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April 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:30
191 An Invitation to Christians Part 3: The Economics of Faith
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Good afternoon. It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. Look at that.
It's been almost 12 minutes since we last talked.
It's 20 to 6.
I stayed a little over time right before my long weekend, so don't know how much podcasting I'll get done this weekend.
It really depends on how much money you send me.
Just kidding. We had to actually...
I got an email today from my internet hosting provider.
Who informed me, and I guess not too regretfully, that my bandwidth had been exceeded for the month, I guess the billing period, 16th of March until today, which, and I'd already gone 5 gigs over, and they were going to charge me $6 per gig over, and so I just thought, well, this is a double plus ungood.
And it was 250 gigabytes that I had gone in the billing period, which translates to about, gosh, I don't know, 35,000 shows over the past 26 or 27 days.
And given that I split my bandwidth between...
Mississauga Therapy and this one, it's quite a lot of shows.
And that is cool, I guess.
Welcome to all the new listeners.
Glad you're aboard. And I just wanted to point out as well that I bought a Google AdSense program.
And this is the money that's being donated.
Not only is it going to find massages for yours truly, you know, to keep me limber, relaxed, and to keep my voice in good health, but also I'm spending it on increased bandwidth.
I now have more server storage space because these podcasts are now growing over two gigs.
And also buying the AdSense program.
So if you bought the word libertarian, I think, and economics.
And I can't remember one other.
Objectivism I bought. And so when people then go to Google, they'll search it.
If you do it just for your own funsies, please don't click on the link because I have to pay money for each time somebody clicks through.
So we shall see how well that works out.
I'm not going to pay a huge amount for it, but I'm curious to see what kind of traffic it drives to the site.
Right now, of course, it's an economically massively losing proposition because I have to pay for the click-throughs, and it's not like the click-throughs are going to generate me any revenue as yet, unless I start going into the whole advertising thing.
But the click-throughs are not going to generate me any particular revenue as yet.
And so it's going to actually cost me, right?
So I'm going to pay for people to come to the site and then pay for them to download and so on, at least if they go over.
I now have 500 gigabytes a month plus more from the Mississauga Therapy.
I've got to think that should tide us over for a little while, although I must say that this recent series on Christianity...
Is rather popular, I guess, particularly with our friends down in the south of us in America, because it's just a little bit of religious fever running through American history, as there always has been.
I mean, as you may or may not know.
Sweden, there are only 10% of people in Sweden who believe in the kind of religion or the kind of religious fundamentalism or the religious approaches that 80-90% of Americans believe.
America is off the charts in terms of two things in its social consciousness.
One is extreme religiosity.
To me, of course, all religiosity is extreme, but America is extreme even in that level of extremity.
And the other, of course, is social fear, which we'll talk about another time.
So, I hope that from the atheist perspective, like I've taken a number of runs at this, of course, and I probably will take a number of runs more at it, but when you start to put together the illogic with the evil commandments within the Bible,
With the lack of historical veracity in any of the texts that have been handed down, with the blatant political and economic self-interest of those who wish to create these kinds of texts.
And they obviously were created and not exactly handed down word for word from...
Eyewitnesses. There's no photocopying in the ancient world.
And, of course, we know that even the current state of things can be pretty heavily cast into doubt, right?
So you have something as simple as, I mean, look at 9-11, right?
And I'm not going to get into the truth or the falsehood of it.
I'm just going to talk about what was reported and what was believed.
If you look at something like 9-11, you see that everybody knows that most of the hijackers...
We're Saudis, of course.
This is what everybody knows in terms of the news reports.
I'm not going to go whether that's true or not.
It's a debate which we're having separately.
But everyone, particularly, let's just say in the United States, they see all these Saudis and so on.
And... I think as of 2003, over 50% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the 9-11 attacks, and that's why we were invading Iraq.
Now, that's just fantastic.
I mean, really, when you think about it, this is a span of two years with an enormous amount of...
Infrastructure for the communication of information.
And even if we say, well, the media outlets are dependent on this and that and they're bad people and they're serving state power and so on, that's fine.
I believe you. I mean, let's talk about that another time.
I have no issue with that statement.
But if you just look at the fact that the Internet is available and it takes you, like, you go to 9-11 sites and you get the facts as they're presented there and you can look up any of this stuff very, very easily.
It's very easy to look up.
It's not hard to find, not hard to get to.
The internet has removed from everyone any excuse to be uninformed about contradictory or non-mainstream viewpoints.
You've got to say, it's right out there.
And you can't get any easier than the internet in terms of getting information.
So, if you look at this incredible age of information, it's a mouse click away, it's all free to get at, and still you have 50% of people believing complete nonsense, because you have a media which was much more free than it was in the Roman times, of course, and much more prevalent than it was in the Dark Ages.
