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Dec. 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:19
551 The Despair of Godlessness
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Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. Fine post from a fine listener.
Thank you so much to the gentleman who donated today.
I can't tell you how much that makes my day.
Poster who writes on the board, My mom is one of those mythical beasts that has decided to let go of religion at the age of 45.
She also apologized to me for forcing me to go to church when I was younger.
She said she was brainwashed when she was younger and that she didn't know any better.
She divorced my dad, who was a jerk, a couple of years ago and realized Christianity is a sham.
Predictably, all of her religious friends disappeared overnight.
Recently, with the help of Steph's podcast, she's confronting the reality that there is no God.
We've had some frank discussions in which she has asked me two tough questions that I've had a difficult time addressing myself.
One, how or why are people good without the threat of an afterlife or without a God to judge them?
My general feeling is that being good feels good, but I'm not sure if that's entirely comforting.
Two, what do you replace hope in God with if you can't rely on a savior?
Is God a crutch that reduces worry with the idea that someone else will take care of everything?
I think the answer might just be that there is no savior.
I don't want this to lead to nihilism, though.
Help is appreciated.
Well, these are fantastic questions, and first of all, massive, massive, massive, massive congratulations to your mom, and to you, of course, but particularly to your mom, for waking up to certain aspects of her life, of course, and also, equally importantly, in many ways, getting this religious thing out of her.
She's going to wash that god right out of her hair.
Something I can't really do.
But anyway, I just sort of wanted to say a massive thanks.
Now, there is some concern from people who've responded to this post to say, maybe you shouldn't be parenting your mom and so on.
But you're an adult, she's an adult.
I guess she had you when she was quite young.
So, you know, from my sort of humble standpoint, if you guys can work it out such that you can have adult conversations, I think that's great.
You know, why not?
I think that's exactly the kind of togetherness and talking about real issues.
That philosophy is really designed to do.
I mean, everybody thinks I'm down on family.
I'm not. If this is what philosophy is bringing you to with your mom, I think that's wonderful.
And I think that you can now, as adults, explore...
These questions in a way that just can be enormously productive, enormously positive.
And so I would just say congratulations to you and congratulations to your mom for having the guts to apologize, having the guts to change, to ditch her, lose her religious friends and so on.
I mean, that's just wonderful.
So good for you. That really is laying the foundation to some wonderful things in your life.
Doesn't always feel that way. At the time, but it will come.
And so I just think that's terrifically exciting.
Good for you both.
I mean, what do you care about my approbation?
But it's a thrill for me to hear about these kinds of conversations occurring in a family.
I think that that makes, you know, the bond of philosophy is stronger than the bond of blood.
And so if you guys can get a relationship based on a mutual examination of truth or explanation of truth, I think that's fantastic.
So, good for you. Now, the two questions that your mom has, or, hey mom, if you're listening to this, hi, hope you're doing well, and they're very, very central questions, and there is, of course, a great hollowed out aftershock in the soul of many people who've been raised religious when they come to the conclusion that there is no God, right? There's quite a A painful and shocking excavation of debris that feels like ends up feeling kind of empty, I think, for a lot of people.
And it's like, well, why bother being good?
And the great temptation, as Nietzsche keeps pointing out, the great temptation of the end of God is nihilism, right?
That there is nothing true, no virtue, no positivity.
It's because you have had your own desire for virtue, right?
used against you, right?
So you want to be virtuous and people say, well in order to be virtuous you have to obey a priest.
But people just desperately want to be virtuous.
That's why I never have any fear about a stateless society.
I never have any fear about the stateless society.
So far only evil people believe that people are virtuous.
I think that's a desperate shame.
Evil people believe that people are virtuous and want to be virtuous.
Which is why they pour so much damn effort into propaganda in this realm.
So, to me, it would be a wonderful thing if good people believed in virtue to one percentage point of how evil people believe in virtue.
