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Jan. 2, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:30
580 How Religion Spreads

How can 6 billions theists be wrong?

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph. Oh, good lord, it's the new year.
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas break and a wonderful New Year's, and I look forward to continuing our chat this Year 2007.
It's January the 2nd, 2007.
And, oh, let's have a look and see if we can see out of our car or not.
And in this case, it would be more on the not side.
Let's see if we can't fix that up a little and not go anywhere until we can.
So, I have been listening to our good friend Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion.
Which is a very interesting book and well worth a listen to, although I must say I do find it a little bit frustrating.
There is certain kinds of caveats that scientists bring to the question of the existence of God that are actually rather annoying.
And this is, of course, the same tentativeness with which I would bring my thoughts to the realms of certain sciences, so it's not particularly that I'll blame him for it.
Nope, still can't see.
I don't know what's going on this morning.
Normally it's not so bad.
We had a dip in temperature last night.
It's not too cold now, though. Let me just see if I can't do a little bit of manual cleanup on the old window here.
Look at this. The high-tech continues.
We're all about the quality here.
And there's quite a lot of talk in the book about why is it that religion is so successful?
Why is it that religion is so successful?
And the fact that religion is successful is something that is quite It's used quite a bit in the realm of religion to say, well, there must be something to it because everyone believes in it.
And I think we've all heard those, for want of a better word, arguments.
But it's all quite a bit of nonsense, naturally.
But it's a kind of nonsense that people seem to have some difficulty...
Getting rid of in their own mind.
Ah, look at that. The outside world.
How lovely. Even better to drive when you can see.
Hey, isn't that the purpose of philosophy as a whole?
So, the one thing that I think that he brings up that is quite helpful is that children are very keen on gaining the approval of their parents.
And that is an entirely sensible thing, I think.
It makes good sense to me that when we are children that it's very important for us to gain the good approval or the good graces of our parents for two reasons.
One is that they have knowledge around us about the world and about society that we need to know.
And I think, interestingly enough, the value of parental instruction increases to the degree that society is irrational.
So to the degree that there are weird, crazy beliefs and rituals, to that very same degree, the value of parents increases.
If society is rational, then you don't need parents to lead you through the myriad and silly beliefs that people have, which they'll get oh so offended about if you don't.
If you don't obey them.
So, I don't know, just think of all of the various ways in which you can address someone in Russian.
It's all complete nonsense and all based on a social hierarchy that is also complete nonsense.
Pardon me. And yet it's something that people really have to learn if they're going to avoid getting beaten up or snubbed or if they're going to avoid having the problem of not...
Getting ahead in the...
Gogol world of...
The same thing occurs in the realm of manners in England.
At least, when I lived there, that was the case.
The fact that I went to a boarding school and had a plummy, upper-class accent had quite an effect on those I was talking to.
And when I would speak to those who had a Cockney accent, which would be more lower-class, Then they would feel either belligerent or inferior.
That would be a sort of natural response.
Of course, this had something to do with where I ended up in the realm of philosophy, but then coming to Canada, the plummy British school accent was not exactly a cash-positive investment, let's say.
So these kinds of things are quite important in society, or at least quite common to be regarded within society.
And if you don't have parents who can teach you all about them, then you're going to have...
Oh, that's the blinding glare of my thoughts.
Don't worry, we're going to go east-west rather than north-south in just a little moment.
And all will be better.
Sometimes that's the forehead with the fluorescent lights on and a little bit of baby oil.
I'm sure you get the picture and I'm sorry for giving it to you.
So the more irrational society is, the greater the value of parental instruction becomes.
And that's, I mean, I wouldn't say that that's an absolute statement because in a sane society, parental instruction insanity would also be very helpful.
But conformity is a scar tissue to brutality, and in general it's very important for children to conform to a brutal society that is irrational.
So if you can picture in a sort of Stalin-esque or Big Brother-esque 1984 kind of world where there are all of these silly things that you have to do in order not to get killed, I don't know, when you see the picture of the dictator, you have to spin three times and spit over your right shoulder, or people will take it as a sign of disloyalty, and you will end up being dragged off to a gulag or something like that.
Then, of course, a child who doesn't listen to his parents is going to get killed.
The examples that Richard Dawkins uses, one sec...
The examples that Richard Dawkins uses are also, of course, completely valid.
The man's very smart, naturally.
But they're more along the lines of, if you want to go and eat all the red berries in the woods, then your parents have to tell you no.
