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Dec. 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:03
574 Barriers to Atheism Part 2
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Time Text
There is no God.
There is no God. There is no God.
God, there is no God, there is no God, there is no God.
God, hope you're doing well.
Steph, we're going to be doing well.
We are going to finish up part two of the godless universe and the fresh and tasty hell that that will produce for large sections of humanity.
I really wish that people in the past had been able to close this gate, nail this fence shut, in the way that people have relatively easily been able to do to the concept such as slavery, such that slavery still exists, of course, in the form of taxation in the draft, but at least it's called by other names.
And the core approach to slavery is...
Not accepted as a moral ideal.
But this God thing, man, people just cannot nail this one.
And I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that, I don't know, maybe prior to this show there was other stuff.
I wasn't particularly aware of it.
But I think that there was a great deal of intellectual integrity that was focused upon abstracts in the philosophical realm, but it really wasn't tied together with the problem of the family and the problem that...
Really, the existing family, the ideal of virtue in blood, virtue in familial relationships, intimacy in historical accidents, the accidental biological cage, the ABC as we've called it, that whole idea has to go in the same way that the virtue of priests and the virtue of politicians and the virtue of being white or black or whatever, that all of this bigotry has to go.
The only virtue that exists is, yes, you know what's coming.
The only virtue that exists is virtue.
Nice and tautological.
The only thing that we can love and admire is virtue, integrity, courage, honor.
And there is no possibility of...
Virtue in being born somewhere, which is patriotism.
Virtue in being born to a particular family, which is familyism.
Blood bigotry.
Or a race, or a gender, or any of these sorts of things.
There is no virtue in talent.
There is no virtue in intelligence.
There is no virtue in eloquence.
There is no virtue in ability.
There is no virtue in accomplishment.
Set accomplishments accepted only if they are accomplishments of virtue.
But it's stripping away all of this stuff.
Layer by layer, bit by bit, onion peel by onion peel.
With often accompaniment of tears.
Ooh, the metaphor has just eaten its own tail.
But it's just getting rid of all of the criteria except virtue.
All of the criteria must be eliminated from what we value except virtue.
Now, there are people who are agnostic to certain kinds of virtues.
There are people who are opposed to particular kinds of virtues.
And there are people who have reversed particular kinds of virtues, or have reversed virtue itself.
So, in the realm of taxation, there are those who don't really care.
Well, I have to pay my taxes, not the most important thing on my list.
Yeah, I don't like it, but it's not really a big deal.
And then, there are people who say, well, you must pay your taxes because it's a civic duty, and we care about the poor, and we've made it a positive virtue.
And there are people who are against paying taxes for no particular reason, other than, I don't like paying taxes.
I think of the rich guy who just wants to create some sort of offshore account, and it could be someone else other than the rich guy, but we'll take the stereotype.
Pre-packaged metaphor is now in use.
So we'll just take the rich guy and say, well, he wants to just create some offshore nonsense that there's a tax shelter and he wants to put his money in a trust fund and this and that.
And why doesn't he want to pay taxes?
Well, just because he doesn't really like paying taxes.
It's not really a moral principle. He just wants to keep his money.
If pressed, he may come up with some sort of moral principle.
It's for my children or something, but it's not really a universal principle.
And in the same way, there are some people in the question of religion who say, well, I am indifferent to religion.
I'm agnostic in that sense.
I am against religion because I just resent that smug certainty that Christians have or whoever.
And I don't like religious extremism, so I'm just kind of...
But it's just a reaction. It's not really a principle.
And then there are the people who are pro-religion.
And often they're pro-religion because they want universal morality and think that somehow religion provides it.
Sorry.
Oh my God.
It's just too funny, you know?
I mean, yeah, there's trouble.
We have consistent problems with universally preferred behavior.
And I don't know how many more podcasts I can do on universally preferable behavior before my head explodes.
Which will be a forehead detonation visible from Jupiter, I think.
I can't quite make it to Saturn yet, but soon.
And yeah, we have our struggles or trials or tribulations or challenges in the realm of universally preferable behavior.
