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Dec. 15, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:02
15 The State and God - Part 2
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Hello and welcome to my next podcast.
This is Stefan Molyneux.
Thank you so much for joining me as we have a look at a variety of religious questions and try and see if we can't make sense out of this sort of epistemological mess that people call a religious belief.
So I'd like to talk about a few things.
This is a sort of second part of this examination of religious belief and The first part is available, of course, through my feed on iTunes, or if you go to my website, freedomain.blogspot.com, you can listen to it there.
I'd certainly suggest having a listen to that before you listen to this.
But hey, I'll wait while you go listen.
No, I'm just kidding.
All right.
So, a few of the thoughts that I didn't sort of stir into the mix the last time that we chatted were... I'm sort of going to go into here.
And one of the first ones, of course, is the question of monotheism.
And this, you know, initial question of monotheism is not specific to the Christian theology, but to all monotheistic religions.
And, you know, the basic issue is this, which is that, you know, although there is no rational or empirical proof that some sort of divine being exists, and the very nature of a divine being, as I mentioned before, contradicts all known rational principles, you know, it's, contradicts all known rational principles, you know, it's, It's a mind without a body, and it's life without death, and it's existence without creation, like life existence without creation, and so on.
And even if we accept all of that, and say that beings can exist, Which have no corporeal physiology, and they're eternal, and they're invisible, and they can't be detected by any known methodology, and so on.
Then, of course, the question then becomes, well, how do we know that only one of them exists?
I mean, if it is simply a matter of faith or belief or some sort of inspiration, then we can of course see throughout history that there have been many religions with multiple deities.
So if there was only one God, Then you would assume that one of the ways that you would test for that hypothesis, the hypothesis that there is only one God, would be to look throughout history and say, well, you know, if there was no such thing as God, we would expect an enormous variety in religious beliefs.
And if there was a central deity that was communicating to people, then we would assume that there would be a sort of a paucity of diversity in in fixed beliefs about religion.
So, of course, as we look both across the world and throughout history, we can see that the evidence is not good for the case of God.
In so far as, of course, we can see many religions which have many different forms of deity.
The Indian religions with Shiva and Vishnu and all these other gods.
There is, of course, the ancient Greek religion With Zeus and Apollo and Hera and all these sorts of characters.
The Roman religions.
And so, you know, there really is no logical reason to believe that even if we cast rationality and empiricism to the winds and say, okay, we accept the existence of the possibility of an invisible deity or an invisible eternal all-knowing form of life, There's absolutely no reason to believe that there's only one of them, even if we accept the premise.
And if there was only one God who spoke to human beings, then we would expect that there would be a similarity of belief across mankind and throughout history.
And of course there's, you know, a ridiculous diversity of religious beliefs
uh... you know from the cat-headed gods of the ancient egyptians to this sort of three-in-one god of the catholics and and you know all the saints and then the indian religions and the sort of uh... these sort of anthropomorphic uh... roman and greek religions and and atheism and you know there's nature worship there's this druidic uh... religions there is satanism there is you know everything that you can imagine uh... somebody has probably worshipped
At some point or another.
The idea that there's only one God is not at all rational, even if we accept the idea that gods do exist.
And, of course, it is further disproven by the fact that if there was only one God, we would expect some sort of similarity in religious beliefs.
And, you know, there really isn't any similarity in religious beliefs across cultures and across times.
So this does not speak well towards the existence of either one God or, you know, any gods at all.
Now an argument that I've heard from a Christian, and this may be common to other belief systems, I don't know, but an argument that I've heard from a Christian is a young gentleman named Adam, as you can well imagine, was telling me the following sort of what he considered suggestive proof towards the divinity of Jesus Christ.
And that was that something must have occurred that people felt was divine when Christ was alive because the people who saw his miracles or his person or perhaps his resurrection and so on They must have seen something divine because they were put to death for it.
They, you know, they fought and, you know, they risked persecution and they risked mutilation and torture and crucifixion and all of this sort of mess.
And therefore, given that it would not be particularly rational for a human being to pursue these things in the absence of seeing something extraordinary and divine, that that would at least suggest that something very unusual was going on throughout Christ's life and in the presence of those who saw him.
