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Jan. 5, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:07
585 Jesus Part 2

Biblical scholarship and narcolepsy

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. It's January the 5th, 2006.
Hope you're doing beautifully. It's a little bit before 9 in the morning.
I'm heading into work just a little bit late.
I've had light sleep the last two nights.
The other night I was working until midnight on some marketing analysis, which didn't help me get to sleep too well.
So, we're going to continue on with Jesus, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of his etymology, but sort of some of the basic problems that was occurring for the Christians during this sort of early period, and why Christianity has been quite successful over the years, and less successful in the present.
There's an enormous amount of scholarship that floats around which attempts to do things like figure out when Christ was born and how long after Christ died were the Gospels written and so on.
And a fine listener has sent me a book and I've managed to plow my way through about a quarter of it.
It is staggeringly tedious.
I have to tell you, it is staggeringly tedious.
In the same way that even if you really like Lord of the Rings, the people who attempt to go beyond the books to figure out, just based on a variety of hints within the book, what Tolkien actually meant with this, that, or the other, it's sort of indescribably tedious and sort of beside the point, and of course it gives an enormous amount of importance to attempting to wring historical facts out of Rancid fairy tales.
So, I can make my way through some of that, but I can't make my way through too much of it, because I have a fairly strong stomach for watching horrible self-destructive things that people do, but I gotta tell you, watching people waste their intellectual energies trying to dissect fairy tales, spending their entire lives doing this and learning...
Completely wasteful languages to do so is really horrible.
It is like watching somebody self mutilate on a YouTube video and do this for say 40 years.
That's not a very easy or pleasant way to spend my time and I really do get the horrible agony that is occurring for these people.
So the few that I'll share which I have managed to grind my way through Is that they really can't figure out when Christ was born somewhere between 100 BC and 100 or 150 or some maybe 280 or when he sort of was born and died.
There's some indications that he died at 30.
There's some indications that he died at 50 because he is rebuked by the Jewish elders saying, how can you consider yourself so wise?
You are not yet 50.
And of course, if they were trying to make fun of his youth, they would say to Christ, well, you're not yet 40 or 30 or 12 or something like that.
And the question of why Christ was born in Bethlehem, or whether Christ was born in Bethlehem, This is something that is simply to fulfill Old Testament prophecy, that the Messiah was going to be born in Bethlehem.
Bethlehem is the center of a good number of prophecies from the Old Testament, but the one that the Messiah is going to be born there It's pretty key, right?
So if you were going to have a Messiah who wasn't born in Bethlehem, and as we mentioned yesterday, died like a hamster staple to a tree, then you're going to have a great deal of difficulty convincing anyone that he was in fact the Messiah because he's supposed to be born in Bethlehem.
So then the question becomes, how do you get the Christ to, the Joseph and Mary crew to Bethlehem?
Well, the idea was that there was a census and they had to return to Bethlehem because Joseph's ancestors, like a thousand years back, were from Bethlehem.
This is all just nonsense because it would be like the English government saying to me, you have to go back to France for a census because...
Your ancestors came over in 1066 with William the Conqueror.
The Romans weren't that stupid.
They're pretty efficient in many ways.
And that, of course, makes no sense at all.
And the star thing is all pretty clear.
And the December 25th thing was the Feast of Saturnalia, I think it was.
It was the Winter Solstice Feast, and they just inherited that.
And it was also considered to be a feast of Mithras, which they sort of put together.
And so the December the 25th thing is purely arbitrary.
And as we've mentioned a few times before, the virgin birth is a mistranslation.
In the same way that we have maiden, just means young woman, but doesn't mean a woman whose maidenhead is intact.
And of course, how would they know, right?
Would somebody go and check? How would they know it was a virgin birth?
I mean, you don't listen to Joseph saying, I never touched her!
Oh, well, it must be a virgin birth.
Somebody would have to go and check.
And that's pretty oogie.
