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Aug. 10, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:03
837 Board Responses: DeFOO Feedback and the Christian Channel

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Time Text
Hello, everybody. It's Steph.
It is noon on the 10th of August, 2007.
What? What?
There's no need to stare at me like that, everybody.
It's not that I'm at the beach, ignoring all of the core work that needs to be done in the redrum, redrum, for Free Domain Radio, but rather I have got a beach relaxation tape?
That I'm playing in the background?
I'm not sure if you heard my wife's skeptical comment.
Strangely enough, she's also on the beach relaxation tape.
And boy, is she relaxing.
So, I hope that you're having a wonderful, wonderful time.
I'm sorry that my podcasts have been scanty of late.
But I have been working on taking a little bit of time off after grinding away on the last book and also starting I am working on a very...
I think it's a very good metaphor for understanding morality, which ties across both religion and science, economics, politics, and the family, and ties it all together.
But shockingly enough, it is a new metaphor, but I'm working on it quite hard to make sure it all fits together and coming up with good examples, so that's going to be the beginning of the new book.
Now, there was some consternation for people who have read the existing book.
Not some, a little bit of consternation.
Somebody was saying, I said, since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics, and I can certainly understand that the implication there is that when we had religion around, we had our way in ethics.
But I don't think that's certainly not what I meant.
I'll sort of explain it, though.
It doesn't really matter what I explain.
It either makes sense to you or it doesn't.
This really isn't coming.
Oh, sorry about that.
Slight interruption. I just had to flip the tape for the beach music relaxation background noises.
So, to continue, the book is designed to introduce people to some of the philosophy that we talk about here and requires no prior knowledge of the A podcast series and so on.
One of the things that you have to answer when you talk to people about the need for change is, why now?
Why not 100 years ago?
Why not 100 years in the future?
The question is, why now?
If the plumber comes and says, you need to replace your flanges, I'm going to say, why now?
Why can't I wait for a couple of years?
Why did it not happen a couple of years ago?
Why now? I do right after that say that religion is illusory and so on.
Just because you've lost your way, It doesn't mean that you were on the right path to begin with, right?
But we're more conscious about having no sort of centralized ethical standards at the moment compared to, at least in the past, where there was the illusion of the Ten Commandments and so on.
I may or may not change that for the second edition because I don't want to sort of mislead people, but remember, this is designed for people who haven't had the benefit of 837 or 838 podcasts, and so I can't go into a whole definition of ethics and how Religious ethics were false and so on.
I'm really just trying to gain central agreement on some basic things like truth-telling and going from there.
So anyway, that's a minor quibble that one or two people have had about the book.
I certainly appreciate it and understand it.
I was quite conscious about that when I put it in, but I'll wait and sort of see what more feedback may come from people with regards to this question or issue.
The problem is, of course, the challenge that I face when writing passages like that If I start to say, we never had any ethics, religion provides no ethics, or the ethics that religion provides are illusory, I can't make that claim without backing it up.
And backing it up takes a heck of a lot of energy.
That's an entire book in itself, right?
Dismantling religious ethics and showing how they are not valid.
So I couldn't logically make the claim that all religious ethics are invalid, because I can't just make that statement without backing it up.
And backing it up is sort of what the next book on UPB As I mentioned on the board, it's actually more of a musical.
It's going to be to the tune of songs by the Jackson 5, so it's going to be sort of U-P-B, easy as A-B-C. It's going to be sort of going like that, and that's sort of the core melody, using the term in the loosest possible sense, as my rendition of it goes.
So, thanks again.
I appreciate the people who bought the books.
The book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, available at Lulu.
You can just go to freedomainradio.com, click on the link there to buy it, and you'll get it in about a week or so.
It's under $20 and worth 10 times every penny if I do this as myself.
And you can also go to podcastawards.com to vote for Freedomain Radio.
You can create as many emails as you want and vote.
Every 24.01 hours.
So if you could see your way clear to that, that would be a wonderful thing.
