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May 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:02
244 Sniping at God - A pro-war article and a listener conversation

Canada's bloodlust and four-winged birds...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
I am in my home studio, also known as my family room, while Christina is putting together a fine meal.
I thought I would do a short podcast about a few ideas that I've discussed with people this week.
This is like emails from the listeners, but this is more IMing from the listeners, internet messaging or instant messaging, because on, I think, Thursday or Friday...
I had an interesting internet chat with the man we know only as Spear, who is a Christian, with the cojones enough to wander into this wild camp of largely atheist anarcho-capitalists, and who is willing to share his thoughts and insights with me,
which I think is interesting and I have had respect for until this last particular IM, which is not to say that I don't have respect for the gentleman as a whole, but one little thing that occurred here, which I think is interesting and well worth talking about.
I'm going to just read a little bit about the transcription of our IM chat and then talk about my thoughts about an objection that he had to a particular perspective of mine.
And we can sort of share this out and you can let me know what you think.
But before I do that, I guess two orders of business, nay three, three orders of business.
The first is that we are going to have our regular free domain radio chat tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
And the topic which we're going to work on is going to be the question of raising children.
How do you raise children in a society which is fairly irrational, full of state schools and assorted other patriotic crazies, and of course religious people who don't necessarily appreciate little tykes.
There are little tykes being told by your little tykes that there's no such thing as a god.
So Christina will be leading us through that conversation.
She's rather surprised. Oh no, she's holding a knife.
I will be leading us through that conversation.
And we're going to talk to those who have theoretical children and those who have real children and see if we can't get some perspective on it.
And I think that will be very, very interesting.
The second order of business is, of course, the usual one, is me cravingly throwing myself on your mercy for funds to help expand Free Domain Radio.
After I got my article published on LewRockwell.com, Space Aliens from Luxembourg, a Horror Story...
I got probably the largest volume of emails that I've ever received for an article, so that seems to be a pretty good way of communicating libertarian ideals across the wire, and we had the largest single-day group of hits on Freedom Aid Radio, the website, which I guess since its launch in late February, has received about 14,000 visitors, which is not bad for a website that's growing.
And yesterday, sorry, on Friday, the day after this was published, We got 300 visitors in a single day, which I think is very good.
Of course, that's translating into even more people listening to the podcast, which I think is good.
And as a result of all this, that, and the other, extra cash is always welcome.
So if you'd like to go to freedomainradio.com, click on the Donate button.
I will certainly, certainly appreciate it.
And last but not least, as I track the number of listeners, I actually had to go and buy more RSS feeds.
I use an RSS aggregator to publish freedomaderadio.com podcasts to other agencies.
And I bought it in March.
And this is just one of the ways in which people can get through to the podcasts.
And I bought 60,000 and I just ran out.
So I actually had to go and buy some more.
So all of these costs, if you could help me defray them, I absolutely and totally thank you.
And all that will happen with your money is that I will use it for even more Swedish back rubs that you can shake a stick at.
And for helping to promote the freedomaderadio.com website.
And we also got the Lou Rockwell article, which was published on Thursday, was also cross-linked on Friday to antiwar.com.
They had initially rejected the article saying that they were going to let Lou Rockwell publish it.
And then they decided to run it anyway.
So that's good.
And I got one very touching letter from a woman in Iran saying that she found the story very well written, which is nice.
But the most important part of her email was that she was quite frightened at how this might be applied to her own country.
And of course, there are precious few words of comfort that I can offer her sitting in such a terrifying position.
My heart's just bled for this email.
The only thing that I can say or could say to her is that there are those of us of conscience and wisdom who are doing our best to oppose what is going down in American foreign policy and British foreign policy at the moment.
And we are doing the best that we can to get as much of a message out as possible to try to enlighten the population about the horrors that are going on overseas and that we will do the best that we can and keep our fingers crossed.
But it's people like that that we need to remember when we are looking at how we communicate these ideas.
I know we've run into a lot of opposition.
We've run into a lot of hostility.
We've run into a lot of indifference.
But it's absolutely worth it.
We should always keep plugging away both for the pleasure and satisfaction that it gives us emotionally and spiritually, but also because there are people on the far side of the globe who have no capacity to influence events over here.
And we who do, I think, I think should do what we can as much as we can within the limits of our degrees of pleasure and ability to do to to make these things as public because there are people on the far side of the world trembling as the shadow of this beast of U.S. foreign policy ravages the world and those people are our brothers and sisters and we should do what we can to help them I think Thank you.
Now, on the heels of that, I recently got a free subscription to Maclean's magazine, and I thought that it would be interesting to read to you a few snippets from an article that is in the May 15, 2006 edition of Maclean's.
