcast, which was around God and the non-existence thereof, I mentioned, and I wanted to expand upon in this podcast, I mentioned that anybody who opposes violence or the state I mentioned that anybody who opposes violence or the state or sort of institutionalized power is going to run up against the problem of a deity and sort of...
To clarify what it is I'm going to talk about now, I'll sort of chicken out and not take the all-cultural approach to deity and simply talk about the Judeo-Christian one, partly due to just a lack of knowledge of things like Buddhism and Zoroastrianism and so on.
And partly because, you know, in my mind they're kind of all the same, right?
Disprove leprechauns, and then disprove ghosts, and then disprove pixies, and then disprove dryads.
I mean, I can just pretty much set up a criteria for proof and they all fall down.
So, with specific examples to Judeo-Christian theology, I'll sort of have a swing at why I think it's so important to face up to the problem of God when you are talking about political power.
So to start, I've got a couple of points that I sort of wanted to get across about why I think it's so important.
But to start, I guess, a small caveat, because, you know, I know some nice Christians.
I wouldn't say that I'm close to any Christians, because as a philosopher, it's a topic of great interest to me, you know, the validation of knowledge and the role of rationality and so on.
And I really get, I got sort of tired running up against, or running into the sort of blank hostility that comes about from Christians when you really start digging around in the roots of faith, right?
I mean, you really are taking an enormous piece of imaginary candy from a very imaginative baby.
And so I got sort of tired of that and you know of course when it comes down to faith, right, faith is a form of bigotry in that it is belief without evidence, right?
It's not bigoted to say that Oriental people tend to have thicker eyelids than Caucasian people or that black people tend to have flatter noses than white people.
I mean this is not racist because it is an observation of reality.
But if I have some opinion that is collective about the nature and personalities of races, that is racist because there's no evidence for these things.
So if you believe things without evidence, it's a form of bigotry.
And of course religious faith is a form of bigotry in that it is belief without rationality.
And so you can't really argue with these people because they just sort of get cold and hostile and retreat back to the virtue of belief without reason.
So arguing that it's not virtuous but in fact destructive doesn't really get you anywhere.
I don't know that many Christians.
It's been probably over a year since I've had any discussions about theology or philosophy with Christians.
However, I do know that there are a large number of Christians who are libertarian to one degree or another.
I don't know enough about their belief structure to know why they're libertarians, but I would imagine that it's something like God gives us free will, and the government, by interfering with free will, is interfering with the liberties that God gives to every human being, and so on.
So, you know, to the Christians out there who are libertarian, I would say, you know, grit your teeth and listen to the end of this.
It won't kill you.
Lord knows that everybody who's not Christian has listened to a lot of Christian ideas throughout our lives.
So, you know, grit your teeth, hang on, and get through to the end, and it might be something that is illuminating for you.
And if you care about freedom more than you care about the belief in a deity, Then this might actually liberate you from what I think is a pretty futile task, which is to attempt to oppose government while simultaneously accepting the belief in a deity.
So why is this so important?
Why bother with theological matters when we're talking about political liberty?
I think that there's a number of reasons for it.
The first thing that I would say is that in any sort of empirical understanding of the world, it's pretty clear that the more that human beings possess power, and we're not talking economic, quote, power, but political power, power of violence, power of coercion.
The more that human beings possess power, the more corrupt they become.
I certainly don't claim to be original in this idea.
Lord Acton said it, I think, over a century ago, that power tends to corrupt.
Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
So when we have the idea of a deity, though, especially, of course, an anthropomorphic deity like the Judeo-Christian deity or the Muslim deity, which has, you know, anger and forgiveness and hatred and rage and love and, you know, all of these emotions, which seem rather odd to me to be part of the nature of an all-powerful and all-wise and all-knowing being,
But we have an anthropomorphic deity wherein perfect power, or absolute power, is co-joined with absolute and perfect goodness.
And that is not really a very good concept to have in your mind when you're analyzing political power.
We're made in God's image.
We know that a God can have ultimate power and perfect goodness.
And so it sort of shortcuts or short-circuits the whole question of increasing power leading to increasing goodness.
