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May 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:16
245 The Arrogance of Fantasies

We rationalists are often called arrogant for asking for proof...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's 2.41 on May the 21st, 2006.
I hope you're doing fabulously up here in Canada.
It's a long weekend, so I am catching up on all the sleep that I tend not to get during the week because, for some reason, my clock is always at about 25 hours.
I can always go to bed later and can never get up earlier.
I think it's my body's way of saying, for God's sake, start to be a kept man in some way, shape, or form because this whole working thing, not so much for you.
Now, I'm going to talk a little bit more about religious stuff, but I'm going to do it from the perspective of Judaism, which of course is a fascinating cult due to its longevity and its pervasiveness.
and I would like to talk about the question, which I've touched on once before, around conflict resolution, but also the question of arrogance, which has been something that, since our good friend Spear brought it up last week, has been sort of rolling around in my brain.
It's sort of like if you've ever been to museums or charity things where they have those sort of concave bowls that look like gravity wells of plastic, and you roll a coin around them, and they go around and around and around, and straight in and straight down.
The idea has been rolling around in my mind, and I think the idea of arrogance, in the case of atheism or rationalism, arrogance is a fascinating thing.
But what I'd like to talk about a little bit is some of the ways in which we can see conflict, unresolvable, unmanageable, febrile conflict, to be associated with certain kinds of irrational thinking.
And so the reason that this is worth putting out there is not because I'm going to convert any Jews.
That's next week's show.
Just kidding. But it's not because I expect to convert any religious people.
But it's simply because those of us who don't have much experience with or knowledge of particular religious experiences or thoughts...
May not so easily understand the degree of conflict and emotional and social and sometimes physical violence that is associated with religious thoughts, religious experiences, religious cults, or you could just say cults.
So I'm going to read a little bit from a book, Jew vs.
Jew, the Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, so I'm sure it's something that isn't going to be too offensive to religious people or to Jews, except, of course, in the way that we are going to be approaching it, by Samuel G. Friedman.
And this, just so we understand the relevance of it, what was the date of publication?
Let's see if we can't dig that up.
Should be somewhere here at the beginning.
This was published in 2000, so relatively recent, I guess you could say.
Now, the basic premise behind this book is that American Jews are particularly torn apart by diversity, sort of majorly, it's sort of fundamentalist versus secularist, denomination versus denomination, liberal versus conservative, and this is all quite fascinating.
My recent boss, who was Jewish, told me quite a bit about this, and that...
A lot of Jews are really pretty secular, and then a lot of them are sort of religious fundamentalists, and this is a particularly important question for Jews because Israel has this thing which was put in shortly after its creation in 1948 by Ben-Gurion, who actually was able to create, according to my boss, and I haven't verified this independently, Ben-Gurion was the first Prime Minister of Israel and somebody who went round to the UN and to the Allies.
Hoping to get a state of Israel created out of the rubble of the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War.
And one of the major ways that he did it was that he had a lot of dirt on Western politicians, particularly the Roosevelts, who of course had, as far as I understand it, or at least as far as my ex-boss, who's pretty well informed, tells me about it.
They sold a good deal of war-making machinery and oil to the Nazis, even during the war.
And, of course, this is a crime of high treason, punishable by death.
And so he threatened to expose all of this, and he had other stuff on the British leadership, and so was able to push through the creation of the State of Israel.
And shortly after the creation of the State of Israel, there was this right of return was created, which allowed for Jews to get automatic citizenship within Israel.
Then, of course, became the huge question, what the heck is a Jew?
Because, of course, there are many answers to this in a way that there aren't as many for most of the other religions that I know of.
So, for instance, a Jew could be defined as a racial thing.
In other words, it's matrilineal.
It can be defined as a cultural thing.
It's a set of beliefs.
It can be defined as a religious thing.
It really does mutate to accept as many people as possible while maintaining a club of exclusivity because, of course, they are the chosen people.
So you wouldn't want it to be open to everyone.
But here's something that's quite interesting.
I'm going to read a little bit from this book.
This is from the prologue, page 17.
And he's talking about being in...
In Israel and a religious ceremony that's occurring.
Two hours before dawn, on May 21, 1999, the holy day of Shabbat, I walked into the vine-draped courtyard of the Mazotti Synagogue in Jerusalem, already bustling with dozens of people studying, snacking, and pacing in anticipation.
Like me, they were bound for the Western Wall for the traditional daybreak service to celebrate God's handing down of the Torah to Moses.
It was my first trip to Israel, and I'd been advised not to miss the experience, in part for its tableau of faith in an ancient place, and in part for its more recent history of religious strife.
The congregation in the courtyard belonged to one of the few conservative synagogues in Israel, and each time its members had attempted to worship at the wall with men and women together, it had been attacked.
For those who don't know, there's quite a wall between men and women in conservative or orthodox Judaism.
On Shavuot, two years earlier, ultra-orthodox yeshiva students had rained soiled diapers on the Minyan, who I think is the guy reading the service.