I'm fairly sure this is offensive to many people, but I simply look at this through a sort of rational perspective and I try to disassociate myself from the emotional overtones that everybody who lives in the West has grown up around the divinity of Christ and the Christian God and so on.
And so I sort of sit myself in this sort of Not exactly cold, but definitely non-mythical, rational chair.
And this is sort of what I see.
That if the desire or the ability to die for a belief proves the divinity or suggests the divinity,
of, you know, what is believed in, then, you know, if you cast your mind back a few years to these, you know, nut jobs who cut off their own testicles and killed themselves to go and join the comet that was floating past, then, you know, this would, of course, also be an argument for the divinity of that comet, because, I mean, the Christians suffered persecution at the hands of the Romans, and, you know, these guys persecuted themselves, which, in a sense, is even more
I mean, you can get away from the Romans or evade them, but you can't get away from your own hand and knife and a good chopping block.
So it could be said that these comet worshipers were, in fact, that the comet was more divine than Christ because they went to even further extremes.
So I don't see that it's any sort of argument to say that, well, something must have gone on.
Otherwise, you know, why would people believe it?
Similarly, you can't even remotely talk about You know and say well so many people believe in religion and you know it's common experience the world over and you know throughout history and therefore there must be something that is I mean that's ridiculous and the reason that it's ridiculous is because children are bullied into believing in religion.
I myself was I wouldn't say bullied Definitely there was a lot of social pressure to be religious when I was a child and I was in a boarding school in England where, you know, we went to church a couple of times a week and, you know, we had preachers who, you know, I think were on the most part dull.
I do remember one fairly young guy came through one day and said he sort of, you know, gave the Milton-esque story this way, that God threw the devil in a pond and put up a big sign saying, no fishing, which I thought was cute, you know, I was Six or seven years old when I first heard that in boarding school, and I guess I thought it was kind of cute.
I did sort of find it a little weird that we had to dress up so much to go to worship a god who said, you know, it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
You know, Christ says, all who would follow me cast off your worldly possessions and blah blah blah.
So I did find it rather odd that we had to dress the lines to go and worship the God of poverty, but I guess I didn't really reason it through much at that time.
But, you know, to say That the common nature of mankind's belief in a deity indicates that such a deity exists is completely ridiculous.
Because, as I mentioned in my last podcast on this topic, the way to test that would be to raise a child with no indication of religion whatsoever.
and answer their questions about the origins of things in a scientific manner, and then see if they came up with things like a three-day resurrection, and, you know, a virgin birth, and, you know, all of these mistranslation nonsenses that came out of, you know, this ancient Hebrew text. you know, this ancient Hebrew text.
And, you know, if you raised a bunch of kids that way, and they came up with those beliefs, then there would be some indication, either of a collective unconscious or some sort of outside influence, which could be a deity, whether or not there would be anything to worship, and whether it would answer prayers, I mean, all would be unknown.
But, you know, the reason that the belief in in religion is so universal is because children are coerced and forced and bullied and punished and frightened into believing in religion.
So, you know, to me it would be similar.
So it's a kind of conformity and ignorance of the rational arguments against, you know, the existence of this sort of big sky ghost that is what keeps people believing in this stuff.
I mean, it would be equivalent to saying that you know there must be something in this flat earth theory because you know by golly for tens of thousands of years people believe that the world was flat uh... well they just uh... you know they didn't know any better uh... and so that was uh... you know that's what uh... that's what they believed in and that's why
So to go to another point, I would say that I have an enormous amount of sympathy towards children who are bullied and frightened into religious belief, particularly those children who are faced with the unbelievable and violent social pressure
uh... within the muslim uh... worlds and within the uh... that those those uh... sort of uh... no separation of church and state societies at least in the west there's a little bit of breathing room where you can uh... look to explore the ideas a little bit more openly uh... but you know in theological societies it is just rampant child abuse this This communication of this infinite, powerful, destructive, punitive deity.
I mean, it's just unbelievable what it does to children's minds.
So I have an enormous amount of sympathy for children who are subjected to these beliefs.
