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Sept. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:04
435 The Argument From Psychologizing

Sooo, you think you know me better than I know myself?

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Well, here come the Christians, here come the Christians, walking down rational lane.
They don't know if you're bad or good, but they'll damn you just the same.
Hey everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. I don't know what it is.
I am getting a slew, a veritable slew, and that's a technical term meaning a bunch, of emails coming in from our good friends the Christians.
Who are shocked, nay, appalled at my blanket condemnation of Christianity.
And they are couching some interesting questions, and I'm not going to go over old arguments.
I promise! Brand spanking fresh new arguments this morning.
And... I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the arguments that I have been receiving quite a number of.
I'm guessing that through the YouTube world, people are getting a little bit more access to what it is that I guess different people, new people, are getting access.
So if you are a Christian or religious, you may, instead of Taking the approach of saying that I have unresolved issues, that I am irrationally anti-theological, that it's psychological,
like the psychological argument when you're in the philosophical world, not only is it tiresome and not only has anyone who is a philosopher, not only has anyone who's a philosopher heard it about a bazillion times before, but it's intellectual laziness of the first order.
And I'm not blaming people for using it because, again, I... You know, with Christina's help, I... Oh, I got interviewed off of Bureaucrash.
You might want to go Bureaucrash, B-U-R-E-A-U, C-R-A-S-H dot com.
I was interviewed by them the other night, and I talk a little bit about this.
But with my glorious and gorgeous wife's help, I ended up tracing stuff back to the family, power structures and so on.
And so I ended up going sort of all the way back to the root, and of course I know what this means from the standpoint of how you learn to debate or how you learn to argue, but oh boy, oh boy,
I mean... If there's a couple of things that I could do for freedom, one of them would be to, of course, get the kids out of the clutches of public schools, but another thing that I would do is place a universal ban on arguments from psychology.
Now, I know that this might be strange, but To hear, coming from me, Mr.
Argument from Psychology. But, to me, there's quite an important difference.
Now, maybe I'm being defensive and self-serving, and I was beaten by arguments from Psychology when I was a child.
They were all put in a sack, and I was clubbed with them, and that's why I have an aversion.
But hear me out, and see if I can't make a little bit of sense out of what it is that I'm...
my sort of approach.
Now... When you go for a trial in the court, and I know this from having watched some legal shows, you need to establish a couple of things in order to prove guilt.
You need to show that the person has means to That they have the capacity to commit the crime.
So, if the crime occurs in New York and they're verifiably on 12 video cameras in Thailand at the time of the murder, unless they're real big on astral projection, it would seem to be unlikely that they committed the crime.
So, they need to have the means and they need to have the motive.
I mean, this is all outside of direct physical evidence, right?
I mean, if you have direct physical evidence that ties someone to a trial, I don't know, and I don't even know how reliable this stuff is, but, you know, DNA, eyewitnesses, video cameras or whatever, smoking gun stuff.
If you have evidence which ties someone...
To a murder, say.
Then you have evidence.
I mean, if you have that and you have a confession, you don't need a whole lot of motive and you don't need a whole lot of means because the means is sort of included in the fact that they're verifiably placed at the scene of the crime, committing the crime, right?
So that stuff's all fairly well taken care of.
But in the absence of direct physical evidence and in the absence of a confession, right, you need means and you need motive.
So, a crime has to have occurred.
Obviously, there's a huge amount of logical causality that we've just taken for granted, that somebody with a knife sticking out of their head probably didn't trip and fall on it.
It wasn't done by the dog.
A knife didn't spontaneously appear in some bizarre Heisenbergian principle.
The knife didn't spontaneously appear in their head.
It wasn't the Terminator.
That it was a human being who had a motive to kill.
That human beings don't randomly go around killing people.
That there must have been some motive.
So you look for, I don't know, like insurance or a grudge or something like that.
And so the psychology of establishing a fact or establishing the motive is important.
But psychology alone It's irrelevant, right?
I mean, psychology is what you use once you have narrowed down your suspect to generally one, and you then use psychology to understand the motive because that's the final piece of the puzzle, right? It's not the first piece of the puzzle.
It's the final piece of the puzzle.
So, in this realm, when people are listening to me talk about You know, religion or the state or whatever, and they then immediately jump to psychology, then it's absolutely irrelevant.
