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April 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:24
187 Putting the *con* in *text'* - the contexts of Biblical commandments (Part 1)

What does it mean to contextualize the Bible?

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 8.30 in the morning on April the 12th, 2006, and we are back in the car, so you'll get yourself a nice, tidy, audio-poor quality 35 to 40 minute rant this morning.
So we're back on track as far as audio quality and consistent thinking and calm exposition.
Strap yourself in.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I have had an interesting back-and-forth with a brave Christian who has joined the boards, and kudos to that Christian who has come on board, who is an anarcho-capitalist and a Christian, so we're getting a fascinating perspective there.
And we are going back and forth a little bit on the interpretation issue.
And I think this is something that is common enough that it's worth having a bit of a chat about.
Because if you've ever had disagreements with a Christian, or anybody, over what is in the Bible, then you will get this problem put back towards you, which is that you have to take things in context, you can't take everything literally, and so on.
So let's have a little look at that, and I think that's worth talking about because it is just such a common rebuttal.
But before we get into that, I do want to applaud the intellectual courage of the fairly recently converted Christian for coming on the boards and talking with us.
I think that it is fascinating.
I also plan to have a chat with this fellow And I'd like to record it, but we'll see how amenable he is to it.
Because the one thing I would like to know is, how was he converted?
That is something that is very interesting to me.
Because you may have problems with Christianity, as I do, but you cannot fail to notice that it is a fairly dominant ideological structure, or structure of belief.
And in that, we have to give props to the Christians for being fabulous at converting people.
And I think I would like to know what particular approaches or aspects to the Christian theology or the Christian approach was compelling enough for this gentleman to become a Christian.
I think that is fascinating.
It's not something that you hear about a lot, other than in sort of vaguely pious terms that aren't helpful to the uninitiated.
I'd like to talk to a Muslim about how he was converted, too, but I don't know any who'd be willing to talk to me, so that would be something that would be a little trickier.
And, of course, it's fascinating to me to find out how somebody converted as an adult, as we've talked about before.
My general theory is that if you weren't raised religious, then you won't Become religious over time.
But it would be interesting to find that out.
I think that we need to learn a little bit about this.
In my humble opinion, we need to learn a little bit about how Christians get people so motivated to change their belief structures because it wouldn't hurt for us to learn something about that just in terms of anarcho-capitalism.
So let's have a look at this problem of context.
So the general debate that I've had with Christians a number of times, a large number of times, and which we're also having with this new board member, is this.
Basically the question is, what do you have about religion?
Why are you religion bashing?
And so on.
And my response is, well, I have logical problems with it, of course, but much more... I mean, I have logical problems with the worship of tree elves as well, but I don't spend a lot of time tree elf worship bashing, because I don't believe that those... I mean, the one guy who worships tree elves who's in a self-body-hugging suit somewhere in a ward is not any particular threat to my life or my interests.
However, a dominant religion or a dominant theology or a dominant belief system that says that I should be put to death, I have a little bit more trouble with.
And as I mentioned on the board, the growing dominance of theology as a governmental structure of belief and of advocacy, which is, you know, I mean, I believe that America, for instance, right now, I mean, just sort of to put it in context for me at least, America, at the moment, is a religious theocracy.
I mean, you have a president who's an openly fundamentalist Christian, unlike the founding fathers, who you could barely get to set foot in a church.
You have a religious leader who is absolutely outside the bounds of the Constitution.
He is declaring war without Congressional approval, and of course the Congressional weasels do nothing to protect the Constitution, which is another reason why a piece of paper will never make you free.
But you have a fundamentalist Christian, a born-again Christian, a literalist Christian, who has declared war on his own initiative against another religion.
It's a religious war.
You have a president, El Presidente, who can do things like declare war and...
Do all of these raise taxes and pile up spending and so on.
He can do all of this stuff without any particular interference and he's declaring war on Iraq because an invisible voice told him to.
