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March 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:57
673 Subjectivism

Why is it that only the rational are supposed to give in?

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. 9.43.
Just dropping off some stuff at UPS. And I'm on my way to work, so I wanted to talk about a question that's floating around the boards at the moment.
Again, thank you so much, everyone, for posting your thoughts and feelings.
And, hey, we're getting close to 600 members of the board.
I really appreciate that. So, this question, somebody posted and said, well, I was talking about a friend of mine, talking about a guy I know, who says that people who believe in God are happier, or people who believe in God are happier, and then somebody else, our good old communist lady...
She posted this.
She said, there are legitimate studies out there that have been done on the power of prayer in healing, the power of faith and overall health based on medical standards, etc.
There is a query of medical journals on the web.
Can't think of it right now.
That might be a good source for you to at least view the research out there.
Most of what I've read on the subject doesn't come to any conclusions on whether or not someone should pray or have faith, and they certainly don't use the results to argue for faith over a secular life.
What the studies I've seen suggest has more to do with a person's frame of mind as it relates to health, that people who pray to be healed have a positive approach to treatment, and that in turn helps the treatment respond well.
Similar studies have been done with a secular perspective as well, I think, focusing purely on the notion of positive attitudes, etc.
From what I've read, it's an attempt to understand the individual's role in his or her health and outlook in life.
What works for them...
It's not a lie from their perspective.
This is faith. It's not a lie from their perspective.
Some writings have also identified faith as not just belief in a supreme being of sorts, but faith in anything, including the individual, and having a generally optimistic perspective on life.
That, of course, is pure nonsense.
And the prayer thing, this is from BBC News.
No health benefit from prayer.
The world's largest study into the effects of prayer on patients undergoing heart surgery have found it appears to make no difference.
The mantra study run from Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina involved 750 patients.
Before their operations, they were randomly split into two groups and half were prayed for by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims.
However, checks revealed that they had fared no better than those not prayed for.
The results of this controversial study contradict earlier findings from the same team, which suggested a drop of a quarter or more in adverse outcomes, including death, heart failure or heart attack.
However, that trial involved only 150 patients, and the more extensive research completed this year found no evidence of any benefits.
Well, this, of course.
Many theologists say that even if you believe in the power of intercessory prayer, such a trial is doomed to failure because it puts God to the test, and there are clear instructions in the Bible not to do this.
The Bishop of Durham, the Right Reverend Tom Wright, says, Prayer is not a penny in a slot machine.
You can't just put a coin in and get out a chocolate bar.
That is like setting an exam for God to see if God will pass it or not.
Other experts are highly critical of the concept that the benefits of prayer might be dose-dependent, that is, the health benefits might increase as the number of people praying went up.
This is particularly important as Duke University is at the center of the U.S. Bible Belt, and many of the trial participants, regardless of whether they were randomized to receive prayer during the trial, would be getting it from relatives and friends, and of course themselves.
Dr. Richard Sloan from the New York Presbyterian Hospital describes the concept of prayer dose as absurd.
He says, it requires us to abandon our understanding of the physical universe.
And of course, of course, prayer is a load of nonsense.
But I would like to talk about the larger sort of question that's going on here, which is that there is this belief, and it's quite prevalent, that's out there that sort of goes along these lines.
And they say, well, it may not be true, but it's beneficial.
It may not be true in the way that you would understand truth or something like that or some sort of nonsense like this.
Well, God may not exist, but belief in God makes you happy, so who are you to take that happiness away from someone and who are you to impose your values on other people and who in you and who in you and you and you and you know how this nonsense all goes.
And this is a sort of powerful argument for a lot of people, right?
Because basically it's what?
You don't want people to be happy.
You want to reduce them to secular, empty, existential angst and misery.
And you want to impose your secular views on other people who themselves are stewing in a simmering bliss of deific godhood and you want to take that away and that's cold and that's cruel and that's mean and blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And this is really, really, I mean, I've got to tell you, this is really at the sad and pitiful shallow end of anything to do with God.
This is where the whole mess just has really broken down.
And it sort of comes down to, but I like God.
I like believing in God.