It's absolutely irrelevant. It's sort of like if I'm some detective, a DRO detective, let's hope.
I'm a detective on a murder case, and a beautiful woman gets murdered, then I'm going to sort of sit down with my captain, and I'm going to say, Ah, you know, she was a beautiful woman, and it's well known that women who are not as beautiful physically, who are plainer, are generally jealous of beautiful women.
So, this is New York, 10 million people, half of them are women, and we can assume that about 95% of them are not as attractive as this woman, so that narrows it down to just under 4 million suspects.
Let's go start interviewing.
Well, that might be thought of as casting a little bit too wide of a net.
And, of course, what would probably happen in the real world is that the police would say, oh no, there's a bunch of women who are slightly less attractive who compete with this woman in the model world.
I need to go and interview a thousand models.
That would be the general cop approach.
But there's an example of where you just start casting the net around in terms of psychology without having anything refined.
Now, if you're at a mathematics conference, and again, I apologize for the simplicity of just about all my scientific metaphors, but me no so bright when it comes to the science, man.
And I don't think that was Jamaican, just in case I don't mean to offend any Jamaicans.
I have no idea what accent that was.
Perhaps it's from the home world.
Who knows? So, if I'm a mathematician at a conference and you're putting forward the proposition, a whole bunch of mathematicians are putting forward the proposition that 2 plus 2 should equal 5 in order to prove a theorem which proves global warming, which gets them a billion dollars in grants, right?
So, they're willing to subvert the truth and their own integrity and their own standing with the public in order to get a hold of a pretty vast vat of cash, right?
Sort of vaguely understandable, but still not particularly a good act.
And so I am vociferously arguing against this, right?
So appealing, and I'm passionate about it, and I'm appealing to their professional integrity that they should not be bought or buyable, that they should not sell out, that they blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You get the general idea.
And I'm very passionate about this.
And I even get angry, let's say.
And I'm still making jokes, and I'm obviously not out of control, but I get angry that my professional colleagues, who I care about, I care about the health of their souls, there are some of my friends in there, that...
My professional colleagues are all willing to jump onto the statist bandwagon and lie about what is in order to get a hold of money.
And I see very clearly as a philosopher what that is going to do to their souls, how they are going to be suckered into doing this, how they are going to end up buying a bunch of stuff, but they are not going to end up enjoying any of it, and they're going to end up sitting in the rubble of everything that they've bought, which gives them no pleasure, Their love for their wife is going to dry up.
Their love for their children is going to dry up.
Their love of their profession is going to dry up.
And so they're going to end up completely hollowed out brutal and end up brutalizing their children, all for the sake of a bunch of money that they won't even enjoy after they get it, after the initial euphoria has worn off, right?
And you end up still, you know...
Somebody said, I mentioned this once in a coding format, in a coding context, but it's very true for moral decisions as well.
He said, you know, we always had to do everything quick and dirty in terms of writing code.
And he said, now the quick is gone and all we're left with is the dirty.
And that's very true when it comes to most moral decisions that are tempting, right?
Tempting. That there's some immediate gain that you're looking for.
Like all we had to choose was between the money and happiness and now the money is gone or we don't enjoy it and we're not left with the happiness anymore.
The happiness is gone too.
Greed and misery, right?
I mean, we were greedy, so we did something miserable, and now the greed is worn off, and all we're left with is the misery.
I mean, there's lots of ways that you can look at this statement.
It's a very good way of putting it.
It's very concise. Gee, I wonder why I envy things that are concise.
Oh, well, who could figure out that psychology?
That's all far too deep and incomprehensible for us, isn't it?
But in the...
So in this realm, you can't just look at psychology first.
You have to narrow down your sort of list of suspects.
So if all you see is the video of me arguing passionately against my mathematical colleagues selling out their souls for the sake of a couple of state shekels, Then, are you going to immediately assume that...
And all you see and you don't understand what the heck we're talking about or what we're arguing about, all you notice is that I'm upset or I'm angry or I'm passionate or I'm whatever, right?
I'm charged up.
Are you going to immediately assume, since you don't know anything about what we're talking about, are you immediately going to assume...
That I am playing out, unconsciously and with no self-knowledge, some sort of childhood abuse.
Right? I mean, I certainly have been frank in putting it out there that I did not have the happiest childhood.
I certainly didn't have the most miserable childhood in the world by, like, billions, right?