Two months after that, on Tisha B'Av, the police had shoved and wrestled the worshippers off the limestone plaza facing the wall in the name of protecting them from assault.
Last Shavuot, the congregation managed to pray while being pelted with small rocks and plastic bags of chocolate milk.
Of all this, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Orthodox himself, had said,"...the very fact that the conservative Jews who symbolized the destruction of the Jewish people came to this place that is holiest to the Jewish people is a provocation.
They have no reason to be in this place." Just now, a lanky figure in cocky slacks and an Oxford shirt gathered the crowd to within earshot.
He was Andrew Sachs, a Philadelphia rabbi, now leading the conservative movement in Israel, and many of his listeners were Americans, too, students in the conservative seminary and day school.
We'll probably daven very quickly, he told them, using the Yiddish word for pray, and if there is any threat of violence and the police ask us to leave, we will.
Then he hoisted an Eddie Bauer duffel bag on his shoulders.
It contained a Torah. Less conspicuous this way, Rabbi Sachs said as he led the congregation through the courtyard gate.
Already the streets leading to the old city were thick with the reverend moving seven or eight abreast towards the Jaffa gate, and Rabbi Sachs's group slid like a tributary into the broad river.
Jews in black hats and kerchiefs, Jews wearing skull caps, known proudly by the Hebrew term kippot, Jews trailing from their waste, the fringes called Tzitzis that remind them of the commandments, some of the Hasidim already singing and wheeling in joy.
Down the crooked zigzag lanes within the old city went the thousands, passing over paving stones worn to icy smoothness by centuries of pilgrims.
Finally, Rabbi Sax's worshippers reached the rampart overlooking the Kotel, the wall built by Solomon, the holiest site in all of Judaism, and beheld a plaza filled to its last cubit with humanity.
Why are we doing this?
an American high school student suddenly fearful asked Rabbi James Lebeau, Sax's colleague.
I know why I'm doing it, Rabbi Lebeau answered.
This is my place as much as anyone else's.
Officially, the Kotel remained under orthodox domination.
As a place of worship, it subscribed to orthodox rules.
By design, the conservative congregation assembled at a corner of the plaza far from the wall itself.
The police had erected a double line of metal barricades to demarc a zone, perhaps 80 feet by 100.
Several dozen armed officers stood atop concrete pylons on the perimeter.
Within this protective cordon, Rabbi Sachs hoped men and women could worship in egalitarian fashion.
The rest of the Kotel plaza, under orthodox auspices, required the Sachs to be separated by the partition called a mechitzah.
As the sky altered slowly from black to faint purple, most of the worshippers passed the conservative minyan without any more than a curious stare.
The congregation moved through the liturgy without incident.
All of these particular religious speakings or sermons were all led by men.
I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce these.
Then, for the reading from the Book of Ruth, two women moved to the folding table holding the Torah, and the first heckling could be heard.
It came from the boys clad in the black of the ultra-Orthodox Haradim, the tremblers, so named for the way they shake with awe before God.
Less abashed in this setting, one gave the finger to the conservative worshippers.
Another hooted until he got some congregant's attention.
"'Why are you looking up?' he then taunted in Hebrew.
"'When you're supposed to be praying!' Gradually, as if bored, the Haredi crowd around the barricades thinned from three deep to one, even showing a few gaps.
The moment of confrontation, it seemed, had safely passed.
But as the conservative service neared the Torah reading, the central element of any Jewish service, the nearby Herodim once more raised their voices in derision.
Make an evil plan, and it will be dissolved, they sang in a tune used on Purim for the villainous Haman.
Speak something evil, and it will not come to pass, for God is on our side.
Another song thanked God for separating us from the goyim.
By now, the sound of ridicule had attracted a clique, a clack.
The barricades grew more crowded than they had been all morning, and it was no longer just children or just Hadidim who led the catcalls.
A young man in his early twenties, without side locks or a fedora and wearing a double-breasted suit, began shouting from the perimeter,"'Are gorillas accepted by your conversions?' he asked.
"'At a homosexual wedding, who gives the ring to who?' He had been speaking, Rabbi Sachs' group abruptly realized, not in Hebrew, but in English, and not the thickly accented English of an Israeli, but in the casual, easy English of an American.
Soon after that, bottles began to fly.
Plastic bottles of soda from the bag lunches that yeshivas had supplied their students.
Every time one crashed into the conservative minyan, the nearby haradim cheered.
When the police waded into the crowd to grab assailants, the crowd cried, Why are you taking civilians?
Some of the haradim ran deep into the throngs on the plaza, and from that safe area hurled more bottles.
By then, nearly two hours into the service, half of the conservative congregation was facing outwards, chanting the liturgy while scanning the air for incoming rounds.
The rest huddled tightly together close to the Torah.
Every time a bird swooped low, every time a Haredi shouted a fake warning, the worshippers flinched as one.
Some of them quaking, headed for the gate.
One young man, speaking in the cocky American English one might hear from a ballpark heckler, shouted as they passed,"'Go back to Germany!
