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Nov. 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:48
514 The History Of Religion Part 1

Rank speculation on the genesis of gods

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Hello, back to the YouTubers.
This is a live video.
Live. Not quite live, but lively.
Let's go with that, shall we? And I just wanted to say hi, and I'm going to YouTube this baby because there was such a high degree of interest in the topics of theology that were being discussed on Sundays, 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Freedom Aid Radio Call-In Show.
There's a little plug. And we had like 50 people in at a time, which was quite a few.
So I assume that there's a great deal of interest out there.
And as an ardent capitalist, I am a slave to the market.
Whatever you people say is how it's going to be.
I am as a liquid in the container of your needs.
So I wanted to broadcast this, and I've also noticed that The occasional YouTube videos that I still post do get quite a number of hits.
So, at least, not relative to an oriental girl sticking a pencil up her nose or anything, but relative to, say, a for sale sign.
I have to go into the traffic, yay, like a half of a zipper.
I love that people give you like 1.001 car length to come in while they're screaming along in the merge lane.
It's all too beautiful.
Alright, so, given the level of interest that is floating around in the world of theology or interest in sort of theology, one of the questions that was asked at the end of the last show was if I sort of had any thoughts.
Actually, I don't think the question was, do I have any thoughts?
I think that's pretty much a given by now, right or wrong, but would I share my thoughts on the history of religion?
Now, I mean, I've had some esoteric out-there-make-it-up-as-you-go-along kind of podcast before, but nothing quite compares to the question of the history of religion, since, of course, there are very few records, and since, as we mentioned two podcasts ago, history is written by the victors.
These Victor guys, whoever they are, they just win a hell of a lot.
Oh, I'm so sorry about that joke.
I had a 50-50 in my mind.
Should I go for it or not? Anyway.
And so, of course, since the religions who have won are the ones who have left the records behind of their conquering of other religions, and they usually leave the sword out and put the spirit back in.
So we don't have any really legitimate or valuable, at least not that I've ever read, and I spent a fair amount of time on this in grad school, I haven't seen any really good or valid history of religion that is not either sort of made up in the way that I'm talking about, where you just sort of work with logical inferences and with human nature as it presents itself now, and assume that human nature hasn't changed radically over history.
So, you know, with all caveats, this is more of a fairy tale.
Which is kind of appropriate in a way.
But it's more of a fairy tale with, I would say, some reasoned statements about human nature than it is any kind of logical or purely historical examination because those things are impossible.
All right. To start, well, one of the...
One of the functions of the human mind that is really endlessly fascinating, to me at least, is our ability to deny sensual stimuli.
That really is, when you sort of mull it, it is to me the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the species.
It's what's got us out of the caves and what might end up pounding us into some sort of radioactive ash, unlikely, but it is going to be the downfall as it was the rise of the species.
And where there is great power comes great responsibility, of course.
And so when we start to look at what is possible for the human mind in terms of the rejecting of empirical and sensual reality...
We see that when we go askew in this area, you know, grave horrors result.
So it's the most powerful thing that we can do with our minds is to reject sensual stimuli.
So, I mean, to take a silly example, an amoeba has no capacity to reject sensual stimuli.
I mean, you put something around it that it doesn't like, it retracts every single time with almost no learning curve, maybe a very minor one.
Moving up the food chain, we do, of course, get the chickens with the pellets.
If you peck the button, you get a pellet of food and so on, and they will learn that kind of stuff.
But they still don't have any capacity to reject sensual stimuli in a sort of very fundamental way.
If you look at something like a goldfish, you can feed a goldfish and it will keep eating until it dies.
So it doesn't have any capacity to reject the sensual requirement or the sensual desire to eat.
It's pleasurable eating and whether it dies or not, it doesn't matter.
So, in the chimpanzees, of course, there's a stronger learning curve and so on.
But a chimpanzee, at least not anything that I've ever read about, not that I'm an expert in this area, as in most areas, but I've never read of a chimpanzee.