A god, a deity, a thing, a figment of his imagination, a snapped off part of his own grandiosity, an extruded part of his own megalomania told him to go and declare war on the Muslims.
And so it's hard for me to understand that that's not already a theocracy.
So it is with regret that I spend my time and my energies countering religion.
I do so because I am concerned that it's only going to be a matter of time before you start to get things like If you are not religious, then you're going to be excluded from public office, either overtly or covertly.
If you are not religious, you're not going to get particular federal grants.
If you pass atheistic laws, you're not going to get federal subsidies.
If you're a state, or even non-Christian laws, these things are absolutely inevitable.
I mean, this stuff just rolls downhill, unless it's opposed vigorously.
And so it is not with pleasure that I take up the sword against religion.
It is with regret that it has to be done again, right?
I mean, this idea of God is like a... Let's just say the public idea of God.
The idea of God that is related to government and to war.
It's one of these things like, you know, it keeps coming back, it keeps coming back, and we keep having to beat it back.
Now it keeps coming back because of the state.
This is not something that once we get rid of the state we won't have to worry about this kind of stuff, but because there is a state we have to keep beating it back, and the state and religion, as I've talked about before, are fairly co-joined intellectually, and so it's just something that you have to keep doing when you're an atheist.
Now, this gentleman on the board is making sort of two major points, as far as I understand it.
And please, he can correct me if he's wrong.
The two major points, one of which I'll deal with this morning, and one of which I'll deal with this afternoon, are the following.
One, dude, take it in context.
You don't think I want to kill you, do you?
I mean, most Christians I know are very nice.
They're not interested in murdering people who are not believers.
We care about them.
We want to save their souls.
And that's sort of the major belief which we'll talk about this morning.
And we'll talk about the second major premise this afternoon.
So, the idea of context.
So the argument goes, what do you have against religion?
Well, religious texts demand that I be put to death.
Well, I don't want to put you to death, saith the Christian.
And Lordy, I don't believe that the Bible wants you put to death either.
Jesus was a man of peace.
Unless you're a money lender.
Or an unbeliever.
A woman who had slept around outside a marriage.
Or a child who disobeyed his parents.
Or... Anyway, we can go on with that.
I think you've already heard that sort of stuff in previous podcasts.
But, he says Jesus was a man of peace.
And then what happens is you say, okay, if you believe that Jesus was a man of peace, then help me understand these 50 New Testament Bible texts wherein Jesus advocates the use of violence.
And then, with all due respect and apologies to the Christian who may not have heard this perspective before, or maybe he has and he has a good answer for it, but if you say that Jesus was a man of peace and didn't advocate violence, then if somebody says, yes, but these fifty times, and these are only the fifty times that I could dig up, there may well be more, and this is just in the New Testament, Then they say, well, but that's not what he meant.
So obviously you have an axiom, which is Jesus is a man of peace, which is not related to what he said.
So it's just a belief, right?
So they'll point you at the holy texts.
They point you at the Bible to say, these are the texts which support my belief.
And then when you point them to opposing texts, they'll say, well, you can't take those out of context.
And then you will also hear that the New Testament is kind of God's apology for the mass genocidal rape brutality, sexual slavery, slavery in general, and so on.
And, you know, killing the whole world except for Noah and a sort of floating zoo.
That the New Testament is God's sort of, oops, sorry, didn't mean to go so overboard for the Old Testament, insofar as the rainbow is God's sign.
It's like, I'm never going to do that again, don't worry.
I mean, okay, killed the whole world once because there were some bad people, but I'm just not really going to do that again.
Which is an interesting thing, of course.
I mean, the rainbow, which is God's sign that he's not going to kill the whole world again, is sort of interesting, because why would you promise to never do something again if it was moral to do it?
Then you should do it.
And if it wasn't moral to do it, then it's hard to believe how God is, well, moral, right?
I mean, we talked about that before.