Evil people know that you need to convince people that the state is good, that God is good, that all the propaganda, all the emotional manipulation that goes on in families and in states and I just wish that good people would believe in virtue to some percentage of a degree that evil people believe in virtue.
That's what I was talking about in the third prostitution podcast.
Sorry, I was seized by a vaguely gay oriental man, but I'm back.
I should always check the back seat when I get into my car, but they can be very quiet.
It's just, why is it that only bad people get to be certain?
And why is it that only bad people get to talk about good and evil?
Why is it that only bad people get to manipulate people's desire for virtue?
Why is it that bad people believe in virtue?
I'm not speaking, of course, about anybody here, but why is it that bad people believe in virtue and know how powerful virtue is and people's desire for virtue is, such that they continually will Use people's desire for virtue in the realm of propaganda to get their nefarious ways.
Why is it that bad people believe in virtue and that good people are nail-biterous and worrying that people will just go bad and nobody wants to be virtuous and so on?
It is one of the greatest tragedies of philosophy and it makes me crazy!
So, this question, with a sort of question numero uno, which is, why would you bother to be good if there's no threat of an afterlife and so on?
Well, I would say that this is not going to be comforting and I'm not going to be able to be comforting in this area because the truth can be a chilly mistress when you first hang ten with her.
But the question, you know, if you're not going to be threatened by an afterlife, why would people be good?
And this, of course, is a very old and ancient question.
Why would people be good?
The implicit premise is that people are not good, and people don't want to be good.
That's sort of the fundamental premise behind this, that people don't want to be good.
People are prone to grabbing and selfishness and thievery and nastiness of every description, and the only way that you keep people in line is through threatening them with eternal hellfire and punishment.
So, of course, you can't use...
If you're going to give up on the nonsense of religion, which is of course a wonderful thing to do, you can't then allow your...
Conversations to be framed by that, right?
I mean, if you're going to give up on the idea that gravity is the lassoes of tiny elves, then you can't say, okay, well, gravity is not the lassoes of tiny elves, but maybe electromagnetism is, right?
If you're going to get rid of the tiny elves' explanations for things, then you have to kind of clear the decks, if that makes sense.
You have to clear the decks of all of the tiny elves, right?
If you're going to get rid of elves...
You kind of have to get rid of all of them and all the hobbits and the dryads and the naiads and so on.
So you have to clear away the rubble and clear away the concepts beneath the rubble that give rise to the rubble and give way to the premises and the axioms and so on.
Start again from the root, from a blank page scenario, which is not easy, which is really not easy, but is essential, right?
Because otherwise what's going to happen is, or what is at risk of occurring, is that you...
My sister are going to give up all of the good stuff, all of the good but crazy stuff of religion.
Just allow me to use the word good stuff somewhat colloquially.
You're going to give up all the good stuff of religion and not as much of the bad stuff, right, if you keep those premises.
So if you like the idea that people aren't going to be good, or if you feel that the idea that people aren't going to be good without a threat of eternal hellfire, If you feel that that is the case and you give up on God, then of course you're going to worry about the virtue of the species.
But that's based on a religious premise itself.
If you're going to give up on God, there's so much that you have to give up on that it almost staggers the imagination.
Like how much it is that you're going to have to give up on when you give up on God.
So the question then is, well, why would people be good In the absence of the punishment of hellfire and damnation and a God who judges and so on.
Now there's a couple of premises that are built into that.
And of course the one is that people don't want to be good.
And they have to be threatened and conjoled and bullied in order to be good.
So let's unpack that just a little bit if you don't mind.
Because I think it's something really worth pausing and spending a few minutes on because traffic is bad.
Because it's such an essential question.
So, the first thing that I would ask is that, if the proposition is put forward that human beings are not good unless they are threatened, then what I would look at is, you know, this is the scientific method.
Somebody puts forward a theory, says, people are not good unless they're threatened.
Say, okay... Let's see if that's the case.
Let's forget about the theory.
Just start with the evidence.
So then we say, okay, so people were threatened in the Dark Ages, people were threatened in the Middle Ages, and they weren't particularly good.
