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Dec. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:33
571 God's Probing Truth

Christ, that's a rather large rubber glove!

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. It is the 27th of December, 2006.
And, oh boy, what a wonderful Christmas.
I hope that you all had a great time.
I guess other than dodging a few phone calls from Christina's family, and I'm here from my family, so that was a little stressful.
We've got some messages, but we haven't listened to them.
Other than that, it was a fun kind of Christmas.
Um... And I got everything I wanted, which was to say very few presents, but some wonderful company and some great ideas and some really fun moments, especially on the God interview show.
570, I think. It was quite a lot of fun to do.
So, tootling back to work and not too happy about it, to be frank.
Oh, God.
I mean, it's just...
Work is fine.
Work is not that rich.
Work is selling software, and there's nothing wrong with...
I'm a free market guy. Nothing wrong with selling software.
But work is still a...
You just don't get to deal with the people who I sort of like to stay dealing with in my life, which is the really sane ones.
On the plus side, an agency, a literary agency in New York, which I know very little about, so I don't know whether it means anything or not, is having a look at...
The God of Atheists, and we'll see what comes from that.
I'm sure things will be fine as I get back into the swing of work, and I do get to apply reason, and I do get to do some fun stuff at work, but, you know, it's just not quite the same as philosophy, because nothing, nothing is quite the same as philosophy, as far as at least my pleasure goes.
So... I wanted to talk a little bit this morning around religion.
There are some people who write to me who really don't understand why I have this approach to religion or why it is that I spend time talking about religion because they say, well, my country isn't really that religious.
Well, that's not true. I mean, that's not true of any country in the world.
And people tend to They distance themselves from irrationality, and they say, oh yeah, well my country is, I mean, our problem is mostly politics.
We don't have the problem so much with religion.
Well, I perfectly understand that, and that could be a perfectly valid definition.
That's not the one that I work with, so I can sort of show you my one, you can let me know what you think.
Religion is really the worship of opinion.
I mean, it's a very fundamental thing to understand about religion.
It is a worship of whim.
It's a worship of opinion. And it is the worship of an abstract religion, the worship of an abstract God, and through that abstract and through that perfect abstract, The priests are ennobled and non-testably virtuous.
Non-testably virtuous.
Because, as you can see from this Haggard fellow recently, going to prostitutes and buying crystal meth and so on, gay prostitutes, while at the same time raging against gay marriage in front of his American congregations, Well, of course he gets fired and so on, but his virtue is not destroyed, because he gets to apologize, right?
Oh, I have these sins and we're all fallible and we all have sins, so don't judge me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And each of the individual instances, like the people who represent this abstract ideal called God, are all fallible human beings...
And the degree of their vices is completely removed from the abstract entity that is considered to be perfectly virtuous or perfectly right or perfectly good or whatever.
And, of course, in the Christian world, there is the received text, the Bible, and it's true of most religions, right?
Now, the Bible is considered to be A representation of the Word of God.
May be perfect, may not be perfect, whether you're a fundamentalist or not, literalist or not.
It is considered to be a representative of the Word of God.
Now, we know, or everybody knows, that individual priests are highly, highly fallible.
That they make horrible, disgusting, revolting, inhuman, evil mistakes and commit atrocious acts and so on.
And we also know that priests wrote down the Bible.
And religion is all in the communication.
And somebody who is an evil priest is the one who tells you.
I mean, nobody reads the Bible, right?
Almost nobody reads the Bible all the way through.
So you rely on what people tell you about religion.
And, of course, they'll say they got it from the Bible and whatever, right?
But almost nobody. I guess priests do, right?
But none of the parishioners really read the Bible all the way through, very few.
So we know there are corrupt priests.
We know that corrupt priests are going to misrepresent things in the Bible because they're under the sway of Satan or Loki or whoever.
And most of the parishioners receive the information about religion from their priests.