I don't think specifically about that, but this is just another one of these examples in the Bible where You spend a few moments thinking about it, you realize that there's some significant moral issues with killing the whole world and then promising never to do it again.
I mean, if God is perfectly good and outside of time, then everything that God does must be perfectly good.
Therefore, God should never apologize and promise never to lose his temper that way again.
You know, killing the whole world and all.
It could be considered a mite genocidal.
And so the Christians will then say, well, the Old Testament, yeah, it's rougher, it's tougher, it's meaner, it's down and dirty, but the New Testament is glowing with light, and it's God's redemption, and he sent Christ to save mankind, blah blah blah.
However, there is a numerous text which you can find on the board under this thread, which I quote, wherein The New Testament and Old Testament are full of text which says you have to obey the whole deal.
You have to obey the Old Testament and the New Testament.
And so it's a little hard to say logically how this is all possible that you have to reject the Old Testament at the same time as the New Testament commands you to obey the Old Testament.
So this is all rather tricky.
And I think it's something that is interesting to look at.
I think that it is not too honest, to put it mildly, intellectually.
I think that a Christian who has a belief in the innate pacifism and virtue of Jesus Christ should say, I have an innate belief and not appeal to the texts.
They have a tough time, of course, because the only reason they know of Jesus Christ's existence, and whatever he said, is because of biblical texts.
So they have a tough time saying, I am only going to believe in Jesus' virtue because of my own belief in Jesus' virtue, and it has nothing to do with the Bible.
Because that's sort of separating the whole course of your knowledge of Jesus Christ and saying, OK, now that the Bible has told me all about Jesus Christ and how good he is and how bad he is and how this and that and the other, then I'm now going to have this isolated, free-from-the-Bible belief in the virtue of Jesus Christ, and no longer am I going to reference that Bible because it contains things which contradict that thesis.
I mean, that's not really very rational.
And so they generally have to go back to the texts.
And this is really the flawless, and I would say fraudulent, beauty of this kind of religious text.
You've got to admire it in the way that you would admire a flawless and nearly universal con job.
With all due apologies to the sensitivity of this religious gentleman's text, I'll just explain what I think about it, and then you can tell me if I'm incorrect.
If a prior religion did not succeed against Christianity, I would say that that prior religion was probably too consistent in its approach.
Humanity is full of wildly divergent personalities.
Some people are naturally pacifistic.
Some people are naturally violent.
Some people are prone to forgiveness, and I would say, certainly looking at my own past, somewhat over-prone to forgiveness.
Some people are vengeful.
Some parents are dictatorial.
Just do it, damn it, because I say so.
And some parents are more collaborative.
Let's sit down and talk about what we should do.
There's a very wide spectrum of human personalities, of course, and some of it is innate and some of it is based on brutalization.
Most of it is based on brutalization, including the over-tendency towards forgiveness, which comes out of not bonding with your parents and not having anyone to bully as a child.
But this fantastic genius, which is the Bible, is that it contains texts which appeal to every personality type.
This is one advantage that the Bible has over something like Objectivism, or I don't even know what to call what I'm talking about.
Stephanesque?
Molyneuism?
I don't know.
FDResque?
But what we're talking about here, which is where we're trying to hammer out a logically consistent view of morality and reality, does not actually have enough goodies in there for a wide variety of, I would say, dysfunctional personality types.
So, for instance, the Marine who called me out, I guess about a month ago, and who, sadly, I have never heard of again, although I'm sure he's looking up my address on the Internet, This gentleman is prone to a kind of pious violence.
And he can find justifications for that in the Bible.
Because what he will say, unlike our Christian friend on the boards, he will say that where the Bible counsels pacifism and anarchism, you need to take that, not so literally but more figuratively, but the stuff where the Bible and Jesus talks about an eye for an eye, you need to take that literally and not figuratively.
Whereas somebody who is more pacifist will say that you need to take If thine right hand offend thee, cut thy left hand off as well.