And those children who do not have a gene which causes them or more or less impels them to obey their parents, those genes won't replicate.
So... But that's just relative to nature.
But... It's relative to society, I think, that we all notice that as societies become more and more irrational, parental authority tends to increase.
So the parental authority in Soviet Russia was very strong because there were so many irrational rules that the children had to follow in order not to get dragged off to order to reduce their chances of getting dragged off to a gulag.
And as American power increases in the world, The Christian right and the concomitant parental authority that occurs there, which is also occurring not just in the right wing in the Christian sense, but in the left wing in the socialist or state power solves everything, violence is good sense.
All of the stuff is perfectly irrational to children.
It must be cloaked in the wildest of abstract metaphors about love your country and we want to help the poor and this kind of stuff.
But this amount of brutality that is inflicted upon children, very, very few children have the chance to escape or have the ability to escape their parental infection of what is sometimes called memes or the way that you can analyze a spread of ideas in a biological context.
They replicate and so on, and they follow the same patterns of infection that a plague does, and of course, most ideas that come out of this world are absolutely rooted in the effects of a plague, and sometimes even worse.
So, I think that it's important to look at, don't eat the red berries and stuff like that, But when it comes to the rituals through which you will either be openly killed or ostracized as a child or a youth, which means ostracism, of course, means no reproduction and physical danger and death in a sort of primitive tribe.
So it seems to me that there are two Actually, I didn't say two.
I'm not even going to try and count the ones up, because someday somebody's going to come back and say, well, he said two, and there's actually none, because it was all tangents.
The New Year's resolution, which I have, which I'll talk about later, which I think will affect this show quite a bit, is...
I've made the New Year's resolution, but it's not about tangents, because I think it's important to make New Year's resolutions that are achievable.
So... So, when it comes to religion, though, I think that there's a more basic approach to take.
And this isn't particularly abstract because we can see it working in the world today.
If you look at the numbers that secular people are reproducing, the degree to which secular people are reproducing, and compare that to the degree with which Christian people are reproducing, and you compare that to the terrifying fecundity of our Arab brethren, of our Muslim brothers and sisters, then you can see that there's probably a much more basic way to look at the spread of religion.
Which is that religious people are told to breed.
Are ordered to breed.
And a good number or a good amount of religious instruction is pointed like a gun at the heart or perhaps even lower down at women.
This fantasy that women will elope with a man who is pushed out by the Klan out of love, right, rather than out of sick desperation, is really quite a fantasy.
Now, women are serious conformists when it comes, and this is all overgeneralizations for which I apologize and blah blah blah, caveat, caveat.
There are some women who aren't, there was Ayn Rand, there's Margaret, you know, you get all this stuff.
But women as a whole, just looking at it biologically, are very dependent upon the tribe because they have children.
I mean, they're pregnant and helpless for good chunks of their middle year.
So I guess from teenagers to middle age, from the age of 13 to about 40, they are pretty much dependent upon the tribe.
Whereas a man can leave the tribe and have a much greater chance of survival.
A woman is much more dependent on the tribe.
Women are by nature slightly more compromised and this is fairly well borne out by studies of women and their sensitivity to facial expressions and disapproval and things like that.
And this of course makes perfect sense to me.
A woman who thinks, you know, I can make it alone when she's six months pregnant in Borneo in the jungle is not going to be very good at reproducing her genes.
She's certainly not going to be very good at reproducing her genes Relative to any woman who says, hey, whatever ritual you want, other than killing my children, or at least not many of them, I'm down for that.
You all just bring me papaya when I can't get off the bulrushes.
And now I eagerly await the email from somebody who tells me the bulrushes do not grow in Borneo.
Hang on one sec. So...
This fecundity, which is ordered by the priests, is, I think, the most central aspect that needs to be understood about religion and its spread and its popularity.
There's also this example that he gives, which is well worth looking at, called the cargo cults.
And there was a man named John.
I can't remember his last name.
We'll just call him John Smith. John Smith was supposed to have lived in the 40s.
He was a short man. He had the magical power to bring to New Guinea and other remote places where the indigent tribes had never seen white men before.
He had the power, apparently, to call down the planes, which would bring the cargo, which was full of wonderful things.
Picture books and guns and, I don't know, kaleidoscopes, whatever, beads.
