Molly took me by my hand, she said, lonesome George, you know I understand, who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who's your daddy?
Who's your daddy?
Luke, I am your daddy.
How's it going everybody?
Hope you're doing well at staff.
You know, I really am quite looking forward to doing 3D Mate Radio full-time because this whole grip on reality thing, rather tenuous and quite a strain, really, in so many ways.
So, sorry about the low-quality recording.
We are going to back up.
The computer is not recognizing la microphonie.
So, we're going to low-tech, high background noise, low quality, but expedient.
And the reason that I'm not waiting until tomorrow morning is I wanted to go out on an extraordinarily slender and extensive limb and start working on a theory that's been rolling around in my brain for the last little while and share it with you as a preliminary exploratory committee view on a possible answer to a number of coincidental things and you can let me know what you think.
The generalissimo idea is something like this, that we all know that religious countries have, or religious cultures, have this hostility towards certain kinds of patterns of thought or behavior.
Things like, the more religious a country, the more it tends to be against things like illicit drug use, The more it tends to be against sexuality, at least in a non-procreative sense, the more it tends to be against things like abortion and a large sort of number of other things that we're fairly aware of.
And so I've sort of been mulling it over why.
I like to never think that anything is not connected when it's a common enough set of behaviors or perspectives as this is.
And also against stem cell research and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So for me, a sort of question is why?
And I'll roll out the barrel of thought and see who salutes.
Now, I'm going to start with a bit of a metaphor.
And let's see how far it goes before turning and attacking us like a bunch of rabbit poodles in a barrel.
You love a robot.
You love the Roboto.
And you believe that this robot is animated by a pure spirit of virtue.
And if you do love this robot, and believe that this robot is powered by this pure spirit of virtue, or whatever you can imagine that is not material or electrical or gasket-driven in origin...
How friendly are you going to be to somebody who then just starts disassembling said robot and showing you the constituent and component parts?
Because you love, my friend, the spirit of the robot.
You do not love the oil, the battery, The pneumatic tubes, the circuit boards, the electric come-hither eyes.
You loveth the robot, the spirit of the bot.
You do not love each, or any, or any combination of individual parts.
So, given that thou dost loveth the robot, how friendly are you going to feel towards somebody who begins to disassemble the robot to show you its component parts And reveal that the robot is a metal, and circuitry, and oil, and perhaps a well-oiled orifice, but not anything which contains any spirit.
And I feel, and this is not to say that it's true, this is just sort of what I'm working on, let me know what you think.
I feel that herein lies an important clue about the hostility that religious people have towards the disassembling of what they consider to be human or humanity.
For me, there's nothing wrong, and I'm not inflicting any deterministic, compatibilistic, free will interpretations on this.
Let's just say that it's a robot with a scrap of free will.
For me, there's nothing wrong with loving the robot.
There's nothing wrong with loving the material.
Because it's very hard to give back rubs to the spirit of your wife.
So... The disassembling of the human to the merely material, to me, doesn't matter at all.
I'm perfectly aware that I love my wife.
If I were to view her brain activity on a CAT scan, I'm sure that I would not attempt to mount the CAT scan unit if there was a nurse handy.
And I'm aware that if I took out my wife's brain from her head and sliced it thin and laid it out to dry, that I would not love any of the atoms that compose her brain, but that all of the wet work in combination of her mind gives off personality expressions that are empirical to me and that I love.
Virtue and courage and sweetness and beauty and all that kind of stuff.
So I don't view that my wife has a soul or a spirit or that there's some sort of essence of wifeliness slash Christina that floats around her in some incorporeal manner.
I love the atoms that she is composed of and the energy and the chemistry and whatever it is, and I would say to some degree her choice.
I love all of that about her.
So disassembling my wife into component atoms and chemicals, I mean, not that I'd like you to do it, but doing that conceptually is no particular great harm to my love for her, or my love of life, or my love of myself, or any of these sorts of things.
So, it does not threaten my philosophy, which is fundamentally and essentially materialistic.
It does not harm my philosophy for there to be a focus on The physical, or an essential and exclusive focus on the physical.