I will take that in lieu of donations for the foreseeable future, because for me, that will gain more credibility for the site when people come to visit it.
It will allow me to restart my stumble-upon ads, and I think we'll get us some good credibility.
And also, what else was there that was going on that people wanted to know about?
Oh yes, and as usual, donations are more than welcome.
And I'm making some good progress on The God of Atheists.
It should be finished next week, and I will post them all at once and let everybody know who's gold plus, who have access, who has access to it, so that you can finish off that book.
I'm really enjoying reading it again.
It's great fun to get back into the characters.
So, some things that are, this is going to be a bit of a ramble cast, shockingly enough, or even by regular ramble cast standards, it's a rambling cast.
So, this is just some stuff that's been on the board lately that my fortune cookie 12-syllable answers have not done justice to, but the first question or issue that came up is, if you're going to defoo,
like if you just sort of have gone over Your family relations and you've tried to connect with people and you have found that it is rejected or scorned or negated or ignored or not satisfying and you've reached the end of that road of sort of finding your way out of the cage by going to the trap door in the foggy center of it and you've decided to defuse.
Sort of two central questions have come up.
One is the content of the letter that you may or may not be sending and I would certainly recommend that you do send To your foo.
And my sort of suggested wording, and I know that this sounds a little silly, but I think it makes sense, is think of it like you're quitting a job.
If you're quitting a job, you don't have to go into lengthy explanations about why you're quitting your job.
You know, like if you've had some job where the boss has been a jerk and you decide to quit that job, you don't necessarily need to send a 12-page letter detailing the times and dates and Everything that occurred and everything that was said and done, that defines your boss as a jerk, right?
Because you're leaving the job.
It doesn't matter, right? You're leaving the family, right?
You're leaving the job. Now, of course, I know that defooing is not quite the same as leaving a job.
It's more intense. It's more of a rollercoaster.
But fundamentally, the ideal state of mind to defoo is not to gain closure.
You don't leave your family to gain closure with your family.
You gain closure with your family by attempting to connect with your family.
You gain closure with your family by attempting to be intimate and honest and open and vulnerable with your family.
And then when you realize that that is never, ever going to happen, never, ever going to work, you're forever going to be scorned, rejected, humiliated, ignored, bullied, and so on, then you gain closure through that.
And Like, you don't get out of a marriage by storming out, right?
I mean, slamming the door and using it as a tactic and then, you know, going back.
I mean, that's not closure. Closure is when you're just done.
There's nothing to add, nothing to take away.
You're complete with the experience.
There's no doubt left.
And so when you know that you're done with a job, then you're done with the job, right?
So at the last job I had at P-Velocity, it was on my second weekend.
So I said, oh, you're going to go down to New York and present at a conference.
And it was a new field for me and so on.
So I worked pretty hard on a presentation with literature and books that I'd read.
Basically, the company took apart the presentation and reassembled it in a way that I argued wouldn't work, but I didn't make a very strong argument because I was two or three weeks into the job and what did I know?
These people had been working in the field for a decade or more.
And so the presentation...
I went and did the presentation, and it bombed, right?
And it didn't bomb because I can't present, right?
I've had great success presenting at conferences before.
It bombed because the content was rudimentary, right?
So they had underestimated the intelligence of the audience, and so basically people were not engaged in the presentation because it was 2 plus 2 is 4 to a group of mathematicians, right?
So it's like, well, obviously he's misjudged just, but we're going to be polite and let him get through it, but we're not going to have any questions, right?
And so afterwards, I said, well, I don't think this presentation really works, and here's why, and blah, blah, blah, right?
But then when we decided to part ways, this company and myself, I didn't have to write a long letter saying, oh, by the way, there was this presentation, and then there was this other thing, and then there was this other thing, and then there was this other thing, because we've decided to part, or at least I've decided to part ways with the company, and I don't think they regretted it very much as it occurred.
But you don't have to go into all these details because you're not trying to reform the other person.