So, if you look at something like this, where even mild propaganda just completely skews people's view of reality...
And, of course, the number of people who have any credible understanding of alternate theories to 9-11 are enormously few.
I mean, it wouldn't be such news if Charlie Sheen was not one of the few people to speak out about alternate theories.
It wouldn't be news, right?
And so, if you look at people's credulity and the ability of propaganda to skew public opinion, when you just look at the span of two years, when people have information available to them from every angle, easily available to them, well, I think you sort of understand where I'm coming from in terms of biblical accuracy when you start to talk about a couple of hundred years during the fall of the Roman Empire and into the Dark Ages.
And you also talk about an enormous sum of money.
Whoever claims monopoly over the Gospels I mean, these people are fabulously wealthy.
I mean, even now.
I mean, relative to the average peasant in the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, the average priest was just doing enormously well.
So whoever controls gospel controls the economy.
I mean, the gospel was the internet boom of the Dark Ages.
Controlling the gospel was controlling the wealth of nations.
And so... There are certain economic factors, I think, at work here.
Like, if you want to sort of understand how did this come about and how did it take the shape that it did, I think there are certain economic factors around this.
So, for instance, I mean...
If you are looking at...
I think I've mentioned this before, so I'll keep it brief, but just to our new listeners for this particular series, it's worth mentioning again, I think.
So, if you have a religion, and like I'm founding a religion tomorrow, I'm the Elrond Haber of the 21st century, I'm founding a religion tomorrow, and I say, well, in my religion, if you believe in my deity, you will win the lottery tomorrow, and you will win a million dollars.
Well... That's a little bit testable, unfortunately.
And so people might say, holy, yeah, I'll believe in that.
Are you kidding me? Fantastic. I'll believe in that for sure.
Then they believe in my religion, they go play the lottery, and lo and behold, they do not win the million dollars, or if they do, it's a pure coincidence.
Well, naturally, then the veracity, the truth veracity of my religion is pretty testable, and so religions that make promises that are closer in time and more empirically verifiable tend to not do as well as those that make longer-term promises that are less verifiable.
So, there's a natural tendency around that.
If you come up with religious rituals that are complicated and hard to remember, so, for instance, if you come up with a religious ritual that says, in order to worship this god, you have to run up and down this mountain, and you have to cut your thumb off, but you can only do this every fourth blue moon, right? Then nobody's going to remember that sort of stuff, right?
So, religions which tend to tie their rituals around common and dramatic and Rare, but significant events in people's lives, right?
So, you're born, right?
That's obviously rare. You do it once, I think.
And you're born, and then you sort of hit puberty, and then you get married, and then you have children, and then you die, and so on.
All of these are rituals that are biological in nature, cyclical in nature, rare and powerful.
So, you want to make sure...
That you tie your religious rituals, I think, to this sort of circumstance so that it's easy to remember, it's sort of tied in naturally and so on.
And of course, you definitely want to do when the kids are born because you want to sort of bring them into the fold, so to speak.
So there are these kinds of economic drivers which are designed to weed out religions that are inefficient in their parasitism, religions which are inefficient in their promises.
An efficient religion, of course, ties into two well-known biological transition points, birth, death, marriage, and so on, and also it tends to promise the most To the least verifiable situations,
right? So, if I say, if you believe in my religion, you will get one less common cold every single decade, then people will be like, oh, well, that seems like a pretty small net benefit relative to you've got to get up every Sunday, you've got to give me money, you've got to do this, you've got to do that.
All of that to gain like, well, one less cold every decade.
I've passed the sort of truth veracity standpoint because who on earth is going to be able to prove whether or not you have one less cold a decade, but I have not passed the test of greatest gain relative to the effort, right?
So what you want to do, of course, is you want to produce infinite gains in a completely unverifiable manner.
And so those religions which then promise eternal life or eternal damnation after death, which can never be verified in any way, shape or form, those religions tend to do the best.
So if you had a religion which said, I'm going to promise you a benefit that in the house that you will inhabit after death, there will be a bidet if you follow my religion, but there will be no bidet if you don't follow my religion.
And then people would be like, okay, well, so I'm going to get a great house after I die, I'm going to live in bliss, but one has a bidet, one doesn't have a bidet.
I don't know, maybe a big screen TV, who knows?
But it just, you know, that's not quite enough to compel me.
What you need to give me is, you know, an extreme one way or the other in order to make the, you know, what Pascal called the wager, in order to make the wager.
worthwhile. Pascal's wager, which is not unheard of in Christian circles even to this day, is something like this, right?
He says, okay, so maybe there's no God, maybe there is a God, maybe Christianity is right, maybe Christianity is wrong.
But what you want to do is you want to take the wager and look at your costs and benefits.