And you don't have to be a Christian to have this idea in your head, because we're all exposed to Christian or Judeo-Christian ideas, sort of from the day we first draw breath until the day we last put one out.
But when you hear people talk about the state as this abstract entity that has benevolence that, you know, takes care of the sick and the poor and the old and the frightened and the nervous and the lonely and, you know, will save you from enemies both foreign and domestic and protect you from polluters and blah blah blah.
When you have this abstract entity called the state, which is ascribed virtues, you know that you're dealing with the aftereffects of certain ideas within religion, which is that an abstract entity can have virtue, and the more power that it has, the more virtue it possesses.
So all powerful equals all good.
Now of course there are philosophies like communism and so on which specifically deny the existence of a God.
In my view that's because they don't like the competition.
So to clarify how that philosophy fits into this formulation, I would say that when you believe in an abstract entity, and of course we'll just talk about God and say countries now, you face a significant problem.
You believe that the abstractions are the greatest truth, but the problem is that neither empirical verification nor basic logic proves or can derive the existence of any of these concepts that you're talking about.
So, if I believe in God, then I have a problem, which is that logic and empirical verification completely deny and disprove the existence of God.
So, of course, to maintain my belief in a God without any evidence, I have to sort of split reality into two sections or dimensions.
And I have to say that, OK, one dimension is the dimension of the flesh, and it is the dimension of senses and rationality and science and, you know, the petty world of, I've got to go to work, I've got to pick up my mail, I've got to pay my bills, and, you know, all of this sort of mundane, day-to-day, sensual existence.
That's the world of the flesh.
And it is a degraded or inferior copy of the other dimension, which is the perfect realm of spirit and concepts and abstractions and ideas, and it's all perfect.
And Plato would call it, of course, the forms, and Kant called it the new amenal reality, and everybody comes up with their own name for this sort of drug trip.
But split in reality, you shovel all of the concepts that have no evidence that you want to keep into this perfect dream world of absolute conceptual beauty, and you shovel all the stuff that you can experience through the senses and through empirical logic into the other realm, which is sort of the inferior copy Or degraded, inherited version of this sort of perfect world.
And that's how you save your deity.
You shove the deity into this platonic world of forms, or this Kantian new immoral realm.
And there's no evidence, no senses for that realm, right?
Plato calls it getting out of the cave or whatever, right?
So, you shovel all the concepts you want to keep into that perfect realm of abstraction, and you say that this perfect realm of abstraction is vastly superior, infinitely superior, to the mundane world of the senses.
And that's how you save the concepts that you want to believe in, when there's no evidence in the sensual or logical realm for them whatsoever.
Now this, of course, occurs in communism, fascism, socialism, all of the isms that are state-based.
Nazism, of course, as well.
Because what they do is they take an abstraction And elevate it to this perfect world of ideas, and then they take each instance of that abstraction, like a person, and they say that this person is inconsequential, because relative to this perfect world of ideas or historical movements or whatever, they just don't matter at all, right?
Any more than one cell matters relative to my whole body.
So, of course, in Nazism it was race, right?
race and nationalism, right, sort of fused together at the Germanic or Aryan people, were this vast historical movement that superseded any individual and was just this massive tidal wave of passion and sentiment and propaganda sweeping across Europe.
And, you know, you couldn't stop it and you couldn't question it and so on.
So they just shoveled, you know, God and Aryanism and Germany into this big bucket of heavenly beauty.
And then that's what they said everybody had to be enslaved to.
And, of course, the fascists were a little more nationalistic, a little less racist.
the...
The communists were class-based, right?
So you had no free will because your personality, your inconsequential individual personality, was entirely determined by, you know, who owned the means of production and class warfare and so on.
And so there were no individuals, there were only classes and grand historical movements.
And so, you know, you didn't have to judge any individuals.
You could just say, well, this guy's a bourgeoisie, this guy's a kulak, and, you know, let's kill them and let's, you know, take the hard-handed workers and elevate them to this sort of Gay, fetishistic, Soviet, poster boy, factory worker thing.
And of course, for religious people, it is a god, right?
I mean, we elevate this idea of a god to this perfect abstract realm, which is vastly superior to the world of empiricism and logic and the body.
And that's where we throw everything to save these concepts.