Trying to reform the other person is an attempt to stay engaged in the relationship.
It's a very, very important thing to understand.
If you're still wanting to fix your parents, a couple of people have sent me emails saying, I want to buy a copy of On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, the first volume in the Free Domain Radio, Plan 666 volume library of Endless exposition.
They said, oh, I want to buy a copy for my parents.
I'm like, hey, I'm happy that you want to buy a copy, but I don't think it's a good idea.
I mean, if they defude, right?
I don't think it's a good idea to buy it for your parents.
Because if you're still in the relationship with the hopes of reforming the other person, A, it's illusory because you can't reform other people.
You can only lead by example and hope that they will follow.
And B, you're still engaged in that.
You're still hoping for a change.
Letting go of hope for change with your parents is one of the hardest things about defooing.
That's the endless part about defooing.
So defooing is like landing from an empty, arid orbit to a lush and fertile ground.
But then the problem is you still have dreams about being in orbit, and that goes on for a long time.
And so after you stop seeing your parents, it's very hard to let go of the desire to change them.
That's why defooing too early is really risky.
That's why I say communicate with your parents relentlessly.
Tell them how you feel if they reject you.
Tell them that it hurts you that they reject you.
If they get angry at you, tell them that you're scared when they're angry.
If they then try and manipulate you, say, I feel upset or I feel distant or I feel manipulated or whatever, right?
You're just relentlessly honest with them in a real-time relationship about what is occurring for you.
And either they're going to start listening to you, or they're just going to keep manipulating, keep manipulating, keep rejecting, keep humiliating, keep ignoring, keep putting down, keep changing the subject, keep rejecting you.
But you keep going with that.
You keep beating your head against the wall until you never want to go back and beat your head against the wall again.
Right. This is very, very important.
Right. Very, very, very important.
If you don't get that throwing yourself into a riptide is going to drown you, ooh, beach metaphor, and you have this real desire to throw yourself in a riptide, the way to kill that desire is to almost drown.
Right? So you, in a sense, push into your parents, push into the relationship with your parents, not push at them, but just push relentlessly in, in terms of openness and honesty and authenticity and so on.
And take them at their word, right?
They say, they love you.
Oh, we love you. We want to hear from you.
We want to hear about you. We want to know what's going on for you.
Well, tell them what's going on for you in terms of your relationship with yourself, with others, and with them, right?
So you just keep telling them the truth.
Keep telling them the truth. Keep telling them what you feel.
If they make you angry, say, what you're doing is making me upset.
Oh, it's making me angry.
You don't just lash out at them. Or you say, oh, and then they change tactics and they start trying to guilt you.
It's like, oh, what you're doing is making me feel guilty and I don't really like that.
And, you know, maybe they'll switch tactics and just start ignoring you and say, well, now I feel like you're punishing me by withdrawing from me because I said you felt guilty.
You were making me feel guilty or I felt guilty because of what you were doing and so on.
What's your experience of what I'm doing, right?
And they say, well, I think you're just being a jerk or whatever.
It's like, well, I don't think that I'm being a jerk, but I don't think it's very helpful to communicate to me that I'm just being a jerk, right?
That doesn't really... Help in terms of communication.
Just relentlessly honest.
Real-time relationship. What are you feeling?
Processing. Talk to them. If you don't feel anything when they say something, say, you know, you just said that and I don't feel anything.
If your mom bursts into tears and talks about how hard done she is by you and you feel nothing, say, you know, when you cry like that, I don't feel anything.
I don't feel any sympathy. I feel kind of a little bit of disgust because it's like all about your pain and I'm talking to you about things that have hurt me and so on, right?
You're just relentlessly honest.
Relentlessly honest. Keep beating your head against that wall.
Maybe you'll break through. Maybe you'll be the first.
But maybe you'll break through.
But of course, the vast likelihood is that you will eventually, like close to when you feel like you're going to go insane, and it's very uncomfortable to do this, right?