I have a good deal less sympathy, of course, to people who should know better, who have the capacity to open their eyes, look around the world, and see that the existence of a deity It's in no way evident and it's important to give up superstition and prejudice so that the human species can advance and stop collapsing into these orgies of self-destruction that consume societies at the end of their life cycle.
But I will say that the capacity for human beings to reject the evidence of their senses is a pretty important part of the human mind.
And in a sense, right down at the root, science and religion thus have the same origin.
I mean, if you're not a human being, a goldfish or a puppy or something, you really don't have the option to reject the The evidence of your senses.
So, you know, I imagine if you put a dog in a desert and it can see a mirage, it's going to keep running towards that mirage.
I mean, at some point it may give up, but it won't be able to sort of reason while it's light waves bouncing between differently heated layers of atmosphere or anything.
So, you know, the fact that we're able to reject the evidence of our senses is pretty crucial in our development of the human mind and of human knowledge.
So, I mean, an obvious example is that the world looks flat.
But you have to reject the evidence of your senses and recognize that it's round.
Similarly, the sun and the moon, they both look about the same size.
It's sort of a dime held at arm's length.
And during an eclipse, you can see, well, by golly, they are the same size because they cover each other perfectly.
But, of course, the Sun is many, many hundreds of times larger than the Moon, despite what our senses tell us.
I mean, there's tons of other ones that you can think of, I'm sure, wherein rejecting the evidence of the senses is, in fact, the route to knowledge.
The fact that we're moving and the sun relatively is not is certainly not what our senses tell us.
Our senses tell us that we're stuck still and the sun is being pulled across the sky by a Roman chariot god, of course.
So, the ability to reject the evidence of the senses is very key to developing some knowledge about the universe, right?
The ability to reject limited and localized sensual evidence for the sake of generalized and universal scientific principles is, you know, very important.
So, I can certainly see how So, you know, whatever mental paroxysm the Cro-Mannian man went through, which produced the ability to reject the senses, opened up this sort of Pandora's box of religious, nightmarish concepts, which at the very bottom, as in the Pandora myth, is the little fairy of science, which, you know, puts all the rest of it away.
So I certainly do understand The capacity of the mind to reject the evidence of the senses and how that initially leads to something like a god, right?
You believe in something for which there is no evidence in your senses.
But the rejection of the senses, of course, should only be done on the basis of empirical verification and rationality, not because you want to be taken care of and think that you're going to meet the people you love after they die.
And, of course, one of the more important, I guess, axioms in the religious framework or in the religious mindset or worldview is the idea that, well, I really, really, really believe in God.
I mean, I guess I sympathize to a small degree, you know, because for me, religious belief is a form of scar tissue that comes out of social punishment.
So, you know, we all grow up desperately wanting to believe that our parents and society is good, you know, because if it's not, then, you know, we have some pretty tough choices ahead of us, right?
We either ignore that society is pretty corrupt and teaches children all the wrong things, In which case, we kind of have to step outside the social bubble, which is very hard, as anybody who's a committed and vocal libertarian or atheist knows.
But of course, in the same way that we have the capacity to reject the evidence of the senses, which can lead to science, we also have the capacity to reject social convention which leads to progress if it's, you know, well thought out.
You know, I certainly view myself as a sort of random gene in the social body, simply because, you know, in my sort of 20 to 25 odd years of talking about this stuff, I've met, you know, except for my wife, almost nobody who, you know, can follow this to any particular degree.
And it's not because it's so hard, to figure out, simply because it's, you know, it just goes against everything that they're trained to believe in.
So, you know, the social organism, you know, takes care of its own and wraps around its own and blinds everyone who's part of it.
But, you know, there are people like myself and perhaps yourself who are standing outside of the illusions that everybody's trapped in, you know, this sort of glossy cage of social convention.
And we are the random gene through which society progresses or evolves in the same way that, you know, certain genes within biology will cause a species to evolve.
And, you know, evolving is really adapting to reality and human beings are really not very well adapted to reality at the moment because, you know, social convention and religion and nationalism and all this sort of nonsense.