It makes me happy to believe in God.
And that's the argument.
That's the argument.
But this is sort of a central contradiction here, right?
It's pretty obvious, at least to me.
But I know that when you're in the heated debate, it's hard to remember this kind of stuff.
But... If someone says, I believe in God because God exists.
That's one thing.
I believe in God because God exists.
The other aspect is to say, I believe in God because I like to believe in God.
Right? I like to believe in God.
Believing in God makes me happy.
Not that God exists. But believing in God makes me happy.
These two things are diametrically opposed, these two perspectives.
And the latter is completely unsustainable.
The latter is completely unsustainable.
And this is an important thing to understand, I think.
I mean, in my humble opinion, I think it's very, very important to understand this.
If somebody says, belief in God makes me happy, then the first question to ask them is, so, do you believe that God exists?
And as a consequence of your belief that God exists, you feel happy?
Or, do you accept that God does not exist, but you just choose to believe in something that you admit does not exist, and that makes you happy?
Well, you're never going to get anyone who says the latter.
This idea that you can shift the debate to whether God makes you happy is ludicrous.
Because the only way that that opinion that God exists would gain any traction or have any effect on your personality is if you believed it was true.
Is if you believed it was true.
So it all comes right back to this.
Like imagine if you thought, I'm about to inherit a million dollars.
I've got some rich uncle who's promised me to blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, you would feel really happy, I guess.
I mean, if that's what you want.
I would, right? Because I'd like to use the money for free domain radio.
So somebody, ah, you're about to invest here.
We're going to be a billionaire. And you felt really happy about that.
Somebody would say, well, why are you happy?
It's just, oh, because I'm about to inherit a million or a billion dollars.
That's what's making me happy.
And then if you found out that it was not true, If you got a letter from the lawyer saying he died and he left all of his money to pay off the national debt, and you can't fight it, it's incontrovertible, and by the way, he was never related to you to begin with, so this was all a complete fantasy.
This expectation was a complete fantasy.
What would it mean, then, if this belief had been proven to be false, that you were about to inherit all this money?
What the hell would it mean? If you said, no, I'm still happy because I'm still going to inherit a million or a billion dollars.
I'm as happy as I was before I found out it was false.
I have this big expectation I'm going to inherit all this money.
I'm overjoyed. I find out there's just no way in hell that I'm ever going to get this money.
I was never going to get this money.
It was a complete fantasy, but I'm still as happy.
Well, we would call someone like that insane, wouldn't we?
I mean, just picture your dinner conversation with someone.
And they're overjoyed.
Oh, I'm going to make a million dollars.
I'm going to inherit a million dollars. You see them a week later and they say, Oh, I'm not going to inherit that money, but I'm still as happy.
I'm still acting.
I'm still as happy as if I was going to inherit that money.
Well, you'd think they were insane, right?
And if they said, I'm happy because I believe that I'm going to inherit that money.
When it's already been completely established, and they admit that it's completely established that they're not going to inherit this money, but they say, I'm happy because I'm going to inherit this money.
And you say, no, you just told me that you're not going to inherit this money.
And they say, yeah, I know, I admit that.
I admit that I'm not going to inherit this money, but I'm happy because I believe that I'm going to inherit this money.
I mean, people!
Come on! This is madness!
This is madness!
And we would never accept a sane or mentally healthy somebody who prattled on about how they weren't going to inherit this money, but they were happy because they were going to inherit this money.
We'd recognize that as the lunacy that it is.
So the question comes back to, is God real?
Does God exist? If you say, God does not exist, but I'm happy because of my belief that God does exist, then it's exactly the same as the inheritance scenario.
And it's deranged.
And it's deranged.
So please, let's not talk about whether or not a belief in God makes you happy, because if that belief is not connected to the existence of God, then it's insane!
It's insane!
It's insane! And let's not have any truck with that kind of insanity for heaven's sakes.
Let's have some standards of truth and let's have some even minor rigorous in terms of philosophy.
It's not a lie for them.
It's not a lie for them.
They say, oh, it's a lie.
It's a lie. It's a lie.
God does not exist. Well, it's not a lie for them and so it works for them.