Let the Nazis finish the job!' From somewhere in the fundamentalist ranks, a plastic bottle of cola took flight, tumbling end over end through the bluing sky.
Seconds later, the missile struck what its launcher surely would have considered a bullseye, the cheek of a woman named Toby Strauss, a Jewish studies teacher from New Jersey who had read earlier from the Book of Ruth.
As Toby collapsed in a heap on the limestone plaza, a second bottle arrived.
It, too, found an appropriate target striking a rabbinical student named Shira Yisrael flush on the forehead, a few inches from her kippah.
Shira recovered the bottle, this one containing orange pop.
Her father was a rabbi.
Her mother had been killed years earlier in their native Argentinia in the terrorist bombing of a Jewish community center.
Now she was being assaulted in the Jewish state by Jews!
Clutching the bottle in her fist, she stalked to the barricades and began shouting at the nearest boys,"'What are you doing with the Yamolki on?' one shot back in English.
As Shira retreated to apply an ice pack, and Toby groped to her feet and into a friend's embrace, the conservative service proceeded, with a woman chanting the Haftorah, the reading from the prophets.
And the attack proceeded, too, with a few more bottles, a few bags of rugala pastry, and a song whose Hebrew words translated as, You're desecrating the mitzvah place, the commandment place.
As if in reply, the man in the conservative group muttered, Sinat hinam, pure hatred.
Finally, a single wizened rabbi walked with policed escort along the barricades, pleading with the young men to halt, even disarming one of a soda bottle.
Several yeshiva girls began arguing with the boys, saying, You're worse than they are.
Ignored, the girls left in tears.
By the time the conservative service was moving into its final section, the Musaf, a policeman, approached one of the worshippers.
How much time is left?
he asked in Hebrew. Thirty minutes.
See if the rabbi can hurry it up.
Based on past experience, Rabbi Sachs had been hurrying already, admitting the usual repetition of the Amidah section, and pushing briskly through the rest of the service.
At the end, he paused long enough to give directions in English and Hebrew on how to safely exit the plaza.
Then the congregation sang the Hatikvach, the Australian national anthem.
Two years ago, the Hatidim had booed it, this time pushed back from the barricades by the police.
They didn't respond.
Rabbi Sachs returned the Torah to the duffel bag and shouldered it.
For the mile-long walk back to the Masorti synagogue, the rest of his congregants staggered out, guarded by a corridor of police.
As one of the conservative worshippers, a teenager on a study trip from Maryland, passed through the gate, he recognized a Haradi boy roughly his own age, who he recognized in the barricades.
Hag Samech, the Haradi said.
Happy holiday. Now this to me is quite interesting because we see this so often within these kinds of religious situations or settings that it's very hard, I think, for us to understand or to really appreciate at an emotional level just how insane all of this sort of stuff is.
So to look at a parallel, I'd sort of like to show a couple of other situations where this kind of conflict could exist or could occur.
Or conflicts around ideas, motivations, or aspirations could occur.
And let's just have a look at the pointed absence of incidents, even as minor as pop bottle throwing, the odd bruising, the screaming of epithets, and the physical threatening, and the need for cordoning off people, and also the need for police protection for human congregations.
Let's look at a scientific conference where there's great debate about whether, I don't know, Newtonian physics or Einsteinian physics or, I don't know, whatever the new stuff is these days is occurring.
Would you really need the people who believe in one branch of physics to be cordoned off and guarded by police and have people screaming epithets and throwing pop bottles at them?
I don't think I've ever heard of that from a single scientific conference.
And it's not that scientists aren't partial, it's not that they're not partisan, it's not that they're not irrational, it's not that they can't be hostile.
It just doesn't really occur.
And so this is one of the reasons why, when I look at the scientific method, or capitalism, or objectivity, rationality, and so on, that I think it's well worth looking at, because it doesn't seem to...
This is a completely minor example of religious violence, and this is among a similar sect, all of whom are supposed to have the same basic goals and ideas.
And there's still an enormous amount of hatred.
And could you imagine that somebody who believed in a particular branch of physics rather than another branch, or who believed that a certain approach to a mathematical proof was better than another approach to a mathematical proof, that somebody who disagreed with that person would say that they should be murdered in a genocidal manner, in the way that one that somebody who disagreed with that person would say that they should be murdered in a genocidal manner, in the way that one of these Jews shouts at another I've never heard of anything like that coming out of a scientific conference.
I imagine that when scientists are vying for state funding that things can get pretty ugly, but that's not in the nature of science, that is in the nature of state funding.
Now let's have a look at another situation where people are gathered and they have very material and opposing concerns.
And from that, let's look at the idea of something like an auction at Christie's or Sotheby's or some other auction house.
Now here you have people who are bidding, directly bidding against each other for material goods that they all want, and they're all in the same room, those who aren't sort of phoning in their orders.
And so they have directly opposing and pretty intense material gains.
However, you still don't need rows and rows and rows of police to separate these people who all have opposing material goals.
