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April 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:06
189 An Invitation to Christians Part 1: Saving Your Soul

OK, so God exists - how should we best worship him?

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. It is 8.38 in the morning on the 13th of April, 2006.
And I'm going to have a chat to those Christians who have made it through this far.
Congratulations to you.
I appreciate and hugely respect the intellectual challenge of listening through to these podcasts, and I can't tell you how impressed I am that you have made it this far.
And I am going to do my last bit of reasoning, or storytelling and reasoning, Which is designed to free you from what I think is a pretty grievous error and what I think is not good for your soul.
And so I am going to take on the issue of Jesus and his relationship to you and I'm going to take it on fully accepting the existence of a deity.
So here we put on the acceptance of God just so you understand that I can work within the paradigm and also so that I can try appealing to your sense of spirituality and see how that might be used or how we might use your sense of spirituality to free you from what I consider to be a pretty grave error.
So I would like to talk about the issue of...
We're not going to talk about the evils of the Old Testament or the New Testament.
We're simply going to talk about Jesus in particular and how I think we might be able to try and come to some sort of resolution that might help free you to pursue your spirituality in a way that is uncluttered by other people's storytelling.
The major issue that I have with the Bible is not that it makes people pray.
It's not that it makes people believe in God.
It's not that it contains grave evils.
It's not any of those things.
The major, major, major problem that I have with the Bible and the Koran and all of the holy texts in the world is that It is anti-individuality.
And I'm going to use the word soul here as I generally do to mean the totality of consciousness and feelings and emotions and instincts and reasons and memories and dreams and all of that.
And the major problem that I have with organized religion is that, obviously, there's political difficulties and all that, and there's moral difficulties and all that.
But the major problem that I have with it, the thing that I think causes all of those other problems in the real world, is the wholesale destruction and undermining of individuality.
Of individuality.
I think that is a really...
It's the worst crime, in a way, for me.
Because there is a certain amount of life that is specifically individual.
I mean, the moral aspects of life are relatively unimportant.
Insofar as I am never going to walk past a drowning man who needs my help.
At least I'd lay good money that that's never going to happen.
And I am never going to steal.
I am never going to kill.
I am never going to rape. These things, as far as universal morality goes, I am never going to have to deal with.
And so, because I don't recognize the existence of positive obligations in the field of morality, morality is simply leaving people alone.
And I don't view that as...
A very significant, or even a minorly significant, part of my life at all.
So morality is a small topic that is only enlarged by the amount of false morality that is in the world.
So morality is, in a free society, a tiny and insignificant topic.
And so the reason that I have so many problems with Religion, organized religion, far more than I do with something like spirituality.
Now, spirituality... It's a complex term, which I'm not going to try and define all the way here, but I'm going to say that for the moment I'm going to accept the definition of spirituality as the belief that we have been created by a higher power and so on.
That's fine.
I'm willing to accept that for the purpose of this podcast, because I think that it's going to at least give you a sense of why My hostility towards religion is not due to purely historical or hagiographical or purely rational or moral terms, because it's not. And of course, I haven't been clear about that at all, but I thought it would be worth being clear about it so that people can understand my problem with it.
Well, not that you care about my problem with it, but I can talk about a problem which might be helpful to others.
So the vast majority of life is concerned with what some psychologists, and Jung in particular, has called individuation.
Now, individuation is a complex topic, I'll just touch on it here, but basically individuation is becoming who you are, or being who you are, In your original state, in the states that you were before society got its curly and hooked, nailed hands or claws on you and began to shape you into what society wanted.
And by that I can be even more specific and less abstract and talk about how your parents and your siblings and your extended family and your school and your priest Moulded you into a beast of burden to service their needs.
Who were you before that?
Who were you before all of that enormous amount of pressure?
Whether it was manipulative through withdrawal or emotional punishment or physically violent or emotionally abusive like being told about hell and so on.
Who were you in your original state?
Because who you were has very little to do with morality.
Morality is generally what we talk about to try and restrain those who have been broken from spilling over into violence.
And so in a free society, morality is going to be almost a non-existent topic because it just won't be an issue.
We'll talk about morality about as much as we talk about the genealogy of Zeus.
There will be a few people who study it because it's interesting, but the majority of people won't even give it a second thought because it won't be a presence in their life or a problem in their life.
And so, the idea of individuation is the idea that you have an original soul, an original soul, an original nature, an original personality that you are born with, that people attempt to break and squeeze and compress and twist and tear and shape into something that is of service to them.
