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April 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:12
206 Reasoning with Faith

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 23 minutes past 8 on Monday the 24th of April 2006.
And thanks to everybody who called in and chatted with everybody else in the third weekly Free Domain Radio call-in show.
If you would like to participate next week, then have a look at the Free Domain Radio message boards.
Which will be at freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D board.
And have a look under general announcements.
We will give you the location for the next show.
Now the next show is a special show.
And it's going to be Christina talking about depression.
And the reason that we have that as a topic is that you either know somebody in your life who is depressed or you may have some trouble with the blues yourself from time to time.
So we are going to be talking about depression.
Christina is a mental health professional.
Of course. And so she'll be talking about, of course, remember, it's purely for informational purposes only.
So feel free to come in and have a question.
If you have questions about loved ones who are depressed or have a couple of bouts of the blues yourself, Feel free to call in, and Christina will be more than happy to answer your questions.
I will be lurking in the background to say whatever I can to add to the conversation, but it will be mostly the beloved wife.
So feel free to come in.
That will be 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time next Sunday.
So that will be a lot of fun.
And we also have a Skype chat going so you can ask and answer questions.
But we're not going to have a roundtable.
Hitherto, the call has been a roundtable which has some advantages and some disadvantages as well.
It's like a dinner party of the blind because you can't exactly easily tell when somebody wants in or somebody wants out or...
So this is going to be a little bit different in that it's going to be a sequence of callers and we're going to do our best to try and have it broadcast as well so that if you don't, if you just want to listen in and you don't want to download, we're using TeamSpeak.
If you don't want to download the TeamSpeak client to join, hopefully we will get away to get the odd magic of the internet to work in our favor.
So, that will be 4pm next Sunday.
Christina re-depression.
So, I hope that you will find the time to join us, and I'm sure you will find it of use.
So, this morning, beware religion.
Now, I have a, and I don't know if it's an age bracket thing, I have a slightly different view of religion than some of the people who are younger, and that may be for the best, in that they've grown up with less religion than I did, but I certainly grew up.
I had to go to church.
I was a choir boy, all of these sorts of things.
And so I was definitely exposed to the ideas and have some respect for well-meaning Christians in the same way that I would have respect for good doctors who've never heard about antibiotics but who do their best to try and help their patients.
So there's a fine gentleman.
I'll call him Spear.
There's a fine gentleman named Spear who comes on and is brave and throws himself into the viper's nest of atheism, although he is a Christian, a Seventh-day Adventist, or at least he was raised that way, if I remember rightly.
And I think that he's got some very interesting perspectives To talk about in terms of religion.
And we started a debate yesterday but for a variety of reasons we weren't able to continue it.
But we started a debate yesterday around this question of if you want to make people better And Spears' position was that if you want to make people better, you focus on their ethics and leave their religion out of it, leave their private relationship with God out of it.
And I thought that was a very interesting perspective.
Now, of course, if you've listened to the show, you'll know this, but I'll summarize it briefly to those who haven't.
And so my perspective was that you need to dismantle or approach from an empirical and logical standpoint the existence of God, and then once you take away that justification for the existence of God, then you're going to end up helping to dismantle people's false moral arguments about what it is that they're doing.
So I used an example which I'll touch on briefly here, which was that if there was, and this is obviously insulting to Christians, but I don't mean it in that way just yet.
I'm just using an argument from an extremity.
But if there was a group that believed in leprechauns and justified their violent actions by reference to the will of these leprechauns, Then I think that, for sure, it might be worthwhile to talk to them about ethics, but it also probably would be worthwhile to tell people that no leprechauns exist.
Because if no leprechauns exist, then this terrorist group that is saying, oh, for the great leprechaun, do I blow up these desert cities, say, then...
People who also believe in the leprechauns will say, well, I guess the leprechauns are talking to them.
I mean, they're not saying the same thing to me, but hey, you know, the leprechauns work in mysterious ways.
Their will is ineffable.