When you have a mall where you have a number of stores, let's just say to go out on a limb for a mall, women's clothing stores, which it seems to be is the entire foundation of the North American economy when it comes to malls.
You have a bunch of stores that are in a mall, and they're within the same neck of the woods, and they're all competing for the same dollars to some degree, yet you still don't need security guards to stand between these stores and to make sure that people don't vandalize and call out horrible epithets and throw pop bottles at each other.
If you look at something even more crowded and intimate and immediate, if you look at the food court in any mall, you have all of the Food sort of suppliers, the little restaurant chains or the little fast food chains, all standing around in the same neck of the woods.
Everybody comes in and can choose between them, and still, you don't have vandalism and violence and screaming epithets and the fear of imminent attack occurring in these particular situations.
Well, what's the difference?
Why is there such an enormous difference between religious situations or religious circumstances and things like the scientific community or the capitalist community?
Why is it that in these areas, two areas in particular in society, we see the most hatred and violence?
And it is in two areas.
It is in the realm of politics and it is in the realm of religion.
Well, it's not because it's a zero-sum game.
Because if I've got five bucks and I'm going to a food court, if I buy my food from Mr.
Greet, I'm not going to go to the pizza place and get a slice of pizza because I've already had my food.
So it's not the fact that it's a zero-sum game.
If my wife goes to buy a dress from one store, oh wait, no, she will go and buy dresses from all the other stores, so that's not quite the same.
So it's not that it's a zero-sum.
Every dollar you spend is a dollar you're not spending everywhere else.
So it's not that it's a zero-sum game at all.
It's not because there's fierce competition.
There's fierce competition in the food court.
There's fierce competition in Sotheby's and in Christie's to purchase particular goods in an open auction with the people you're bidding against right there.
Yet still, in these other situations, we do not need an enormous outlay of violence control.
And we're just talking again about a particularly minor incident.
We're not talking about the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition or any of this sort of stuff.
We're just talking about a sort of very minor situation where you need an enormous amount of police protection to make sure that people don't end up killing each other.
So it's not because of competition, it's not because it's a zero-sum game, it's not because the stakes are high or anything like that, because there's lots of areas where that occurs in the free market and in the scientific community where we still don't have this problem of imminent and incipient violence at all times.
No, the real issue, of course, is the complete absence of objective or verifiable or reproducible kinds of situations, truth values or anything like that.
So, if you got together two children and you said to them that you were going to give $100 to the child who could most come up with the perfect mental image of the color purple, Without describing it or anything like that,
if you have two kids and they're both concentrating like crazy, and they're both trying to come up with the most perfect mental image of the color purple, well, who are you going to give the $100 to?
Is there going to be tears?
Are there going to be protestations?
Is there going to be upset?
Are there going to be complaints?
Is there going to be conflict?
Well, of course there is. Because the stakes are high.
In other words, for kids, I don't know, maybe $100 doesn't mean that much to kids anymore, but it sure did when I was a kid.
But the stakes are very high, and there's no possibility of any kind of objective measure of the success of the criteria by which the rewards are supposed to be doled out.
Let's take another example.
Let's say that in a democracy, the political leadership, whoever gets to be in charge of the government, is decided not by the vote count of the voters, but rather by how many votes each politician wants.
So you've got a whole bunch of people running for the presidency or the prime ministership or whatever, And the person who wins is the person who gets the votes that they want.
So, of course, you call up each politician at the eve of the election or just at the end of the election and you say, okay, well, how many votes did you get?
And each politician then says, well, I got all of them.
I got all of the imaginary votes.
I got all the made-up votes.
I got all the votes that can't be objectively counted.
I got them all. Well, of course, that is going to be a rather difficult situation to resolve in a productive manner.
And so what you want to do, of course, is to get a really biased Supreme Court to decide the matter for you to the exclusion of the desires of the voters.
But that's neither here nor there than just now.
And let's sort of take one other situation where you have a boxing match for the heavyweight title of the world.
And the boxers are not allowed to step into the ring, but they must say, they must sort of mentally concentrate on the fight, and the person who wins is the person who most effectively beats up in his imagination on the other person.
Well, of course, there's no objective way to measure whether somebody's conscious or unconscious or anything like that.
The only thing that can occur is each fighter is going to say, oh yeah, I totally beat up on the other guy, I definitely win.
Now, these situations may sound quite silly, but these are all directly analogous to the process of religious decision-making, so to speak.
So, when we atheists talk about religion, we're not saying, as a lot of people say, or a lot of people believe, a lot of us are not saying, well, God is stupid, God is wrong, God...
But there are also very practical reasons as to why we have a problem with the idea of supreme decision-making about the most important things in human life being sort of left up to the imagination of people who are very superstitious.
Because when it comes right down to it, you do have a significant problem if you are a religious or superstitious person at all, which is of course how do you tell somebody else that they're wrong?
I mean, let's just sort of say within the same denomination.
