All Episodes
Previous Next
June 21, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:29
804 Defending Christianity

Was the Jewish Zombie the midwife of liberty?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. Thank you so much for joining the conversation here at Freedom Aid Radio.
This is going to be a non-Yelly cast.
Christian has a patient, but a listener has posted a defense of Christianity, which is not uncommon.
It's not uncommon that there is this perspective.
And so I thought that I would take a swing at reviewing the article that this gentleman posted, just to sort of give a perspective that I think would be quite helpful, because you do run into this quite a lot, where people say,
well, Christianity... It has had a strong effect on the respect for individual liberty and freedoms in the West, and Christianity has a cultural heritage, and Christianity has supplied metaphors for literature, and Christianity has a sense of reverence, and Christianity promotes many good things, and all this kind of stuff.
And so I wanted to spend a few minutes, more than a few minutes going over this, And so he did post an article that I'm going to read from and just to give due credit where credit is due.
This article is available at The Autonomist.
It's called Three Books on Atheist's Defense of Christianity by Reginald Firehammer.
It's a fabulous name, by the way.
So, he starts off and he says, I seldom read book reviews and would not have read one entitled Suicide of the West if it had been written by anyone other than Theodore Derimple, and if someone I greatly admire had not suggested I do so.
So I did. The opening paragraph explains exactly what the three books reviewed are about.
And this is a quote from the review that this essayist has read.
That Western Europe suffers from a state of general paralysis is a truth too universally acknowledged to require much reiteration.
Slow growth and high unemployment, an aging and shrinking population, scientific and cultural irrelevance to the rest of the world, a large, unassimilated, alien population, much of which is hostile to the very countries into which it has immigrated.
These are just a few of the problems that Western Europe not only fails to solve, but even properly to recognize.
And then there's a heading which says America is part of the West.
The title of the review, says the writer, is a bit misleading because the books are all about Western Europe's rapid decline and its case causes, and, though mentioned, does not include America in that suicide.
It is that neglect I want to address.
Because many of the symptoms of Western Europe's decline are already apparent in the US, and the causes of Europe's descent are rampant in America, but generally unrecognized.
My impression when I read the review was, we're next, because America is already sick with the same poison, killing Europe, and if we keep on in our present direction, the death of Western civilization will be total, including America, which will certainly succumb to the same toxins.
This paragraph in particular directly related to America, and this is again from the review he's reading.
There is a crisis of meaning and purpose in Western European societies.
They are almost entirely post-religious, but they have found no form of transcendence to replace religion, and none is on the horizon.
Modern Europeans believe in very little, except in as comfortable and safe a life as possible.
Indeed, health and safety have replaced faith, hope, and charity, as the cardinal desiderata.
It is scarcely any wonder that, when faced by people who quite mistakenly and with a combination of staggering ignorance and arrogance believe themselves to be in a possession of a truth that justifies almost any atrocity committed, if not by them, exactly then by those whom they have indoctrinated, modern Western Europeans do not know how to react.
There is in the above paragraph a significant mistake which I left out, continues the writer.
After pointing out the end of religion in Europe, left an unfilled moral philosophical vacuum, de Rimpel wrote, an awareness of belonging or of contributing to a collectivity or endeavor of world importance is no longer possible for them.
He is wrong that what is missing is a sense of belonging or endeavor of world importance, which are collectivist status concepts, the very thing that is finishing off what is left of Europe.
He correctly identifies what is missing in the next sentence.
Modern Europeans believe in very little.
In fact, they believe in nothing at all.
It's called postmodernism, and pervades the universities, the media, and most of society in the United States in two contradictory forms, multicultural tolerance on the one hand, and zero tolerance.
On the other, the multicultural madness is about the destruction of values and zero tolerance is about forcing people, especially children, to conform to that madness.
While multiculturalism promotes something called diversity, it despises anyone who is truly different, that is, exceptional.
Every kind of outrage is tolerated as diversity, unless it exhibits exceptional intelligence, decency, and strength of character.
Religious tolerance, for example, is extended to all religions.
And the more backward, oppressive, cruel and savage it is, i.e.
Islam, the more it is tolerated.
There is one religion that is not tolerated, however, and that is Christianity.
This fact is becoming more apparent every day.
While little girls are being threatened with punishment for reading the Bible during their lunch recess, virtually all Supreme Court decisions seek to eliminate any evidence or practice of Christianity from the schools.
Islam is being taught in American schools and even to American troops.
The reason Christianity is singled out is the untolerated religion bewilders most Americans.
I'm going to explain it and show why that intolerance is the measure of America's decline.
And then the writer goes on to just talk about how Christianity isn't that strong in America, which I don't really agree with.
His objective perspectives on religion.
I would gladly take the credit for that identification if it were mine, but it is not.
He says, while religion has no magic power to confer anything on people, especially backbone, there is an aspect of religion, particularly Christianity, that is part of the distinction between America and Western Europe.
It is that which I want to identify.
I would gladly take the credit for that identification if it were mine, but it is not.
It was Ayn Rand who made that identification and clarified it in a way that few of those who call themselves by the name of the philosophy she developed, objectivism, understand.
I'm afraid many objectivists find themselves on the wrong side of this issue, siding with those who would tear down all values, that is, on the side of the postmodernists and multiculturalists.
In a Feb 4, 1963 letter to U.S. Congressman Bruce Alger, she wrote, quote, In accordance with the principles of America and of capitalism, I recognize your right to hold any beliefs you choose.