So parents who look at children as inconvenience or parents who look at children, get impatient because the children just don't obey, are destroying or at least undermining, twisting the original self, the soul, into something that is going to be more convenient to them.
So you can look at some pretty stereotypical examples and I think get some useful stuff out of it.
So if you have the prototypical, and I mean I can't tell you, the level of cliche is almost ridiculous, but let's do it anyway.
You have the prototypical sports dad who has the prototypical sensitive poetic son.
Who will not accept that son for who he is and attempts, like, with every curl of the lip and every scornful glance and with every contemptuous sneer, completely communicates to this child that the soul that that child possesses, which the child is not in control of generating.
I mean, it's like saying how tall you're going to be is under your control.
Well, to a small degree it is.
Like, are you going to eat? Kind of thing.
But one's personality is not really under one's control.
It is something that is imprinted.
Now, personality is not anything to do with morality, so I'm not talking about evil people have no control over themselves, but...
Personality we do not have control over.
Who we are we do not have control over.
All we can do is suppress it or not.
We can't change our natures.
I could not change into some guy who liked watching, I don't know, Aussie Rules Rugga for six hours on a Sunday and never picked up a book.
I mean, I couldn't change into that kind of person.
I could pretend to be that kind of person, but it would be a living, crawling agony to live through that kind of life because it would not be in concordance with my nature.
Which is to watch, of course, only three hours of Aussie Rules, Raga, on a Sunday.
Four... Oh, it would be abhorrent.
I can't even tell you. So, your nature is something you can't control.
You really, really can't.
All you can do is you can say that I am going to suppress my nature, and the way that you suppress your nature, or you're forced to suppress your nature, is always with the argument for morality.
So... If you take the sports dad, what he is communicating to his son is that his son is not a real man and that a real man is better and that he's a fairy or he's a queer or he's effeminate or he's bad or wrong in some manner.
And don't underestimate the level of impatience that these kinds of narcissistic and broken people have With the natural flowering and development of the human personality in its unviolated state, in its uncoerced and unmanipulated state.
I mean, in a sense, most, if not all, I say all, almost all modern parents and certainly educators are Sort of evil sculptors where the idea of the sculpture is that you take the block of wood, as somebody famously said to Socrates when he said, how can you create such a beautiful lion?
He says, well, I take a block of wood and all I do is chip away anything that doesn't look like a lion.
But this is a different kind of sculpture because this is more like you are taking a beautiful lion and chipping it away until all that is left is a fine dust that you can just do whatever you want with.
Or it's like you're taking a tree that's beautiful and strong and you're cutting it up into little bits of sawdust so that you can use it in your butcher shop.
Ooh, there's a metaphor that works on more than one level.
Ooh, isn't that nice? You're born with an original personality, which is the source of your joy.
Joy is living with integrity to morality, of course, but we only need to talk about that because of the degree of evil sculpting that has gone on with our own personalities.
Joy is living in accordance with and in the trajectory of your natural true self, your original self.
And we know that there is an original self.
We absolutely know that because children have distinct personalities from day one, and I know this very well from...
Working in a daycare for a couple of years with some pretty young kids and also I grew up with nieces and so on.
So I mean I know that children have very distinct personalities from day one and also because when you force people to not be who they are, they remain unhappy specifically and exactly for the duration that they are not who they are.
So, we know that, for instance, somebody gave me a metaphor on the board, which I appreciate because it lets me not talk about the poor Chinese women who had their feet bound, but there is this tribe that causes necks to be elongated by stacking hoops from the shoulders to the neck, and they end up with these ridiculously elongated necks.
And we know that there's an original neck that is in pain because, of course, two things occur.
One is that they're in enormous, incredible, unbelievable pain while their entire cartilage and spinal structure is being stretched to create these new necks.
That's sort of number one.
And number two, and this is a metaphor that works beautifully with regards to religion, so thanks again for the poster.
The second effect is that they can no longer exist without these hoops supporting their heads because their necks no longer have the ability to support their heads in the absence of those props.
So they become entirely dependent upon these hoops to maintain their neck structure.
And we know that because if those hoops are taken away, they feel great pain, their heads flop over to one side, they have to sort of hold their own heads up like a sort of headless horseman.
And so... We know that there's a neck that has been deviated from because there's enormous pain in elongating it, and we know that the purpose of a neck is to be functional and hold the head up and swivel it around and so on, and receive hickeys, if I remember rightly.
And this is not what is occurring with the existing neck, so we know that there's been a strong deviation from the natural neck.
Now, there is no possibility of returning to the original neck.
Anymore. For these people.
Anymore than there is the possibility of uncurling the feet for the Chinese bound women.