So when I say that religion is something that we have to face when we wish to question and hopefully begin the process of dissolving this idea of the virtue of the state, what I mean by that is that there is this general approach to
To epistemology or metaphysics which says either concepts rule and individual things don't matter or individual things rule and concepts are just these sort of descriptions That we apply to like individual things, right?
So a bunch of rocks I can call a bunch of rocks.
You know, all warm-blooded animals I can call mammals.
But mammals, as a concept, doesn't exist.
Neither does things like a country, a god, a class, a race, any of this sort of things.
So the last example is, of course, a country, right?
I mean, So, logically defined, what we call a country is a conceptual tag for a geographical area which is ruled by a particular group of criminals, which we then call the state.
And, you know, where people have the power, where one group has the power to rob the population we call Canada, where another group of people has the power to rob the population we call America.
And so this is true for all countries in the world.
We know that Canada stops at a particular spot on land because if you're born on that side, you pay tribute to the Canadian.
And if you're born on the other side, you are subject to the US state, and really that's what is called a country.
It's a sort of a neighborhood or a turf that is carved out by a particular gang of criminals in order to feast on the productivity of the decent members of the population.
Of course, there's no such thing as Canada.
There's no such thing as the United States.
It doesn't exist in reality.
It's just a concept.
So, you know, you have to have sort of patriotism and nationalism and our country is better and our, you know, Your country is bad, and so on.
And in order to do that, you have to have this other realm that you throw things that don't exist in and make them superior to things which can actually be perceived and reasoned about.
So, if you believe in a god, or you believe in anything that doesn't have any sort of empirical proof or rationality, then You have, by definition, to create this mad sort of LSD world of perfect forms and where, you know, power can equal virtue and all this and, you know, things which don't exist are much more important than things that do exist and so on.
And that other realm has virtues associated with it, right?
So Canada is a good, nice country.
The U.S.
is a I don't know, a militaristic, selfish country, and Britain is a colonialist, aristocratic country.
You ascribe all of these anthropomorphic characteristics to these abstract realms, and that's really where your morals go as well.
The whole point of opening up this crazy world of higher reality.
is so that you can create non-empirical moral absolutes that completely dominate the choices and realities of individuals.
Scientists don't use this other realm because they tend to be, at least in the scientific realm, a lot more sane than other people.
It's only moralists who create this realm and they create this realm in order to use unverified morality or unverifiable morality to dominate and bully individuals.
When I say that if you love freedom, you're going to run into religion, you will absolutely run into religion because you have to, if you love freedom, you have to say that individuals are more important than the group, that the group itself is unimportant, that it's just a useless conceptual tag for talking about a group of people.
And when I say useless, I just mean useless in that it doesn't exist.
I mean, of course, it's useful to talk about mammals versus reptiles.
It's useless in reality, it doesn't exist in reality.
So the primacy of the individual requires the opposition and ridicule and disproof of this higher realm of forms, because otherwise people are still going to say that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, that the group has the right to lord it over the individual, that the state, blah blah blah.
So, you're going to run into this and that's why I wanted to talk about it.
So, what else in the Judeo-Christian theology also is dangerous in terms of political liberty?
Well, of course, another aspect of Judeo-Christian philosophy is that the Lord works in mysterious ways, right?
We've all sort of either heard this or seen it, or maybe we've even thought it ourselves if we've gone through a religious phase, that, you know, I wake up happy and joyful and praising God for the birds that sing and the blue sky and the green grass.
And it's a wonderful thing to be alive and God's world is good and so on.
And then, you know, I get struck with flesh-eating disease, and my leg falls off, or I get hit by a bus while singing a hymn on the way to church, or I hear someone who donates all their money to the poor.
And then, you know, gets an aneurysm and dies.
And so, you know, when the world is going well, you know, people are happy and God is good.
And when the world seems to be going badly, well, you know, we just don't understand God's plan and maybe we'll understand it after we're dead and it all makes sense, but we can't figure it out.
If you look at how this mysterious ways nonsense works with the government, you have this perspective that is so common it's almost not worth talking about because it's just so evident, wherein when the government does something good, People say, well, of course, I mean, the government is a good thing, and that's what the government does that's good, and, you know, that sticks to them emotionally, right?