And on the same grounds, you have to recognize my right to hold any convictions I choose.
I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one.
This means that I am not fighting against religion.
I am fighting for reason.
When faith and reason clash, it is up to the religious people to decide how they choose to reconcile the conflict.
As far as I am concerned, I have no terms of communication and no means to deal with people except through reason.
The difference between not fighting against religion and fighting for reason is profoundly important.
She is not just speaking of freedom of religion, because she has a profound respect for religion and an equally profound contempt for those who would destroy it.
For example, she wrote in the April 1966 issue of the Objectivists in the article, our cultural value deprivation the following.
From a report on a television discussion in Denver, Colorado, I gather that one member of this movement has made its goal a meaning a little clearer.
God, he said, is a process of creative social intercourse.
This, I submit, is obscene.
I, who am an atheist, am shocked by so brazen an attempt to rob religion of whatever dignity and philosophical intention it might once have possessed.
I am shocked by so cynically enormous a degree of contempt for the intelligence and sensibility of people, especially of those intended to be taken in by the switch.
Now, if men give up all abstract speculation and turn to the immediate conditions of their existence, to the realm of politics, what moral inspiration will they find?
The answer, of course, is none.
Rand is not saying or implying that religion provides men with the right values, only that men embrace religion because they seek values and believe in them.
She's not saying religion provides the right inspiration, only that religion is, for those who embrace it, an acknowledgement that principles matter, that there is something to revere, that life is important, and that there is an absolute truth.
When that is taken from men, they become what all Europeans have become, men who value nothing, reverence nothing, believe in nothing, and live for nothing.
Ren described that too.
The Road to Nihilism.
This is from journals, the early projects, the Hollywood years circa February 1928, her first attempt in English to plan a novel, the working title was The Little Street.
So this is Ayn Rand.
When to most people lack the capacity for reverence and taking things seriously, they do not hold anything to be very serious or profound.
There is nothing that is sacred or immensely important to them.
There is nothing, no idea, object, work, or person, that can inspire them with a profound, intense, and all-absorbing passion that reaches to the roots of their souls.
They do not know how to value or desire.
They cannot give themselves entirely to anything.
There is nothing absolute about them.
They take all things lightly, easily, pleasantly, almost indifferently, in that they can have it or not.
they do not claim it as their absolute necessity.
Anything strong and intense, passionate and absolute, anything that can't be taken with a snickering little sense of humor, is too big, too hard, too uncomfortable for them.
They are too small and weak to feel with all their soul, and they disapprove of such feelings.
They are too small and low for loyal, profound reverence, and they disapprove of all such reverence.
They are too small and profane themselves to know what sacredness is, and they disapprove of anything being too sacred.
The thing that is hated about religion is not what any specific religion teaches so much, but that it is something sacred to men, something worth living for, a source of values and profound reverence.
It is what must be destroyed if men are to be enslaved.
Wren puts these words in the mouth of the ultimate collectivist, Ellsworth Toohey.
Don't set out to raise all shrines.
You'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity, and the shrines are raised.
Then there's another way. Kill by laughter.
Laughter is an instrument of human joy.
Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction.
Turn it into a sneer.
It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything.
Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue.
Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul, and his soul won't be sacred to him.
Kill reverence, and you've killed the hero in man.
One doesn't reverence with a giggle.
He'll obey, and he'll set no limits to his obedience.
Anything goes. Nothing is too serious.
Notice it is not on the absurdities of any specific religious teachings that is laughed at, but religion itself.
In my long satire, I'm religion, blah blah blah.
Why Christianity? On the face of it, the almost fanatical hatred of Christianity, especially when compared to other religions, is inexplicable.
Certainly, the history of Christianity is filled with some terrible chapters of cruelty and oppression, but no more than other religions.
And it doesn't even show on the meter when compared to the horrors associated with modern socialistic ideologies or Islam.
Well, that's not true at all. Religion has far more blood on its hands.
In most of its present-day forms, it is the most innocuous and benign of religions.
So, from its beginnings, the dominant religion in America was Christianity, and in that context, the freest and most prosperous in society came into existence.
It is because of this fact that many, especially the religious, mistakenly attribute the unique nature of this country's government, culture, and society to what is frequently called its Judeo-Christian heritage.
There is a mistake in this, but it is a mistake.
Not about religion itself, but the exact nature and role and contribution to what is considered Western civilization.
The mistake is in attributing religion's contribution to its actual doctrines or teachings.
The Ten Commandments are frequently cited.
In fact, if the doctrines of either Judaism or Christianity were really the basis of a political system, it would be intolerably oppressive.
Examples of the Holy Roman Empire and Geneva under Calvin.
It is not any of these specific teachings of Christianity that were the source of its positive influence on, first, the Enlightenment, and secondly, the Enlightenment's highest achievement, the founding of America's free society.
Guess he didn't notice the blacks.
Anyway, the source of the positive influence of Christianity on history and society are three characteristics of the Christian religion that make it unique among religions, and the reason that, of all religions, it is the most hated.
These characteristics ironically seem to contradict some of the specific teachings of Christianity, and this conflict is not unknown to Christians.
It is partly the attempt by Christian theologians to resolve these ironies that is the reason for the many different varieties of Christianity.
Christianity and reason. Despite its emphasis on faith and authority, Christianity encourages reason and scholarship, even to question its own teachings.