Where matter is, personality is not.
I'm sorry. Where matter is not, personality neither is.
So, I love the robot, and if you pull out the batteries of the robot and you say, this robot just runs on batteries, I'm like, great, put those batteries back in, because we love the robot.
And if you show me that if the robot runs out of oil, then the robot gets creaky, I say, great, let's put some more oil in, because we love the robot.
But if you believe that the robot is not the sum of its parts, is not the manifestation of all of the natural and empirical energy that animates it.
Then when people begin to disassemble the robot, it's going to irritate you, it's going to really bother you.
It's going to be fundamentally annoying to you, fundamentally enraging to you.
And you're going to get very screwed up ideas about what is the nobility of the robot.
Ah, the nobility in the robot is not showing me the batteries.
The nobility in the robot is not showing me the schematics.
The nobility in the robot is not decompiling its core processing.
That is an affront to the dignity of the robot wizard, which is immaterial and spiritual and incorporeal and so on.
When you put that formulation together, I think that it's interesting in terms of what it reveals about the religious mindset. I think that it's interesting in terms of what it And I have a great deal of difficulty truly understanding the religious mindset, but I'll do my best and see what we can't come up with.
But I think it does help to understand What the hostility towards particular aspects of human behavior, what the hostility is in the religious mindset.
The desire to tame sexuality into a sanctified and sanctioned blah blah blah blah blah social institution, religious institution like marriage, is very interesting.
Because if the yearning of the body is to reproduce itself, if the yearning of the body is so all-powerfully sexual in its manner,
in its approach, in its emotions, in its context, if lust makes life, Then it's not God that makes life.
Or at least, it's an alternative explanation.
I mean, everybody who's religious is fairly aware, I think, that God does not bring babies to families.
God does not create human life.
Sexuality creates human life.
The dipsticky, the rubby, creates human life.
And that's kind of physical.
I mean, it's very physical.
And it's a pretty significant interdiction or intervention in the idea that God creates life, because it's clearly not God.
That creates current life, and there's no religious person who would say that.
I would say, God puts the soul in this and that, but there is, you know, with the exception of one Jesus H. Christ, there is no man alive who was not conceived or born of woman, or who from his mother's womb was untimely ripped.
And I think that's one of the hostilities that religious people have towards sexuality. - Okay.
It is a reduction of what they consider to be the elevated soul of the species to the merely physical.
I mean, it's messy, right?
Sexuality as a means of creating life, it's pretty messy.
I mean, and a little bit wild, a little bit uncontrollable.
So, I think that the hostility towards sexuality is, to some degree, because sexuality is a pretty viable way of explaining how life comes about in the absence of God.
And, I mean, maybe there's some sort of premonition of the Darwinian approach that occurred in the 19th century.
I sort of doubt it, but you can't say that God creates life, because clearly human beings create life, and it's the body that reproduces, that creates life.
And the desire...
To recreate life.
The lust to recreate life that is endemic to puberty and thereafter.
That is physical.
That is not spiritual. And so, to turn...
The messy, fluid-based physical reproduction of life into something spiritual, you have to oppose physical sexuality, and so on.
So, I think you sort of get the idea.
You have to turn lust into obedience to God, right?
and lie back and think of England, as the women were told in the 19th century.
So, that's sort of one way, I think, of looking at the hostility towards the physical as a reduction of the fantastical view of looking at the hostility towards the physical as a reduction of the fantastical view that there is an Mad fantastical view.
And it's a direct competition.
Human beings create life, or rather our bodies create life.
We don't have much to do with it other than some naughty bit interaction.
So, let's have a look at another.
So, for me, there's competition.
Competition to the explanation is one of the bases of hostility of religion towards the physical.
Because everything that occurs in life and in the universe up to now and over time in the future can be explained with reference to the physical.
There's no reference to the spiritual, reference to the soul or to God.
So, it explains precisely nothing.
It explains precisely nothing.
And it's like, what's the answer to 2 plus 2?
Hey, whatever it is I'm thinking of right now.