It's also available on mcleans.ca on the website.
Now, this, I think, is quite interesting, because those of you who are in America may feel that America has some sort of monopoly on war lust or on this sort of semi-erotic worship of the soldier.
But I also wanted to read to you something that, not the whole thing of course, but some parts of it that were written for a Canadian article.
Of course, Canadians are considered to be the nice people of the planet, the peacekeepers, those...
Who make the Swedes look like Rambo.
And I wanted to just read a little bit because I think it's quite interesting to look at how this semi-homosexual pornography can be applied in this worship of outright state hitmen and murderers.
And let's just have a look at this.
This is an article entitled We Were Abandoned.
And it's here, it is about the political and emotional trials of, as this header puts it, an elite group of snipers went from standouts to outcasts, victims, many say, of a witch hunt driven by jealousy and fear.
Right. Because when people go overseas on the blood money ripped from taxpayers' backs and shoot strangers who are threatening them in no way, shape, or form, when we're focusing on victims, what we really want to do is focus on those who were denied medals, not those who were shot down in foreign countries by those funded by violence at home.
Because those are the real victims that we want to focus on.
So, this is how the article starts.
Lying low beside the rifle, his stomach touching the ground, Corporal Rob Furlong concentrated hard on his breathing.
In. Out.
Deep, but not too deep.
Slow. But not too slow.
The tiniest twitch, a heavy exhale perhaps, or a breath held one second too long, could jerk his weapon ever so slightly, turning a sure hit into a narrow miss.
In the sniping world, where one shot should always equal one kill, steady breathing is just as crucial as steady aim.
A Newfoundland boy with pale blue eyes and a chiseled frame furlong adjusted the elevation knob on his scope, the barrel of his gun pointing higher and higher with each turn.
He knew the routine had practiced it a thousand times back at the base in Edmonton.
The further away the target, the higher the rifle should point.
Wind blowing to the left, aim slightly right.
Most snipers will tell you it's not much different than a golfer and his caddy lining up a long putt.
Calculation, instinct, and just a little bit of luck.
You can teach a certain amount of it, Furlong says, but there is a large percentage that you must have naturally.
A good shooter is born.
You can't teach someone to be a good shot if they don't naturally have it.
The twenty-six-year-old stared through the scope, his left finger tickling the trigger.
In. Out.
In. Out.
The first shot missed.
A second round missed, too, but not by much.
It pierced the man's backpack.
They had no fear, Furlong recalls of his target.
They didn't run, I guess they've just been engaged so many times.
He immediately reloaded the chamber and lined up his rifle for a third try, checking to make sure his grip was flawless.
Furlong knew exactly why that second shot missed.
Instead of following a perfectly straight line, he had squeezed the trigger a tiny smidgen to one side.
Even a fraction of a millimetre can make a huge difference on the other end.
In this case, the difference between a man's knapsack And his heart.
Stand by, Furlong said again.
Another loud pop echoed through the valley, sending a.50 caliber shell, rocket-shaped almost as long as a beer bottle, slicing through the Afghan sky.
Four seconds later, it tore into the man's torso, ripping apart his insides.
So then the article goes on to talk about how this shot was something special.
Rob Furlong had just killed another human being from 2,430 meters.
It was, and still is, the longest ever recorded kill by a sniper in combat, surpassing the mark of 2,250 meters set by U.S. Marine Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock during the Vietnam War.
It should have been a moment of pride for the Canadian Army.
Five of its most talented snipers, men trained to kill without remorse, then turn around and kill again, did exactly that.
They destroyed al-Qaeda firing positions, saved American lives, and tallied a body count unmatched by any Canadian soldier of their generation.
U.S. commanders who had served alongside the snipers nominated all five for the coveted Bronze Star Medal.
Thank God the Canadians were there, is how one American soldier put it.
Today, more than four years later, three of the five decorated snipers who served in Afghanistan are no longer in the army, brushed aside by a military machine that seemed all too willing to watch them go.
Persecuted instead of praised, they fell victim to what many still believe was a witch-hunt driven by jealousy and political correctness.
Aaron Perry was pushed out the door furlong left on his own, so disillusioned that he could barely stomach the thought of putting on his uniform.
Graham Ragsdale, the leader of the unit, suffered perhaps the worst fate, stripped of his command and later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he has spent the ensuing years battling deep depression.
Now, I must tell you what an instructive story this is on so, so many levels.
So many levels.
Now, of course, the questions that pop into my mind, which are never answered in these kinds of questions, and I just wanted to point out that we should never, ever take American aggressiveness as an American phenomenon, because we're all human beings and everybody is subject to the same kind of moral corruption and moral evil.