It just completely blinds people to the facts of life and the true honor and virtue of life.
So, you know, I certainly do have some sympathy towards those who have been, you know, scarred and broken by this religious bullying.
But, you know, however difficult it is, anybody who claims to have any kind of intellectual integrity, or who claims to have any right to say what people should do, does have the absolute responsibility to learn as much as possible about the facts of existence and of life and of truth.
Because if you say what the good is, or what people should do, or what's right, and you're not correct, then you really are destroying the capacity of those around you to be rational, to be happy, and to be free.
So this religious passion, I fully understand it.
I do sympathize with it.
But it is something that has to be grimly opposed.
The fact that somebody believes something very passionately has absolutely nothing to do with how valid their belief is.
I may root for a particular sports team, if I was at all inclined towards rooting for any sports team, which I've never really had much luck getting interested in, although I love sports.
If I were rooting and passionately and desperately believed that my sports team were the best, it would have absolutely no effect on their chances.
I don't believe there's any sort of universal tsunami karma that everybody can get enthusiastic about and change the nature of reality.
So, a passionate belief has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of that belief.
So, for instance, and this is not something that religious people generally like to hear, but epistemologically it's sound, if I believe that, say, all Orientals are thieves, then, and I passionately believe that, and I have a whole you know, horrible little website devoted to my racism, then, you know, the fact that I passionately believe it in no way determines the validity of that belief.
If I say that it is moral to believe that all Orientals are thieves, and anybody who doesn't believe that is going to be punished in some sort of eternal hellfire after they die.
And, you know, it's virtuous to believe in it, and I'm very passionate about it, and this is what I really care about.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the facts, right?
I can choose to reject the simple fact that, you know, very few orientals are thieves in the same way that, you know, very few of any people are thieves who aren't necessarily working for the state.
But my particular belief, I can choose to reject all of that empirical or sensual evidence about orientals and claim virtue for my belief, which is absolutely identical to saying that you believe in a deity.
And rejecting all evidence to the contrary, and just saying that my belief is virtuous, and that's why the deity must exist.
Okay, so let's look at one or two other issues before wrapping up the whole case of God, and hopefully helping us to flush it into the dustbin of history.
One of the other things that I would like to talk about is the question about morality, because of course religion rests on the principle of morality.
Say, a Christian claims to know that one cannot be moral without a belief in the divinity and obedience to the edicts of Jesus Christ, and so on.
But for those who've been following this question of the argument for morality, which is also available in one of these fine podcasts, you will understand that you can't claim a moral axiom that is not valid for all people for all time.
And therefore, I guess I have a slight logical bone to pick with the Christians, because I would view Socrates as a pretty moral fellow.
I wouldn't say that he was necessarily the most consistent of all thinkers, but certainly pretty much one of the most consistent of the ancient world.
But, you know, the man did not kill, he did not rape, he did not steal, he did not set fire to things, you know, he didn't, you know, well I guess he went to war, which wasn't so good because, you know, that sort of puts him in the Winston Churchill mercenary camp.
But, you know, overall, I would say that in terms of his philosophical life, he was a pretty good guy.
And, of course, so was Aristotle and Plato.
Mentally corrupt, but, you know, not an evil man.
But, of course, the problem is that these people all lived before the birth of Christ.
And so, one of the logical problems that any sort of prophet-based religion faces is the question of what happens to the people who lived before that prophet was born, right?
I mean, that's a fairly important criteria.
a fairly important criteria.
So a Christian, if he believes that the belief in the divinity and following the edicts of Jesus Christ is the only thing that gets you into heaven and otherwise you get burned in hellfire for eternity, has to then answer the question of everybody who was born before the birth of Jesus Christ has to then answer the question of everybody who was born before the birth of Jesus Christ that they're all evil and there's no Or they have to say they don't have souls, which is obviously a little odd, because we're supposed to be made in God's image.
Or, you know, there's a lot of grey areas here.
Like, what if you were passing by the Sermon on the Mount at a sort of middle distance, and you couldn't quite make out what Christ was saying?
Well, if you'd been sort of 10 feet closer to Christ, you would have heard what he was saying and would then have been able to live your life according to his edicts.