But I would say sort of below average for sure.
And I have done that in order for people to be able to understand that...
I mean, there's a couple of reasons I've done that.
I don't want to get into all of them.
But first of all, honesty and frankness is important.
The other thing, too, is that because I'm sort of opinionated and professionally successful and so on, I wanted people to have a sense of where you could come from.
You know, like if somebody's walking tall...
That's really good, but if they were born with multiple sclerosis and then you see them walking tall, then the cure they talk about that they have applied to themselves might be just a little bit more believable, right?
Because once you understand the vast distance that somebody can come...
Through the understanding of an application of philosophy within their own life, I think it becomes a little bit more compelling.
And of course, I'm not faking any of it.
I did have a bad childhood.
And I am professional, successful, joyfully married, happy, and content in my adult life, which is...
It's rare for people even who are raised fairly well, and nobody's raised really well these days, but people who...
That's rare. But I've managed to achieve all of this from a pretty wreckage-strewn, horrendous, abusive childhood.
So, you know, it's kind of like the before and after shot is important.
And also, a lot of the people who listen to this went through similarly bad childhoods.
And I wanted to sort of give them a sense of what's possible on the other side if they're willing to go through the rehab, right?
If they're willing to go through the physical and mental and emotional and spiritual rehab, what's possible on the other side is something, you know, I'd like to hold out a carrot, I guess you could say, because I had to fight my way through all of this stuff without the carrot hacking my way blindly and with only philosophy as my guide.
And I thought that having come through the thicket, Of dysfunction to the clear meadow of happiness?
Oh, the metaphors are not working this morning, but that's okay.
Having sort of hacked my way through it, I wanted to sort of turn back and shoot a flare-up for other people, right?
It was psychologically very dangerous for me to do it on my own.
It was great risks of despair, and it was like having to run across a narrow rickety bridge in the dark with no handrails while being attacked by bats.
Hey, that's not bad.
Anyway, at least I got dark and bats together.
So, you know, I've talked a lot about my childhood, and also I wanted to talk about personal experiences that have helped me to illustrate philosophical principles.
And the reason that I do that is that there's nothing wrong with talking about the economy of Chile, but it's fairly far removed from the kind of freedom that I think is more important than political freedom, which is personal freedom, right?
So if I'm going to talk about personal freedom, there's no point in me talking about characters in books, and there's no point in me talking about The economy of Chile, and there's no point talking about Job in the Bible.
You have to talk about yourself.
The whole idea behind the show is the logic of personal and political freedom.
Personal always coming first.
And so, how could I simply talk about personal freedom without talking about personal obstacles to freedom in my own history?
It would be disingenuous to the point that it would almost be called false and hypocritical.
So, of course, I've put my history out there, and naturally, what comes then is a bunch of people who, when they disagree, and it's quite a few by now, people who disagree with what it is that I'm saying, come across with this approach, which is, well, Steph, you had a bad childhood, and that explains belief X, Y, or Z that you hold.
Now, I've talked about how this is an appeal to insecurity and so on, and all this, that, and the other.
But there's sort of two major points that I think are important to understand when somebody comes at you as they will, inevitably, whenever you have firm beliefs that offend people's illusions, especially if those beliefs are rational, then they're going to use the argument from psychology.
And the first thing to ask them is that the argument from psychology only really works when a theory is false.
When a theory is false, but passionately believed in, then the argument from psychology can be helpful.
Right? I mean, that's...
If you have a confession and you place someone at the crime, establishing motive is not such a big deal.
arguing the psychology is not such a big deal.
So, the first question to ask when somebody comes at you or comes at me with an argument from psychology is to say, oh, okay, so what you must have done is found out that my argument is false and... so what you must have done is found out that
Now, because I am passionately devoted to an argument that is false, there is possible indication of emotional scarring, of some sort of lack of self-knowledge, or, you know, however you want to put it.
There are all of these kinds of possibilities.
And so let's start talking about those, right?
Because if the murderer says, I wasn't at the scene of the crime, right, then that's a thesis they're putting forward that you believe is false.
And so if you can bring up some circumstantial evidence and then, you know, prove motive and their alibi falls through, you're beginning to get sort of the reason beyond a reasonable doubt kind of situation that you need in a legal case.
And I know that the laws are run by the state, but all of these come out of fairly community-based common law standards from the British tradition, so originally they weren't statists in nature, right?