Then when people were a lot less threatened in the sort of early to mid-19th century, moving onwards to the 20th century, in those areas where people were not threatened, then people should have been better, right?
And they should have been good. I mean, that's the theory, right?
Conversely, when people are free, they should be tending towards evil when they're free, right?
Because if they're not being threatened, then they should be tending towards evil.
And that evil should be a removal of threat, right?
So a good situation, if this theory is the case, that when people are threatened, they become good, a good situation then would be a dictatorship where everyone threatens everyone else and whatever, right?
That's sort of one way to look at it.
But evil would be to seek out a non-threatening situation, right?
So it would be evil people should then want to continually build a breakdown government and evil people should want to continually create a stateless society where there is no punishment that is state-based or coercive or top-down or hierarchical or whatever.
So evil people should continually seek to reduce the size of government, to eliminate rules, to eliminate any kind of laws or external threats and so on.
So people in a state of freedom should be continually trying to break down the laws, break down any kind of rule, any kind of threat.
On the other hand, people who are in situations of extreme threat, where they're threatened with just about everything under the sun, should be the ones tending most towards virtue, right?
I mean, that would sort of make sense, right?
If threatening people makes them good, and if they're not good in the absence of threats, then evil people should continually seek to get rid of threats against others so that evil could be unleashed on society.
And those who are subjected to the most threats should be the ones who are tending more or most towards the good.
Now, and it doesn't take a lot to do this, and I know you can do this very easily, it's just that you may not have thought of this approach.
But just to take a couple of minor examples, if human beings become virtuous through fear of punishment, Then a minimization of a fear of punishment should tend to make people more evil.
Therefore, evil people, in order to maximize their capacity for evil doing and to maximize the evil in society, should be continually working to reduce the amounts of threats in society, to reduce government, to reduce punishment, and so on.
However, that does not seem to be the case.
Evil people continually try and grab control of the government and to increase the number of threats upon people.
And this is true at a private criminal level and a public criminal level, a politician level.
So, given that evil people are continually seeking to escalate the threats against people, then it cannot be that threatening people makes them good.
Because then evil people would be trying to make people good, which means that they would not be evil people.
That wouldn't sort of make much sense, right?
It's like saying a doctor who's committed to helping people be healthy is killing them, right?
Well, then clearly he's not interested in helping people be healthy.
So evil people do not want to multiply the numbers of good people on the planet.
And since evil people continually try to increase the use of threats and violence in society, They clearly must understand something about evil and how it grows and what to do.
So in a state of freedom, it is the evil people who attempt to increase the number of threats within society.
So threats cannot be that which causes goodness, just sort of logically, right?
And this is just a threat.
I mean, you could say, well, evil people threaten people with good stuff and so on, but then threat is not the major criteria, right?
Then threatening people is not the major criteria.
There's got to be something else, right?
I mean, then threat alone doesn't do it.
Conversely, of course, people who are in prisons who are subject to the greatest number of threats...
are not those who become the most virtuous.
In fact, they seem to be those who slide more and more towards evildoing and corruption of the soul.
So, in this instance, we have both a positive disproof and a negative disproof.
We talked about the negative one, which is that evil people continually try to increase the number of threats against other people, so threats cannot be the cause of virtue.
But also, people in prisons are continually under threat of the lash and of punishment for violations of rules and so on.
And yet, those criminals then seem to become worse off through this threat of punishment.
If we look at the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages, when The punishments for evil doing in the eyes of the church were, you know, endless, genocidal and severe, murderous, brutal, torturous and so on.
I mean, we won't even go into the gruesome tortures that were inflicted upon those who displayed a lack of faith, but they were pretty extreme and pretty significant.
So I think that we can safely say that the threat, threatening people, Does not make them good.
And there's lots and lots of empirical evidence.
And we don't really have to go too far to figure out The explanation of this.
We don't have to go too far to figure out the explanation of this.