And the local natives very quickly began to worship these cargo planes as gifts from the gods, and they began to build simulated airstrips with simulated airplanes, and they actually had, they would build bamboo control towers,
and they would Sit in these control towers pretending to direct planes and they would have headphones made of wood attached to nothing or with little vines attached to a box which meant nothing.
And they would basically do this.
They built artificial planes to attempt to lure down the cargo planes with all their goodies, to attempt to lure them down from the guards.
And, of course, this John Smith fellow was supposed to come back with all the cargo in the world when the time was right.
And this, of course, was considered to be a prophecy that he was going to return.
And you even had a priest who claimed to be able to talk to...
John Smith, the cargo guard plane guy, the cargo plane guard guy, and he talked to not a radio because they didn't actually have working radios, but he claimed to be able to talk with him on the radio.
And the way that this was achieved was they tied a pseudo-wire around a woman who then fell to the ground and began babbling incoherently, which the priest then interpreted as the words of John Smith, the god of cargo.
The incredible speed to which these myths grew up was remarkable, and they've been quite well studied.
Richard Attenborough, David Attenborough, sorry, did a documentary on them in the 60s, I think, when he was quite young.
And when the king and queen came to visit from England to Papua New Guinea or something, the prince was worshipped as a god and this was incorporated into and you could see the myth of John Smith changing over time.
He became taller and wiser and the gifts that he gave were greater when he was to come back and so on.
And David Attenborough asked one of these cargo-worshipping dudes Well, it's been 19 years since this guy was here, who has supposedly had all this cargo, and of course nobody actually knows whether this guy existed.
It seems likely that he did, but of course he'd have no relation to, in any way, shape, or form, to what was going on with this religion.
He said, look, you've been waiting for this John Smith guy for 19 years, and he's not coming.
Don't you think that's long enough to wait?
And he said, well, you've all been waiting for your God for 2,000 years.
Who's to say I can't wait longer than 19?
Well... Quite true.
Quite true. Eternal salvation is just another box in the cargo plane of the gods.
So we can see religions being created and disseminated and becoming very popular.
You can also see the paralysis, of course, that religion brings with it.
Everybody's sitting around performing silly rituals, watching women twitch on the ground and listening to lying priests, rather than building an economy, building a society, learning about the world, learning about science.
They're just doing all these stupid rituals, waiting for the gifts to come their way, which of course is just the mark of an abused child.
So... This fecundity of religious people is really quite important.
It certainly is the case in the Muslim world that the Muslims have a duty to give birth to other Muslims.
I watched a documentary on the women of Afghanistan where this woman had had 10 children and her husband was like, hey, I'm a good Muslim.
We're going to have more. This is what we do as Muslims.
This is how, you know, creation is easier than conversion, right?
So you just have children and you brutalize them into believing in the Islamic faith and ho, hey, ho, presto, you've gone from, I guess, a couple of years ago, only a billion Muslims to now 1.3 billion.
They say it's the fastest growing religion in the world.
And what they mean by that is it's the fastest breeding religion in the world.
And what they mean by that Is that you will face social ostracism, hostility, brutality, and so on, if you don't breed.
I mean, look at Catholicism, right?
Catholicism had the same issue.
No birth control. Why? Because of God?
Give me a break. Everything is designed to just channel people into breeding.
No masturbation, which means that the only way you can get sexual release, which is a thundering wildebeest of desire when you're a teenage man, and ends on your deathbed, I think, about 12 minutes after you die.
But you are not allowed to masturbate, and therefore you must seek sexual release.
No other form than intercourse is valid from a reproductive standpoint, and therefore people are shotgunned into marriage by biology plus Catholicism.
And they just breed, breed, breed. You get a married young and you tell them that they can't use birth control.
And lo, hey, ho, presto, you seem to have a very fast-growing religion.
But it's not really due to conversion, either than the conversion of children from the happy beings that they might have been otherwise.
And you can see this in terms of statism as well.
Bye.
If you look at the fecundity of the childbirth rates of the most educated and the most intelligent people versus the least educated and the least able people, it's inversely proportional.
Those who have greater education and greater intelligence tend to breed the least.
And that of course is not a universal phenomenon.
It is in fact a result of statism.
One of the things that has occurred in terms of breeding is that smart people are better at calculating the odds of having a satisfying life if they have lots of children and...
They look at the tax burden they have, they look at the problems that society has, they look at the quality of public education, they look at all this stuff, and they either say, you know, kids, I don't know, really, it's pretty intense, right? They also will talk to people who are parents and find out what having kids is like, and they'll realize that it's going to be a pretty horrible drain, right?