So if there is a God and Christianity is right and you don't believe, well, you've saved yourself some time, some money, you don't have to get up that early on a Sunday or whatever, So you've gained a little for sure, but what you've lost, what has cost you is an eternity in hell, which is not so good.
Now, of course, you don't want to necessarily take your theological reasoning from a philosopher who went completely insane and for the last 16 or 17 years of his life wore a belt around his midrith with nails pointing inwards to mortify his flesh.
But hey, the guy invented calculus, so let's give him a break.
He invented the laws of probability, so we'll cut him some slack.
Ooh, I think we're going to get a little bit of outside noise because traffic's a little slow, which means more quality time with your benevolent host, and it also means a little bit of outside noise because I'd rather at this point...
It's a beautiful sunny day.
It's 19 degrees Celsius, so don't think that's too cold.
And we have definitely turned the corner as far as spring goes, so Canada becomes a much more pleasant country in my mind.
So we're going to get a little background noise, some cars, and I'm going to get a little nice breeze here rather than switching on the AC, which isn't nearly as nice and I don't need until usually.
May. Like you care about when I turn the AC on.
Anyway, so, of course, religions are going to want to not give you sort of these kinds of minor benefits for minor costs, because then you're not going to take them, right?
Pascal's Wager, on the other hand, says that if you do believe, sorry, if you don't believe and there is God and he does want you to go to church, then you get eternal damnation, which is a pretty bad thing, so that's no good.
If you do believe and there is no God, you've had to get up early on Sundays a little bit.
You've had to spend some time listening to stuff.
You listen to people talk about Jesus and be nice to people.
It's not the end of the world. You've spent some money on stuff, but you had some place to go on Sunday and you had a nice community.
It's not the end of the world.
It's not like you're commanded to go and kill all of the chickens in existence and so on.
And so... That wager, Pascal's wager, is fairly important.
And, of course, this is well understood at an instinctual level by these who come up with these fairy tales, right?
So that they make the devotion that is required of you not to be too excessive.
So you've got to go to church on Sunday, you've got to pay some tithe, you've got to whatever, right?
But it's not like you have to human sacrifice your firstborn, because that would probably be a little high.
Then you might say that the wager is not so great, right?
So if you look at this from an economic standpoint, the church wants to get the maximum amount out of you that it can, relative to completely unverified promises of bliss after death.
And... In return for that, it's going to give you these unverified promises, and it's going to continue to increase what it thinks it can get from you, like a 10% tithe, and this, that, and the other.
And in return, it's going to give you these promises.
It's going to peak out, right?
The promises are as big as they can be.
Once you come up with eternal bliss and eternal damnation, those are as big a risk and a reward as you can get that's completely unverifiable.
You can't max it out any more than that.
So the church gets, I guess, about 10% tithe, right?
So people are willing to pay 10% of their income to the church in order to hedge their bets about the afterlife and so on.
That's sort of the economic transaction of it.
Now... The real question, of course, then becomes, why would you believe any of this stuff to begin with, right?
I mean, I don't think I get to walk up to you and say, I'm going to give you an invisible million dollars and all you have to give me is a hundred dollars.
Well, people are going to say, well, that's great.
Sign me up for that. I'll be right over.
Yeah, that's it. And then they're going to sort of slowly back away and not make any sudden moves and so on.
Well, I don't get to do that because I don't get to do that to them when they're children, right? Much more likely because of the immaturity of their minds to believe in things like massive ghosts and goblins and evils and devils and stuff like that because they're credulous, right?
I mean, that's part of being a child, right?
You have to learn how to become discriminating as you get older.
And it sort of was instructive to me that I never really dated an out-and-out Christian, but I did like a woman who was an out-and-out Christian when I was doing my master's.
And we never dated. We went out like two places.
I went to sort of see shows or whatever.
And... We talked fairly frankly about this, and she said to me, yeah, my dad's an atheist.
I don't really care if you're an atheist, but I need to remain a Christian.
And I said, well, I've said that's an interesting thing.
I mean, what I would say is that when it comes to kids, that I would not want the kids to be raised as Christians, but I would want the...
The children, too, obviously be raised with lots of viewpoints and perspectives, and then they could choose for themselves.
But I certainly wouldn't want the children being told that something like religion was true and absolute for a number of reasons, but they would be sort of informed that this is a perspective in the world.
And I would be able to make my case, you would be able to make your case, but they would not be forced to go Sunday school or anything like that, because that would not be right.
And that was a deal-breaker.
Absolute deal-breaker for her.
So we never did end up going out anywhere, and I think it's important to have those discussions up front.
You want to be surprised with them later.
Why is Dad an evil infidel who sleeps in on Sundays?
And... So, that was a deal-breaker for her, and good for her, right?