He's gonna say, well, that's just a metaphor for don't masturbate or something.
That's just a metaphor for you have to take personal sin very seriously.
I mean, he's just talking figuratively.
He will take the stuff that's more around pacifism and possibly anarchism and say, well that's the stuff that you have to take literally.
Do you see?
It's just a wonderfully complex ecosystem wherein no matter what your personality type, You can find agreement with what it is that you are naturally inclined to believe.
And they've done psychological studies wherein people who have what Freud would call an aggressive superego or a dominant inner voice that criticizes and tears down the personality and you're never good enough and you're never going to get it right and all that kind of stuff.
Those people who are like that, who are religious, tend to have a domineering dictatorial God or drawn towards more of the Old Testament stuff and so on.
And people who are, in a sense, more gentle, i.e.
often in the modern world more broken down and ignored, those people who are gentler have the sort of sweet-eyed Jesus with the hippie beard and the sort of dewy expression and so on.
That's what they're drawn to.
In other words, the Bible is a perfect, perfect, perfect ecosystem wherein you can get reflected back at you particular aspects of your personality magnified to infinity, which is comforting to, I guess, the narcissistic tendencies within human beings, and it's also comforting in that you get to feel that whatever your natural bent is, you are virtuous simply by being that person.
Now, the problem, of course, is that by reflecting you perfectly and enhancing everything that you do to infinite virtue, it does, to some degree, I think, not promote human growth, right?
So, whoever you are, you're great!
As long as you believe in Jesus, you can find whatever it is that you're natural-bent to believe, you can find that in the Bible, and that's what you should focus on, and then you can wave the magic wand called, it's figurative at everything that you don't agree with, and translate it into what it is that you do agree with.
So, for instance, this gentleman who was writing on the boards did sort of write the following text.
So he says, you have heard that it was said by them of old time, this is from Matthew, thou shalt not commit adultery.
But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.
For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.
For it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
And he says, I don't think that this should be interpreted literally.
Rather, I think this is Jesus telling us how severely we should deal with sin as a matter of personal evaluation.
Well, that's fine.
You can certainly say that when Jesus says, if your right eye offends thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee, you can say that that's metaphorical.
Of course.
There's no evidence that it's metaphorical.
Otherwise, Jesus would say, as a parable, or a story is told of, or he would tell it as an allegory.
But he's saying sort of directly.
And so when he says that unbelievers should be killed, I have a tough time sort of figuring out how that's going to be taken sort of figuratively.
They should be killed in your heart.
They should be killed in a video game.
They should be killed...
In a picture?
It's sort of hard to figure out what that means.
Like, what does it mean when somebody says, you and your wife and your friends and most of the members on the FDR board, except for one or two, I think, should be killed because they don't believe?
It's kind of hard for me to figure out in what way that could be taken figuratively.
And I certainly would be interested in hearing it back.
Let me sort of guess what I think might come back.
It would be something like that we're not fully alive because we don't accept the Lord Jesus Christ as our personal Savior.
So we're not fully alive.
So we're kind of figuratively dead.
Our souls are spiritually dead because we haven't accepted Christ and so on.
So he's not saying that we should be killed.
He's saying that, in a sense, we're not fully alive because we've... There's going to be some way of interpreting it that is going to bring comfort to people who are pacifists.
And I think that's not particularly rigorous or intellectually honest.
I think that Christians do need to deal with sort of two facts.
And then I will get to the Christian side of the argument in a minute or two.
Now, the two facts that Christians need to deal with is, number one, that the Bible regularly says that people who don't believe in God and Christ should be murdered.
That is all over the Bible and feel free to come and have a look at it on the board.
I actually have read the Bible cover to cover when I was working as a As a young man, as a young stripling, I worked doing gold panning and claim staking up north, and spent a whole winter in a tent in unbelievably cold weather, by the way.
So I had some time.