It's just how people developed the capacity to establish truth from falsehood after they gave up on having people reach into fires to pull out rods to see if they got infected from the burn and whether God had cursed them as guilty.
So... The first thing that's important is to try and understand, is the argument true or false that's being proposed?
If the argument is true that is being proposed, then the psychology means nothing.
It means nothing.
So let's say that the entire reason that I passionately talk about philosophy for an hour and a half a day is because of my unhappy childhood.
It's because of my brutal and unhappy childhood.
But so what?
All that says is that people have a motive for what they do.
There's certainly no direct causal relationship between having an unhappy childhood and having a love of philosophy.
Because the vast majority of the planet has an unhappy childhood and very few of them have any love of philosophy.
So, there's no correlation whatsoever between having an unhappy childhood and having a love of philosophy.
And so that causality doesn't mean anything.
And if you say, well, whatever you love, it has been caused, whatever you do has been caused by your past, right?
If that's, I mean, this is the argument for morality, and everybody knew this was coming, but I just wanted to show you how flexible and powerful it is, right?
So when a Christian says to me, you do what you do because of your past, right?
That you have a love of philosophy, or you have a...
A dislike of religion because of your history.
Well, fine. That's a principle that somebody is putting forward.
Now, if it's binding upon me, then it must be binding upon everyone.
In other words, if it's something that is put forward as a principle rather than just an opinion, if it's just their opinion, then of course I don't have to listen to it at all.
But they're putting forward this thesis that I do what I do because of my history as a principle.
And as a principle, of course, it must be universal.
If it's not universal, then it's just a made-up nonsense opinion.
Like, I think this pig should fly.
You don't have to think it.
The pig certainly doesn't have to fly, because it's just a made-up nonsense opinion.
But as soon as somebody puts something forward as a universally preferred behavior, which is that people should believe that what they do is based on their history, then of course, well, my friend, it is universal and preferred.
If I do what I do, if I love what I love and dislike or hate what I hate because of my history, And not because of any truth in what it is that I propose or believe.
Then of course the same thing is entirely true of religious people.
You certainly don't rescue God by blaming my motives on my history.
Because then that means that your love of God is entirely based on your history.
Your belief in the existence of God and your passionate devotion to Yahweh is entirely based on your history.
And your motive for defending God is entirely based on your history.
Right? See, the thing people don't understand...
Oh, I wish they would just understand it.
The thing that people don't understand is as...
William Goldsmith talks about in Lord of the Flies, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
Whatever you plunge into the heart of your brother, you plunge into your own heart as well.
Now, you may not notice it, your brother may not notice it, but it happens nonetheless.
And so everything that you use that is an unjust attack upon somebody else's integrity is all the more so an unjust, well, a just attack on your own integrity.
So if a Christian, as they vociferously and voluminously do, say to me, well, Steph, your anger and dislike of religion, your anger to and dislike towards religion, is based on, is entirely derived from your history.
Okay, let's say that that's true.
Right? Let's say that it's true.
Then the principle is that what somebody loves and hates is an effect or a factor of their history.
That it is an effect of their history.
Then, of course, a Christian's love of God and dislike of atheism is a product of their history.
Her history doesn't mean that it becomes true.
In fact, if positive beliefs are a function of history, right?
Let's just take the principle at its face value, because, as I've said before, principles that are false in their root can be accepted at every stage of the syllogism and disproven.
Let's take it as true.
All beliefs that one has are a functional result or are caused by directly one's history.
Right? Then opposing beliefs is a rational thing to do.
Even if it's totally caused by your history, it's a rational thing to do.
Because then all positive beliefs which are believed to be true are a function of history.
And not a function of truth or evaluation of reality.
And so an atheist who is opposing a Christian is actually far more in the service of truth than a Christian is in opposing an atheist.
Because an atheist says there is no God.
A Christian says there is a God.
And he's anthropomorphic and we should worship him and he listens and he intervenes but he doesn't intervene and blah blah blah blah blah.
And he has moral rules that he himself doesn't obey but I'll think he's all good and blah blah blah.
And so the Christian, in putting forward a positive universal belief, but of course all positive universal beliefs are based on history and therefore are not true, except for that positive universal belief, the Christian, by putting forward a positive universal belief based on his history, is acting in a far more irrational and incorrect manner than an atheist who is saying that this universal positive belief that there is a God is incorrect.