Try putting that on a test and see what happens.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I did at one point in a math exam.
So, that's one way of looking at the hostility that religion has towards sexuality.
Here's another. Illicit drugs.
Produce in people, as we all well know, beatific visions at times.
I mean, there's some negatives, I'm sure, but beatific visions and spiritual visions and revelation-style fantastical imaginations and all this kind of imaginings and so on.
And that is the merely physical.
What is the approximate cause of this stuff?
Well, you take LSD or you take mescaline or peyote or whatever it is.
Smoked marijuana. And some of the feelings which are supposed to be central to religion are generated.
And that's not so pleasant for the religious people.
In fact, it's distinctly unpleasant.
I mean, it's sort of similar to this, right?
Like, if I say that only my immortal spirit can move my arm, and it's the ultimate province of my free will, and there's nothing physical in it, that's the only way that my arm can move.
And then you stick a couple of electrodes in my brain, fire them off, and lo and behold, my arm moves Well, then I sort of stand corrected, right?
Then clearly it's electrical impulses, biochemical impulses, that cause my arm to move.
Sorry, just moving the steering wheel.
Now, if it's electrical impulses that cause my arm, To move, then saying that it's spirit alone, the soul alone, or God's will that makes my arm move, doesn't work.
Now, I can say that the electricity runs through God's veins, or something like that, some nonsense like that.
And that's fine, but clearly I'm ridiculous at this point, right?
Because... I'm just hanging on to a thesis no matter what.
So, there's another sort of example, I think, that if we say that beatific visions come from God, but beatific visions can be recreated through chemicals or naturally occurring substances in plants, then clearly, it's not God that's causing them.
Unless you start to take, you know, God created the marijuana and stuff like that.
So, again, there's this lengthy and endless resistance to the physical explanations of things, as we can see with the continuing and ludicrous hostility or skepticism towards evolution.
And, you know, be skeptical if you want about evolution, but please don't imagine that intelligent design is some sort of coherent response to that question or problem.
So that's another example of where religion and the physical stand in direct opposition to each other.
Because if you can recreate what is claimed by religion through merely physical means, then it seems fairly likely that the religious explanations are not true, right?
It's not a bunk. Now, if you look at something like stem cell research, Again, we're sort of in this realm where the body is merely physical.
It's merely physical.
And I use the word merely only in terms of context of religion.
It's not merely physical in my view.
It's gloriously, transcendently physical in my view.
But that's sort of another example of how that works against what is considered to be the sinh kwa noh of the religious approach, which is that it's all spirit all the time, baby, and flesh is a sort of mere minor effect of spirit.
But if believer actually works the other way, if spirit is a fantasy that is created through exquisite matter, Then religion, obviously, is revealed as sort of just that, a fantasy.
So again, we have this hostility towards the physical.
So in stem cell research, we can clearly see that we have these cells that are capable, if there are, you know, 150 cells in the blastocyst that are clearly capable of Adapting themselves to a wide variety of capacities.
And this adaptability of matter, of cells, this power of cells, is, again, right back to the physical.
The more miraculous, in a sense, that matter is, the less miraculous the spirit is.
And so there's this continued hostility towards this kind of stuff.
And so to me, that's sort of another reason why...
Religion views these kinds of things with hostility.
And if you look back through history, particularly the Catholic Church, though of course this occurred under Protestantism and is occurring currently under Islam, if you look at this kind of stuff over time, it's pretty clear that as knowledge progresses in the realm of In the realm of science,
every progress in that knowledge is utterly and vehemently opposed by the church, by religious people.
Because as knowledge advances, religion has to sort of shrink back.
And as knowledge advances, more and more do...
Does this sort of fantasy of the spiritual, or the soul-based approach, more and more does that fantasy sort of withdraw and end up sort of in a corner?
And so I think if you look at the prejudices and the hostilities that religious people have towards the material, I think it's really down in this route that they're all imagining that they're loving the spirit of the robot, but the robot is mere matter.
And it does not...
It makes the love of the spirit...
And not the flesh look like the ridiculous superstition that it is.
Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.