Somebody who threatens somebody else is not able to usefully apply the argument for morality.
The argument for morality is that what is moral must be universal, reversible, constant and so on.
And if threatening other people makes them good, Then it should be mutual, right?
So if a priest comes and threatens me with torture if I don't recite the catechism or fall to my knees in praise of God...
Then clearly the principle is not, since the priest is a human being just as I am, the principle is not the priest can threaten the individual and the individual must then become more good.
It is that threatening another human being makes that human being more virtuous.
But the problem is that in the act of threatening another human being, you yourself are not being threatened.
Obviously, it's a one-way. You don't want this Tarantino, two guns up each other's noses kinds of situations.
That's not a situation where you'd really think a whole lot of ethics is really being trumped there.
But a priest who is threatening, like a priest comes along and says, Steph, if you don't fall to your knees in praise of God, you're going to be threatened.
I'm going to nail you up or burn you or drown you or boil you or something like that.
Then the priest is threatening me, and the principle is that threatening another human being makes that person good, but there's an innate contradiction in that, right?
Because if the priest is threatening me, then I am not threatening the priest.
It's a one-way interaction.
Because if the priest believes that being threatened makes you good, then the priest can never initiate a threat against another human being.
Because the priest must himself be threatened in order to be good.
This is the basic contradiction that's involved in all these kinds of positive obligations, especially those that are negative in intent.
But the priest, if the principle is threatening another human being makes them good, who is it who does the threatening?
Well, it can't be a good person because when you threaten someone else, you're not being threatened.
And if threatening someone makes them good and you're not being threatened, then you can't be a good person when you're threatening.
I mean, this is just basic.
This is the argument for morality.
Is it universal? Is it reversible?
Is it applicable in all times and all places?
So, it cannot be both in terms of empirical evidence, the test case scenarios, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the fact that evil people constantly seek to increase threats against others, which would be the reverse of what they should be doing if threats against others made people virtuous, and that when people are in a state of being less threatened, they tend to become far more virtuous.
When people are in a state of being more threatened, They tend to become far less virtuous.
So that's the evidence side of things.
The logical side of things, of course, is that it is absolutely impossible, if the premise is that threatening other people makes them good, that you can ever be good by threatening someone.
Then nobody can threaten anyone, because when you're threatening someone, you are not simultaneously being threatened yourself.
Or it's two people shouting at each other in ever-escalating and ever-hoarser kinds of manners.
No, you're going to go to hell!
And of course, that is not what we would think of as a particularly virtuous approach.
So, there is no possibility that people can become virtuous through being threatened.
In fact, it is quite the opposite, that people become less virtuous Through being threatened.
Now, through being threatened is different from simply there being consequences to behavior.
People also don't tend to be very good if there's no consequences to their behavior.
The inevitable consequences of somebody's behavior, i.e., if you are an asshole to everyone and people don't want to talk to you anymore, That is a consequence to that behavior, right?
But that's not the same as saying that everyone should go to hell and burn forever if they don't do what the priest says, right?
The other, of course, the other problem is that if it's true and it seems to be logically fairly bulletproof that only evil people wish to threaten others, then, of course, those who subscribe to this philosophy are telling you the exact opposite of the truth.
They're saying that human beings won't be good unless you threaten them.
And, of course, it's one of these wonderful self-fulfilling prophecies, because what happens is you threaten lots of people, and then people are bad, and you say, holy crap, well, can you imagine how bad they would be if we weren't threatening them?
I mean, this is the basic lie of family and church and state, right?
I mean, they create all of these problems, and then they say, well, can you imagine how bad the problems would be if we weren't pursuing our path, right?
So the higher taxes in the welfare state creates a massive underclass of ever-growing people who are constantly getting poorer, and the government says, well, can you believe how bad things would be if there was no welfare state?
I mean, this is absolutely inevitable, right?
So this is one of the reasons why these ideas continue on for so long, because...
They create the problems that they claim that they're solving, and because those problems continue to escalate based on the application of unjust power, the unjust power continually claims the need for more and more power, right?