But I think that you're not going to be able to convert.
The terrorists from their leprechaun-based ideologies, if they even themselves believe it, which to me would be pretty unlikely.
It's just a justification that they use to quell questions from the faithful, those other people who believe in leprechauns.
It's not so much to change the minds of the terrorists that I would be interested in arguing for the existence of leprechauns.
it is really because I am interested in removing the veneer of ideated or perfect morality from the terrorist pronouncements so that other people can begin to examine the violence from a psychological perspective, from a moral perspective.
I'd say humanist, but that means a lot of things to many people, but a logical, moral perspective.
of From a self-interest perspective and also from an economics perspective.
So if you take away, for instance, about the war in Iraq, if you take away the religious overtones, then there's hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands and therefore it may not be said that people's primary motives would be religious.
That is something that is publicly proclaimed.
And if people still exist in God, then they can't correctly analyze what it is that these people are saying.
They can't correctly analyze their motives.
They can't correctly analyze their pronouncements.
And so, to me, the first step is...
To get rid of the idea of God as much as possible and as public a manner as possible so that people can examine what is occurring, the choices and motives of those who claim justification through a belief in God, they can be examined more openly and more honestly So that would be, I mean, it's the same thing with patriotism, and it's the same thing with classism, and it's the same thing with feminism, and it's the same thing with misogyny.
You take away these false moral arguments and you can begin to see that people's motivations are more basically psychological.
In other words, that they had a bad childhood or whatever, haven't dealt with it and are acting it out.
Or economic, in which case, well, sure, I mean, if I can get this war going by an appeal to God, then I get to make hundreds of billions of dollars, myself and my friends, and...
If you take away the guard, you can see that more clearly.
It's really just a way of pulling away this fog so that you can actually see what people are doing and why without being distracted by these false ideations and justifications.
So that was my approach and Spear's approach.
Was to say that you simply need to question them ethically if somebody is doing something immoral, like let's go back to the leprechauns and the terrorists.
If somebody is a terrorist and believes that leprechauns are telling them to do it, or at least publicly proclaims that, we have no idea what is going on at the heart of faith for any individual because all we know is what they say and what they do.
But he says that you would simply approach them from a logical and moral standpoint and disprove their ethical assumptions.
And the debate that we were beginning to have, which I'd like to sort of continue here, and I'm sure that I will hear back from our good friend Spear, and he will tell me where I may have gone wrong in this analysis, which I certainly look forward to.
But my approach to that as a challenge, and of course the reason I think it's important is that religion is the central moral force in America, for sure.
It's not that central moral force in other countries, and those people who were on the chat yesterday who weren't in America did sort of say, well, why are we even talking about this?
It just means it has nothing to do with the freedom movement, it has nothing to do with libertarianism, and that's very true.
However, I think it's important to look at the most powerful country and look at what is driving that because the country which rightly or wrongly is perceived by the majority of people in the world since the fall of the Soviet Union to be the biggest threat to world peace If its ideologies are based to a large degree on certain kinds of religious thinking, then I think it is important.
And it is important even if you don't live in the U.S. Because if you live in France, say, what the U.S. is doing in Iraq has some effect on the Muslim youths in your city or in your country.
And so I do think that it's important for us to have a look at religious belief, because it is the backbone of the superpower, the remaining superpower.
And so I do think that it's important for us to look at it, not because we're going to find, you know, I think in Sweden always like 10% of the people are religious, and they're probably not very central, and they're similar in other Western European countries, but that's not what we're talking about here.
What we're talking about here is Looking at ways of dismantling religious ideation, which, if you follow it along, will give you a lot of clues about how to dismantle socialist ideation, state ideation, race ideation, class ideation, gender ideation. Thank you.
So you can talk, have a harken back to the podcasts on concept formation and what concepts are, in my view, and that will probably help clear up some of that rather mouthful of technical syllables.
But I do think that it's important to approach what I view as an irrationality and to understand it and to try to unravel the problems that are innate within that irrational framework And this is going to work with any irrational framework.