It's something that accumulates, I guess you could say, emotionally for them as certain proof that the government is good.
When the government does something bad, right, it does not stick to people emotionally.
I mean, one of the things that makes libertarians tear their hair out, it certainly makes me tear what's left of my hair out, is that, you know, I mean, we all know the government fails at absolutely everything, and everything that the government touches turns to crap, and it always achieves the exact opposite of what is intended, and people don't remember that.
You know, Abu Ghraib, and Katrina, and the Iraqi war, and weapons of mass destruction, and, you know, the saving the poor, and we're going to fix health care, and health care gets worse, and we're going to fix education, and education gets worse, and, you know, all this stuff, as we all know, when we're talking to people, it just vanishes down the memory hole.
It just goes straight into the Orwellian tube and is vaporized, you know, and atoms are spread across the sky and nobody ever remembers it.
Well, one of the main reasons for that is this sort of religious hangover wherein when God does something that we perceive as good or something good happens to us, we give thanks, right?
It sticks to us emotionally as a proof of God's existence.
And when bad things happen, we can't think about it because God works in mysterious ways and we have to block out any critical thoughts, right?
Because we just don't understand and it's bigger than we are and we, you know, we'll learn it later when we're dead.
So when you create a concept that has virtue, you know, the stage, the gods or whatever, Then you set up this mental configuration wherein everything that is positive is remembered and everything that is negative is flushed down the memory hole never to be seen again.
So this concept that authority works in mysterious ways and good stuff is proof of the existence of virtue within authority and bad stuff can never be thought about directly is translated into people's perceptions of the state and how quickly they forget and ignore all of the disasters that the state is responsible for.
Another thing that religion contributes to, which is problematic in people's analysis of humanity and its relationship to power and so on, is that, and this is a little subjective, so please forgive me for going off on this tangent, we'll get back to the empirically logical stuff, but I still think this is important.
In the religious worldview, people, human beings, in relation to concepts, are absolutely tiny and relatively insignificant.
I know they say that God loves you, and you mean the world to God, and Christ died for your sins, and all that nonsense.
Psychologically, when you measure your finite and limited existence against infinite and eternal existence, it's, you know, it's like, what is one divided by infinity?
Well, it's exactly the same thing as ten million divided by infinity.
It simply doesn't exist.
It's infinitesimally small, which is exactly the same as sort of not existing.
So, people, in relation to a deity, can't help but define themselves as small.
You know, if every time you attempt to apply your natural rationality to understanding and analyzing these concepts like God and the state, let's just talk about God for now, if every time you try and analyze these things you fail and you're told that you fail because you're limited and you don't understand and you can't understand and God is so much wiser and we can't figure out God's will, we just have to submit and accept and believe.
You know, it absolutely cripples your mind.
It absolutely destroys your self-esteem to know that you are infinitely non-existent relative to this sort of perfect deity.
And, of course, that translates into a general sense of helplessness and hopelessness when it comes to looking at politics, right?
Because if you accept the idea that concepts are bigger than individual things and that they are more virtuous and that your virtue in existence is inconsequential relative to these larger concepts like God and the state, then you really aren't going to have the willpower and confidence and surety to say, well, yeah, I think I am pretty much smart enough to figure this stuff out.
And if I come across stuff that's not logical, you know, then by golly, it's wrong until somebody proves me otherwise.
That takes a certain amount of confidence, and in order to achieve that confidence, you can't be measuring yourself against infinity, because then you just sort of cease to exist.
That's a little bit subjective, but I do find that it's quite important.
Let's have a look at other aspects of the Judeo-Christian myth, which have a negative effect on people's perceptions of political power.
Now, there's a whole other topic around people's perceptions of familial power, or patriarchal, matriarchal power, which is heavily conditioned by these existence of deities, but let's just talk about politics for the moment.
If you believe in the Christian or Judeo-Christian deity, so I guess that's most of our Jewish, Muslim, and Christian friends, then you have a problem with ethics, a fundamental problem with ethics.
I talked about this in the last podcast, about how God does not follow the moral injunctions that he sets out for mankind.