You can see this going on with the War on Terror and the Patriot Act and so on.
This is just sort of inevitable, right?
Abuses of power lead to terrorism, which leads to further abuses of power, which leads to more terrorism.
And, you know, this is just the joyful spiral of ugly red death that human beings go through until they actually pull their heads out of their asses and start to think for themselves.
Not you people, my wonderful listeners, but others in general.
So I hope that that gives you some comfort that there's a negative correlation between threatening people and people being virtuous.
There's just no way that you can make people good by threatening them.
The other question, of course, is why would people want to be good?
Well, there's two reasons that people want to be good or could want to be good or might want to be good.
Practical and emotional. And this is not to say that the practical and emotional are separate.
They are in fact two sides of the same coin.
But we're talking in a sort of free society or in a state of freedom, a stateless society.
People are going to want to be virtuous because it's economically advantageous for them to do so, right?
So if you lie and cheat and steal and so on, then people aren't going to want to work for you, and you shoot yourself in the foot economically, right?
Unless, I mean, people can do that now because there's government contracts, and there's the military-industrial complex, and there's war, and there's corporate welfare, there's personal welfare.
So people gain enormously because they get the immoral fruits of immoral actions, i.e. the theft of income by the thugs of the state and the redistribution to the state's friends.
So, yeah, of course, I mean, people are not gaining an enormous amount from virtue, and I would say that to some degree virtue is a little bit at a disadvantage these days in the world, even in the West.
But that is not to be mistaken for a state of freedom.
In a state of freedom, people are going to want to be virtuous.
Because it's just economically better.
I mean, it's economically better. I've talked about this before.
If you can reduce the transaction costs involved in doing business for yourself and for others, you get to keep a whole lot more juicy profit, right?
So if you can do business on a handshake because for 20 years you've fulfilled every obligation and a DRO rating agency has fulfilled that for you, then...
On any but the largest possible contracts, you're going to be able to do business on a handshake, not going to even have to bother involving a DRO, and you're not going to have to pay for all of that, so there's a lot more juicy profit for you, and the DROs will regretfully watch you say goodbye.
But there's no way that you're going to waste all that money, because reputation, credibility, is efficiency.
Reputation is something that...
That is enormously valuable economically.
And that is something that people are going to want to be honest and virtuous and so on.
Because it makes them...
He's changing a lane right past my headlights.
They're going to want to do this...
Because it makes the money. And there's lots of other reasons which I won't bother getting into right now, but people are going to want to not beat their children because after our philosophy gets out a little bit wider and the philosophy that other people are putting forward which says there's no innate virtue in family and you judge people according to standards, not according to ridiculous DNA compatibilities, But you are not going to have parents because the result is going to be that the kids are going to grow up and ditch the parents and go off on their own.
I mean, the consequences, right?
I'm trying to make parents be better by appealing to their virtue and also by saying that the kids should leave the parents if the parents are corrupt and don't listen, which is, you know, pretty bad for the parents in a lot of ways as they get older.
But, of course, in the absence of consequences, there is no such thing as virtue or justice or whatever, right?
So... So there's a practical and then there's a personal happiness, peace of mind, contentedness, which I've argued for before and I don't really need to go into.
When your mind is working in accordance with reality, when you're logical and objective and virtuous and treat others as you want to be treated and all this kind of stuff, then you generally are happy in the same way that when your body is fulfilling its intended function and processing according to its nature and its form, then you are happy...
And healthy and so on.
So it's sort of like saying, well...
Why would people want to be healthy?
Well, the vast majority of people do want to be healthy.
It doesn't mean that they don't pig out.
It doesn't mean that they don't get diabetes.
But most people will change their habits to become more healthy over time and so on.
And yeah, there's lots of people who are getting overweight.
But that's all state-based stuff as well.
So we talked about that kind of stuff before.
But people will want to do it because it makes them money and it makes them happy.