I am very interested in reading ancient critiques of Zeus and other things like that because just because I don't believe in Zeus doesn't mean that I can't learn how to talk to a Marxist or something like that by listening to somebody critique the existence of Zeus.
So... As far as this question goes, do you attack God or do you attack an individual's false morality?
One of the questions Spear had for me was, you know, maybe you don't have anything against God, maybe you just have something against bad religious people.
And, well, it's certainly true that I have nothing against God.
I mean, why would I? It would be like saying, do you have something against leprechauns?
No. No, not at all, because they just don't exist.
But what I do have a problem with is both the moral belief and the belief that faith is valid as a methodology for determining truth from falsehood.
I have a great deal of problem with that.
Do I have a problem with Marx?
Well, yeah, a little bit more so, because Marx put forward this crazy ideology that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and I don't separate Marx's ideology into there's good ideas and there are bad people, right?
This is what you always hear about.
Marxism, that it's a good idea, but unfortunately people are flawed, and people can't put it into practice in a way that works, and people are just not good enough for Marxism, which I find a pretty repulsive notion ethically.
If only people were better, then they would be able to lord it over everybody else, have the power of life and death over hundreds of millions of people, and handle it well.
But of course, that comes back to the religious question.
God has power, and it does not corrupt him.
And therefore, if human beings were as moral as God, they could have power and they would not be corrupted.
But this is not the case.
If power corrupts, we have some sense of what God's moral nature is about, because God has more power than anything else put together.
So it's not that I have anything against God.
I have something against the irrationality and subjectivism that goes into the maintenance of a religious fiction.
And so let's have a look at the argument, and then Speer can make his case back.
Let's have a look at the argument that I would make about why it's important to dismantle God and what it means.
The main reason that I think it's important to dismantle God is not to dismantle God per se, but to dismantle the concept of faith.
To dismantle the concept of faith.
Now, faith is not specifically religious in nature.
Faith covers the vast majority of human thinking.
And faith is simply belief without proof, belief without logic, belief without evidence.
It's selective belief based on X, Y, and Z. So if I was a libertarian, and the only thing I'd ever read are libertarian books, and I'd never picked up a newspaper, and I'd never gone to public school, and I'd never talked with anybody who had different opinions, and I'd never gone to university, and I'd never gone to grad school, and I hadn't read Marx, and I hadn't read all of the critiques of capitalism, and I hadn't taken courses specifically against capitalism.
If all I'd ever read were Libertarian books, then it certainly could be said that I had faith in libertarianism, and this is assuming that I didn't read the newspaper and so on.
And so you would have a logical framework that was consistent with its own premises, which is great.
If you take the premise of 2 plus 2 equals 5, you can come up with some logically consistent mathematical ideas.
And so it's not just in the case of religion.
Atheism also falls prey to this, as we talked about yesterday.
In my view, atheism is very often and very sadly a subset of nihilism.
Nihilism is that nothing is real, nothing is true.
Everything is manipulation.
And religion is just one of those false stories.
Another false story would be ethics.
Another false story would be sensual reality.
Another false story would be integrity.
And so these people just believe that everything is false.
Everything is relativistic.
And of course, like all relativists, they're absolute about their relativism.
And while I remember it, if you go to hellboundalley.com, the host there has set up a page for a war on relativism.
So if you'd like to have a look at that, read some articles and submit your own, I would certainly suggest that that might be worth your while.
So drop by hellboundalley.com and have a go at that.
But like all relativists, they are absolute in their relativism without batting an eye at the massive contradiction that entails, right?
I am absolutely positive that you can't be absolutely positive about anything.
And it's like, do you even listen to yourself?
Do you even listen to yourself?
This is obviously somebody who's just experienced a wretched, wretched past and has had their spirit broken and now has become sort of a virus, right, of irrationality and subjectivism because you can't conceivably be certain that everything is relative because that belief that everything is relative must itself be relative and therefore absolutes can exist and therefore blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And of course, some absolutes exist, and some relative things exist, and that's the natural order of things.