But when you look at something like the emotion of volatility, particularly the Old Testament deity, you've got wrathful smiting, you've got jealous impatience, you've got no other gods before me, you've got, if you don't obey me, lake of fire.
You have, you know, instructions which I, as an atheist, find particularly offensive.
Which is things like, you know, take all the unbelievers and drown them in a lake, right?
I mean, I view the Bible as a black man would view the handbook of the KKK.
Except that even the handbook of the KKK says just lynch, don't murder, right?
So, one of the reasons that I have a particular problem with with religious Judeo-Christian, the Judeo-Christian religion, is that, you know, it openly advocates my murder, right?
It is a little tough for me to sort of treat this with all the gentleness and respect that, you know, an intellectual, a merely intellectual Opposition takes would move how that would manifest I you know when somebody says I think you should be killed for your beliefs Then I have a certain amount of I guess you could say Contempt and disdain and an outright hostility to those sorts of people, right?
I mean, nobody's gonna blame a black for not being good pals with a KKK member and so it sort of would be unreasonable to expect me or any other free-thinking atheists who have any particularly friendly relationships towards a philosophy which advocates our murder, right?
So you do have these sorts of problems that you have a situation where if a particular being is in a particular, or a particular concept is in a particular position of power, i.e.
God is, you know, all-powerful and so on, The emotional or emotionally charged actions of that entity cannot be questioned, right?
So if you're a Christian, you're supposed to be meek to some degree, but you believe in a god that when he's angry can, you know, pretty much destroy the world except for a couple of people on a floating Winnebago.
So, how do you oppose anything that comes from a position of power, when you have already accepted that power is its own virtue?
And that, you know, if whoever's in power, or the concept gets angry, the concept can do anything that it wants, regardless of any moral absolutes.
So, you know, might makes right in the Christian philosophy, and that is not a very good concept to have when examining the state.
Another thing that I have, which is a problem with religion, is that there is no way to rationally compare the value of nonsensical concepts.
So, is Zeus better than the Christian God?
Is Jesus better than Muhammad?
Is Isaiah better than Ezekiel?
There's no way to compare these particular concepts.
If I say to you, my leprechaun is better than your leprechaun, or my dryad is better than your nymph, what does it mean?
We can both just define these imaginary entities as just being the best, and there's no way to resolve these disputes.
So, what it does is it promotes in people this sort of blind loyalty to localized concepts, which is incredibly dangerous and is amazingly exploited, of course, by those in power.
Canadians believe that, you know, the Canadian way, the Canadian country, the Canadian system is the best, you know, in the same way that people believe that, you know, their local sports team is better than the sports team on the other side of town.
And this, of course, is entirely, well, one of the things that religion provides is this whole mindset, right?
I mean, there is absolutely no rational reason to believe that being a Christian is, you know, better than being a Jew or, I mean, a religious Jew.
Or that being a religious Jew is better than being a religious Muslim.
So, you know, there's simply no way to rationally argue these things, because they're all based on faith, and there's no evidence or logic in any of them.
Right?
If I say my spoogle is better than your spoogle, it'd be like, okay, maybe yes, maybe no.
Since there's no rational definition of what a spoogle is, then, you know, you really can't compare any of these concepts.
But what it does do is it gives people an emotional allegiance to localized abstractions.
So, my country is better than your country.
Why?
Because it's my country.
I mean, I remember years ago I had an argument with a fellow who said that he would rather pay high taxes to a Canadian government than low taxes to someone who invaded and took over or whatever.
And, you know, that sort of statement is simply astounding, right?
But it all comes back to this whole sort of sports mentality, right?
My team's better than your team, but, you know, they're both just a bunch of, you know, overpriced, overpaid and, you know, heavily juiced up athletes, you know, who would be traded back and forth like Halloween candy the day after Halloween.
I remember this just as a sort of minor aside.
You know, when I was a kid, I was supposed to cheer for sort of my local football team in England, you know, and you know, they were all Jamaican and had thick accents and had just been bought from some opposing team the year before.
So even as a kid, I remember thinking like, you know, nothing against the Jamaicans, but You know, okay, so last year I was booing these people, these exact same people, but now, because they've changed, you know, who's paying them, and they've got a different jacket or a different sweater on, I'm supposed to cheer these exact same people.