And that's... And if that's not enough, right, like if that's not enough, fear doesn't work, right?
Bullying people and threatening people with eternal damnation and the hell afterlife and so on.
Completely illogical, completely counter to the facts and counter to any sort of consistent moral premise.
So that for sure is not going to work.
So there has to be some other motivation as to why people will be good and it's because they are happier and they are wealthier.
And that is a productive way to do it.
And if you don't think that those are enough motivations, if money and happiness aren't enough of a motivation, Then you're going to have to explain away the whole science of economics, which is kind of based on people respond to incentives.
You're going to have a bit of a trouble ditching the whole of economics when you've ditched God already.
Secular sciences and disciplines and logical approaches from philosophy to economics and other scientific disciplines can completely provide you with what you need when it comes to trusting why it is that people will be good.
Right now, it's hard to believe in human virtue because there's so much corruption around and so much irrationality around because evil people are climbing their way up our legs, sinking their fangs into our femoral arteries bit by bit, and we have a challenge on our hands, right? But that's not to mistake, right?
You don't mistake a plague for a bunch of people who are normally quite healthy, right?
You recognize that human beings aren't sort of born to die at the age of five, coughing up their own horrible sputum But are in fact designed to last just a little bit longer than that.
And there's no real reason why we have to assume that the plague is the natural state of things.
And similarly, there's no real reason why we would have to assume that how human beings act in a state of escalating and increasing coercion, violence, and control.
What I said I read today is doing some research on some conferences which I'm going to spend some money attending for the company that I work for, pvelocity.com, just in case you're curious.
15,000 regulations govern the release of medicines onto the market, and that's pretty nasty.
I mean, complying with all of that means that lots of people die in horrible, horrible kinds of ways.
So, you know, seeing human beings and how they act in a state of ever-escalating and ever-hysterical violence and wealth and reward and skewed incentives and corruption and brutality and, you know, all of this kind of stuff, the great evil temptations.
You know, if a... It's like if a Brinks truck explodes and a whole bunch of dollar bills go flying through a neighborhood on a stiff wind and then looking at everyone, you know, laughing and grabbing at the bills.
Some people will return them and so on, but you can't look at that situation and say, ah, everyone's a thief, right?
It's like, no. It's like the opportunity costs are very low, the rewards are very high, and if you don't even know where the money came from, then finding out where it came from returning, it's tough, right?
So saying that that's in that situation that everyone is...
It's probably mistaking some of the realities of human motivation and cause and effect.
So that's my sort of approach to the first one.
You can trust on people's self-interest in terms of material and emotional goodness, wealth and happiness and peace of mind and so on.
I would say that's how you can figure out that people can be good.
Now the other question is, I'm going to just hit the gym for a little bit so I'll deal with this on the way home, but the other question is, It sort of runs along the following.
What do you replace hope in God with if you can't rely on a savior?
Is God a crutch that reduces worry with the idea that someone else will take care of everything?
Well, that of course is another excellent question, another fine, deep, and wonderful question, and again, And applaud its and applause for your courage in dealing with these issues.
This is a great challenge for everyone who is peeling their way out of the general cults.
And we will talk about this in a few minutes after I go and hurt myself on some machines.
So we will talk. Just a few minutes, and let me park, let me park, let me park without the scratch.
Excellent. Alright, we'll talk in a little bit.
So, the question then becomes, how do you find hope if you can't rely on a savior?
Is God a crutch that reduces worry with the idea that someone else will take care of everything?
Well, look, there's no doubt that there are certain aspects of believing in a God that have the capacity to provide comfort.
I mean, let's not call everybody who's religious completely insane.
There are some real benefits to Believing in a deity, that everything's going to work out, that your mistakes can be rectified through an apology, not to the people you've wronged, but more to a priest who's paid to listen and nod sympathetically, and also that everything's going to work out, that your life has meaning just through breathing, right?
That your life has meaning just through breathing.
That is some of the great comforts, right?