In its original meaning, faith did not apply blind acceptance, but a faithful allegiance to what one's best reason showed the most true and was more closely allied to, faithfulness than belief.
Throughout the Bible, faith was always predicated on evidence and reason.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting that.
I skimmed the article. Throughout the Bible, faith was always predicated on evidence and reason.
Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord.
When Thomas doubted the resurrection of Jesus, he was convinced by evidence, not a demand to simply believe.
It is not evidence that you and I can accept, but the principle that only evidence and reason serve as the basis of our knowledge is correct.
The highly influential 19th century American theologian and evangelist Charles Finney expressed the common Christian view.
God has given us minds and expects us to use them.
It was from within the context of Christianity the Reformation broke the oppressive and intellectually stultifying influence of Rome.
And within the context of society dominated by the reasoning from evidence, influences of Christianity that the Enlightenment and Western civilization were spawned.
Two of the most important and positively influential philosophers, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke, were Christians and Aristotelians, and it was Aquinas who actually reintroduced Aristotle to philosophy.
It was not the doctrines of Christianity that influenced these philosophers, but the content of their philosophies came from Aristotle.
But the character of their philosophies and what all right philosophy ought to be came from Christianity.
Wow, just saying stuff, eh?
Philosophy, Ayn Rand wrote, is the goal towards which religion was only a helplessly blind groping.
The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy.
It was this sense of grandeur, reverence, exalted purity, and dedication to the pursuit of truth that was necessary to a correct philosophy and one of the most important of Christianity's contributions to Western civilization.
Christianity, purpose, and values.
Those who would destroy religion out of hand, like Christopher Hitchens, who can say, My hope is that literature can replace religion as a source of our ethics.
Thus admitting religion is a source of ethics for those who have a religion, but in the space of two paragraphs can describe his hatred and contempt for religion.
Demonstrates it is not what is wrong in religion that they hate.
But the fact that men have any basis for values, and what they wish to destroy is man's belief in any sort of ethics, it is instructive that he would replace religion with literature, of all things, as that source, not philosophy.
Well, I agree with that, of course, literature is an unsensical way to approach the problem of philosophy, as we use literature to figure out medicine.
It is not any particular teaching of religion that is hated by the likes of Hitchens, although they apparently hate that too.
What they hate and want to destroy It's that spirit of man that needs the grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, without which the spirit withers and dies.
So they kill religion itself and replace it with literature or something worse, and are bewildered by the fact that men have no values, revere nothing, and are contemptuous of all meaning and all virtue.
When nothing is sacred, when nothing is revered, when there is no absolute truth, there is nothing to live for beyond the moment, nothing to inspire one to do or be more than they can get away with, nothing to believe in beyond what one sees and feels right now.
And what they see is bewildering, and what they feel is fear.
When it is not the particular things that people believe that are addressed, but the fact that they believe in something that is held in contempt.
All that's left is nihilism, in philosophy, in hedonism, in ethics.
They dominate philosophy and ethics of today's Western societies, a society without purpose or values, ripe to be taken over by the first man who or ideology which claims to have values or purpose, such as Islam.
Christianity and individualism, perhaps the most ironic aspect of Christianity, is its inspiration towards individualism.
The early American pioneers, and most Americans until the middle of the twentieth century, were above all self-sufficient competent, honest, and proud of their abilities to live on their own merits.
Oh wait, except all of those who owned slaves.
Without anyone's help, especially the governments, most of them were Christians.
Well, sure, they were fleeing persecution.
Anyway, Christianity is a highly personal religion concerned with man's relationship with God.
Though not true of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, all other Christians believe there is no human mediator between them and their God, and that their relationship with God is determined by the individual, and they are judged or rewarded by their God for their own choices and actions.
This contradicts the Reformed view of original sin, of course, and some other specific teachings, which, of course, is problematic for the specific religions themselves.
Except for the mystic content, this view is not far from the view of the objectively rational.
Well, yes.
You know, the wind might accidentally carve 2 plus 2 is 4 in sand, and that's pretty close to being a mathematician.
It is not God, that was me, sorry, it is not God, but reality for the rational individual.
But in the same way, the Christian is responsible to no one but God, the rational individual is responsible to nothing but reality.
Reality is ruthless and unforgiving, even less forgiving than the Christian's God.
Yeah, I don't think so.
The Christian believes he cannot do wrong and get away with it because God knows everything he does, even his thoughts, and will judge him based on what he thinks and does.
Okay, I think we get that, so.
The danger is government, not Christianity.
Now there is a great mistake about Christianity in politics.
That is frequently made that must be made clear.
The Christian view in the United States has always been clearly a separation of state and religion.
That, in fact, is a specific teaching of Christianity, exemplified in the words of Christians, Jesus, rendered to Caesar the things that are Caesar, and to God the things that are God's.
It is true today that certain aspects of the religious community are influencing some government policies, which is a violation of both the US Constitution and Christian doctrine.
So the entire history of Christianity, including its desire to influence the Roman Empire and all of the Dark Ages, the entire basis of Christianity, wherein the Christians were cheek by jowl with the state and thoroughly enmeshed in state power, all of that, 1500 or 1200 year history, all of that was a violation of Christian teachings.
Oh boy, oh boy, where do you even begin with these people?
Anyway, we'll come back. Despite the altruistic aspects of Christianity, it's Christians who've understood better than any of the secular philosophers and teachers the necessity of all charity being voluntary and the evil of so-called government charity or welfare.