I mean, it really is, in a minor way, this whole Orwellian thing, right?
I mean, we are always at war with Leeds United.
We have always supported Crystal Palace.
So this is another aspect of religion that you have to come up against when you're talking about liberty, which is that People's allegiance to their local rulers, well, people's allegiance to this local concept called the state or the government, supersedes any actions that are taken within the confines of that abstraction, right?
So, I love the Canadian government, my country right or wrong, I mean, this is all nonsense.
What it means is that people have an allegiance to a concept, irrespective of, you know, how people act within that.
I mean, there's lots of Catholics, I bet you, Who, if every single priest were proven to be a pedophile, would still remain Catholics.
Because, you know, their abstraction, which they have loyalty to, has nothing to do with the actions of the people who represent it.
I guess the final thing that I'll talk about here, in terms of how religious thinking affects politics, and I could do hours on this, but in the interest of your storage space and patience, I will limit this one to just one more point.
In order to save gods and countries and races and classes and so on, as I said before, you have to create this big fantasy bucket and throw everything in there and say that anything in that bucket beats anything that is empirical or rational.
What that does, of course, is it splits reason.
Now, I mean, it doesn't accurately or truly split reason, it just splits reason in this sort of weird imaginary way.
And it says that practical reason has no relationship to ideal or idealistic perfection.
You know, everybody's always heard, well, you know, he's an idealist, you've got to be more pragmatic, don't be such a dreamer, you've got to, you know, focus on the here and now.
And so what happens is, you know, with this sort of religious or collectivist mindset, people split rationality into inconsequential sort of reality manipulative rationality, you know, like science or like, you don't sort of look at the snow in your driveway and wonder if God's going to clear it away.
I mean, you get to go and pick up the shovel, right?
I mean, so you don't, you sort of end up having to split rationality into this sort of valueless, pragmatic, you know, whatever works, regardless of any sort of higher values or consistency, whatever works in the short term materialistic sense whatever works in the short term materialistic sense and
And then there's the morality or the higher vision or the more important rationality which is, you know, part of this higher realm and, you know, it's accessible only to the few and, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
Not only does it cripple people's ability to reason, but it cripples rationality itself.
If I say that rationality is only applicable to driving your car and going to the bank and walking around a lamppost rather than into it, that that's really the role and value of empirical verification and thought and so on.
Then what I've said to you is that, you know, don't worry your pretty little head about thinking about things like state power or the existence of God, because your, what you call rationality, this petty little tool that's sort of like a useless screwdriver at the bottom of your tool kit, tool bag, Don't you worry a pretty little head about it.
You just do the rationality that I need you to do, or that is, you know, that is valueless.
And don't apply any rational thinking of your own to these bigger concepts because they're not accessible or open to you.
It's only the elites who understand.
All we need for you to do is to accept that they are Uh, that we know what we're doing, that we are perfect, that we don't need to explain it to you because you wouldn't be able to understand.
But, you know, we're good no matter what we do.
So, that is particularly bad.
And, of course, The reason that this is said, to tie it up and to tie it back to politics, the reason that people say, you know, you just work with your practical little reality and you leave the big stuff to us, is because they want to pillage you.
They want to take your money, and they want to take your time, and they want to take your resources.
And if you're not producing any, Then they've got nothing to steal, right?
I mean, if you're not working, then you're not paying any taxes.
So, if sort of the religious or primacy of concepts mindset were consistent, right, then what you would want to do is to get back to God as soon as possible, right?
I mean, so there's this veil of tears argument in the Bible which is, you know, We were all happy before we got to Earth.
You know, being on Earth is sort of a punishment because Earth is run by Satan and, you know, as soon as we get back to God, everything's gonna be hunky-dory and we couldn't be happier.
We'll be singing and singing and singing.
And so, of course, the logical thing to do would be to throw yourself off a cliff while thinking of God.
Actually, I've never seen this, but a friend of mine told me about this movie wherein one character is playing God, and another character is playing the devil, and the devil is talking to a man.
And the man says, so why did you revolt?
Anyway, why did you rise up against God?
And the devil says, well, I can probably explain it to you if you like, it's probably better to show it though.