But it's good. So you want to experience that discomfort so you don't have any desire to go back.
Or if you keep pounding your head against the wall, thinking you're going to get through it, and you don't feel any pain, and maybe you're even masochistic and it feels good, then you're never going to start beating your head against the wall, right?
If you just feel a little twinge of pain, then you're going to say, well, I can cut through this because the goal of getting through the wall is so good, right?
What you want to do is be bowed, bloody, and broken with a splitting migraine on your knees, spitting out your teeth.
I mean, to take a strong metaphor, but it's real, right?
You have to do it until you can't bear it.
And after not bearing it is closure.
After beating your head against your parents' indifference and coldness or hostility or contempt or...
Humiliation. After you beat your head against that so hard and so long that you just feel like you can't do it anymore.
That's what they call closure.
And that's why I keep saying, be honest with them.
Reveal. Don't run away. A few of your parents run to them.
Talk to them. Express yourself.
Be open with them. Be kind.
Be curious. Be angry.
Be upset. Be humiliated.
Be embarrassed. Be frustrated.
Be alienated. And keep pushing through to connect with them.
Keep pushing through to connect with them.
If you can break through, fantastic.
Fantastic. You're the first person who managed to will his way to the North Pole and back.
Good for you. It's a whole new tourism industry.
But the likelihood is that your parents will not be available.
There's nothing but the false self there.
You can't connect. Closure is when you recognize not that you have to reject your parents.
Closure is when you recognize that your parents will always reject you.
That's closure. Closure is not saying, I've decided to stop beating my head against the wall.
Closure is when you say, it is masochistic to hurt myself.
Closure is when you say, I will never get through the wall, and oh my god, does it hurt to do it.
I can barely see there's so much blood pouring into my eyes.
That's closure. And then you walk away from the wall, and there is no force on earth that would make you go back and start beating your head against the wall again.
When you were a kid and you put your hand on the stove and you burnt yourself, what force could make you go back and put your hand on the stove again at high temperature or stick your hand into a fire?
That's closure with self-abuse.
Not only is it not tempting, you would do a hell of a lot to avoid it.
You would do almost anything to avoid it.
That's closure. Right?
Right? And that's hard to achieve.
And the only way that you achieve it is through relentless openness, relentless intimacy.
When you experience the agony of constant rejection, then you get closure with those people.
Because why would you want to go back to be rejected if you're never going to get through the wall and you're only going to kill yourself by trying to beat your head against it?
What force, once you get away and your head heals and you feel great, what force could conceivably compel you to go back and futilely beat your head against the wall again?
There is no force, no power that would make you do that.
The idea of me sending a copy of my book to my brother or to my mother is madness.
Because that's saying, well, I'm taking my helmet off and I'm going to start beating my head against the wall.
We would say, well, no, it's just for them.
It's not because I have any expectation.
Well, that's nonsense. That's nonsense.
You know who you don't have any expectations of?
Your relationship with a guy you've never met in Bangladesh.
And you're not sending him a copy of your book.
Why? Because you don't even know him.
You have no expectations. You have no relationship.
So if you're sending your book to your parents or someone...
Send me the money instead, because I'll do it much better.
Good with it. But if you're sending it to them, it's because you have hope.
It's because you're taking off your helmet and start beating your head against the wall again.
And if you need to do that, don't take substitutes.
That's sort of what I'm saying. So if you feel the need to buy my book or send podcasts to your parents and so on, don't do that.
That's sort of like leaving your helmet on and continuing to beat your head again.
It's just going to make you dizzy.
It's not going to get you anywhere. You drive over and talk to them.
And if you're terrified to do that, do it anyway.
And if you're too terrified to do it, then explore that fear.
And don't start beating your head against the wall by sending them a book, right?
Closure is when you no longer want to self-abuse.
You no longer want to be rejected by people and humiliated by people.
And you have too much self-esteem to put yourself in the service of narcissists or empty people.
When you no longer exist, To serve other people's needs at your own expense, right?