So if you have kids and you have two people working, I mean, outside of absolute necessity, It's a pretty crappy life.
I've seen it in a number of different instances.
It's a really crappy life, and the children suffer.
So you have all these children. You have all the negatives of having children, of which, I mean, there are considerable negatives, as everyone's pretty much aware of.
I mean, they're very expensive. They're exhausting.
They're time-consuming. And they're wonderful and joyful and so on.
But when you're intelligent, you see the downside, which is considerable, and you get all of that downside just for having children, but you don't get the upside of spending lots of time with them and really molding their growth and teaching them great things, because you're at work 8, 10, 12 hours a day, and you're traveling, and you're commuting, and you get to spend an hour, hour and a half with them every night, which is the time when they know they can manipulate you out of guilt.
The children are manipulative, not necessarily by nature, but Certainly, those children who didn't try and maximize their resource use weren't selected for survival either.
So it's sort of innate, and it's something that children try, and if they can get away with it, that behavior expands, and if they can't, they settle into a more happy and reasonable negotiating stance.
But parents who go to work all day, come back, children are going to spend that time being fussy, trying to get what they want, and, you know, fundamentally feeling kind of weird.
It's kind of weird when you have a parent who comes home for an hour or two a night and is trying to tell you all about how to do the right thing.
Because there's a fundamental contradiction there, right?
I mean, why would you want to have kids and then only spend an hour or two a day with them?
It's not really very sensible.
And of course, parents who really love each other make the best parents.
And parents who really love each other look at what's going to happen to the marriage with children, that they won't be able to pursue entrepreneurial dreams, that...
They're not going to really get to enjoy their children, but it's mostly going to be a negative experience.
And of course, you're going to get to spend that much less time with your spouse.
It's all going to be spent wrangling the discontented children.
I'm painting a bit of a dark picture, but this is sort of what I've seen.
And then the appeal of a life without children when you're well-educated is much greater than an appeal of life without children when you're not educated.
And, of course, at the very bottom of the social rung, there are people who, on welfare, can survive without having to work or work nearly as hard in a way that beats minimum wage and not having children.
So, at the bottom, of course, people are paid to breed and that breeds statism in those people just by their very nature, right?
I mean, women particularly don't, at least in my experience, don't particularly care where the food to feed their children comes from and who can blame them.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't in that situation either.
So, all of these kinds of issues really end up breeding statism and end up breeding religion.
So, that particular aspect is quite important to understand in the spread of religion, that you're just told to breed, and for secular and atheists and rationalists and scientists and so on, they absolutely have children, of course.
I'm not saying they don't, but they have fewer children, on average, than those who are Less educated, less intelligent, and so on.
And you can see this particularly in Europe, where the birth rate has just plummeted.
I mean, look at places like Greece and Italy.
Oh, it's ridiculous. I mean, they're not even close to replenishment.
In France, the Western populations, within a couple of decades, the French population is going to be a minority relative to the Muslims.
The Muslims live in these ghettos.
I'm totally generalizing, so I apologize for that as well.
But the Muslims often live in these ghettos, and they take welfare.
And so naturally, inevitably, you're going to pay for them to breed, because obviously the state system is denying them a bunch of other values, like a decent job, right?
So they're going to have kids and they're going to raise those kids Islamic and they're going to be even more radicalized because the beliefs that occur in an immigrant community are usually far sharper and more defined than those which occur in a non-immigrant community.
And so what do people think is going to happen?
So religion simply swamps people.
And you can see this as well in the Jewish community wherein Not the highest breeding community in the world, but definitely on the replenishment side.
Of course, it passes through the mother's line because Judaism, like most religions, is matriarchal, which makes perfect sense because you want the women to withhold sexual favors from the men and only give them sexual favors in return for breeding and financial commitments to raise children.
And whether the father is involved in raising the children religious or whether it's more the mother, It doesn't really matter.
Obviously, sorry, the degree to which the father is involved in raising the children in religious context doesn't matter as much.
It's the mother who is really focused on by religious authorities in the raising of the children.
She's the primary caregiver.
She's the one who has to stuff their head with lies.
That's why, to me, it's quite funny that everybody focuses on the religious violence that men commit without really asking exactly who they primarily learned their religious tenets from.
It's the moms. This is the female inclusion in the cycle of violence.
You can't have a cycle of violence without women providing at least half the input.
