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March 24, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:01
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| Hi, everybody. It's Devan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. | |
| Up here in the top right-hand corner, I'm going to try a little experiment, which is rather than set up my study to be whiteboard central for the planet, I got myself a little pen tablet, and we'll see if we can't take this as an approach for putting together an argument or two. | |
| So I apologize for the grade two lettering, but I'm still getting used to it. | |
| So one of the criticisms that I received with regards to my video on Christianity Was the idea that God does not work directly to people or speak directly to people, but rather, God in fact works through human intermediaries in the form of giving them information, giving them visions, insights, and so on. | |
| So, in the sort of standard Christian way of looking at things, as far as I understand it, you know, we have God up here along the top, And God comes up with the original rules. | |
| And then what happens is God talks to what is colloquially called a dude. | |
| And then what happens is this dude then takes God's words and passes it to another dude who then passes it to another dude who then passes it and this goes on and on and on. | |
| And this is considered to be the way that religious instruction is passed, and of course the first cause is considered to be God. | |
| Now, clearly, God is aware and understands, because he designed human beings, that human memory is fallible, that human beings are susceptible to greed, to political pressure, to the desire for control. | |
| They have a lust for power. | |
| He knows all of this, because he, of course, made human beings, so he knows where all of this goes along. | |
| So, He also has a rule, which this particular instantiation of the rule, where he talks to dude numero uno, that is a pretty important aspect of the rule of God, because he's saying, I will directly talk to human beings, reveal myself in all their glory, and so on. | |
| And then he's going to tell this guy that he told two friends and so on, and it's going to go on through all of the translation problems and so on. | |
| So God, of course, judges people by their knowledge of God. | |
| So if we say that this guy has a... | |
| A knowledge factor of ten, because he's the guy out of ten, let's say that God correctly imprints himself on dude number one, then we know for sure that because human language is finite and human beings can't put thoughts, visions, and ideas in other human beings' heads, that this guy is going to be a ten. | |
| Now this guy, if he's lucky, is going to be a nine, right? | |
| And then this guy, It's going to be an 8 and a 7 and a 6, so pretty much we're going to get a very, very quick degradation of the accuracy of God's initial Conversation with dude number one, to the point where what happens after, and again, this is all stuff that God knows, because God is all-knowing, and God did create man, and so on. | |
| So what we have is, if we say that God, let's say, I don't know what it was, 5,000 years ago, Talked to Moses or whatever, then we're talking about, I don't know how many generations that is, but probably about 200 generations, 170 generations and so on, right? And, of course, it's going to be sort of an asymptotic decline, right, insofar as if we look at, you know, this is time, the x-axis is time. | |
| Can I put a clock in? | |
| I don't think so. And then this is comprehension, right? | |
| So what happens in any form of human communication, if you've ever played that game, you know, where you tell a secret down a line when you're a kid, you know kind of what happens as a result of all of this, that the guy starts off here... | |
| And what happens is knowledge quickly declines, and then maybe it shallows out here as time goes forward. | |
| The accuracy of something completely diminishes and declines, and you can see this in the study of any myth. | |
| And then it continues with a few shreds of possible... | |
| I'm sort of reminded of an old myth, a sort of story that I remember hearing as a kid, that a woman was attacked by a murderer, but her child hid in the oven and thus survived. | |
| And the truth of the matter was that a pregnant woman was attacked and killed, but the baby was sort of carved out of the mother's stomach after she died and survived. | |
| And this is known as a bun in the oven. | |
| To be pregnant, you have a bun in the oven. | |
| And so the kid hid in the oven. | |
| This is a shred of truth that's left after a certain amount of time when it comes to myth. | |
| Now, the problem, of course, is that, well, a problem, is that God knows for sure that this decline of accuracy is going to occur over time. | |
| He knows exactly the strengths and weaknesses of his creation. | |
| So the problem is that he's got a standard, which is up here, for not sinning, right? | |
| So, if you don't want to sin, then you have to have perfect fidelity to God's original communication. | |
| Now, no matter how wonderful... | |
| Human communication is. | |
| There's no possibility that it can be as good as God, because God gets, you know, kind of in your head and illuminates everything that you could possibly want or need to have. | |