And all of this, of course, is to say that it is completely obvious and clear, I think, that an evil priest or a corrupt priest, which is to say a priest fundamentally, they all live in the world of psychosis and bizarre fantasy, that a priest is not in the grip of an infinitely good being, and yet that priest is the one telling everyone about what religion is.
So the authenticity of the Bible In terms of God moved the hands of the people who wrote the Bible in the past, the authenticity of the Bible is one aspect that's open to correction and people argue about whether the first or second century priests or the Council of Worms, oh, how appropriate, was accurate in their approach to the Bible and so on.
But I don't think that's really important.
I think what's really important is what is the character of the people who are teaching us and teaching our children about religion and to recognize that the parallels between Religion and politics are so strong that to say that because my country worships democracy, not God, that I'm not in the grip of a religion, I think is not correct.
I can understand it, and there's important distinctions in certain, to me, fairly minor ways.
Whether you worship the God of democracy or Abraham doesn't really matter.
The real question is when you have to look at your priest or you have to look at the priest who are teaching your children or maybe the priest who taught you when you were a child and say, is this man or woman in the perfect grip of God?
Is God moving through this man or woman to tell me about religion?
Or did I learn about religion from a book written by similar such people?
Because everything that we know about religion we know from people who've told us.
Maybe we've had some visions if we have strange brain chemistry going on, or we've fasted, or we've taken some mushrooms or something.
But I've yet to meet anyone who says, God speaks to me.
Because you can ask people, you say, does God confirm what's in the Bible?
Does God tell you that the story of Genesis is true?
And of course you get these things back.
Well, God is more subtle than that.
You get these things back which say that God would not allow for a false book about his teachings to be so widespread in the world.
God would not allow a book to be written down and for everyone to believe in it if that book were misleading as to the nature and purpose of God.
Because for people who are religious, the idea that The book is just a bunch of raving lunatic monks who needed a decent meal and probably to get laid, writing down their weird fantasies that the world is being fed by the recipes of mad cooks.
Somebody asks a priest for a house, he gives them a picture of Dr.
Seuss' house and says, here you go, live in that.
But it's your priest directly.
Who needs to be moved by the Spirit of God directly every time he speaks to you and tells you about religion.
And it's your Sunday school teacher, and it's every preacher on television, and everyone who's ever talked to you about God must be moved by the Spirit of God to tell you perfectly accurately what God is all about and what the story is.
And when you see people, they love arguing about the authenticity of the Bible, but who cares?
Nobody learns their religion from the Bible.
Nobody tosses a ten-year-old kid the Bible and says, plow your way through this and meet me at church.
Right? Because they just won't believe a thing.
They should be pretty horrified.
What does spare the rod spoil the child mean, daddy?
Unfortunately, the priest would tell you.
So, it's the people, everyone who talks to you about religion is the one who must be moved.
By God. Not just when they're talking to God, but when they're talking to you.
Because they're telling you their impressions of God.
They're telling you what they think God wants you to do, right?
So when George Bush, you have to say this to Christians, when George Bush says, I prayed to God about Iraq, and he told me to go invade.
Well, did he?
Did God? And when he's telling you this, is God still in him?
Using his, like, sticking his divine hand up Bush's ass and making those gum flaps move.
Because if God is not in George Bush saying to him, okay, tell these people that I told you to go kill the Muslims, then you're getting more misleading information.
If God spoke to George Bush telling him to invade Iraq, then God must also be in George Bush telling him to tell people that God told him to invade Iraq.
And I'll give you another thing.
Since the demeanor of Christians is very important, right?
It's the bizarre fantasy of Sunday best, right?
That Christ would almost never be allowed into church, right?
I mean, Christ came back in sort of ragged jeans and a smelly t-shirt.
He'd be turned away, right?
Because he doesn't look purdy enough.
He's not into Sunday best, right?
I mean, this is how silly and ridiculous it all is.
Take everything you own and give it to the poor, right?
Oh, he meant that metaphorically.
I'm still supposed to enjoy my leather-seated Mercedes Coupe.
Got it. How do you know?
Wow, the entire highway going the other way is shut down.
Ooh, that's not going to be pretty.