In Judaism, it's a very strongly matriarchal religion.
The whole lineage passes through the mother.
And the greatest blow that any single religion has had inflicted upon itself, I think, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, is the Holocaust, the genocide against the Jews in the Second World War.
Not just the Jews, but we'll just focus on that.
If there was a testable way to work out the hypothesis of, are you God's chosen people?
I would say that if you get slaughtered by the millions, you might have some doubt about the whole God's chosen people thing, or certainly you would have doubt about the virtue of God, or the ability of God to answer prayers, or the willingness of God to answer prayers, and so on.
But of course the Jews, as all religious nuts do, they come up with all of these wonderful explanations for the Holocaust.
And the supposedly intellectual race, of which most intellectualism, as is true with all religions, most intellectualism is simply torture justifications from the priests to the rabbis to just keep paying the money.
because it's a hell of a nice job sitting there in your office pontificating about virtue rather than going out and having to swing an axe or a typewriter for a living.
So the way that Jews sort of reframed the question of the chosen people were sort of both brilliant and simple.
but nuts.
So they said that now they have taken this What should have been a pretty elemental blow against the vanity of their faith, right?
Because there's sort of two things that are important in the realm of the Holocaust, right?
As far as how you could maybe look at it in a sane way as a community.
One would be to say, well, we all got slaughtered.
God did not answer our prayers.
So maybe we're not the chosen people.
Maybe that's just sort of a myth, right?
Or if we are chosen, we're not chosen by God, but by Satan.
Because, you know, we kind of got slaughtered like cattle there, right?
So that would be a blow against the fantasy of virtue and the being singled out by God for all the great and special things in the world.
And that is not a very good thing to have happen to a religion, right?
That's a rather bad thing to have happen to a religion.
So, what happens next is that people then go through this process of saying to themselves...
Well, also, if we hadn't been Jews, they couldn't have found us.
Not only did our God not protect us from all of these bad things that occur in the world, but also these bad things only accrued to us because we were Jewish.
So not only were we not protected and not chosen, but this evil was visited on us because we were a visible part of this minority called being Jewish.
And that's kind of a rough thing to go through when you are looking at a community that is supposed to be composed of all of these people who are chosen by God for all the special and wonderful things in the world.
So that could be considered a kind of hammer blow.
But naturally, religious people Now say, of course, Jews in particular, now say to all of the lovely young Jewish men and women that if you don't breed and you don't have Jews, Jewish children, then you are continuing the work of Hitler.
That you are letting Hitler win and that all of those deaths will have been in vain.
Which is really quite remarkable and speaks to the horrifying moral nature of priests and rabbis and so on, right?
This mark which has gotten you killed throughout history must be continued.
Well, do they really care about people's lives?
No, of course not. Of course not.
Their single and sole focus is merely to ensure that People end up continuing to pay the money.
And whether those people get killed in some horrible new wave of terror, it doesn't really matter.
Just give you the money. I don't want to work for a living.
Just pay your synagogue fees.
Don't ask so many questions.
Let's stay in this lane. So that, and of course the other way that, or the other thing that people do is, and this is how incredibly embedded this meme is, right, of religion.
And why it's so important to get these kids when they're young is that some of the Jewish men and women would say, oh, well, you know, I guess this whole Holocaust thing was a bit of a blow against my faith, so to speak.
But the way I figure it is I believe in God or I don't believe in God.
If I believe in God, I'm happier.
If I don't believe in God, I'm not so happy.
So I'm just going to make that calculation and call God true because he'll make me happier.
And that's Sadly, that's actually the story that a lot of people will tell.
And this is the amazing immune system that religion has to any kind of evidence, right?
If good things happen to you, it's because God loves you.
And if bad things happen to you, he's testing your faith.
Or you've been a bad person, right?
You have stripped out any empirical negative proof from religion.
This is one of the reasons why it's so hard to get out of people's heads.
There are other ways in which you can see the growth of religious beliefs and how they end up being fairly well standardized in many, many ways.
You can see, of course, that...
I've mentioned this before, I'll just touch on these briefly, but you can see very quickly that any religious belief that is hard to remember, any religious ritual that's hard to remember, is not going to fare very well in the meme pool, so to speak.
So, if you say, well, every third blue moon you need to do this really complicated 59-step dance, well, that's not going to be replicated very well.
People are going to forget the third blue moon or whatever, and so if you can tie them into birth and death and marriage and so on, puberty, then people will at least remember them.