You know, they can assemble stuff to get a banana.
Maybe there's some debate about this rudimentary language thing.
Who knows? But... They're not able to reject their senses and find another route to solve a problem in the scientific method way.
So, a human being looks at the world and says, the world looks flat, but can reason his or her way into understanding that the world is round.
And similarly, and I've used this example, they're just the ones that pop into mind, we can look at a bunch of stars and see that most of them, it looks of course like they're wheeling around the Earth at a fixed distance with different light, different brightnesses. So that's where you get the original idea that came out of medieval scholasticism and the Ptolemaic system of astronomy that the world...
Actually, sorry, this is when Ptolemaic astronomy was not in vogue, but there was a general idea that the sky above at night was a bowl of stars, right?
So far out there, I think it was certainly out beyond the planets, because they'd figured out the Plotanets and retrograde motion and so on at this point, though, had a bad explanation for it.
But it was like a bowl.
It was like an inverted bowl of black material with holes poked through it, through which the light of heaven shone.
It was all that kind of stuff, right?
But, so, I don't think a chimpanzee ever needs to come up with explanations as to what the stars are, and so on.
And that's, I mean, that's what I mean by sort of looking at sensual evidence and rejecting the sensual evidence that is immediate and direct, right?
So if you look up human beings that we know of are the only species that wonders, you know, what the stars are and what they're there for, and so on.
And we do that in a sense by wondering what is over and above and beyond sensual experience.
What is the causality of sensual experience?
What is behind sensual experience?
The mere tickling of our eyeballs with light waves or particles or whatever the hell they are that come thousands or hundreds of light years from the stars.
That would be a mere electrical or biochemical response from the optic nerve to the brain and every other species just looks up and says lights and then goes back to, are the lights threatening?
No. Can I eat them?
No. Then I'm going to go back to what I'm doing.
But human beings want to go beyond a sensual experience to find the causality of things.
And so along with that, if sensual experience, if sort of just looking at the world and getting stimulated was all that you needed for knowledge, then of course...
We wouldn't need language, and we wouldn't need books.
We wouldn't need conversation.
We wouldn't need learning.
And we'd be stuck in a sort of cyclical.
Every generation learns exactly what the previous generation was able to learn with a small bit of teaching from elders, and that's about it.
We'd be stuck with instinct and that which could be learned in a single generation.
But, of course, the great thing with human knowledge is that it doubles every 18 months.
Or was that Moore's law? Something like that.
But human knowledge, of course, can be built brick by brick to create a very high wall, and human beings who took many generations to find out the world was round can now be told that in about five seconds, and assuming that they accept it, they can continue on to learn the next thing.
So human beings do have the ability, they have the desire, we have the desire to go behind the senses to find out the causality that is at the root, or behind, or the sort of first cause of our, of our sensual stimuli and we also have the capacity to reject that and these two things are very interrelated,
right? So we can say why are the stars there and we can also say the world looks flat but it's actually round and we can also say that the Sun and the Moon look the same size but they're not and we can also distinguish Between the planets, which move more rapidly, and the stars, which move less rapidly.
So we can do all of these kinds of things, which seems to be pretty unique to our species, at least so far, that have been discovered in this world.
And maybe dolphins, if they could see the stars, would be astronomers too, I don't know.
So these sort of two basic things that we wish to know the causality behind the world's happenings, And that we are able to reject the evidence of our senses and to go beyond, right?
So I can imagine that certain species that live in the desert who, if they were subject to the same kind of mirage illusion that human beings are subject to, might say, ooh, water, and keep chasing it.
And they go, ooh, water, and keep chasing it.
But a human being does have the capacity to reject sensual stimuli.
And of course, animals do as well.
I mean, if you If you stop giving pellets when the chicken pecks the pellet button, then you end up with the chicken not pecking the pellet button.
Sounds like a tongue-teaser, doesn't it?
So, human beings have the capacity to reject the stimuli and a desire to understand what's behind the world.
The world's events or the world's happening.