I mean, lift your skirts.
We're going to see if you're pregnant and a virgin.
So... This stuff around what Jesus said and who wrote it down and which Gospels contradict each other is, to me, it's mind-numbingly wasteful.
It's like people arguing about the gender of God.
You might as well, I don't know, argue about the...
You know, in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf says, I must go and see the head of my order.
And it's like coming up with a detailed list and hierarchy of Gandalf's order, Flame of Arnon, or whatever the hell it is.
Coming up with one of these sorts of things, and then coming up with the charter of the order and the rules and the spells that are available, and not for any game, just sort of write it down.
Well, there's a kind of tedious and depressing futility to it all because it's fiction.
But at least The Lord of the Rings is not fiction that claims to be the production of a perfect God, and it's also not fiction that claims to be full of nothing but moral instructions on how people should live.
So I can't get through all of that stuff, because when you don't believe in God, or when you realize that God is just a bunch of nonsense, and that the Bible is just a bunch of raving lunatics, trying to figure out where the raving lunatics contradict both themselves and each other is giving entirely too much credence to the whole mess.
My wife used to work on a psych wing, It would be like her sitting down with her colleagues and going over in tedious detail exactly how her psychotic patient stories don't add up to reality.
Well, then he said this, and then he said it was Napoleon, but Napoleon has been dead for quite some time, and then later he seems to imply that he's not Napoleon, but Genghis Khan.
But he can't be both Napoleon and Genghis Khan, and Genghis Khan has been dead longer than Napoleon, and none of this sort of makes any sense, and then he tells me that he lives in a cloud castle.
But there's no such thing as cloud castles, and by the way, Napoleon never lived in a cloud castle, so that doesn't work.
Like, at some point, her colleagues are just going to interrupt her and say, you do realize he's psychotic, right?
Like it would be an insanity on her part to continue to go into all of these horrible details and pointless details about exactly how her psychotic patient was contradicting himself and it would be even more crazy For her to sit down with her colleagues and say, you know, 20 years ago, I had a patient who claimed to be Napoleon.
And then 10 years ago, I also had a patient that claimed to be Napoleon.
But they can't both be Napoleon.
And there's got to be a third patient says that Napoleon never existed.
So which one of them is right?
It's just a big contradictory mess.
Well, her colleagues would look at her and say, Ma'am, you're pretty nuts there.
I mean, they're psychotic.
You're working in a psych ward.
Of course they're not going to make any sense.
Of course they're going to be bizarre.
Of course, I mean, that's the whole reason that they're in a psych ward.
And once you really get and work into your bones that there's no such thing as God...
Then, by their very nature, people who claim to speak for God and people who claim to be writing down divine instructions are psychotic.
That's just the nature of the beast.
Religion, and particularly the writing down of religion, and to a smaller degree the analysis of religion from a highly detailed standpoint, that kind of Analysis and that kind of writing down of divine commandments is insane.
I mean, it is deeply, deeply, deeply.
I don't mean neurotic. I don't mean quirky.
I don't mean belligerent.
I don't mean sociopathic.
I mean psychotic.
When you think that you're writing down words and that God is speaking in your ear, And he's moving your arm.
That's deeply psychotic.
That's a hallucination of vivid and megalomaniacal proportions.
So I can't really get down and dirty with all of the contradictions in the Bible and the this's and the that's and the inheritance of the Bible from...
Other sources and...
I mean, I've talked early on in the podcast series about the evils within the Bible.
That's, I think, a reasonable thing, just so people don't get hung up on the idea that it's some sort of moral instruction booklet, or booklet would have been better.
But detailed critiques of what occurred within the Bible and compare and contrast stuff within the Bible and to other religions, all you're doing is you're attempting to mediate A dungeon full of babbling psychotics.
And if you want to do that, then you're crazy too.
And that's really why I have a great deal of difficulty going through highly detailed Bible criticism.