So, everyone who talks to you about religion, everybody around you who is religious...
Has a certain, as we've said, must have a certain kind of demeanor.
Because if God is going to make sure that the book is relatively valid, relatively true, if God is going to do that, then God is obviously not going to want to give you the wrong signals.
God is not going to want to give you the wrong signals.
And therefore, somebody around you who is apple-cheeked, clean scrubbed, got a tidy haircut, seems nice, seems good, seems successful, seems virtuous, seems positive, seems certain, that person must be entirely animated by God.
Because if God allows you to get the impression of a Christian that Christians are good, Then that person must be being animated by God.
Because otherwise, God is giving you a total red herring.
So when your older brother sits you down when you're four years old, and he's six or seven or whatever, and tells you about God, God must have his hand up your elder brother's ass making his gum flaps move.
Because otherwise you're going to get entirely the wrong impression on how you're allowed to be virtuous if you get the wrong impression, either in content or in form.
Either in the content of what is said or the manner in which the person lives and communicates his demeanor.
All that gel and hairspray.
The pompadours. I was watching this 2020 special on heaven.
What is it and how do we get there?
Oh, these mealy-mouthed priests.
I don't know who's worse. I mean, each one worse than the other.
I'm now speaking to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Can you imagine how freaking insane you have to be to not respond to a question unless it is prefaced with your holiness?
Oh my God!
I can't believe anybody ever calls me vain.
Can you imagine?
You call into the Sunday show, the chat about philosophy.
You call in and you say, Hey Steph, what about this?
And they're simply dead air.
Somebody else says, No, no, you have to call Steph His Holiness.
Oh, His Holiness.
Oh, and then you have to use his full name.
His Holiness. Oh, Your Holiness, Stephan Basil Molyneux.
What is the answer to this?
Oh my God, how insane would that be?
And yet we look at it.
My father, a father, father this, that, and the other, right?
Particularly true in the Catholic religion that the irony is ridiculous because these people aren't allowed to be fathers, even though popes have fathered children.
Oh, that's fallibility.
You see, that has nothing to do with the divine perfection behind the whole thing.
Now, the other thing too, if you're going to have an accurate view of the benefits or non-benefits of religion, then the people who are not religious, or who are religious in a different context, right, who worship a different God than you do, how they present themselves must also be animated by God.
So, if you're a Christian, then the Buddhists that you encounter who talk to you Must also be animated by your God to look ridiculous, right?
So it's the Christian God who makes the Buddhists appear ridiculous.
Makes them wear those yellow robes and shave their heads because that's quite a bit different from wearing the duvet covers and teapot kettle cozies that the priests in your religion wear.
He must be making the Muslims appear really violent so that you can say that your religion is one of peace.
And unfortunately, Islam is violent.
So he must be forcing the Islamic people to be violent.
He also must, since I am an atheist, right, he also must have his hand at my...
Oh, sorry, that's the seat warmer.
He must have his hand at my ass making me speak.
Because as a rationalist, as an atheist, as I'd like to think a scientist of philosophy, I am also having an impact on other people in the realm of religion.
So I got an email this weekend from a guy who's plowing through the first 50 podcasts, and they startled him quite a little bit.
But if its religion is correct, then I must be being animated by the hand of God to speak.
Because I'm talking to him about religion.
Or I guess you could say Satan too.
But really, this is why I say religion is so fundamentally, abysmally, cripplingly, interstellarly, lonely.
Lonely. Lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely.
Because everyone around you is a hand puppet.
Of some divinity. In your gut, you have to believe that.
The person who told you about God, your mother, your father, Sunday school teacher, brother, sister, priest, whoever, that person must have been a mere mouthpiece of God.
And when someone like this Haggard fellow, I always think Merle Haggard, although that guy actually did something pleasant for humanity and that he sings pretty wretched songs that people like, but...
Dan Haggard, I think it is.
