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Jan. 15, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:45
601 Christianity for Slaves and Masters

Turn the other cheek for an eye for an eye? Wha..?

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Good morning, everybody. Steph, hope you're doing well.
As you can see, we have a lovely freezing rain this morning in Canada.
So, it seems relatively likely that we shall have a little bit of time to chat this morning.
So, I thought I'd pick a nice juicy topic, which will allow for a rather far-ranging discussion, but one I think which will be quite fruitful.
For those of us who are laboring under theological societies, or increasingly theological societies, so that we can understand a little bit about the success of religion, and I'm going to particularly talk about Christianity in this context.
It's just the one I happen to be most familiar with, and the one that I can pull the most examples from, having read through the Bible in its entirety when I worked as a gold panner up north when I was 19.
So, I have that, I've had that privilege, I guess you could say.
So, I'd like to talk a little bit about the two-facedness, I guess you could say, of the Bible and why it came about that way and how that has contributed to its success.
Now, Luther pointed out something very interesting.
This is Martin Luther, the original, not the king.
Martin Luther was the monk, the German monk, from Wittgenstein, who nailed up his famous 93 Theses on the church door, who was highly opposed to the practice of What were called indulgences or the sale of the excess virtue of Jesus and the saints to mere mortal sinners so that you could have your funsies and go and kill people or have sex with a mistress or whatever.
And not worry about it affecting your eternal salvation because you could simply purchase the excess virtue that was left over from...
I mean, Jesus obviously was much more good than he needed to be to get into heaven and the church managed to hang on to all that excess virtue and could sell it to you for a very good price.
And Luther was not such a big fan of that and many other things within the church and so he founded Protestantism Which then split into Anabaptism, Zwingelianism, Calvinism, and resulted in some pretty horrendous crimes and murders and a hundred years of religious wars throughout Europe until people got sick of it and decided to separate the church and the state.
Amazing how much blood has to flow before people will do the right thing.
Anabaptists who believe in adult baptism had the charming practice in Germany and in other places throughout Europe Of people saying, oh, so you believe in adult baptism, do you?
Well, what we're going to do is we're going to drown you as an adult, and that's the punishment, because you believe in adult baptism, which is wrong, so as an adult we are going to drown you.
And this was how these lovely Christians resolved their disputes, and really it's not particularly their fault.
Those who were brought up in the bigotry, sorry, the faith, I don't know why I use synonyms so much, But that's really the only way you can resolve disputes, when you have the eternal soul as your stake, but there's really no other way for people to be able to resolve disputes than that.
But he wrote a wonderful passage, and he was actually a very good writer in my opinion, he wrote a wonderful passage explaining the difference between an eye for an eye and turn the other cheek.
An eye for an eye and turn the other cheek.
It's one of the most famous contradictory Bible commandments or instructions or moral rules.
And he wrote, and I've mentioned this before, I mean, a couple hundred podcasts ago, so I'll keep it brief.
But he mentioned that, or he wrote that, the way to solve this seeming paradox of an eye for an eye versus turn the other cheek was that turn the other cheek is for those who are ruled It's for those who are ruled by secular leaders,
the kings and so on. Whereas an eye for an eye is God's commandment to his rulers on earth, to those who are Put by God on earth to run the world, right? Because, you see, God doesn't intervene.
We have free will.
However, it does seem that he is more than willing to appoint secular rulers over us to force us and compel us to do X, Y, and Z, which, of course, is all pure nonsense when you take just a moment to think about it, even from a theological standpoint.
If God doesn't intervene, then the appointing of rulers over a human being, like kings who have absolute power over them by God, is not exactly appealing to their free will.
That is all the most errant and ridiculous nonsense.
And brutal nonsense.
If I say to you, I'm going to lock you in my basement, and I'm going to push food under the door, and you're just going to eat what I give you, and then I say, but I'm leaving you perfectly free to eat whatever food you like, then people would understand that I would be rather insane and hypocritical.
Yet, of course, in the realm of God, all of this stuff passes with barely a ripple through the, quote, minds of the believers.
But there's an important truth about the success of Christianity locked up in this duality, in the duality of submit to authority and also in fight, fight, fight.
And Jesus, of course, pulls this trick quite a bit.
Blessed are the peacemakers, he says, and then he says, I have come to divide family member against family member, and I have come Not to bring peace, but to bring the sword, and you should sell your clothing, and you should buy a sword so that you can join me.
And there's this heavy martial element to Jesus' preachings.
And these are very hard to understand if you're processing it like it's a religion or anything, then of course it's impossible to understand other than making up nonsense like God appoints rulers with absolute power over you, but then you're totally responsible for what happens, right? Oh man, they just kill me, these people.
