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Dec. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:16
573 Barriers to Atheism Part 1

Peeeeeling off the band-aid of cosmic fantasy...

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is the 29th of December 2006.
Oh, the civilized time of 8.29 in the morning.
Just heading off to work. And we shall continue our chat from yesterday about...
This problem of religious people and the challenge of just saying no to them.
Just saying no to them.
Now, I think it's relatively important to understand the barriers to atheism for a couple of reasons.
One, I mean, if you If you want people to sort of wake up and see the truth, it's important to understand their resistance to it.
And for the other thing, too, I think it's important to try to avoid contempt towards your fellow man.
And I am not always as successful at this as I would like to be, but we all have our foibles.
So if you don't really get a sense of how people...
Just hate and fear atheism, then you'll actually end up with quite a lot of contempt for them, because then you'll think they're willful and stupid.
And that's really not true.
I mean, if people were willful and stupid, but there was a minority of intelligent people who were virtuous and good, then we'd be Platonists, right?
Thinking that there'd be some perfect dictatorship that we could inflict upon people.
That would make them better.
And that, of course, never happens.
So, in order to avoid contempt, we need to look at motive.
And once we understand the motive, then we will understand the resistance.
And once we understand the resistance, then we can let go of distaste or the hatred or the negativity that we have towards these religious types.
Now, the first thing that I would say, which is a statistic that's well worth pondering for some time, although we won't, because we must move on, move on, at all times, we move!
And that is that about one person in twelve, in a free, not in the Muslim world, but not in a theocracy, but in a free society, about one person in twelve manages to escape the religion of his or her parents.
About one person in 12.
What is that? 8%?
Something like that? 8.33%.
It is a really terrifying statistic when you think about it, but it's perfectly natural.
Because the price of the truth, as people are discovering, not just here, but as people are continually discovering throughout the world, the price of truth is solitude, for the most part.
And it is a solitude well worth going through because there is joy on the other side and there is the possibility of a real relationship rather than attempting to hug shadow puppets your whole life.
But the price of the truth is solitude.
And what happens is people are wounded by that solitude.
Solitude is how society inoculates itself against those who have the truth.
I mean, society being the fantastical kind of corrupt parents, politicians and priests.
But people do actually have a strong desire for the truth.
And when somebody comes along who speaks the truth, I mean, prior to this magical thing called podcasting, when somebody comes along who does have some snippet or some aspect of the truth, society forms a protective barrier around that person.
And we've all experienced this when you speak the truth to your friends or your family, colleagues or anything like that.
People will immediately start to shun you.
I mean, this is exactly how any social organism works.
Just think of how your immune system deals with a virus or a cold or something like that.
It surrounds it, it coats it, it kills it.
And that is how the fantasy within society, that's how the false self that is society, It maintains its hegemony, maintains its power.
The moment you start speaking the truth, you're socially excluded and isolated.
The price of truth is solitude.
And the way that society creates this autoimmune response to any kind of intellectual rigor or honesty is it promotes vanity.
Society breeds the false self because the false self is innately opposed to honesty and rigor.
And the scientific method, logic, empiricism, philosophy, whatever you want to call it.
All the stuff that we talk about here.
And so what you want to do, if you're a society, is you want to get people to believe that they are greater than they are for reasons that are dependent upon somebody else's opinion, and then you have to tell them that it's not an opinion.
I'm sorry, that's so complicated.
Let me try that again.
But using helpful words...
You have to get somebody to believe that they are greater than they are, but that that greatness is dependent upon somebody else's opinion, and then you have to tell them that it's not an opinion.
Right? So you've got to give them delusions of grandeur, And you've got to get them to base those delusions of grandeur on somebody else's opinion, as all delusions of grandeur are based, because they're not supported by reality, only by opinion.
And then, you tell them that it's not an opinion, but a fact.
And that's how you lock them in.
So they create this false self, they create this vanity of specialness, which was mentioned in one of the arguments yesterday, and They create this fantasy of specialness and then you tell them that it's not a fantasy.
So then they're entirely dependent upon other people's opinions but they don't know it.
This is what is so fundamental about religion as we were talking about yesterday.