That's the natural things of reality, right?
Gravity is absolute, and the colors that I like to paint my house in are relative and subjective.
So, 2 plus 2 is 4 is objective.
I like green is not objective.
And so, those two things exist, and every relativist who spent a moment thinking about it would realize that that is true, and that slamming the door on truth, using the door of truth, does not really close the gateway, so to speak.
So, that is natural and inevitable, and a sad subset.
Most anarchists are a sad subset of relativists.
But the reason why faith is so abhorrent, sort of mentally, is because it is belief with neither evidence nor reason, and therefore it is simply prejudice.
It is simply bigotry of any number of kinds.
I do not view, and I apologize in advance, I cannot for the life of me see the difference between believing that blacks are inferior which is a belief without empirical evidence or logic or that homosexuals are evil or that I mean, you just make up your own, all men are pigs.
I don't see any difference between that and the proposition that God exists.
They are two different species of willful bigotry, or a number of different species of willful bigotry.
And in fact, I would say that there is almost no greater bigotry that I can come up with than the proposition that God exists.
The reason for that... Is that if you say, well, all blacks are inferior, at least some blacks are inferior in the same way that some whites are inferior, so at least you can go around and you can drive around, I don't know, Compton and you can drive around areas of Washington and you can say, oh, look at all these blacks, they're just lazing around, they're just doing whatever is...
And that's welfare and single moms and irresponsibility and drug dealing and, oh, look at the prison population and so on.
So at least you can look around in society and find objective evidence for the proposition that all blacks are inferior.
Now, I'm not saying that this is true, of course, but at least you can find some tangible evidence of it.
Objective, empirically reproducible, and so on.
However... Oh, sorry, and if you say, all men are pigs, you can find some men who are pigs, right?
So if you're some, I don't know, bitter feminist, you can say, all men are cheaters and liars, and you can go and find some cheaters and liars and say, ah, you see?
Now, the problem with God is that there's not even a single shred of empirical or logical evidence for this willful belief, right?
This belief despite all facts and reason.
And so... If you say to somebody, your morals should be more logical, while allowing them to believe whatever the heck they want for whatever the heck reason they want, with no logical or empirical evidence, then it really doesn't matter what you say to them.
It's like trying to reform a government program while still allowing it to be funded through taxpayers' money.
I mean, you're letting the entire basic premise stand, and so whatever you nibble at the outside doesn't mean a damn thing.
So if I say to someone, well, you shouldn't be somebody who is a Muslim suicide bomber, you shouldn't go and blow up people.
Then that person is going to say, well, why?
And I'm going to go through this long process of proving logical and universal morality and this and that, and well, how would you like it if they did it to you, and does everyone have the right to do it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I can leave aside his faith completely.
I can forget about his irrational preferences that are simply willful and prejudicial, that he believes whatever he wants to believe and he is told that he is absolutely right in believing whatever he wants to believe and that to apply any logical or empirical criteria to what he believes is completely wrong, which is also true with socialists and Marxists and so on.
And Republicans and fascists, just so I'm not attacking the left overly.
But if you don't attack this central premise that a human being can believe whatever he or she wants to believe, and that that is virtuous to believe whatever you want to believe or whatever you're told to believe, And it is absolutely immoral to apply any logical or empirical criteria to belief.
And, of course, I know that Christians drive in traffic and don't pray for the traffic ahead of them to part, but instead swerve around them.
So I'm not saying that Christians don't have any empirical validation.
But in their basic philosophy, the basic philosophy of religious people is that I can believe what I want.
My belief is a matter of will.
It is not a matter of logic.
It is not a matter of proof.
It is not a matter of empirical observation.
It's not even a matter of historical veracity.
What I believe is my preferred will despite any evidence whatsoever.
Now, if you allow that premise to stand in any debate with anybody, That whatever they want to believe is good and that applying rational criteria to their beliefs is bad, then what does it matter what you prove to them?
