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Nov. 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:50:46
506 Call In Show Sun 13 Nov 4pm - Religion

Agnosticism, religion and the spirituality of power

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Hello, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux.
This is the mythical but not quite podcast 500.
We're actually podcast 506 or 507.
I've got a few in the can that are waiting up on me to get some stuff finished.
So thank you all so much for joining.
I really appreciate it. This is Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio, the one of the few in-car shows in the history of the world, I think.
Thank you so much for joining.
Really welcoming everyone who has joined recently on the boards.
We're up to, I don't know, 310 board members.
We've had a jump of 50 or 60 over the past week or two.
And that's good. So I really appreciate that.
There are people joining in. A fantastic conversation that's going on there.
And the way that this is going to work, for the people who are just joining, who haven't been in before, the way that it's going to work is that there is a chat that is running along, and you're welcome to join that and to post questions there.
Unfortunately, there is a wide variety of noise and static when I unmute everyone.
So if you do have a question or a comment, Hello.
I truly appreciate it.
But I'm going to have to just ask you to go into the chat window to do that, just because otherwise we get the noise of infinite worldwide static, like we're listening to every bad dream on the brain of the planet.
So we'll do it that way.
Now, you can also try your self-mute, which would be helpful as well.
Self-restraint would be excellent in this area.
I certainly don't have any problem with you being more proactive in your chat, but unfortunately, if you have a self-mute, that would be excellent.
I'm just going to try and unmute. There's a little mute button there.
If you could do that while you're not talking, that would be beyond excellent.
Let me just end. It's not the best thing in the world to work with Skype to do this mute and unmute thing.
It's kind of sluggish. All right.
So I'm afraid I'm going to have to go back to the mute.
So anyway, just as we get started here...
Okay, so let's get started.
What I'd like to do today is to go over a little bit in the realm of agnosticism versus atheism versus religiosity and sort of share a couple of my thoughts about it.
I did a pre-podcast on this earlier this week, so if you download that one, you might notice a few similarities, but I wanted to go over a couple of themes that I see as relevant or valuable in the realm of agnosticism versus atheism so that If you are interested in these kinds of topics, that there is some structure or some layout of thoughts that might be of use to you.
Now, of course, we've got no problem with the idea of religiosity, that somebody believes in a god or a deity, usually monotheistic, although I guess we have Wiccanism as the fastest growing religion in the United States, so there are some options around that, I guess you could say.
But more importantly, we have the two worlds of atheism and agnosticism.
Now, agnosticism, and let me start with atheism, it makes it a little bit easier.
Atheism is the positive proposition that there is no God, that the deities and gods do not exist, that you cannot have things like consciousness without form and life without birth or death or any of these sorts of things.
So that's sort of one form of atheism.
It is a positive proposition that God does not exist.
Now, an agnostic, on the other hand, usually sort of falls into one of two categories.
The first category would be usually something called a deist.
And a deist is somebody who says that God does exist, but God doesn't interfere at all with creation.
It's also known as the sort of watchmaker theory, like God just wound up creation at the beginning of time and it's sort of ticking on its merry way through to its conclusion without any particular interference.
From God at all. And this was very common in the 18th century.
It was the majority of the beliefs of the people who founded the United States of America was not Christianity but deism.
So there was no point praying because God didn't intervene or interfere in human life.
And it really was a way of explaining the origin of the universe without getting into some of the complications of organized religion.
So that's sort of one aspect of an agnostic.
Now the second aspect of an agnostic is somebody who says...
That no meaningful statements whatsoever can be made about the existence or the non-existence of God.
So you can't say that God does exist.
You can't say that God doesn't exist because there's no particular logic or sense or empirical test Whatsoever to say that God does or does not exist.
There's no way that this can ever be proven one way or the other, and therefore the most rational, wise, and intelligent response to the question of the existence of God is simply to sit back and look upon the atheists and the religious people sort of like they're squabbling children and you're the wise mother who's sitting back and saying, you know, I don't care who's right, I don't care who's wrong, y'all kids just better stop fighting now, you hear?
So that, I think, is sort of the three areas, right?
There is a God and he interferes.
There is a God and he doesn't interfere.
And there is no God at all.
Now... To talk about the term atheist for just a moment, it is one of these problematic terms, and it is a real challenge for people who are atheists to deal with this term in a way that is not annoying, either to the atheists or to those who are criticizing or questioning the atheist position.
The reason, of course, is that the root of the word atheist is against God, anti-God, like asymmetrical is non-symmetrical, of course, so A is sort of anti.
So when a person says that there is no God, rather than we can't decide, or who knows, or who cares, or it's a personal belief, or this or that, when somebody puts forward a positive proposition that there is no God, then that person is put into the camp of atheist.
And the problem with that, I think, or at least the problem that I'd like to put forward and talk about Is that if you are sort of scientific or take a rational approach to talking and thinking about the world, It's not that you sort of, you know, a rationalist doesn't sort of wake up in the morning and sort of, you know, scratch whatever's itching and stretch whatever's cramped, look around and say, I am now going to be against God, right?
Any more, I would say, than if even if you're religious, you don't wake up every morning and say, you know, scratch what itches and stretch what cramps and say, you know what, I'm really going to focus all my energies on being against leprechauns today.
It wouldn't really make any sense.
Now, it certainly would be the case that if you were scientific and took scientific methodologies as valid approaches to saying that something is true or false, then it would be a natural consequence of that scientific approach to life that you would not believe in leprechauns.
I mean, that would be an inevitable consequence.
Now, if you look at it sort of like grammar, like typing, right?
So we got a hundred monkeys in a room, right?
So obviously the window's open.
We have a hundred monkeys in a room and they're all, you know, typing for bananas.
Sometimes this is fairly close to my grad school situation, but we can get back into that another time.
And they're all typing for bananas.
And these monkeys are, you know, chittering and exciting and jumping up and down on their hind feet or hands or whatever the hell you call them.
And they're typing madly away on their typewriters.
Now, of these hundred monkeys, every now and then, you're going to get a sentence.
Just out of the sheer random fluke of everything, you're going to get a sentence out of these random monkeys.
And if you are interested in sort of grammar, logical sentence structure, you'll go, okay, well, that's a sentence.
So we have 10,000 nonsense pages and we have one sentence.
Now, I don't think that it would make much sense if you were sort of interested in grammar and so on to say, okay, we have one sentence here and we have 999 nonsense sentences.
I really hate sentence number 500.
I am anti-sentence 500.
It's not even that I'm pro the logical sentence, like that makes sense and it's logical, but I'm really, really, really anti-sentence 500, because that's the one that makes no sense.
But of course they all make no sense, except for the one that just happens to make sense.
So the problem with the term atheism, and the reason why I think it leads people to a lot of confusion, is...
That it is defined as being somebody who's against God.
And that's really not the case with atheists.
I mean, I guess there are a few who, I don't know, like rabidly anti-God and so on, but atheism is really a byproduct of a whole load of other philosophical ideas around the need to validate things through sensual evidence, right? So if you can't sort of touch, taste, or feel it and so on, then it's not true.
It doesn't exist. If it's illogical or if it's self-contradictory, then it doesn't exist, and so on.
And so a logical Euclidean geometrist would say that a square circle does not exist, right?
A mathematician or somebody who's entered into geometry is not going to say, well, I don't know whether a square circle exists.
They're going to say, well, a square circle doesn't exist because it's a contradictory notion, right?
So I think that the question of saying, is it valid, logically and scientifically, to say that God may or may not exist, there's nothing sensible that can be said about it, or that an atheist is defined as somebody who's against the idea of religion or God is, I think, a false idea.
It is something that is very problematic, and it puts a lot of confusion into this realm.
Because, I mean, I'm sure it's no great shock here that I am what you would call an atheist, but I don't really think of myself that way.
I think of myself as an angel of pure dance.
No, wait. Sorry, that's a different show.
I think of myself as somebody who's interested in rationality and logic and so on, and the use of the scientific method in philosophy as well as in all the hard sciences.
And so as a consequence of being interested in evidence and reason, you have to get rid of the concept of God.
But you don't sort of focus on the concept of God, right?
Like if you're driving from New York to Chicago, you don't say, well, the sole purpose of my journey is to drive away from London, England, right?
That's not the case. You do happen to be driving away from London, England when you're driving from New York to Chicago, but that's not the purpose and definition of your journey.
You just happen to be going away from London, England because you want to get to Chicago.
And in the same way, when you use the scientific method and you use rational philosophy to determine or to evaluate the truth value of propositions, 2 plus 2 is 4 versus 2 plus 2 equals a flying fish, then you are inevitably led away from the concepts of supernatural beings like gods and devils and gremlins and leprechauns and unicorns and so on.
Pegasus and Griffins and Banshees and Nymphs and Dryads and, you know, you could go on and on.
It seems to be quite a cottage industry of this, except for Hobbits.
But there really is...
It's not that you're against these things at all, right?
Any more than, you know, you're against Santa Claus.
I mean, nobody sort of wakes up and says, damn that jolly fat fellow, I'm going to bring him down because he represents all that's evil in the world.
Although I think Santa is an anagram of Satan, which will be next show's topic.
But it's not that atheists are against God or anything like that.
It's just that if you're going to have a standard for proof and disproof, and not just say, whatever anyone says goes, which of course makes nothing true.
If it's like, anything anyone says goes, and that truth is just whatever people happen to say, then there is no such thing as truth.
Then even saying that...
Anything anyone says is true is not itself true, right?
Because then it's just a subjective opinion of yours.
So you either sort of have logical empirical truth or you don't.
There's not a lot of halfway measures there.
And if you do have it, then you're kind of driving from New York to Chicago, which means that you're leaving a whole bunch of stuff behind, but that's not why you're doing it.
That's not why you're doing it at all.
Now, the last thing that I'll sort of say before turning it open to our cardinals who've joined us is that agnostics, in my view, and this is in my humble opinion, so I'm sort of putting my bias right up out front here on the table, so I hope that you can let me know if I'm being unfair to religious people.
Or to agnostics in particular.
I sort of view agnosticism as a horrible form of intellectual cowardice.
I view agnosticism as more irritating than religious fundamentalism.
I view agnosticism with a peculiar kind of disgust verging on hatred.
So I apologize if you are an agnostic.
This doesn't mean that my opinion is true.
I'm just sort of putting my bias, if that's what it is, sort of right up front here.
And the reason that I feel that way about agnostics, because agnostics simply refuse to make a decision in my viewpoint.
At least a Christian or a Muslim or whoever are saying, God does exist and he loves me and he hates you.
At least that's a positive proposition that you can kind of get behind and get into.
But the agnostics simply won't come down on either side of perhaps the most important fence in the world, which is science versus faith.
But the reason that I really dislike them is because this is the only place in their life that the agnostics use this particular methodology, right?
So let's just say I set up an eBay shop for agnostics.
And I set up an eBay and I say, I'm selling special agnostic iPods For $100.
They're 80 gig iPods with the nice TFT screens and all that kind of juicy stuff.
But only agnostics can apply.
Then I say 100 bucks and they send me, so agnostic guy, we'll call him Steve, Steve sends me 100 bucks and I send him a box, right?
And Steve says, huh, okay, great, my agnostic iPod is here.
So Steve opens up the box and there's a lot of packing foam, right?
And he roots in with his excited agnostic fingers into the box of packing foam and And unfortunately, all he comes back with is the fingers he went in with, because there's no iPod in the packing phone, right?
And he then sends me a bitter and angry email saying, I didn't send you.
You didn't send me the iPod that I paid you for, you eBay bastard.
You're a nasty guy.
And I write back to him and say, I did.
I did. I did send you the iPod.
And he says, you did not.
It's an empty box. You want me to send you a photo of this box?
And I say, no, it's in there.
It's just invisible.
And he says, well, what do you mean it's invisible?
I didn't ask for an invisible iPod.
And I'm like, well, write down the fine print it says that the iPod is invisible.
And he says, well, okay, if it's invisible, how come I can't touch it?
And I say, well, because it's not only invisible, it's also incorporeal.
You can't touch it.
Right? And it's like, what?
I say, well, you can't see it and you can't touch it.
Oh, and just in case you're going to ask me this next, you also can't see it on any infrared device.
You can't measure its gravity.
You can't measure its weight. You can't measure its dimension.
It doesn't give off any electrical signals.
There's simply no possible way to detect the iPod, but it's really there.
Now, I ask you, you know, as reasonable, intelligent, thinking human beings, would the agnostic then say, well, I guess you're right.
There's no real way to determine whether this iPod is here or not, so I'm not going to ask for a refund because I don't know whether or not you sent me the iPod.
I mean, just, we're not asking for brain surgery here.
We're just asking for a little consistency with how people live their lives.
We're just asking for a little consistency in how people live their lives.
Adam Smith said something in the realm of economics where he said, what is prudence in the affairs of a household can scarcely be folly in the affairs of a great kingdom.
Yes, all we're asking is for people to have a little bit of consistency between how they live in the details and how they live in the grand philosophy of things, right?
So where Adam Smith said, what is prudence in the affairs of a household can scarcely be folly in the affairs of a great kingdom.
So if you run up more debt than you can pay, that's a bad idea for you, so how could it be a good idea for a country to do it?
Well, the same thing is true in the realm of philosophy.
If you're going to be shipped an empty box and not then say, well, I don't know if I have an iPod or not, but say, come on, Who are you trying to kid, you scam artist, you mid-Atlantic-accented flim-flam guy?
Of course you didn't send me the...
You'd laugh at somebody like that, right?
But that's really all that's being asked for in the realm of philosophy is for people to accept that if somebody ships and something is an empty box and they don't remain...
They say, well, there's no way I can answer that.
Then, of course, they're kind of not mentally well, right?
So why would it be in the realm of determining the existence or non-existence of something?
Why would we have these two enormously different methodologies?
I mean... The one is, of course, the basic scientific method extrapolating from the evidence of the senses, using the faculty of reason, looking for experiments and reproducibility, and so on.
Oh, look at that. We're back.
Okay, sorry about that. I'm not sure that I want to go to the beta, given that this is what happens with the real software, but I will edit that out.
I do apologize for that exciting blast of sound.
But all we're really asking for when it comes to agnosticism is for people to apply the same standards of truth to the question of the existence of God as they would to the existence of every other proposition in the world.
Why would there logically be this massive counter-exception to this argument that you do need to have some rigor and logic and proof behind the existence of a certain thing?
And, of course, not only is there no proof of the existence of God and conspicuous counterproof, certainly around the virtue of God, but even more importantly, God himself is a blatantly self-contradictory notion.
And, of course, if I were to go up to a group of biologists and I were to say, ah, I am a biologist.
I sort of went to my own university, but I'm really good.
And what I've done is I have found and classified a fish.
It's a new species of fish, and it has feathers.
And it flies through the air, and it lives in trees.
I don't really think that the biologists would say, well, I guess we can't really determine whether or not that exists or not.
What they'd say is, well, you may have found something, but it sure as heck isn't a fish.
What you've described there is a bird, right?
Or if I say to a physicist, I believe that, or I have proof that something exists.
We'll call it a quoxar, that the quoxar exists, and it has gravity without mass, but every time you try and measure the mass, it switches to gravity, and every time you try and measure the gravity, it switches back to mass faster than you can think, right, and put up all of these negative proofs for something existing.