That's closure. There's only one way to get there.
So when it comes to writing big letters about, oh, Mom and Dad, you did this bad and that bad, and I haven't appreciated this, and I don't like that, and the other thing, and you've styled the dog badly, and Mom, I've never liked the way you grew more goldfish, and this and that and the other, go talk to them, right?
If these are issues that you feel will be beneficial to communicate to them, then don't send a letter and never see them again.
Go talk to them. And if you feel terror at that prospect, then explore that terror.
But don't put it in a letter. Because either what you're doing is spiting them to leave.
When you leave, which means you want to hurt them.
Which is not closure. And wanting to hurt someone is not closure.
That's like saying, I don't want to beat my head against the rock.
I'm going to punch it because I'm angry at it.
No. Walk away from it.
Recognize it's never going to give you what you want.
You're never going to get what you want. It's completely and totally...
Harming, undermining, and destroying your contemporary and future relationships, and you just walk away.
I mean, if you're in a trench like L.A. World War I, and shells are coming down, pick up shells and lob them back, you just walk away.
AWOL. And the question is, do you have to send them a letter?
Well, no, you don't have to do anything.
That's the whole point, right? There's no universal positive prescriptions.
But I think it's helpful or useful.
You don't want them calling the cops. You don't want them freaking out.
You just want to get out, right?
So I found it useful to just say, you know, Mom and Dad, I'm going to be taking some time off of the family for personal reasons and some stuff I need to work out.
I'll be back in touch if and when it's right for me.
Best wishes, blah, blah, blah, right?
Nothing they can say about that.
And just let it stretch on.
Yeah, you'll get calls when someone gets sick.
You'll get calls when they start to feel anxious and so on.
But you've already told them you'll be back in touch with them when you feel it's right.
And you don't blame them and you don't say it's because you guys are such jerks and you burnt my teddy bears when I was a kid and blah, blah, blah.
So they feel like, okay, it's his issues.
He's got to go and deal with it. He's got to go and get his head fixed and we're not bad people.
Fine. Whatever they need to believe is no problem.
Whatever their false self needs to cling to to make you wrong and make them right, give it to them.
Because your goal is not to fix them or change them, but get away.
Get into your own sunny skies.
Get into your own ecosystem.
Get into your own life. And if you've got to lie to the jailer to get out of jail, do it.
Right? So, yeah, I don't need long letters to explain every reason why you're just, you know, it's not working out.
It takes some time. I'm out of here, right?
But you can do it in a way that they can sort of let you go and then it just calcifies over time.
Yeah, they'll try to get back in touch with you when something happens or they need you or they want you or they start to feel anxious.
So what? They're free to email you.
I'd block their email. I think I've blocked everyone in my family now.
Family of origin. But you don't need to get involved in these conversations.
Don't punch the wall. Stop beating your head against the wall.
Just walk away. Ah, yes.
We also have put a video out on YouTube that's received quite a number of hits, I guess relative to mine, 1,300 or whatever.
And it's sort of how to talk to Christians without losing your mind.
And yes, I do have a couple of more videos planned for next week for the Christians.
I'm in a fighting mood, so I have some good plans for Christian chats.
It always sort of amazes me that Christians correct me.
There's something so sort of fundamental that they don't understand about how they appear to anybody with a rational brain.
It's just amazing to me how it is that they will correct me.
See, the thing is, one of the fundamental criticisms of Christianity is it's all just the opinions of people.
There's no God that's ever talked to me.
A goddess, yes, but she just said, I do.
There's no God that's ever talked to me and said a damn thing, right?
I think that reception to God is inversely proportional to intelligence, at least I hope so.
The more intelligence, the less reception.
But what I say, pretty openly, is that Religion is just opinion.
It's just a whole bunch of people's opinions.
There's no evidence for it.
There's no God that talks to anyone.
There's no God that's measurable. There's nothing in the Bible that indicates that knowledge was anything more than what people just had at the time.