So if you're a Christian, and you think that the war in Iraq is wrong, how are you going to disagree in a really fundamental way with George Bush, who believes that the same God that you worship has told him to go and invade Iraq?
This is a kind of significant question, a very fundamental and very significant question.
How are you going to disagree with the conclusions that other people reach based on faith when you yourself believe that faith is a valid method for reaching decisions?
So, if you are a Christian, and you are opposing the war in Iraq, how do you do it?
Well, of course, you'll quote scripture that says war is bad.
But that doesn't matter, because there's tons of scripture which says that war is good.
So, that becomes...
everything...
The Bible cancels itself out in one form or another, which of course is why it has survived for so long, because it appeals to everybody in all situations at all times.
You can always find something to justify your position in the Bible.
It is like the eye of an insect or a disco ball in how it reflects and scatters back any opinion.
In a perfectly straight line, any opinion that you want to find in the Bible or want to be supported in the Bible, you can find or be supported by.
So, quoting scripture never solves the problem.
Now, are you going to say that if you are against the war in Iraq as a Christian, and George Bush has instigated the war in Iraq as a Christian, are you going to say that he's a bad Christian?
Well, on what grounds could you really be doing that?
God is against war, well, God is sometimes for war.
And it really then becomes very difficult to figure out exactly how you're supposed to oppose this guy.
And the fact that there's no objective criteria for truth or falsehood within religious situations or religious decision making is one of the reasons why conflict either has to be completely not touched upon, right?
Never talk about politics or religion, as I was told when I was growing up.
Because these two areas, you simply can't ever come to any agreement on, because there's no rational criteria for determining what is right and what is wrong.
Now, in science, you're obviously supposed to talk about science when you're in a community, because there's objective ways of determining what is true, what is wrong, what is right, sorry, what is correct and what is incorrect from a scientific standpoint.
The same thing is true in medicine, all of the subsets of science as a whole, mathematics, physics, medicine, biology, and so on.
All of these have objective criteria for true and false, and therefore discussion and debate is welcomed and encouraged.
Not always perfectly peaceful, of course, but never really rises to the same level of violence and hostility that political and religious discussions exist.
You see this lack of civility, of course, fundamentally its most significant broadcasted area in the Western world is in the Republican and Democrat split within the United States, where you have 50% of the population believing one thing and 50% of the population believing quite the opposite in many ways.
Although, of course, they're all for government solutions.
It's just should the government spend money on social programs or the military?
That's really what it comes down to.
Should the violence be directly pointed at the domestic population or the population of people overseas?
That's really the basic difference between the two political parties.
And that's only in theory, of course, in actual practice.
The Democrats howl as much war lest as the Republicans, and the Republicans put in as many social programs as the Democrats, so it's all nonsense when it comes to the rubber meeting the road.
But in rhetoric, of course, they make up these opposite things.
Now, it is really the disposition of power that is forcibly ripped from the necks of the people that political parties disagree on.
Of course, after you have forcibly ripped money and resources and time and lives from the necks and souls of the people, it really doesn't matter what you do with it, which is one of the reasons why you never have any objective answers to these things.
It's like saying, what's the moral way to dispose of stolen goods?
Well, other than restitution to the original owner, there really is no moral way to dispose of stolen goods.
Should I give stolen goods to this guy or this guy?
Well, it doesn't matter.
People will just make up answers that fit their self-interest.
So that's sort of one area in which it's very important to understand that the opposition to religion is because religion, because it's based on faith, which if there is no God, and of course the atheist position is there is no God, then it's pure, it's absolutist fantasy.
It's absolutist fantasy.
This is a combination that is very dangerous, right?
So if you have a subjective fantasy like, wow, it'd be great if I were an astronaut.
It doesn't do anyone any harm.
But if you have an absolutist fantasy, then you have a great deal of difficulty with other people.
It's going to create a lot of conflict.
Now, another area in this book, this is a chapter called Denver, Colorado.
I'll just read a few paragraphs from it.
This is chapter 2.
Denver, Colorado, 1977 to 1983, and it's talking about a gentleman named William, or Bill, who's a Jewish doctor, and he gets attracted to a lady whose name is Anne, and she's non-Jewish.
She's, gosh, I think a Catholic, or at least she's a Catholic, yes.
Now, they fall in love, and they want to get married, and so on.
Now, There is a great deal of difficulty with this.
A great deal of...
a great mess of problems because Anne's parents are Catholics, of course, and this guy's parents are...
Bill's parents are, of course, Jewish and his community is Jewish.
And so what happens, of course, is that Bill says to Anne that she has to convert to Judaism.
And... So what happens is she goes into this conversion class to convert to Judaism.
And so this is what Rabbi Foster asks at the beginning.
He says, I'm giving up the Methodist religion.
Anne answered quite literally.
Are you sure you can do that?
He persisted. Give up Christmas and Easter?
Give up raising her own children with youth choir, family fellowship, summer Bible school and the other staples of her own girlhood?
Give up the common bond of faith with her parents and sisters?