Of course, a physicist isn't going to say, well...
I don't know whether what you're talking about exists or not.
The physicist is going to say no.
Unfortunately, it doesn't exist.
If you claim that there's, for instance, mass without gravity, then that's a self-contradictory concept, and therefore that thing doesn't exist.
So from all that standpoint, this is why I sort of view it with a kind of Peculiar loathing.
I guess it's not that peculiar. Because the whole problem with agnosticism is they're creating a case of special pleading or a case of an entirely different methodology and approach to determining whether something's true or not.
And the fact that they do that around a very contentious issue like religion leads me to believe that they simply don't like arguing with people about religion.
And that's fine, too. I mean, there's nothing wrong with people saying, well, you know what?
I have my own opinions about the existence of God, but I don't debate them with people because it's too explosive.
I've got no problem with that.
That's a perfectly valid approach.
I wouldn't necessarily say the most courageous, but I could certainly respect the approach.
But that's not what agnostics do.
What agnostics do is they say it is a logical error to say that there is a God or it's not a God.
So they make a virtue out of withholding themselves from the fray, and I think that's the part that bothers me the most about the agnostics.
Alright, how far did I get before I got cut off?
You had just ended up agreeing with me.
Ah, excellent. But then you said you were going to be blacking out for a little while and then coming back.
I'm sorry, you had gotten to the part where you were talking about a Christian putting forward the proposition that there is a God, and then you were mysteriously silenced from above.
So this God that doesn't exist just silenced me in the middle of proving...
No, anyway. What I was saying is that a Christian puts forward a theory stating that, okay, God exists and here's his description.
I will give you all his qualities and stuff like that.
Well then, it's pretty easy to blow a hole in that theory and say, okay, no, that's an incorrect theory.
Thanks for trying. An atheist comes along and says, okay, there is no such thing as God at all, and here's a bunch of stuff.
Well, since there may be something completely beyond human ability to recognize or to see or to experience or whatever, we don't know.
And so the agnostic says, well, I don't really see any evidence for any of this stuff in the supernatural realm, so why would I bother putting forward a theory at all?
I mean, it just... It's not like we have to go around yelling and screaming that...
I'm sorry, that's kind of a passive-aggressive language there, but we don't go around saying that I am an A-Elphist, I am an A-Trollist, I am an A-Unicornist.
We just don't bother saying that there's a unicorn out there or there's not a unicorn out there.
It's just because no one's ever seen one, so why bother talking about it?
Right, people don't debate Zeus a lot.
Yeah, so it's kind of like, you know, I don't think that being an agnostic is really inconsistent.
I think it's very consistent because, I mean, people weren't able to see x-rays before they developed x-ray film and stuff like that, or they were able to somehow some other way detect it, but that didn't mean that x-rays didn't exist.
It just means that no one ever said, hey, there's something called an x-ray.
And so an agnostic is just saying, well, you know, so far we don't have anything called a god, but...
Just because we haven't detected it yet doesn't mean it's not fair.
Right. Okay.
That's a perfectly valid viewpoint.
Let me take a stab at it and then you can let me know what you think.
Well, the reason that we don't say that we're a trollish or against trolls or Nazgul or whatever...
It's because there is, you know, and this is a bit of a practical argument.
You can sort of accept it or not.
I'm not going to say this is a clincher, but it's because there really aren't those people out there, right?
I mean, there aren't a whole lot of people out there who believe in Zeus and wage war and, you know, get all this high dungeon about the existence of the gods of Olympus.
And so given that people don't really believe in that era, then there doesn't really seem to be much point Going around disproving it.
Like a scientist is going to want to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.
They're not going to want to go back and disprove medieval alchemy because nobody really posits it or invests any time or energy into it.
So it's not a debate that I think needs to occur.
I would absolutely agree with you that why would you want to put the time into disproving something like that because nobody believes in it.
There's not a lot of debates about slavery anymore.
Except at my house on chore day.
On the other hand, though, religious belief is enormous and incredibly influential and powerful throughout the world, and there has been some pretty credible estimates, although, of course, there's a lot of fringe statistics that are hard to pin down.
Credible estimates that up to close to a billion people have been murdered in religious wars throughout history.
So I think that by saying that religion It's not something that a thinker needs to address and to oppose.
I think just from a practical standpoint, It seems a little bit, and I don't mean this in terms of you, I'm just sort of talking the abstract.
It seems a little selfish.
You know, like if there's a plague going on and a doctor says, I'd rather play golf.
I mean, you know, in a sense that seems kind of selfish and there is a sort of plague of religion in the world in my view.
And so I think that people do need to take a more positive approach to debunking that.
And the second thing that I would say, before turning it back to you, is that X-rays don't, like, if somebody posits the existence of X-rays, that does not contradict any of the known facts of nature, right?
So if somebody says, yeah, there are these things called Z-rays or something like that, and that's what Superman uses to look at women's underwear, then, of course, we're all going to feel a moment of envy, and then we're going to continue on, and we're going to say, well, okay, how do these things work, and so on.
And if somebody puts that forward, and that doesn't contradict any of the existing known laws of physics, Or biology, then I think we'd all be like, well, good luck, heavy burden of proof, I'll certainly buy the sunglasses, but that's not impossible.
But the problem with the positive proposition that consciousness exists without matter, that life exists without material form, that a mind exists without matter, that life exists that was never born and will never die,
And these things which we've talked about in the show before, the contradiction between omniscience and omnipotence, so that if God knows everything, then God knows everything that's going to happen in the future, which means that God can't change it, which means that God can't be both all-powerful and all-knowing at the same time, that kind of stuff. I think that's where it really is then a big mathematical theorem It may or may not be true, and if somebody's not a very good mathematician, we may not spend a lot of time doing that.
But if we see at the very bottom that their first premise is that 2 plus 2 is 5, then I think we can't just say, well, I can't decide now.
Right. I think all that makes perfect sense when you talk about the omniscience and omnipresence and all that stuff.
I'm completely on track with you on that one.
I guess what I'm...
What I'm more or less referring to is that when we refer to the supernatural, we may just be referring to something that is not yet known to be natural, because anything that does exist, obviously, is natural.
There's no supernature in stuff that exists.
Well, you've never seen me break dance, but I think I understand what you're saying.
Maybe that's super freak?
I don't know. Absolutely.
But what I'm trying to say, though, is that, you know, maybe what if science someday It gets its head wrapped around the whole Clemson physics, you know, conundrum right now that they're saying that, well, what if we have all these different universes,
yada, yada, yada. Is it possible, perhaps, that all people, you know, all life forms are gathered together in a giant superbrain or something like that, and that superbrain is God because it creates, the superbrain creates its own universe to live in or something like that.
Creating a dream that we then live in or something, and we're all just these little neurons playing around in it.
You know, we don't know any of that stuff, and we probably won't for a long, long time.
But, you know, does that fit a description of God?
Well, probably not the traditional one, but it certainly doesn't really fit.
It doesn't jive so much with our current understanding of the natural world.
So there just may be some new physical laws that we just haven't discovered yet, but they're still playing an active role right now.
Now, does that describe God?
Who knows? But, you know, I'm not saying that there's a being out there, like you said, an omniscient being that's all-powerful and all stuff like that.
No, I absolutely agree with you.
There isn't that because it's impossible.
But, you know, again, I'm just going to go on to this other thing when you said that there's a doctor playing golf rather than helping people during a plague.
Well, we're still kind of, I think we're doing this at least Consistently with what we've been talking about on the rest of Free Domain Radio here, too, is that when we have messed up families that it's pretty apparent that they're not going to, you know, fix themselves, then we defoo from them.
And so we have a bunch of messed up people who are not going to fix themselves with regard to their messed up religions, so we can pretty much just walk away from them, too.
Do we have to engage with them all the time, or can we sort of, I guess, defoo from the religious people?
That's my question. Well, a good turn of the conversation.
I wasn't expecting that, but that's no problem.
I appreciate that. Let me just jump back to your first one, though, because it's a lot easier to answer.
And what I'll do is I'll spend a really long time answering it with the hopes that you have then forgotten your second question.
So I'll just be perfectly upfront with you about that.
So I'd like to sort of be clear about that.
If it were the case, and I know you're not putting forward anything like this as a theory, but if it were the case that we sort of came across, you know, that we're all atoms in a giant brain or we're cells in a giant brain in the way that, you know, liver cells are part of our bodies and so on, if that did sort of come together and there was an aggregate of intelligence throughout the universe and so on, then sure, you could label that aggregate of intelligence a god, right?
The same way that you can label an aggregate of fish a school.
But you wouldn't be inventing anything there.
You wouldn't be creating anything.
Nothing would be greater than the sum of its parts.
When you put the word around forest, around a group of trees, you don't add any more trees or atoms or anything like that.
So if there was some giant brain that we were all a part of, then we would call that giant brain whatever we wanted, but it wouldn't change the physical nature of reality.
And the second thing is that We, of course, haven't discovered everything in the universe, and we may never do so, but there is still the barrier to accepting a particular proposition in the realm of science, which is that it has to identify observed phenomenon in a non-contradictory manner.
So I don't think I even need to repeat that.
I think that's fairly clear. And so we can be fairly safe in saying that science will never accept something that is innately contradictory that has no evidence.
So if there is evidence for God, then God won't be religious.
God won't be faith-based.
And everyone who believed in God prior to evidence would still have been completely incorrect.
So if I have a belief that all Oriental people are fabulous basketball players, then if it ends up being proven at some point that they all are, it would still be a kind of prejudicial bigotry, although not perhaps a very negative one, for me to believe that beforehand.
So the problem is that in opposing religious belief, you're absolutely on solid ground because they propose something that is innately self-contradictory and We're good to go.
They're still completely incorrect for holding those beliefs now because they're doing it using the wrong methodology.
If I'm blindfolded and happen to drive through a maze of pedestrians without knocking any over, that doesn't make me a good driver, that just makes me pretty lucky because it's not reproducible and that's the problem with religious approaches to truth.
Now, the second question, can I just ask you, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but it seems only fair you did it to me.
Is this an issue that you're facing yourself, that you are more on the rational side of things, not just because you listen to this show, but...
No, no, it must be because you just listen to this show.
But is this something that you're facing in your personal life, that there are religious people in your life that you have this problem with?
Oh, definitely. Yeah, I mean, my...
Well, my parents are religious, and they keep on pretending that I'm religious, too, so they ask me if I've gone to church and stuff like that.
That's one of the main reasons that I'm looking at depoing myself.
But again, I absolutely do agree with you.
I mean, I don't mean to avoid this question.
I think that you are aware of my...
We're just two people with a hot potato, aren't we?
Right. Hey, hey, I think one of the monkeys is typing.
So, yeah, I mean, okay, so continue with this.
Let's just stay on this for a little bit.
What were you meaning by asking that?
Well, I mean, first of all, I think it's generally more relevant so that I know sort of at what level of sort of immediacy to talk about, whether to be very abstract or more personal, and whether it was sort of an abstract question for you.
And whether it's sort of more personal, because, Ian, there are principles, which is all wonderful, and we definitely, at least I worship the altar of principles, to mix my metaphors, but when it comes to actually putting them into practice in life, I've certainly found in my experience in history, however pure the principles are, it's not always exactly a three-point landing, bringing them to bear in my own life.
I guess I could say, then, that when I think, when I'm pondering this whole atheism, agnosticism question, I don't think that what I'm doing is trying to make excuses for myself as far as not confronting my parents and things like that on this, but what I believe that I'm doing is trying to say,
you know, I mean, I would gladly and frequently engage in conversations with religious people stating that, no, I do not believe that your God exists, and I can explain to them why.
And I do absolutely agree that, you know, The existing religions that you see around the world right now are just missing completely in their theories.
It doesn't make any sense the way they talk about these gods that they've created.
But once I've said to those people that, okay, your god doesn't exist, I'm saying your god doesn't exist.
But then once I say that, I'm pretty much done with the conversation.
I don't need to then...
Go on and make my own theory about what the nature of the universe is.
And again, I'm sure that when we say that...
When we use the word God, of course, it's really heavily loaded with all kinds of connotations.
So when we say atheist, yes, I'm atheist in so much as theism requires the human construct of religion.
Absolutely, I'm atheist in that sense of the word.
I guess I'm just...
Maybe I'm just hung up on definitions, but again, the one thing that bothers me about saying I'm an atheist is it seems like I'm then defining myself as a derivative of the other people in the world who are theists.
It seems like my definition of myself has come as a result of someone else's erroneous theories.
Right, and you also are then associated with communists as well, which is pretty much on the Nazi side of the moral spectrum, so there's that problem.
I'm atheist, but I'm not a communist, right?
Right, and so Greg just typed into the chat here that it's a reaction formation, so that's kind of what I feel like.
Why should I have to be defined as a reaction to someone else's Correct.
Yeah, sorry.
I'm not sure if you caught at the beginning.
I did sort of talk about that, that atheism as an oppositional philosophy is not very satisfying in terms of creating positive approaches to life.
So I'm certainly with you there.
Now, let me ask you a couple of questions, if you don't mind.
You were raised religious?
Yep. I was in a Lutheran church growing up.
Oh dear. Honey, can you send him a card?
Can we just get your address? We're going to send you a...
So sorry about the...
What was your experience of that as you were growing up?
I remember very distinctly several times when I was growing up being terrified by things that I heard in church.
We had a minister who...
He wasn't like complete fire and brimstone every Sunday, but every once in a while he'd be kind of fired up.
And he would use very...
Descriptive, emotionally laden language quite often.
I remember just walking out of some, or just being in some sermons, kind of feeling like I was trapped between my parents on either side of me on the pew there, thinking, I really don't want to be here.
I want to be somewhere else.
And I also remember coming home from Sunday school a couple times and just thinking, I don't ever want to go back there.
You know, like the stuff that, I think I've always had a pretty decent experience Compass in my head as far as, okay, this is total garbage and this seems plausible or, you know, it has trueness to it, you know.
And so I always, every time I was, you know, encountering these things in church and Sunday school and stuff like that, I just kept on feeling that, you know, this is the garbage side and I just don't want to be around these people because they just made me genuinely uncomfortable deep down in my, you know, in my psyche, I guess.
I also remember, Greg just had a post earlier today about some, I guess there's a passion play theme park down in Orlando now, and this jogged a memory in me that I hadn't even thought of for many years.
I just remembered that when I was a very, very small child, probably one of my earliest memories.
My parents took my brother and me to a passion play, and I guess, you know, the guy playing Jesus, all I remember from this play I remember absolutely no other details with this, but I remember after the Jesus guy was crucified and put up on the cross, he thrashed around violently and screamed and stuff, and there was flashing lights and everything.
It was absolutely just shocking and terrifying to me as a child.
You don't see a whole lot of that on the Barney TV shows.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, Barney's terrifying enough, but man, this is like...
This is the stuff of nightmares for a little kid, you know?
Absolutely. No, I feel for you for sure.
Sorry, go ahead. And so I was just saying on the...
I lost my word for this.
On the forums today, you know, how...
It just really infuriates me when I think about how my parents, you know, systematically, you know, it seems like they broke me down emotionally as a little child.
I mean, it was just terrifying to go through those first years When I was first developing my language skills and how the world outside of my home works, so much of it was filled with going to church.
It was awful.
Now, was there any sort of spillover of this within the home in terms of disciplinarians, right?