I knew I had to get it in at least once.
I'm in a metaphorical transition phase.
It's going to take a little bit to let the old one go and take on the new one.
However, the original self always remains.
The true self always remains.
Because you can redirect that energy, but you simply can't Eliminate the true self.
It is neurological in nature.
It's the configuration of your brain.
It's how your neurons are fitted together.
And you can diverse and you can bypass, but you cannot restructure your entire mind.
So, that true self is there, and the true self is, and I'm going to use this term narrative slightly loosely, so don't worry about it if it freaks you out.
I mean, I know, I sort of have a good idea of what I'm talking about, but I don't want to go on too many explanatory tangents, because I want to get to the topic, believe it or not.
The true self is also what generates and substantiates and fleshes out the narrative that is your life.
Like your life's purpose.
People always say, well, what is the purpose of life?
Well, the purpose of life is what is revealed to you by your true self.
The purpose of life is what is revealed to you by your natural soul.
The purpose of your life.
I mean, it's obvious to me what the purpose of my life is and that's what came out of my true soul and I did not have a purpose to my life and I did not have any particular power in my life or any satisfaction or joy in my life when I was rejecting my true self for the sake of conforming with others.
Now, God gave you this soul.
God gave you this self.
It is innate to your very biological and spiritual structure.
And God gave you this soul so that you could achieve what it is that you're supposed to achieve.
And I don't know if that's, you know, in this sort of, if we're using the religious approach or the spiritual approach, I don't know if that's because God has a big plan for you, or whether God's plan for everyone is that they enjoy themselves, but God likes the variety of having different selves, and also the enjoyment that people get is partly out of interacting with people who have different selves, different true souls.
Now, since the true self exists, cannot be extinguished, cannot be altered, can only be repressed, and is the author of the narrative that is your life, and is the theme of the narrative that is your life, and is the moral of the narrative that is your life, if you take on somebody else's narrative, you always do that at the expense of your soul.
You always do that at the expense of your spiritual joy.
You are not broken.
You do not have original sin.
It would be unbelievably unjust to inherit the sin of another human being.
And God is just, according to the spiritual approach.
God is just. And so if you're told all of these things that cannot be just, as I talked about last night, it cannot be coming from a just and good God.
It must be coming from somewhere else.
Now, God gives you a soul with particular preferences, with particular configurations, with particular goals, with particular ideas, with a kind of narrative.
And you can accept that or you can reject it.
It doesn't mean that you're a slave to anything.
I mean, if you have a body that is sort of lean and quick and you like playing tennis, are you a slave?
Then if you end up playing tennis, of course not.
You can decide that playing tennis is evil and not play tennis.
And you're unhappy.
You're perfectly free to do whatever you want, but you have particular configurations and preferences and abilities that are innate to you.
And even those are the mere tip of the iceberg.
They are like one snowflake on the top of an enormous iceberg when it comes to your entire abilities and your entire preferences and the depths of your natural soul, which can do enormously powerful and wonderful and surprising and amazing things, if you let it.
Because we do have the ability to reject our true self.
That is the free will that we have.
We have the ability. And the most fundamental way that we reject our true self and thus disown our power and create misery, alienation, and emptiness within our life, the main reason, the main way, the main circumstance under which that happens is that we accept somebody else's narrative.
As the organizing principle of our life.
We accept somebody else's narrative as better than our own natural self, as more ourselves than we are.
That, to me, is the major problem that I have with religion, With patriotism, with racism, with all of the things that we are fighting, tooth, nail, and syllogism, and have been for the past couple of months.
Your true self is yours, and taking on somebody else's story about how you should live kills your soul.
It destroys that which is God-given, innate, and beautiful and joyful within you.
And any narrative that you take on that is not your own, that is not thought through by yourself, that is not reasoned by yourself.
And we apply a lot of reason to the thou shalt nots.
And they're incredibly irrelevant in a free society.
And we want to get to the free society so it's worth spending time on them now.
But who you should be? How you should spend the sum of your days?
What are your priorities?
What are your abilities?
What brings you joy? All of that you learn by exploring your true self.
Now, the moment that you accept a narrative that is absolute, universal, and completely moral, The argument for morality, which is the core of the true self, which is consistency and objectivity.
It's there to help us survive.
It's not there to make us run off cliffs into the arms of angels.
The argument for morality then takes over and the true self, like watching a baseball player club himself into unconsciousness with his own baseball bat, the true self takes the argument for morality that is injected with a false narrative, with somebody else's narrative.
Even if it's not false for somebody else, it definitely is false for you because it's not generated spontaneously from your own nature.