And they do have, of course, a picture of the guy here, and he has the dead eyes of a murderer, of course.
That is exactly what you'd expect from somebody who is a professional hitman, a professional murderer, and mass murderer.
These people are shot, dozens of people, according to this article.
Now, first of all, there's the military porn, what I call the warnography, which is in our, too deep but not too deep, the tiniest twitch, the guns, the statistics, the distance, the, oh, it's all, I mean, this is a death cult of war and murder worship that is occurring here,
and it is a real tragedy in both what has happened to this man, who was raised to believe that, I guess, shooting people that the government points at is the highest honor a human being can occur to a human being, And sadly, this writer, who is sitting at home and has probably never had a day's military training in his life, talking about how wonderful these people are.
The idea that it is like a sport, as they say here, it's not much different than a golfer and his caddy lining up a long putt.
I think it is actually quite a bit different from a golfer and his caddy lining up a long putt.
For instance, if you could imagine a game that might be struggling to get into the Olympics...
Populated by slightly elderly white men who are slightly portly and lots of lesbians who are also slightly portly, wherein you have a slave running down a field, and the sport is to wait until they're, I guess, just a little over two kilometers away, and then to attempt to shoot them.
And, of course, you'd have the same sort of breathless voiceovers that you have for golf, where somebody is saying, oh, a fine shot.
Normally he would make that kind of shot, but sadly it missed completely.
Oh, that must be a disappointment to this man who's worked so hard to get where he is.
Oh, he's going for another shot.
He's going, oh... Oh, what a shame.
It went straight into the running man's backpack.
How sad. Oh, dear, oh, dear.
Still, it is a great distance, and he's quite a talented man.
I'm sure he's got time for one more shot.
Bam! Yes, his insides have exploded, and the man now lies shattered and twitching on the bloody ground.
What a wonderful shot.
He is going to be so proud.
I can't wait to see him standing up there.
With his death cult murderous trophy.
Oh, what a wonderful day.
This is a day which is a moment of pride for all Canadians.
He's managed to shoot down a slave from almost 2.5 kilometers.
Now, of course, you may say that this is an Al-Qaeda guy and this is what they say.
Of course, that's just what's said.
There's absolutely no question that the army very rarely tells the truth about the people who get killed.
There was that American fellow who was a football player who was, you know, they said he died a hero.
He was actually shot down by friendly fire incidents.
There was Jessica Lynch, who was supposed to have had all of these dramatic escapes and been imprisoned.
And, of course, this had nothing to do with what actually occurred.
For the military, lying is second nature.
You know, there's just no way that they can open their mouth and tell the truth.
So the fact that they're talking about how this guy shot an al-Qaeda guy from two and a half kilometers away, it's very hard to imagine how he's going to know that from two and a half kilometers away.
And so we can assume that it was not the case that he was shooting an al-Qaeda guy, but just some guy.
And the other thing, of course, is that even if he was shooting an al-Qaeda guy, The people who have grown up to be Al-Qaeda members are subject to an enormous amount of slavery.
They're born into a family and religious and political structure that gives them no capacity for freedom, and so when they do end up becoming terrorists...
We can assume that they've not necessarily had the greatest degree of choice in their life, and so they're kind of like rabid dogs.
And also, we know that their hatred for Westerners stems a good deal from Western foreign policy.
In other words, people exactly like this guy, who go out and shoot and kill and bomb them, and then provoke them to attack us back, so that we could then go out and shoot and bomb and kill them some more.
And so it's very hard for me to understand that even if this was an Al-Qaeda guy, that this is something that...
We should be very proud of.
But I think it's very interesting just to look at how this victimhood, right?
They're looking for victims in this story.
And the victim is not the poor al-Qaeda guy who gets his head blown off or his insides blown apart from two and a half kilometers.
And the fact that he shows no fear is also quite interesting, right?
So this guy gets shot in the backpack and shows no fear.
Well, this is something that is very interesting.
What kind of human being shows no fear when they take a bullet?
A bullet misses them, another bullet hits them in the backpack, and they show no fear and just wait to get killed.
Well, this, of course, is the murderous killing the depressed and then becoming depressed themselves.
This guy who ends up With post-traumatic stress disorder and spent the ensuing years battling deep depression, is this because the man did not get a medal?
Is this because the man faced some jealousy within the army?
Do you think that's why he has now spent the ensuing years battling deep depression?
Or do you think it's because his conscience is perhaps telling him that being a paid murderer is not the way to a virtuous life of peace and self-respect?
But of course this is not something that is ever talked about by civilian writers.
What they talk about It's how we should be proud of these people and how sad it is that they didn't get more medals for shooting people who had never done them any harm whatsoever.