So, I say to people pretty clearly, look, all religion is just opinion.
And Oh, God!
Countless Christians come along and say, no, you're wrong, there is a God.
I mean, is there anybody who doesn't listen like a religious person?
Like, is there anybody who just has that amazing amount of blind, angry willpower to just not listen to somebody so fundamentally?
So I say, well, religion is just opinion.
And then somebody writes to me and says, no, you're wrong, there is a God.
That's my opinion. It's sort of like this.
I say, if you tune your television station to channel zero, you will get the most.
And the reception is available to everyone.
Everyone. Tune your television station to channel zero and you will get the most amazing program.
And somebody turns their television station to channel zero and gets nothing but snow.
Cosmic afterbirth skydust.
And they say, you know, I tune my television station to channel zero and I get nothing.
And I say, no, no, no, no.
There's something there. Just channel zero.
Just tune it. I tune and I tune and I tune and I get nothing.
It's just snow, right? And they say, no, that snow is the most amazing station.
It's like, no, but you said I tuned there.
I see the most amazing program. Not, I'll see snow.
I say, you know what? I think it's just everyone's opinion that channel zero has a great program on it.
Right? Right? And then you tell me that it's your opinion that there is a great program on Channel Zero.
When I tune to Channel Zero, I get nothing.
But you tell me that it's just your opinion that it's there.
And I say, well, the facts contradict your opinion.
It's like, no, it's really there. I mean, how mad.
And I say, well, it's just people's opinion.
You say, no, it's my opinion that it's there.
And you should believe it because it's my opinion.
It's like my whole problem is that it's just people's opinion.
My whole problem is that God is just people's mad opinion.
And then people try and convince me through asserting their opinion.
It's amazing!
What they should be doing is praying to God to talk to me.
Right? I mean, if God talks to me and tells me things that turn out to be true, right?
That's how you distinguish mental illness from a deity, right?
So God tells me exactly what the price of a stock is going to be five days hence.
A, God's my broker. And B, I make a lot of money.
And C, that's pretty strong evidence, right?
Of some sort of prescient intelligence.
God tells me exactly where a diamond is buried.
God tells me where the gold is on the beach.
Things that I couldn't know.
God tells me what the headline of the New York Times will be in ten days, right?
Then that's all the proof I need to at least think there's something cool going on, right?
If God reveals to me the unified field theory, if God reveals to me the secret to Coke, I think that's all I need.
Just give me a sign, baby.
And that's all Christians need to do is to pray to their God to give me the proof, right?
Show me the money.
But they don't. At least I've never had a Christian say, well, I'm not going to try and convince you of God's existence, because obviously you have no experience of God.
What I am going to do is pray to God to reveal himself to you.
But they never, at least, I mean, maybe they do and I never hear about it, but I've got cavalcades upon cavalcades upon cavalcades of people angrily asserting that there is a God, when I'm saying that the problem with religion is just an angry assertion.
But they don't listen. They just don't listen.
I don't think. I can't process.
It's just the possibility you've got.
Not existing provokes anxiety and they lash out.
Just as I describe in my book.
Did I mention the title? Anyway.
So I say, well, it's all opinion.
And they say, it's my opinion that you're wrong.
It's like, did you not listen to the first part?
I require reason and evidence.
You're just presenting me opinions.
Right, I mean, somebody responded to my son, Klan Reformer, a YouTube video, and...
So I like Ron Paul because Ron Paul is openly committed to defending the Constitution, and that's my criticism of your video.
And I said, but that's not a criticism, that's just an opinion.
And he got really angry, and he comes back, well, a criticism is just an opinion.
What the hell kind of weird dictionary are you using?
It's like, no.
A criticism is reason and evidence.
You don't criticize a philosophical idea by saying that's a stupid-looking font and then think you've disproven the idea.
Thank you.
Oh, Ron Paul defends this piece of paper, and that disproves your argument.
No! It does not disprove the argument by analogy, that is, my son, clan reformer.