She knew the facts of the matter.
She knew that if the children weren't raised religious, that she would be the only religious person in the family.
Now, that didn't guarantee it, but of course, the role of women in religion is pretty strong.
Now, it's not like all mothers are religious and all fathers are not, but in general, in my experience, it's been that the women are more religious.
Religious than the men.
And we can talk about that sort of variety of reasons later.
But in Germany, it's sort of well known.
I can't remember the exact German phrase, but it basically says that the things that are big in women's life are the church, the kitchen, and children.
That's being a homemaker, being a religious person, and raising children.
Now, this is some time back.
This is like in the 1930s, 1940s.
So I'm sure that's not the case anymore.
I'm sure that they get excellent...
Career opportunities now, but this is sort of how it was in the past, and so it was pretty well known that if you wanted to keep a religion rolling, you had to focus on the women, and you had to get the women to give the children over to the church for some period of terrorized religious instruction before turning them loose on the world.
And you do get a certain amount of freedom, which is sort of something I've noticed, that We have...
Christina had some friends who were Jewish and still are Jewish, I imagine.
And they, of course, got all the indoctrination when they were younger.
And then when they were sort of in their teens, they were turned loose to some degree.
And then when they got older, they were still loose in their 20s.
She dated a Catholic.
Nobody really cared. And then when they got married, there was sort of a wave of, you know, come back into the church, right?
I mean, because once they got married, then it was only a matter of time until they had children.
And so what they really wanted to do was to get their sort of claw-like hands on the throats of the children so that they could begin to indoctrinate them in all the cultural stuff that that would naturally entail or be required to keep something going for 5,000 years that's patently absurd.
And so they had a certain amount of liberty and freedom before they got married and obviously before they had children.
And then when they...
When they had the children, the vultures descended upon them, and it's like the reverse stalk, right?
The stalk brings the child to life.
This is the vulture that tries to take away the child's soul and constrict it into a kind of claustrophobic conformity and so on.
And so that was their experience, and I've heard that from other people too.
It's like, well, you know, we kind of left us alone until we had kids, and then it was just like, I can't breathe, culture closing around my neck like a noose.
Not like a noose, it is a noose.
So there's lots of factors at work here in terms of figuring out which religions get to last.
The most central factor, of course, is, and I've talked about this briefly, well, not briefly before, but I'll talk about it briefly now.
The other central factor in what promotes religious belief, of course, is the power of the state.
Now, I've never read before, and I can't say that I stand by it, but I've never read before that figure of 12 million people killed in religious wars from the mid to late Roman Empire through to the Enlightenment.
It feels right, which doesn't mean anything other than to say that it is a figure that seems low if you think about World War II, but of course you have to understand that they weren't as efficient at killing each other back then, and populations were far, far, far, far lower, far smaller.
And so that figure, I mean, I have to sort of compare it to the general European population at the time, but it doesn't seem that surprising to me, in that wherever you have theocracies that are struggling to maintain power, then you naturally are going to have a problem of fairly extreme violence within that society, as I've talked about before, I guess in the podcast about two, two and a half months ago.
On the effects of placing concepts above reality.
You end up with this endless war of all against all.
So that seems right to me.
I sort of have to look it up and if anybody else has any other sources.
While I remember, some kind gentleman sent me a note...
Which said that my estimate of the dead was actually about 40% too low.
So 170 million.
I think it's now in the high 200s.
People killed by governments in the demo side.
People killed by governments in the 20th century.
So it is actually even higher.
And it actually, if I remember rightly, 264 million people.
I'm not positive. I'll double check that and I'll correct it again if I'm wrong.
But I did promise that person that I would correct it on air.
So on air, in car-ish.
And so I wanted to point that out, that my estimates of 170 to 250 were low.
It's 264 million if the number, if I remember correctly, and you can check on the board if I haven't got it right, but it's even worse than you would think or imagine when it comes to looking at this kind of destruction.
The state and God are not my two favorite entities in the world because they are, to my mind, sort of black carrying crows that feast on the flesh of people and so on, and by the millions, right?
So please understand where I'm coming from.
It's not because I'm not a nice guy.
It's not because I have any particular problems with religion that are emotional in nature.
I was never abused by a priest other than having been told about God.
But it is because I value human life, and these institutions do not promote it.
In fact, quite the opposite.
They do everything in their power.
It would seem to be to scrub human life from the face of the planet, except the human life that it needs, like a farmer needs his livestock to continue to prey upon them.
So that's one of the main reasons I have that as an issue.
Now, I'd also like to talk a little bit about some of the things that you would expect if there was such a thing as God, right?
If there was such a thing as God and prayer worked and so on.
Again, I've mentioned this briefly.
I'll go into it in slightly more detail.