The very American hero, David Crockett, is the perfect example of a devout Christian and anti-government welfare proponent.
Christians have always been political activists, but only as private citizens.
The abolition movement was almost entirely a Christian movement, which we've talked about before.
The movement would no doubt have successfully wiped out slavery in this country without the politically motivated and horrible Civil War.
The Civil War was not initiated by Christians, but politicians.
But didn't you just say that politicians are all Christians?
Anyway, the virtue of Christianity.
I, like Rand, am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one.
Like she, I'm not fighting against religion, I'm fighting for a reason.
Helpless blind groping for the truth, blah blah blah.
I think that you can...
I think we sort of get the idea of this, so I'd like to just run over a couple of this guy's points.
Of course, it's like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall to figure out the rational content of somebody who's working with religion, right?
Because they'll just quote stuff.
They'll just quote stuff.
It's hard to say that Christianity is anti-state and then say, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, right?
That's a very, very important statement in Christianity, and of course it's pulled out a lot by Christians.
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
Not render unto Caesar what Caesar takes from you.
Not render unto Caesar that which he forces you to give him.
Not submit to Caesar's power.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.
And what that means, of course, is that the taxes that you pay, the life that you have to give to those who have guns, is actually owned by them.
It's their property.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.
Pay your taxes. He already owns you.
He already owns your life. He already owns your property.
He actually has a moral right.
It is his property.
You are giving him only giving him his property.
Render unto Caesar. That which is Caesar's.
He owns it. It's his.
Give it to him. It's hard to say exactly how this is virulently anti-state.
Because if the government actually owns you, I don't really see what moral commandments you can really bring to bear in terms of...
Saying that this is an anti-statist philosophy.
Now, of course, I mean, I think that the writer is correct in saying that there is a crisis of values in the West or whatever.
There's a crisis of values the whole world over.
It's just that the devout mystics don't know it because they're too enmeshed in mythology.
But yeah, absolutely.
I couldn't agree with him more.
There is a crisis of values in the West.
And that is a natural hangover, right?
When you stop taking a drug, you get withdrawal, right?
And nihilism is the withdrawal from religion.
Nihilism is the withdrawal that we're facing from religion.
And I don't think that that can just be chalked up to let's bring religion back, right?
That's like saying, oh, does it feel bad to get off heroin?
We'll go back on heroin.
I mean, that just doesn't make any sense.
And yes, the 20th century was an absolutely brutal, brutal, brutal murderous genocidal century for most of the world.
And that was the inheritance from Christianity, right?
From 1,500 years, more actually, I should say, for 1,500 years of rank superstition, of the worship of authority, of the worship of abstracts, right?
Christianity teaches you to worship fictional abstracts.
Christianity teaches you to worship anthropomorphized projections.
And so because you are trained and taught to worship these abstractions, these personified abstractions, then of course you are actually embedded in a cult of personality called the priesthood.
And even if you believe that it's not the priesthood but God itself, you are still trained from birth almost, actually from birth with the baptism, you are trained to worship collective abstracts, fantasies, mythology.
And of course, this is then just taken over by the fascistic movement.
I mean, it's amazing to me that the fascistic movement in the 20th century, which was openly embraced, subsidized, prayed for, By the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church, the fascistic movement in the West would have been impossible without the support of the Church.
By that I mean both the one in Italy under Mussolini and the one in Germany under Hitler.
I mean, in Mussolini, in Italy, the Catholics were commanded by the Pope to vote for Mussolini.
The Pope sends letters of welcome and gratitude and praise to Hitler on the eve of the Second World War?
It's fantastic! So, yeah, for sure.
What happened was that we were immersed in this soup of collective fantasy, of mythology, and then along comes science, which was specifically attacked and opposed by the Church in just about every single one of its manifestations.
The number of scientists burned at the stake goes into the thousands, the opposition to doctrine.
I mean, the Church was against Anesthesia.
I mean, the church was against, the church opposed anesthesia, saying that it was an interference with God's plan of pain, right?
But of course, right, the more miserable you are, the more likely you are to turn To God, right?
I mean, Christianity, as all religions, has a specific motive when it's got control and power of making people feel bad, right?
You come to a happy man and say, I'm here to save you, and of course he's going to say, from what?
I'm happy. You don't need to save me for anything.
Thanks very much. I'm doing just fine.
So, yeah, for sure. I mean, what happened was you sort of sunk into this brutalized mist of irrationalism and superstition, and then science came along and managed to triumph.
over the church despite the opposition of the church And so then the church in, you know, in many Western countries, the church as a whole sort of went by-by, right?
I mean, as a sort of core cultural institution.
And that's simply because science came along.
Now, science has not provided a science of values, and that's what we're up to.
That's our project, right? Provide a science of values so that we can get off crack cocaine.
We can get off the opiate of religion And not end up with the nihilism, right?
So it has been a massive hangover, to say the least, in terms of our loss of religion.
But the solution is not to look back yearningly at the final days where we were dying from addiction to poppy seeds, but to continue to work and look forward.
So, it is, of course, quite amazing that there is just a lot of historical nonsense here, like a lot of historical bromides and so on, and only somebody who has any kind of reference for religion would think that quoting Ayn Rand is an argument, right?
I mean, Ayn Rand's a brilliant thinker, but, like all of us, makes mistakes, right?
So, to have a look at the Ayn Rand things, right?
You know that you're in the realm of mythology when you get words that are bundled with lexical sets or emotional meanings that are embedded, right?