Well, this is a radical nonsense.
Subjectivism is...
I mean, it's...
You don't even have to break a mental sweat to shred this to the four winds.
I mean, this is just lunacy.
It's complete lunacy. But let's flex our muscles a tiny little bit and let's flick this wadded up tiny little piece of paper off the desk.
So, when we say that religion is false, and then some fine lady comes along and says, well, but it's not false for the people who believe in it, and it works for them.
So you should not believe that religion is false.
Oh, my heavens, how hard it is to see and how easy it is to see the silliness that is involved in this.
And the cowardice, if you don't mind me being brutal, frankly.
Let's say that everything is subjective.
Let's say that everything is subjective, and whatever belief works for you is whatever belief works for you.
It doesn't matter if it's true or false, it's what you believe in, what works for you.
Right? Well, let's say that it works for me to believe that God does not exist.
And so I say that those people who believe in God are wrong.
Someone comes along and says, oh, that's an incorrect position.
You should not believe that God does not exist.
And you should not believe that the people who believe that God does exist are wrong because it works for them and it's true for them.
But how on earth am I allowed to be corrected in this logic?
Because my belief that God does not exist and that other people are wrong works for me!
It's true for me, even if we accept the premise.
Even if we accept the basic premise that everything is subjective, how the hell am I supposed to be corrected in this?
So people believe that God does not exist and I'm not allowed to correct them because that belief works for them and there's no truth and it's not a lie to them.
Well, let's say that God does exist and I choose to believe that He doesn't.
Well, that belief works for me.
So how is it that I'm not allowed to correct others But other people are allowed, nay, compelled to correct me.
I would love one day for one of these subjectivists to come along, right?
Here's another fantasy conversation that will never occur.
Because people want to give up all the tough stuff to do with truth.
All the tough stuff to do with truth.
They want to give up that. It's like Jennyism, right?
But they don't want to give up judgment and opinions, right?
They don't want to do that so much.
They want to give up all the stuff that requires them to confront people who might be irrational or aggressive or abusive or might be offended.
They won't take on the religious people.
They won't take on the status.
They won't take on those who believe that the Easter Bunny should...
If goats sacrifice to it, they won't take it.
Because those people can be dangerous.
Those people can be aggressive.
Those people can be abusive.
Those people will be highly offended and will get angry.
But they'll come along to a rational philosophy forum and they'll start talking about how we're just incorrect and we need to be tolerant.
Because everything is subjective.
And if something's true for you, then it works for you.
They don't want to give up the right to correct people.
They just want to give up the right or they don't want to take up the sword of correcting people who are seriously in error.
They're like the schoolyard bullies.
They don't want to get into a fight with people who might actually fight back.
They just want to pick on who they perceive as the weaklings, the rational, the objective, the scientific.
They don't wanna give up the right to judge others.
They just wanna give up any principles that would direct that correction of others to something rational and productive.
It's like Jennyism, right?
She doesn't want to accept truth and reality.
She doesn't want to accept empiricism and science and rationality and objectivity because she doesn't believe that reality exists.
But does that stop her from passing opinions on every goddamn thing under the sun?
Of course not! So we're told not to correct religious people because everything is subjective and we should not believe that religious people are in error.
But what conceivable theory could cause rational people would compel or would advocate that rational people give up their judgment but irrational people must be allowed to keep theirs?
What mental sickness is that?
And I'm sorry to be so angry.
I've just faced this my whole life and I'm just sick of it.
I'm just sick of it.
The rational people are supposed to give up their judgments based on science and reason and learning and evidence and empiricism, logic, reality, objectivity.
We're supposed to give up our judgments.
But people who believe in sky ghosts and sprinkling water on their children's heads to cleanse the stain of original sin and the devil's hold over the infant, those people's beliefs must be respected.
We must be tolerant of those people's beliefs.
The only people Who are told that they must change their opinions are those whose opinions are based on the truth!
The truth-tellers must always bend, must always give way.
The rational must always fade back into the woodwork and not disturb the beliefs of the mad.