But, you know, one of the major things, as we know, that has benefited humankind more than anything else, any other single factor, has been capitalism.
Capitalism. Now, One of the things that is required for capitalism, of course, is a collapse of central authority and the institution of private property.
Not a complete collapse, but definitely a diminishment in the power of central authority and the expansion of the right of private property is the foundation of capitalism.
The other thing, of course, that is required is lifting of restrictions on what is called usury or the lending of money at interest.
The prohibitions against usury in the Bible are pretty long and extensive and so on, and they are particularly strong in the New Testament, if memory serves me right.
And that is something that's well worth sort of mulling over when you look at what is beneficial to mankind, and we would assume that a good God that wanted to at least give people a better chance to be good.
So if you...
If you are interested in your child being moral and you say, I want you to be moral, but you do everything in your power to prevent that child from getting an education, from understanding the world, from learning a trade, and then you complain that they seem to have slipped into a life of crime or self-abuse, I would say that your protestations that you want the child to be moral might be taken a little bit skeptically, especially when you had a perfect knowledge of what you needed to do to give your child a better chance in life.
So get an education and treat them gently and help them build self-esteem so that they learn to value themselves so they can't be exploited as easily and so on.
All of these sorts of things you would think would be something that you would do if you wanted your children to be good, especially if that's what you sort of profess is the sort of main reason to be good.
Your desire that they be good is your greatest desire and so on.
Now, The invention of capitalism, the discovery of the universal ethics of property rights and the diminishment of centralized state power, is something that is one of the enormous, I mean, central, I would say the central benefit to human beings has been the discovery of the principles of property rights.
I mean, you want to talk about things that are good for human beings.
Forget about Einstein. You want to talk about things which are genius-based and benevolent.
Forget about the guy who invented penicillin and so on, the guy who discovered a cure for smallpox.
These people fade into insignificance because they are entirely dependent upon the excess of wealth that is created through the universal discovery and application of property rights.
Well, that particular thing, that particular aspect is the most beneficial aspect of society that has come about since the invention of fire.
It supersedes even the invention of fire or anything like that.
It is the greatest single benefit.
The greatest single intellectual discovery was the discovery of property rights and the concomitant discovery Or invention or realization of the fact that government and church were not the means by which to best advance human knowledge and human happiness.
That is, to me, the greatest benefit.
Now, were the church to be derived from an all-knowing, all-just God and goodness, and the church was interested in people becoming good, the church, of course, would have received this information from God Or would have thrown every single ounce of its backbone into researching the value of the growth of property rights,
into researching economics and so on, because clearly if the church is interested in people being good, it wants to create circumstances under which people can be good to the greatest degree that is possible.
And that means, of course, that they're self-sufficient, that they have options, that their resources in society are not constantly short, because if they're constantly short, Then bullying and grabbing and so on become the norm, right?
So they should have been working very hard to figure out constantly where pockets of economic improvements were occurring, and they were occurring, of course, even in the Dark Ages.
Where pockets of economic improvements were occurring, the church should have been all over that, sort of trying to figure these things out.
I mean, in the same way that you would expect that the government, if it were really interested in the alleviation of poverty, would study the root causes of poverty and the ways in which poverty gets permanently alleviated, which is through, of course, the free market and property rights and trade and so on.
Now, if, on the other hand, the Church was not interested in property rights, or if the Church were sort of fought tooth and nail, Against the institution of property rights and against usury or the lending of money at interest, which is what creates jobs, creates opportunity, creates prosperity, because it allows capital to accumulate in the hands of those who can use it best.
The main reason that lending money for interest is beneficial is that those who can create the most wealth can bid the most for capital, so capital will then naturally flow to those who can maximize it and increase it to the best, to the greatest advantage of society as a whole.
And so if you look at the economic factors around religion, if it was true that religious people wanted the best for humanity, then they should be entirely behind capitalism.
Now, That's not, of course, what you would expect from an economic entity like the church, or if you look at the church through the economic lens, you would not expect that the church would be particularly interested in advancing human prosperity, the wealth of nations, that the church would not be the church's major goal.
For two reasons. One is that the Church, as a monopoly of theistic doctrine, needs the state in order to maintain its central hold upon the doctrines.
And, of course, if the state is diminished, then the power of the centralized religion diminishes thereby as well.
Now, since the state must be diminished in order for capitalism to flourish, and the church has a net negative benefit from the diminishment of state power because it loses its ally in destroying competing religions, Then we would assume that the state is going to be protected by the church.
And in return for that ideological protection, render under Caesar and obey the secular authorities and so on, that the state is going to protect the church from competition.
Now, this, of course, held mightily during the Dark Ages, and it wasn't until the invention of the printing press and Luther's crazy thrust into the side of the sort of his crazy sword thrust into the side of universal Christendom, which was by no means universal, but at least had a universal sort of home.