I had some time on my hands, and I specifically bought up a Bible so that I could read it and understand what all the fuss was about.
And so I did read it.
I actually read the Old Testament twice, even got through the baguettes, and read the New Testament once, and sort of made some notes and so on.
And so it's not that I don't know the Bible.
I think I do know the Bible fairly well.
I mean, it's been a while since I've read it because I can't take it really.
For me, it's pretty horrifying reading.
But first of all, the Bible and the religious texts do command that unbelievers be killed.
So I want Christians to be honest enough to accept that as a fact.
I mean, if you're going to tell me that your texts are divinely inspired, at least be honest enough to agree with me that they do say that I should be killed, and that my wife should be killed, and that children should be killed, and that slavery is... At least have the intellectual honesty to admit that, because that is in the Bible.
I'm not making that up, and it's not allegorical, and it's not put forward as a metaphor.
So, the first thing that Christians need to do is to accept that.
I mean, that is the basic level of intellectual honesty that needs to be there.
If they say the text is holy and perfect, or even largely perfect, or even the basis of their moral beliefs, then they do have to understand that it says that I should be put to death.
And Christina should be put to death.
And you, probably, should be put to death.
So, I'm going to have some problems with that.
I really, really am.
And we have to deal with that honestly.
You can't pull out the weasel word of allegorical interpretation.
And the reason that you can't pull out the weasel word of allegorical interpretation is that it's happened!
If benevolent religious Christian or Muslim or Jewish leaders had never, ever, ever, ever in the two to five thousand years history of the Old and New Testament, if those religious leaders had never laid one finger, had never laid one sword, one branding iron, one cage, one iron maiden, one torture implement on an unbeliever,
Because they'd all said, no, no, it's allegorical, we're just supposed to reason with him, and if he doesn't want to listen to us, that's fine.
If throughout this two to five thousand year history, unbelievers hadn't died at the hands of religious authorities by the millions, and in the most horrible ways, then I would have a little bit more sympathy to the idea that these texts were allegorical.
But the fact of the matter is that millions of unbelievers have been murdered by religious authorities throughout history.
And millions, well, sorry, not millions yet, over a hundred thousand Iraqis are now being killed by Christians and on the orders of a Christian leader whose God told him to do it.
And he's not reasoning with them.
He's pretty much taking it to heart, right?
And so I do find it tough to understand the argument that these texts should only be taken allegorically when throughout the vast majority of this religion's history they have been not taken allegorically but very very literally and very bloodily literally.
And this occurred after the New Testament was handed down.
And then, of course, you will get the twin responses to this.
And we'll talk about that in a sec.
But that's sort of what I need Christians to understand, if they want to debate with me, which I'm more than happy to do.
First of all, your texts say that I should be killed, and secondly, for the vast majority of Christian history, that's precisely what's happened.
And not just the Spanish Inquisition.
Just look at this early scientist.
Just look at anybody who professed unbelief.
Regularly killed.
Tortured.
Maimed.
Brutalized.
You know, it's not really taken figuratively.
Now, you might not want to do it, and I'm sure that these board members have no intention of killing me, or killing Christina, or anything like that.
But, you're still associating yourself with a belief that says it needs to be done, and for the vast majority of its history, has been done.
This is what has been done.
That's kind of important to me.
Now, it's not being done right now in the West, but that's because of atheists, right?
That's because we've hammered at God and we've hammered at religion and we've hammered at the state and separated them and so on.
This is all the Enlightenment philosophy, the deists, the non-Christians, the non-fundamentalists.
We have whittled back the Church's power through attacking it epistemologically and ethically and metaphysically and politically.
So, to my particular opinion, the lion, in its natural state, is a dangerous predator.
Now, a lion tamer has tamed it, but then you don't say, you see, the beast is gentle.
No, because the lion tamer has tamed it.
And even then, you know, just talk to Siegfried, he can turn on you, right?
Or was it Roy?
One of those two got mauled.