Religion is so fundamentally based on opinion that people really have a great deal of difficulty understanding that So once people are dependent on other people's opinions,
but no longer see those opinions as opinions, then their hostility towards the truth becomes unconscious and becomes a reaction against vice.
I mean, of course you have to infuse all of this with virtue.
I mean, that's a... I don't even need to mention that.
That's a given. But once you tell people a whole bunch of nonsense...
And you tell them that that nonsense makes them special, and then tell them that it's not just you telling them, it's the truth, even though there's no evidence for it, then people become entirely dependent upon living a lie.
Their false selves, this is how the false self replicates, right?
It points people towards opinions rather than reality, what Ayn Rand called the social metaphysics.
Not, is it true, but do people say that it's true?
Now, once you can get people from, do people say that it's true, to it is true, then people are unconsciously dependent upon the lies of others.
But they have assumed that it's a virtue, or they believe that it's a virtue, it's a belief in God or whatever.
So not only are they unconsciously dependent upon the lies of others, But their virtue, their self-esteem, their sense of self-respect, their reason to get up in the morning, their purpose, everything they teach their children, everything that makes them good in their own eyes, and human beings absolutely, totally, and completely want to feel self-justified and good in their own lives.
That is what defensiveness is all about.
It's people who are too lazy to be good who just get angry at anyone who suggests that they're not.
So once people do not view their lies as lies, do not view their personalities as dependent upon the lies of others, but instead believe that those lies are true and virtuous, then what's happened but instead believe that those lies are true and virtuous, then what's happened is people's desire for virtue and their innate
or their innate, let's say, negativity in some manner or another towards vice, No, you know, I think hatred works.
Let's stay with hatred. People's innate love of virtue and innate hatred of vice has been hijacked.
That's exactly what a cancer does, right?
It reverses the immune system.
The immune system ignores...
Maybe it's closer to AIDS. The immune system ignores the danger and attacks the healthy cells.
Maybe it's more like the flesh-eating bacteria.
So it's the complete inverse of what our psychological morality immune system should be doing.
You attack virtue and you foster and you feed vice, right?
And people just take that mechanistic calculation within the human mind and this innate love of virtue and hostility towards vice and reverse it.
So that the priest dripping his syrupy, claustrophobic, evil tongue into your ear It's viewed as somebody who makes you all a shiver me timber as my mateys with virtue.
And the atheist who comes along and is telling you the truth is a bad person who wants you to stop believing in good things and start believing in bad things and is an agent of the devil in some form or another and so on.
So once you understand this theory, of course, I mean, there's no proof for it, but it seems to make sense based on what I've experienced and what I've sort of reasoned through, but let me know what you think.
If this theory of how religion replicates is valid...
Then, it's important to have some sympathy for those who are struck down so early in their childhoods.
So early in their childhoods, as we talked about in Podcast 70, the fruit.
So early in their childhoods are they struck down.
And one in twelve of them manage to escape the religion of their parents.
I don't know if that includes people who intermarry, marry into another faith or into an atheist household.
I don't know. But whether it is or not, it's still a pretty staggering statistic.
And it's not like the one in 12 who escape, escape to reason.
I mean, a good number of them escape to Rastafarianism, to Druidics, to mere deism, to agnosticism, to astrology, to New Ageism.
I mean, the numbers who escape to reason from the religion of their parents is, oh, I can't even imagine, one in a thousand.
And then they're inoculated by isolation.
And in their isolation...
They are faced with the great temptation of hatred and bitterness towards humanity.
When you love the truth and humanity hates you for loving the truth and calls you evil for loving the truth and loving virtue, then it's very easy to become misogynistic, to start to hate people, hate the world, hate society.
To feel this Archmankian contempt for humanity, and then all of the people sitting and singing in their church and clapping their hands like robotic god morons look out the window and look at you shivering with your little flame of truth and say, well, that's a bitter, resentful human being. Look where his supposed truth has gotten him.
We're singing and clapping and making a joyful sound to the Lord.
And he's out there shivering and staring hateful glances at us, cupping his hands over his little flame of truth.
Which is very similar to people in graves murmuring to each other as somebody coughs himself back to life that, well, we're sleeping comfortably.
He's going back to the challenges of living.