I mean, one of the problems with people who are religious, particularly on the sort of punishment side, is that there is this sort of basic belief that children are born bad, right?
Born bad. And that if sort of left to their own devices, children will sin and do bad things and be selfish and so on.
And that the only way really to reason, sort of quote, reason with a child is through some form of threat or some sort of overbearing use of authority in some manner.
Was that, did that sort of translate into your own home out of the church?
No, I wouldn't say that it directly translated to the way that my parents treated me.
I guess it was, and that's what was, I think, I think that helped me to pull myself away from religion when I got a little older.
I was always kind of resisting going to church and stuff.
My dad said, oh, you're going to church until you're confirmed.
And then once I was confirmed, I stopped going.
But the one thing that, if I look back at my childhood with my parents, one thing that is kind of interesting about the whole comparison to Christianity is that my dad was very much the fiery...
Yelly type, you know.
He never really directly yelled at us kids, but he would just scream flaming death at inanimate objects and stuff like that.
You know, he had a really fiery temper.
And then my mother was the passive-aggressive, very, you know, touchy-feely, you know, type mother, you know.
So it was almost like we had the Old Testament God and the New Testament Jesus right there raising us, you know.
It was really kind of...
It's funny when I look at it that way that, you know, Dad was always the angry god and the clowns that was down in the barn screaming at his machinery for breaking down.
And my mom was the Jesus that was right there walking amongst the people.
I'm trying to teach the passive way of living and, you know, don't ever get mad at people that have done you wrong and all that stuff like that.
So it was interesting.
Well, I guess you learned that, right? Yeah, absolutely.
If only the Old Testament God had been angry at inanimate objects, the world would probably be quite more heavily populated than it is now.
We could smash Saturn into Uranus or something like that.
Who knows? Now, this is a sensitive topic, so I don't want to tread all over your history or put any sort of words into your mouth, but it's my understanding that when you see a parent exhibiting violent behavior, it is abusive whether or not it's directed at you.
Absolutely. So the fact that your father was sort of yelling and screaming and punching his tractor, however much good that hit him, is a pretty negative experience, right?
I mean, the terror that you felt at church was probably to some degree related by the terror that you felt with regards to your father's temper.
Absolutely. And it's not generally considered a good deal of protection to say, well, he'll punch up the tractor but not me, right?
That's not the division that children make in that sort of environment of violence.
And so, you know, your original question was, it's shocking, I do remember it.
Your original question was, you know, what do I do with regards to religion with my family?
I would say that that would probably be rather secondary.
Right. To discussing these kinds of issues, right?
That you had opinions that in your family were not respected, right?
So you weren't allowed to choose whether you went to God's house or not.
You weren't allowed to choose whether you went to Sunday school or not.
You weren't allowed to say to your dad, Dad, it scares me when you punch up the place like that.
I feel really bad.
And so I would say, I mean, there's nothing wrong with talking about religion with your parents, but I think that what would probably be more immediate and would give you more of a stronger sense of the potentials or the lack thereof in that relationship is to sit down and talk with them about your childhood, if that makes any sense.
It does make a lot of sense.
And one thing that's been going through my head a lot lately Especially with my mom.
They're divorced now, so my parents live apart and I speak with them at separate times.
But with my mom, I've been increasingly getting the sense lately that when she talks to me, she's speaking to her, you know, quote-unquote son.
She's not speaking to me.
And so when I start to discuss some of these really important topics with her that I think, you know, my past with my family, And the way I view politics and religion and things like that, she very quickly zones up and tries to steer back to this discussion that she's having with her I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I just want to really sort of make sure that I understand that distinction because it's not very clear to me.
So can you just tell me what the difference is between your mother viewing?
Is it like generic G.I. Joe's son?
I'm not sure I understand that categorization between you and the son.
Right, okay. So when I say that generic son, yeah, it's pretty much G.I. Joe's son.
It means that she has an image in her mind of what You know, she wants her son to be.
And that son, you know, has a lot of my qualities.
You know, he's a successful engineer and he, you know, does well at work.
He's respected by his peers, things like that.
And that's fine because that's part of me.
But then when it comes to the part that really, really means something to me, the really important stuff, the stuff that's really making my life worth living lately, is that's the stuff that belongs to just Rod.
And the generic son doesn't quite get it, you know.
So the values that exist for you in your soul, independently of her values, don't exist for her.
Right, it's just like she can't quite see that.
It's almost like an apparition that floats just to the side of me is this son that she's always talking to.
And I hate to be annoying.
Sorry to interrupt.
I hate to be annoying semantic guy, but I just want to point something out that may not be clear to you just because I can see from the outside.
So, you know, this is not anything to do with that.
But your mother can absolutely, totally and completely and perfectly see your values.
I just sort of wanted to point that out.
Because if you say I can't see these rocks whenever I sail my ship around.
but every single time you sail your ship perfectly around those rocks, it could well be said that you do in fact know where those rocks are.
So if she's continually able to divert the conversation away from your values, then she's Perfectly aware of what your values are and how important they are to you and the choice that she makes.
I mean, this is not to sort of dog on your mom or anything, but just logically, right?
The choice that she makes is to specifically reject your values.
It's not that she can't see them.
She chooses to reject them.
Absolutely. And it's very apparent because this same behavior, every time, you know, my important topics come up, that same glaze falls over her eyes and she immediately starts to, you know, shake her head and say, I don't understand.
And so I do know that she sees it.
And it's just that whenever she sees it, she walks away from it.
Yeah, and she understands it enough to know that she better not end up understanding it.
Absolutely. Because it's going to be threatening to her worldview and so on.
Right. And in fact, I think I mentioned this earlier to you about...
I was having a conversation with her a few weeks ago when I was at home.
And she said that, you know, I wish that you wouldn't talk about that stuff with your brother because he just doesn't understand it.
And that's when I said, well, yeah, he does understand it.
And as soon as I started directing the conversation toward her and the way that she reacts to the stuff, then magically she didn't understand it too.
Right, right.
Now can you think, because of course the relationships that we have with our parents are mostly around the history and a certain amount of tertiary obligation in the present with a sort of rising obligation in the future when they get old and sickly, but Can you think of any areas in your life wherein the problem with having your values, and not just your values like, you know, I like jazz, but, you know, these are the real hardcore, positive, juicy, human virtue values, right?
I mean, it's in truth and philosophy.
I mean, this is not just a particular preference like NASCAR versus carriage racing.
But can you think of any other areas in your life that this problem of having all of your values continually rejected has shown up elsewhere?
Let's see.
Actually, not that you mentioned it, I hadn't thought of it this way before, but I frequently get the impression that I'm a very creative person.
When I work as an engineer, I'm supposed to be a left brain type person.
I move papers around, I make drawings that are very accurate, things like that.
And engineers aren't seen much as creative people, but, you know, I do have kind of a left-brain, right-brain type of approach to things.
And so when I try to bring forward that right-brain creativity in my work, a lot of times it just sort of falls on deaf ears with my, you know, my engineering peers because they just don't quite get that whole, like, you know, the chaotic nature of Creativity can be a little bit frightening to very logical people sometimes,
I think. You know what I mean? Listen, I'm a writer and a programmer, so I certainly do understand that you get that googly-eyed Roger Rabbit thing going with quite a few people in your life when you think outside the box, and I certainly do get that reaction quite a lot.
And I imagine that that's not obviously very pleasant because of your history.
Right. Yeah, and I think I really do kind of bridle at that often.
And I've gotten sort of used to it, so I'm trying different methods for bringing forth, you know, hey, why don't we try this crazy idea type stuff, too.
And, you know, it takes quite a bit of self-deprecation sometimes, and other times it takes just some firm assertion.
But, you know, it still is.
It's always an ongoing difficult thing for me working as a mechanical engineer to To say, hey, let's be crazy and creative for a little while.
It's a very difficult position to be in sometimes.
Do you mind if I ask you how old you are?
31. 31.
Okay. I'm going to give you a very off-the-cuff piece of advice.
And, of course, I don't know you very well, so I apologize if I'm missing the mark.
But this is sort of what's bubbling up in my brain.
The times when I've been most satisfied as a left brain, right brain person is when I've actually had authority, right?
When I don't have to sort of manipulate and cajole people into, you know, please, you know, let me have a little porridge of creativity, sir, you know, in that sort of Oliver Twist kind of way, that when I was on the entrepreneurial side of things and I was the core coder for the system that I was working on, I could be as creative as I wanted and didn't need to consult anyone.
And what I would suggest And the reason I asked your age was because it would seem to me that this would be a good time to seize the day that way.
I would suggest that you have the capacity or potential to take on those kinds of leadership roles where you don't have to – you can sort of come up with the ideas and tell people what to do, which is going to give them that level of comfort.
In every field, right, there's a couple of people who are creative, and there's everyone else who tries to clamp them down.
I mean, that's just – I don't know why that is.
I'm not even going to try and hazard a guess on the fly, but – It absolutely is the case that the tall poppies get cut down and the nails that are sticking up get pounded in.
And so the people who break through that, the people who break through that do enormous good for the planet.
They become the leaders, they become the people who liberate other people through their own lack of fear.
I would suggest that it's entirely possible, and I would say probable, That you have this capacity for this kind of leadership and the designer for this kind of leadership.
But until you clean things up with your past, you're going to be stuck because you're still going to try and avoid the pain of having your creativity overridden because really that's what was happening.
I mean, one of the most awful things about religion, as I've mentioned before, is the degree to which it cripples the personal imagination because your own capacity for creativity is entirely crushed Under this mad weight of other people's fairy tales that are taken as absolutes.
So you can then only imagine and think, if that's the right word, Within the sort of metaphors that other people have given and created for you.
So human race moves forward quite a bit on imagination, and if you are, and I certainly believe you, a left brain, right brain kind of guy, then I would say that the compelling reason, and this obviously will show up in your personal relationships as well, that the compelling reason to focus on this stuff with your family would be to liberate your capacity for leadership And so you don't end up at the end of your life looking back and say, gee, you know, I could have been a whole lot more creative, but man, you know, it was just too hard.
Right. You know, it's funny that you say that because recently I have been thinking of becoming, you know, more entrepreneurial with my career.
And in fact, one thing that's kind of interesting with my current career is that...
Over the last couple of years, as I've been, you know, really delving into this, you know, libertarian theory and then later anarcho-capitalism and then into the Freedom Man radio with the personal relationships and stuff, I've noticed that my assertiveness and my strength at work has been increasing a great deal.
And it kind of, you know, just hit me up.
It surprised me one day.
One of the guys who is, I guess, Two levels up in management.
For me, one day, we were in a meeting and he just kind of said off the cuff, just as a joke, yeah, Rod's going to be leading us someday.
Right, right. At first, I was just like thinking, oh, that's funny, but then I later thought about it.
I was like, you know, you might be right.
I might actually, you know, I do sometimes feel like I have, you know, more of a big picture, chess player type perspective on these things sometimes than the guys who are managing me, too.
Yeah, I absolutely believe that.
And so the question of which we started with, which was, you know, do I reject family members based on their religion?
I would say that that would not be the right approach to take at the moment.
And to focus on the religious aspect of things wouldn't be the right approach to take at the moment.
But I think that you need to, and I sort of generally recommend this, but I'll mention it again here, that it's a very, very important thing to do in terms of self-liberation.
To get to the truth of the relationships in your life is very, very important.
Life is short, and you don't want to, and I'm not suggesting that you do, but you don't want to live in a fantasy camp of, well, I have these obligations because I want to be a good son, and I have these obligations because I want to be a good daughter or a good husband or a good whatever, right? I mean, of course, there are obligations when you have kids that I'm not going to get into here, but you don't want to have imaginings about your relationships.
You want to have the facts. You want to work empirically, not out of a sort of habit or history.
So I would say that with both of your parents, if possible, but certainly with your mother, It's important that you sit down and not take no for an answer, and not in an aggressive way, but just in an assertive way to say that I really do need to talk about these things because I think that my history is really holding back my potential.
The joy in life comes from achieving your potential.
Again, that's Aristotle's definition, which I'm perfectly happy to work with, but you have an enormous amount to offer the world, and you have been historically really, really held back by your family.
I would say explore that kind of stuff, and the religion is really just a What's the symptom of that?
Right. Yeah, actually, when it comes to my own experience, or my journey toward the beefooing, I think, myself, I've been thinking more or less about when I do confront my parents about this stuff, it's not going to be so much about, like, here's all the crap you did to me when I was a kid, and I hate it now.
I'm going goodbye. But I want to do that, you know, walk toward the middle of the cage thing that you spoke of earlier in podcasts.
You know, it's going to be the, you know, hey, I'm here.
I know you can see me, but why do you keep on talking to this, you know, quote unquote, son over here?
You know, and so it's definitely going to be a thing where, you know, I want to tell my parents that I really do genuinely want to have a healthy relationship with you.
So far, it's not healthy.
And, you know, if we can make a healthy relationship out of it, then fantastic.
If not, then so be it.
I'll have to go. I agree with you on that.
It really has helped me a lot to hear other people's defluing experiences, Greg and Nathan especially.
I think I'm on the right track.
Hi, Rod. It's Christine.
Hi. Sorry about that.
I got confused by the echo of my own voice.
With respect to what you were talking about with meeting your parents and telling them...
Sorry.
Microphone issues. No, sorry.
I just wanted to make sure that I can't hear you.
Go ahead. Sorry about that.
Just the conversation that you want to have with your parents, not about these are the things that you did to me when I was a kid, but this is the kind of relationship I want to have now.
It'll be very interesting to see what they say to you.
If you say to them, well, I feel like you don't listen to my ideas, and they say something like, oh, no, no, that's not true.
You can use that as evidence for yourself.
It may not be worthwhile to try and point it out to them because you're going to constantly, I think, I'm guessing you're going to be constantly rejected in that way.
They're going to say, everything that you say to them will come back, oh no, we want a relationship with you, you're wrong.
Once again, what's the word I'm looking for?
Rejecting you in the present.
Yeah, my mother is really She has a black belt in emotional manipulation.
So, I mean, it's one of the things that I need to, you know, really strengthen myself for before I try this because, you know, I still do, you know, it's not It's not hard to injure me emotionally in those ways.
Well, it's never hard for our parents to do it, right?
That's one of the reasons why you can't have...
If you don't have a good relationship with your parents, you have a bad relationship with your parents.
There's nothing in between because they just have too much historical authority and power with us.
Yeah, and there's so many levers that they can pull that they've set up in my mind over the years.
It's going to be something where I'm going to need to wear some pretty thick armor to go into that battle, I think.
Well, you know, again, I hate to sort of send you into the dragon in your tidy whities, but I would certainly suggest that you don't put any armor on, right?
I mean, you have to trust your own strength with that.
When you go in to talk to your parents, vulnerability is key, right?
Because the one thing that you haven't been with your parents since as long as you can remember, and I just know this because this is just basic, but the one thing you haven't been with your parents for as long as you can remember is vulnerable.
And so in order to get new effects, you have to take new approaches, right?
If the route you keep taking takes you to the wrong place, you've got to try a different route.
And it is the opposite that you bring to relationships that usually is where the greatest growth is.
And so I would say go in with no armor.
Be perfectly prepared to bawl your eyes out, to faint, to whatever it is that's going to happen.
But armor won't help you because armor has kind of kept you from feeling the negative parts of this relationship.