While Rabbi Foster didn't know just how deep the animosity of Anne's family ran, she and Bill hadn't told him, he knew the general pattern all too well.
Once, a bride's mother had confronted him in the midst of a wedding reception to proclaim that her daughter would forever be a Catholic.
Anne tried to allay the rabbi's concerns.
For her, converting was no active impulse made in new love's thrall.
She and Bill had been together for two years by now.
She spoke of Jesus as no more than a great teacher, as Max Frankel had taught, and of her faith in God rather than the Christian Trinity.
All that put her far ahead of the conversion candidates who were struggling with belief itself, like the divorce lawyer who insisted on calling God the cosmic administrator.
So then when she goes through this, she scrubs herself down, goes naked into the water, all this culty stuff.
And then the Rabbi Goldberger asks her,"'Are you doing this of your free will?' he began, reading from a rabbi's manual.
"'Have you given up any form of faith or severed any other religious affiliation?
"'Do you pledge loyalty to Judaism and the Jewish people amidst all circumstances and conditions?' Do you promise to establish a Jewish home and to participate actively in the life of the synagogue and the Jewish community?
He reached the last question, the one that mattered to Anne perhaps most of all.
If you should be blessed with children, do you promise to rear them in the Jewish faith and to have the male children circumcised?
Anne said yes, dropped her head beneath the surface of the water and lifted her feet off the tile.
Allowing the water to touch every cell of her skin.
Emerging, she recited the blessings she had learned phonetically and practiced almost nightly.
Praise to you, O Lord, our God-King of the universe, who sanctified us with your commandments and commanded us concerning immersion.
And then they give this woman a new Hebrew name.
It's a pretty common thing among cults, right, to rename people.
Of course, we do it on the board all the time, but that's because we're trying to learn from the really effective cults and get our own one going in a way that's going to last for thousands of years, too.
Now, this is said, as December arrived and the wedding loomed, Anne installed a tiny Christmas tree in the basement of the house she and Bill shared.
That way, he didn't actually have to see it.
He knew it was there, of course, and he kept reminding Anne that there was no place in a Jewish home for a Christmas tree.
But that lonely Yuletide of 1980, Anne sat beside it, wrapping presents for her estranged family and Listening to carols that she would never again sing, and as she later put it, just saying goodbye to it all and grieving.
Now, this couple chug along in their marriage, but they can't have children, so they begin trying to adopt a child.
The pregnant girl, who approved them as parents, was a Gentile, and she insisted that her child be raised with Christmas.
Without the threat being uttered, Anne knew the stakes.
Agree or risk not getting the baby.
She finessed the issue by pointing out that her family in North Carolina was Christian and surely would include any grandchild in its celebration.
But at a deeper level, she refused any compromise.
She'd already made her decision.
She'd gone over the hurdles.
No way was she going to justify who she was all over again.
She was a Jew.
Now this, of course, again, if you're not religious, and if you just look upon this stuff as rank and corrupting and exploitive superstition, all of these rabbis and so on get paid for all of this, as all the priests do and all the imams do in the Muslim world and so on, Well, look at the amount of human division that is engendered by this.
This couple, let's just say, who knows, right?
I doubt it, because they are a bunch of conformist, empty-souled people who are just grabbing onto this scar tissue I call culture, or the fact that I define culture as scar tissue is relevant, and I've talked about in other podcasts.
So these are some empty-souled people who are just grabbing onto each other, but let's just say that they've gone a little further than most, and that they're willing to marry outside their faith.
Well, actually, I shouldn't quite say that, because the bill forces, or doesn't force, but entices Anne to convert to Judaism.
And so she goes through a bunch of rituals.
She learns a couple of words in a foreign language.
She dunks her head underwater.
And then she agrees, of course, to cut the heads of the foreskin of her baby's penises off.
And I guess that's fortunate enough that she adopted a girl because otherwise they would have had to do that to the boy, which, of course, is rank and brutal child abuse of the most vicious kind.
But this amount of conflict that is engendered by this religious stuff is quite funny.
Again, can you imagine that somebody who believed in one scientific theory versus another scientific theory...
You would not be allowed to marry somebody who believed in a different kind of scientific theory and that your family would disown you and most of your sisters wouldn't come to the wedding and you wouldn't see your in-laws for five years because you married someone outside of a particular scientific theory.
Or can you imagine that if you liked buying clothes at the Gap but somebody else liked buying clothes at Old Navy...
That if you did not get your prospective wife to switch from Old Navy to the Gap that nobody would conceivably ever talk to her and that you would have to have a whole ceremony at the Gap saying that you have now renounced your desire to shop at Old Navy and you are now only going to shop at the Gap and they went through this whole ritual where they cut up all your credit cards and everything that would allow you to buy clothes at Old Navy Old Navy,
and they got you naked and scrubbed and put you underwater and then said, as part of your pledge to now only buy at the Gap, you've got to cut and mutilate your baby's penises.
Peni? So, can you imagine just how that would sort of come across as an advertising slogan, right?