But, by God, if people think that religion does anything to solve it, they're just mad.
They're just mad.
Well, we have universal morality because there's a God, really.
So, what does God say?
Well, you should do this. Wait, no, you should do the opposite.
Wait, no, this god says that, or the other god says the other, and this priest says this, and my dog says this, and unless I wear the tinfoil helmet to keep the beams from Mars from invading my skull, my inner voices say the other.
Boy, the idea that religion provides universal morality is absolutely one of the most deranged notions.
I guess it's second only to, well, no, slightly ahead of, I think, that the number two in those is the idea that if you get rid of natural selection, you can say that intelligent design provides an answer as to how we got here.
I just find that too funny.
People say, oh, religion provides universal morality.
Really, which religion is that?
And which sect of that is which religion?
And which opinion of it is it of each individual within each sect?
How is all of that providing us universal morality?
What it does is it elevates bigotry to universals, and maybe some people who are morally insane think that that's some sort of universal morality, but I just don't really think that's the case.
So, we talked a little bit this morning about how the priests are going to hate it, and the population is going to hate it, and so on.
There is an enormous amount of resentment that is bottled up in the realm of religion, in the realm of religious people.
There's an extraordinary amount of resentment.
Now, belief in religion is to a large degree inversely proportional to intelligence.
Belief in religion is inversely proportional to To education.
Particularly belief in religion is inversely proportional to scientific education.
So, of scientists who've been polled, only a few percent believe in a personal god, and even fewer from the biologists' realm believe in a personal god.
Because once you're educated and you know that there's intelligent answers, or at least intelligent questions, to basic material phenomenon, Then you kind of understand that...
Oh, I just had an idea.
See? Isn't it a good thing that I paused?
Ooh, yeah, baby.
I'm just going to let that idea rub it safe all over me for a while.
Ooh, yeah, baby.
Ooh, scaly.
But... Ah, very interesting.
Okay, so if people who are less intelligent believe in gods, then it's either because, A, they just want stupid, easy answers, and they're too stupid to see that they're not really answers.
And I don't think that's the case.
I don't think that's the case at all.
Or they unconsciously recognize a deficiency in their own intelligence, but rather than try to remediate the deficiency in their own intelligence or understanding, They just make up answers that are superior to real understanding and strut around that way.
So it's either dumbness or it's vanity.
I don't think it's dumbness.
I'm going to tell you why. When you start questioning someone about religion, like in any intelligent, consistent, methodological, knowledgeable way...
Then it very quickly becomes clear that they really dislike Your questions.
They will start to dislike your questions within like 10 seconds.
Anyone who's seen somebody's theological hackles go up knows that it is a really clear, it's like, lock and load.
You can sort of feel the infinite spiral disco balls of gun sight laser beams coming onto your forehead from all the religious people around or all the fragmented personality bits within the religious person's An ecosystem of insanity.
They get very quickly, like instantaneously and emotionally they get that you are threatening them.
So I don't think it's stupidity because a stupid person wouldn't even know that there was a threat coming along.
And of course it's much harder to believe in religion than it is to believe in science.
So I think it's much more around the realm of vanity.
And the idea, of course, the hilarious idea that religion has anything to do with humility is just fantastical.
Religion has absolutely nothing to do with humility whatsoever.
Religion is the most astounding vanity that exists in the world.
And So I wonder if people who are deficient either in self-esteem, which I think is most likely that they're deficient in self-esteem, and it seems to me quite likely that people who are raised religious are going to be deficient in self-esteem because they're aggressed against when they try to use their rationality by their parents and their community and their priests and so on.
So it seems to me quite likely that they're going to be deficient in self-esteem, and they then have to do this leveling thing.
Or people who have low self-esteem, when they meet somebody who has higher self-esteem, they tend to get engaged in this thing called leveling.
And leveling is when you try to tear the other person down or build yourself up.
Now, prior to the rise of the scientific method, religious people who are deficient in terms of self-esteem, broken human beings fundamentally, They could tear other people down because they had access to a great deal of political power.