Even if the atheist is acting from his history, he's still more right and more true than the Christian.
But of course, that's not what Christians mean.
What Christians mean is that your reasoned logical beliefs derive from empirical reality supported by swathes of philosophy and argued for in closely rational and empirical terms.
Forget about the passion, right?
I mean, just look at the rationality.
That Steph's beliefs are rational, derived from an enormous amount of study and logical rigor, and those beliefs are false.
Those beliefs which go against the grain of everything that he was taught.
I absorbed the same bullshit in Sunday school and church and state schools and all the way through university.
It was a constant pressure of conform to irrationality and be rewarded.
So, although Steph has surmounted all of the prejudices he was taught as a child, although Steph believes something directly contrary to the prevailing winds of his culture, although Steph decided against a career in academics and teaching because he would end up in a situation of significant compromise, which is not to say that other people wouldn't, I just couldn't figure out a way to do it, because Steph has done all of these things, and because Steph uses rationality and evidence for his argument, Steph's beliefs are false.
And Steph's beliefs are false, and Steph doesn't know it.
Steph has no idea that his beliefs are false.
And this is despite the fact that Steph has done countless self-examination exercises, written books, kept a journal, gone to therapy for years, despite the fact that Steph has a psychologist for a wife, Who is incredibly acute and perceptive,
and cute, but despite all of these things, despite the fact that there seems to be no correlation between a bad childhood and a love of rationality, and a passion for philosophy, despite the fact that I have reversed all of my former opinions, including being a minarchist as of a couple of years ago,
despite the fact that I have closely reasoned arguments, despite the fact that I display a fairly prodigious amount of self-knowledge, Despite that, somebody who doesn't even know me, who's just listened to a couple of podcasts, knows that I am psychologically motivated for what it is that I say, that it's scar tissue, not rationality, and that they themselves are not.
Right? That's a fairly important thing, right?
They have to believe that I am motivated by psychological reasons and that they are not.
Of course, what they do is, and this isn't just the Christians, I mean, it's a lot of different people who comment on what it is that I say, is they will not argue against my arguments.
They will not point out the logical flaws in my arguments.
That doesn't mean that there aren't any, it just means that they don't choose to point them out.
Generally, the arguments that come back are, you know, threefold, and I've mentioned one or two of them before, but, of course, the first one is that I'm ignorant, that I'm taking things out of context, and I'm doing that because of my own psychological motive to believe something that is not true just because I want to, right? And, of course, that has nothing to do with...
That's not Christian projection or status projection at all, right?
To be attacked... For believing something based on emotional, incoherent, psychologically motivated scar tissue history terms is a far more apt description of a religious bigot or a religious person Than it is of a rational philosopher, in my humble opinion, right?
For reasons that I'm sure we don't even have to bother going into because we've become somewhat nimble with our understanding of the psychology of projection, I think, after these, lo, these many podcasts and vidcasts.
So, the first one is the argument from ignorance, which is then, once I am passionately ignorant, they have to give me a motive, right?
And so the motive is, I had a bad childhood, and so on.
And so that's sort of the second thing that they go with.
And, gosh, what was the third?
Ooh, I was doing so well. One tangent, and I dropped the ball.
Ignorance, psychological motivation...
I can't remember. Anyway, it might come back to me.
But there's certainly no rational rejection of my arguments, right?
There's nobody who sits down with me as a friend.
Of course, there is a lot of hostility in these emails and a fair amount of...
Oh, sorry, I remember the third one.
The third one is that I know nice Christians, right?
You say that teaching Christianity is...
Somebody emailed me this morning and said, you say that you've used the term soul murder in terms of teaching people about teaching children religious principles as if they're true.
And I keep waiting for the proof, right?
It says, I keep waiting for the proof.
You claim to work empirically, I keep waiting for the proof, right?
Now, of course, I still feel the threat of giggles that occur for me whenever a Christian demands proof of me, that I provide proof for my propositions.
Well, of course, they take as faith.
The basis of their belief, where there, of course, is no proof or evidence for and plenty of logical reasons and evidence against the existence of a deity.
But they're all about the proof, right?
So, when a Christian demands proof of me, I just, again, I still find that quite funny.
But... The third argument against what it is that I say, which of course is not rational, is they say, well, I know very nice Christians.
So this person says, I'm still waiting for the proof.