Those of us who have struggled through to some truth and objectivity based on reason and science and evidence, we must give way forever and forever and forever to people who believe that praying to ghosts will cure you of sickness.
The doctors must always give way to the medicine men.
The scientists must always give way to the priests.
Those who advocate pacifism must always give way to those who wish to use violence.
Those who use reason must always give way to those who use faith and whim and mere, asserted, aggressed opinion.
We must always bend.
We must always shift.
Why? Why? Why?
Why? On what grounds could it conceivably work, logically or morally, that objective and scientific and reasoned truths must always give way to irrational, blind, stupid, historically inflicted and abusively received opinion?
Because here's my fantasy conversation, right?
I say, God does not exist and the people who believe that God exists and especially who inflict that, quote, belief that bigotry on children are destructive and wrong.
And some subjectivist comes up and says, well, I can see that that belief really works for you.
Good for you. I'm glad it works for you.
It's true for you. And I say, well, what do you mean it's true for me?
Compared to what? Well, other people don't believe that.
Well, who's right? Well, no one's right.
Well, which one of us is correct?
Well, no one's correct. Your belief that God doesn't exist obviously works for you, and their belief that God does exist obviously works for them.
Good for both of you. And then I would say, well, is it true that both of our beliefs, though opposing, are true?
Well, yes, because everything is subjective.
So, it's true that everything is subjective?
Yes. Is it your personal belief that everything is subjective?
Or is it something that is true beyond your personal belief?
It is my personal belief that everything is subjective.
Okay, so then you have no right to say, works for you, doesn't work for you, you have no right to pass any truth judgment or positive or negative value judgment on anything or anyone else.
Is that correct? Yes, because it's just my opinion.
Okay, so you're just telling me that you like eggs.
Actually, it's even more subjective than that.
You say you like green eggs that are invisible.
Okay, that's great. I like ponies that fly.
Let's call this philosophy, shall we?
Not. Or they say, no, it is not just my opinion that everything is subjective.
It is true that everything is subjective.
Well, of course so.
It is objectively true that everything is subjective, therefore not everything is subjective, because the belief that everything is subjective is objective.
Therefore, if one belief can be objective, it's possible that more beliefs can be objective.
And then you say, okay, but everything is true except for that one belief.
Everything is subjective except for that one belief that everything is subjective.
Like, okay, well why is it only that one belief?
And compared to what? And blah, blah, blah, blah.
and it'll all fall apart and it'll all be the purest nonsense in the world.
This hostility, and don't get me wrong, it is rage and hostility towards the rational, is a telltale sign of pretty significant corruption and very is a telltale sign of pretty significant corruption and very significant abuse.
Very significant abuse as a child.
This is a child who was attacked for being rational and has not processed the agony of that.
And as an adult, then, she works to undermine the certainty of others in lunatic and contradictory ways.
And the only people that she undermines or opposes are the people who have rational, unconsidered opinions.
I've never heard of this type of person.
Let me stop picking on an individual board member, but I've never heard of this type of person.
Going to Christian boards and saying to them, well, this belief works for you, and God is not real, and this belief is subjective, and maybe it works for you, but it's not true.
The atheist belief works for them, and you shouldn't be critical of it, and you should be tolerant of it.
I've never...
because they actually would get attacked right now.
They only pick on the rational, right?
These brave, brave warriors of truth.
They only pick on the rational. They only undermine those who put reasons forward.
Those who have blind bigotry, they don't talk to.
And there is an extraordinary amount of personal agony that is at the root of this.
An extraordinary amount of rage and terror that is at the root of all of this.
So, when someone comes up to you and says, but religious people are happy, and who are you to take away their happiness?
They say, well, how do you know?
Happy compared to what?
Well, they report that they're happier.
It's like, okay, so Christian people say that they're happier.
Let's just say that's true.
Christian people say that they're happier than atheists.
Fine. So what? It's self-reporting.
It's self-reporting.
Being a Christian doesn't make you happier.
It just makes you lie about being happy.
Because for a Christian, and this is the emotional crippling that occurs with faith and with a belief in a benign divinity, this is the emotional crippling that occurs.
This is why Christians have such completely distorted emotional lives.