And his destruction of the unified voice and thoughts of Christendom, because once he was able to get a hold of the original text and publish them and so on, he was able to start getting the Bible into the vernacular, into the hands of people who then realized for themselves that of this crazy book with 50,000 errors...
That they could pretty much make up their own religion and find any kind of absolutism they wanted in the text of the Bible which caused the massive fragmentation, civil wars, religious wars that occurred for hundreds or two hundreds of years at various points throughout the European continent from the 16th to the 18th century until they finally separated the church and the state realizing that it couldn't survive any longer.
We would anticipate from a purely economic standpoint that the dominant religion would never have an interest in diminishing state power, because as soon as it does, it's no longer the dominant religion.
Well, and of course we find this to be borne out, I think, pretty strongly throughout history, that dominant religions are never that interested in diminishing state power.
Certainly, Luther was never interested in diminishing state power at all.
He was very much interested in arguing that you always had to obey the secular authorities, that to disobey the secular authorities was to disobey God, and you have to render unto them whatever they want, and if they order you to do things that are immoral, it's on their soul, it's not on yours, so you have to do them, so there was really no limit.
And of course, it was no accident that this Germanic priest was around, and that you ended up with Nazism, right?
I mean, these things are not uncoincidental, I guess you could say.
So the central religious authority has no interest at all in promoting the diminishment of the centralized state authority, because they're yin and the yang.
They're like the sword and the scabbard.
This is exactly what you require in order to keep mysticism alive is the violent power, which is why in America you have great government power, increasing government power, co-joined with increasing theological influence.
These two things are one and the same.
You don't get one without the other.
And there is, of course, the example of the communist countries where you have absolute state power with no theological religion.
But, of course, my argument, and I'll make this relatively soon, as soon as I get to it on my list, my argument is that communism, of course, is just a religion.
It's just a form of theology.
You have the good and evil, and you have abstract concepts that are far larger than any individuals, and you have the state as the god.
I mean, there's lots of parallels which we'll get into another time, but in the history of the West, for sure, Christianity rises and falls with the power of the state.
When the state is diminished, then Christianity tends to fall away.
Over time, it takes a couple of generations, because...
in the same way that it takes a couple of generations for people who come over from a particular culture to become sort of more blended, right?
Less Greek and more sort of Greek-Canadian and then just after a while kind of Canadian, right?
So you would not expect the church to do that.
Now, you would also not expect the church to be in favor of usury for two reasons.
One is that usury tends to draw money away from the aristocracy and towards merchants because the aristocrats don't really like paying interest so much, whereas the merchants are happy to because they can optimize capital and create manufacturing situations and so on.
So the church is going to be against usury because it's for the state, and usury drains money away from the state and puts it in the hands of private capital, which is not good for the power of the aristocrats.
And secondly, of course, the aristocrats are always in debt, and they're always in debt because they're always at war.
I mean, they're a warrior class.
That's what they do, is they kill people and they tax people.
That's their job, right?
Unlike today, where it's just so much different.
But the aristocrats want the interest rates to be low or non-existent.
And to do that, they look to the church, right?
And the church which allows for usury doesn't get much support from the aristocrats who are always in debt.
And usury then, higher interest rates would result in less money for the aristocrats.
And so that's no good, right?
They want usury to be attacked so that they can do two things.
They can borrow at lower interest.
And also, when usury is attacked, And especially when they are borrowing from the Jews, and there's a variety of historical reasons as to why Jews were allowed to borrow at interest, but mostly due to the fact that it was the New Testament that was specifically against it.
And so the Jews were permitted to lend at interest, and of course they were absolutely required to do so because of the continual wars that were going on, right?
Wars always entail public debt, and those who can lend to the government at interest have a great interest in provoking war, Which is sort of the international money lending sort of organizations, which we will get to another time, my friends.
This is one of the biggest topics, of course, around freedom is the degree to which banking interests and state interests are co-joined with war.
And so we will get to that in time.
But suffice to say that the aristocrats also really like the church attacking usury because then it allows them to kill the Jews, right?
I mean, they'll borrow from the Jews and then kill the Jews or at least drive them out of your country, exile them, take their property, and so on.
That's a time-honored tradition of Christian aristocracy is to sort of whip up the population into these pogroms against the Jews because they owe the Jews money, not because they have any particular interest in theology.
I mean, all of these things are around economics fundamentally.
And so that's sort of what's very important, that you don't follow the idea of a particular god or religious instruction without understanding that you are serving economic interests.
I mean, that's a pretty basic and, I think, fairly incontrovertible idea.
When you start to understand these things from an economic standpoint, you can pretty clearly understand why things are the way they are.