It's like, oh, puberty, aren't we supposed to do that ritual?
So, the fact that religious rituals get tied around major life events that most people go through, that is...
Pretty solid. The more complicated the ritual is, the less likely it is going to be to survive.
And the more directly painful to the parishioners the ritual is, the less likely it is to survive.
So if the ritual is, you know, bang your thumb with a hammer until it turns blue, that is not going to survive relative to sing pleasantly and eat some wafers and pretend it's the flesh of your god, and that deific cannibalism is nothing to be ashamed of.
So there's lots of ways in which reproducibility and rationality work on...
And baptism, of course, right?
You've got to get the kids when they're very young.
If you can also do a bris and cut off part of their foreskin, that's a pretty significant child maiming that is going to pretty much tell the kid that authority has control over him to begin with.
So religion has control over him to begin with.
Why? Well, we cut a bit of your dick off, and that's...
That's a pretty strong mark of having to be obedient, right?
If we can do that, and if your parents let them do that, if your parents let us do that, right?
I mean, these things all have a reason.
And there's lots of different ways in which these things work, but if your parents let us, do you really think that your parents are going to side with you against religion when they let us cut a bit of your dick off?
Well, not so much, right?
It's all very clear and all very focused.
So this aspect of the reproducibility of religion is also quite important, that these rituals tend to solidify around the major life events and that they focus on the women a little bit more so than the men, that they really heavily focus on the children and all these sorts of approaches and aspects.
And I think that does a fair amount more to explain why religion is so prevalent.
People are to a large degree conformist, and there's nothing wrong with that.
You can't fault what biology has naturally selected.
And human beings are much more interested in survival than science.
I mean, the genes don't care a whit about science.
They care about survival.
And genes only have to get you raped by the age of 13 to continue.
I mean, I hate to put it so bluntly, but that's sort of the purpose of that kind of stuff.
And of course, there's nothing wrong with that.
That's why we're here.
You can't complain about a process that gives you a brain to complain about it, right?
So I don't have any problem with that evolutionary stuff, but I think it's important to recognize that it's not really that beneficial as far as understanding what is true and right.
It is only beneficial in examining What is popular and what gets people reproduced.
The last thing I mention as well, of course, is that religion is very good at getting people to conform to the violent commands of military or secular rulers, aristocracy and so on.
As I mentioned in the show yesterday, the greatest predator against human beings is other human beings and the greatest destruction is war or tribal warfare of some kind.
Religion is really excellent at getting people into foxholes, getting people to shoot other people, both in terms of making you conformist, making you fear death less, and all this kind of stuff.
Religion is really excellent at that.
And that's another way that religion spreads.
You don't spread science by the sword, but you spread religion by birth and the sword throughout most of history.
And those who are afraid of the violent nature of Islam I think and sort of understand this, just as the Islamics were afraid, and rightly so, of the violent nature of Christianity before the partial separation of church and state that occurred for a brief period of time in the 18th century.
But, let me just do my lane switch here.
So Christianity is a very, very useful tool for the rulers in terms of getting people to come and attack enemies and go and kill.
God wants you to. God is on our side.
Justice and might and right and the deities are on our side.
Let us charge with cries of thanks to the gods for giving us the ability and right to charge and you will get your reward in heaven and all these sorts of things.
It makes people sell their own lives very cheaply.
For the sake of, well, nothing after death.
But of course, that's not something people come back from and talk about, except those idiots who think that their psychogenic hallucinations are some sort of vision of the afterlife.
I shouldn't say they're idiots, but I'm sure it's a very powerful thing to feel your brain die.
The oxygen starvation produce very predictable kinds of hallucinations, but of course none of it's true.
There is no other realm.
There is no other realm.
Whereas atheists are a little more cautious, right?
Atheists are not so good at the soldier thing.
I mean, unless they're addicted to some other collective thing like the socialist Marxist collective or something.
But religion is pretty good at getting people to kill and getting people to die.
And that's a pretty good way to get the ideas to spread.
Of course, if the ideas were intrinsically valuable, and this is the thing, I always try and throw in something that you can use as a debating point with people.
It's like, oh, well, religion must be true because so many people believe in it.
It's like, well, fantastic. Then people who are religious should have no problem not teaching their children religion because it's so valuable they'll pick it up when they get older, and of course that will never happen.
Anyway, I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much. Happy New Year to everyone.
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