But once the rise of science and rationalism and the rights of the individual and the decoupling of nationalism from virtue and so on, once all of that occurred, religious people didn't have the same kind of power to tear down those who were more confident and had more integrity.
Well, you have more integrity, you end up with more confidence overall, I think.
They had no way really to tear down those who were confident using the brute political power and burning people at the stake and torturing them and all that sort of fun, juicy theological stuff.
So instead they had to pump themselves up even further by considering themselves more special and more knowledgeable and wiser and deeper and more spiritual and more understanding and kinder and gentler and more humble and so on.
And you can see this occurring When religious people debate with scientists all the time.
So one of the things that occurs is that religious people will always want to put scientific people on the defensive and then trumpet victory.
So one of the things, and we'll talk about this in a little more detail next week, but one of the things that occurs in the realm of natural selection Is that every facet of an organism's capacities has to be built up in an incremental fashion, right? I mean, you don't go from a feeler, stalker, see an enemy thing to a human eye in one generation.
It has to be incremental.
And what Darwin himself said was that if an organism's appendage or some sort of characteristic, an organ, can be shown that it's impossible for it to have been developed incrementally, if each of its components' parts would have no utility prior to the assembling into the final part, then that would be a blow against the Evolution and a strike for creationism or intelligent design or whatever you want to call it.
And so theologians are constantly finding some obscure animals saying, ha!
The psychic data helmet of the duck-billed platypus could not have arisen in incremental steps.
Therefore, God exists.
And then the scientist who's honest says, gee, I've never heard of that.
I'll have to look it up.
I don't really know much about it.
It's not my area of expertise.
They're humble, right? Whereas the asshole theologian, theologian, sorry, redundant again, the theologian then says, ha, you see, science can't answer everything, and that leaves room for the possibility of God, and this and that and the other, right?
The humility of the scientist in the realm of facts, I mean, some of them personally can be quite arrogant, but the humility of the scientist relative to the crowing superiority of the theologian, the fantasist, It's really quite striking.
And of course you see this in the realm of statists all the time as well.
Oh, it's complicated to come up with solutions for things involving DROs and so on?
Well, fuck that. Let's just point guns at everyone.
Look, I've come up with a solution and I don't have to worry my pretty little head about a whole lot of details.
We'll just hand some guns out and make a monopoly and everything will be fine.
This is how retarded people try to think.
Or try not to think, I guess is the way of putting it.
So the agony that is going to occur in the world is the agony of exposing people's low self-esteem.
And if you really want to see what kind of agony is involved in exposing people's low self-esteem, just have a little, little harken back to our happy, happy little prostitution debate.
And you'll get a sense of the kind of human agony that is trapped Like massive fetid bubbles under a glacier in the realm of low self-esteem or self-hatred, self-contempt.
And you'll get a strong sense of the kind of emotional violence, rage, fear, terror, destruction that is buried under the thick, armored, ridiculous hide of supernaturalism.
Of superstition. Superstition is the scar tissue that forms over self-hatred and contempt, and especially contempt for more knowledgeable and deeper and wiser people.
Somebody who comes across a wise person who is themselves, who does not hate themselves, then learns, as I do all the time, from wiser people.
Oh, that's very interesting.
I did not know that. That's very interesting, because you have the ego strength to handle Being incorrect.
Your ego is based on a methodology, not a conclusion.
Therefore, you don't have to hang on.
To conclusions. This is what happened to the objectivist movement, right?
They lost, and it's only gotten worse since the death of Ayn Rand, but they lost the methodology and began rooting themselves in conclusions.
And then their scar tissue hardens, and they're forced to defend all the conclusions in the world, and they can't ever be flexible and return to an absolute methodology because they have to defend absolute conclusions.
That is a disaster.
And you can see this in some of the 9-11 debates, some of which have occurred on the board.
We always return to the methodology.
We don't return to the conclusions and defend the conclusions.
We always just defend and forever defend the methodology, which is really what the argument for morality is all about.