Here's another fine piece of prose that helps us understand how this death cult pornography fever can be part of the sort of moral fabric of even a nation that is considered to be pacifistic.
The Chinook carrying Perry, Raxdale, and Eason twisted its way onto the mountain just before dawn.
Within minutes, enemy fighters opened up, feeding the new arrivals a steady stream of small arms and mortar fire.
Perry, hauling his rifle on his back, headed for higher ground.
Anyone who says they're not scared is crazy, he recalled.
But it was great!
In that first hour, Perry fired at target after target, some as far away as 1,500 meters.
His shots were incredible, says Sergeant Major Mark Nielsen, a veteran of America's 101st Airborne Division.
One shot, one kill.
If I had to send him a sweatshirt, that's what it would say.
Now here's where the sense of justice for me becomes rather fascinatingly perverse.
So they go on this mission.
They don't find anyone to kill, which is obviously a real bummer.
And it says here, As soon as the sniper cell returned to camp, an officer pulled them aside, warning them that one of their own, Perry, was under investigation for allegedly desecrating an enemy corpse.
Among the gruesome accusations were that he cut off a dead man's finger, stuck a cigarette in the corpse's mouth, and posted a sign on his lifeless chest.
Fuck terrorism, the note read.
Military police also suspected that Perry defecated on a second body.
Now, this really is quite a fascinating thing when you sort of just break it down mentally.
So, you get praised for shooting the guy, but you get punished if you cut his finger off after he's dead.
So, blowing his brains off from two and a half kilometers when he has no chance to fight back, and you're over there because your government has sent you over there to Afghanistan, which has never raised a single mention of threat towards Canada.
You're over there shooting people, And you get praised for that.
You get paid for that. You get medals for that.
So you can blow a guy's head off and get praised.
But if you cut his finger off after he's dead...
Well, you get to church, and this is a bad thing.
This is a negative thing. Because I'll tell you, sort of in my humble perspective, this is sort of the way that I would approach the problem.
I would, you know, if I'm some guy over in Afghanistan, wandering around the desert with all these people shooting anything that moves, this is how I would sort of like it to sort of shake down.
What I would like is that it's kind of illegal to blow my head off.
And I really don't care whether you cut my finger off after I'm dead.
You can even take a crap on my body if you want.
You can put a cigarette in my dead mouth.
I don't care, really. I mean, I'm past caring.
What do I care? What I would really like, though, is if people actually get punished.
For murdering people who are doing nothing to threat them.
People get punished for stealing money from taxpayers, being flown over to foreign countries, and shooting people from a distance, or up close, or anywhere.
That, to me, is something that people should actually be punished for, not whether they cut the finger off after they kill the guy.
That seems to me just a little bit kind of ethics ex post facto.
But it gets even more bizarre, ladies and gentlemen, if you just want to follow the twists and turns of military ethics.
Obviously an oxymoron almost as unbecoming as military intelligence.
But what is it that really got this guy into trouble?
Well, investigators search for clues, senior officers strip this guy of his command, and then the NIS, I think that's the National Intelligence Service, tearing apart his barracks box and seizing a knife.
A Canadian chaplain later claimed that Perry swore at him in a threatening manner, an allegation that landed the soldier under arrest for conduct unbecoming.
Now just savor that moral evil and insanity just for a moment, because this is a kind of concoction that you're not going to get to taste every day.
So a priest is over there, and he's got no problem with these Canadian kids going and shooting everyone and sundry over there.
But what he really has a big problem with is that they may have cussed him.
So you can go and shoot a guy, and the priest has no problem with that.
In fact, he's there to support you and help you through it, and to tell you to obey the secular authorities and get to heaven by killing arabs.
But the moment you say some word which he finds offensive, well, then he's going to get you arrested, because you see, that's wrong.
So, later on the article says, As for the finger investigation,
he was adamant that he never mistreated a corpse or staged a so-called trophy photo.
He even went so far as to say that although he was innocent, he still supported the words written on the sign.
Fuck terrorism, who can disagree with that?
So you see, he never mistreated a corpse, so he's not a bad guy.
Now, he created corpses...
So he blew apart the interior organs of living people and scattered them across the sand, but he never mistreated a corpse.
So I guess he's a good guy then.
It goes on to say, over and over the NIS grilled the men behind closed doors, hoping to catch one of them in a lie.
It was a really, really hard emotional time, Furlong remembers.
We fell apart when we came back.
I mean, this is just fascinating.
This is the mindset of somebody who's probably shot dozens, if not hundreds of people.
And why? Because somebody pointed and said, those are your enemies.
Have they ever threatened him?