If the argument for morality is used, then the true self automatically will use the argument for morality.
That's just inevitable. The true self will then take that false narrative from somebody else and immediately suppress itself, which is a desperately sad, hollow, empty, and terrible thing.
And that is the major problem that I have with it.
This narrative of Christ or of Mohammed or of the ancient rabbinical excellencies, I don't know what it's called in Judaism, they're not your stories.
They're not your stories.
They're not your true self.
They're not your soul. They're not what God gave you a unique self before.
God did not give every human being a unique self in order to have that person becoming out like a cookie cutter stamp of Jesus every time.
That's not the purpose of why God gave us different selves.
God gave us different selves so that we could be happy being uniquely who we are.
That's why God created more than one person.
Because if he just wanted everybody to be like Jesus, he would have just created Jesus and that's it.
But he didn't. He creates lots of people, every one of us who has different souls, different aspirations, different goals, different ideas.
And it's not the purpose of happiness or of spiritual fulfillment or of joy or of worship of a deity that created you.
It is not the fulfillment of that to take somebody else's narrative and jam it over your own soul and suppress and compress your own soul into simply doing what somebody else tells you the narrative that is correct to do.
What a spaghetti sentence that was.
Sorry. It's not right to do what other people tell you to do.
It's not the purpose of your soul.
It's not the purpose of your spiritual nature to do what somebody else tells you to do.
Your narrative is your own.
And you should not inflict...
Like when I talked about Christianity or religious instruction being child abuse, this is what I was talking about.
That you do not immediately and ghastly inflict...
A narrative on a child that completely overpowers and swamps his own capacity to be himself.
He will spend the rest of his life now, like the women with the enormous necks, empty and broken and undermined and now completely dependent upon the supporting structures of the initial narrative.
Because It certainly is clear that the narrative of Jesus is a narrative.
There is no possibility whatsoever that the narrative of Jesus is historical fact.
I mean, unless you really are right on the edges of fundamentalist belief, there is simply no possibility that everything that occurs in the Bible that is related to Jesus is an absolute historical fact.
Partly because even at the most basic level it contradicts itself.
So, if I say that Queen Elizabeth was born in 1522 and Queen Elizabeth was born in 1524, then I don't think that it's possible that my historical narrative can be considered perfectly accurate.
I at least have to resolve those issues.
And I'll talk a little bit more about other issues in Jesus' life that are not just illogical or counterfactual, but also...
Not moral, at the basic level, then what I want to do is to free you from what I consider to be a pretty evil narrative, a pretty satanic narrative, that if there was a God and a devil, this narrative which forces everyone to be the same in a manner which can never be consistent, can never be achieved, and is of questionable morality to begin with, but that everybody has to be that way, well surely that's what the devil does to undo the work of God.
Surely that is the devil's approach To undoing the beauty of the individual soul is to force it into this restrictive, contradictory little cookie cutter and take like 1% of a human soul and say that this is exactly how you have to be and anything that you do that's different is wrong.
And I'm not talking again about helping the poor and things like that.
That's perfectly fine. If that's in your nature to do, that's what you should do.
And that's perfectly wonderful.
Other people create jobs.
Other people do other things. But if you want to do that, that's perfectly wonderful.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about obedience to a narrative which is not natural, which is not derived from your own nature or validated by your own reason.
God gave you your personality.
God gave you your reason.
God gave you your capacity to think and to be yourself.
And if you reject God's gifts and end up in this cookie-cutter world of devilish conformity to a false contradictory and immoral ideal, you are undoing God's work.
You are not doing what God wants you to do, which is to not want...
Sorry. Oh, that was so close to being a home run.
You are not doing what God wants you to do.
And what God wants you to do is to be true to yourself.
Because yourself is what God gave you.
Why would God give you this gift of a true self and of an original soul and of an individual nature never to be replicated in creation by anybody else?
Why would God give you that incredible gift of a true self and then say, I want you to act like somebody else's narrative about some guy that people claim had something to do with me?
That would be not rational.
And obviously we don't want to worship a God that's not rational, because that would be worshipping the devil, and God gives you reason and so on.
But the whole idea behind individuation is that God gave you this perfect, unique, wonderful, beautiful soul, and you should not squeeze it into the tiny little box of somebody else's narrative.
That you should be fully yourself, and that you should fully flower into your own individuality.
And you should fully grow into who you are, and who God gave you the seeds to grow into, and who God gave you the nature to be.
Not to take some fantastical, contradictory, strange, bizarre, amoral at best narrative That has come down through tale-telling and mistranslations over thousands of years.