But if you're 10 feet further away, you don't hear what he's saying and then you have, of course, no capacity to live according to his edicts.
What about people who couldn't read?
uh... and didn't have access to a bible and and so on uh... even after christ's uh... story was written down uh... then uh... of course they don't uh... uh... that they don't have the capacity to go to heaven and to be good and so you have a lot of pretty localized morality right uh... there's people who live in jungle in borneo who've never heard of jesus christ uh... and you know that they obviously then have no capacity to go to heaven
So, it is rather hard to understand how you have such a localized morality that you have to, you know, have heard and understood this message and you have to live right.
And everybody who was born before Christ doesn't get to go to heaven and everybody who was born after Christ does, as long as they've heard about Christ and can speak the language of the preachers and don't get misinformed by anybody and so on.
So, that has a particular problem.
The argument for morality says that if you have a moral rule, it has to be valid for all people for all time.
And, you know, Christianity completely fails on that score.
And I guess one other thing too, I mean, there's so many contradictions inherent in the nature of Christianity, and I'm sure there are in other religions too, it's just that I haven't, you know, bothered my pretty little head to study them too much, so, you know, if you know of them, please let me know and I'll be happy to record part three of this.
But, you know, you would expect that if Christ were divine that he would utter no falsehoods, right?
And therefore, you know, when he says, as he is being crucified, there are those among you who will not taste death before I return.
No, I'm sorry, I think that was after he was resurrected.
There are those among you who will not taste of death before I return in all my glory.
Well, you know, they're all dead and, you know, the dude hasn't come back.
And so I think it's fairly safe to say that this was an incorrect statement on his behalf.
I mean, there's many, many of these in the Bible.
It really only takes one.
I mean, if God is omniscient and all-powerful, then he can certainly send his kid back to mankind before people have died who are listening to him.
And, you know, I guess a little over 2,000 years later, You know, we're still waiting.
They're all dead.
And therefore, you know, obviously this is not omniscience that is speaking.
And of course, it's fine to say that, you know, everything's abstract and it's a metaphor for the death of Western society and so on.
But, you know, that's not what he said.
I mean, you can make up anything, right?
Yeah, he was talking about a cloud formation that is still circling the Earth.
I mean, but, you know, that's what he said, you know.
Now, of course, people will say that was mistranslated, misunderstood, that everything was written down 200 years after Christ's death, and so on.
But all that means is that the book is not divinely inspired.
And as anybody who's studied history knows, 200 years in a society without uh... transcripted uh... interviews and videos and you know fabulous things like podcasts uh... you know the truth gets just a tad distorted over two hundred years of retelling especially when there's an enormous amount of political and religious power uh... dependent upon the recasting of some preacher as the son of god so
That's, you know, the fact that he may have been mistranslated and this and so on.
All it means is that, you know, we then have no idea what the facts of the story are.
I mean, if you ever play a game of secrets or whispers, you know, where you sort of have a group of people sitting around, you whisper something in one person's ear and it comes back to you, it's not even close to the same.
I sort of remember the very first day that I was in university at Glendon, which was a campus of York University in Canada.
I was sitting in the front row and I was taking a course in Canadian history.
God help me.
And the professor, she sort of, you know, I had my hand up.
I was a keener because this was before I ran into the rotating blades of mental disintegration that higher academia is for anybody who thinks for themselves.
So I was keener sitting up front asking questions and then at one point the teacher turned and hurled her glasses at me.
And, you know, I guess I've always had fairly good reflexes, so I caught them.
And then she turned and said to the class as a whole, what just happened?
And she said that I couldn't answer, right?
So that's fine.
And man, it was amazing.
You couldn't believe the number of different stories that came out about what happened.
That she had sneezed, that I had thrown something at her, that she had dropped something, that I had, you know, dropped something off my desk, that nothing had happened, that, you know, what is happening for people who've been dozing in the back?
And this is something that people were eyewitness to.
And, you know, they could not consistently report on what had happened.
And this is about 10 seconds after the event, when everybody's supposed to be watching the teacher.
So, you know, if... And then this was with no political or economic or religious pressure being brought to bear on the topic.