That's exactly the same.
Is saying Ron Paul defends the Bible Sorry, saying that Ron Paul defends the Constitution and that's a response to an anarchist argument is like saying that, well, the Bible says there is a God and thinking that that's a response to an atheist argument.
It's the same thing, right? Or my community says my family is good and that's the response to a family critique.
My parents say they're good.
You've got to be wrong. But people don't know how to criticize, right?
All they know is how to lob angry opinions of people or hurt opinions in the case of sometimes women, right?
What you're saying is upsetting me and therefore you're incorrect.
What you're saying is making me angry.
But people don't know how to think.
It's so sad.
It's so sad. Somebody else posted on the video on talking to Christians without losing your mind.
He's saying, you can see playing out in this thread and all these comments exactly how Christians just People decide to believe in God, and other people decide not to believe in God.
And you can see the conflict that this engenders.
Like, the conflict is just that there's two different opinions.
Oh, how weirdly irreconcilable.
There is a God, there isn't a God, and people just get mad and fight about it.
Of course, it's not a decision to believe in God.
You don't flip a coin. It's not a choice.
It's not a choice. It's not a choice to believe whether the world is flat or the world is round.
It's not a choice to believe whether 2 plus 2 is 4.
It's not a choice to believe whether gases expand when heated.
It's not a choice to believe that rocks fall when you let go of them.
It's not a choice. We bow to the truth.
The god of atheists, sadly, is almost always themselves, their opinions, their opinions.
Faith in whatever. It's not a choice to believe in whether there's a God.
I think it'd be cool if there was, frankly.
But it's not a choice. I think it'd be cool if there were unicorns.
I think it'd be cool if people could fly.
I think it'd be cool to live forever.
but it's not my choice to believe whether these things are possible or true or exist or not.
I think it would have been cool to have had a happy childhood.
it.
But that doesn't mean I get to have had one.
It's not up to us. It's not a choice that people make to believe in God or not.
Superstitious ignorance is not a choice.
It's bigotry. Our religion is just bigotry with icing.
It's the same shit as any racist.
They just put this icing of sentimental godhood on it.
It's not a choice. We don't get to choose these things.
Reason and evidence.
We get to choose whether to think or not.
Well, we don't get to choose whether we get to believe in God or not.
It's not a, hey, I think it's cool, let's do it.
Or, hmm, it doesn't work for me, I don't think it's true.
Or it's like in a debate that I had with some friends years ago, and I was sort of a watcher in this debate because my mind was so totally made up.
One of my friends was saying, you know, I understand the attraction of religion, I just don't buy it.
I just can't buy it.
And my other friend said, look, it's not a question of buying something.
It's not a question of whether you buy it or not, whether you can accept it or not.
that's not the criteria about whether something is true or false saying that something's false because it offends you is like throwing yourself off a cliff and then yelling at the ground that it offends you that gravity is working that's not Try screaming in fear if you fall out of a plane and see whether you can repeal gravity.
Your emotional upset or preference for something else doesn't have a damn thing to do with reality or truth.
You can manipulate people, you can't manipulate reality, but you can only manipulate weak and foolish people.
Which is why people get locked in this underworld of manipulation when they become religious or statists or Fu-Celtists or whatever.
But it's very hard for people to understand that their feelings are not tools of cognition.
Their emotions don't have anything to do with the truth.
It's highly insulting to people who would rather feel than think, or who would rather have their defenses pretend to be philosophy.
But we are doing our best to lead the way to a happier and sunnier climate.
And I really appreciate your support in listening, in buying my book, in donations.
And again, magnificent congrats to the guy from 836 who really took this podcast that I did in a great, great spirit with wonderful maturity and amazing, amazing, amazing.
Congratulations, brother. It's a fantastic thing that you're doing and you're doing a heck of a lot to help other people, men.
And women with your searing honesty and growth.
So thank you so much, everyone, for listening.
All the best. I will talk to you Sunday.
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