| So God can directly wire into you and get the information across. | |
| Other people, political motivations, problems in memory, personal ambitions, greed, fear, and also just being insane, right? | |
| God knows that people are insane. | |
| He knows that the old wetware is a little buggy from time to time. | |
| So the standard, of course, is up here, and the problem with sin, of course, is that sin is occurring in this sort of area here, and sin is constant, right? | |
| So we have an increase in sin through no fault of anybody's own as time goes forward. | |
| So to judge Someone, by saying, you know, the first guy, I remember, had a knowledge of 10, you know, out of 10, and so he was expected to meet this thing, right? | |
| Unfortunately, now, we're talking about 0.02 maybe that we have, and yet the standard is still compared to 10, which is clearly not a reasonable proposition. | |
| And, of course, God knows all of this going forward, so this is a little hard to understand. | |
| Now, people are going to say, and this, of course, is the challenge, right? | |
| People are going to have to say, so there's God, right, right up front, and then God transmits to, let's say, Moses or whoever, you know, 100% of the truth that he kind of wants to get across. | |
| So far, so good. We're relatively happy with the logic of it. | |
| And then Moses carves down and says to, you know, number two, I don't even remember who that is, number two, maybe he gets 90% or 95% of the information across. | |
| Now, what has to happen in order for the people down the chain of understanding to be held to the standard that Moses did was that God has to come in and say, no, no, no. | |
| If you get anything wrong, right? | |
| If you get anything wrong, I'm going to bump that up So, Moses, if you have the impulse to say that, you know, God believes that chickens can fly, or God told me that chickens can fly when chickens can't fly, God is going to intervene and is going to say to Moses, you can't say that. That is not valid. | |
| I'm going to block those words in your mouth and I'm going to replace it with chickens are in the bird family or something like that. | |
| So all of the communication that goes between generations from God's original communication to Moses has to be constantly propped up or reinforced or renewed or guided by God so that the standard of no sin is the same for number 2, number 3, number 4, number 5, number 150, that the standard remains the same. | |
| The information has to be It has to remain carved out by God. | |
| Now, let's look at another situation wherein Moses writes down, ye olde, Cecil B. Debil, ten commandments. | |
| And what happens, of course, is that some of those commandments, originally, of course, you know, no kill, right? | |
| No killing. No-kill was originally, of course, meant don't kill other Jews. | |
| You're allowed to kill other people, of course, and Lord knows the Bible is full of that, both in the Old and New Testament, the murder, slaughter, and rape of non-Jews. | |
| So originally it was don't kill Jews. | |
| And then when it was translated to thou shalt not kill, and it was expanded to include So, the no-kill, don't kill the Jews, which was the original commandment, was then translated into no-kill anyone, right? | |
| No-kill, period. | |
| And so we don't know, of course, which one God meant. | |
| We assume that the original one was what God meant. | |
| Did God change his mind between don't kill Jews and don't kill anyone? | |
| Or was this a sort of squiggly, bad mistranslation? | |
| Of course, the virgin birth is a mistranslation. | |
| The original Hebrew word for woman was young maiden or whatever, and this was mistranslated to virgin. | |
| Generations of Italian men have horrible complexes about women because of a mistranslation from the ancient Hebrew. | |
| So, here, if we have the situation where the commandments change over time, and we then have to sort of try and figure out, if they're written down, is the person who's translating them being told by God what to translate? | |
| In other words, is he being re-inspired by God to translate accurately, as is the case with Martin Luther when he wrote the Vulgate version of the Bible, 16th century, then God is clearly saying that he wants to continue to translate. | |
| I'm going to just take my video off for a second. | |
| He wants to continue this process of getting information across, right? | |
| So then, now we have a situation where a guy is writing. | |
| Let me just do my little graphic here. | |
| He's writing down a book. | |
| And then this book sort of becomes that which is then transmitted to, you know, guy number one, guy number two, three, four, five, six, seven, and so on. | |
| Now, this book, as it's translated from prior versions, is God coming in there and saying, write this, write that, write the other, if it contradicts what God said earlier, which is the real version, did God change his mind if God is outside of time? | |
| Then contradictions like this shouldn't exist, he shouldn't be able to change his mind, and so on. | |