When Haggard reveals his hypocrisy and hideousness, as happens continually in the priestly world, then the question is, of course, for all the people who became religious or had their religious faith enhanced as a result of this guy's preaching or this guy's ministry, Do they then go back and say, holy crap!
Well, since this guy was not in the grip of God, at least I don't think God goes to prostitutes and buys crystal meth.
God can have a menagea himself, right?
That must mean that everything that he told me was not the voice or the word of God speaking through him, but just some wretched guy trying to cover up his tracks, trying to make some money by telling lies to people, right?
He's a... He's a compatriot of the 419ers in Nigeria, the email guys.
But people don't do that.
They say, well, he's made a mistake and we should forgive him as the Lord says.
But if they say that the Spirit of God was moving through him and then he lost God, then of course it would say, well, why did he lose God?
People say, well, he did bad things.
Well, when did he lose God?
Because he was hiding this for years.
So if he lost God, then obviously what he was telling people for years was not motivated by God and therefore was a merely human opinion.
Merely human opinion.
And ridiculous opinion at that.
But people don't ask these questions.
They can't ask these questions because they know deep down that they're addicted to mere opinion.
That's why they have to keep making up all this crap to keep twisting and turning to believe in it.
So everyone you encounter In the Christian world, this world is all about getting to the next world, right?
It's all about getting rewards.
Jews, not so much. Jews are more about trying to do good in this world.
Anyway, we'll come back to that another time, but...
Everyone you meet, everyone who tells you about religion, everyone who talks about religion, everyone who gives you an appearance of anything to do with religion or has a content or personality streak or conversational topic that has anything to do with religion, anything you've read, not just the Bible, but even the news where they mention a church, everything, since God already has made sure that the Bible is at least somewhat accurate.
Then, clearly God has no problem intervening to make sure you get the right message from people.
And of course, if you get the wrong message from people, if some priests tell you something about God that's not true, then it's how can it be your fault if you sin?
Now, given that human beings are fallible and the degree of corruption within the clergy is not inconsiderable, then how do you know that anybody who's ever talked to you about religion is telling you the truth?
Especially when there's financial incentive, i.e.
the Vatican's 30 billion dollars of trinkets has all been accumulated from the hides of the poor, mostly, throughout the ages, and that your priest must get you to believe in religion so that you will pay him.
And given that priests used to be for slavery, just to take one of about a billion egregious examples, and now are against slavery, why?
Because people don't believe in slavery anymore.
Even this papal A ban on a husband who has AIDS using a condom so he doesn't give his wife AIDS is being reconsidered because it's clearly just too horrible.
That's lifting the lid on the hell of religion a little bit too much.
So they have to review that with all due compassion.
But everyone that you meet has the hand of God or devil up their ass, making their eating hole move.
And that's so fundamentally, abysmally lonely.
This is one of the reasons why Christians are so weird.
They're so lonely.
We can only connect in reality.
You know, Christians, the goodbye is a contraction of God be with you.
And the Christians genuinely do say God be with you.
But God can't be with someone.
God can only be in someone.
And if God is in there, there ain't no someone there at all.
If God is in someone making that person talk, then you're talking to God or you're listening to God when that person's talking.
And if God isn't in them and isn't making them talk, then you're listening to things that aren't true and aren't verified by God.
So everybody has to believe that they live in a solitary world With all of these empty, mechanistic stick puppets around.
Talking to them with God's hand up their ass.
Talking to you.
That's so lonely. Human beings, as I've said before, can only meet in reality.
We can only meet in reality.
There is no other realm in which human beings can connect.
There is no psychic realm.
There's no spiritual realm.
There's no abstract realm.
There's no platonic realm. There's no nuomenal realm.
There is no... That's fantasy.
That's fantasy. And human beings cannot meet in fantasy.
They can only dominate and subjugate in fantasy.
They can only merge by erasing their identity, pretending they don't exist, and joining together in a sick emptiness of non-existence.
That is one of the reasons why Christians are so bizarre, and why they're so confident, and why they hate difference.
There's also, and I'll get to this topic in a bit more depth another time, but when you look at Christians, they're all kind of looking the same in a lot of ways.