So when somebody says, I'm intransigent but not militant, Well, who wants to be militant?
Hands up. Anybody. Who wants to be militant, right?
And we had this conversation on the boards recently about the word ideological.
Nobody says, well, you're really ideological, and says it in a positive way.
An ideology is considered to be a defense mechanism masquerading as political intent.
So... Who wants to be militant?
Well, no one, right? This is just a manipulative word that people use in place of an argument.
It's an implicit argument, an ad hominem argument.
It's an implicit, well, only stupid people would believe this.
You don't want to be stupid, do you?
It's like, well, only militant people would oppose religion.
You don't want to be a militant, do you?
So, when faith and reason clash, it is up to religious people, says Ayn Rand, to decide how they choose to reconcile that conflict.
Well, no, it's not up to them.
I mean, of course, it's up to them in terms of their personal choice.
But, A, you can't resolve that conflict.
You can't resolve that conflict.
You have to just get rid of superstition.
When you're faced with reason, you can't resolve the conflict.
You just get rid of superstition.
To resolve the conflict between a husband and wife is to find a compromise.
So you can't resolve that conflict.
And it's not up to you anyway.
I mean, how would it be if I was a mathematician and I said, well, When someone says that 2 plus 2 is 4 and someone else says that 2 plus 2 is 5, it's up to the people who believe that 2 plus 2 is 5 to decide how they choose to resolve their conflict.
No, it's not. It's not up to them.
In terms of reality, in terms of their own biases and bigotries, yeah, sure, believe whatever you want, right?
But it's not a responsible...
It's not a responsible mathematician who says, well, it's up to you to determine whether 2 plus 2 is 4 or 2 plus 2 is 5.
No, you say, no, 2 plus 2 is 4.
2 plus 2 is not 5. That's error, right?
And you can still believe it if you want, but you're completely wrong.
You're completely incorrect. So, I mean, you know, all due respect to our favorite Russian chain smoker, but this is not a rational argument.
This is a Weasley argument, right?
And this is the woman who says that in any conflict between food and poison, it is only death that can win, right?
So she's very big on the dramatic stuff, and I love the dramatic stuff too, but when it comes to actually...
Talking to politicians who are obviously religious, then there is sort of a live and let live philosophy which I don't think is reasonable.
So... When she criticizes this television discussion where somebody says God is a process of creative social intercourse, and she says, well, that, I submit, is obscene.
And, of course, I think that word is a bit strong, but that doesn't really matter.
To rob religion of whatever dignity and philosophical intention it might once have possessed.
I'm shocked by so cynically enormous a degree of contempt for the intelligence and sensibility of people, specifically of those intended to be taken in by the switch.
Well, why isn't God a process of creative social intercourse?
Since God doesn't exist, God can be whatever you want, right?
God can be a tap-dancing tea cozy.
God can be the angel that sings from your armpit.
God can be your first memory of sex, and God can be anything you want, because God doesn't exist.
It's a null comparison. So, dignity and philosophical intention it might have once possessed.
But religion is not philosophical.
Religion is anti-philosophy.
I mean, that's just by the very nature of it, right?
And... Religion is not embraced by people.
Religion is inflicted upon children through the threat of punishment.
And people always want to bypass this basic etymology of this belief and say, well, what they do is they look at adult Christians and they say, well, this adult Christian, you see, is religious and believes in God and goes to church and so on and so on and so on.
The question is, why? The question is, why is this person a Christian rather than having some other belief?
Well, they're a Christian because they were taught that this was true, that they would be punished if they did not believe it.
They may have been physically punished if they did not believe it, but they certainly would be punished with rejection and disapproval, which of course is an asthma and death to a child.
So they were bullied into believing in Christianity.
Christianity is a virus that attacks children.
That's all religion is. But Christianity is not embraced by people.
People are not just Christians.
Christianity, as any cult belief, is inflicted upon children through the threat of dire punishment.
It is propaganda that is inflicted upon children through the threat of dire punishment.
And since there is no God, it doesn't come from God.
Right? It doesn't come from God.
It comes from people.
So, this is very simply, I mean, just looking at the etymology of religion, right?
If there's supposed to be nobility in religion, then why is it always and forever inflicted upon children through the threat of dire punishment, propagandized?
Why is it always and forever inflicted upon children Specifically because those children don't have the ability to reason.
Why is Christianity not spending its time trying to convert intelligent scientists who are adults?
Because, of course, the reason that Christians don't spend their time doing that is because what they're teaching is a bunch of lies.
I don't set up a Church of the Tooth Fairy and try and recruit Nobel Prize winning physicists, right?
Because they just laugh at me and assume it was kind of a joke, right?
I don't go to biologists and try and get them to believe in Santa Claus and the flying reindeer because they know better.
So, religion is a viral meme that attacks the helpless, attacks the dependent, attacks the weak.
Children are mentally weak, in the same way they're physically weak, it's just they're not developed.
And these are just the facts.
I mean, this is just empirically observable, right?
I mean, just go watch Jesus Camp, right?
Religion is something that is inflicted upon children, 99 times out of 100.
So, if any other cult were indoctrinating its children, In false beliefs, then you would not say that it was a gentle, wise, and wonderful, and curious, and interesting, and decent, and moral, and this and that kind of thing.
I mean, imagine if I went to an adult.
This is something I noticed on the internet, right?
Imagine if I went to an educated, intelligent adult and said, this is my cult.
This is what I want you to believe.