I know many, many, many people who have been raised as Christians and who are not damaged in the way that you say.
So there's empirical evidence against what it is that you say, and therefore...
You're wrong, right?
This is the sort of result that you get from these arguments.
I know nice Christians. You say that Christianity is corrupt.
I know nice Christians. Therefore, you're wrong.
No. Sorry, that doesn't hold any water, logically.
First of all, it's hearsay, right?
I mean, it's like me saying, I know the murderer, he's a nice guy, so he didn't commit it.
And everyone going, oh, okay, you know him, he's a nice guy, so obviously he didn't do it.
Well, of course, the question is not, does somebody think that you're a nice guy?
The question is, what do you actually do?
What do you actually do?
And I'll talk more about this in the podcast scheduled for this afternoon.
Wait, let me check my imaginary schedule.
Yes, the 28th at 5.15.
We will be launching into this topic.
Yes.
So, if I say, if somebody says to, oh, I know the murderer, he's a great guy, he would never do it.
You don't, so that's hearsay, right?
Even if somebody says, oh yeah, the murderer confessed to me and there's no evidence and I have a motive to get rid of this guy, It's not admissible. So, of course, this guy, whoever it was, writing to me saying, well, I know nice Christians, therefore your philosophy of anti-religion and your belief or your argument that teaching children bigoted, false, detrimental things is not child abuse,
Is incorrect, because I know nice Christians.
And this is a common sort of emotional appeal.
It's complete nonsense. It doesn't have anything to do with anything.
I don't have the chance to examine this guy's friends.
The one thing I will say is that this guy who's writing to me obviously has very, very little self-knowledge, has almost no capacity to reason, which is, again, exactly what you would expect.
From Christianity. Christianity irradiates the capacity for introspection in an objective way, right?
Because introspection in an objective way threatens faith, right?
Because once you start looking for your own psychological motivations, then by golly, you end up in a situation where you are...
In danger of coming across your own capacity or desire for faith as a psychological motivation, and that is going to destroy your religious sensibilities, right?
So, religion, or the faith, whatever it is, faith in whatever, right?
Completely irradiates and destroys the capacity for introspection.
Introspection then becomes a danger which must be studiously avoided and which will anybody who suggests it or approaches that need to look at your own beliefs in an objective way relative to reality, not relative to your own desires.
That kind of introspection is very bad for faith, right?
So faith, of course this guy doesn't have any capacity to introspect.
And so, of course, he projects that lack of capacity to introspect onto me, right?
So he says, you, Steph, are motivated by things that you don't understand, when, of course, the truth of the matter is that he is motivated by things that he doesn't understand, but he can't accept that.
The truth remains the same, so it has to be projected onto somebody else.
He also says to me, Steph, you believe what you believe because of your history, when, of course, the truth of the matter is that my history contradicts everything that it is.
You would never be able to predict from my history that I have become who I became.
And so, but it would be certainly easy to predict that somebody who's raised as a Christian all the way through is a Christian because of being taught to be a Christian, right?
And people don't sort of wake up...
You know, people wouldn't wake up if they were dropped from a plane on a desert island as babies and survived somehow.
They wouldn't wake up and come up with all the cosmology and fables-based stories and horrible metaphors of Christianity, right?
They'd come up with some, I don't know, palm tree worship or something.
So, of course, Christians are Christians because of what they're taught, right?
They're not Christians because there's some revelation from God.
Because if revelation from God were the key, you wouldn't need the Bible, and you wouldn't need Sunday school, and you wouldn't need the endless indoctrination of children about a kind of bigotry and hostility to rationality and the self, and...
Objective analyses that occur, the destruction of children's minds that occurs during the teaching of religion, not as, here's a dangerous fable that lots of crazy people believe, but this is an absolute truth that you'll go to hell and be thrown out of your community if you don't believe.
That's called a cult, right?
So, this guy is totally projecting, and of course, given who he is, then...
That I'm perfectly aware that he is trying to get me to doubt my own position by using principles that damn him infinitely more than they damn me, and of course maybe thinks that I don't notice that.
But what I can say is that this person who is embedded in the dominant cult, who can't think for himself at all, who refuses at this point to think for himself, because now he's listened to my podcasts, at least he has a reasoned, I won't say true, but he has a tightly reasoned and passionately put forward contrary viewpoint, and all he's doing is attacking it on emotional and irrational and hostile terms.