But if you look at it as a transitional cult, then it's a little easier to understand how it is that these constantly conflicting statements are there in the Bible.
A growing cult, or a cult that may have some chance of surviving and flourishing, as Christianity did, it needs two things.
It needs two things.
A cult needs two things in order to flourish.
The first thing that...
I'm talking about sort of in the ancient world.
The first thing that it needs, of course, are followers.
But the second thing that it needs is forbearance from the rulers, or tolerance at least from the rulers, with any luck, enthusiasm from the rulers.
But it very much needs tolerance from the rulers.
A cult doesn't get very far...
If it preaches things like slavery is an abomination, all slaves should rise up and free themselves from their masters through whatever means possible, and all masters, in order to gain access to heaven, must free their slaves.
The domination of women is an abomination.
And all women who are so oppressed should recognize that their oppression is a sin and work to free themselves in whatever manner they can, and so on and so on and so forth.
If a cult was preaching that, and there may have been cults preaching exactly that in the ancient world, but the only thing that we find is perhaps a little dried blood between the cobblestones of those daring moral philosophers who might put forward such heretical notions.
And they would have been killed by the religious people, and they would have been killed by the state representatives.
So, if you preach real and true and common equality, if you preach property rights, if you preach the evils of slavery and the evils of the subjugation of women, and heaven forbid if you preach the rights of the child, then you're not going to get very far.
You may gain some followers, because these things I think are all morally good, But the problem is that if you go around preaching that slaves should overthrow their masters, you're not going to get very far when you have a slave-based economy all around you, and quite a large number of masters, who have invested quite a lot of money and time and whip energy effort into their slaves, not really going to do so well.
So, If you preach that slavery is an abomination and slaves should be free, you will definitely appeal to the slaves, but you will be killed off by the masters, thrown to the lions, as it were. Now, if, on the other hand...
So, sorry, that will give you followers, but you won't get to survive very long, and thus your ideas will be as the dew in a hot sun.
They will simply evaporate and vanish from the passage of history.
Now, on the other hand, if you create a cult that is solely focused upon the rulers, Then, of course, they will accept that as a cult that furthers their own interests, but you won't gain that many followers.
It's kind of tough to appeal to rulers through at the top and say, I can save you because the ruler's going to look up from his orgy and his feast of peeled grapes and say, from what?
What do I got to be saved from?
I'm doing great, thanks.
I don't know why all rulers seem to come from New Jersey by way of London, but there it is.
So, the most successful ideologies, the most successful cults, are those that appeal to the slaves and also appeal to the rulers.
But since the rulers and the slaves have such diametrically opposite goals, the slaves to be free and the rulers to subjugate the slaves, It's not the most logical thing to produce a system of thought that appeals to both sides of the divide.
In other words, everyone hates a philosopher, but it's possible to twist a religion into such a convoluted pretzel of self-serving and other justifying, quote, logic, that it appeals to everyone that the more violent a society is, the more that it prefers religion.
The more violent and hierarchical and the more the imbalance is between those with power and those they rule, in the modern instance, between the...
The rulers of the state and those who are forced to pay taxes, the greater the divide...
Pardon me. Are we going to have three?
I think we are. Pardon me.
See, you just don't see that on the view, do you?
But the greater the disparity of equality within a society, the more that religion tends to flourish...
And whether that religion is overtly a God-worship, such as is in Christianity or Islam or whatever, or whether that religion is simply the worship of the common good through the state and so on, doesn't really matter.
The innate contradictions are similar, are common to both, and the propaganda of the culture, the community, the common good, the people, the country, the state, the patriotic side of things, is just as irrational and twisted in its logic as the worship of, batter my heart, three-person God, as John Dunn put it.
It's the three-in-one crude oil of Christian religion.
So, how do you appeal to the slaves?
Well, you appeal to the slaves by telling them that slavery is a virtue.
Most human beings, when given the choice to either A, risk life and limb and fight to free themselves, or B, slip into a nice cozy justification for doing exactly what they were doing before, will choose B. And that's not because human beings are cowardly or bad or even irrational.
It's because the genes that would cause someone to choose A, or would make somebody more likely to choose A, kind of got weeded out in the process of natural selection, because those people would tend to get killed, and usually before...
The age of reproduction. If you look at the Old Testament and you see the kinds of brutalities that are regularly enjoined against disobedient children, basically kill them, then it's fairly clear to understand that where we come from is not some noble savage Rousseauian paradise of everybody sitting around chatting and having a great time, but rather a top-down hierarchical brutalization of the children in order to maintain the status of the tribes and the tribal leader.
Then it's pretty clear to understand that the gene for buck in the system is pretty rare, and it's not something that we can blame people for not possessing.
It's simply weeded out.
But people still, as I was talking about in the Colin show yesterday, people really don't want to feel that they are subjugated and humiliated by a mere mortal, because then their sort of pride rouses itself.