I want you to believe that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Well, you'd think I was mad, right?
But of course, if you are a dependent, wide-eyed child, then somehow this is now embraced, this sort of madness, right?
This gentleness or this idea that Christianity is sort of interested in reason, I mean, if every quote that a Christian finds about reason is pariah, let us reason together sayeth the Lord.
But, of course, the Lord says that to Job, who he's just...
Murdered Job's family, killed his crops and his livestock, inflicted him with hideous pustules and boils.
Why? Because of a paranoid love, or a paranoid test of faith that was instigated by Satan, right?
So in a sense, since these things are evil to inflict upon someone, it's clear that God is doing Satan's work and so on, right?
So, it is really, really quite amazing to also sort of to think, right?
You can look at all this sweetness and light and make up all this stuff that you want about religion, but the sort of basic and simple fact of the matter...
Is that, in the Bible, of course God says that slavery is good, that we should just try and rape children, that selling your daughter into sexual slavery is moral, that genocide and murder is moral, and this and that and the other.
All of this sort of stuff is sort of core within the realm of religion.
I'm not sure exactly how reverence, which is really just the scar tissue of propaganda, right?
How reverence plays any part in the content, right?
I mean, because if all you value is reverence, then just about anybody can reverence anything, right?
People reverence Karl Marx, people reverence Mao Zedong, people reverence Kim Yong-il in North Korea, right?
So there's lots of reverence and these children are taught all of this, right?
And children of communist dictatorships are taught a lot more science than children of religious dictatorships.
A lot more rationality.
So, reverence is sort of the scar tissue of that which was inflicted on you as a child.
And the reason that we end up with reverence is because we're terrified, right?
We desire approval as children.
That's our coin for survival, right?
If our parents disapprove of us fundamentally, they'll leave us in the snow and we'll die.
So we are programmed to desire the approval of our parents.
That power is abused by parents, of course, as almost all power is in the absence of velocity.
And so we end up reverencing because we're terrified, right?
It's a reaction formation, right?
You know, the old thing that if you really want to date a girl, you pretend that you don't like her, you know, if you don't think you can manage it or whatever.
Well, it's the same thing is true with religion.
We end up with reverence because we're terrified, bullied, and brutalized.
So we end up with reverence as a reaction formation.
We can't have a stable relationship with God or our parents.
Religion is our relationship with our parents and our teachers, but the teachers that our parents give us too.
It's all about the family.
It's all about the family. It's all about our relationship with our parents.
It's got nothing to do with God and fundamentally nothing to do with the priests or the government.
They just cash in on it. And so we have to love our parents because we're terrified of what they've done to us and we're horrified of what they've done to us deep down.
So we have a reaction formation because we're told that that's sin, right?
Honor thy mother and thy father. Which is a paradox.
Any mother or father who commands you to honor them is worthy only of fleeing from, right?
So I'm not really sure exactly how a respect for reason is tied into this.
Yeah, for sure. Christians, like all religious people, have a tortured relationship with reason, a love-hate relationship because they desperately want the credibility of reason, but deep down, you know, this cosmic Jewish zombie stuff, not so much amenable to reason.
The astounding thing, too, is that, I mean, this guy says that in the Bible, reason and evidence is at the core.
I mean, I don't even know what to say to that.
A certain amount of error is always acceptable, I mean, because, you know, we're all full of mistakes.
It's very tough to have consistency and integrity.
But when someone says something like this, That at the core of Christianity and the core of the Bible is a respect for reason?
Boy, I can't even imagine what you would say to that.
I mean, that's just such an astounding...
I mean, that's exactly like saying that the core of Nazism was a respect for Jews.
I mean, as Luther said, reason you tear out the eyes of reason, kill reason, reason is the enemy, reason has been considered the enemy.
And yes, there was some respect for Aristotle in the church.
And it's important to remember as well that the church in the Dark Ages was a haven for people who were interested in philosophy as well.
Like if you wanted to have a life that wasn't dying at the age of 20 from tooth decay after, you know, 15 years of working in the fields, then you would join the clergy.
But it wasn't that everybody who joined the clergy believed in God.
It was a refuge, right? I mean, you would join the church because you wanted to learn how to read, right?
So that was the only avenue, right?
The church monopolized education.
So yeah, there was some reverence and some interest in Aristotle, and this was a sort of secret non-church within the church.
But you couldn't speak about these things openly.
You couldn't reason from first principles, right?
Then when he says, I think it was St.
Augustine... Doubted the resurrection, but then evidence was provided.
Well, that's astounding.
When a writer says St.
Augustine doubted the resurrection of Jesus, but was convinced by evidence, the writer is actually saying that the resurrection of Jesus actually occurred.
That a man crucified and three days dead came back to life.
And not like, you know, he went into a coma and then came out of it, but he used the word resurrection, right?
So, a writer who says that the Bible is based on reason and evidence, and who says that there's evidence that convinces people of the resurrection, I mean, that's not a writer that I can respect.
Plus, you know, can we, Christ Almighty, can we please, at some point in the world, at some point in history, Stop insulting our Nubian brothers by talking about how amazingly free America was in its founding.
I mean, please, please, can we just get off the Whitey-Von-Whitey bandwagon and stop talking about the immense freedoms that were available in America in its foundings?
Can we perhaps also have a small piece of sympathy for the children and the women, as well as the slaves within that society, who did not have political freedom, did not have the right to vote?
I mean, not the children, but the women.
