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March 25, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:01
1023 God Speaks to Whom? (audio to a video)

God, translation and responsibility.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope that you're doing very well. This is me up in the top right corner.
I have a new toy which I'm going to use as part of a way of explaining some of the ideas that I have.
It's a real hassle to turn my study into whiteboard-enabled education land, so I've decided to go digital and save myself some time and some energy on this.
So, let's get started.
After I put out my Happy Death Day Jesus video recently, I had a number of people who wrote to me to inform me that a god did not speak to people directly anymore.
The age of miracles is past.
Like the age of balanced budgets.
And that I should not expect God to speak to individuals, but rather he spoke to Moses, he spoke to other people, and it is through their knowledge of God's will transmitted through the generations that somebody now actually understands or knows about God's will and what God wants to do in Christianity and so on.
So, that is a thesis that is put forward, and I think it's worthwhile having a look at the logical implications of this theory so that we can see if it makes any sense or not.
So, let's take a tootle through the theory and see what we can make of it.
So, first and foremost, let's start up here with the dude known as God.
Right? So, God...
It's up here in his, you know, halo cloud and so on.
And what happens is, God takes his, or gives his divine word to a dude, we'll call him, say, Moses.
So, God gives His divine word to Moses.
Now, we can assume that God, being all-powerful and all-knowing, He actually communicates His divine will to Moses accurately, and then Moses communicates that information to other people.
So, what happens is, Moses then goes along and takes God's word and gives it to Other people, right?
So he gives it to, you know, guy one, two, three, etc.
Now, this first step, I think that we can reasonably say, this step is actually controlled by the divine will, and therefore we can assume that it's a photocopy of the divine will.
Now, God, of course, having designed and created the human mind, knows its strengths and its weaknesses.
And in particular, its weakness is around memory and what is perceived as self-interest.
So, for instance, when you see people who are involved in politics, they will use certain ethical guidelines in order to exploit other people, right?
So they'll talk about how great their country is, what a noble people we are, how virtuous we are, How bad our enemies are and so on, but they do that in order to wage war, which is basically to pillage the public purse.
So people use ethics all the time in pursuit of political self-interest and so on.
God knows this, of course, because God designed human beings and God is all-knowing and all-powerful.
So, God knows the fallibility of human memory and the desire for human beings to use ethics as a way of aggrandizing their own political power.
So, this particular step here This second step that we have going on here, this is the one that, of course, could be well perceived as a challenge in terms of understanding, in terms of Guy 1, 2, and 3's ability to understand directly what God said to Moses.
So if I give a complicated set of instructions to a complete idiot, a fool, somebody with low IQ, somebody who is developmentally handicapped or whatever, if I give a whole series of complicated instructions to that person, And then that person is the one who disseminates my information to others, then clearly there's been a disruption in the continuity of information.
I mean, any significant one.
If you ever played that game of telephone when you were a kid, you know, you all sit in a circle, you whisper something, and then what comes back to you, it's never what you whispered to begin with.
So... This is, of course, to explain the fallibility of human consciousness when it comes to the conveying of information.
Even neutral and objective information gets messed up in the transition.
However, when the information is around political power, control of the ethical narrative of society, and so on, well, I mean, it's pretty much a free-for-all.
And God, of course, would be perfectly aware of that.
So... That is sort of one possibility, which is that God tells something directly to Moses, and then Moses tells it directly to everyone else.
Moses being, of course, the weakest link in the chain, followed by everybody else he tells it to.
Now, that's one possibility.
Now, the other possibility, of course, is that God actually...
uses Moses's mouth or voice, but in fact this particular aspect of the process is something that is divinely managed by God.
In other words, Moses thinks that he's opening his mouth and speaking according to his own consciousness, but what's actually happening is that God is coming in and, you know, sticking his hand up Moses' back and making Moses speak the truth to everyone else.
In other words, in the same way that God directly revealed himself to Moses, Moses directly reveals God's will to other people, but...