I mean, and that it was now evil to shop at Old Navy and virtuous shop at the Gap and there were all these social sanctions and family dramas.
I mean, all of this stuff is quite Quite ridiculous when you think about it in this kind of manner.
But that's because none of this stuff is real.
There's no greater brutality than absolutist fantasies.
There is no greater source of human dysfunction, of human violence, of the corruption of children than absolutist fantasies.
These things, these rituals, they're all nonsense because gods don't exist, ghosts don't exist, gremlins don't exist, leprechauns don't exist, triads and naiads and Zeus and God and...
The Christian God and Set and Amun and Vishnu, none of these things exist.
They're all pure fantasies.
And so because there's all of this absolutism wrapped up in pure subjectivism, pure fantasy, then we are locked in mortal combat.
Around things that don't even remotely exist.
And the reason that we're locked in mortal combat is because these things don't exist.
Scientists are not locked in mortal combat and do not need security guards for their conferences because, of course, scientists are dealing with that which exists.
And in capitalism, in the food court situation, there's an objective measure for the value of what it is you're providing.
Do people want to buy it for their own particular requirements?
And this is different from religion because religion is something that's inflicted on children when they have no choice and cannot process or understand what is being inflicted upon them.
So the adult need for religion that you see in these people is simply scar tissue from a brutalized childhood where they were dragged off to church and told all of this nonsense that is complete nonsense with the serious-faced absolutism of parental authority as we talked about in a podcast about religion.
The apple at the dinner table.
And so the fact that these people need religion is just not the case at all.
That's like saying that your parents beat you up so badly that your kidneys failed, and therefore for the rest of your life you need dialysis, so somehow it's in human nature to need dialysis.
Well, it's ridiculous. All it is is an after-effect of abuse, and to call it part of human nature is ridiculous.
If children are raised without religion, they don't become religious.
That's almost a universal fact, as you can see from the...
Varieties of Religious Experience that I read about a couple of months ago from V.S. Nightballs Among the Believers, and there's countless other examples of this.
So I just wanted to talk about this example of the kinds of divisions, and these are everyday common divisions.
These aren't big dramatic ones that guys get in their hands cut off because that's what Sharia law says should happen to thieves.
Women who have to walk five paces behind their men with their faces veiled.
I'm not talking about any of that stuff.
I'm talking about stuff that's just a little bit more simple and a little bit more everyday and a little bit more sort of Western, just so you can understand exactly what has occurred, what religion does to human society, the amount of conflict and horror.
That it produces. And, of course, we don't just oppose it because it's false.
It is important to oppose it because it's false, but the belief in Zeus is false as well, but I don't spend a lot of time ranting about ancient Greek and Roman religions, because they just don't have that much effect in the modern world.
I don't spend a lot of time campaigning against the use of leeches to treat cancers because it really doesn't occur that often, and so I don't really spend a lot of my time doing it.
But what does happen is that religion and, of course, politics end up really destroying and undermining the happiness of human existence, and that's why it really has to be opposed very strongly and in a very absolutist manner.
Now, the final thing that I'll say is this question of arrogance that I touched briefly on in yesterday's podcast.
The question of arrogance is very interesting to me.
There is a psychological phenomenon which was also in yesterday's podcast, though not explicitly, called displacement.
So, we were talking yesterday about these snipers who have been killing all these people because a bunch of guys in suits in Ottawa pointed at these guys and said, these are your enemies, and robbed the population to pay for their upkeep.
Flew them over to Afghanistan, and lo and behold, they began shooting people.
And so, what happened was they then got swallowed up in this incredibly hysterical and political witch hunt designed to find moral guilt in a particular situation.
Well, because they were acting in such an evil and corrupt manner, there was an enormous amount of moral guilt in the situation.
And the fact that there is this hysterical witch hunt trying to find out if somebody defecated on a corpse, that that's the real moral issue, is an inevitable result of a great moral problem, a great moral evil that occurs, which people can't process because of propaganda.
it always ends up being a hysterical attack in a sort of related but inconsequential area, right?
So rather than saying, gee, we've been out here murdering people, perhaps that's a moral crime that's occurred, they get hysterically focused on should we, in fact, allow these people to desecrate corpses or not, and that becomes the real moral focus, and it becomes so destructive because it is displaced from the original situation. and it becomes so destructive because it is displaced from So that is something that occurs very commonly.
The most common thing is that people don't like their parents, can't admit it, and so end up reproducing their own parents' corruption, which they experience as children, on their own children.
That's a kind of displacement that's very fundamental.
Now, in this situation, we can see this occurring as well.
So this question of arrogance is very, very, very interesting.
Uh And this is not the first time.
I'm in Spears' commentary on the instant message thing which I talked about yesterday.
It's far from the first time that I've been accused of arrogance for not giving credence to people's belief in a deity when, of course, there's no proof, no logic, no empiricism, no rationality, no reproducibility, no experimentation.
It's all just wild, wild opinion.