To go beyond sensual stimuli and with the capacity to reject sensual stimuli.
And, of course, I know that people are going to write to me and say this is not unique to human beings.
If you look at a cat and play it a steady tone, after a while the cat's auditory canal will stop transmitting the tone to the brain and all that.
Yes, absolutely. There is an adaptive kind of...
There is an adaptive kind of mechanism in almost all neurological systems, which is to minimize unnecessary or irrelevant stimuli, right?
So if you've ever been working hard on something, even if you have an intermittent sound like somebody drilling into concrete outside your window, after a while you'll simply stop hearing it if you're really concentrated.
So sure, the mind does have a natural and autonomic methodology for Minimizing unwanted stimuli because, of course, you want to hear the lion's roar, not the rustle of the grass, right?
Or I guess, actually, that would probably be the reverse.
By the time you hear the lion's roar, it's too late.
You want to hear the rustle of the grass, you don't want to hear the babbling of the brook.
So just from a sort of filtering out the unwanted stimuli, when, of course, that facility or faculty is not present, bad things happen to people because they can't screen out.
Now, that's sort of the autism thing, right?
Everything has the same priority when it comes to the functioning of the mind.
So, there is...
And for human beings, there are questions long before there's a methodology for answers, right?
And this sort of two facts are interrelated.
So, a human being wants to know where the stars came from and why they shine and why there's night and why there's day and so on and so on and so on.
And these questions will arise long before there's any methodology for answering them, right?
So, why are we here?
Sorry, why are there stars came around a long time before calculus and higher mathematics and astronomy and, I mean, in the sense that you actually had telescopes and so on.
So, the questions arose long before there were answers.
And human beings, whenever you have a question, right?
Whenever you have a question, you have one of two methodologies.
And the sort of rational philosophy of market anarchism is really at this very early stage, right?
Which is why I'm saying we need to let go of everything that came before, because we're only going to be muddying the waters by hanging on to that which came before and trying to build a bridge from error to truth.
You really can't. So...
When human beings have a question, they face one of two ways of resolving that question or of solving the question.
Two methodologies.
The first is that they can accept that they don't know And they can work in tiny increments with the knowledge that they will very likely never know in their lifetime, but that they'll be adding something useful for the next generation to build on and so on.
A very patient, rational, empirical methodology for determining what is true and what is false.
They can sort of approach that and that is one methodology for solving problems.
The second is that the scientist is always in competition with the storyteller.
The scientist is always in competition with the storyteller.
The storyteller, also known as the propagandist, but we won't be that cruel, we'll just call him the storyteller for now.
The storyteller will provide an instant and enjoyable answer to the question.
So... For instance, in ancient Greece, they were working out and had figured out not only that the world was round, but by sticking stakes into the ground and looking at the shadows at different places, I think in Alexander's empire, they had also figured out that they knew its circumference, and they were pretty accurate, within a couple of percent.
So that's sort of one answer, right?
What is the world? Well, the world is round and the world is this size, right?
So that's sort of one answer, but it takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of not listening to people who've come before, but rather thinking for yourself.
And it takes a lot of extrapolation from personal experience to universals to be able to make that leap, right?
When you are hungry, you don't just make up some food in your mind.
I mean, I guess you do, but if you can't get any, but it's not going to make you any better.
I remember reading some, and if anybody remembers this, I remember reading some story when I was a kid where the kid said to the mom, they were very poor, and he said, Mommy, I'm hungry.
And she said, Well, eat a hungry.
And the kid was very...
I was very frustrated, of course, because there was no such thing as a kangri.
But if anyone remembers that story, I've always been curious what that came from.
I was very young when I read it. But you don't just sort of make up food.
When you need some money, you don't just sort of make up some money.
I mean, unless you're the government. But You actually will sort of go through a sort of methodology of cause and effect and say, well, I'm hungry, so I've got to go to the store.
I've got to get some food. I've got to grow some food for next year.
I've got to, you know, do this kind of stuff, so I'm not as hungry again.