You've already accepted that proof is not a precondition of belief.
You've already accepted that logic is not a precondition of belief.
So how on earth can you prove something to them and have them change their mind?
And that's the fundamental reason why you can't leave God out of the equation when you're talking to people about ethics and reality and logic and proof and economics and philosophy.
Because it's not the question of God.
God is just one of the ways in which irrational belief manifests itself.
Angry will, as I sometimes call it.
And if you're a Marxist and you say, capitalists exploit the workers, again, like the bigotry that's racial in nature, you can find some capitalists who go ahead and exploit their workers.
But you can't find one tiny atomic shred or ectoplasm of God in the entire universe.
You can't find one single solitary rational reason why an existence of God would ever be justified or something you could ever conceivably believe in.
You just want to believe in God, and you've been told that it's moral, that what you want is what is true.
It's true because you believe in it.
It's true because you want it.
It's true because you were taught it.
And I do want to save people from these falsehoods, these falsehoods which they are exploited by, these falsehoods which cause the transfer of money from parishioner to priest.
Because if you're going to have a debate with somebody The first and basic thing that you have to figure out, that you have to establish, is that logic and empiricism and the scientific method is how we are going to resolve this dispute.
I mean, forget Hannity and Combs and all that kind of nonsense.
The first thing that you need to establish is how are we going to resolve our dispute?
So if you're arguing with your wife...
And you don't have this thing which is like, well, we don't call names, we don't raise our voices, we don't use always and never, we don't let things escalate, and we assume and we work to find a win-win solution, which is going to end up beneficial to both parties and we will try as much as we can to keep humor in the debate and so on.
If you don't have those general principles of negotiation with your spouse, then you're going to have a miserable time.
And if you end up debating with someone and you don't establish, either implicitly or explicitly, that logic and empiricism and the scientific method as a whole is going to be how the question is resolved, then you just end up going nowhere.
You're nowhere. You're nothing.
You're wasting your time. You're basically like two television sets talking to each other.
We can only meet in reality.
We can only have intimacy in reality, because that's the only place, that's the only thing that human beings have in common.
We do not have our dreams in common.
We do not have our fantasies in common.
We do not have our faith in common.
Faith is solitary. Because everybody believes faith in a slightly different way.
But we all live within the same empirical reality, and within empirical reality and the logic that you derive from it, human beings can meet, human beings can become close, human beings can share and join and merge in a good way, in a positive way, in a loving way, in a way that is supportive and healthy.
But faith is isolating.
And I know that sounds funny when you think of 50,000 people going to one of these megachurches in the States or all of the Muslims kneeling as one.
But it's incredibly isolating.
Because it's not true, of course.
It's just a fantasy, and fantasies do isolate.
And so I don't think that you can let the question of baseless, absolute belief...
I don't think you can let that go or put that aside in a debate with someone.
I think that you need to be fairly upfront and to say, if we're going to debate, and I'm more than happy to, then we have to accept that it is logic and empiricism that is going to resolve our dispute.
I mean, if you're two mathematicians and you don't agree that logic is going to be what resolves your dispute, then you're just two geeks shouting numbers at each other.
If you have two computer programmers, and they're both saying, my algorithm is Foster, but you're not allowed to test it against anything empirical, and it's all too complicated to figure out which it is just by looking at it, then you can't resolve that dispute.
If you have two novelists saying, my novel is longer, but you can't count the numbers of lines and words, then you're just two people shouting at each other, or not shouting at each other, but you're certainly not resolving anything.
A doctor who says my cure is better than your cure, but who never runs double-blind experiments, like these crazy nutjobs with their human growth hormones.
If you don't have any access to any empirical verification or logic, then you're just saying stuff, and it's nonsense.
So I don't think that you can say, let's have a rational and objective discussion about ethics, but let's not examine whether rationality or logic is viable.
And let's not at all try to disturb people's belief that what they want to believe It's a perfectly valid criteria for determining whether something is true.