Transfer property, own property, take out loans.
Please, can we just stop looking at the upper middle class white people and saying that is the sole category of determining freedom within America?
I mean, please, we know enough now.
We know enough now.
This is not hidden. That there were millions of slaves in this country who were not freed through the founding of the country.
I mean, God, can we just get out of our white armor and look at the multicultural landscape and notice that there were enormous, enormous sections of society that were openly enslaved or denied the most basic rights.
That really bothers me, because every time somebody hears about how free America was, Who was not part of that, we lose them, right?
We sound horribly racist, frankly, or prejudiced, or whatever, but just, like, nonsensical, right?
This is a completely nonsensical statement.
When a bunch of people are slaves, and nobody ever talks about that, but just talks about how wonderfully free the country was, I mean, I think you get the idea.
Please, let's not bother with that anymore.
It just shows appalling ignorance.
Appalling, appalling ignorance and an agenda, right?
An agenda, right? Somebody who says that religion is founded or the Bible is founded on evidence and so on, right?
This is somebody who is not...
This is just a piece of propaganda.
It's just a piece of nonsense that's put out there because the person doesn't like confronting Christians.
So, yeah, absolutely.
Christianity as a fanatical, propagandistic, superstitious bunch of nonsense, when it finally gave way, because thought advances, when it finally gave way, nobody knew what to believe in.
Nobody believed in anything after that.
Sure, I got it. I got it.
But when superstition is proven false, and nihilism erupts, the solution is not then to respect religion again.
We push on when something is proven false.
There's all these other religions, 10,000 different gods, and you could say each one of them, right?
And why is it that people think that Christianity is about absolute truth?
Christianity is about totalitarian opinion.
All religion is about totalitarian opinion.
Brutal totalitarian opinion first inflicted upon children and then if allowed to run rampant in society, And look, God!
People did not tame Christianity because Christianity wanted to be tamed.
People tamed Christianity because after the schism that came about, after the Protestant Reformation, religious wars consumed Europe for hundreds of years, and society became a living hell.
If heroin addiction has you retching up blood in a gutter, weighing 95 pounds, and then you decide to quit heroin, You don't say, well, heroin led me in a positive way towards quitting heroin.
No. You simply have to make the choice.
You either die or you give up heroin.
Some societies continue to die.
The Islamic societies and other kinds of the Buddhist societies.
And some societies, like the West, decide not to.
Now, whether it's the Greek Socratic history or whatever, I'm not going to even get into that right now.
That's a big, long, complicated discussion.
But religion makes you sick.
Fantasy makes you sick.
Totalitarian opinion makes you sick.
We're not talking about personal superstition here.
We're not talking about rabbit's feet.
We're talking about the dictatorship of whim.
Because there's no God, people just make stuff up.
So yes, absolutely.
The West ditched the unity of church and state.
Why? Because the West was vomiting up blood, 95 pounds, in a gutter, strung out on heroin, about to die.
Yeah, so we made the choice to give up for heroin, and yes, then we felt like shit for quite some time, and we're still there, because we just, right?
The state is the methadone for religion, right?
The state is what we think is going to get us off heroin, the heroin of religion, but it turns out to be any, if not as bad, possibly even worse, addiction.
Maybe methadone's not, I don't know, my drug, but you know, whatever drug you take to deal with a problem, you get involved, and Vicodin to deal with depression, then you end up addicted to Vicodin, right?
That's all that's happened, right?
We were addicted to religion, we gave up that addiction, and we grabbed onto the state as the new addiction, right?
And now that is becoming less believable, and that's why our time has come, right?
Because I think at some point people are going to get sick and tired of these addictions and want to live free and clear and rationally.
So, Christianity did not pave the way to its own loss of power Then he says, well, Christians don't believe in X, Y, and Z, well, except for the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox and so on.
Well, who gets to make up what Christians believe except for?
Because then he's saying there's a Christianity which excludes Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox religion.
Well, how does this guy get to define Christianity and say that tens of millions of people who believe stuff are not part of Christianity?
But this is what I mean by a dictatorship of whim.
He just says, well, these people aren't really Christians.
Well, says who? Says who?
The almost fanatical hatred of Christianity.
Again, this is just a lexical set design, but you don't want to be fanatical and full of hatred, right?
But which is the more fanatical set of beliefs, right?
I think that it is moral to murder unbelievers, to own slaves, to rape children...
Because some imaginary Jewish zombie sky god tells me to.
Or to correctly identify religion as that which is bullied upon children and that which commands the death of unbelievers.
I don't make anything up about religion.
I'm just reading back their own texts and people get upset.
In most of its present-day forms, it is the most innocuous and benign of religions.
Well, I don't think you could really say that...
I really don't think that you could make that case.
With the Iraqis in mind, right?
It is not a benevolent religion.
You've got two of the most religious leaders in the Western countries, Tony Blair and George Bush, who apparently, it seems, prayed to God, and God told them to go and kill all the Middle Easterers.
The danger of that, of course, is not that these two lunatics think that they're talking to God.
I don't imagine that they do think anything of the sort.
I think they just find that it plays well with certain constituents.
But what is really terrifying about that, of course, is that how do you tell them that they're wrong?
If somebody says, well, I prayed to God and God told me to invade Iraq, how does a religious person say that he's wrong?
By what standard? I mean, this is the hell, the living hell of religion.
Right? You could say, well, in the Bible it says this, but then he says, well, in the Bible it says that, and you can make up anything you want, right?