So, I'll tell you what, I'll stand up on this chair, and I'm God, and now you're me, and I want you to run around saying, oh, you're so great, you're so powerful, you're so wise, praise be, praise be, praise be, right?
So the guy does this, and he runs around in circles, and, oh, praise be, praise be, oh, you know, and he keeps going, and he keeps going, and he keeps going, and finally he stops, and he goes, man, oof, that's tiring!
And he's like, yeah, you see?
That's kind of what got to me, too.
So that particular approach, where they want you, you know, the powers that be, the rulers, They want you to be practical, they want you to live, they want you to not attempt to live just by the rules of this higher reality, for two reasons.
One is that you will have a vision which contradicts with theirs, and then you will cast them as the devil, you will rise up, and this and that and the other.
So they want to dominate you.
with this abstract realm of perfection and absolute goodness, but they don't want you to live by it, because then you're going to get your own visions and contradict theirs and question them and so on.
And also, if you lived in conjunction with this perfect realm, consistently, you wouldn't get out of bed, you wouldn't go to work, you would just sit there and dream about this perfect world.
And if you didn't get out of bed and go to work, Then you wouldn't be producing anything that they could steal, right?
So, I mean, this is where, of course, the hypocrisy is in all of this, as it is in the basis of any irrational moral philosophy, which is that, you know, if you attempt to really live by the edicts that this sort of supernatural perfect world that you knew before you were born and will rejoin after you die that's so much better than this world, I mean, the first thing you would do is you would kill yourself.
You do find some painless way to go and rejoin this blind perfect ecstasy, and of course you're not allowed to do that.
That's against the rules, which completely makes no sense at all.
So that's the last thing that I wanted to point out, that this is very clearly just a superstructure of belief that is designed to make people not question the edicts and decisions of political rulers or for religious rulers.
It is designed to make people feel small and incompetent and pathetic and tiny and, you know, so that they're easier to subjugate.
It also allows or forces people to submit to the whims of authority in the same way that God works in mysterious ways.
It makes people loyal to localized and undifferentiated concepts like my God versus your God, my country versus your country.
And, you know, finally it provides a small window of rationality for people.
So, you know, saying that practical reality has its value in terms of going to work and having a job and so on.
But that's only done so that, you know, you create stuff that the political elites and the military elites can pillage.
And the religious elites, of course.
And so basically you're allowed a little bit of rationality in the way that a cow is allowed a little bit of wiggle room and some hay, which then allows the cow to continue to produce milk and ultimately be led to the slaughter.
So that is why whenever you advocate political freedom, You are going to have to deal with this higher realm of abstract concepts.
You're going to have to deal with the imaginary moral content that's dumped into these imaginary realms like God and class and religion and race and all of this sort of stuff.
And you're going to have to oppose that because you can't triumph or champion the rights of the individual unless you say that the individual is supreme.
In which case you have to say that the group does not exist.
The group is merely a concept that sits in people's minds and is used to describe a collection of individuals.
And if you say that the group does not exist, then you are saying that concepts have no moral validity and no epistemological superiority to instances, right?
So the government doesn't exist.
The government as a concept has no moral superiority over individuals, right?
And in order to be consistent, you then have to say that all concepts have no moral concepts, no moral content, that all concepts are are inferior and have no validity relative to individuals, which means that you have to get rid of the concept of God.
You have to take this unreal bucket that everybody throws all of this crap into and rules over everyone with, and just get rid of it.
You have to close the door and brick it up to this other realm, this higher realm of fantasy, this platonic nonsense.
And that way, the only thing that has reality, the only thing that has moral validity, is the individual.
So you get rid of the state, you get rid of the race, you get rid of God, you get rid of all of these countries and classes, and you simply deal with individuals.
And that is the only way that you can develop any kind of moral certainty and any kind of consistent moral theory.
Because a moral theory has to describe reality.
And the reality is that only individuals exist, and concepts only exist in our mind, and any time a concept contradicts the nature of an individual, it is invalid.
So, that's my particular take on why we have to look at this problem of religion and abstractions in general, and I hope that it's been helpful.
And feel free, of course, to send me an email.
Let me know what you think at s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
And, of course, my blog is freedomain.blogspot.com.
Thanks so much.
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