Have they ever threatened his family?
Have they ever threatened his community?
Well, of course not. Yes, I know that al-Qaeda dropped a few hints about attacking America because America was thinking about going into war in Iraq, but al-Qaeda's never done anything remotely to attack Canada.
In fact, I think they kind of need Canada because we are pretty good at getting our passports stolen.
But I think that it really is quite astounding when you think about this guy, and he's out there murdering.
I mean, this guy is a mass murderer.
He's out there shooting everyone who he can see out there in the desert.
But then he gets grilled about desecrating a corpse, and he says, you know, it was a really, really hard emotional time.
We fell apart when we came back.
it was really difficult for me emotionally to be criticized about this.
This is the level of empathy that this man has.
Zero empathy for the hundreds, dozens or hundreds of people that he's murdered in cold blood, but particular empathy for himself, because it's quite difficult to get interrogated about whether you desecrated a corpse.
And what has he become since he's gone back to civilian life?
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure it's no surprise here, he's become a cop.
This mass murderer has become a cop, and this is the guy we're trusting to protect us from violence.
Isn't that funny?
Now, let's move back to Spears' conversation, which is a little bit more on the theological standpoint, because I just find theology quite fascinating, so I will...
Relate to you an IM chat that we had and his response to it.
So his basic question in this IM chat was, why are all these people pestering me to become an atheist when all I want to be is a libertarian?
And I, of course, had a number of opinions which I'm sure would be fairly clear to you.
So he says, do you think it's possible to be a Christian and a libertarian?
And I said, well, it depends what you mean by libertarian.
If you mean small state, then sure, but of course I think both positions are incorrect.
And he says, well, why, basically?
And I say, well, libertarianism is a subset of rationalism which says all concepts must bow to the evidence of logic and the senses.
That is how we know that the state or the collective does not exist.
And all rules for people apply only to individuals.
But if concepts don't exist except insofar as they describe what is in the world, if concepts don't exist except insofar as what they describe in the world, then the state does not exist, but then neither do gods.
And that's probably the pressure that you're feeling.
And he said, Religious beliefs are still an error, and a dangerous one, and dangerous errors in its application by others.
Remember, the Bible says we unbelievers should be killed, and that can make us just a little bit jumpy.
So he said, so following with that, since I agree that the state shouldn't be here because of the evil I see very present, yet disagree with your view on atheism because of other reasons, aren't I entitled to that?
And I said, but the existence of God, like the ethics of the state, is not a matter of opinion.
It's not up to me whether I believe or not, no more than it's up to me whether the world is round or not.
And he said, well, let me see if I can use an analogy, because I think we can agree on this.
And I said, sure. And he said, I believe we can both have rational reasons why we believe what we believe, even though they contradict.
Now, here's the analogy.
He says, if you saw me on a plane to Hawaii and went home only to see on the news that the flight crashed into the water, all attempts to see if there are survivors have failed, it would be rational for you to believe that I had perished.
But if I were in the water bobbing up and down in my life vest, it would be just as rational to believe that I'm alive.
And it would be understandable why you might think I would have died.
And he goes on to say, I'm just stating...
I'm not saying one is clearly not more correct.
I'm just stating that we both would have very rational reasons why we believe what we believe.
So since I have rational beliefs and you have rational beliefs, and we disagree, I think we can still be entitled to those rational beliefs without trying to dismiss the others.
And I said, well, that's a very interesting argument.
I've never heard it before, but my first reaction would be to say, I would say that it would be very unlikely you had survived, but still a possibility.
But if someone asked me if King Arthur was still alive, I would have to say no.
He says, well, I think the analogy holds water.
I think you're saying it's a possibility for me to be alive in the analogy, but it's not possible for God to exist.
And I said, I understand, but it is not possible for God to exist.
So, he's basically saying that, why can't I hold true to libertarian beliefs and still be a Christian?
If I'm not taking away your rights and trying to convert you to what I believe through persecution, then wouldn't it be holding true to libertarian beliefs to let me believe what I want?
And I said, sure, but if you're claiming that your belief in God exists, you are claiming an objective fact that Rather than a subjective opinion.
So if you claim that you believe in God and it's just a subjective opinion, I'm not really going to spend much time trying to change your mind.
But if you're claiming that you believe in God because God exists, then you're claiming an objective fact rather than a subjective opinion.
Like if somebody says to me, I worship my cat because my cat is the best thing ever, I'm like, great, more power to you.
But if they say, I worship my cat because my cat is an embodiment of the ancient Egyptian god set, then I would sort of say maybe that that might be something you'd want to prove rather than just sort of state it.
So I think that's something that I would sort of approach to that, right?