And the fascinating thing, and I would definitely call this a kind of displacement, or I guess technically in this case it would be called more projection than displacement.
The fascinating thing to me about this is that when you look at these two opposing methodologies for approaching the truth, one is, in my view, incredibly humble.
And I would say that as a thinker, I do feel, and I think I try to express this as often and as consistently as I can in my podcasts and in my articles, I feel incredibly humble because, as I said in the instant message conversation, it's not up to me what is true and what is false.
My opinion doesn't count for anything, and I try to be really clear about this in my podcast.
When I'm talking about something that's syllogistically provable or where there's significant evidence for it, fantastic.
But when I am talking about something that's my...
Sort of based on my experience and is not empirically provable or syllogistically demonstrable, then I say that.
It's just my opinion. I think it's useful.
It's a sort of fertile ground for the development of ideas, but I'm not saying any of this is true.
I am an incredibly humble thinker in the way that scientists who are great are also, or any scientists who are effective, are also incredibly humble.
If you come up with some theory that the world is banana-shaped, and you go to a conference and you just say, well, the world is banana-shaped, and I believe that, and then people say, well, where's your proof?
And you say, well, I don't have any.
And then they say, well, I've got to tell you, your theory can't be taken as true.
And then you say, well, you people are incredibly arrogant.
Well, I've got to tell you that I think the arrogance there is misplaced.
The arrogance that occurs in religious thinking is not on the part of those people who say that proof is important as a differentiator between fact and opinion.
It is not arrogant to say that God does not exist in the absence of proof, logic or reason.
It is not arrogant at all.
It is incredibly humble. Because, hey, wouldn't it be great to believe in God at times?
Wouldn't it be great when you're scared or when you're lonely or when you feel like your life is meandering or you've lost your way or something bad happens to you or someone you love dies and you're going to meet them again?
It would be great at times to believe in God.
I understand that. I really do.
But it's not up to me whether God exists or whether a belief in God is valid.
It's not up to me. It's not up to you.
It's not up to churches. It's not up to atheist societies.
It's not up to anybody. It's just, is it a fact or not?
Is it provable or not? Is it empirical or not?
Facts and truth, the truth as a criteria, is absolutely not up to us as individuals.
And if you say, because I feel it, it is true, that seems to me extraordinary arrogance.
To say, my opinions, my opinions, Unfounded suppositions, my illogical, anti-empirical, non-provable, non-reproducible opinions define the truth.
I define the truth.
My fantasies are not fantasies, but objective reality.
Well, not only does that seem sort of not on the mentally healthy side of the coin, but is that not the most rank and unbelievable arrogance that you could possibly experience or ever see in another human being?
My opinions are the truth.
Why? Because I believe them.
That is incredible arrogance.
And the psychological mechanism of projection It's something that occurs when a trait that you can't stand in yourself, you then project onto others.
So if you're a very angry person, but you think it's very bad to be angry, then you're going to go around making all these other people angry, and then say, oh, these people are much angrier than I am, therefore I'm a good person.
So when somebody who's religious says to me, you're arrogant because you require proof for something to be more than an opinion, I've got to tell you, I really do feel very strongly that arrogance is occurring in that situation, but it sure is not on my side.
And I think that's the kind of confidence that we need to have.
It's not that I'm telling somebody that God doesn't exist, because the existence of God is not up to me.
I mean, if it were, I'd be more powerful than God.
The existence of God, the existence of the state, the virtue of the police or the lack thereof, the virtue of soldiers or the lack thereof, the ethics of taxation.
None of these things are up to me.
They're not subject to my opinion or your opinion or anybody else's opinion whatsoever.
And to say that it is up to me is a kind of arrogance and rank intellectual irresponsibility that I find particularly troublesome.
So, that's sort of where I wanted to finish up this podcast today, just to talk about this issue of arrogance.
Anybody who says to you that I believe what I believe, and it's true because I believe it, and if you then say, well, that's not a valid criteria for believing that something's true or not, they then call you arrogant?
When you're saying, look, you need to be humble.
Your opinions don't mean anything.
Exactly the same as my opinions don't mean anything.
What means something, truth, logic, empiricism, reproducibility, the scientific method, rationality, all that good stuff.
That means something.
That's where human beings join together.
That's where peace and cooperation occur.
When we give up our mad and angry wills that what we believe is true because we believe it.
That is where conflict, war...
Horror, separation, cruelty, violence, humiliation, corruption, all of that exists in the realm of opinion is fact because I want it to be.
So I think there is arrogance in the interaction.
When somebody says, I believe something is true because I want it to be true.
But the arrogance is not in the person who says that's not a valid approach to truth.
The arrogance is in the person who believes that opinion has anything to do with fact and refuses to submit themselves to any kind of higher power, in other words, higher standard of rationality and empiricism.
Thank you so much for listening. I guess we'll be talking shortly.
It's almost 4 o'clock.
So thank you so much for listening as always, and I will talk to you soon.
Oh, and please feel free to come by and donate at www.freedomainradio.com.
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