And the other thing that I'd mention is that You know, we always feel that it's very cruel To look at separation from our parents if the relationship is negative and stultifying.
We always feel like, but they're going to miss me so much.
They call me every week or every day and I go over there and we have dinner and this and that.
But the one thing I'll tell you for sure, and this is based on my and Christina's experience, and it's a little bit of a blow.
It was a bit of a blow to my vanity.
I don't know how you'll take it. They won't miss you.
So you say that there's this imaginary son that your mother has this relationship with.
That will continue. So the saddest thing about all of this stuff to do with the family is that nobody gains.
Because we think, okay, well, I'll take the hit.
I'll go and see my parents because it's so important to them and it's so meaningful for them.
And even though it's boring for me and even though I don't like it and even though I don't feel good afterwards, I'm going to go and see my parents because somebody's benefiting from it, right?
But the awful thing is that nobody benefits from it, right?
Because your parents can continue to have the same relationship with you that they've always had.
You don't even need to be there. And that's just something that's hard for us to get because we're so used to, like, if I take this away from my parents, if I take my true self away from my parents, that'll be bad.
But it won't be because they don't even know your true self.
And in fact, they'll be relieved because your true self just keeps interfering with their relationship that they want to have with the fantasy.
Right. I wish I could give them an action figure of me or something like that that they can hold up to their friends.
That's quite right.
Absolutely. You've made this point several times in a lot of your podcasts on the subject, and I really do believe that the main reason that That my mom has this son is because she likes to hold that son up to all of her friends and relatives and say, isn't he great? And, you know, obviously she leaves out all the details about how I'm an anarchist and how I don't believe in their God and all and stuff like that because that's not part of that thing that she holds up.
And, you know, mom's always been this, you know, it's all about image.
It doesn't matter if everything's falling apart behind the curtain.
Whatever is in front of the curtain is what you show everybody.
And that's the play that you put on for everybody.
But, you know, backstage can just be chaos.
It can be like monkeys flinging poo and, you know, bombs blowing up and stuff like that.
So it's just, it's all about what's in front of the curtain.
And I keep on thinking that I'm being put behind the curtain because that's, you know, I'm exploding with the rest of the junk.
Now, that's all very good, well and good.
But let me go back to something you said a little bit earlier, where you said that I've made the point a number of times in a number of podcasts.
I'm not sure exactly what you're accusing me of, but I don't like the smell of it.
Extreme repetition? How is it something like that?
It's good repetition. A good repetition.
It's like a song that you like to hear over and over and over and over and over again, but with jazzy tangents that make no sense.
Okay. Is there anything else that you wanted to chat about here?
I was going to open it up to others if you had nothing else.
No, I think it's pretty good.
I still have a little note on my text editor here about the whole...
I thought there was kind of a similarity between the doctor going out to play golf instead of treating the illnesses and deep feeling from the family.
I think you said that you're going to try to talk a lot and make me forget it.
Damn these engineers!
Always taking notes, curse them.
With the whole family defoing thing, if they're so messed up and you can't help them, then you just have to walk away.
And can't you just do that with these rabid theists?
I mean, they're pretty messed up.
Why do you have to keep engaging them and saying, I'm not you, I'm not you?
Well, yeah, I certainly agree with you.
And the one great challenge of philosophy is knowing, you know, know when to hold them, know when to fold them, right?
And I myself, like if I'm stuck in a railway carriage with a priest, And there's nobody else there?
I'm not going to have that conversation, right?
What's he going to do? He's going to say, you know, gee, I never should have taken this job.
I never should have done what I did to those little boys, and now it's all wrong.
He's never going to change his mind, right?
On the other hand, though, if I'm in a railway carriage with myself and a priest and a teenage...
Then I will have that conversation.
Not for the priest, but for the kid, right?
So for me, that's important around picking your battles, right?
I mean, you're not going to change anybody hardcore, but the number of times that people have been changed by overhearing something, because there's no pressure, there's no stress, and so on.
So that would be, yeah, I agree with you.
I mean, you know, we're not going to go to Bill Clinton and say, hey, you want to be a market anarchist right now?
I mean, that's not going to be the case, right?
Or if we do, Christine is going to go.
But, you know, for the cause.
So I agree with you, yeah.
The truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs, right?
I mean, you definitely do have to gauge the value of it.
And there's no point being a slave to freedom, as I've talked about, any more than there is being a slave to anything else.
But I think that if you have the chance to influence somebody else, that can be very helpful.
Yeah, that's a very good point, I guess.
I guess with the de-fooing analogy, it's sort of like you'd be helping your younger siblings or something like that if you de-fooed yourself or whatever.
So, yeah, I do agree that's a good point, just to set a new curve.
Okay, I'm done. No, I mean, some people stay because of younger siblings when I would sort of say that staying is the wrong thing to do.
It's the idea, you know, that the mom's going to stay with the abusive dad or vice versa because of the kids.
It's, you know, it's not a good approach.
Yeah, okay. So I'm done, but thank you very much for indulging me for this long time.
Oh, no indulgence. I think that what you're going through is very powerful and very good, and be sure to keep us posted with what's going on.
Absolutely. Okay, the Skype chat is open.
I'm going to watch your ears, my brothers and sisters.
We are going to take the mute off.
Unless somebody has a comment to make who's currently in the chat, I'd be certainly happy to unmute you if you have something there.
So if you would like to do that, feel free.
If not, I will open up the boards to whoever has opened up the phone lines, for want of a better phrase, for anybody else who wants to say anything.
So I'm just going to have a look here in the chat.
And I don't think... Nothing's coming in.
Can you just have a look? Can you just have a look at the chat itself?
Nothing, eh? Okay, all right.
Watch your ears. I'm going to unmute, and we're going to get the blast from all the people who are currently listening to this while, I guess, cleaning live jet engines or something.
Yeah, hi. There was just a point about AFUS, as you said earlier.
Okay, the number of podcasts, you've said that God's existence doesn't make sense because His existence is not consistent with known scientific principles.
But my point is that while science is not a static thing, it evolves over time.
So how do you know these principles will always have relevance or will always be applicable?
Is it possible that these principles could be refuted sometime or new principles could be discovered which makes God's existence more plausible or feasible?
Okay, I'm not a Christian or theist or anything, but well yeah, that's just my basic point.
No, that's an excellent question, and thank you for raising it.
Certainly for the people who are listening who are newer to the conversation, that that is going to be the next logical question.
And of course, as a rationalist or an atheist, I want to avoid the general idea that is sometimes thrown against atheists.
I'm not saying you're doing it, but it's a generally accepted problem that atheists are slamming the door down on the future of science by saying, I know now and forevermore that there is no such thing as God, which, you know, seems kind of silly relative to certain aspects or views of the history of seems kind of silly relative to certain aspects or views of
So one thing that comes back is, you know, well, if you'd said to people, I don't know, a hundred years ago that people would be able to talk around the world for free as we're doing now, they'd say that's never going to happen, that's impossible.
And of course now they would be proven wrong.
So, it's an excellent question, and I'm very glad that you brought it up.
The response that I would make, and you'd let me know if it makes sort of any sense to you, is that...
There are two things in science that need to be separated in terms of principles, right?
One is a principle that is currently discovered, right?
So there would be a certain principle like Newtonian physics would have a certain measure of speed and acceleration and so on relative to a fixed point.
So there's Newtonian physics, which has all of its principles embedded within it.
Which, you know, themselves came from, you know, prior versions of physics, the Ptolemaic system and so on.
And then after Newtonian physics, you get something like the Einsteinian physics, right?
Theory of relativity and so on.
And those paradigms or those principles are constantly changing.
You're absolutely right within science.
Now we're in the world of superstrings and quantum physics and all stuff that makes your head explode.
So yes, science is absolutely in a constant flux, except for one thing.
Except for one thing in science that never changes.
The one thing in science that never changes is the scientific method.
And the way in which science is refined is with reference to the scientific method.
And the scientific method has been around in one form or another since, you know, very early thoughts.
Certainly Aristotle talked about it, but it was Bacon in the 16th century who really focused on systematizing and saying that making stuff up, which is really the world of the medieval scholastics, doesn't make any sense.
Nothing is true. Except what can be proven, what is experimentable, where you can reproduce the experiments, where there's physical evidence.
We have to assume that nothing is true except for that.
Now, that principle has never changed throughout the entire history of science, and that principle will never change in science.
Like, you can go to a scientific conference and you can say, I have a new scientific theory called Z-rays that are radiating from my big shiny forehead like a disco ball, and people are going to say, well, that's...
Interesting. I can certainly see how that might occur just looking at the fluorescent reflection.
But they would then say, okay, dude, what's the proof?
And that would be a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.
And that's no problem.
And if I am some physics genius, I can supply that.
But what I can't do is I can't go to a scientific conference and say, I think we should replace the scientific method with superstition.
People then won't say, well, that's interesting.
Maybe we should. They're going to say, no.
The scientific method is inviolate because it is derived from the nature and properties of reality, that reality doesn't contradict itself, that it's logical, that it's consistent, that matter is neither created nor destroyed but simply converted to energy and back and so on.
So because the scientific method is constant and the scientific method entirely repudiates any possibility of the existence of supernatural beings, then I think it's safe to say that if something does emerge in the future, I don't know, matter contradicts itself or winks in and out of existence or whatever, then it won't be science anymore, right?
If you can't test for it, if it's not logical, if it doesn't have any rigor to it, then it's astrology or it's religion or it's fantasy or whatever, right?
So I would say that it's important to differentiate between the conclusions of the scientific method, which in truth, of course, you're right, are constantly being refined, and the scientific method itself, which is as inviolate as gravity, and as inviolate as the behavior and properties of matter.
Does that help? Yeah, it does.
Okay, yes, you mentioned the scientific method, but, well, again, isn't it possible that Well, okay, all the scientific method is just the methodology.
You know, anything can be discovered by the scientific method, can't it?
As long as you use that methodology.
So, well, again, all I'm saying is that Well, never say never sort of thing.
Just because our current physics knowledge refutes the concept of the existence of some kind of supreme being or God, that doesn't mean it will always be that case.
Well, if there is...
This is a question that was posted on the board.
I'm a slave to science.
I'm not a slave to atheism.
If tomorrow this celestial being, other than my wife, descends from the sky and levitates my Volvo to heaven and I podcast from heaven, then assuming that everybody else sees that that's occurring and it's not just something that I think is happening...
Then I would be an instant convert to the existence of a deity, right?
I mean, but that would no longer be religion, right?
If God sort of comes down and manifests himself in the sort of looks like Morgan Friedman, if I remember rightly, if God comes down and manifests himself in an empirically testable manner, then sure, God exists.
Absolutely. But then God is bound by the properties of matter and therefore is subject to the scientific method.
But I can't say that God exists just because I want him to.
And I can't say that God exists because I had a bald spot that mysteriously disappeared after I prayed.
I can't just assert that something is true because of my own particular prejudices any more than I can say that astrology is true because of X, Y, and Z, or all dreams are prophetic because I had one dream that seemed to come true, and so on.
That would be to not use the scientific method, and that would never be valid, in the same way that you're never going to have mathematics that, you know, founds on the principle that 2 plus 2 equals green.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Yeah, I agree that sites should be based on some kind of rational, logical means.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He remains unconvinced, ladies and gentlemen.
Go ahead, if you have something that, I mean, don't, if I haven't answered, feel free to just keep plugging away, because I definitely want to sort of clear this up, because it's a common objection, and I mean, this is, you could be right, this is just sort of my opinion, so go ahead.
Well, as I said, just in reference to an earlier point I made, that It's possible that our current scientific knowledge today may be refuted in the future.
So what I'm saying is that I think it's wrong to sort of use our current knowledge as some kind of absolutes.
That, you know, that's not really the nature of scientific inquiry.
Like saying anthropology, like, Fifty years ago there was no evidence that all human beings came from Africa.
But today there's genetic evidence that states that the case.
So, you know, science is always improving and building on its knowledge.
Well, I mean, I completely agree with you, but again, it's important to differentiate between the conclusions of science and the methodology of science, right?
So I'm sure you're correct that human beings came from Africa, which certainly wouldn't explain my dance capacities, but if you're correct that it is now generally accepted scientific knowledge that human beings came from Africa, which wasn't the case 50 years ago, I would still submit that the reason why we know it's true now versus before was that there's more evidence now.
I guess more bones have been found or there's been more accurate carbon dating or more accurate genetic tracing or whatever.
But it's because the scientific method has been used that we know more than we used to.
But the scientific method itself has not changed.
Does that make any sense? Yeah, I understand that.
And so the degree to which God, the existence of life without matter, of consciousness, of a mind without a brain, of consciousness without material form, that's a complete contradiction because what that says then is something exists and does not exist simultaneously, right? That God exists but has no material form and is no energy that can ever be recorded.
So given that the only way that a scientist knows that something exists is it has material form or is detectable in some manner, either through the direct evidence of the senses or through the spectra detector from Shaggy-Doo or whatever it was, So the only way that science knows that something exists is because it has some sort of tangible physical evidence.
And so if somebody says something exists that will never have any tangible or physical evidence, then what they're saying is something exists and does not exist at the same time.
But that's a logical impossibility.
And there will never be a scientific method that will be invented or will ever be valid that says self-contradictory statements are valid.
Yeah, I understand that point.
Well, someone's just posted a message to me, someone called Chris Robinson, on the chat thing.
He was just saying that if God lives in another dimension that has different physical laws or something, how is the scientific method applicable, or our scientific method applicable to that dimension?
Does that make sense to you?
Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
If there's an anti-gravity universe where up is down and black is white and so on, for sure, absolutely, then that universe will then be explored.
I personally, I mean, this is me going out on a limb, and please, I apologize for all of the ridiculous hubris that this involves.
I think this stuff's all pure nonsense.
I mean, all quantum physics, alternate dimensions, 15 dimensions, and all this, I think this is all pure nonsense.
And, you know, good for them if they can get money from the taxpayer to keep pursuing that kind of stuff.
But you don't see a whole lot of capitalist firms pursuing this kind of nonsense.
It's all at the university level and they just love fooling around with this stuff because it gets just so ridiculous that you never have to supply anything, right?
I mean, you know, if you're doing R&D for a company, at some point you've got to produce a good that they can sell or something that they can use.
Whereas if you're in the university talking about 12 dimensions or 50 dimensions or whatever, it's like, yeah, okay, here's another billion dollars.
Go do your thing. You never have to produce anything.
I I think it's kind of a scam, but that's just my ignorance, so forgive me for that.
I just want to put that out there. But yeah, if there's some alternate dimension where up is down and black is white, sure, absolutely.
I'm perfectly willing to accept that as a possibility.
And if in that dimension God is proven to exist, then absolutely there will be a God, for sure, and that God will be detectable and measurable in some manner.
But that doesn't mean, still, that we could ever countenance the existence of something that is not measurable, that is never detectable.
So yes, there's an alternate dimension where there's a God, but we have to reach into that alternate dimension with some kind of God detector in order to find that God.
We wouldn't say, well, there's some other dimension, so now God has been proven.
We would have to go in and measure that and have a conversation, and we'd have to know that it wasn't someone messing with their head from that other dimension, and there'd be...
You know, decades or hundreds of years of exploration and so on until it was actually proven according to some scientific methodology.