The existence of the original man can never be determined, and there's some significant questions around it.
Even if he did exist, we really can't tell anything about him based on any narratives that have come down.
And that God gives you rationality and a stable universe.
God created a universe that is stable.
There are no miracles. Thank God, so to speak.
God gave us a universe that is stable.
He gave us senses that are accurate.
He gave us rationality to interpret it.
This idea that we're going to believe that the stable universe that God created, that obviously he wanted to create, He didn't create highly variable gravity and trees that pop in and out of existence and elephants that turn into birds and back again and giraffes that can fly.
He didn't create any of those sorts of things.
He didn't give human beings psychic powers.
He didn't give us any evidence of ghosts and goblins and he didn't create leprechauns and everything that is in the universe that is created by God is fully stable and fully rational.
So God wants you to exercise your reason, and he wants you to understand the evidence of your senses.
He wouldn't have created it that way otherwise.
Now, everything that's in the Bible and everything to do with Jesus contradicts all of that, contradicts all of the nature of reality that God has created, contradicts rationality.
I mean, people don't walk on water.
People don't create entire banquets out of one set of loaves and fishes.
People don't come back from the dead.
These are not tests of faith.
These are tests of credulity.
And I think that people are failing them.
And they're tests of spirituality.
God created a stable, rational universe and created stable, rational senses and gives us a stable, rational mind.
And we throw it away in pursuit of ridiculous and contradictory narratives that have nothing to do with what God has given us in our life, which is stability and rationality.
God doesn't let people walk on water.
Right? God doesn't let people come back from the dead.
That's not how reality was set up by the good old fella.
And so the idea that to worship God we should believe that all of God's rules around physics and reality and rationality should be violated, could be violated, and that it's moral to violate them is absolutely against what God has given us.
Absolutely anti-God.
And there's lots of examples.
I'll touch on some more of them this afternoon, but I think it's so important to understand that.
When you receive a narrative, a spiritual narrative that is in direct contradiction to both your abilities, to the nature of reality, to the effects of your senses, that is not something that is there to help you be yourself.
That is not something that is there to praise or worship the divine creator of the universe, because everything to do with things like Jesus completely violates every single rule that God has created for the known universe.
So how could that be considered in any way, shape, or form worship?
If my father says to me, when I am 14 years old, your curfew, young man, is 10 p.m., and I come home at midnight, and he says, what are you doing?
And I say, I am praising and respecting your wishes.
I am praising and respecting your rules.
I am praising and respecting you.
Then my father can legitimately say, Hawa?
What are you talking about?
I told you to come in by ten, and you come in at midnight.
How on earth is that, worshipping me and respecting my rules?
Well, I say some guy told me that the way to worship and respect your rules is to do the opposite.
It's like, I don't care what that guy told you.
The rules are pretty clear.
10pm, get home.
Midnight, I don't care if someone tells you that that's the way they interpret obeying my rules.
So the rules of reality, the rules of physics are pretty clear.
The rules of morality are pretty clear.
And so if somebody else tells you that the best way to worship God who created a stable universe is to believe in a completely contradictory universe where matter has no particular properties and can be changed at will, well, that's not really the way to worship the divine creator of a stable universe.
That, in fact, is rejecting everything that the divine creator has created.
And if somebody, if the divine creator creates rules which the argument for morality simply support, which is something like, don't do unto others as you would have them, don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, whatever, then believing a narrative which tells you to do the exact opposite, to kill unbelievers, to strike down the money changers, to get angry at stone women to death, any narrative which tells you to do the complete opposite is not worshipping God.
Like your father says, don't steal.
Right? And you come home with something you've shoplifted and he says, well, I said don't steal.
And you say, well, no.
See, somebody else told me, somebody else told me that stealing was really good and that you'd like it.
It's like, no, but that's not what I told you.
Right? So the idea that there's a Bible and the idea that there's a Jesus or something that somebody else is telling you this is how to worship God and it's completely inconsistent with your experience of God's reality and simple moral rules that make perfect sense and that when practiced make people happy, well, it would seem to me that that's not worshiping God, taking on somebody else's narrative.
Swallowing somebody else's stories, all of which directly contradict your sensual experience of God's universe, is not the way to worship God.
It's not the way to be spiritual.
It's not the way, even if you do want to believe in a God, it's certainly not the way to worship anything that God created.
And most importantly, it completely undermines and destroys, not permanently, but every moment you do it, you continue to destroy it.
It destroys your true self, which is your God-given birthright and something that you should treasure and nurture because it is the source of all joy and creativity and happiness and love.
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