These things don't just settle in accidentally.
I mean, they're set up very, very carefully and Not always consciously, but definitely with base self-interest and instincts always working to optimize these kinds of situations.
So, just to understand, I mean, the Church didn't end up with the doctrines that it had by accident, right?
So, to take a slightly different angle of it, the other thing which I mentioned also the other day, but we'll look at from a sort of economic standpoint, the other question which arises, of course, is, well, why on earth would there be so many errors in the Bible?
Why would there be so many contradictions?
Why would there be so many things that don't jive together?
Surely, the Church, in its infinite wisdom and its 2,000-year history, would have had a bunch of scholars sit down and work out a consistent Bible.
So that you wouldn't have all of these criticisms that could be leveled at the Bible for its inconsistency.
Surely, surely, that would make sense, right?
I mean, why would they leave it so at loose ends, so unraveled, so contradictory?
Well, my friends, the reason that they do that is purely economic as well.
If you create a good...
Like an mp3 player.
Then you can sell it to people who want to listen to music and audiobooks and fine podcasts like this on the fly.
However, you will not be able to sell your mp3 player to people who want big screen televisions.
You also won't be able to sell it to people who want a dictionary.
You also won't be able to sell it to people who want a house.
So, one of the things that is important to understand about philosophy is that the more consistent it is, the fewer adherence it will gain.
Now, I like to think that as we try and work out this consistent philosophy on Free Domain Radio, that we get the highest quality and best intellectuals who get involved in the conversation.
And by that, I don't mean the public philosophers or those in the media who are...
I mean, it would be an insult to me if Noam Chomsky said, I've converted.
Oh my God, can you imagine how many mistakes I would have to make to attract a public intellectual?
Oh, yuck!
But I'm talking about the underground.
We underground are philosophers.
We people who are actually building the future rather than pandering to the media or the masses.
We who are actually building the intellectual future home of mankind.
We actually have some integrity, I do believe, and we can have some claim to consistency.
But what it means, of course, is that people who are Christians, who stay Christians, are going to have a real tough time staying with these podcasts.
And if you do, fantastic.
I congratulate you. I appreciate it.
I think that's wonderful. Let me know how it's going.
If you remember the fine marine who sent me an email damning my anti-militarism and calling me all sorts of bad things for actually daring to point out that the military is composed of people who kill other people that are pointed out to them and do so for money, that it's not too distinguishable from a mercenary or from just what we would call in layman's terms a hitman or woman.
Then, of course, he was very interested in my social philosophy and he liked the sort of, argh, anti-welfare or whatever, right?
All of the stuff that is traditionally associated with the right wing, which is like, you know, we hate the poor and we like to kill them when they're overseas.
But he then didn't like the fact that I was pointing out pacifism, which is, of course, a logical result of the argument for morality.
So he, I'm sure, bailed on the conversation.
And this is occurring pretty constantly, I think.
People pick up a podcast and they go, wow, this guy's great!
I love what he's saying! And then they get to another podcast, but gouges one of their sacred cows, and they're like, this guy's a jerk!
I hate what he's saying! And then they leave, right?
I mean, that's inevitable, right?
Whereas if I were able to create the all philosophy for everyone, I wouldn't lose listeners, of course!
I mean, if I came up with something wherein you could, and this wouldn't be the case in a podcast, it has to be in a narrated or Dip into able, kind of a cherry-pickable kind of philosophy.
So it has to be a written thing or something which is instructed so that people can pick particular bits from the text of philosophy and come up with pretty much anything that they want.
Well, that kind of approach to philosophy is, well, not philosophy, of course, that's theology, but it is going to attract an enormous number of people to come and enjoy and get involved with and feel justified with the philosophy.
So, the fact that there are 50,000 odd errors, contradictions, and so on in the Bible It's not accidental at all.
It's perfectly valid.
It's perfectly, exactly, absolutely, completely and totally what you would expect from a money-hungry cult.
And I don't care how big the cult is, it's still a cult.
You would absolutely expect a cult that wished to find emotional loyalty or intellectual loyalty from everyone would promote itself as the all-religion.
So, if you want to obey the secular authorities, you can find justification there.
If you want to disobey the secular authorities, although we'll keep those kinds of people at a minimum, we will be able to provide you with justification for that.
If you want to be kind to your child, you bet, it's right here.
If you want to beat your child, you bet, it's right here.
Want to be nice to your wife?
It's there. Want to beat your wife?
It's over there. If you want to invade other countries, great, you do it this way.
If you want to justify pacifism or anarchism, you can do it.
If you want to justify theocracy or absolutism or dictatorship, you can do it.
But this is exactly what you would expect.
From a cult whose primary purpose is to gain adherence and gain money and gain power.