So, the fact that Christianity is not violent now is not because Of the New Testament.
Because the New Testament's been around for 2,000 years.
And Christianity's been non-violent for, like, two, three hundred years.
Because atheists separated the church and the state.
And that's because there were a hundred years of religious wars throughout Europe wherein millions of people were murdered for the cause of religion.
Religious differences.
This wasn't just unbelievers like atheists.
These were unbelievers like... There was this wonderful torture and murder that the Lutherans, I think it was, or the Calvinists did to the Anabaptists.
Now, the Anabaptists are a Christian sect that believe in adult baptism.
And so, they didn't take so much with Original Sin, and you could get baptized as an adult, and so it was all very complicated, and they had their own religious justifications for their belief, and they said that the text which disagrees with me needs to be taken figuratively, this is the literal one, and everyone else said the opposite.
And so the other competing religious sects in Germany and Austria, I believe, had this wonderful torture where they would take the Anabaptists who believed in adult baptism and they would put them on a long sort of lever and they would douse them repeatedly until they drowned, sort of in a lake or in a pond.
Now that is exactly how, in the past, before the rise of secular humanism, or you could say atheism, or you could say whatever, critiques of religion and the beating back of religious power from the state, and the beating back of religious justifications, and the plurality of beliefs, at least, that took away the one sort of crazy absolutes, in my view, of religion, and I'll deal with communism in a second.
But this is an example of what was going on for about a hundred years before Europe, in order to survive the constant waves of religious genocide washing back and forth like a big bloody foam, had to separate the church and the state.
I mean, it was mere survival.
And so when the brutal power of religion is diminished, then religion becomes more peaceful.
Well, sure, of course.
You know, I mean, if I wrestle the gun from my mugger, then of course the mugger is going to be more peaceful and say, hey, I'm not attacking you now.
It's like, well, yes, that's because you don't have the gun anymore.
Because I took it from you.
So don't tell me that you've become peaceful.
The tide has turned.
And the tide is turning back.
So, the fact that religion in the West, Christianity, is more peaceful now than in the past is simply because it doesn't have the power.
And you can ask Iraqis exactly how peaceful Christianity is when Christianity does have the gun and does have the chance to wage war.
So, there's pretty real, I think, criticisms that need to be addressed, that are not sort of made up.
Now, the second objection that you get, which, the first objection you get to the idea of Christian violence is to say, well, those Christians who perpetrate violence are not real Christians.
Well, I mean, that's just kind of specious, right?
I mean, if they take their justification from biblical texts, which contradict your interpretation of biblical texts, then they're perfect Christians.
Either that, or you're not a perfect Christian.
Like, the degree to which you take Instruction from Christian texts or from religious texts is the degree to which you are a member of that religion.
So if every single one of your moral decisions is based upon a biblical text, then by golly, you are a Christian.
You are a member and a practicing member and a devout member of that religion.
And if you've picked the ones that are more in congordance with your natural emotional apparatus, like if you're a crazy, evil, violent lunatic, then you pick the sort of crazy, evil, violent parts of the Christian text, you're still perfectly part of that religion, because everything you do is based upon divinely inspired and perfect religious texts.
Or even if it's not divinely inspired, it's taken from the text, for sure.
So if that person is not a Christian, because they are cherry-picking then it's hard for me to understand how somebody who cherry-picks differently is any more or less of a Christian.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem to me to make sense.
Now, of course, logically that means there are no Christians, because the Christian Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, is full of so many moral contradictions and dead ends and blind alleys of logic that nobody can practice it.
Well, of course.
I mean, absolutely.
So there is no such thing as a perfect Christian, unless you could find somebody who's simultaneously doing everything in complete opposition to itself at the same time.
But it's hard for me to understand how one Christian says to another Christian, Well, you're taking the wrong Bible text, so you're a bad Christian.
I'm taking the right Bible text, so I'm a good Christian.
I just can't quite see how that logically makes sense.