So, if you're saying that your belief that God exists occurs because God does exist, then you're claiming an objective fact.
And as an objective fact, it's open to scrutiny and criticism, just like any other theory.
Now, he says that I can accept that my belief will be subject to scrutiny and criticism.
And I said, well, how would you determine truth from falsehood then?
If your opinions can be objectively true despite logic and evidence, how can you oppose a status?
He believed the state exists.
Right? So this is an important thing.
This is why Christianity and statism must go hand in hand, or if not, there's a contradiction in the thinking.
Because people believe the state exists, and this is a concept that has no existence in material, logical, or objective reality.
People say, well, the state exists, and the common good exists, and society exists, and we have to subject the individual to the collective, and so on.
So they're saying the concept exists and has primacy over the individual.
Right? And so if a concept can exist that has independence from its constituent elements, then of course God can exist as a concept independent of reality and testable evidence.
So then he's saying, he says, but now you're arguing that I can't have a rational belief in God.
That we can have conflicting, disregarding what we agreed on, that we can have conflicting rational beliefs and that they would both be rational.
So we both have rational beliefs, but they conflict and they're both still rational.
And I said, no, that's not possible.
Aristotle's basic laws of logic deny that two objectively rational opinions can conflict and be still both rational.
So either both of us are wrong or one of us is.
We cannot both be right. And the test is logic and sense evidence just as in science.
So then he tried a mathematical analogy, which didn't work for me very well at all.
And then he said, but recently it has been discovered that the speed of light has changed, meaning that the theory of relativity has been disproved.
And I said, sure, science is always conditional, of course, relative to logic and reality.
Science is a set of thoughts, a methodological set of looking at reality, of describing the laws of reality.
And so everything that science says is conditional upon verification and details from reality.
So I have no problem with that.
It's the scientific methodology that is absolute, not the conclusions.
And he agreed with that.
And he said, but as of this moment in our small lives, I think we need to agree to disagree, which I've never really liked that as a general idea at all.
He said, libertarianism can be had by both of us, and I don't see a logical reason why that's not true.
And I said, but it's not libertarianism versus religion.
That's a false dichotomy.
It's fact versus opinion.
If you say you're a libertarian because it's true, logical, empirical, great.
But then if you say you believe in God despite logic and empiricism, then you have two contradictory standards.
So you're saying that I can't believe in God and libertarianism.
I said, you can't have both faith and reason and imagine that they are equally valid approaches to truth since they are polar opposites.
You can split your thinking, of course, but that is psychologically dangerous.
And he said, now you're saying that there's no possibility that I can have rational and logical reasons for believing in God.
And I said, sure. And he said, I'm sorry, that's absurd and arrogant.
And I said, perhaps, but I've never heard a logical argument for a belief in God's.
And he said, does that mean it doesn't exist?
If Stephan hasn't heard or read it, it can't be true?
I said, well, I'm sure it wouldn't be a secret.
Now, that, I think, is a very interesting approach to the truth.
To say, I believe in something that is logically absurd, and we'll take an example that's not even as absurd as a belief in a god or a deity, and we'll create a metaphor out of that, and then we'll return to the god and the deity.
Now, let's say that I go up to a biologist, so you're a biologist, and I say to you, do you believe that a bird can exist with four wings?
And the biologist would say, well, yeah, I mean, I guess I could sort of see that it seems a little inefficient, I mean, but I guess flies and insects have four wings, so yeah, I could see it being possible.
That a bird with four wings could exist.
And I said, okay.
Now, is it possible that a bird with four wings...
And all of those wings that are made out of lead could exist.
And he would say, well, no.
No, definitely not.
Because wings made of lead would obviously be too heavy for a bird to fly, so evolution would preclude that survival.
Lead cannot transmit blood or oxygen because it's a metallic solid, and therefore you'd never be able to get circulation out of there.
Lead also can't grow because it's not organic, so it wouldn't be able to be born small and then...
And then raise up, grow up to be larger.
And so there'd be so many reasons as to why you would never have a bird with four wings, each one of those wings made out of lead.
A biologist would tell you, sorry, that's not possible.
Now, if you were then to say to the biologist who's given you very good reasons as to why it is impossible...
For a bird with four lead wings to exist, if you were then to say to that biologist, you are very arrogant.
I mean, what arrogance?
Just because you've never seen a bird with four lead wings, you have to then just say it's impossible for it to exist?
How arrogant can you get?
How ridiculous can you get?
And that really is still a lot more rational when I hear arguments about God, comparing them to a bird with four lead wings.
The bird with four lead wings is a lot more possible than a deity.
See, a bird with four lead wings, you're using a whole lot of concepts that do exist in reality.