Particularly in the States.
They all have to have that fixed grin, dewy-eyed benevolence, and peppy optimism.
And they're completely rigid about differences.
Homosexuality is evil.
Why? Christ didn't marry, God made the rainbow.
God never married. But...
It's wrong in the Christian world, because we're all made in God's image, and so is God sort of gay or straight, right?
I mean, that's the fundamental problem that Christians have with difference.
If you deviate from the template, then you can't be from God.
If everyone is straight, but, you know, what is it, 2-5% of the population is gay, then the question is, what does homosexuality mean?
What could it possibly mean?
Well, it can't be that everyone is made in God's image, because everyone has to be the same.
So something like homosexuality has to, sort of, almost by definition, be from Satan.
Immoral. Wrong. Because we're all supposed to be coming out of the same mold.
So when Mother Teresa says, I don't see the poor, I see Christ in the poor, and Christ be with you, what would Jesus do, all of this kind of stuff, Christians are speaking to an evacuated fantasy.
When they speak to each other, it's incredibly lonely.
Mother Teresa is not helping the individuals, she's helping this fantasy of the Christ-given soul.
But that's not the individual.
That is just that, a fantasy.
And it's just ridiculously lonely.
Now, the same thing occurs in the realm of religion.
Sorry, the same thing occurs in the realm of politics.
You see what synonyms they are?
There's not even any need to use different words.
ABS has just kicked in.
How cool. Good to know they still work.
So, in the realm of religion, there's this perfect thing called democracy, and then there's flawed human beings who inhabit it in the same way.
There's this perfect thing called God and flawed priests.
So, the virtue of democracy can never be judged by the behaviors of the people who represent it, just as the virtue of God can never be judged by the behaviors of the people who represent God, the priests.
Now, the strange thing about...
Democracy as opposed to religion is that there is this thing called the will of the people which people claim to represent and so on which is not quite the same as the will of God.
Representing the will of the people is considered to be the job of democracy and there are no standards over and above Sorry, there are standards over and above the mere will of the people.
This is what people who believed in non-natural law, positive law, I can't remember the term.
That's what they wrestled with after the Second World War.
They voted Hitler in, so clearly democracy can have evil results in a way that the religion never seems to be able to get a handle on.
And you'll see this written about quite a bit in the realm of democracy.
Because people will say, sure, there are bad politicians, and the system is flawed, but it's the best system we have, right?
Churchill's saying, democracy is the worst system in the world, except for all the others.
Well, of course he's going to say that he got into power, though it wasn't voted in.
I mean, sorry, it wasn't voted into prime minister.
But the same principle occurs that there is this abstract perfection which you cannot judge with relation to the people who inhabit it.
And you can also have fun with this, right?
And just ask people to tell you about what it is that they represent.
When you're talking to people, if somebody says, I believe in God, say, okay, well, you believe in God.
Are you representing what God wants you to say to me exactly right now?
This is a very important question to ask.
And it sounds mocking, but it's not.
It's just taking people at their principles.
So you can say, so when you tell me that you believe in God and you're a Christian, is that exactly what God wants you to say to me right now?
Because if it's not, then that's not good, right?
Then they're deceiving. They're a deceiver!
On the other hand, if they say, this is exactly what God wants me to tell you right now, then you can say, so I am in fact talking to God, not you.
Or, you are God in this moment.
Your will and God's will are synonymous.
So I'm talking to God.
Well, they're going to feel uncomfortable with that.
Sounds vaguely blasphemous, right?
But it's an important question.
Because if I'm not talking to God, then who am I talking to?
Am I talking to you as distinct from God?
Am I talking to you under the spell of Satan?
The degree to which your will is deviating from that of God, does that mean that what you're saying to me is immoral and incorrect?
So if you say to me, I believe in God, and then I ask you if God is telling you to say that, and you say no, then obviously it's a deviation.
From the absolute truth, because God is absolute truth and absolute honesty, right, according to the Christians and everyone else.