I mean, it's... I mean, the only problem is that it's not true, but if you believe it, then there's a great deal of comfort, because you're part of a larger plan, you have meaning, you're special, you have purpose, you have all of these good and juicy things.
And you don't actually have to go out and earn any of it in the free market of give and take and ideas and so on.
So there is a great deal of comfort in that for a lot of people.
It's, you know, instant meaning, just add God.
And so when you get rid of the idea of God, then it's like getting out of a wheelchair, right?
I mean, the muscles that you would have developed...
If you had not been in a wheelchair, right?
Let's just say you were put in a wheelchair and you were told that you were crippled and then later on in your life you find out that you're not crippled and you have to or you can choose to get out of the wheelchair, well of course it's going to be hell.
It's going to be painful and you're going to say, my god, I'm so weak.
No wonder I needed a wheelchair.
But of course all that's happened is that the muscles that you would have otherwise used have atrophied, right?
The muscles by which you can generate meaning within your own life have atrophied because you've had this instant fantasy of infinite meaning simply by breathing.
By having the precious capacity to stay alive as a carbon-based life form, you've immediately had wonderful and almost infinite meaning in your life.
So, working to create meaning within your own life is something that People have a trouble.
People have a tough time with, right?
It's like weeding yourself from a drug.
It's not like it is weeding yourself from a drug.
So I understand that it's hot, and I truly sympathize.
But let me tell you this, and I'm not even going to try and prove this.
I mean, it could be, but let's just go with the statement at the moment.
People want to have meaning that is external to themselves.
Because if the meaning that's in their lives is not external to themselves, then it's not really meaning, is it?
It's just made-up preference.
It's just subjective imagination.
And that's not...
That doesn't really have a whole lot of meaning in the world, right?
To just sort of make it up. It's like imagining that you're Superman or something like that and saying, well, that's my meaning.
Well, it's really not very satisfying, right?
Because it's just you relative to yourself.
So there's not a lot of meaning unless you can find some meaning in something external to yourself.
Now... I would say that human beings do have meaning in the world, and that that meaning is judged by a standard that is external to yourself.
It doesn't have to be God.
In fact, if it is God, you're missing the point.
But we do have meaning relative to what is external to us.
We do have meaning relative to objective standards.
In the same way that a statement called the This is true has meaning only if it is true, right?
So if you say there is no God, that statement only has meaning relative to reality.
The meanings that we have or need or that we can judge ourselves by, the meanings in our life, are those meanings that occur for us Relative to reality, right?
Which is an external and objective standard of physical atoms and energy and so on.
A scientific statement only has, or a scientific theory only really has meaning, only gets infused with something special if it corresponds to reality, if it corresponds to the physical actions of matter and energy in the external world.
That's when science has meaning, when it's accurate.
Now, of course, religion has no meaning.
This is the great lie.
You can't be good if you're bullied.
You can conform out of fear, but you can't be good, and you're much more likely to be bad than good if you conform out of fear.
And there is no meaning in fantasy.
There is no meaning in fantasy, and religion, and gods, and superstitions, and so on.
It's all Rank fantasy.
There is no meaning in God, right?
So the interesting thing is that I would suggest that when you wrestle with these issues, or those who are out there wrestling with these issues, that you're not looking at the future.
You're actually looking at the past.
That's why it's so hard to escape, right?
So you think that you've gotten rid of God, and now you're looking at emptiness of meaning.
But that's not the future.
That's not mankind as a whole.
That's you in the past.
You were empty of meaning when you believed in God, because there's no meaning in fantasy.
The same way that there's no meaning in a statement...
There's no meaning in that statement because it's just gibberish, right?
And there's no meaning in religion because it's all just nonsense and gibberish.
So when people say to me, and I've heard this a number of times before, which is not to say that it's not something I hugely sympathize with, when people say to me, well, there's less meaning in my life now that there's no God, I don't believe that that's actually true.
Psychologically, I think that they're now realizing...