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but it gives way too much credence to the spoutings of truly psychotic people.
And if you're going to spend your life visiting psych wards and attempting to shame or correct or reason with or humiliate or pick apart all the ravings of psychotics, then I have to say that you're pretty crazy yourself because they're psychotic.
Attempting to piece together the fragmentary, mad, spouted delusions of psychotics, especially occurring over hundreds of years, embedded in a political process that was attempting to gain ascendancy, and did, is really crazy.
Because once you get that there's no God, then people who write down and say, this is what God said, and this is what Jesus did, and it's divinely inspired, well, of course they're psychotic, and the best evidence for that, of course, is the Bible.
The Bible is full of just the most monstrous nonsense, truly psychotic moral principles, and Jesus was a mad psychotic too, and all those who followed him were completely insane.
Especially those...
I'm sorry, I just want to sort of differentiate that between...
I'm not saying that the average Christian is completely insane.
They're only somewhat insane.
But their sanity is buffered by general agreement, and it's buffered by this...
General sense of trepidation that people have about treading anywhere around the minefield of religious belief.
That's the defense mechanism that religious belief has.
So the people who are Christians these days, they're going to go to church and donate some money to this, that or the other and hand over a couple of their kids as altar boys and so on.
They're not totally insane, but they're also not writing down the Third Testament.
I mean, how would you feel if in tomorrow's or this afternoon's podcast, I said, well, a vision came to me last night.
I am now in the grip of the all-powerful Yahweh, and I am writing down the Third Testament, which are his final and complete and total instructions for all of humanity.
And anybody who disagrees with me is evil and must be hunted down and killed.
Well, I think... You would not necessarily say, wow, I guess there is a God and he's just chosen to speak to Steph.
You'd say, dude, I knew the strain of doing 1.6 podcasts a day for a year was going to snap that little brain like bad twine.
And you would think, well, he's gone insane.
What a shame. That's a bit of a blow to the whole rational philosophy thing, I would say.
Too bad. Another Pascal, I guess.
And if I said that I was speaking with God's voice, not in jest, but in truth, and if I were writing down God's complete and total instructions that were coming only to me, that I could hear being whispered perfectly or boomed perfectly into my ear, or that God was moving my hand or moving my mouth and tongue to produce the sounds, and I was nowhere in the equation.
I was a mere empty puppet of God.
Then I think you would not feel that this was true.
And it would be quite right to recognize that this was not in fact true, but that I was insane and psychotic and actually having active delusions.
I guess there are some people who keep a fairly tight lid on their insanity.
My mother and my father are just such people.
Yes, they are horrible, evil people who were very cruel to their children, much more so with my mother, of course, she was my direct caregiver, quote, caregiver.
And my father, I don't know so much, but I certainly do have some minor evidence of some significant cruelty in his nature.
But they managed to keep it together relatively well, given how insane they were.
And their insanity was much more the result of unprocessed and then acted out on emotional abuse.
And, of course, for both of my parents, it was the shadow of war, much more so over my mother than my father, that caused the moral evil that they acted out in their lives.
But they managed to sort of hang it together quite well.
So my brother is sort of in the same category.
My mom had a job until she was, gosh, 50 or so.
She spent the last 30 years not working.
Actually, about 25 years not working.
But she had a job.
She had friends.
We had a home.
She did not suffer from psychotic delusions.
She did not believe that voices in her head were telling her to go eat some poinsettias.
And the same thing is true of my father.
So there are people who are crazy, who manage to sort of more or less keep it together.
But then there are people who are so crazy that they just, bing, ghost the thread holding them to reality and they just wander off into the realm of pure, mad, delusional, hyper-real fantasies.
These are the people who are having active delusions, who believe that there is a potted plant on your head that is telling them to go and invade Panama.
These are the people who've just had a totally psychotic break with reality, and these are the people who write down religious books.