Forget about the conclusions of what's right and wrong.
We need a consistent and universal methodology for determining what is right and wrong.
We call that the scientific method.
We apply it to philosophy and particularly to ethics, and we end up with universally preferable behavior.
See? It's so easy to say, and there it is just done.
Okay, I'm not going to say that that's proven yet, because I know that there's still lots of thrashing around on that one that's occurring for people, and I'm not going to say it's proven when there's still so many people thrashing around, because there's some very smart people out there having trouble with the concept, which may mean that the concept itself is troublesome, although I still can't see how, but we'll still keep that conversation going, of course, until my last death rattle occurs in my throat, probably on a show.
Come to think of it.
So the radioactive, bilge-filth, rat feces that's down at the bottom of the human soul when there is self-hatred.
And self-hatred doesn't arise out of ignorance.
Self-hatred arises out of feigning knowledge.
Self-hatred doesn't arise out of a lack of wisdom.
Self-hatred occurs because you feign wisdom.
And it's a species of dishonesty that is fundamentally bred like vermin in the family.
In my family, for instance, whenever I made a mistake, or whenever anybody made a mistake, you had to hide it and bury it and kill the witnesses.
Because the moment you made a mistake, people would grab onto it.
Like a shock and a feeding frenzy.
And they would just attack and attack and attack like nuts.
And then it would enter into the family annals as a permanent source of endless and bottomless contempt and dismissal and derision and so on.
And this occurs in marriages too, right?
I mean, people always make fun, in a tired old kind of comedic way, of the guys who won't stop to ask for directions.
The reason that that's the case is, yeah, yeah, maybe there's some pride in guys, I don't know, I don't have it, but maybe there's some pride in guys in figuring out where to go and what to do in a car.
But more fundamentally, when you have a marriage that people jump on errors like a fat kid on a smarty, Get like a terrier on a postman's leg and hang on as tenaciously.
Then nobody can admit a mistake, because the moment you admit a mistake, you get savaged and you get mocked.
People will make fun of you in a sort of ha-ha kind of way.
Oh, you know, you'd lose your head if it wasn't attached, or you're just so accident-prone.
Oh my god, I feel so sorry for you.
And this becomes a kind of mythology that is self-reinforcing and intensely frustrating for the person who is now put into this little box that people now feel they can mock until the end of time, right?
So the cost of making an error Or admitting a fault or admitting an error is pretty much eternal damnation, right?
That's where the concept comes from, not from God, but from families.
So if you're responsible for getting...
If you're getting your family somewhere and you make a mistake, then the next time you propose getting your family somewhere, they're going to say, oh, is it going to go as well as last time?
And then if you get them to the right place five times and you propose it on the sixth time, you get them to the right place five times in a row.
On the sixth time, they're going to say, oh, is that going to work out like such and such a time, the very first time you made an error?
And... This can also occur...
I still feel this in business sometimes, right?
So I am not that busy...
I wasn't that busy at work in November, so I offered to do the...
Put together the Christmas party.
We went to LaserQuest. We went to a restaurant.
And... I was paranoid about sending people to the wrong laser quest, like I show up on, because then it would be like, oh, if I offered to do something again, it would be, I felt at least, it was going to be, oh, so it'll work out as well as that whole laser quest thing did, where we ended up paying for money and we couldn't get to the laser quest because everyone went to the wrong place because you sent their, you know, that kind of stuff, where you make a mistake, you have to immediately cover it up or blame someone else, or there's this tension, this fear that occurs around the realm of errors.
And so, in families, you end up in this situation where you have to constantly hide ignorance.
You have to make up answers, you have to pretend that you know.
And of course, nobody can make up answers in the scientific method because it requires research, it requires consultation, it requires experimentation, theorization, reproducibility of experiments, you've got a peer-reviewed crap in journals, and so on.
You can't make up answers in science.
So in science, you have to be pretty comfortable with the idea of making mistakes.
I mean, 99% of everything is a complete failure.
Look at all the movies that get released every year.
How many of them are really successful?