In the present how little meaning there always has been for them in the realm of being embedded in this fantastical and nonsensical superstition.
And that's a mistake that people often make, and it's perfectly understandable.
I mean, that's what is sort of being transmitted, right?
When people go through this kind of big change in their life relative to a central fantasy that has eaten away their core, to some degree, has eaten away their energy, for sure, and their integrity, and then they think they're looking into the future and seeing an absence of meaning, but it's really not... It's not the case at all.
It is simply that you are feeling your past for the first time, right?
That's a big thing to understand when you go through these kinds of aches and pains.
When you grow as a human being and you go through significant changes, you're feeling your past for the first time.
You're feeling everything that you have missed.
That you've been in this wheelchair of fantasy, in this wheelchair of superstition, in this wheelchair of conformity and irrationality and fear.
And you think, well, gee, well, why am I so afraid that people aren't going to be good?
Well, it's because you weren't good and virtuous by doing what you did.
You weren't good and virtuous, right?
You were simply conforming out of fear.
And it wasn't virtue, right?
You sort of see that back now.
So then when you say, well, how can people be good in the absence of virtue?
You're feeling... Sorry, how can people be good in the absence of bullying?
This is your own history, that you were not good when you were bullied.
Your absence of good was there when people were being bullied.
So it's all about your history, your lack of virtue in the past.
And we all do sympathy, and we all grew up with our own hobgoblins and our own histories and all the things that are bullied unto us when we were children.
So this is not a bad, bad, bad person or anything.
But I think that that aspect of personal growth is just so crucial to understand.
So crucial to understand.
If you are addicted to heroin and you quit heroin and you feel like you're throwing up, you feel like crap, right?
Your baby's on your ceiling. But it's not the future that is causing you this.
It is the actions of the past that you're now feeling.
Now that you're no longer taking the poison, you are going to feel the pain of having taken poison for so long.
If you're drunk and you quit drinking and you get the DTs, this is because of the past self-abuse that has occurred and the abuse of others in the case of religion being brought up in that manner.
But it's not the future that you're worried about, and it's not other people that you're worried about.
The hollowness of meaning and the emptiness that rises to the surface when you get rid of God is your own history, is your own soul.
It is what this gassy, flatulent fantasy of religion has done to your own...
Meaning? It is completely stripped it away.
You've been in a fantasy of just thinking that you're the long-lost descendant of an imaginary empire, the king of an imaginary empire, that you are first Lord Cherophon or Seraphon of Atlantis, and that's what makes you special.
Well, of course, then if you realize that Atlantis never existed, of course you're going to feel let down.
But that's all the lack of meaning that occurred in your own past as a result of being addicted to this fantasy.
And this is just important to understand.
Philosophy is personal first and foremost, and it takes a long time, or at least it did for me, to go from beyond the personal to the rational.
So when you feel the urge to worry about other people and virtue in the abstract and what is going to happen with the hope of salvation...
You're not thinking about, how do I have hope without salvation?
When you believed in salvation, you did not have hope.
It was impossible to have hope, because salvation is a fantasy.
And fantasy does not breed hope.
Fantasy breeds despair.
So all of this stuff is very tied in to where you've come from, not the abstract world beyond yourself in the future of mankind as a whole.
It is the fact that you are coming across your own scar tissue that religion has inflicted, the own Your own emptiness of meaning that has been inflicted by religion, that is, I think, where you need to start dealing with your own emotional history.
And then, if you worry about the planet as a whole, that may be a little bit more legitimate.
But be careful not to project your own emptiness, the history of your own emptiness, because of this addiction to fantasy that was inflicted on you.
And I fully sympathize with that.
Don't project that onto the world, right?
I mean, religion is the projection of a bunch of fantasy elements into the world, and you don't replace the fantasy element of religion with the fantasy element of How can people be good?
And all these abstract questions.
It's your own history and the absence of meaning and the hollowing out of any kind of rational meaning that you had in your life as a result of religion.
I hope that this helps. Thank you so much for listening.
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