I mean, we know these people exist and we also know that they're drawn to delusions of grandeur, particularly around a messiah complex.
And the brain chemistry that produces religious delusions is fairly well understood and can be reproduced.
I mean, somebody could stimulate particular parts of your brain and angels would pour down through the stratosphere and carry you away.
And like angels, not bats.
You know, not chitty-chitty bang-bang, but you would get particular kinds of religious iconography that would result from certain stimulation within your brain.
So when people have misfiring brains, the fact that they get these John on acid revelation kind of visions is not at all surprising, right?
So the fact that these people are psychotic is pretty clear, and...
Who is more psychotic than the guy who says, God is speaking through me, I hear God?
Well, the more psychotic is the guy who says, I am God.
And, of course, we don't have a freaking clue what Christ actually said, but...
The myth is what needs to be believed, right?
The myth is what needs to be believed.
So it doesn't matter at all what Christ said.
What matters is what people believe that Christ said.
And somebody who says, I speak with God, a priest, is crazy.
Somebody who says, God speaks to me, Is more crazy, which is certainly some priests.
Somebody who says, God speaks to me and I can hear him in my ear is psychotic and hallucinating.
Somebody who says, God moves my body is psychotic and having a significant break with reality, likely to never return.
But in the old layers of mental dysfunction, where does the guy sit who says not, I speak to God, or God speaks to me, or God moves my body?
Where does the guy sit who says, I am God?
Because that's the story that must be believed.
I am God.
And of course, As we were talking about a little bit yesterday, those who wrote down the Bible for...
And, of course, the Bible changed continually to attack rival sects, right?
So when the Christian leadership was being threatened, they would just change the Bible to have Christ specifically speak out against the new sect.
And they'd say, well, it's in the Bible that that's wrong.
Somebody believes that if you eat a canary, you go to heaven, and they're gaining popularity.
Well, all that happens is that the priests rewrite the Bible to say, Well, God himself says that you can't get to heaven through eating a canary.
And that's how they oppose this nonsense that's pouring forward from the new sect.
And you can see this occurring through the rewrites of the Bible.
Because remember, the Bible is something that was entirely buried within the priestly class for most of history.
Certainly for three quarters of its history, a little bit more.
So the priest could say anything that they wanted.
So basically somebody would just say, oh, I've discovered a new piece of text that sheds new light on this, and now it says that canary eating sends you to hell, not heaven.
There was a mistranslation, blah, blah, blah, and boom, that's it, right?
That's it. And that's how the debates occurred.
So the Bible is constantly twisting and changing in terms of its content, its interpretation, its meaning, just as you would expect.
When you've got a whole bunch of people who are arguing, who are psychotic, then of course they're going to end up with this kind of nonsense.
So if I've got a big invisible bird that's telling me the truth, and you've got a small, tiny frog in your ear that's whispering to you the truth, Then I'm just going to make my bird bigger, and you're going to multiply your frogs, and then we're going to invent other imaginary beings, hippogriffs and griffins and dragons and so on, and we're going to just multiply all of the voices in our head in the attempt to prove that we are the more correct.
So you just make up stuff, right?
You just make up stuff with belligerence, and that's how psychotics argue, and that's how sociopaths argue for sure.
Trolls. So, there is so little of any reality in the Bible.
And the Bible, the amazing thing about the Bible, I mean, this is the thing that, I mean, to hearken back to an early podcast about Genesis, this is the part of the Bible that is just so astonishingly honest.
That people don't see it takes a real effort of willpower and of course takes an enormous amount of trauma and emotional or physical violence towards the young, the threat of the withdrawal of parental approval and resources which terrifies the young like nothing else does because it's a death sentence.
The Bible is exquisitely honest in this regard.
The Bible doesn't fool around.
You don't have to look very far in the Bible to find evidence of psychosis.
You really don't. Just look at what the people believe.
We don't have to go into the whole etymology here, I'm sure you know, and we've gone through it before, but what people believe is insane.