So you go through a sort of strict methodology.
And if your mom says, if you say, I'm hungry, and your mom says, eat a Cungry, you don't starve to death going, hmm, that was the best Cungry I've ever had, right?
So when it comes to sort of bodily needs and so on, what your parents tell you doesn't really mean anything, so why would it mean anything With the rest of empirical reality, right?
I mean, so there's a lot of work, and it's laborious, and it's painful, and it can be emotionally very difficult because you're rejecting all of the nonsense that you were told before, and the moment that you tell people or talk to people that what they've been told before is nonsense, they get hostile, and you get in the ire of the authorities, as scientists throughout history have felt, now that they've been bought by the authorities, they're a little less worried.
Of course, when scientists get bought by the authorities, the rest of us get a whole lot more worried, but So, this scientific approach is, you know, slow, laborious, painful, difficult, and all that kind of stuff.
The only plus is that it actually happens to get you closer to the truth if you apply it consistently.
On the other hand, though, you have the storyteller, right?
And the storyteller is the guy who's, you know, he's entertaining and he's charming and he's engaging and often he's got the right look like that pastor who bought the crystal meth for the male prostitute recently.
He had that right wholesome, white-bred Christian look.
I mean, it's, you know, 99% of bullshit is aesthetics, right?
So... So you have somebody who's charming and pleasant and certain, right?
And certain. And this is why people gravitate towards certainty because you kind of have to rely on experts, right?
So for most people, on the one hand, you have this scientist dude saying, well, I don't know, it's complicated, and the best that I can do is spend the years trying to figure out whether or not the world is likely round, right?
Just because you measure a curvature doesn't mean that it's not banana-shaped or something like that.
But that it's likely round and that it conforms with the rest of the round objects we see in the sky and so on.
Oh, that was the other thing. The shadow of the Earth slicing across the moon during a lunar eclipse was round as well.
That was another clue. But...
You've got this one guy who's saying that knowledge is going to be slow and laborious and challenging, but it will, of course, be deeply satisfying and we actually will be conforming our concepts with the reality of how matter behaves and energy behaves, so that's good.
And so you've got this guy. Now on the other side, you've got this charlatan, charming, frightening whoever, like whatever they're using, whether they're frightening children or charming adults, And there's a lot of seduction as well in religion for women, right?
Because the religious people know they have to get a hold of women.
It's one thing that libertarians don't, I think, get quite as much.
It's all fine to talk to 45-year-old men, but if you really want to change the world, you have to talk to the women, because the women are the ones who give...
The first instruction on the world to the children, mostly.
And that first impressions can be fairly long-lasting.
So that's one of the reasons why I've dragged Christine in and we talk about relationship issues and so on.
To be broadly stereotypical, there is a great deal of value in that for women.
And men. And, you know, kudos to the sensitivity of the men and the rationality of the women.
A lot of them are blowing away my stereotypes.
So on the one hand, you've got this scientist guy who says it's going to be difficult and it's going to be horrible and it's going to be challenging and people are going to dislike you because you're questioning the sort of social norms.
And every scientific methodology has an impact on society.
You can't have a scientific methodology without that scientific methodology proving that religion is false, that there's no such thing as countries, that leadership is nonsense, and that violence is bad.
There's an implicit thing in the scientific method that you recognize no authority but the senses and reproducibility and rationality, And you don't use violence to resolve disputes, and blah, blah, blah, blah, anyway.
And of course you say that things that don't show up in the senses and don't conform to reason aren't valid, and the countries don't show up in the senses and surely don't conform to reason, so...
Everything that occurs within the scientific method has an implicit criticism of very many social institutions.
And... So that's on the one hand.
On the other side, you've got, you know, Joe Charming, storyteller guy, who says, you know, the world was created with a bowel movement from the great intestine, or, you know, the world was created in six days from God, although there was no such thing as days at the time, and there was nothing, and God created light, and there was still nothing, but you could see it, all right?
All this kind of stuff.