The beta males and the zeta males would much rather think that they are obeying a man-god that they simply could never compete with or contest with, or that they are obeying the will of God or Zeus or the social good or whatever.
But the average male and female would rather believe that they are submitting themselves not to a mere average mortal, which would be humiliating, but they are submitting themselves to some monstrous greater good, some god, some democratic ideal, some good of the society, and so on.
They need to recast their submission as virtue.
That is a very basic human hunger.
And the leaders very much want those they rule over to equate submission to their will, the leader's will, with submission to virtue.
Human beings are moral-based life forms, and everything that we do requires a moral justification.
I mean, if human beings could come up with the breathing as virtuous and have it stick, then they would.
But people will twist almost anything into a virtue.
It is the Stockholm Syndrome.
If I am enslaved, I am going to feel the great temptation to love my masters because the alternative is simply to feel grinding and ugly humiliation day after day, which would really lead someone to suicide, thus take them out of the gene pool.
So the reaction formation of loving those who brutalize you is something that keeps people alive and gets them to reproductive state.
Remember... Nature doesn't care whether you're happy or not.
As long as you're banging someone who's fertile, nature doesn't care if you're doing that out of despair or if you're doing that out of love.
That's not part of natural selection.
Certainly, it is probably mildly better to do it out of love so that you're around to take care of the child as the child grows up, but it's not essential.
The sperm meeting the egg is the essential thing.
Everything else is sort of a nice-to-have byproduct.
And so, not only does the evolutionary demands of natural selection favor compliance and obsequence, but the...
and loving it, right?
And being happy with it.
Those slaves who rebelled, as you can see from...
I'm Spartacus!
Don't tend to do very well.
Those who buck the system don't tend to do very well.
And so it gets selected out, Whether, if you have either a natural bent towards or espouse a philosophy of revolting against the leaders, you survive neither in a biological nor in a sort of thought world in a meme kind of sense.
So that's why religion tends to flourish in a violent society.
And, you know, everyone, well, Scandinavian countries aren't that religious.
Well, they are, and not to stretch the definition too far, but they're religious in the way that communism is religious.
In that there's a worship of an ideology, there's an all-powerful There's an all-powerful leader.
There is a false consciousness, which is that the evidence of your senses is not valid.
There's an enormous amount of religious backgrounds to these kinds of ideologies.
And, of course, Hitler was a Christian.
Stalin was put through as a seminary and considered becoming a priest before finding that there was a more efficient way to brutalize people.
What's that story, Alfred Hitchcock?
Driving along some street in Europe with someone, and he glances out the window.
Hitchcock, the famous maker of frightening films, glances out the window and says, Now that is the most frightening thing that I have ever seen.
And points, and he sees a priest talking to a little boy, and he rolls down the window and he says, Run, little boy!
Run for your life!
Old Ellie. But...
Christianity, in its dualism, and it's more than dualism, but we're just sort of talking about the major threads here.
Christianity, in its dualism, as a splinter group, faced a very great challenge, which was that it fermented dissent among families, but that dissent could not be fermented among classes.
And I do believe that it's valid to talk about classes in a society where you have a top-down slave-owning hierarchy.
So, you have to ferment dissent within families...
And I know that I've talked about families.
This is not sort of the time and place.
I certainly say to people that you should get close to your families, but if your families are immoral and resist your growth and resist your expanding knowledge, then they are not to be fought with, but to be broken with, to be discarded.
Not attacked, not vengefully pursued, but simply you can not see them.
To me, that's not exactly sowing dissent.
I actually want people to be closer to their families and very much encourage that, but if that is impossible, there's no point torturing yourself.
But any sort of splinter movement has to create dissent within the families, simply by its very nature.
It's going to appeal to some people and not to others.
And through that process, there's going to be dissent within society, and the rulers don't mind dissent within families.
If they're fighting with each other, then they're not focusing on the real oppression that is occurring politically, which is the rulers' power over them.
So, infighting is perfectly fine for the rulers.
But Christianity had to have a message for the rulers as well, and that's where you get, I uphold every atom, every tittle of rules in the Old Testament, right?
That was really for the Jewish elders, and also for the rulers.
Because, of course, Judaism doesn't exactly counsel revolt against rulers.
It counsels, let's pray to God and have God smite them with X, Y, and Z. And rulers basically are perfectly happy with that kind of nonsense.
Like, yeah, you'll pray for the rain of frogs to hit my house.
That's no problem. Just don't take up arms against me, and I'm happy.
So the fact that religions counsel the resentment of the ruled and channel it into praying for things which will never...
Occur to a god who isn't there, well, it keeps them busy, and it keeps them from actually trying to do something to change their state, and it keeps them alive and breeding.