That they want to believe it makes it true.
That they prefer to believe it in the absence and in the flying in the face of all evidence and logic.
That they wish to have it be true makes it true.
You can't just sort of throw that aside.
Because then they're not going to listen to you about anything.
They'll nod, they'll smile, they'll pull up, they'll make a couple of feints, they'll go back and forth, they'll say, well, yeah, but there's this, and well, yeah, but there's that.
But fundamentally, you're still arguing with somebody who believes deep down and thinks that it is virtuous.
Not just that it's nice, but that it's virtuous.
That to believe despite reason, to believe against reason and against all evidence is virtuous, and then you're going to talk to them about ethics and say, let me prove to you this ethical supposition, well, it's not going to work.
It's not going to work.
If somebody believes that to believe without reason is moral, reasoning about morality isn't going to work.
And it hasn't worked.
It hasn't worked.
The only way that it is going to work, with all due respect to our friend Spear, the only way that it's going to work is if that person is himself willing to pretend that religion or that the base premise of faith does not exist.
And that's why I focus so much on the argument from morality and not the argument from effect.
Because the argument from a fact and the argument from any other types of arguments are going to obscure this basic fact.
So if you're arguing with a Marxist and quoting evidence, then you're arguing with him as if he has achieved his thinking through a rational analysis of evidence.
And if you then produce evidence that counters his theory, that he is going to then change his theory.
You're dealing with him as if he's empirical.
But, I mean, there's no such thing as an empirical Marxist anymore.
Maybe early on, maybe in the 1920s.
But there's no such thing as an empirical Marxist, and there's no such thing as an empirical or rational faith-based belief system.
Whether Marxist or religious or patriotic or statist or whatever.
These people do not achieve their beliefs because they have rationally examined all the evidence and come down in front of it.
Because rationally examining all the evidence, to my view, comes down to the freedom of anarcho-capitalism and of the free market.
So, you have to recognize that just about everybody has their beliefs because it's what they were told, it's what they were taught, it's what they have imbibed at their daddy or mommy's knee.
And we know this from religious people, especially those who are not just sort of vaguely spiritual, but part of a particular denomination, that they have learned about that denomination very likely from their upbringing.
And so it's not empirical.
I mean, nobody sort of sits there in a field when they're five and says, well, I believe in the trees, and I believe in the grass, and I believe in the sky, and I bet you there's this big invisible eye watching me.
I mean, kids don't say that.
Nobody says that, right? That's something you have to be taught over and over and over again, and taught as moral and sort of drilled into you, and then you will end up believing it.
And then you may fight it and say, okay, there's no big invisible eye that has power over everything, but I'm going to become a statist instead.
And give that power to the government.
And so, to me, you have to take this problem of faith first.
You have to approach this problem of faith first.
If people are allowed to believe whatever they want, flying in the face directly against rationality and evidence, then they're never going to be able to end up being rational except by accident and except in specific circumstances.
So I don't think that in the argument about religion and ethics or Marxism and ethics that you say, to a religious person say, that you say, okay, well we're not going to talk about your faith, we're not going to talk about the morality of believing without reason and believing because you want to, and we're now going to debate ethics from an objective and rational standpoint.
I mean, you're missing the whole point.
You know, it's like saying to the guy, despite the fact that you have no legs, I'm going to put you as a forward on our basketball team.
Well, it's kind of impossible based on the premise, right?
So that would be my approach to it.
I certainly look forward to hearing back from others about it.
But don't leave this topic behind.
Don't leave this on the side.
This is very central to when you're debating with people because you need to retain your optimism and your positivism about this philosophy and this approach.
And you don't do it by beating your head against the wall and throwing evidence at people who are not basing their decisions based on any logic or evidence, because you're not going to get anywhere, and you're just going to feel frustrated, and you're going to feel that logic and evidence are futile, which is going to make you sadder thereby.
And that is bad, except of course that will be good for Christina's show on Sunday next at 4 p.m.
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