And not just in terms of the form, but the content.
I mean, the form is, you know, Jesus walks on water and raises people from the dead and comes back from the dead and ascends as the Son of God and there's three in one and you drink the blood and all of that stuff.
That's the form. But I mean, the content as well.
That you should kill unbelievers, that you should, in order to avoid getting some guy in your house raped by other guys, you should hand over your daughter for sexual slavery, right?
You should hand out your daughters like candy to be gang raped in order to secure some protection for yourself, or to gain favor.
That you should attempt to kill your son because God tells you to, and then stop when God says stop.
It's completely insane.
Not even taking into account the really mad stuff like revelations and so on.
It's not fooling around and it's certainly completely obvious.
And this is an important thing to understand about life in general.
The crazy people don't hide.
The crazy people are really obvious.
The crazy people are writing in a clear blue sky with With fire and smoke and skywriting planes, we're crazy, we're insane, don't listen to us.
I mean, the Bible is completely clear about all of that.
We're crazy, we're insane, don't listen to us.
And this is the power, of course, of early imprinting of...
Truth, right? I mean, we imprint on truth as children like ducks imprint on a mother.
Have you ever seen those ducks following the balloons around because that's the first thing they saw when they popped out of the shell?
We just imprint on truth.
And, of course, there's very clear advantages to that from a biological standpoint, from a survival of the fittest.
Because most people are, first of all, we're totally dependent on our parents, second of all, we're mostly historically dependent upon the tribe, and so conformity is, you know, it's what people do.
It doesn't matter how crazy it is, we just imprint on it.
We imprint, we imprint, we imprint.
And biology, of course, didn't anticipate science and the Internet, right?
So we can have this conversation, which would never have occurred throughout most of history.
It's why these particular genes that we share and willpowers and understandings that we share didn't make it, for the most part.
Skepticism doesn't get selected for survival prior to science and the Internet.
So I think that...
That's one of the reasons why I'm going to sort of withhold my approach to dealing with the anthropological etymology of the Bible.
I just can't rouse myself to care too much about it, and I can't stand watching people twist their brains and hurt their own souls spending their lives doing this kind of stuff.
So, I mean, you know, there's supposed to be one author of the Bible, which is God, right?
And the Bible has about a bazillion times more contradictions than the longest novel in the world.
And so, it's just silly, right?
If a human being with an editor or two can end up completing the Remembrance of Things Past or the Brothers Karamazov or whatever it is that's the longest novel...
And actually have the wherewithal to get the facts straight.
I don't think the Lord of the Rings is the longest, but it's complicated.
He gets it pretty well. Then it seems to me that we can expect this of God.
But of course, if it was human beings who were just ranting their own psychosis, then you would expect all of the madness, the evil, and the contradictions to occur.
And they're all right there. And so it's not that hard to figure out that these people are crazy and that analyzing the contradictions and complexities of what they say and the irrationalities of what they say is really sort of mad.
So, Jesus is the most psychotic of all, or at least you have to believe that Jesus is the most psychotic of all if you're going to credibly understand or accept that he did say that he was God, or the Son of God, or whatever the hell that means.
So this sort of stuff that's being asked to believe is really, really important to understand that the barrier to acceptance is extraordinarily high when it comes to accepting a living man-god who can, of course, walk on water and Who can raise the dead and do all of the transubstantiate, water into wine, and so on, but who can't prevent his own execution and slaughter.
That's a pretty high barrier to get over, and it's a very strong indication, of course, that he's psychotic.
I mean, because these are just stories, but you can't...
I don't think that there was any way to get over the problem that he got killed, and that's one of the main reasons, I think, why these stories ended up being the way that they were in the Bible.
So thank you so much for listening.
We will continue on this chat this afternoon and we'll close off the topic until such time as I get all the questions, let's say, from people.
But I'm sure it'll take a while to get through to these podcasts.
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