And if they say, yes, you are talking to God now, then you can ask questions that this person wouldn't know.
So you can say, okay, God, can you give me pi to a hundred decimal places?
What is the exact population of soul?
S-E-O-U-L. You can ask the person, right?
Because, you know, it's one of the sort of fundamental things.
If somebody says to you, I am speaking with the voice of God, then you need to make sure that they're not just in the grip of Satan or making something up, right?
And of course, if they can't answer the questions that you are saying, posing directly to God, which of course they can't, then you say, okay, so you're not speaking with the voice of God.
And then they say, well, God doesn't do tricks, right?
And you say, oh, is that the voice of God?
Or was that you? Is that the voice of God?
Because it would be less confusing for me, if I'm speaking to God himself, if you said, I don't do tricks, rather than, he doesn't do tricks, because that's kind of confusing.
Then you've got, like, the guy who refers to himself in the third person in Seinfeld, Jimmy.
Jimmy wants the popcorn. So when you're speaking directly to a Christian, if God is speaking through them, it would certainly be more, I think, accurate for that person to say, I, when they're talking about God.
So then you could say that the Christian would have to say, I believe in me.
I am God.
And if they can do that, that's wonderful.
Because then it's a lot less confusing.
And then you can have a chat with God Which, I gotta tell you, would be pretty darn cool.
But you'll never get that from religious people, right?
They'll simply won't ever say that they're speaking with the voice of God.
And so they're not correct to the degree with which they don't speak with the voice of God.
And if they do speak with the voice of God, and they start giving you the big voice and I this and I that, then boy, just have some fun chatting with them, but start back in slowly away, because the person is psychotic.
I mean, if God's got their hand at the ras and is using their mouth to let you know about God, then he might as well use the first person, right?
Because otherwise it's confusing.
And God shouldn't make mistakes in grammar, right?
And it's the same thing with people who tell you about democracy.
They say to you, taxation is right.
You should pay your taxes.
And then you'll say, well, why?
And you'll say, well, it's the will of the people.
It's what people have voted for.
It's like, wow, so you are actually directly channeling the will of the people right now.
So I'm not speaking to you.
I'm speaking to this thing called the will of the people.
It's not just your opinion that people should pay taxes or whatever, volunteer for wars or whatever, oppose the war.
It's not just your opinion.
You're actually channeling the will of the people right now.
So I can actually talk to the will of the people.
So, in fact, you shouldn't use the personal pronoun I. You should say, we the people want you to pay taxes.
We the people think you should pay taxes.
Not I want you, but we the people.
We the people support the war, the invasion of Iraq.
We the people think the welfare state is a good idea.
So that you can have a debate with we the people rather than with an individual.
Anybody who appeals to voting, anybody who appeals to the principle of democracy is obviously speaking for we the people, rather than for just this person's opinion.
So you should get them to be upfront about that.
I am now speaking to we the people.
I am speaking to them, to they, to the Borg, to the collective.
I finally have a pipeline through to the will of the people, but maybe you can tell me.
What the will of the people is in a whole bunch of other areas.
And if you could reply to me using we, that would be a lot less confusing because then I can just differentiate it, right?
Because you say, well, do you like jazz?
No, I don't like jazz. But that's not a we the people.
That's a you. So you say, I don't like jazz.
But when you say, I think you must pay taxes, that's confusing because I think that it's like, I don't like jazz.
I think that it's a personal opinion.
But you're actually speaking for the people.
You're speaking for the common will.
So you need to use we, the people, think you should pay taxes so that I can differentiate it from your merely personal opinions.
If you speak for society as a whole, I'd like to know that so that I can speak to society and get some answers finally.
People will look at you like you're crazy when all you're doing is accepting their premises and eagerly going in the pursuit of knowledge, which of course will immediately upset them because bullshit artists hide behind God and we, the people, all the time.
It's how people think they prove their opinions.
It's how lazy people manipulate other people.
It's how bullies operate no matter how pleasant they appear.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you had a great Christmas and all.
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