And even if you count the ones in any given year, how many of them are really successful and look back as classics and still rented 10 or 20 years later?
99% of everything is a complete and total failure.
Maybe 90% of everything.
99% is everything in the long run.
Actually, 99.999%.
How many novels from the 19th century are still read?
0.0000001%, something like that?
So whatever you do in life, and I'll do a podcast, as one listener has suggested, to do a podcast on failure, which I've been more than happy to do, and eminently qualified to do, since, boy, failure.
Oh, it's my middle name.
But... When you have a family structure or a social structure where you simply cannot admit error, then you just get used to making up shit and stick into it, come herald high water, right? So then you get this self-fulfilling prophecy as an adult.
So when you're a kid and dependent upon your parents or community or priest or whatever...
And remember, a lot of people from older generations than ours come from environments where if you didn't know the answer to something, you could get caned, you could get beaten, you could get whatever.
I mean, it'd be pretty rough.
So people get used to just making stuff up and sticking to it.
And parents then, of course, since they've grown up, usually in environments where you're not allowed to make mistakes, parents then can't admit mistakes to their children.
And this is why religious instruction continues to replicate like a virus, because people just can't look at their kids in the eye and say, yeah, I kind of knew it was wrong all along, but I'm just a conformist.
And all that stuff I told you about being a good person and all that parental authority when I would yell at you or beat you up or at least give you endless lectures about right and wrong, I didn't have a clue.
This is what the God of Atheists is all about, right?
Parents just can't admit that they don't have a clue about ethics, because they need to teach their children ethics, but they don't know anything about ethics, so they just have to bully them.
And you can never get them to admit this later.
So people's inability to admit error, because error is punished, makes them drift towards, well, more than drift towards, makes them, creates an enmeshment between their false selves and religion.
Because religion just provides instant answers.
And you can see this kind of eerie fluidity.
Actually, in Podcast 300, when I played the priest, to Christina's skeptic, People wrote and said, gee, that's eerie.
It's like, what, I haven't debated with a lot of religious people?
It's eerie that I could just come up with all of these obfuscations and answers and so on, just on the spot.
Well, human beings are very good at doing that.
Just making up shit and sticking to it, come hell or high water.
I mean, religion is really just that.
It's just making up shit and then sticking to it, come hell or high water.
And in the extremity, of course, it's killing people who disagree with you.
And then human beings are absolutely capable of that.
And that is the logical conclusion.
If the self-hatred is going to be exposed, people get very aggressive.
Very aggressive. Indeed.
And throughout most of history, of course, that's meant that if you puncture any of the social illusions of your time, people are going to stick a sword in your ass, right?
They're going to kill you. Burn you at the stake or something.
Throw you in jail for sure. And boy, those Elizabethan jails.
You had a life expectancy in the minutes.
Rats, buggery, starvation, scurvy, you're toast.
And so in this realm, when we start to peel off religion, and there's a race, right?
Because once religion gets the power of violence, which it doesn't have as yet in the West, it's getting it in America, but not so much in the rest of the West.
Once religion has the capacity of violence against, once it's merged and slithered back into its dismal and grim and murderous embrace with the state, then it's too late, right?
That's one of the reasons I'm fairly urgent about focusing on religion at the moment.
But once you begin to expose the self-hatred of people...
Who have pompously and viciously asserted their superiority based on pure fantasy.
Once people have told you that they know everything, and that they're right about everything, and that they understand everything, and that you're stupid basically, and you lack faith, and they've got this whole pompous thing going.
Once you start to peel back those layers, holy fuck people, I am telling you, people will just explode.
What is underneath faith is murderous rage.
Once you start to hold up the mirror to people who hate themselves, oh my god will you get an enormous cannon loads of venom and viciousness fired directly at you.
And that is what the world is going to have to go through.
We're going to have to stand in the gale of this hatred.
And continue to persist its exquisitely hard to say and to do, apparently.
But it is absolutely a brutal thing to do.
In order to be interested in the truth, you have to have sensitivity, empathy, intelligence, all these kinds of things in order to successfully achieve the truth.