There's actually a great, I can't remember who came up with this story originally.
For some reason I think it's somebody in Benny Goodman's band, it's an old swing band from the 40s.
You know the song, right?
It's Christmas Day and they have to do a concert.
And the band is on a train, but the train breaks down.
And it's snowing, but it's slushy, and they don't have their snow boots, because of course they were expecting the train was going to be taking them to the concert hall.
And they have their huge instrument cases, and they're in their tuxes because they're on their way to do a Christmas concert.
The train breaks down, and they realize that they're going to have to hump it.
A couple of miles across farmer's fields to get to the Christmas concert.
So they're in their tux.
They've got these ridiculous formal shoes on.
So they step out into the snow with their huge instrument cases hoisted above them.
And they're struggling along.
And their feet are freezing.
And their hands are freezing.
They have no protection against the cold.
It's blowing snow in their faces.
It's hailing. It's, you know, whatever you want to say.
And they're struggling along.
And they go past a farmhouse.
And in the farmhouse is...
And none of them are married because they're traveling all the time and so on.
And in the farmhouse is a husband and a wife and two apple children who are sitting down to a feast of turkey and ham and vegetables and so on.
And it's warm and it's cozy and there's a fireplace clicking away.
And... One of them who's carrying his, I don't know, giant bass or something over him in the slow and the slush, freezing cold, shivering, breath-fogging, eyes almost frozen, turns to the other one and says, my God, how can people live like that?
I've always loved that story, because ain't that the truth with philosophy, right?
Looking out, it's like, my God, what a bunch of miserable guys all humping their instruments through the snow.
But, from the outside in, their love of music is so great that they look at the people in the farmhouse, oh my god, how can people live like that?
So, that's sort of the general process.
To be excluded and to return, I should say, this sounds a bit saccharine and I apologize for that up front, but it's true in a way.
To return with love.
As I've talked about before, to return with love to your fellow men, with the truth and with the patience of knowing that they're going to hate you for the truth that you're bringing, is very important.
It breaks the cycle of abuse, right?
The cycle of abuse being, he has the truth, we shall shun him, look how bitter he is, that can't be the truth because it makes him very unhappy and we're happier.
That's how society abuses the truth, and that's how the truth lets itself be abused, right?
As it goes and grumbles and murmurs and shoots ghastly glances at people in coffee shops and so on, and it becomes misogynistic.
And then the truth becomes so unappealing, and the person who is speaking the truth becomes so unappealing that you may get this sort of Mencken slash Ambrose Bierce kind of bitter honesty...
Which makes people laugh, but nobody wants to become that person.
You become like the fool in Lear's court.
You make people laugh, but you affect no change.
No matter how pointed and barbed your jest, as Mencken said, we will accept that a man's religion is true in the same way that we accept that his wife is beautiful and his children intelligent.
Well, that's a pretty bitter way of putting it, right?
I mean, that's the nihilistic approach which Mencken, and Bierce in particular, was...
Quite prone to.
But if you return with love and joy, with the truth, and you stand, I mean, this is the philosopher's ball rock, right?
This is the philosopher's devil.
This is the great challenge of philosophy, in my opinion, which is to stand on the bridge of Khazad-dum and to hurl down the contempt that When humanity lashes upon you,
the contempt, the exclusion, the fear, the hostility, the ugliness, the resentment, the petulance, the superiority, the condescension, the pettiness, every negative devil in the world is loose from the human chest in the presence of truth.
So you have to be a doctor fighting a plague when those with the plague are fighting you.
They say they don't have a plague.
If you try to hold them down and give them the antidote, they say that you're being violent.
If you walk away, they say you're being cowardly.
Right? I mean, this is the impossible situation that the truth has put in relative to society.
And so far, I don't think that the truth has done nearly as well as it should have.
I mean, as I've talked about, even Socrates had his resentments and passive aggression.
And veiled superior hostility.
I think, as I mentioned in Ask a Therapist, there's nothing wrong with just hating people.
But I think that it's important to have sympathy for the children that they were who were put on this false path.
And to recognize that most people in their current psychological states are far beyond reclamation.
And to spend your energies on those people who can be helped.
It's going to be a bit of an incremental process.