Birds exist in reality, wings exist in reality, flight exists in reality, organic life exists in reality, evolution exists in reality, and you're talking about a material object with impossible characteristics.
But each one of those, and lead of course exists in reality, So what you're doing is you're taking all of these things that exist in reality, and you're assembling them, and then you're just applying one characteristic, like lead.
So you're transposing one material object, which is lead, to birds' wings, and that makes it impossible.
But everything exists in its component parts within reality, and therefore, you're really not making that much of a leap relative to somebody who believes in a god.
Because somebody who believes in a god is saying, That all-powerful omniscient consciousness exists independent of organic life, independent of any kind of organic cycle of life or death, and independent of any matter whatsoever.
And yet... Although this day of being is independent of matter, it can interact with matter, right?
So it's not like a ghost that walks through walls or tries to pick up a cup and can't quite make it.
And also, if you go even further, that this independent entity, which has a completely different and non-existent life structure from anything that we've ever seen or heard of...
I think I'm going to go.
It comes back from the dead.
You're not even assembling things that have existence independently of your concept and then calling it something that exists.
So with the bird, with the four lead wings, we've got lead, we've got wings, we've got birds, we've got evolution, we've got everything.
It's just the assembly of material matter that doesn't work.
But in the case of a god, you have consciousness without form, without material form or energy or any kind of detectable mass, which of course is completely impossible.
You can't have an entity which is composed of neither matter nor energy and is indetectable by any methodology whatsoever and claim that it exists.
Not only that it exists, but it has consciousness, it's omniscient, it has all these properties that we can determine.
Even though we can't detect God in any way, we know he's eternal and moral and all-powerful and omniscient and blah, blah, blah.
Blatantly self-contradictory characteristics like omniscient and all-powerful.
Blatantly self-contradictory moral attributes like telling people that they need to help those who are in need, like the Good Samaritan, but then does quite the opposite.
Kills and murders people, commands the murder of other people, yet we worship this thing as moral.
So when somebody comes up to me and starts talking about a deity or gods or ghosts or goblins, leprechauns, whatever you want to call it, they're not even assembling component parts of material reality into something which could not conceivably exist.
Like a giraffe with a nine-mile neck or a bird with four wings or a whale that can fly, right?
Because then you're just taking whale, and you're adding the word fly to it, but things do fly, and there is such a thing as a whale.
But when you talk about a god, you're not assembling anything that has any existence at all, so it's less likely.
That a god would exist, then a bird with four lead wings would exist.
And so if you're comfortable with a biologist saying, no, I'm so sorry, little boy or little girl, this idea that a bird with four lead wings can exist is just not the case.
Like, it's just not true. And here's how we know this, blah, blah, blah.
If you consider that arrogant for a methodology of knowledge to actually deny the existence of blatantly self-contradictory and ridiculous entities, then I'm not really sure what is meant by arrogance.
I mean, that wouldn't make any sense to me at all.
So that is something like if I come up to you and say that Santa Claus exists and you tell me, I'm so sorry, he doesn't, and I say, well, that's extremely arrogant of you.
Have you disproven that Santa Claus exists?
It's like, no, I... I don't think I really need to, and of course the tangible possibility of Santa Claus existing is much higher than the tangible possibility of any kind of abstract deity existing, because at least Santa Claus lives somewhere like the North Pole, has material objects, can be detected going up and down chimneys, and is an old man with a ruddy complexion and a rather large midsection.
This is much more likely.
What I think is even more close to this analogy, if you're going to go to a biologist and say, does this entity exist, is not so much even the bird with four lead wings, but it is in fact the phoenix.
So the phoenix is a mythical beast, like a half-invisible bird that dies, bursts into flame, dies and goes into ashes, and then three days resurrects itself as a tangible material being which is alive again.
So it's like it's flying around, and I don't know exactly why, but maybe it holds a sneeze in or something, or gets hit by lightning, and it bursts into flames, and then it's just nothing but ash, and then three days later it reassembles itself back into a bird.
Now, if you were to say that to a biologist, and you would go up to say, look, I believe that phoenix, phoenixi, phoenixes?
Phenises? Take the H out of there.
We're talking about something really great.
But if I go to a biologist and say that phoenixes exist, then the biologist says, well, what are they?
And I say, well, they're half invisible, you can't detect them, but then you can, and then they burst into flames, but the flames don't consume anything except the phoenix that goes into ashes, and then it resurrects itself a couple of days later and flies around again and so on.
Well, I think that the biologist would be fairly comfortable in saying, I'm sorry, that really doesn't work.
So unless you have any particular kind of proof for such a particularly wild theory about something existing, I'm afraid you're going to have to surrender that belief to the bounds of impossibility.