But... It's those very traits that make it so damn hard to basically press the knife home into the false self.
I mean, it takes a certain...
This is an exaggeration, but I'm not going to gainsay the metaphor that's popped into my head.
It takes a certain kind of murderous intent to kill an illusion.
To really drive the knife home into illusion.
It's like that slow-motion murder in Saving Private Ryan.
To really drive the knife home in an illusion.
And know! And know for a fact that you are going to be destroying people's psyche.
Knowing for a fact that you are going to be destroying people's psyche.
Look, if you are addicted to illusion long enough, you don't have a true self to return to anymore.
You just don't have a true self to return to anymore.
People will absolutely go down with the ship in this case.
The captain will go down with the ship of illusion.
And you have to, I mean, I don't mean suicide or anything like that.
I just mean that psychologically people will be destroyed.
Psychologically, people will be destroyed.
When you take away the state, when you take away the army, when you take away patriotism, when you take away religion, when you take away the family, when you say, no, no, doesn't work, not logical, no, doesn't work, not logical, not universal, not consistent, not reversible, not testable...
Not empirical, not logical, doesn't work, doesn't work.
When you keep doing that, over and over and over again, with all the nonsense that people believe in, and found their virtue and their false self nonsense on, you keep saying no to that.
People wriggle, they fight, they kick, they tear, they get angry, they get murderous, they shriek, they call you asshole, they get contemptuous, they get scornful, they pull the major general blah blah blah on you, they'll do anything, and you just keep pushing forward, and you just keep pushing forward, and you never give up, and you never give in.
Accept the reason and evidence in good sense.
And people will...
We'll hate you and people will be enraged.
We need to do this, though, before the state gets any bigger and before religion crosses over.
As it is crossing over, before religion completes that crossover, then it'll be too late and we get another thousand years of a dark age until about another billion people get murdered by religion and statism and then people will start to rethink the whole matter.
We need to do it now.
We need to do it now.
Not later. Not when it's too late.
This is something that we need to do now, and it is very hard to do.
But if we don't do it, it's not going to get done, first of all.
And I very much and very clearly see the billion lives that hang in the balance.
I know that it sounds ridiculously megalomaniacal, but of course not my balance or anything, it's the world's balance, the rationalist balance and all.
But I very clearly see that if we don't get this right now, and it probably will be more than a billion people because there are nuclear weapons in the world, so there will be some sort of dirty bomb, there will be some sort of biological warfare, and this is the price that human beings continue to have to pay for illusions.
Illusion is the source of murder.
And everybody feels...
Sorry.
If we don't fight the illusion that is kicking around, if we don't fight these illusions, then murder is the inevitable result.
No question. What is going to result is mass slaughter.
I see that very clearly.
I see, as they say in Germany, when the religious wars were going on post-Reformation, you couldn't pass by a tree without seeing some poor heretic hanging from it.
I see a world of bodies ahead.
I see a landscape of death and desolation, radioactive, biological.
I see that. And I think it's perfectly preventable.
Certainly in history, as illusions grow, murder grows, and we've never had the murderous capacities that we have now.
And you don't need to imagine all of this.
Look at 150,000 dead Iraqis as a result of the Christian fantasy of George Bush, right?
People say, oh, Christianity doesn't murder people anymore.
Really? Really? Really?
Just go ask people in the Middle East.
So, I see all of this is perfectly preventable, but it's going to take an emotional staunchness, and the time to act is now, because time is running out.
It's going to take an emotional staunchness.
And you don't have to convert anyone.
You just have to stop associating with the people and you have to say, oh, I stopped associating with him because he's a bizarre and irrational and superstitious freak.
And just keep saying that over and over again.
You debate with people in all positivity, and if they accept your debating, fantastic.
If they can reason you, if they listen to reason, fantastic.
If they don't, give them a couple of tries, and if they continue not to, you dump them, and you are open and proud of your dumping them, and that is not necessarily going to avert disaster.
It's going to take a little more than that, but it is a necessary first step.
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