So it would still have to be detectable and reproducible and it would have to sort of pass the test of knowing that it wasn't someone who was being fooled with because we're talking about consciousness, not matter here, right?
Yeah, so I would say that, for sure, we could absolutely...
And then, you know, it would have to be a God that, you know, if it were to be anything to do with religion, would have some effect on this world or any of these kinds of things.
So, for sure, the existing religious view of God, what you'd find in some other dimension wouldn't have anything to do with God, fundamentally, right?
Because what they talk about is a God who intervenes and reaches with his ghostly hand into this realm to do X, Y, and Z... And it's detectable by human beings at the present in the moment, right?
So the people who say that there's such a thing as a God who is detectable and interferes in human affairs at the moment are all entirely and totally incorrect.
If there's some other dimension where there's a God that exists and so on, that's fine.
That's a matter for science to explore.
But it would have nothing to do with religion at all.
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you.
So would you use the same rationale for things like, say, ghosts or any kind of, well, supernatural phenomenon or something?
Oh, sure. Absolutely.
For sure. If it is a contradiction, right?
Again, we talked about Z-rays earlier, X-rays, right?
But if the idea is in ghosts that a body can exist with intermittent corporeal form and live forever and walk through walls, I mean, this is all nonsense, right?
So none of that stuff is true at all.
If it did turn out that through some massive spectra detector you could see a soul leaving a body and you could measure that souls live forever and there was an animating principle that was half in this dimension and half in some other dimension and so on, That would be fine.
I get no problem with that, right?
That's going to be something subject to science which we can verify, and I would certainly think it would be very cool to live forever.
Right now, it is mere superstition and has no truth value whatsoever.
And if people say that I believe in it, despite the fact that there's no evidence, then they're completely irrational and need to be talked out of that.
And the corner where people like to go and hide, which is to say, well, you don't know everything.
I'm not saying you, right? Where people say, well, you don't know everything, and who are you to say?
That's never going to be the case. There could be 15 other dimensions.
There might be gods in each one of them.
We might come across Osiris in some alternate dimension.
Well, that's all fine, but that's no reason to believe anything right now, and it certainly is every single reason in the world to reject the nonsense put forward by organized religion.
Again, I agree with you.
I see your points in general.
That the scientific method must be applied to all phenomenon, for that phenomenon to properly exist, and that anything that does not adhere to that, well, basically is just mysticism or something.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, I generally see your points here.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
I'm very, very glad that you brought that up.
That is an excellent topic. And I'm going to, if you don't mind, did you have anything else that you wanted to add to that?
Because we've had another question from another listener.
No, that's it for now.
All right, thanks so much. I appreciate that.
Excellent questions as always.
Really, that's wonderful. All right, let me just go back to my magic world of Skype casting and see if I can't find...
All right, so...
It's all too well-manned for words.
Okay, hang on. I need like 12 engineers and a shiatsu massage while I'm doing this, but...
Actually, no, I'll just open it up.
I'm just looking for him. I don't know what order this occurs in Skypecast.
Is Greg in? Yeah, he is.
Okay. So, Mr.
Gimmagothy... Let me see if I click that right.
Are you on air?
I'm sorry, can you say that again?
Hello. Hey, how's it going?
Not bad. You really have a problem with my ID, don't you?
You know, it's just buried in there somewhere.
And because there's 37 people in it at the moment, going through the list and trying to find one person is not the easiest thing.
Go ahead. What was my question?
Wait one moment. Let's have the lovely Christina read it out for you.
Before all the spamming started, you wrote a question.
Is it logically possible that an aspect of reality cannot be materially validated?
Right, right, exactly.
Well, that's exactly why I podcast.
Yeah, good luck going back to try and find a quote from old Steffi.
I could have sworn you did contradict yourself, Big Chatty Forehead.
Some were back in Podcast Three Million, but I can't find it.
Yes. So, I'm sorry, but you wanted to talk about that, perhaps a slightly greater degree of seriousness.
Go ahead. No, that's fine.
Now, I guess all I'm suggesting is that if we...
How can I put this?
If we accept that rationality is one criteria for reasonableness, logic is a fundamental precept of at least one half of the whole criteria for truth.
With evidence, right?
So then if somebody could demonstrate logically That it's possible that, say, there could be an aspect of reality, some other dimension or some other...
Zed rays or whatever.
...some other kind of substance or something that our five senses are incapable of experiencing.
If that's logically possible, then...
You can't really...
It would be difficult to make the case for somebody who wanted to believe in such a thing, right?
It would be difficult to make the case against it.
Right. So I guess what I'm suggesting is that in asserting that somebody shouldn't believe that, what you're...
What you're presupposing is that the material universe that we can sense with our five senses is all there is.
Sure, sure.
Absolutely. I mean, call me simplistic, but yeah, that's, you know, as far as what philosophy and ethics and all the important stuff in life goes.
But even down to epistemology, yeah, for sure.
I mean, the five senses, right?
I mean, there may be all these other dimensions occurring at a subatomic level, and maybe that's important for the pencil-neck, white-coat guys, but, you know, when it comes to sort of living your life and so on, to me, that's all just, you know, it's interesting nonsense, I guess you could say, which doesn't mean it's not true or anything, but Again, I have a fair amount of skepticism.
The moment that sort of intel starts saying, I now have the n-dimensional processor, then I'll believe in these other dimensions.
But as long as it's a bunch of government scientists, I'm going to hold it with the same degree of skepticism that I hold everything else that comes out of the more of our friendly state.
Right, so I guess all I'm saying is that the very same precepts that we use to argue that it's not reasonable to believe, the theist is saying are the exact same reasons why he would the theist is saying are the exact same reasons why he would argue that it's reasonable Well, I kind of agree with you there, and let me sort of tell you why, and then you can tell me if that makes any sense or not.
I don't want to say it makes any sense to you, but whether it makes any sense, period.
A theist is only going to claim that a god exists, and is only going to be able to claim that that god exists in any kind of objective way if he's had some direct experience of that deity, right?
Because if he's never had any experience of that deity whatsoever, then it would be a ridiculous thing to say that that deity exists.
So he must have had some vision, some feeling, some dream, some prayer that God answered, some epiphany, some something must have convinced him that that God exists.
And he must also believe that that epiphany has come from outside himself.
I have minor epiphanies when I stub my toe, but I don't claim that that's coming from outside myself.
So in order for a religious person or a theist to say that there's a God and that God exists, they must have had some kind of intervention within their own consciousness that comes from outside.
In which case it now has moved into the realm of science.
Because it's measurable.
It's come to them from outside and has had some effect on their consciousness.
And so we automatically have a measurable phenomenon.
And so they can't then say, well, you know, there's no proof, right?
Well, whatever. It doesn't because the whole reason that they believe that there's a God is because that God has reached into their brains and flipped on the God switch, or I guess flipped off the light switch would be the way that I'd put it.
But there's no way that they can say that this should never be subject to any empirical testing because they're saying that God exists based on the fact that he's done something to them.
So we already have an intervening deity.
We already have an intervening deity.
The only way that somebody's going to say that God exists, something came in from outside of them.
God intervened.
Which means now he's subject to the scientific method, he's subject to rationality, he's part of reality.
If there's some God in some other dimension, fantastic.
You know, great. I can't wait to read the autobiography.
The moment that God reaches his ghostly little finger into this dimension, then he's subject to science and rationality.
So, of course, the only reason that anybody wants to believe in God is because God's going to do something for them or to them if they're bad, right?
People don't believe in this 27th dimension God.
They believe in a God that intervenes in human affairs because that's...
Why would you ever bother learning or teaching about something that would never affect your life in any way, right?
So they do believe that God intervenes.
Right. So either he's defined as an intervening being, which means he should be empirically testable, or he's defined as a non-intervening being, which is synonymous with nothing, and so you might as well take the Well, I wouldn't even say it's sort of like nothing.
It is the exact equivalent of nothing.
If I say that there's no matter, there's no energy, there's no possibility of recording anything whatsoever in any way, shape, or form, That is the very definition of non-existence.
It's a synonym that's identical.
It's two sides of the same coin.
I can either say that something doesn't exist, or I can say there's no conceivable evidence in any way, shape, or form for this thing that it does exist, and they're both exactly the same thing.
Right. It's the exact same definition, so it's the exact same thing.
It can't be that easy.
Come on. Come on.
Now you're scaring me.
So then what you're suggesting is that in this case, the logic really doesn't matter.
The logical possibility doesn't matter, since we can't sense it anyway.
What do you mean? Like a god in another dimension or something?
Right, right, exactly.
Well, I mean, all you're doing is creating a special category of non-existence called another dimension.
It's like me going to the Nobel Prize people and saying, there's dimension 57.
Can I have a Nobel Prize? Well, what's your proof?
Well, I don't know, but it's possible, isn't it?
Can I have the Nobel Prize?
Because it's possible, right? And they're going to say, well, I don't even have any clue what you're talking about, right?
But you described it as a...
What did you just say?
Are you taking notes too?
Killer crowd today.
As an aspect of non-existence, which again you're presupposing that if it's not sensible to the five senses, Then it mustn't exist.
Well, I mean, it can be, I mean, yeah, at some level it has to be translatable, right?
So, I mean, we can't see x-rays, but we can see the effects of x-rays.
We can't see sound, even if we're deaf, but we can see a spectrograph and stuff, right?
So, yeah, it has to be translatable in some manner.
We can find x-rays and we can experience them in some way.
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, you may not see radiation, but, you know, your hair falls out or whatever.
So that which cannot be experienced does not exist.
That which cannot be experienced does not exist.
That's correct. I'm just thinking because the real trick with all this kind of stuff is then you get the mathematics people saying, you're saying math doesn't exist, and so on and so on, right?
Right. And of course math does exist, logic does exist, and so on, but math and logic, the principles thereof, are all derived from reality.
Right. They exist as processes in the brain.
Which formulate from our five senses providing us with material experience.
Right. And we know the validity of scientific and mathematical theories by the predictability, the accuracy by which they predict the behavior of matter and so on.
So, yeah, for sure.
There is no such thing as existence that cannot be translated into some sort of tangible thing.
Okay. So, I just wanted to clarify that that's That's a fundamental presupposition of atheism, is that if you can't experience it, it doesn't exist.
I would say more of science than of atheism.
I mean, I wouldn't claim to be an atheist if I didn't know the scientific method.
That's sort of where I got it from.
Oh, right, okay.
I agree with that. But I just mean in the context of atheism, because we kind of draw on the same...
Right. Now, an agnostic would say, if I say to you, Greg, I had this dream about a unicorn last night, and you were riding it in a flowing white gown.
Wait, we'll talk about this more after the show.
But if I say to you that I had a dream about a unicorn last night, an agnostic is going to say, well, there's no way to prove or disprove that.
But that's not really the issue because that doesn't contradict the facts of experience or of logic, right?
Because it's certainly within the realm of possibility that I had a dream about a unicorn last night.
But because everyone has dreams and these things exist and we can recreate things within our own mind while we dream that we don't experience in reality and so on.
But if I say to an agnostic, I was a unicorn last night, then it would be quite an effort of willpower for the agnostic to say, really?
Are you available on eBay?
Because my daughter would love to ride a unicorn.
You know, they don't really go down that road, right?
So then...
Lady Greg Diver, I think, is the name.
Lady Greg Diver, that's your new name.
Right. I think I went from the train of thought here.
You win hands down.
And you know, it's a cheap and hollow victory, but I still feel a thrill.
So then, logical possibility is a criteria by which we're measuring this, then?
Yeah, certainly. Logical possibility is a necessary but not sufficient criteria for truth.
Okay. Like, I mean, if I'm going to have a mathematical theory that describes the orbits of the planet, the first test is not, does it describe the orbit of the planets, but is it logically consistent?
And we're arguing that it's not logically possible for there to be an existence outside of the experience of the five senses.
Right, right. I mean, it's the old thing.
If you're marking a math test and the person starts off with, you know, 2x equals x, you don't have to go all the way through to the end to know that the answer is incorrect.
Or if the answer is correct, it's still incorrect because it's just a freaky coincidence, right?
So, yeah, for sure.
If the proposition is logically self-contradictory to begin with, you don't need to go any further.
It doesn't exist. Now, if it does turn out that there's some God in some alternate dimension, then that still doesn't mean that the religious people are right at all, because they just accidentally came by the right criteria.
They accidentally came up with the right conclusion using the entirely wrong methodology.
If I come and saw your leg off and then it turns out you had gangrene and I didn't know about it, I'm not called a surgeon, right?
I'm called a murderer or whatever.
Right. But I guess where I'm getting confused, though, is that I'm not seeing the assertion as logically contradictory.
I'm not quite sure why.
Of a God? No, that there could be an aspect of reality that's beyond the five senses.
That to me seems logically possible.
That there may be some sixth or seventh sense that biologically we're not equipped with because You know, maybe we didn't need it for survival, right?
Well, sure. Absolutely. And I'm perfectly aware that, you know, maybe there'll be a kid born in this sort of X-Men scenario.
Some kid will be born who can see heat or something, right?
And he's got the third eye that can, you know, see X-rays or something.
Cool. I think that's great.
But that's still all within the bounds of reality.
He's not going to be able to see God.
He's not going to be able to see ghosts, because those things don't exist.
And if he sees some Z-rays that we didn't even know were there, they will still be empirical and testable and measurable.
But if some kid comes out of the womb, and I guess as soon as they learn to speak, they say, Mommy, Daddy, I can see Z-rays.
Our kid's a physicist.
She's a genius. Let's get the Nobel Prize.
He can see Z-rays. And then the scientists say, well, what are Z-rays?
Oh, there are beams of light and rainbows and pixies and blah, blah, blah.
And then there's never any proof and so on and so on.
Then the kid needs medication.
This is not knowledge.
Right. So I guess what I'm saying from that, it's, you know, the next step is, well, if the realm could logically exist, then certainly beings within that realm could logically exist, too.
Now, not as defined by Christian theologians, because that particular being is, you know, logically contradictory from the get-go, but if we concede that it's logically possible that there is There are aspects of reality that may be imperceptible to human senses,
then the next logical step from that is, well, then why couldn't there be beings that exist in those states that are Imperceptible to human senses.
Sure, and absolutely that could well be the case.
But if they're imperceptible to human senses, then all organized religion, of course, is a complete falsehood, right?
So yeah, we could define, like there could be some beings that can travel through time and are invisible and, you know, whatever, like the psychic and they live forever in some bizarre way, right?
But they could have all of these characteristics.
And they could exist in reality or whatever, right?
But that has nothing to do...
Like, they still haven't intervened in any measurable way in human history.
And so the whole organized religion thing would still be incorrect.
Right. That's where it all kind of falls apart for the theist, is that if there's no interface with the existing reality, at least with the existing central reality that we're aware of, then, you know, where do they come up with...
You know, they're a theory in the first place, right?
Well, yeah, because what happens with theists, and this is the constant switcheroo that goes on, right, is they'll say, they'll work the sort of seam that you're working, and it's a great thing that you're doing it, because it's a very important question.
They'll work the seam that you're working, and they'll say, ha, so it is possible that something called God exists, right?
And then you say, well, sure, I mean, anything's possible as long as it's, you know, going to have the scientific method applied to verify its existence, right?
And then they say, ah, so it is possible that something called God could exist, right?