If it's in the text, and you are accepting it, and you're acting on it, then it's hard to see how you're a bad Christian.
Or any worse than somebody who takes the opposite text.
I mean, everybody who's a Christian has to cherry-pick, because the Bible is contradictory.
So one cherry-picking over another cherry-picking, That doesn't make any sense to me.
And of course, if somebody says that these sections of the Bible are more valid than these sections of the Bible, then it's hard to understand how they could make that argument sort of compellingly and logically without saying that there is some standard of value superior to an outside of the Bible.
I mean, the Bible says thou shalt not kill and also thou shalt kill, right?
Sort of non-Christians or people who don't believe what you believe.
And so, if you say that the thou shalt not kill is the valid text, and the thou shalt kill is the non-valid text, then obviously you're appealing to something outside the Bible to make that decision.
I mean, that's just pure logic, right?
Since both are divinely inspired and absolute commandments, it's hard to say logically which one should be more right.
And so, if you're saying this one is right and this one is wrong, not just a little more right, but totally right and totally wrong, then you're obviously appealing to some sort of standard of ethics or behavior that is external to the commandments within the Bible.
Otherwise, you'd have no way of determining which one was right and wrong.
And so, if there is some standard of morality that is external to the Bible, then just take that standard of morality and work with that.
I mean, since it's superior to the Bible anyway, what are you bothering with the Bible for?
It doesn't really make any sense, right?
So, I just, that's sort of the one thing that you get.
I'm a good Christian, he's a bad Christian.
And people use religion to justify violence, but no, religion, religion, religion itself justifies violence continually and perpetually within the text.
So, you know, that, unless I'm missing something that's, you know, unless there's some sort of index of the Bible that happened to fall out of the one I was reading that says these texts are good and these texts are bad, signed God, then I have trouble understanding how it's not just emotional projection to say that these texts are good and these texts are bad.
Now, the other thing that you hear, of course, and this is a standard rebuttal, and I've heard it, I don't know, well, let's just say, a near infinity of times, is to say, well, sure, religious authorities have done really bad things in the past, and that's wrong, and that's bad, and these people weren't real Christians, but you know what?
Atheistic authorities have done really bad things, I mean, communism, absolutely, of course, absolutely, of course, completely and totally.
But two wrongs don't make a right.
Even if we accept that these communist, crazy, evil dictators were atheistic.
Which, of course they were.
I mean, they were atheistic.
If we accept all of that, I still don't understand how that makes religion any more right.
Just doesn't sort of make any sense to me.
I mean, if I go and kill someone, and then say, well, yes, but that guy killed someone too, I don't see how that makes my crime any better.
I just don't really see that at all.
I think the idea that they're trying to get across, this response to the issue of atheistic authority, I think what they're trying to get across is, you know, hey, nobody's perfect.
Nobody's perfect.
To me, what is not too logical about that is that what an atheist, and atheism is one of these tricky terms, of course, I mean, I don't really label myself an atheist at all, because atheism simply means against God.
I mean, that's not a philosophy, right?
To be, I mean, a leprechaunism, to be against leprechauns is not a philosophy that tells you anything about the person other than that they don't believe in God.
And they might not believe in God for any number of reasons, none of which are rational.
To take an extreme example, they might have been pillaged by a priest as a child, as an altar boy, and then they say, well, where was God?
I don't believe in God because God didn't save me.
That's not exactly a rational philosophy.
That's just an emotional reaction, which is fully understandable, but not exactly syllogistically exquisite.
And so that may be a reason why somebody's an atheist.
Somebody also may be an atheist because their father was a priest and beat them.
Somebody also may be an atheist because their child died of leukemia and they're angry and they just rail against.
Somebody may be an atheist because they don't like the competition, which is sort of the idea behind the communist dictatorships.
So being an atheist doesn't mean anything other than you don't believe in one particular form of irrationality.