So, if a group of, say, 50 people can't record 10 seconds after something that happened consistently, then one could for sure say that 200 years after something has happened, what is being told has absolutely no relationship to what actually did happen, and there's absolutely no way to know what actually did happen.
For those who have done a little bit of research into this, the last point I'll make on this is probably well known, but for those who don't, it may be interesting.
The Virgin Birth is, despite the fact that it's screwed up generations of Italian men, It's also one of the things that's supposed to have resulted from a mistranslation, that the ancient Hebrew word for a virgin and young maiden were very similar.
And so, you know, Christ's mother was a young maiden, but it got mistranslated as a virgin.
And, you know, next thing you know, you know, Catholic men, you know, have this sort of Madonna-whore complex.
So, you know, these kinds of things are, you know, just foolish mythologies, right?
I mean, a virgin birth, please.
It really doesn't make any sense.
Although, I've got to tell you, if you knocked up your girlfriend and you could convince somebody that it was a virgin birth, that may be divine, because being able to convince people that, you know, You didn't have sex with her, and nobody did.
She just happened to get pregnant by some visiting angel.
I've got to tell you, that's a pretty cool story to tell.
And the fact that you're believed is an indication of a society that's gullible enough to believe in things like loaves and fishes and walking on water and all this other kind of nonsense.
So, okay, we can, I think, take one more swing at the last aspect of this.
Unless, of course, any other thoughts strike me, in which case I'll keep going in those tangents.
But, you know, the question of evil.
Of course is, you know, something that all religions, you know, have to, you know, put a big junk of squid ink all over because, you know, a perfect God who creates a perfect world which is then infested with things like plagues and sores and storms and murderers and, you know, especially in, of course, the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages where life was just an unbelievable sequence of horrors.
It is rather hard to say what may have gone wrong.
If I claim to be the most perfect house builder in the world, and the house I put up is full of mildew and rot and slanted floors and holes in the walls and it keeps having to get patched up, then of course it may be perfectly valid to question what exactly is my criteria for being the best builder.
So the question of evil, which we talked about briefly in the last podcast, and just to reiterate what was in there, the question of evil is interesting because, you know, people say God is not interventionist, that we have free will, but of course God is interventionist in every single religion, and that's simply axiomatic.
If God was not interventionist, then there would be no such thing as religion, because we wouldn't know that God existed, because he really, really wouldn't intervene, you know, the same way that I just watched March of the Penguins, the same way the penguins don't know that I exist.
We would have no idea that God exists, because he really wouldn't intervene.
So God does intervene, and because God does intervene, and God doesn't do anything to help the suffering, and the meek, and those who are sick, and those who are victims of evil, then of course God is morally culpable by God's own moral rules, as in the example of the Good Samaritan.
But the question of intervention is interesting, as is the question of the source of evil.
So, you know, all religions, from, I mean, Zoroastrianism is very much along this way, that the forces of good, the deific forces of good, are sort of on one side, and the god-like forces of evil are on the other side, and it's human beings who choose which one wins through their dedication to good or evil, whatever, right?
In the Christian mythology, the structure is a little different.
God is all-powerful and God is all-knowing, but somehow God didn't quite figure out that Lucifer was going to turn on him.
Again, this is just the sort of normal contradictions that you expect from the ravings of starvation-addled lunatic monks from the late Roman Empire.
But, I mean, it's all just such nonsense, right?
I mean, if I claim to be all-knowing, and then I create a being second only to me, who then turns against me and leads legions of angels into the pits of hell, and then begins corrupting mankind, and I don't do anything to stop that, then, you know, obviously my claim to being all-powerful and all-knowing might be subject to a little bit more critical scrutiny than it is.
So, you know, the fact that God creates Lucifer, chief among angels and second only to himself, only to have Lucifer turn on him and wage a war against heaven, which, you know, I mean, it's really silly too, because, you know, Lucifer is far more intelligent than human beings.
I mean, he is second only to God in knowledge and power.
And we know that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, so we can kind of assume that, given that Lucifer's almost infinitely more intelligent than we are, that Lucifer also knows that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, yet, for some reason, he still decides to try and fight him.