And then they sort of, you say yes, and then they slither back to an interventionist kind of anthropomorphic God that they pray to and sends people to hell, which is entirely different from...
Are there beings out there that we haven't discovered yet?
Well, of course, right? But there's nothing to do with the Garden of Eden and sending people to hell and consciousness without form and eternal life.
I mean, all that superstitious bullshit has nothing to do Could there be other dimensions with other beings?
Sure, but they haven't shown up and there's no proof of any kind that they intervene in the world.
And so they don't exist, right?
And yeah, in the future, who knows?
But they still get nothing to do with religion.
Right. So the whole thing becomes really nothing more than an interesting speculation.
I mean, you can't really found a belief system on it because you have no...
You're walking on clouds, really.
Yeah, it's like if I go to some oceanographer or marine biologist and I say, you know, is there a species of crustacean down at the bottom of the Mariana Trench that hasn't been discovered yet?
And he says, sure, how can I tell you no?
Of course, we haven't discovered everything, right?
And I say, great, let's worship it.
That's a bit of a leap, right?
So there's this crustacean down there that fills every human child with invisible sin and cursed human beings and sent his only fish spawn to get crucified and rise from the dead.
There's a whole leap that goes on in the realm of religion that's just bizarre.
It has nothing to do.
That's exactly the wall I hit every time I have a discussion like this with anyone, is that Because you're willing to concede the logical possibility there's no reason for me to give up my belief.
Exactly. Exactly.
And the thing you have to do is say you believe in a God because God does something for you or against you.
Right? Which means that God's impact is measurable.
Which means that you can't believe in a God just on will.
Right. Right.
So if you believe there's If you believe the Christian God exists, then you must believe that he somehow has the capacity to interface with sensual reality.
No, no, no. Sorry to interrupt you.
I'd go one step back.
You can't say if you believe the Christian God exists because he impacts on reality.
You could only differentiate the Christian God from a purely personal fantasy because you believe that the only reason you believe in a God is because he's reached in from somewhere and flicked the God switch in your body.
Right? So you only believe in a Christian God because God from outside of yourself has already done this.
But no, so the only reason that you would believe in a God, that a God exists external to yourself, is because you believe some external agency has reached into your brain and given you a vision or an impulse or whatever, right?
Right. So you can't say, I believe in a God and therefore he has to be measurable.
You would only ever believe that a God exists outside of yourself because he's intervened in your life in some way that is not part of your own consciousness.
So already we have a measurable phenomenon.
And the minute they do that, then you're free to criticize it in terms of the scientific method.
Well, sure, yeah, because they're not saying, I had a dream about a unicorn last night.
They're saying a being exists with infinite intelligence and wisdom and perfection and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that being intervenes in reality.
He gave us the Bible. He tickled my brain.
He gives me visions. He answers my prayers.
He's intervening all over the place.
It's like, great, so now we have a testable phenomenon.
Right, unless he's only asserting the presence of a deistic god that's Only touched my brain, so, you know, there's no probe you could put in there to tell you empirically that he touched my brain, but I'm going to believe it anyway, right? I could think of a probe I'd like to put in someone's brain like that.
Might be a little more high voltage, you know?
Can you see him now?
Can you see him now?
Like that guy from the ad.
Right, right. Okay, well...
The problem becomes then that we're not really going to...
I guess this is just stating the obvious, but none of this is going to convince somebody who really wants to believe.
Well, no, of course. I mean, philosophy is voluntary, just as the scientific method is voluntary.
Just as going to a doctor is voluntary.
All right. So we're kind of, I don't know, on the one hand kind of spinning our wheels, thinking that this is going to talk somebody out of their theism, and on the other hand just sort of Engaging in a,
I don't know, just sort of a camaraderie thing where we sit around and all say, oh, there's no God, there's no God, of course there's no God.
Preaching to the quiet.
Right, exactly. Exactly.
Well, look, I mean, people want to be free.
People want to be free of the fantasy of religion as much as they want to be free of everything else.
And they don't know how to get out, right?
And they're afraid of what's outside there.
They don't know how to get out of this funky, weird fantasy world of religion.
And they've been taught that it's virtuous, right?
So this is why I think extreme rigor and sort of enjoyable, positive conversations in the realm of this kind of stuff is so important.
Because you never know when that click is going to happen for somebody and they're just going to go, like the scales fall away, and it can happen like in the space of five seconds, where they just go, oh my god, you're totally right.
I have never thought that for something to affect me from outside of myself, it has to have intervened, therefore it must be measurable and reproducible.
Maybe they've just never thought of that, right?
And that can have an enormous impact on someone.
People desperately do.
Their true selves are down there, like reaching up, like people drowning in quicksand, reaching up for something.
And yeah, I mean, a lot of people aren't going to make it, but you never know.
You never know who's listening in at the next table, right?
You have no idea what's going on, right?
And so I think it's always worth having that conversation.
So doing this really is more out of the hope that there will be somebody at the other table listening in.
For sure, yeah. That's why I say, you know, if it's just one-on-one with some crazy religious guy, I don't really get involved, because, you know, what the hell.
But, you know, if there's a possibility the conversation can be reproducible for somebody else in a useful way, or if I just want to test my wits and refine my argument, then...
But, you know, and I also think it's worth switching sides, as I did in podcast 400, right?
So you get the other side of the coin and so on, so you can see the weaknesses from that side, but...
No, it's definitely worth, you know, the majority of any sport, right, and philosophy is about the most extreme sport there is, but any sport, you know, the amount of time you spend in the ring if you're a boxer is tiny, tiny, tiny.
You spend like.00001% of your time in the ring and the rest of the time you spend training.
And the same thing, I think, is true of philosophy.
So, you know, training and practice and so on is always important.
And, you know, it doesn't matter whether you beat your sparring partner as a boxer.
It matters whether you beat the guy you're actually in the ring with at the end.
So I think that practice and warm-ups and all that, I think, are very helpful.
Okay, I think I've killed the sports metaphor.
See, there's this Gatorade that I'm selling called Free Domain Radio Juice.
Anyway. So who exactly is the guy in the ring at the final match then?
Well, it's the false self. I never thought of it that way.
I guess that's true. Maybe a little glib, but I still think it's true.
So it's not that crazy religious guy.
No, no, no. It's our own capacity for self-delusion and our own historical scar tissue.
We're never going to be the people who are raised well.
You and I both know that, brother to brother.
We're never going to be the people who were raised well, but we can help create a world where people can get raised well.
We're never going to be people who weren't lied to constantly and bullied when we were kids, but we can work to create that.
And so for me, because I did have that sort of history, There is a need to continually make sure that I stay on, you know, on the right path, you know, without wanting to sound like, you know, the path of virtue or anything.
But I think for me, I do have the capacity for self-deception, just as everybody else does.
And so for me, just trying to really, you know, you're going to climb that mountain, you want to pick your path very carefully.
And so, for me, the struggle against error is not with others, but with myself.
Now, others hugely help in that, right?
I mean, my thinking has expanded and refined itself enormously because of the quality of the conversations that we've been having over the past year.
But, yeah, I mean, the religiosity that we need to fight primarily is, for me at least, in myself.
That's a good point. I never thought of it that way, but that's a good point.
So it's sort of a continuous necessity for those of us who haven't to work out, if you will, for those of us who weren't born healthy.
Right, right, for sure, for sure.
And this is where you find out things about yourself, right?
So to take an example from you, which is not quite the same as picking on you, but probably not that far, to take an example that you were talking about, so you're in a conversation with somebody, and you are having a discussion with them about religion, and they get you to concede that it's vaguely possible in some alternate dimension that there might be something remotely close to a god, right? And then that's as far as you can get, right?
And I perfectly understand that.
I have those all over the place as well.
But that's where you know that your false self has set the boundaries.
It's not a big leap.
It's a big leap mentally, but it doesn't take me four hours to explain the next step.
And this is where your level of self-knowledge has gone to.
So this is sort of mapping where our own capacity for illusions are by engaging in debate with people who think differently.
And not primarily with the point of convincing themselves, but with the point of sort of further understanding our own truth.
Because if I change somebody else's mind, it doesn't make my life better.
I mean, I'm happy to do it, but it doesn't make my life better.
What makes my life better is to have more truth and integrity and honesty with myself.
That's what makes my life better.
Know thyself. Yeah, for sure.
And a great way to know yourself is to figure out where the edges of your knowledge are and integrity with regards to other people.
Okay. Well, that's pretty much all I had.
All right. Well, we have quite a large number of people in here.
Hello to all of the new listeners.
I really appreciate it. Although some of them, I think, are requesting that we do rather rude things with cancel sticks and cigars.
I'm not going to read those names, but Greg, if you could stop suggesting that, that would be great.
Sorry, I didn't know you were still on.
Okay, I'm going to watch your ears.
I'm going to open it up.
If anybody else has any of the questions or comments, I would be more than happy to entertain them.
My name is Stefan Molyneux.
I'm the host of Freedom Aid Radio.
Hey.
Good to hear me.
Hello.
Is this Sexy Child 1981 or Jesus Christ 1973?
All right.
The mics are all open if anybody has any questions or comments or issues that they'd like to ask.
Now would be the time.
Can you guys hear me?
Hello? I can hear you.
Okay, I got a question. I got a question.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Could you just give me your hand so that I can unmute you?
Oh, I just muted everyone.
Sorry about that. One moment.
I can hear you, but if you could just tell me the name that you're using in Skype, but if you could just tell me the name that you're using in Skype, then I can get just Certainly, Stephen. I'm looking forward to chatting with you.
Sure, could you just give me your handle?
My name is Andy Carling and the handle I use is Q-U-A-R-S-A-N. Q-U-A-R-S-A-N. Okay, just one moment.
Q-U-A-R-S-A-N. Yes, I have located you in the surprisingly large list of people interested in chatting about religion.
Please, go ahead. Hi there.
Stephan, thank you very much for this.
I really enjoyed listening to this and the refreshing lack of dogmatism.
One of the things I've been really interested in, I was brought up in a very evangelical Christian environment.
I've become something of an atheist myself.
But I do retain some kind of real understanding of the people's Hello.
Hello, Stefan. Are we there?
Go ahead. I can hear you.
Can you hear me? Stefan, thanks very much for letting me join this interesting conversation.
One of the things I'm interested in is that, to be honest, I don't really care what people's religious views are or what religion people belong to.
What I do find that affects me and affects the societies I live in Is the political views people have that they derive from their religious viewpoints, you know?
There is a kind of a...
One thing I love about America is the separation of church and state, but I find that is really broken down, and I find that the religious dogmatism turning into political dogmatism is something that is really very destructive,
very limiting, and I think is also It really demeans a lot of what I would call the more meditative spiritual traditions, whether they're in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, or whatever.
So I don't care what people believe in.
What I do care is what political conclusions and actions they draw from that.
I would be very interested in hearing what you and the other listeners have on this point.
Well, that's an excellent, excellent question, and I really appreciate you bringing it up.
Yeah, for sure, the separation of church and state is an essential aspect of even a remotely free society, but there are several hundred thousand people in the Middle East currently toes up to the daisies who might question the degree to which U.S. politics is separated in this manner.
But for sure, religious beliefs, and we're not going to talk about, you know, the God in Dimension 77 at this point, because I don't think that if anybody really believes that, that doesn't really have much effect on their political beliefs.
But we're talking sort of about the mainstream religions, right, the big three, and I guess there's some of the minor ones around the fringes, like Buddhism and so on, but the big three of Islam and Judaism and Christianity.
For sure, immensely strong and powerful effects on political beliefs.
And I'll just go through one or two of those as I see it, and then I'll sort of let me know what you think of that.
The first and most important is that when people believe in a god, They believe that there is some entity out there that's far greater than themselves that doesn't speak to them directly.
Of course, you wouldn't need organized religion in any way, shape, or form if God actually existed and spoke to people directly.
And so they believe that there's something out there that they have to obey that's much greater than they are, which does not speak to them directly but rather speaks through religion.
Other mediums, priests or whatever, whoever, the person currently speaking in tongues and writhing around on the floor of the Baptist Church or whatever.
So people believe that there's this great entity out there that can tell them what to do and that only speaks to certain people and not others and so on.
And that translates to me in a secular way into the existence of a state, a sort of centrally coercive authority that has people who know so much more than we do And that the social good, right, in Christianity would be called the will of God,
and in democracy it's called the social good, that this great institution, God or the state, is full of people who are so much wiser than we are, and there's this thing called the social good that they interpret and enforce upon us, in the same way that there's something called the will of God, That priests interpret and enforce upon us.
So I would say, I mean, just for those who are not aware of this aspect of at least my approach to the examination of the truth, that I am not a fan of a government-centered society, that I very much am interested in exploring the possibilities of living without a state and how that might work.
So I would say that, certainly historically, the big three religions have been very central in the maintenance and expansion of state power.
And, of course, it really was only after a thousand years of, you know, cultural suicide after the end of the fall of Rome.
Through to the 200 years of, you know, slaughterhouse religious warfare that came along with the Gutenberg Press and the Reformation, the Lutheran Reformation, when everyone got their hands on the Bible, began interpreting it themselves, and then began to try and grab control of the state to enforce their view of religion on everyone else, the Calvinists, the Evangelians, the Lutherans, the Anabaptists, the Catholics, and all that.
And then after 200 years of, you know, cross-European slaughter, They separated the church and the state because they realized that with the multiplicity of religions, you simply can't have a state.
Now, historically, the people in the government, particularly the aristocrats, have always relied on the priests to tell people that obeying the state is a virtue.
And, of course, you don't hear any shortage of this from people like George Bush, who says that he's been put there by God, and he has lots of priests in America who say that to obey the secular authority is the equivalent of obeying God.
This is an enormous powder keg of runaway executive power, of course, where you have people who believe that the political leader is the expression of the will of the most perfect and divine being and that obedience to that political leader is bounded by no human ethics, no reciprocal moral obligations, but is simply a blind obsequence to a perfectly divine being.
So one of the reasons that I focus on the question of religion It's because I am very much afraid of politics.
Atheists don't often do very well when religious people get a hold of power.
And religious people do want to get a hold of power because since there is no God, nobody's talking to anyone.
There's no God who's talking to anyone.
But if you think, and I don't mean you, but if you think that...
Somebody, like a priest or a politician, knows so much better than you do what's true and how to run your life and how to live your life, then there is a great temptation to simply slide into this kind of obedient goose step with regards to secular and religious power.
So I do think that religion is a very potent fuel behind the sort of rising size and power and sort of scary monopoly of power that the government represents.
So... Let me know what you think of that, very brief, Chair.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
I really appreciate the open-minded way in which you're discussing and presenting your views on this.
I find a great deal of broad agreement with you.
I think one of the things I've got as a problem is that, you know, religion is a belief in God and people say they speak with God's authorities.
It's like top trumps, you know, you can't beat that.
You know, if you've got, frankly, political leaders, whether they're, shall we say, a Pope or a President or a Prime Minister, saying, God told me this, as an ordinary citizen, we can't top that.
So it's a way that I find that political leaders co-opt authority that perhaps they lack themselves for this.
I also find that there's such a broad range of opinion within beliefs.
You find different...
Factions within any religion are fighting for control and predominance in the history.
For example, the Catholic Church is a real example of that.
So I'm finding also that things often gravitate, because of all these factors, towards authoritarianism.