They get to project all of their dark sides onto Satan and reject and curse it, which leaves them helpless in the face of their more malignant impulses, as we can see with these continual scandals that occur and all this kind of stuff.
For a Christian or a Muslim or whoever, some religious person, they have Feelings of love towards God and they have positivity and they have happiness and I'm sure that in some contexts they can feel happy about merging into the collective madness of religion and so on.
It takes a lot of responsibility off your life and you get to say that there's a plan and when bad things happen you don't have to grieve as much.
So I'm sure that there are some mildly positive aspects in the same way that there are some mildly positive aspects to being on heroin.
It's supposed to be freaking great!
But religious people, what happens when they have doubt?
What happens when they have anger towards God?
What happens when they don't believe that they're part of a plan?
What happens when something really bad happens to them even though they've been good people?
What happens when they start to really think for themselves?
Well, anger towards God, doubt about religion, fear of living with the fantasy of an immutable and ineffable plan, when those feelings surface, The Christian cannot process them.
Logically, maybe some of them do, but according to the logic of the belief, you can't process them.
You must reject them as temptations of the devil.
Negative feelings, hostility, jealousy, pettiness, all of these sorts of things.
You're not allowed to own them.
You're not allowed to be a full human being with a rich and deep emotional life.
You're not allowed to have access towards independent thought and anger and doubt.
You're not allowed to have these things because they're temptations of the devil.
And so what do you do? Well, you pray and you reject them.
And you fix a smile on your face.
And I can't tell you the number of people who are religious who've told me over the course of their life after they've recovered from this addiction, from this infliction, from this abuse.
That they felt they were faking it the whole time.
It's the emperor's new clothes. Everyone is kneeling in the mosque thinking that everyone next to them is talking to God.
And everyone next to them is thinking that everyone next to them is talking to God.
and no one's talking to anyone except for the crazy people who are the imams who hear voices.
It's just a massive amount of fakery.
And you're not allowed. To be angry and negative.
You're not allowed to be hostile and doubtful.
You're not allowed to be deep and rich and have all of the ambivalence that occurs in the human soul in the way that we're raised.
I think there would be less ambivalence if we were raised better, but right now there's lots of ambivalence.
So you're not allowed to be unhappy as a Christian.
Unhappiness as a Christian is a sign of a lack of faith.
It's a sign of a lack of faith.
So are you allowed to have what are called negative feelings?
Are you allowed to have full access to all the deep richness of your humanity and all of the subtle emotional impulses that can help guide you towards the truth and all of the true self, anger and hostility and fear and doubt and love and veneration and pride that helps guide you at times it feels like a pinball bouncing off the edges towards the truth?
No, of course not. Of course not.
You're supposed to have a fixed, happy, idiotic grin on your face, and when bad things happen, there's supposed to be God's special test of strength because he loves you so much, so you're not even allowed to feel bad about those things.
You're not allowed to feel bad about those things.
When Richard Dawkins is interviewing Ted Haggard before his fall, and Ted Haggard is spouting the most abysmal nonsense about biology and so on, And Richard Dawkins doesn't press him as hard as he should.
I mean, Richard Dawkins is a terminally nice British fellow, and it's not easy to do this with people.
Keeps pushing him and says, there's no competent scientist who would say what you're saying.
There's no competent biologist who would have that opinion that you're saying that complexity cannot arise in any way other than through evolution.
Complexity is the only way. Evolution is the only way that complexity arises.
So no competent biologist would tell me what you're telling me.
And Ted Haggard says, you can believe what you want, but please don't be arrogant.
Please don't be arrogant about your beliefs.
And what is the real message there, of course?
Well, this is projection.
It's completely arrogant to say, I have a belief in my head, therefore it is true cosmologically and metaphysically and epistemologically throughout the entire universe, that I want a sky daddy and so I can will it into existence, that I have been told that God exists and therefore I'm going to believe as true, as empirical, as objective that God exists.
Well, that's the height of arrogance.
That is the height of arrogance.
There is no humility in Christians at all.
Humility would be to say, I don't know.
Humility would be to say, there's no proof that sprinkling water on my baby's head chases away devils.