God is controlling him like a puppet master or something like that.
In which case, the fallibility of human consciousness becomes much less of a factor.
In fact, theoretically, we can eliminate it completely and thus the divine word of God passes from Moses to other people with perfect accuracy.
So, let's look at that as a thesis and say, is this something that we can live with as a thesis?
Well, the first thing that I would say with that thesis would be something like this, which is that we want to have a look at that as a thesis, right?
So, let's just say there are about 150 or 175 generations that have passed since the time of Moses.
Let's just say 150 maybe.
There was a couple of Methuselahs in there, a couple of long-lived people.
So, once more, we start off with the God, who's up here.
And then what God does is he gives the information, as we said before, to Moses.
And then what happens is Moses then passes the information to, you know, this guy, and then this guy passes the information, passes the information, passes the information.
This goes on and on basically 150 times to get to a current or present-day child who is learning about Christianity in 2008.
So what's happened is, if we assume that of the 150 generations that have passed since God first revealed Himself to Moses, obviously if all of that I mean,
there's just no possibility whatsoever that an accurate mythology or an accurate series of subjective impressions, because God can't reveal to himself in Moses purely through language, right?
He's got to inhabit and get the will of and so on, right?
So, after 150 intergenerational, multicultural, multilingual retellings, recountings, with all of the political motives and all the rewriting and all the trying to make it seem true by saying, for instance, that Jesus did stuff that was foretold in the Old Testament, look,
he must be a real prophet, and so on, all of the political motivations and so on, All of that going down 150 generations, there's no possibility whatsoever that the original semi-subjective or, I guess you'd say, impressionistic or metaphor-laced or experiential information that God gave to Moses,
there's no possibility whatsoever That after 150 cross-cultural, cross-language iterations of that experience, that anybody receiving it in 2008 has any clue what the original information was.
On the other hand, we could say that if God...
So, after Moses, it's all nonsense and chaos and confusion.
It probably didn't take more than a generation for it to all become nonsense after 150 years later.
Complete crazy.
No possibility of anything that's true or real.
On the other hand, we could say, let's say that we are trying to get to this kid in 2008, right?
So we've got one happy, well, no, actually he's going to Christian camp, so he's not so happy.
We have a kid in 2008.
Now, in order for that child in 2008 to receive an accurate interpretation of God's will, given that God only spoke to Moses and a couple other people thousands of years ago, What has to have happened is that the divine will or the divine influence must have...
Obviously it occurred on this first translation to Moses.
Then it must have occurred on the Moses translation.
This is God sticking his hand up people's asses and making them talk to make sure that they get the message across correctly and it's not misinterpreted and it's not subject to political motives and it remains pure and so on, right?
So then what's happened is God has done this 150 times, times a billion, right?
So the yellow is the divine intervention in the communication to make sure that the original message remains uncorrupted.
So God has done that 150 times.
So God directly influences people to tell them what to say, and this includes the people who write stuff down, like when Martin Luther in the 16th century translated the Bible from the Latin to the vernacular, to the Vulgate.
He obviously was divinely, he would have to be divinely inspired by God when the ancient Hebrew researchers or the people who first wrote down the New Testament when they mistranslated young woman to virgin, the whole virgin birth is a mistranslation, then they would have had to have been divinely inspired.
The original thou shalt not kill only applied to Jews and of course we can see that because God rains thunderous bloody murder.
Down on huge numbers of people in the Old Testament.
So there's no possibility that the thou shalt not kill applied to everyone.
It only applied to don't kill other Jews.
You can go out and kill and rape and enslave and torture and murder everybody else.
So the people who wrote down the thou shalt not kill only Jews and then changed it to thou shalt not kill in general were all divinely inspired.
So, if it is the case that God has divinely inspired the understanding of His Word all the way from Moses down to some kid in Bible camp in 2008, then what's happened is God has done 150 of these divine inspiration communication things, but then, for some mysterious reason, He simply stops doing it when this kid is born, right?