You know, towards the big father figure.
That says, you know, obey me, I'm the one true channel from God.
And I also think there is a tendency amongst broad populations of people who, many of them, if we look around us, are not interested in politics.
You know, and they will adhere to these authority figures.
So when you've got a political leader playing a religious card, whether it's An Islamic mullah in Tehran or whether it's a fundamentalist preacher in Northern Ireland or a Baptist in the South of America.
You know, these are very potent powers and they're very, very good at manipulating people's views and people's visions.
Perhaps, you know, you're right, you know, pick your battles, don't argue with individuals, you know.
We need to keep an eye on the broad picture and the dangers, not of religion, but of how a genuine spiritual inquiry that all humanity has can be twisted towards people who wish to acquire and maintain power.
I'd be interested in your views on this.
I mean, yeah, very well put.
And not just the parts where you agreed with me, but very, very well put, very eloquently put.
And I appreciate that.
When you – like if you're in America, right, and I do business in the States, so I do get a chance to chat with some Americans, and I had some very exciting chats with them when I was just down in New York this last week.
There is this great challenge, right?
So this is why, for me, you can't have a sort of half-and-half kind of religion versus science in this approach, because – There's this sort of question where you say, okay, so George Bush is put there by God, some people say, and if they don't believe that, and they're Christians or they're religious, then the question is, okay, did God allow George Bush to do this?
And then they have all of these sorts of problems.
I've even had conversations with people where they say, well, George Bush is a bad man, And he's put there as a sign of the end times, right?
So the devil put him there.
And there's really not a whole lot of rational analysis of the nature of power in that.
You know, looking at these divine beings who are either standing by and is that good or bad?
Or they put him there and is that good or bad?
Or they put him there because they're evil beings like Satan and there's that.
There's not a whole lot of rational analysis of what's going on in terms of power.
And there's these great shadowy puppet masters in there behind the scenes.
You know, for me, it's like George Bush.
He's just a guy, right?
He's just a guy. And, you know, everyone else is just a guy.
I'm just a guy. And I can't for the life of me see why political leaders should ever have the right to tell me what to do, you know, any more than I would have them to write to tell them what to do or anything like that.
People have to sort of dissolve their individual egos into some great superstructure, whether it's religion or society or the nation or the race or all of these kinds of things.
They have to dissolve themselves into this big superstructure for a variety of historical reasons, usually to do with their own childhoods.
But if you take away these horrible toys, organized religion, statism, nationalism, Racism.
All of these, patriotism.
If you start to take away these toys, people get very mad at you, right?
Because they don't want you to take away these toys, but it is essential that we peel these things back so that people can actually start to deal with each other as individuals rather than as sort of aspects like a single little mirror on a disco ball Aspects of some much larger whole, but we can all be individuals complete within ourselves, negotiating with each other as equals rather than appealing to the mommy-daddy in the skies situation or in the state situation and not dealing with each other as competent individuals.
Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head, as we say.
There are all sorts of very good reasons and all sorts of well-known and documented psychological reasons why people do subserviate themselves to all kinds of authority, whether it be temporal or spiritual.
We all would like to have a sense...
Yeah, I was listening to the speaker previous to the last one, and I could understand and relate to so much of my own upbringing.
I was very fortunate that I was brought up in a Christian family, and I felt that my parents had a genuine and a devout belief.
And what did it for me was I looked around at the other Christians.
And I saw that their beliefs weren't devout and they weren't real.
And that's what got me asking questions.
But, you know, it does all, like all of life, it begins in the family.
But I'm more interested in the larger picture of how this affects society, you know.
We've got a situation, I was watching some analysis of election results in the United States, when they were saying that basically, if you don't go around saying you're a Christian, you can't get elected.
And then of course the problem isn't that you can say you're a Christian, because How can I put it?
There's all sorts of different types of Christians, from the gentle Quakers to the hard, you know, fire and brimstone speakers.
But I'm finding that in all religions, and I find the same sort of thing happening in Islam as well, is that the gentle, moderate voices aren't being listened to, and people are gravitating to the people who've got these Very hard convictions, these very fundamentalist views, the I'm right, this is a simple answer to everything that's going on.
And I find that very dangerous for the whole of society.
One broad example before I hand back to you would be over the Iraq war, where George Bush and Tony Blair I've both admitted publicly that they prayed and they took what they saw as God's view before they went into war.
And converse to that, I saw that both the head of the Church of England and the Pope were both against the Iraq war, and both thought it would be sinful.
So, either God suddenly stopped talking to the representatives of his church and started talking to politicians, Politicians have completely co-opted this.
So this is what I'm worried about.
It's not about individual people.
It's about the broader political situation that we live in.
Okay, Stefan, back to you. No, you're absolutely right.
And this issue of the war has occurred.
There's quite a fierce debate on the boards at Freedom Aid Radio, which is, I think, a very, very instructive and powerful debate.
And the question really is, it sort of centers around this.
Either A, the political leaders who use religion to justify genocide, either A, they genuinely are religious people who genuinely believe that voices in their head are telling them to go and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
My wife's a psychologist.
If she gets somebody who comes to her office and says, a voice in my head is telling me to kill hundreds of thousands of people, Well, she's kind of obligated to tell the authorities, right?
This is somebody who's making genocidal death threats and is obviously very mentally ill.
So either A, the people who are in power are genuinely hearing these voices in their head, in which case they're psychotic.
I mean, if you're hearing voices telling you to kill people, And you've got nukes.
That's not a good situation, right?
You just have to apply the test of universality.
If you're on a bus with someone and they turn and tell you, did you hear that?
I just heard this voice with a vaguely Scottish accent tell me to kill you.
You're not going to say, hey, you'd be a great leader for the country.
That wouldn't be the approach that you would take, right?
So either they genuinely do hear these voices, in which case they're mentally ill, or They don't hear any of these voices, and they simply say whatever is going to get people to let them do what they want to do.
So if they say they have to pray to Zeus, or if they have to do naked breakdancing on platforms filled with ducks, they'll do that.
Whatever the prejudices of the people are...
That will enable them or allow these people to do what the hell they want to do.
They'll just say whatever crap comes in and is part of the general.
And to me, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter either way.
Because, of course, we don't know what's going on in Tony Blair's head.
I don't suspect a lot, but we don't know.
We don't know what's going on in George Bush's head.
There's no omniscience. I certainly would say that the fact that they can say all of this shit and get away with it, and that people will let them go ahead and do it because they've invoked the word God, is an indication that religion has become a pretty dangerous force.
Yeah. Okay, well, Stephan, I'd like to thank you for letting me have the opportunity for this conversation with you.
I'll be around again, and I'm certainly interested in carrying on hearing your voice and your podcast, and I think I'd like to just hand it over to whatever your other listeners have.
Thank you very much, Stephan. Well, thank you.
Excellent, excellent questions.
I really appreciate that chat.
Thank you so much. All right.
We have a lot of people in, and I absolutely, hugely appreciate that.
And so I'm going to unmute just in case anybody else had any questions or comments about this, you know, very, very essential topic.
Now we just wait for Skype to come back.
All right, the mics are all open.
If anybody has any questions, if you could just let me know what your handle is, then we can do a one-on-one.
Hello.
Hello?
Hello? Hello?
Yes, hello?
Hello? Hello?
Oh! How are you?
I'm very busy.
Hello? I'm sorry, was that with a Q? A Q? Okay, if there are no other questions, no problem.
We'll be gone for two hours. Hello.
Hello. Okay, well, we're going to have to abandon that as an experiment that just didn't work as well as I was hoping.
I just don't know why people have the time to do this.
It's just amazing to me.
Okay, I'm just going to check the window.
I'm sorry that if I didn't get to you, and if you had questions, I'm just going to have to not to go to the general Skypey chat thing.
Is there any other questions that have come in there?
Oh, okay, okay. I think we have...
You know what we should do?
Maybe we should switch. There's some applications where you get to raise your hand, and I know that's sort of ridiculous because...
What was the name? I don't know.
If anyone knows, that would be excellent.
I don't know if there's any way...
Yeah, we're just going to do a test here.
Christina requests to speak?
Oh, yeah, there it is. Oh, look at that.
How exciting. All right, so if you're still in the show, appreciate that.
If you want to speak, what did you click there?
Ask for microphone.
God, that doesn't take it away from me, does it?
It's my lifeline. It is my oxygen.
If you have a question or a comment, if you can click on request the microphone.
My God, I can't believe I didn't even notice that.
Ah, okay, we do have a gentleman who's just mentioned something here, so the gentleman with the fine name of Poltergeist.
And this is actually very interesting, because we have actually been talking about whether or not supernatural beings exist, and we do actually have a gentleman by the name of Poltergeist, so maybe he can tell us what the view is from the other side.
Can you see him? I can't see him at all.
No? Okay, I'm so sorry.
I'd love to have you speak, Mr.
Poltergeist, but I can't find you in the Skype window.
So if anybody has a question or a comment before we close off for the day, then if you could click on the request microphone, I'd appreciate that, and then I can sort of unmute you.
Other than that, though, I'm sure that I've talked enough for just about everybody.
Okay, Thomas, I'm going, sorry, I'm just going to go down the list who happens, whoever happens to be here.
So just wait for a moment, and we'll wait for Skype to keep in.
Alright, I got him. Are you there, Thomas?
Yeah, I'm here. Can you hear me?
I sure can. You referred to religion as a site rather than I believe you referred to it as the scientific method.
Is that correct? You're breaking up just a little bit.
Could you just repeat the question, please?
You referred religion to the scientific method.
What do you mean by that?
I'm sorry to keep asking you this.
Did you mean to say that I compared religion or that I preferred religion to the scientific method?
You referred it to, I believe, is what you said.
No, I certainly would say that religion is the complete opposite of the scientific method, and that the scientific method is a valid way of achieving objective and real truth, which is really the only truth there is about the world, and that religion, because it relies on revelation and faith, is the exact opposite of the scientific method and therefore has no truth value whatsoever.
So you're saying that the theory of mankind and evolution, you're saying that's the valid thing rather than basing it that, you know, God created everything.
That's what you're trying to say.
Well, I'd say, I mean, I'd refine that just a little bit insofar as I would say that the methodology by which we answer questions has got to involve logic and evidence And not superstition and fantasy.
So I'm not going to say that evolution is the final answer.
I'm no biologist. But I will say that evolution is a superior method, like the scientific method which has produced the theory of evolution, is a far superior methodology, infinitely better methodology for determining truth from falsehood relative to faith and fantasy and superstition, which does nothing but sort of destroy minds and destroy knowledge.
I can kind of see what you're saying, but there's prophecies out there.
One of them has to do with Babylon, and you can look at that kind of with the terrorist attack.
That's kind of coming true, and you can kind of see that the prophecies that are in the Bible are actually coming true, and you can actually see that it's all true.
But I'm not going to try to say that you're wrong, because everybody has their own opinion on religion.
I mean, religion is one of the biggest questions you can get out there in the world today.
I just wanted to clear that up.
It was kind of going in my mind.
No, I appreciate that. Now, so what you're saying, and look, I appreciate the approach that you're taking here.
So let me ask you, for you, the Bible has a certain extra degree of validity because it has made predictions which have come true.
Yeah, well, you have to see it.
I can't quote exactly.
No, I understand that.
I'm not going to sort of cross-examine you on verse by verse.
And I appreciate the approach that you're taking, and I think it's quite the right approach to take, which is to say that I'm not going to believe in religion just because someone told me that there's a God, right?
I'm going to believe in religion because there's some testable Way to check whether it's true or not, right?
Because, I mean, you and I both know that a whole bunch of religions have come and gone in the world, right?
Zeus and Osiris and all these other sorts of people, and there's this North mythology, ancient Chinese religions.
There's tons and tons of religions that have come and gone in the world.
And so there's no reason to believe that sort of the one that we have right now is the one final truth, despite the fact that all these other ones have come before.
So, you know, I want to sort of commend you and applaud you in taking exactly the right approach, which is to say, well, I'm not just going to believe in something because someone told me, but I'm going to apply some sort of criteria to it to find out if it's true or not.
And the criteria that you're mentioning is that biblical prophecies seem to be accurate.
Is that right? Yeah, yeah, and if you want me to, and if you would like me to, I can actually send you stuff, information where it compares the stuff in the Bible to the stuff that's going on today.
And what only has to do with the attack on Babylon, and when we get Babylon in the United States, the Paris attack on 9-11, the I just want to ask you two more questions,
if you don't mind. The first one is that, given that the Bible is supposed to have been written by a divine being with perfect knowledge, would you say that all of the prophecies would have to be true, or all of the predictions would have to be true, or would there be some sort of wiggle room for errors?
The books of the Bible were It's written by followers of Jesus Christ, or God.
And the prophecies that are in the Bible, I'm not going to say, yes they're all going to come true, but they are coming true.
Well, but there are some, and I don't mean to sort of jump on you with this, but there are some that have definitely not come true.
And the time sort of period has expired, right?
So I'm sure you're aware that Jesus Christ himself said, as he ascended to heaven after three days after being crucified, that Jesus Christ himself said, there are those among you who will not taste of death before I return in all of my glory.
Right, so he was saying to his human mortal followers, there are those among you who will not taste of death before I come back in all my glory.
Now that prediction, however much, you know, there may have been predictions that are valid with regards to 9-11, that prediction certainly didn't come true, right?
Yeah. And so look, I'm not going to convince you to be religious or not, but I would just say that if you're going to take the approach and say that there's more truth value in the Bible because there are predictions which come true, you certainly need to...
The first thing that I do, and everyone has their own approach, but the first thing that I do when I have a belief that I think is true is I immediately start to look for the opposite evidence.
I mean, I have some pretty wacky beliefs about not having a government and so on, right?
So I sort of say, okay, well, what are all the worst arguments that I could bring to bear on this idea?
And so the thing that I would be careful of, you know, just from a sort of mental health standpoint, not that I'm saying you're crazy or anything, but just sort of good mental health, is that if you have a belief, it's usually the best thing to do to come up with every conceivable Yeah,
I see what you're saying.
Do you do this show often?
I'm new here.
Do you do this every week or something like that?
But I do run a podcast, which you can get at www.freedomainradio.com.
And so if you'd like to dip into some of those, we do talk about religion and so on quite a bit, which might be of considerable interest to you.
And if you'd like to drop back, I'd certainly like to chat with you some more.
Now, we had, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but just because I've been going for a fairly long time here and we had other questions, if anybody else has a question or a comment that they'd like to make, if you would like to click on the, give me the microphone within, was it? Ask for microphone.
Can we change that to beg for microphone?
Would that be possible? Well, I want to thank you for your time there, Steph.
Thank you so much, and I hope to hear from you again.
Thank you so much for dropping by. All right.
I'm scanning up and down the list for anybody who has a question or an issue.
I don't want to drag this into the wee hours, but if there is enough enthusiasm for the topic, I'm certainly always happy to chat about philosophy and religion.
So I'm just looking up and down.
If anybody else has any questions or issues, if you can just click on Ask for Mike, I would really appreciate that.
Yeah, that's some very exciting people.
People come and then they go. It's like everyone's simultaneously liking it and liking it out of Skype.
It's kind of funny. Alright, well listen then, I'm not going to drag it out if people are content with the topics that we've had so far.
I really appreciate everyone's time to listen to these, of course, very, very...