And hypocritical terms, right?
Demanding proof of me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But this gentleman is...
Who he is, psychologically.
And so, can I draw any conclusions about his friends?
The psychology is all-dominant in this area.
So this gentleman I would put into, not hopeless, but certainly very frightened, very angry, very lonely, very corrupted by false bigoted thoughts in the religious sphere, and heaven knows what other spheres he's been abused by, who is embedded in a community that and heaven knows what other spheres he's been abused by, who is embedded in a community that will absolutely attack him, should Now, who is he going to be surrounded by when he's in this psychological state?
Well, it's sort of like asking somebody who is addicted to masochism, what kind of sexual partners are they going to choose, right?
I mean, it's not brain surgery to figure this kind of stuff out.
Or it's like asking a really good-looking guy who's a metrosexual, what are the odds of him going out with an overweight woman?
Not too high, right?
If you look at a woman who is gorgeous, what are the odds of her marrying a bus driver or a janitor?
Well, not very high.
And if they are, you would look for psychological motivation for that, right?
Because women are perfectly aware that beauty is a kind of coin that you can get well paid for.
So... I think that, certainly for myself, when this man says, I know lots of people who are raised as Christians, and they're all great people, and they're not unhealthy at all.
Well, he doesn't even know how unhealthy he is.
So, how on earth could it be the case that he would be able to judge the health of other people?
Right? This is, I mean, this is an exaggerated metaphor, so I don't mean to imply that this gentleman is in this category at all.
But if you're in a trial, and I appear as a character witness to somebody who's accused of murder, and I say, oh, he's perfectly normal.
The guy is perfectly normal.
He doesn't do anything wrong.
Everything's totally fine. I don't know what you all are so fussed about, thinking he's such a bad guy.
And then it's proven that I'm a murderer, who is a character witness.
Would that have any effect on how you viewed my testimony?
Would it make you think that the person I was testifying that they were perfectly normal would be A... More likely to be a murderer, or B. Less likely to be a murderer.
Well, I can't help but imagine that you would believe that if I'm saying that somebody's perfectly normal, and there's nothing wrong with him, and I turn out to be a murderer, then it's going to be your opinion that my friend, both through association and through my characterization of their behavior as normal, It's more likely, not less likely to be a murderer, right?
So this guy is saying, well, my, you know, I know tons, I have tons of friends who are raised Christian and they're all normal and healthy, but he himself is mentally very unhealthy and destructive.
And sadly, it's not the case, of course, that I then look and say, oh, well, his friends must be perfectly healthy because, of course, given who he is, his friends are going to be as unhealthy, if not more unhealthy than he is.
So, this is just sort of what I wanted to get across.
I'm not sort of putting forward any tightly reasoned theological arguments, but I'm certainly putting forward a tightly reasoned argument for morality.
And I'm not going to reiterate it here, because you have the rewind button if you want.
And of course, whenever I reiterate, I always think, gee, these podcasts could be a lot shorter, but sadly it's raining here in Toronto.
The weather is really bad, and that means that, of course, nobody's moving in terms of traffic.
So, I hope that this helps.
Thank you so much for listening. It's been a few dry desert days of donations, and so if you are enjoying these and would like to cough up some shekels, retch up some fur balls of cash, I would hugely appreciate it.
It is... There are costs and so on for running all of this stuff, but more importantly, there's time.
And more importantly, I generally like to feel that what I'm doing has value for people.
And if they don't cough up any change for it, then I sort of end up with the belief that what I'm doing is not providing an enormous amount of value for people.
And that sort of lowers my motivation a little bit.
And so, if you want...
I mean, I'm going to sort of say, oh, I'll quit if you don't send me money, because I think that this is something that I sort of want to record for the future as well as for the present.
But as far as donations go, they do make me feel good.
They make me feel enthusiastic.
And I do believe that, you know, when I sort of say 20 bucks a month, you can cough up for this sort of stuff.
What I sort of mean by that is that...
It will signal to yourself, to your own soul, your own unconscious, that philosophy and truth and virtue and goodness and all those juicy positive topics is worth as much to you, say, as a coffee every two days.
That's sort of where it moves it up, bumps it up a little bit in your hierarchy of values and will certainly help you in your pursuit of truth and virtue yourself.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, I will talk to you, my brothers and sisters, all too soon.
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