Interpret, interpret. You'll always find some theologian who says that, you can find some theologians who say that Christianity is about Catholicism, sorry, Christianity is about individuality and capitalism, because Christianity could as easily be about the magical snake that lives in your toenail.
Well, when you have a null comparison and you're comparing something that doesn't exist and is irrational and is whim-based, you can say it's anything.
So the fact that someone can dig up a theologian who says that Christianity is about capitalism and political liberty, so what?
Christianity can be about anything, because it doesn't exist.
it's fantasy, it's made up.
So, you know, overall, this to me is just a bunch of errant nonsense. ...
Those who would destroy religion out of hand, right?
Again, out of hand, all these kinds of...
These are all just phrases that are sort of clues or keys or, you know, that turn people into...
Of course, replacing ethics with literature is...
Well, that's just Christopher Hitchens once...
Then let's get addicted to literature instead of religion or the state.
Of course, the most dangerous part is going to be when we break the addiction to family.
That's when people are going to join cults, but we can only do the best we can.
We still have to kill illusion. We have to cure the illness.
If we can get someone off crack cocaine, maybe they'll become addicted to heroin, but that doesn't matter.
The first thing we have to do is get them off crack cocaine, because they're going to die either way.
Or they're going to die if we don't.
Oh, here it is. Christianity is a highly personal tradition concerned with man's relationship with God, though not true of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions.
All other Christians believe that there is no human mediator between them and their God.
Well, again, this is just specious nonsense.
Completely specious nonsense.
No other human mediator between them and God?
I tell you what, my friends, this I would be enormously impressed by.
Some guy grows up on a desert island and has no access to books, no access to language, no access to others, no access to communication with other human beings of any form, and comes back believing in Christianity.
Now that, my friends, would be a religion that was independent of human mediation.
And so people say, uh...
There's no need for any human mediation between you and God, right?
There's no need for anyone to bring you to God or your relationship with God as an entirely personal one.
Fantastic! Fantastic!
I think that would be wonderful because, of course, if that were applied consistently, Christianity would be dead in a generation.
Because... If you believe that there's no need for human mediation between a human being and God, then stop teaching the goddamn religion to the children.
Because by teaching children about God, and about Jesus, and about the Bible, and the flood, and the whatever, whatever, right?
By teaching children about that, you are imposing yourself as a human intermediary between you and God.
Sorry, between the child and God.
If Christians believe that there's no need for human intermediary between someone and God, then stop teaching about religion.
Stop teaching the children about religion.
This is so fundamental.
I mean, I could go on and on about this, but I won't.
I mean, but this is just, this is so, so, so fundamental.
Certainly and surely and absolutely, children should receive their religious instruction, not from flawed and sinful human beings, but from God himself.
Is that a fair statement to make?
If there's to be a transfer of knowledge, surely, about God, surely God should do it and not human beings, right?
I mean, this is the fundamental nonsense that's at the core of religion, the evil.
Corruption, I'd say. Surely, God should teach children about God, not human beings.
But the fact is that human beings always teach children about God and their particular religion.
Always. Always. Right?
They never say to their children, I can't talk to you about this, because anything that I'm going to say is going to be my limited human perspective, and it's going to be incorrect in so many different ways.
So, go talk to God.
Like, if somebody who speaks Arabic comes to me and says, what did this Arabic person just say?
I'm going to say, go talk to the Arabic person, right?
And so, the ways of God are mysterious.
God works in ineffable ways.
So, when a child says, where did the universe come from?
He says, well, I can't tell you. You can't even say, go pray to God, because again, that's something that is telling the child something about God.
And of course, God will come to them.
You say, I can't answer that.
And then the child will keep asking it within the child's own mind, where did we come from?
And then God will tell them. Because God is certainly interfering in the situation by providing religious texts, by creating miracles, by bringing people back from the dead, by Punishing the rib woman for listening to the talking snake.
So God is certainly more than happy to intervene in human affairs.
And then people say, well, when I tell my child about religion, I am motivated by God.
God tells me what to say to children about religion, right?
So, well, then you're not necessary.
If you can be the human agency, then if God can talk to you to talk to your child about religion, then surely God can talk to the child directly.
You're not necessary. But religious people simply show that they don't believe in their religion.
The moment that religious people...
Talk to their children about Christ or Muhammad.
They're simply saying, I don't believe it.
I know that God isn't going to talk to you, because I know that God doesn't talk to people.
So I'm going to tell you.
This is completely revealing that they don't believe any of it, right?
So, anyway, I could sort of go on and on, but, I mean, there's just such an astounding amount of error in all of this that you just know.
This is somebody who's got religious people in his life.
He doesn't want to confront them, right?
So he goes and quotes people and doesn't make any arguments from first principles.
But I certainly will say that until I think this conversation came along, and again, this may sound self-aggrandizing, but this is sort of my opinion, until this conversation came along, I'm not sure that there was a very strong Way of answering the question, why be good in the absence of religion?
Saying literature, I mean, let's just get more totalitarian opinion, right?
If literature is to be elevated to the status of moral absolutes, then since literature is merely opinion, it's just another set of totalitarian opinions that we're supposed to be enslaved to.
And I'm just thinking, I'm sick of that.
We as a species have got to get sick of that.
So, yeah, anyway, I hope that this has been helpful.
I certainly do appreciate it. It's been a while since I've talked about religion.
And do let me know what you think.
▲
Export Selection