There's no evidence that giving money to priests is following the will of God.
Certainly following the will of the priests, I'll give them that much.
It's not following the will of God at all.
That would be humility, the kind of humility that scientists have.
Which is, my opinions don't really mean that much.
My opinions are just empty assertions.
Empty assertions. Unless you can come up with some logical structure, some evidence, some way of framing those assertions.
And I do this sometimes. Of course, not everything I do is proven.
I try to work syllogistically as where it's possible, but some of the stuff I have to infer.
But I will be cautious in putting it forward, and I will try to appeal to as much evidence as possible in the communications that I have received.
And I always invite correction.
Always, always, always invite correction.
And we'll try to talk about it, if I recall it.
And sorry, I will get better at this when I go full-time and can set up a correction area of the website, wherein people can correct what they have found to be erroneous in the podcasts.
But there's no humility whatsoever.
It is rank arrogance, right?
So that's the funny thing, right?
That Haggard...
Is calling Richard Dawkins, who humbles himself before the scientific method, Haggard is telling Richard Dawkins and commanding him not to be arrogant in his beliefs.
It's lunacy. It's lunacy.
But of course, the Christian can't own something like arrogance because humility is called a virtue.
So the arrogance is then projected onto everyone else.
You don't get to erase your feelings.
That's not possible any more than you can will your liver not to exist.
You don't get to erase your feelings.
You don't get to erase the richness of your humanity.
You only get to choke it, strangle it, reject it, bury it, throw it underground, project it onto others, throw it into the sky, and throw all of your negative feelings onto the bowels of hell and call it Satan.
So this is why Christians will report that they're happy, because they're not allowed not to be.
That they're not allowed to be unhappy.
To the degree that they're unhappy, they're not Christians.
They have to project this ridiculous confidence and happiness.
Because if they don't, they're not believers.
They're not believers. They don't have faith.
They don't love God.
They are skeptics.
Your son gets hit by a lawnmower and dies.
It's God's plan. He's with God now.
He's with Jesus. And you can weep, but you can't really grieve, and you certainly can't doubt.
Things occur in history.
Terrible things occur in history?
Well, we can't answer it, but I'm sure there's a plan.
The Holocaust. Six million.
Killed? Well, it's part of the plan.
Anne Frank dies of TB two weeks before she's rescued by the Russians.
No, it's part of the plan.
She touched her naughty bits and wrote about it in a diary, so maybe that was it.
Maybe she shouldn't have done that.
So, of course, Christians report being happier because they're lying.
Right? I mean, again, I can't prove this empirically and this is just a way of framing the discussion, but I certainly know that for Christians to experience all the richness of human emotion and all the depth and power of the human soul is to blow away God completely.
It's to blow away the concept of gods and devils completely because you have to carve yourself in two if you're religious.
You have to carve yourself in two.
And all of your healthy feelings of anger And all of your healthy feelings of frustration and doubt, these are all essential feelings, in the same way that pleasure is as essential a feeling as pain for the maintenance and regulation of the body.
So when I went skiing, I was just dying on the end of the second day because I'm teaching Christina how to ski, which means I'm going down the hill and stopping, going down the hill and stopping, and it's killing my legs after a while.
They only were sore for about a day.
So I'm feeling pain.
It's like, good! Good, then I should stop.
Because if I keep going, I'm going down these hills and I am tired, I'm going to have an accident and I could hurt myself.
Or I'm going to hurt my muscles even more by continuing to strain them.
So the pain is essential.
How did I get this infected tooth out of my mouth?
Well, it hurt. The, quote, negative feelings are there to help.
They're there to help you.
They're not there to screw you up.
And your negative feelings are not there to screw you up.
They're to help you. Anger against God is freedom from fantasy, if you allow it to really inform your thinking.
If you are curious with regards to yourself, why do I feel this?
Well, of course, a Christian has an answer.
Religious people have an answer.
Why do I feel angry towards God?
Well, that's a temptation from Satan.
Or some such nonsense and secularists will have this as well in various kinds of areas, right?
Why is it that I'm angry at taxation?