And people sort of look between these two people, the scientist and the storyteller, and they say, huh, which should we go with?
Which is more pleasant?
And the scientist says that your life has no meaning that is external to yourself.
The scientist says that you have no meaning that is external to yourself.
And the philosopher, who's rational, certainly does.
There's no puppet strings out there giving us meaning in the world.
But the storyteller will say, you know, you are part of a great cosmic drama and this deity is totally obsessed with you and loves you and cares about you and so on.
And also, you know, when your beloved ones die, you'll join them in another realm.
So basically, he's a pusher, right?
I mean, he's exactly like a drug pusher.
It gets you hooked with easy highs, and then you're his slave, right?
I mean, there's a downside to the storyteller, folks, right?
I mean, of course, the storyteller that we most hear from these days is the one in the West, is the one sort of political and democratic and voting and freedom and so on.
That's the storyteller, as I was talking about with the Mark Stein article about a week and a half ago.
Actually, almost two. It was Sunday, two Sundays ago.
But, yeah, there's a price, right?
Because once you believe the storyteller, then you become addicted to the story.
I mean, this is one of the things, especially because the story, from the religious standpoint, involves meaning and so on.
So, human beings have questions.
These just arise from our nature, right?
I mean, I don't know what the cause of the questions are, but I can certainly trace the effect in a logical manner.
That people have questions and they want answers, right?
And they feel uncomfortable without having answers.
And I don't know whether people feel uncomfortable without having answers because of conditioning or because of our nature.
I don't know. I would assume that if you have a question that you want answered, you're going to feel less good not having an answer than having an answer, right?
Any want that is satisfied feels better than a want that is unsatisfied.
But answers are very hard to come by.
It certainly was like 25 years of thinking for me to come up with anything useful.
24, maybe 23.
So answers are very hard to come by, and they take a lot of rigor and a lot of emotional rollercoastering, and they have very personal effects, as I've sort of always talked about in this show.
So if the storyteller gets to children, then the children are almost universally doomed.
So the scientist is going to have a tougher time getting to children because the children keep asking questions.
Why, why, why, why?
Why is the sky blue? Why does light do this?
Why is there gravity? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, the answer, God's will, for many children, of course, is going to conform nicely with what they experience in their families, which is that they do what they're told because their parents will it, not because there's any rational answer, but just because it's what your parents say to do, so do it.
It's what your teacher says to do, so do it.
It's what the priest says to do, so do it.
So hearing God's will has a ghastly kind of resonance with children.
And of course, when it's spoken angrily, then they will simply recognize that their health is threatened through the possible withdrawal of parental affection.
And lo and behold, they suddenly find themselves not asking questions anymore.
Now, that whole process of storytelling, and please don't think this is in the past, and please don't think that this is in the past or even not around you at the moment if you're not religious, right?
I mean, the storytelling that goes on in the American empire around virtue and good guys and bad guys and freedom and democracy and liberty and the virtue of the government and the virtue of the cops and the virtue of the army.
I mean, you could just go on and on, and Lord knows I have.
Please understand that you're in as great a fairy tale as anybody else.
And the fairy tale, even if you've gotten rid of all the political illusions, the fairy tale that you have is probably still going to be about your family and your obligations to them and your need to take care of them and your need not to upset them and so on, right?
So you're embedded.
We're all embedded in these fantasies, you know, like flies in amber with a tiny little straw that gets through to reality, that gets us to work and gets us fed and so on.
But You know, we sit in this vile, creepy bath of fantasy pretty much our whole lives, and it's hell to get out.
I mean, it's hell to wake up. It's not so much hell personally, although that's certainly not an insignificant aspect, but it sure is hell socially, right?
Because you wake up and everybody gets angry at you.
It's just inevitable. And tries to manipulate you and puts you back to sleep.
It really is. You know, The Matrix was a very good fairy tale in that sense.
So... This issue then occurs that people will gravitate towards the manipulator or the storyteller rather than towards the scientist.