Of course they're going to want to be all things to all people.
Haven't you ever noticed politicians who speak in ambiguous phrases and contradict themselves all the time depending on the audience that they're listening to?
I mean, it's exactly the same principle.
It would be mind-blowing if it were any different.
Philosophies which actually have consistency...
Don't tend to do as well, of course, because they're not able to appeal to everybody's prejudices and they're not able to appeal to everybody's innate preferences in a way that works for everyone.
Of course not. I mean, good heavens.
I mean, Steph's testament is not very long.
It's the argument from morality, logic, and empiricism.
That's really all it is. And that's not going to appeal to a whole lot of people.
I think it's going to appeal to the highest quality people, which is why I praise my board members to the point of embarrassment sometimes, but it's not an easy thing to look at life empirically and logically.
If it were, the world would be free already, and you'd be listening to a lot of empty air, because I'd be off doing something else.
Actually, I would already be published as a novelist, so I'd be doing that.
I mean, sorry, I'm published as a novelist.
I mean, published and making a fortune at it as well.
So, the errors within the Bible are entirely predictable, perfectly understandable.
Now, there are two types of errors in the Bible.
Of course, there are big errors and there are little errors.
Now, the little errors are no problem either because you do get an entire stable of people who grow up trying to figure out how to put all of these things together.
Well, it says a gold robe here and it says an orange robe there.
Well, what time of day was it? You get all these people who spend their entire waste, their entire existence, trying to unravel these imaginary threads from a long-dead robe that was never there in the first place in another galaxy far, far away.
That's all you're trying to do.
If you want to figure out what a theologian is doing for their whole life, spend your whole life sitting in a corner in the dark, mentally tying and untying a piece of string that doesn't exist.
That's all you're doing.
Or coming up with your own inner vision, painting a picture in your mind that never shows up in reality, and then vaguely describing it to other people.
That's a huge waste of time, energy, and money from these people and resources as a whole.
But, of course, this cottage industry that grows up around these kinds of contradictions are perfectly valid.
It legitimizes the whole thing, right?
It's like arguing about whether George Bush or John Kerry was the better choice.
Okay, well, you're sort of accepting a premise there that's pretty important.
So there's no problem whatsoever with nitpicking at the details of a system rather than questioning the system as a whole.
The system loves that. I mean, that's great.
Nitpick all you want about whether Jebediah said this and Ezekiel said that and this version and that version.
You're still accepting the whole premise, which is that any of it matters at all or any of it has any relevance at all.
So that kind of cottage industry only shores up the central thrust of the religious or belief system.
So there's no problem around that at all.
So that's, again, exactly what you would expect from an economic entity.
Which is promising invisible goods in return for money, and uses the argument for morality at all times, but cannot use a consistent argument for morality, for two reasons, right?
One is that it would damn God, and the second is that it would alienate large sections of the population who wanted something else.
I mean, remember, the vast majority of people have done some pretty bad things in their life, especially if they've been parents.
I mean, talking about morality is pretty explosive.
I mean, you should see some emails I get.
Talking about morality is pretty explosive because the vast majority of people, you know, they're not really that good.
I mean, I think innately they're good, and if they hadn't been twisted and corrupted by state power and religious power, they'd be great.
But most of them have done a fair amount of wrong.
So that pretty much precludes the argument for morality from ever being accepted by the majority of people at any given time.
Over the long run, sure, it will be accepted, and it will be the standard, and it will be as obvious to people as gravity is and the world is round is to us now.
But that time is not yet.
That time is something we have to bring into being.
But for sure, there's simply no possibility that talking about a consistent argument from ethics is ever going to do anything other than irritate the vast majority of people.
I mean, just look at Socrates, right?
I mean, he paid the ultimate price.
Well, he paid two ultimate prizes.
One was his life and the other was his integrity, but we'll talk about that perhaps another time.
I actually wrote a play once which was a dramatization of the trial and death of Socrates, which was, I think, a good play.
I did that when I was in theater school, and I quite liked it.
And so I think that's sort of important to mention, that you...
You can't have a consistent morality without alienating lots of people, which is why religions tend to try to appeal to people who are kind, and people who are cruel, and people who are this, and people who are that.
Sort of exactly what you'd expect.
So, I hope that this analysis, I mean, there's lots more to say about it.
I don't think I need to, because I'm sure you get the general idea.
But I think it's important to understand, like, if you, we've talked about the what, and we've talked about the how, the why is important, and I think the why we've talked about to the degree with which we're able to now, without completely boring everyone to tears.
So I hope that this has been helpful for you.
Feel free to post about it on the boards, and feel free, of course, to discuss it with your Christian friends who will either wake up and see the light or drop off one by one.
In the former case, you are happy, and in the latter case, you are happy.
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