So the gene to want to do that is not exactly selected out of the pool.
So, when we look at the issue of how you appeal to these two groups, well, to the ruled You preach a number of things.
You preach the morality of subservience.
And remember, the Bible was never written to be read by the slaves.
The slaves couldn't read, and it really wasn't until Luther and company translated the Bible into the vernacular in the 15th century, the 16th century, that this all became...
15th century, sorry, that this all became possible, right?
That people could actually read the Bible, and of course it went through all of the normal cleaning up that you would expect when it was being translated into the vernacular, but the Bible was written down as an instruction manual for priests and was heavily guarded in terms of its contents from the masses.
So the Bible would need to be full of a number of contradictory messages depending on who it's being targeted at.
I mean, if you have a company that makes kiddie cereal and Metamucil, you don't have one ad saying, hey, all this sugar's really going to help you be regular, kids.
I mean, that wouldn't make any sense.
People would just be baffled. The kids would be kind of grossed out, and the adults, the elderly, would feel condescended to.
Have a kiting character on a pot?
Who knows, right? But if you are appealing to different demographics, you have to have different messages.
Different music, different actors, different ad agencies maybe.
This is all quite natural.
And if you're writing a manual towards advertising, you're going to include examples of how to advertise to children, and you're going to include examples of how to advertise to the elderly and how to advertise to everyone in between.
But you're not going to...
And then if people get the hold of this book, they'll say, well, this book's full of really contradictory messages.
Well, of course, because it's a manual on how to communicate to a variety of different audiences all of the filthy falsehoods that you need to keep social power where it is.
So, the rulers both like the fact that you say they're put there by God, right?
So, the old local king loves the fact that the Bible says that secular authorities are appointed by God and are representative of God on earth, because that makes it a whole lot easier to rule people.
Now we have celebrities, but back then they had kings and queens and so on, the Roman leaders and all these kinds of groups.
And so the rulers love that, because it's a lot easier to rule people if they think you're a god than if they think you're just some dude who bleeds when you stab him, right?
So, they love that stuff.
Those who are ruled...
Love being told that submission to secular authority will gain them eternal paradise in heaven where they will be free and where they will be the rulers and the rulers will be the ruled even though they're appointed by God and everybody's going to change places and up is down and black is white.
They love that kind of stuff because it takes away the responsibility for them for having to think about the humiliation of their position.
So, these two different kinds of rules are, I think, very, very important.
So, as Luther said, An eye for an eye is what God commands the secular rulers to do, to punish with violence those who disobey the secular laws, or in those days there really was no such thing as secular laws, because there was no separation of church and state.
And so that's what the eye for the eye is, and that's what the wrath of God stuff is all for, and the beat up your kids, and the rape your daughters, and all this kind of stuff.
That is what those rules are for.
But the rules which enjoin peacefulness and gentleness and submission and non-violence, well, those are all preached towards the slaves, so that the slaves will stay slaves, and the slaves grab at this eagerly, because for most slaves, the opportunity of freeing themselves from slavery was almost non-existent.
And yet nobody wants to think that they're simply ground down by mere mortals for the rest of their lives.
They would much rather think that they're pursuing or undergoing some sort of radical moral good that is going to gain them a place in eternal heaven.
So, the cherry-picking that occurs within the Bible also allows the Bible to survive through changing moral times.
So, the story of Jesus, the guy who beats up the money changers in the temple, and the guy who says, I'm going to kill your children and drown the unbelievers, and this raging, psychotic, sociopathic Jesus character, works really well for certain moral, or not so much moral, times in history.
So, that works perfectly and beautifully well for a raging, sociopathic, let's-go-kill-the-Muslims-Crusader kind of Christendom dictatorship.
The dewy-eyed, hands-like-a-dove, hippy-dippy Christian works better for an age where there are different moral standards.
So it's the flexibility, right?
Everybody knows that a gene that mutates tends to survive antibodies and religion by being so full of every moral instruction.
And they've just talked about the two major ones, but there are...
A near infinite series of other ones designed to appeal to women, to children, to, you know, it's an instruction manual on how to preach.
It is not something that's supposed to be read and put together in a coherent manner.
It's stories that you can cherry-pick to convince a wide variety of different people to obey your will and the will of the prince.
It's really not about any kind of logical consistency.
And once you understand it from that standpoint, then it's a lot easier, I think, to deal with.
The fact that it's all just made-up nonsense and that people will say whatever they can come up with that will stick in order to get you to submit to their unjust authority.
So thank you so much for listening.
I'm going to finish early today.
It's not very busy, but it's very slow on the road, so I can safely stop.
Thank you so much. I look forward to your donations.
Thank you for all of the new board members.
I look forward to inviting more people to join in this philosophical conversation.
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