And that's also because, I mean, it's not just because people are bad, but there is always the problem of the bell curve distribution of intelligence across the species, right?
So there are many more storytellers than scientists, I mean, in the past, right?
When there was no profession.
You can make money being a storyteller.
If you're in a tribe, you can make money as the witch doctor.
You can dance around and put hoops in your nose and pretend to cure and heal people and hear enemy guys come in and all that kind of nonsense.
You can do all of that and people will bring you food.
Infertile women will bring you food to do a dance to increase their fertility and all this kind of stuff.
So all of that will occur, and you can actually make a living at it, but if you're in a tribe, you can't make a living as a scientist because you're not actually providing anyone any tangible benefit.
That's a multi-generational situation.
It takes a lot of patience, and that's not usually part of the project, right?
Because they've got an easy answer on one side, and they're happy for it.
It gives them meaning and drama and makes sense of the world in a weird kind of way.
And on the other hand, you've got somebody who just keeps asking irritating questions.
And, of course, the witch doctor is not going to be happy with the scientist coming along saying, look, you're just...
I mean, this is livelihood, right?
What's that old line from...
Risky business, you know, in a recession, never fuck with another man's income, right?
Well, of course, in history, it was always a recession, a depression, in fact.
And the witch doctors, the storytellers are not that happy with the scientists coming along and saying, I don't think we've answered these questions, and so on.
And, of course, people are short of time.
They've got other things to do.
They're not professional philosophers or storytellers.
So, all this sort of combines to create a situation where there is a natural gravitational pull towards storytelling rather than science.
And that has something to do with the history of religion, for sure.
Now, it's not the whole truth, because there's a lot of misery and contradictions that are sort of bred to the bone within this realm of storytelling versus science, right?
Because people have to end up being split.
They do some things rationally and empirically, like grow their crops, right?
It's okay to have the witch doctor for when you have things that you can't answer or can't fix, but...
You don't sit there all in a circle in your tribal village saying, we're going to just pray for food to rain from the sky.
So there's this very great split, which causes a lot of misery and unhappiness, just as me not having my coffee sip does.
Once a moment.
Oh, that's nice.
Right, speaking of being addicted.
So that is one of the problems that occurs.
There's a split, and people give up their power.
And of course, the other thing that happens is when you, as I've talked about before, when you create an external agency like a god or something, Who is sitting up there in the sky and organizing everything in earth, then what that does is it tends to massively increase the power of the rulers, right? And that's a very bad thing for everyone as a whole.
Because then you get this horrible symbiotic-parasitic relationship, symbiotic with each other, parasitic on the rest of the tribe between the rulers and the priests, right?
Which we've talked about before. I don't think there's any real need to go into it now.
So, there is this gravitational pull towards these answers, right?
And you can see the complexities that come out of this is pretty funny, right?
So, I think it's in Hinduism or something where it's like the world sits on an elephant, the elephant sits on something else, and that something else stands on a turtle, right?
And, of course, the classic question is, well, what's underneath the turtle, right?
And the priest, you know, there's an actual priest who would say, no, it's turtles all the way down, right?
Which, of course, is kind of funny, right?
It's how we deal with the problem that we talked about in Pearl Harbor and patriotism with agnosticism and infinite regression.
Or an acceptance of infinity.
So, there is lots of problems, and it does...
you get easy answers, but it stagnates you, right?
So when you make up an answer, you get sort of an instant relief from the discomfort of questions, but it totally stagnates you, right?
You can see this on 2,000 years of Chinese civilization and no progress at all.
The gross national product at the end of the 2,000 year period was pretty much the same as it was at the beginning.
So when you accept easy and silly answers for things, you gain an immediate relief, but you completely stagnate yourself.
And as a society, which of course doesn't exist, this makes no sense.
But for each individual...
The discomfort of going against prevailing opinion, even if you're not actually killed for it, which most times you were.
The emotional discomfort of going against prevailing opinion for the sake of putting knowledge down, which will probably be burned and defamed as heretical when you die or while you're alive.