Oh, we do have one. Luke, I am your father, wants to say something.
Now, are you going to do the breathing?
Or, like, are you going to do that asthmatic thing?
Yes, Luke. Go ahead.
Oh, hi. Hi, how's it going?
It's going good. Did I click on the right icon, or have I completely startled you when you're having dinner now?
Oh, no, all right. Well, so, what's your favorite color?
What's my favorite color?
Yeah. I would say probably on the blue side of things.
Blue's good. Blue's good.
All right. Is there anyone else who had any other questions?
maybe a little more around religion.
All right.
I think I did see somebody else's...
I'm not sure... I'm never sure exactly how often Skype refreshes this kind of stuff.
So... Who each?
Love to live.
All right. Love to live.
That seems like a good principle.
Let me just see if I can't find it.
I wish you could solve these things by alphabetical.
I'll just keep singing until I find it.
Love to live? Ah, there we go.
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no. Okay, love to live dot info.
Did you have a question? Hi there.
Are we hearing each other? Hi, how's it going?
I'm sorry? Are we hearing each other?
You bet. Go ahead. Okay.
You talk about this blog being always set up for self.
I'm sorry, could you just say that again?
You've broken up a little bit. And the conversation seems to be very much about a God which is separate from ourselves.
Yes. So wouldn't there be a God which is not separate from ourselves?
And the God in us, or the good in us, as being that God or that good?
Now, do you mean a non-biological or a non-material-based aspect of herself, like a soul or a conscience?
I just want to make sure I understand what you mean.
Right. And the mind itself, and that intelligence, for us to have an intelligence, surely it is bent and connected in some way into a higher intelligence, which is an overall intelligence that we are all part of.
Well, I mean, I certainly think that's an interesting idea.
I've not sort of seen any evidence for it, and certainly in my sort of travels around the world talking about it.
In your own mind, in your own mind is evidence itself.
Your mind, your own intelligence would say there is an overall intelligence that we're all connected to that gives us all light and existence.
Well, I thought I'd get that kind of stuff from Luke.
I am your father. But I certainly do understand where you're coming from, but I certainly have no experience of this collective intelligence or a part of a sort of larger mind.
You have experience of your own intelligence.
That in itself is representative of our intelligence, your own intelligence, our own intelligence.
Our intelligence is something you can't quantify, can you?
But it's there. I certainly understand where you're coming from, but I think you're going to have the danger of, you know, you may or may not know the term, but I'll explain it for those who haven't heard it before, that, you know, there's a term in philosophy called the tautology, right?
So when I was a debater, when I was in school...
We were always taught about tautologies, right?
So you want to make sure that you don't define something as equivalent, right?
So if I say I have a certain form of human intelligence and you say to me that that's the equivalent of God, then you are defining God as the presence of human intelligence.
But that's a tautology, right?
So you say, well, what is God?
God is human intelligence.
It's a circular definition.
You're just saying, what I would call human intelligence, you're calling God, and I don't think that we've proved the existence of anything that we don't already believe in.
in you believe in existing intelligence as do i but i would certainly not say that that's added anything new to the content if that makes any sense right so you've taken it somewhere you've taken it somewhere whereby it's that reverence or respect we have which is like intelligence which
We have intelligence, humbly asked, that surely there's intelligence which is the source of our intelligence, where we got our intelligence from, our ability to think and to be and aware that we exist,
we are alive. And to have this appreciation of life and to see life as a miracle in itself and disregarding it and taking it for granted and misusing it and simply living out of harmony and understood life because they don't understand what life's about and their purpose of life and to know yourself that our purpose here Which we all strive for is peace and the peace of mind.
Well, I'm certainly not going to be somebody who argues against peace and peace of mind.
I think you and I are together on that, brother, and I certainly applaud you for the sentiments.
I mean, I'm absolutely with you there.
Peace and peace of mind, harmony, respect for life.
I'm not sure that I would say that life is a miracle, because if it is, it's a miracle that very often goes very nastily wrong with illnesses and so on.
But I certainly would agree with you that it is a virtue and a beautiful thing in life to have reverence for existence, to have respect for other human beings.
But, again, I want to sort of understand, do you believe that that comes from an external entity or agency like the Christian...
Not external, not external.
I'm not separate from ourselves, no.
What part of ourselves?
Is it material? Is it material in the same way that...
Okay, okay.
So what you would define as, say, a striving for virtue, or a striving for benevolence, or compassion, or courage, the virtues, I'm sure you and I would be able to agree on a lot of the virtues, that you believe that the desire for an achievement of virtue is to participate in something that is divine.
And to be in harmony with And your natural nature, which is...
Right, so to be with your true self, to be authentic, to be self-actualizing.
Right, and a balance, a balance whereby that's what we're striving to do.
We should go to and those two extremes, but it's that gray area, the middle, the balance, which has harmony.
Right. Not to go to the great extremes, which a lot of beliefs end up going.
It's either life or death sort of thing.
It's a balance that At both pages part, but neither is dominant over the other.
I perfectly agree with you, and I think that to some degree you may be talking about what's sometimes called the mean or the Aristotelian mean, which is that you want to find a balance between two extremes, that if you have too much courage, you're kind of foolhardy, and if you have too little courage, you're kind of like a coward, so you want to get something in between.
And obviously we don't want to totally dominate and destroy nature as a species, but at the same time, we want to have enough control over nature to, say, not have our children die of infections and so on.
There's sort of a balance in life that's quite a challenge.
For individuals and also for societies.
I think that you and I agree about a lot of things.
I'm just not sure what the addition of the word God adds to that debate about virtue and balance.
Well, I pray with words, and God is really that missing O, which is the good within us, that creative force within us, that positive vibes, and what creates It's that good that's within us and giving nature, that healthy nature. Humanity, I suppose, you can say.
Right. Now, and I agree with you, and I agree with you that all of those things are powerful and important.
And I would say, though, that in describing it as a desire for virtue and humanity and so on, that it doesn't do a lot to clarify what you want to get across, which I certainly understand, right?
Because when you say, you know, that the God is within us and so on, some people are going to interpret that very differently.
But if you say striving for balance and harmony and so on, I think that you're going to communicate what it is you want to communicate more clearly.
I think if you bring divinity into it, then it muddies what I think is a very essential thing that you want to get across, if that makes any sense.
Well, I think it's an evolution and process.
It's evolution in motion.
It's where evolution is about and things improving and getting better at being refined, reaching to a more higher level of existence.
It's that development from To something that is a primitive and to something that's more advanced.
And so, as if in us all there is good, some more than others, and that's about how brightly that you let it really shine, so to speak.
It's like, and we're instruments, and it's basically some are shining more than others, and it's those that are not shining, we need to help shine.
And so it helps those that are still shining.
Let's keep it shining. Let's keep it bright.
It's the light within. You can go along the term of and divine energy, light of the whole universe.
It's that energy.
It's a positive energy which creates as we see around us.
Well, I'm not going to disagree with you.
That sounds like a beautiful vision and I certainly appreciate that feedback.
Now, is there anybody else who wanted to jump in before we close the show down?
If you wanted to yank the mic, feel free to raise your hand just now.
Or you may want to join this gentleman with his self-medication.
It is a...
Self-medication, did you say?
We call it self-medication. Absolutely.
Look, I mean, I think it's a beautiful thing that you're talking about there.
The only thing that I would say is I think you might want to throw a little bit more rigor in.
That's what, you know, because, I mean, these things are all great, but to achieve them is a real challenge, and that's, you know, part of it's like...
That's our purpose in life, surely.
That's our purpose in life, isn't it?
Absolutely. I totally agree with you, for sure.
But it's like a doctor...
Sorry. Go ahead.
And you're about to say, go, and about a doctor...
Well, no, I was just saying, I mean, but a little bit, I mean, no offense, right?
I mean, you're obviously a very smart guy, and I really respect that you've thought a lot about these issues and care very greatly about these issues, but the challenge is, of course, how to achieve balance and how to achieve rationality and virtue within your life.
So a little bit, it's like you're saying, you're like a doctor saying, I want everyone to be healthy, and it's like, well, that's great, but how do you get there?
That's the real challenge, right?
That's a really... That's the real journey.
And so that's what I... I mean, that was only sort of the major question that I had about what it is that you were saying.
Well, first of all, and there's one of these commandments that the major faith, which you don't like to hear about, which they're supposed to follow, which is one shall not kill.
And because... And they don't focus on that, and they focus on other issues.
And that's why you find centuries of human existence I have really not followed in the direction it should because those who are in the position to lead have not been leading and focusing that one shall not kill.
And they live in fear of their own life and they just really embark to the tune of the pain master.
No, I agree with you for sure.
I would say that they have been leading.
They've just been leading us off a cliff.
Yeah, the wrong way. They've been leading us downhill and to our own destruction.
And they don't respect life.
And they talk about it and they talk about compassion and love and respect.
But deep down they don't.
It's all words and their substance is a shallow one.
And so much so, Everyday habit of eating flesh from a living being that's been killed, which that shows that they don't have compassion for life if they're happy to eat that body part from a living being that's been killed.
And that is a reflection of how deep their compassion is if they're happy to just have their banquets.
No, for sure.
I mean, they do respect life, it's just not ours, right?
They respect our lives about as much as a farmer respects the rights of his cows, right?
Well, you know, life in general, and they just don't see that life is to be respected, and by killing and promoting that A notion that we need to kill to survive and killing has a place.
So they're not following their own commandment that one shall not kill.
That sounds good.
Let's not kill. But they're happy to promote it and keep it going.
Why? Because the biggest business on the planet is the killing business.
The arms trade.
That's the biggest business on the planet, which fuels the wars.
The more wars they have, the more reason for them to keep manufacturing their arms and killing machines.
And so our mentality is that killing has a place.
It's the biggest business.
The movies have the best-selling movies.
It's movies packed with killing.
And so you can go on with children enjoying their games.
And it's all focusing on killing.
Basically, accept it.
See it as a norm. Don't try and change it.
It's big business.
Because those in power, you know, see life as cheap and people go into wars, not even realizing why they're fighting, but because they're encouraged to see that killing is heroic and glamorous and honorable.
Right. The pride of the Marine, right?
Right. Yeah.
And they're just killing machines.
And so when you have the government happy to have wars because of the...
and buying and selling and manufacturing of...
and killing machines, and don't be surprised, on the streets you have the gangsters following suit.
And then, you know, inside the family home, at home, you know, you find that what people are fear of is...
and being threatened that their life will be lost, and you have domestic violence where you find, you know, Wives and children and mothers have been killed.
And killing seems to have a place.
So this is where you start.
You've got to come by and listen to some of the podcasts that we talk about.
Well, you know, and for sure, yeah.
And we need positive art to try and make the change to wake up people's thinking and not to just accept this existence which is Some people push into position like these, and religious leaders like you've mentioned, you know, and then, at the end of days, and they want to push into motion to justify their belief.
When simply it says, one shall not kill.
And Jesus came down to show that, you know, we're not here to kill each other.
He was killed, but he did not kill back to sort of justify the killing or fight back and then go and take life, yeah, and draw back the sword from the ear that Peter was trying to strike, etc.
We're trying not to kill.
Well, you know, I don't want to get into a huge debate here because it's near the end of the show, but I certainly do respect your respect for life.
And look, I mean, you and I are on the same page for what it's worth to you.
Yeah, well, that's, you know, and the more the better.
We're on the same page as far as war goes and so on.
But you have to really get to digging into your Bible, though, if you believe that Jesus was not an advocate Of the kind of violence that you and I both despise that is so common within the world.
I mean, it's something that you don't get a whole lot from religious people, but there are many, many instances in the Bible in which Christian directly commands that non-believers be killed.
So Jesus commands that non-believers be put to death and so on.
So, you know, I know that there's a sort of story or a fairy tale on a fairy tale about gentle Jesus, right?
That he's kind of like hippie and he's kind of like John Lennon plus Timothy O'Leary plus, you know, a nice guy, long hair, beard, kind of those dewy eyes and so on.
But, you know, if you want to dig into the Bible and have a look for these kinds of quotes, you can find them online and so on.
I'm not going to sort of repeat them here.
But Jesus was not a very peaceful guy in the way that he's described in the Bible.
He said, sure, let's be peaceful and so on, but there's plenty of instances in the Bible where Jesus commands that non-believers be put to death, that it's okay to stone a woman who's not faithful and so on.
I agree with you that we definitely need to work for a more peaceful life.
I mean, that's an ideal that nobody could ever say no to, but I'd be careful.
Go to the source, that's all I'm saying.
Certainly don't take my word for it, but go to the source.
There may be some things that Jesus talks about that may not be part of what you think about in terms of Jesus, but it's something that you may need to dig into because it's important stuff.
Okay, well, it seems like a big contradiction because I think the last commandment that Jesus put down was to love your enemy as yourself and kind of took it further.
And not just love your neighbor, but love your enemy, which is like, you know, that there is to show that you ain't going to take on the bad traits of an enemy coming to attack you by looking to kill them like they're looking to kill you.
There you just become as bad as the enemy.
So it's basically... And killing doesn't have a place, and it's the ideal what we all should be going for, because from childhood, you know, and for the sake of the children, you know, and sadly, and the...
and come into a world where they're easily taken for a ride whereby they themselves accept killing and one day may even do it.
Okay, listen, I've got somebody else who just wants to come in.
Have a listen, freedomainradio.com.
We've got some very interesting podcasts there, which I think might help for you because we're definitely on the same side of the fence.
But I really appreciate your sentiments and I appreciate your passion towards these ideas, which are very, very important.
So there's one gentleman, Chris, who wants to sort of finish off or close off the show and I'm very happy to have him do that.
I just can't find you on the list of people who are in the call.
So, if you would like to sort of tell me who you are, that would be good, because I can't give you the mic if I don't know who you are.
Or you can click on the sort of request the mic and I can click on to unmute you.
Anybody? No, can't see him.
Can't see him. Is he saying anything in the chat?
No. He's here.
Uh-oh. No.
Okay. Well, listen. Maybe you can...
Oh. Oh.
Oh. Okay. Okay. Sorry.
I didn't... I only know people by their handle.
Okay. If you would like to close us off, that would be fantastic.
Go ahead. I love to leave a lot of info.
It's www.freedomainradio.com.
Go ahead, Chris. Thanks.
It's just a question that popped into my head, really.
What do you think the origin of religion is?
Do you think it's basically an offshoot of man's ability to abstract or Yeah, yeah.
What's your view on the origins of religion?
Well, I think that's a fantastic question.
I am not even going to attempt to do justice with it, but it would be a good topic to start off since this question of religion does seem to be quite a popular one.
Why don't we have a look at that next week?
I think that would be an excellent question to start off with.
I certainly have put some thought into it over the years, so I'd be happy to share what I think and then we can have a good discussion about it, but I wouldn't try and do it justice just now.
Look at that. It's a hook for coming back next week.
There we go. Come back next week and you can hear me talk some more and ask some questions.
Well, listen, thanks everyone so, so much for listening.
It was a fantastic show.
I really appreciate everybody's time and attention to these issues.
It's really wonderful to see the level of interest in philosophy and in the examination of these kinds of issues.
And thank you so much to everybody who participated.
And thank you so much for your patience with the technical issues.
But the content sometimes is greater than the form.
I really, really appreciate it.
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