It doesn't mean that you don't believe in 50 million other forms of complete crazy irrationality.
So I fully understand that atheistic organizations such as the communist parties and so on have done unbelievable murders.
Certainly in the 20th century you would look at the atheists as the primary genocide merchants rather than the Christians.
I mean even though Hitler was a Christian, He killed, I guess what started wars, he killed a total of 40 million people, but 70 million people were killed in the Russian system, which was atheistic in nature, the communist system.
So, you know, I think that the atheists win hands down in terms of evil, murderous genocides in the 20th century, but I still don't see how that justifies either system.
I don't think that the system that kills one less human being is virtuous.
So I don't see the fact that atheists killed more people than Christians as justifying either atheism as a moral structure, which it's not, or Christianity as a moral structure, which it's not.
So those are the objections which came from the board posting, and also which I've had with other Christians.
Now, none of these, of course, are at all predicated on... all of this is predicated on there is a God and whatever, right?
So, I mean, we've already had the discussions beforehand about whether there is a God or not, but even within the framework of this religious belief, it's nothing but contradictions, right?
When the premises are false or contradictory, it goes all the way through the belief system.
So this afternoon we'll talk a little bit about hell and how the Christians justify this kind of punishment, which I think is also very interesting and is a great challenge, of course, to a pacifist Christian.
I mean, the idea that you get thrown into an eternal lake of burning fire because you don't go to church or don't accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior is obviously tricky for somebody who's a pacifist, because they probably wouldn't be so keen on the government having those kinds of power of, like, eternal torture.
They probably didn't like the whole Abu Ghraib thing.
And so they probably have a little trouble with this, and we'll talk about how they justify it and the issues that I see with that this afternoon.
Oh, but before we do, am I inside your brain now?
I'm deeper inside your brain, right?
Yes, because I'm not in the car recording in my office.
So, I'm just going to push this little lever which says, go to freedomainradio.com and give Steph some money.
Actually, I just wanted to give you a quick update on the status of the donations.
Thank you, of course, to the 20-odd people who have kicked some cash my way.
I really appreciate it.
I had donations ranging from $10 to $200.
I certainly appreciate those.
sort of two dozen people who gave me some cash.
I really appreciate that.
I think that one of the things that I've noticed, and I think it's interesting, I think it's true, is that when the donations were coming in, and they haven't come in for the last couple of days, I haven't received anything for the last three or four days.
When the donations were coming in, I think that it's interesting that the quality of the podcast went up.
I'm just sort of looking upon that in hindsight, which is interesting.
Maybe motivation is one of these things you can't control either, but is response to the actions of others like love or forgiveness and so on.
But I did get a lot of praise for podcast 182 and 183 in particular, which came after a week's donations from people, which I think was very nice and really did help me feel that there was a lot of value in what I was doing, that people really appreciated it and so on.
So I think it's interesting.
I mean, this is sort of one of the things I'll put out there.
It's a possible selfish motivation for you to kick some cash my way, which is that you, conceivably, will get far better podcasts, far more useful podcasts, far more kind of breakthrough podcasts for you if I am motivated.
I guess I could say, I mean, I'm always trying to do my best in the podcast.
But I did notice that the podcast quality went up considerably when I was getting paid, which has a kind of cause and effect that I think sort of makes sense.
So thanks to those 20 odd people who have given me some money, we are getting between 1,500 and 3,500 downloads of the shows every day.
So, if you're listening to this and you haven't kicked in some cash, I would certainly invite you to do so, and I would certainly appreciate it if you do so.
I certainly think that you will get better shows out of it in ways that I can't entirely control, because motivation is one of these things that is a little bit below the radar as far as the conscious mind goes.
So I would invite you, if you would like to, I would appreciate it, come to www.freedomainradio.com, click on the donate button.
You don't have to be a PayPal member and I pay all the fees for transferring, so you don't even get charged for it.
And I would really appreciate that.
Do what you can to support the cause.
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