And even if somebody else picks it up, it's still going to be baby steps towards a marathon.
You know, the individual incentive to rock the boat is minimal, and the danger and negative, just from a pure cost benefit analysis, There's really no point, right?
So I posted something on the board about a UCLA student getting tasered because he wore a hat, and people are like, oh man, we should have...
I can't believe all these students stood around and intervened.
And it's like, well, they didn't intervene.
Well, of course they didn't intervene.
Why would they? Who would?
I mean, I wouldn't.
The crazy thing to do that would be, right?
You could get shot.
You certainly will be arrested for assaulting an officer and get a couple of years in prison, in the rape rooms, and...
You'll have it on your resume. You'll be a felon.
You'll never get a decent job.
I mean, forget it.
Forget about it. I mean, what's the point?
It's not going to change anything. You change the world with ideas, not with thumping cops, right?
That's why I'm still on this side of the bar, right?
Whether it's justification or an intelligent way of doing things, we don't know.
But the cost-benefit analysis for rejecting the stories and going for science is really pretty...
It's a pretty tough calc to make, right?
And nobody really makes it.
The only time that it really did occur, of course, was when, you know, millions of people were getting slaughtered in religious wars and the death count for religious wars was getting close to a billion.
Then, you know, things began to shift a little and the cost-benefit began to change a little.
And people began to say, okay, well, maybe we'll listen to these science guys who've been killing for the last 2,000 years and see maybe their approach is going to be a little better, right?
I mean, people don't...
Societies generally don't change until they hit rock bottom, and so I don't assume that our ideas here are going to, you know, initiate change, but what they will do is they will help manage change, right?
Change is good, but you need to know how to change for the better.
And, of course, if people imagine or believe that our society is going to mess up because of freedom, then it's not like additional freedom is going to help.
So this sort of conflict between the scientist and the storyteller is very central.
And the earlier that the storyteller gets a hold of the children, the easier it is to get them to swallow all of this nonsense, right?
Especially when you put things like hell and so on in there.
So, people do have a natural desire for answers, and they also have the capacity to reject the senses, which is our greatest strength, as I said, and our greatest weakness.
In our greatest strength, it allows us to say that the world is round and not flat, despite the fact that it really, really looks flat.
I mean, there's no mountain high enough, maybe the top of Everest, but there's no mountain high enough that really makes it look round.
It's not like a plane, where you see a very slight curvature when you're high enough.
Pardon me. So, that whole issue, that whole question, then becomes more complicated by the fact that because people can reject their senses, they can both believe that the world is round and not flat, and also believe that gods exist without evidence.
Right? So, the very rejection...
Of sensual evidence that makes science possible also makes religion probable, right?
I mean, this is the challenge of the species, so to speak.
This is why philosophy is the most essential science.
So just because we can reject our senses and say the sun and the moon are the same size, the stars, that we rotate around the sun, and the stars don't rotate around us, and the sun is another star, and all the sort of basic things that took human beings tens of thousands of years to figure out, Of course, they're only basic because somebody figured them out for me.
So apologies to all the dead people who helped figure that out.
Probably way smarter than I am.
But because we have the capacity to reject sensual evidence, we also have the capacity to reject a lack of evidence.
Boy, there's a horrible sentence.
I apologize. I'm sure you get the idea though, right?
Science and religion, they have the same root, which is the rejection of evidence.
The rejection of direct sensual evidence, right?
That both allows us to understand that the world is round and also it gives us a justification to imagine that gods and devils and so on all exist.
And that, of course, creates some great challenges, which I think, where are we at now?
Ooh, 36 minutes. I think we will get to those this afternoon.
This is not going to be a single podcast talking about the history of religion.
But next, I'd like to talk about the sort of specific and more immediate issues.
Provocations for religious mindsets and also talk about some evolutionary ways in which religious ideas grow and change.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, I will talk to you soon.
Thank you for my donations yesterday.
I look forward to more. I really, really appreciate it.
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