Which, of course, is completely insane.
I don't get a lot of termites squaring off against me, and I don't really understand why Lucifer, who's had direct experience of God and knows of his all-powerful, all-knowing ways, decides to try and fight Heaven, which is obviously completely impossible.
God could choose to undo Lucifer's existence with the snap of a finger, or just change his mind to be back to the loving, created being that he was originally.
So, I mean, it's all just complete made-up nonsense, not even particularly well thought out as a novel or as any sort of plot.
I mean, if you saw this kind of stuff in a movie, right, the first thing you'd say is, well, why would he even fight?
You know, how come God didn't know this was going to happen?
I mean, it wouldn't even be a good sitcom, let alone the basis for a universal world morality.
So, you know, that's sort of one example of how foolish this is.
The second example is, of course, that God claims to be non-interventionist and to give us free will.
And God, in the Christian mythology at least, doesn't sort of swoop down and make us do good things and tempt us with goodness, so to speak.
But the devil has a completely free hand to tempt human beings with all sorts of evil and perfidity and treason and so on.
And, I mean, this is obviously such a biased experiment that there's no way that you could call any kind of deity who allowed that, you know, non-interventionist, right?
It would be like if I put up a sort of a lab experiment to test the health of something while allowing my lab assistants to poison the rats and then say, well, gee, a lot of the rats seem to be getting sick.
I wonder how that could be explained?
I mean, of course that's completely nonsensical.
to allow the devil to tempt human beings and then claim that there's such a thing as free will and I don't intervene in the world because I'm above it all, says God.
I mean, that all just is complete nonsense and makes no sense at all.
Now, there are, of course, many Christian theologians who have, and this may be true in other religions as well, I know it's somewhat true in Christian theology, who have abandoned things like Hell, the sort of intervention of the devil, and so on.
You know, and this is sort of the people who say it's akin to the idea that the Constitution is a living document.
The idea that you can just say, you know what, we don't really believe in hell anymore.
It's contemptible nonsense, is what it is.
You know, I would have far more respect for theologians if they, you know, thumped the table and screamed hellfire at me than this sort of mealy-mouthed abandoning of their religion's greatest premises just to sort of slither into bed with some of the secular humanism that's come around in the past half century.
I certainly prefer intellectual opponents who remain consistent to their beliefs so that they can be more effectively ridiculed for the foolishness that they believe.
But when they start changing their minds, and despite about eight million references to hell, hellfire, damnation, and this and that and the other in the Christian Bible, then they change their mind and say, well, we don't really subscribe to the idea of hell anymore.
Which, of course, begs the question, well, why?
Why not?
Did God visit you and tell you that there was no such thing as hell?
In which case, why did God say that there was such a thing as hell?
One would assume that an all-powerful and all-moral being would not be prone to creating lies that cause night terrors for 2,000 years' worth of children.
So, why would God have said that there was hell if there was no such thing as hell?
And if the theologians have just decided that there's no such thing as hell, then aren't they in fact evil?
Because God says that there is.
And so if they don't believe in the Word of God, then they're not following the teachings of the One True Being, then they're actually just evil.
Or they're just making things up.
So I don't believe any theologians have said that they themselves have gotten divine revelations about whether or not there's such a thing as hell.
I just think it's sort of fallen out of favor.
Because what's happened is a number of psychologists have begun to, or have over the last couple of generations, begun to talk about how destructive it is to hold a child's soul over these roasting coals of infinite torture as a way of getting them to believe stuff that's just nonsensical.
So then they're like, well, okay, the hellfire thing isn't going down too well these days, so let's just change it.
We'll just change it to, well, there's not so much really hell, and just throwing away 2,000 years of terrifying the bejesus out of children, which is completely contemptible.
I mean, if you're going to be a priest or a religious authority, then stand by your book.
And if you're not, then have the sense and integrity to become an atheist.
But don't just keep changing your story.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
And of course, if there is a god, right, then these people are evil, The whole church who says this, churches who refine any sort of biblical teachings, should be abandoned and damned and shut their doors and say, Oh my God, I'm so sorry we were wrong.