And should, of course, we find that such a self-contradictory and fantastical creature were to ever exist, then we would obviously have to be in a different universe or rewrite the entire theories of science and reality.
But I think right now we feel fairly safe in believing that phoenixes don't exist.
And of course, the last thing which I'll mention about this particular topic is even if consciousness could exist without material form and could exist independent of a body and had the organic concepts of consciousness and thought and action and morality and inner direction and judgment and choice and free will,
all the characteristics we associate with biological consciousness, If we did allow that consciousness could exist independently of biology and would exist eternally, there would be absolutely no reason to believe that there would be only one of them.
So if I say that a phoenix exists, that a bird exists, that can fly into ashes and burn into ashes, resurrect itself, fly off again, but then I say, but only one of them exists!
So that would not be something that would be comprehensible, really.
So I say, invisible things exist.
Things which cannot be detected in any way, shape, or form exist.
But only one of them exists.
Well, that doesn't really make any sense.
If they can't be detected in any form, and it's a matter of faith that they exist, then of course...
There's no reason to believe that only one of them would exist.
And if they can't be detected in any material form or in any rational construction or configuration, not only would there be no reason to believe that only one of them would exist, but there would be no reason to believe that any of those characteristics could ever be determined, because these things are independent of any physical verification.
So if I said that an entity called Glotten Bottom existed, which was independent of any physical kind of verification, could never be detected in any way, shape, or form, and had completely contradictory characteristics, like Glotten Bottom is a square circle, which is both fire and ice simultaneously, and exists everywhere and nowhere...
But there's only one of them.
Well, it just seems kind of silly.
There could be any number of them, and since they can't be detected in any way, shape, or form, of course, the existence or non-existence of those things then become meaningless.
Like, if I said that we were all shrinking massively, but everything that we used to measure that shrinking was also shrinking, and therefore it could never be detected, and there would never be any consequences to our shrinking, it'd be like, okay, like you're just inventing this invisible matter called flat botchit.
Which impermeates reality and everything and can never be detected and has no effect upon reality.
Well, these things are all just, to my mind, quite silly.
Now, I understand that for people who are raised religious and who have imbued material reality with deification and godhead and virtue and the grand drama of a Christian myth or other kinds of religious myths, I understand that this all sounds very flippant and I really recognize that,
but I would make the claim in return and with all too sympathy for the deep and personal nature of these beliefs that everything that you claim to worship within God virtue and justice and compassion and charity and concern and care and love and benevolence and purpose and the grand story everything that you claim to worship in God is actually within you Because if there is no God,
then of course when you pray and you get answers that are wise, and you get answers that are correct, and you get answers that lead you in the right direction.
And when you pray, you get peace of mind, and when you pray, you feel heightened compassion for others.
I fully respect that, but since there is no God, these things are all within you completely.
And totally, all the wisdom, all the love, all the compassion, all of the sense of purpose, all the sense of virtue, all the desire to raise the standard of morality throughout the world, all of these things are in you already.
You do not need to look to an invisible external agency to achieve them.
I'm not asking that you give up on these things and create a life empty of meaning and empty of purpose and empty of virtue and empty of compassion and empty of justice.
I'm saying that these things exist within you and the danger of praying to an external deity that other people have to find is that you end up being prey to the manipulation of those people who tell you what that deity is if the justice is within you and the knowledge is within you and the purpose and the virtue is within you then you get to work with those things and define them as your own according to universal scientific standards as we've talked about before the danger of having them defined by other people and written down in books that they get to tell you about the meaning of is that everything that is within you that yearns for purpose and justice and virtue and benevolence and kindness and purpose everything that is within you is subject to being manipulated by other people with their own agendas and their own purpose and their own material greed So that's my particular caution.
I'm not asking you to give up on virtue.
What I'm asking you is to reclaim virtue for yourself, to stop having virtue being defined by other people in some sort of way that ties into a God that can't ever be discovered or understood, that doesn't communicate directly.
Think for yourself about virtue.
Think logically and rationally for yourself about virtue and purpose and justice.
And don't hand over your core moral purpose and certainty To stories that are invented by other people, usually to trap you into acting against real virtue.
It is not to get you to give up virtue that I talk about these things, but to get you to claim virtue as your own characteristic, and not as the characteristic of some invisible deity.
So that's my central purpose in this, and I hope that that makes sense to you.
So thank you so much for listening.
I really appreciate your time and effort in these chats, and I will hopefully talk to you tomorrow, Sunday, 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. Come to freedorainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D, and look for the login instructions if you haven't done it before.
It's one or two installs.
Actually, it's only one install, but I think it's well worth it.
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