I got a letter yesterday from a fine young South American gentleman who is 18 years old and has plowed his way through a good number of the podcasts and is very appreciative.
And I think that's fantastic.
That's exactly before they have children, before higher education is inflicted upon them, to simply talk about the truth.
And the methodology for the truth, to which everyone, particularly me, because I'm originating some of these ideas, is subjected to.
So, this inoculation of solitude that society inflicts upon those who tell the truth, and I don't mean those who tell a comfortable truth, or those who tell an arrogant truth like Ayn Rand, but those who tell, I think, or those who tell an arrogant truth like Ayn Rand, but those who tell, I think, the most important Thank you.
Justice with empathy.
Empathy for the good and empathy for the evil.
Honesty with humility.
I think is important.
There are some important emotional characteristics.
We do have to win people over to the truth because we do have to live in society.
And society is heading not in the right direction.
So we do, for the sake of our kids, for the sake of those who are going to come after us, for the sake of sympathy for the future, and for the sake of the majority of people who can't reason their way out of a paper bag because they've been crippled, We do have to present the truth in some kind of way that is appealing.
If we don't, we should not speak the truth.
If we're not there yet, if we can't do it yet, we should not speak the truth.
Because, as I've said before, you only get one shot to change somebody's mind, to enlighten them, to raise their consciousness.
And if you blow it, it's going to haunt you.
I mean, not only have you turned somebody against the truth, but it's really going to haunt you.
Because then it's a kind of vanity.
Then it's a, I want to look smart, I want to be smarter than you, I want to teach you, I want to tell you.
And when it's vanity, you drive people away from the truth, because that's a reaction formation to the solitude and the isolation, and you're being passive-aggressively hostile.
It's far better to be openly hostile, right?
Then at least you can work through it, people know what they're dealing with.
Didn't quite get to the topic today.
Not quite. Ooh, it's been a while since we've completely missed the mark.
But I'll sort of start on the topic.
I've still got a few minutes until I get to work, and I think it's all entirely too possible that I might not, in fact, miss my entrance.
I'm taking the regular highways because there's so little travel today.
The regular topic is...
What is it going to cost people to give up on religion?
And I think that's a very important thing to understand.
If you see the enormity of the foe that you're fighting, then being struck down repeatedly will not result in humiliation.
Right, so... If you're going into a wrestling ring and you're fighting an 800-pound gorilla that's ten times stronger than you are, when you keep getting thrown to the mat, you don't sit there and say, gee, I'm really weak.
I mean, if you go in and you fight a Boy Scout and you keep getting thrown to the mat, then yes, it may be said that you are a tad on the weak side.
But if you're going into an 800-pound gorilla, you need to see the size of your desk, right?
So that you can prepare and so that you can get used to getting thrown to the mat over and over and over again without feeling that you're weak.
There'll be frustration and so on.
Frustration is healthy because it'll open up new thinking channels.
But you need to understand the size of your opponent in order not to end up feeling that you are a failure.
Now... It may come as some surprise to you, and I've yet to do this podcast, it's slated for next week, that priests have the least testosterone of any male profession.
The testosterone, as you may or may not know, is what drives your competitive nature, what gives you the fight or flight, what makes you rough and tumble, what makes you willing to get angry and compete and a desire to win, and so on.
Men have ten times more of it than women, which is partly why only 25% of women are interested in politics and nearly half of men, and even I think that's not quite as wide a gap as I think it really is.
But... Priests have the lowest testosterone, as you can sort of expect, right?
Being a priest is being an entirely non-competitive human being.
I mean, I guess you're competing with other priests, but you get to practice your slithery wares on children.
So, you're not really competing, right?
Priests don't go and have a guard off where they each do their preaching and see how many intelligent and critical adults they have, right?
That would make most priests faint.
So when priests are looking at the world, or when people who have that kind of nature are looking at the world, when you say getting rid of religion, they see you or when people who have that kind of nature are looking at the world, when you say getting rid of religion, they see That's why people hate the free market in some ways.
There is some biology and personality.
In fact, there's quite a lot.
There are some people who, because they lack things like testosterone, They dislike the rough and tumble of the free market.
It seems uncivilized to them.
It seems unpleasant. They don't like to compete.