Oh, because I'm selfish and I don't want to help the poor and it's okay to be selfish but I shouldn't let it take over my thinking.
Why is it that I feel angry towards political leaders?
Well, it's just, you know, sometimes sacrifices are hard and I have to support the troops and people just make up anything, right?
To explain away their negative feelings.
So this is the same thing that occurs when people respond with subjectivity towards objective arguments, right?
So when people respond with subjectivity towards objective arguments, it's because the objective arguments make them anxious.
This is what human beings do.
This is what we're trained to do. It's desperately unhealthy.
But it leaves us crippled in the face of power.
You can't get angry if you can't be objective, if you can't judge, if you can't stand on principle, then you're a sheep, right?
You're a perfect fodder for whatever people with power want to do to you.
It's wonderful. It's exactly what they want.
For you not to have access to any objective principles other than the pseudo-principle that rejects all principles, right?
Subjectivity. So when somebody comes along and makes a statement that something is true, And has reasons for it, right?
I mean, religious people would just say it's true because it's true.
It's true because I believe it. It's true because the Bible says it so.
But there's no argument with religion.
You can't argue with people like that.
You can't debate anything with them because nothing's based on reason.
There's a debate that was going on about prisons, right?
And one guy is just saying, well, murderers should be punished, and I don't care what happens.
And I don't care about the logical inconsistency that taking a human life is evil, and therefore we should kill murderers.
I don't even care about that inconsistency.
Murderers should pay, and that's it.
And that's final. They should pay and pay and pay and pay.
And if they get thrown into rape rooms and get raped for 40 years, I could care less.
I'm going to do it. I mean, it's not an argument, right?
It's just assertion after assertion after assertion.
You can't debate anything with somebody who's just asserting something.
But people who put logical arguments forward, you can debate with people like that.
Because they're putting logical arguments forward, they're less scary than people who just assert stuff.
Because when you criticize people who just assert stuff, you expose the rage.
That is their entire bruised and violated true self.
Which they'll then direct at you because they'll view it as satanic, right?
The anger and fear and rage that Christians have towards their belief system, which strangles and cripples and destroys them, gets projected onto others.
It's considered to be the agent of the devil.
It is considered to be how the devil pries you loose from the loving caresses of God.
And so the moment that you awaken any of this doubt and fear, you then are immediately associated with the devil and they'll attack you.
They'll try and hurt you, or they'll withdraw in ways that are harmful or painful.
And people don't want to face that, right?
Whereas rational people, people, no problem correcting those.
Oh, we'll correct the rational people.
But the rational people correcting the irrational people, boy, people just don't like to do that at all.
Because if there are principles that you should stick to regardless of opinion, right?
If those principles exist and are valid, Then, obviously, correcting the rational people is much less important than confronting the irrational people.
Just on any hierarchy of values, that would be even remotely rational.
Let's say that there are rational principles, objective scientific principles, that people need to accept.
And I've talked about this before, but it's important to look at it from a number of different angles, in my view.
So, let's say that there are objective rational principles.
Let's say that anybody who claims that a belief is true is incorrect because it's just true for them, it works for them, it's subjective, right?
Then, clearly, the people that you need to deal with, first and foremost, are the people making the irrational assertions that are considered to be universally true.
So the people who believe in things that aren't true, those are the people that you should really be confronting.
The people who make irrational assertions Those are the people that you should really be dealing with in this context, right?
Because if nothing is true, then the people that you need to start criticizing first and foremost are those who are just blindly asserting that things are true.
If there is a principle that nothing is true, then you need to attack on principle those who assert the opposite.
Now, if nothing is true and that's a principle, then people who are using principles, maybe they're on your list somewhere.
Maybe they're on your list somewhere.
You need to do that somehow, somewhere, in some manner.
But that's far down the list, right?
But of course, that's never what happens.
It's never what happens. The people will go for the irrational people before they will go for the irrational people.
And why? Because the irrational people don't attack, usually.
And there is a lot of personal history that goes on in this kind of stuff that is pretty horrible.
So, thank you so much for listening.
I had a lovely donation this morning. I truly, truly appreciate it.
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