| So, in all of these kinds of situations, I think it's sort of important to understand that the story that is being told in terms of human accuracy of God's Word, since God is perfectly happy, right, God will talk to a guy, right, God will also talk to another guy. | |
| God may, in fact, talk to the guy who does the translation, and so on. | |
| So, to sort of move this up to the present, right, let's just say that you are some little kid, we'll put you down here, some little kid of Christian parents, and What's happened is you are responsible for 100% knowledge of God's will and adherence to it. | |
| However, if we look back with sort of up the well of time or back the well of time, what happens is we have a situation where, you know, God has talked to Moses. | |
| Moses talked to guy, guy, guy, guy, guy. | |
| Guy translated from, let's say, Hebrew to Aramaic. | |
| Aramaic to Greek, Greek to Latin, excuse me, Latin to English, or actually I guess it was German originally and so on, right? | |
| So we have all of this situation where there is an enormous amount of human intervention to get the word from, you know, 5000 B.C., 5k BC, all the way down to some kid who's coming up to Bible school and who is receiving his instruction in 2008. | |
| Hundreds of generations of mistranslation, confusion, and so on. | |
| So then, we have a situation, if the instruction, right, that this little kid is receiving... | |
| If this instruction is 100%, or if he's responsible, let's say, for 100% of it, then what has happened is, if we just say roughly, you know, 175 generations, right? | |
| God has accurately given the information to 175 generations of human beings and made sure that there have been no mistakes, no mistranslations, no problems whatsoever. | |
| Right? But then, he says, on generation 176, no way. | |
| Not going to talk to generation 176. | |
| 175 times, he said, this is how it should be, this is how it is exactly, this is exactly what my will is. | |
| 176, he mysteriously stops doing that, and this, of course, is the only way that this person could be, this kid, could be 100% responsible for adherence to the moral rules of the Word of God. | |
| Now, If, on the other hand, we have a situation where, let me just erase all this stuff, if we have a situation where we accept that there has been some human intervention in this question of information that has been provided, | |
| then, of course, even if we say that God to Moses was 100% Then we know, with the 175 going down, going down, going down, going down, we get to 2008, we are talking a, you know, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, this could go on and on, percent of accurate information with regards to the original Word of God. | |
| So what that means, of course, is where we could legitimately say Moses had 100% responsibility for matching the will of God. | |
| On the other hand, We have a problem insofar as the kid in 2008 has an infinitesimally small capacity to understand the Word of God. | |
| So either, and this is the logical problem, which is one of many, many logical problems that occurs in the realm of religion, that... | |
| Either God has spoken to 175 generations and then mysteriously stops at 176, or God has not spoken to anyone since Moses and a few other people, and therefore we have no knowledge of what God actually wanted in the first place. | |
| And this is the kind of nonsense that when you start to defend God by saying, well, God doesn't talk to people anymore and so on, that's fine, but then God knows that imperfect vessels are transmitting his word, and therefore he cannot punish them He cannot punish people for failing to meet the standards of a knowledge base that he simply is not giving to them with any kind of accuracy, | |
| right? I mean, just to take a sort of silly example, right? | |
| If I have, you know... | |
| Let me use the pen again. | |
| If I have, you know, urgent message, right? | |
| Urgent, right? | |
| And I deliver it to a guy who's just kind of an idiot, right? | |
| And maybe doesn't speak English, has an IQ of 70 and so on, and it's a highly complex topic, like a scientific theorem or proof or some sort of piece of coding or whatever. | |
| And then I have it handed to you, The fact that I have chosen this fool to be my messenger absolves you of the responsibility of obeying or finding what it is that I say to you accurate. | |
| Because, of course, if this is the person that I choose to convey the message, clearly the message isn't really that important. | |
| I didn't call you directly and explain it to you. | |
| I just chose someone who clearly doesn't understand what it is that I'm talking about, who is going to be confused, and so on. | |
| So obviously that is not something that's going to work particularly well. | |
| Now if we get rid of this and we say that this fool tells another idiot, tells another idiot, right? | |
| 175 idiots, and then you get the message. | |
| Is it at all reasonable for me to say that you're responsible for accurately knowing and understanding the message? | |
| Of course not. | |
| Of course not. | |
| So this is all the kind of nonsense that people get into when they start to try and justify superstition and cultism and religion. | |
| And I hope that this has been a fun little demonstration of how not to use a pen tablet. |
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