We have no right to tell anyone what to do.
Just as, you know, churches who hear about things like pedophilia and don't do anything about it should, of course, turn in their cassocks and go get gainful employment somewhere.
But if there was no God, and if it was all just, you know, basically Cash-laden fairy tales, you know, like I tell you all of this stuff and then you give me money, then you would expect that as church attendance went down that the stories would change in order to get people to come back.
So if something like hell fell out of favor with people, then if there was no such thing as God and it was all just a load of nonsense, charlatanry, just a load of evil and corrupt moral bullying, when people no longer took to that moral bullying and began to view it as, you know, anachronistic and horrible, then, you know, you would expect that in order to keep the cash coming,
The story would change to further appeal to those who are drifting away.
And that is, of course, exactly what you do see.
So, you know, it doesn't really matter which way you come at this question of religion.
And, of course, in particular, organized religion.
Although it doesn't matter.
I mean, whether it's organized or not, it's still equally false.
No matter which way you come at it, the evidence always points to the same thing.
People make up frightening stories to terrify children and thus bind them in for life.
People create these socially empty structures like church and community and culture and then threaten to bully people and throw them out of this community should they ever question anything.
And the reason that they do this is because they get pretty well paid for doing it, right?
I mean, if you get to be a priest, you can make a fairly comfortable middle class income and be sort of the respected heart of your society just by learning a couple of old words and wearing funny hats.
So, it's not too bad an occupation for a particular kind of con artist.
But it's nothing that real philosophers should have any patience with and pull any punches with identifying the facts of the matter.
Which is that religion is just a con which is designed to bully children, to frighten adults, and to ostracize anybody who has the temerity to ask any kind of rational question.
And they do all of this in return for money and power.
So it is a pretty sick, evil and corrupt mode of thinking.
Something which causes an enormous amount of suffering in the world.
Not just physical, but emotional suffering in particular.
And so this is one of the reasons why, when it comes to this question, I really pull no punches and feel no sympathy.
for people's beliefs that get exposed as false, because I would be much more lenient towards religion if two things didn't occur.
I'd be much more lenient towards religion if it wasn't so frickin' pompous.
If it wasn't so, well, this is the way, and smarmy, and you know, if you don't believe this, you're wrong, and you're just a bad guy, and no rational argument, just ad hominem, then I would be a lot more patient with it, but as you know, if you've heard one of my previous podcasts, I deal with people as pleasantly as I possibly can, and as respectfully as I possibly can the first time that I deal with them, and after that, I deal with them exactly as they deal with me.
So, religion is incredibly pompous.
It struts around saying, this is the right thing to do.
This is the right approach.
We have the universal truth.
We know everything.
And of course they've never learned a damn thing in their life.
All they've done is looked it up in a book that's mistranslated nonsense from crazed monks, you know, thousands of years ago.
Scarcely a valid foundation for knowledge.
The degree of violence that is put forward and supported in the world by religion is just astounding.
I mean, anybody who thinks that there's any kind of moral truth towards religion should just go to the Middle East and live there for a couple of years and see how well religion fosters peace and goodwill between mankind.
And last but not least, religion, and I speak particularly of the Old Testament religions here, right, the Muslim, the Jewish, and the Christian religions, you know, they openly advocate my death.
They openly advocate my murder.
They openly advocate death to people who question.
Death to heretics, death to unbelievers, death to blasphemers.
And I really do not have any patience or any moral sympathy with religion because it counsels that I be killed for thinking for myself and for asking perfectly sensible questions about the validity of these beliefs.
So I would certainly suggest that if you find no fault with these arguments, that you be perfectly frank and open with religious people and tell them exactly what sort of horror it is that they're preaching and they're believing.
And if they have any questions or issues with you, just remind them that an atheist has a perfect right to look at his religious person just as a black does to look at a Klo Klux Klan member, because those people who organize and openly advocate your destruction should not be given any quarter or any place to hide when it comes to a rigorous examination of their beliefs.
So I hope this has been helpful.
We've made it to 47 minutes.
Thank you very much and I look forward to your feedback.
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