It's not because they're bad people.
It's just because they lack certain hormones that drive assertion.
I mean, that's just one of about a million examples of things that, and we'll go into more of them in the next podcast.
But you are saying to priests, well, that's it for your comfortable lifestyle.
That's it for you being the center of your community.
That's it for you getting to just sort of wake up whenever the heck you want, scratch yourself, shuffle around, read a couple of books, go do a sermon, listen to a couple of people complain about their lives, have some tea and crumpets, eat a nice dinner, and go to bed.
It's a pretty sweet gig, I gotta tell you, being a priest.
It's a pretty sweet gig.
You do get to dwell in the realm of ideas, however evil and fantastical they may be.
But it's a pretty sweet gig.
It's a pretty sweet life.
It makes a teacher look like you're working in a coal mine.
Please reassemble that metaphor at your own discretion.
And they're pretty wealthy.
Especially the ones at the top.
They're pretty wealthy. And they just have to act.
I mean, entertainment is the fundamental aspect of the church.
The church is a form of entertainment.
Priests are actors. But they're actors who can never publicly go out of character.
Privately they do, of course.
They can never be out of character.
It's all a big improv.
It's theater. And when you confront them that it's theater, and they can't ever say that it's theater, but when you confront them, they get hostile because you're ditching their livelihood.
When you confront people on religion, you raise the spectra, which is even more fundamental, that their parents lie to them.
Because disproving religion is no brain feat.
I know we've spent some time on it, but that's just because we need to approach it from a number of different angles, because I don't know what the heck's going to work with you if you're still that way.
When you question religion, you question religion.
The fundamentals of people's family, right?
There's a reason why religion is so pro-family, because it's the families who carry the virus of religion to the children.
It's the families, it's the parents who infect the children.
That's why religion is so pro-family.
They care about family.
They care a bit about family.
And another reason why they're against homosexuality is gays tend to be a little bit skeptical.
And homosexuals, of course, don't transmit the virus to children.
In fact, homosexuals can, in their skepticism, can be against that.
But they don't care about family, they just need carriers for the virus.
That's very well understood.
No intelligent adult human being ends up saying at the age of 50 when they've never had any exposure to religion, hey, I think I'll be a Christian.
In the same way, smokers, the smoking companies, tobacco companies have to hit the young because nobody at 50 says, hey, I think I'm going to start smoking.
Selling religion to the mature is like trying to sell a Tickle Me Elmo to some old guy in his deathbed.
Don't have much use for it, thank you.
A little busy right now. More important things to worry about.
So, there are enormous pressures.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
It's a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that is predicated, unusually enough, on the idea that it's not entertainment but truth.
Billed as a documentary, it is in fact a Tim Burton fantasy.
And that is something that when you start to bring this stuff into people's minds, you have their personal stuff, as we talked about, that they're told that they're special, they're dependent on everyone's opinions, but they are then, to save their pride, they're not told that they're dependent on everyone's opinions.
If you tell somebody that they're a slave, you're going to wound their pride.
But if you tell them that they have chosen to be a slave and it's what actually makes them free, then their pride and independence will kick in and save the illusion and enslave them to the illusion.
So they've got the personal stuff.
There's the hostility towards philosophy.
There's the reaction of philosophers to that hostility, which is often return hostility that lowers credibility.
There is the economic stuff.
There's the familial stuff.
There's also the social stuff.
It's the whole community. This is why people have to get married in a church, right?
Because that way, both parties are religious.
That's why I wouldn't get married in a church.
Why do I care? I can get married wherever I want to this glorious woman.
This is why they want you to get married in a church, because if both people are religious, then one person is going to be much less likely to talk the other person out of being religious.
If one person is religious and the other person isn't, then the whole bullshit mantra gets a bit of a knock, right?
So there's enormous barriers all the way around.
And this is something that I think is really, really important to understand when you're sort of going up against this stuff.
And we'll talk about, maybe I'll go for a walk at lunch and we'll see, but we'll talk about it a little bit more a little bit later, the idea of what is going to happen to people emotionally as this stuff begins to come crumbling down.
Thank you so much for listening. I had a nice little donation this morning.
Thank you so much. I look forward to more.
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