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March 12, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:25
1009 God' is really the fear of others...

How to liberate others from superstition.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well. I would like to start off just by mentioning that the offer is still on.
You can get all four Free Domain Radio books.
On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, Universally Preferable Behavior, Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, The God of Atheists, a novel, and Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love for $79 US, including shipping.
Right, that's it for the ad.
So, I'd like to start off by saying that atheists suck.
And as an atheist myself, I think I can speak with some authority as to the general suckiness of atheists.
And what I mean by that, of course, is that atheists suck at being effective atheists, effective communicators.
We have gotten rid of so many illusions in the world.
All but the most crazed and Bible Belt fundamentalists now understand that the Earth is a little older than 6,000 years.
We have recognized, in general, in the civilized world, the equal rights of women, the rights of protection of children, the invalidity of slavery, and we have gotten rid of the 10,000 or so gods that have so haunted the superstitious fantasies of mankind.
We have gotten rid of all but a few, but those few are hanging on like nobody's business.
So, atheists have just not, have been unable to convince people that atheism is a valid standpoint, a viewpoint, and it's considered to be at best a kind of agnosticism or a weak atheism, like, well, it's the Dawkins kind of, well, I'm not very sure that there is a God, but I really don't think there is a sort of Wattleburger stuff, or as a strong atheist position, which is the only rational one in my view, and I think I've got good arguments for it.
Has consistently failed to take the case, which it should.
And this is not the case with any of the other superstitious nonsense that goes on.
There is not people who say, well, there may be a Santa Claus, but I'm not quite sure of it.
There may be Keebler elves, there may be Jedi, but I'm not sure of it.
It's only in particular around this area of the culturally accepted deities, the Christian Yahweh and And the Islamic deity and so on, that this stuff still sticks around.
So, when you've had a couple of thousand years of rank failure, and perhaps this is just my business training coming into the forefront, when you've had a couple of thousand years of rank failure, I think it's not unreasonable to say why.
Have a post-mortem and sort of say why.
I have a particular theory about this, and you might want to listen to, I think it's podcast 73, The Parable of the Apple, which is available at freedomainradio.com.
You can also have a look through The Philosophysician, which is a new wizard that I wrote to help you navigate through the There's an ungodly number of podcasts and you can get a customized feed delivered to your inbox with just the podcasts that are of most interest to you.
So have a look through. It's at freedomainradio.com.
Just scroll down a little bit. You can step through that wizard and it will point you directly at the podcasts that are going to be the most interesting and valuable for you.
But... In it, and it's available as a video here as well, I talk about the true nature, in a sense, the genesis of religion.
A belief which a man has not been reasoned into, he cannot be reasoned out of.
Religion is a trauma that is inflicted upon children.
It is not something that people are reasoned into.
What they do is ex post facto make up all these reasons as to why they are religious.
But religion, if you don't understand that religion is a trauma inflicted on the young through the abuse of parental power, you're not going to understand how to get rid of religion in people's minds in any kind of effective way.
Because if you continue to debate religion at the level of evidence, which no sane human being at the age of 25 looks at all the evidence without any prior propaganda and says, you know...
A Jewish zombie came back from the dead and saved mankind from a sin that is invented by being born because a woman talked to a talking snake 6,000 years ago.
No one looks at the evidence and comes up with that crazy-ass mythological fairy tale as any kind of reasonable explanation of anything.
Because religion is just throwing your hands up in the air and saying, I have no clue.
But it's just masking it in another way.
You say, where did the universe come from?
Well, God made it. And what you're saying is, Some incomprehensible, unknowable being created the universe in some unfathomable manner for reasons that we can never comprehend, using abilities that are completely impenetrable to our mind.
Of course, that's just another way of saying, I don't know, with more syllables.
Religion is simply a confession of rank ignorance and fear of knowledge and fear of doubt, fundamentally, as well.
So, if you don't understand that religion is a trauma that is inflicted upon the young, that people cannot be reasoned out of that which is inflicted on them through trauma, right?
I mean, if you have somebody who's been in war for five years and then they come back from war and you're walking down the street and a car backfires and the ex-soldier dies to the ground because his instincts take over, There's really not much point sitting with the soldier and reasoning with him and saying, well, you know, but you see, you're not at war anymore, you don't need to do this, because this is just a trauma that has now been imprinted upon his nervous system that you cannot reason people out of religion, because they're not reasoned into religion.
It is a trauma that is inflicted on them through the abuse of power.
So, when we understand that, we can understand what keeps the concept of God going.
And this is almost completely true for the idea of the state or the country as well, but we don't have to worry about it.
Let's just focus on the religious aspects, it's more clear.
God obviously does not exist in any kind of sky-ghost or abstract way, and you cannot invent other dimensions where there could be a God, because all these other dimensions are simply defined as that which does not exist, right?
So if you say, well, there's some other dimension where God might exist, you can't say God doesn't exist.
Break down these other dimensions, it always turns out to be the exact opposite of what is considered existence.
It's a dimension where non-matter equals matter, where contradiction equals consistency, and so on.
It is a completely non-rational way of trying to solve the problem.
So, redefining non-existence, or the opposite of existence, as some other dimension where the reverse could be true doesn't solve the problem.
You can't hand in a math paper based on 2 plus 2 equals 5, and then say, well, you can't mark it wrong, because in some other dimension, you see, it might be right.
I mean, it's just wrong, and God is a self-contradictory concept, so we've gone through this before.
So, why do people continue to believe in this?
Well, if you fight the existence of God, if you're an atheist, and you fight the existence of God as if people have looked at the evidence, Read the Bible and said, yeah, you know, this guy that advocates rape and murder, this deity who advocates rape and murder and slavery and incest and death to unbelievers, that this deity Is the most moral being that I could conceivably exist.
He kills the whole world, except for Noah and his family, because he's displeased, including the innocent children and so on.
He recommends that invading soldiers rape women and put entire towns to death.
And so all the moral horrors that you would expect, of course, in the Bible.
Nobody looks at that and says, well, that by God has to be.
The very paragon of moral virtue, so I'm going to follow whatever rules.
Nobody says that, right?
Nobody looks at the evidence.
Nobody looks at the Bible and deals with a basic fact, right?
That the Bible is supposed to be inspired by an omniscient deity.
Yet, strangely enough, in a very odd way, It is a fact that nothing that is in the Bible was not known to the people at the time.
It's a very, very important thing when you think about it.
The Bible is considered to be a work of omniscience, so it should not be limited by the knowledge of the people of the time.
There's nothing in there about the germ theory of disease transfer.
There's nothing in there about DNA. There's nothing in there about the sun being the center of the universe.
There's nothing in there about relativity.
I mean, all of the things which an omniscient deity would know, strangely enough, in the Bible and in all other religious texts that have ever been, quote, written by these omniscient deities, Strangely and mysteriously enough, there's just nothing in it that was not known by the time or not perceived or believed at the time.
So, clearly, there's no God out there.
There's no God that is floating around the heavens doing whatever, right?
And there's no other dimension that people make up some sort of organized religion nonsense.
And, of course, that's not how children are taught.
Children are taught that God is real, that God exists, that God loves them, that Jesus died for their sins, and so on.
And that, what is it, Mohammed, who took a six-year-old bride and then raped her when she was nine, is the very paragon of moral virtue.
Well, nobody is taught.
They're taught this as if it's all real.
They're not taught as an abstract, other-dimension stuff.
So it doesn't do any good to fight religion, to fight people's belief in God, as if it has anything to do with evidence, anything to do with rationality.
So the question is, well, what does it have to do with?
What is it, fundamentally?
Well, religion, faith, belief in God, Nothing to do with evidence, nothing to do with reasoning, nothing to do with any kind of rational examination of either the source text or the physical or rational evidence in the present.
God is fear of others.
God is fear of disapproval.
God is fear of social attack.
God is fear of social ostracism.
If you're part of a religious community, let's say you're a Christian part of a church, right?
If you stop believing in God, they're going to kick you to the curb in a moment's notice.
You're going to lose your friends, your community, your wife might divorce you, you have to look your children in the face and say, kind of sorry I lied to you because I was a coward, and then you're going to have to try and convince them not to doubt a social pressure when they're teenagers, when they know that you tried to corrupt their minds because of your fear of social pressure as a Christian.
So, that's what sustains God, is fear of attack or ostracism through other people.
So, you can't reason people out of God because it is an irrational and cowardly fear of the negative judgments or attacks from other people.
And, of course, deep down, it originates out of fear of rejection by the parent.
So, the parent says, there is a God, Jesus loves you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then if you as a kid say, sorry, that doesn't make any sense to me.
Like, I don't see any evidence.
I've read the Bible and it doesn't seem like a very good book.
And you start reading up, which you can start from the age of seven or eight or nine.
You start reading up. What's going to happen if you say, I don't want to go to church because I don't believe?
Well, you're going to get attacked by your parents.
You're going to get criticized. You're going to get rejected.
You're going to get put down. You're going to get humiliated.
You're going to get bullied. And it's to avoid the knowledge of your parents' corruption that you pretend to go along with the belief in God.
So the belief in God...
It's nothing to do with any kind of examination of the evidence.
Believing God is simply and clearly a fear of attacks by other people who are not very nice people.
It's a collective cult where if you break free, you are attacked.
If you attempt to break out, if you question the basic premises, you simply get attacked by your other cult members.
And so if atheists continue to focus on just these rational arguments, thinking that you can reason people out of cowardly social terrors, which were justly and horribly inflicted upon them as children, if we don't understand that religion is scar tissue,
That religion results from people being bullied as children and frightened and manipulated and controlled and attacked, either overtly or implicitly, then it just doesn't make...
you're trying to reason people out of emotional scar tissue by not even addressing the emotional scar tissue.
And that just doesn't work, and we've got complete evidence that for several thousand years it hasn't worked.
So I will just touch on this very briefly, but if we understand that, that the belief in God is simply fear of attacks from other people, Then we can get a whole lot closer to actually helping people free themselves of this virus, of this terror.
And the way that we do that, of course, is that we build them up as human beings.
We help them achieve the kind of independence.
We inject them with self-esteem, with self-knowledge, with analysis, with an understanding of psychology so that they can understand the social mechanics and the ostracism and the bullying that goes on in their environment.
Maybe they'll break free, maybe they won't.
Who knows? It can't be really determined particularly in advance.
But we don't, I mean, I've never had any luck in, I don't know how many conversations, I've never had any luck reasoning anybody out of religion.
You put the religion stuff aside and you focus on their fears of social ostracism, then if you can help them overcome that, and if you want to, then...
The religion will fall away of its own accord.
And, of course, the same thing is absolutely true of the government as well.
So that's my suggestion to you, and I found this to be very, very effective.
Forget about it. God doesn't exist, so there must be some other reason why people continue to adhere to these beliefs.
And, of course, social pressure and fear of ostracism is the one empirical fact that keeps recurring again and again and which we can see.
Thank you so much for watching.
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