See, this is kind of important, right?
This is very, very important to understand, that what happens is God has done this 150, 150, 150 going on here, and he has told his will all the way down through the chain, and then he mysteriously stops At some kid in 2008.
So, of course, there's no difficulty in testing this thesis, right, at all, right?
So, if you are, God help you, so to speak, the child of Christian parents, right, and they've sort of tried to bring this cult into your life to infect you with this evil superstition, then all you have to do, right, so you're the kid, let's put you down here, You're not so happy because you have this question which is all the way back to 150 iterations of generations and languages and so on.
I'm trying to get to God's will, right?
So then we're looking up this chain of the generations, right?
So we're looking up Generation, generation, generation, generation, generation, generation, up to Moses.
And we're saying, okay, well, what has trickled down the stairs is completely the same water that started at the very top.
It's not gotten any mud. It's not gotten any intermingling.
It's not got any problems.
So, if any of this causal chain is broken, then we know that we no longer have any idea what God's will is, right?
So, all you do is you say to your dad...
So this is generation one before you.
You say to your dad, Dad, did you get God's will directly?
Did God tell you what to say?
Were you surprised at what you said?
Did God inhabit you?
Was there any evidence?
Did you have visions? Did you have dreams?
Did God stick his hand up your ass, make your mouth move, and tell you?
Now, of course, if he says yes, then get him to a psychiatrist, right?
But if he says no, then that's a problem, right?
Because then the causality has been broken, right?
The chain of accuracy has been broken, and no, you no longer have any clue what God supposedly wants.
Then, even whether he says yes or no, you're looking at the next generation, right?
So you're looking at, let's say, his dad, right?
So your granddad, generation two.
And you say, okay, well, I wonder if, did granddad ever talk about having these divine visions where God stuck his hand up his ass, told him what to say, and so on?
And if that is true, if this did happen, then of course you need to check yourself out for possibly genetically transmitted mental illness.
But no matter what, if he says, well, no, that didn't happen, then we have two confirmed generations of people who were not divinely inspired to communicate the truth to you.
Now people will of course say, yes, but you go to the Bible and this and that.
But as we're all fully aware, the emphasis on the Bible or on particular aspects of the Bible continually changes, right?
So sometimes they'll focus on the hell and brimstone.
Sometimes they'll focus on the environment.
Now they've made global warming part of man's sin categories and so on.
So that constantly changes.
Is the focus on particular aspects of the Bible, because you can find whatever you want in the Bible, is the focus that people put on particular things in the Bible and how it changes, is that divinely inspired or not?
So that's just the general thesis that you can work with when you're trying to confirm, or not confirm, this particular issue when it comes to trying to figure out whether or not this information has been transmitted to you correctly or not.
There is of course the last issue, which as I mentioned here, which is that if this information Has not been transmitted to you correctly, then we have a logical problem with ethical obedience, right? And we'll talk about that just very briefly before I put the cool pen stuff away.
Okay, so here we're going to put a graph up, right?
And we're going to put a graph up.
And on the x-axis is time.
So, this is from Moses to 2008.
So, let's do a nice sweep of time here.
And on the y-axis is...
It's a little bit of a swirly y-axis.
I'm still getting used to this. What this is, is accuracy.
Let me just...
Put that in ACC. If you can remember that, we'll all be happy.
Good Lord. All right, so here we have a question, which I think is reasonably worth asking, which is, Moses, obviously, let's just put it up here and say he had 100% accuracy.
All right, so you've got 100% accuracy.
Then what happens is, if we can't conceivably say that God spoke to every generation except the 151st generation, so God accurately allowed the transmission of his will and his viewpoints all the way along until, mysteriously, it just ended on 151st generation.
It's not a sustainable thesis. It's completely mental, right?
So we have to sort of assume that quite precipitously, right, quite precipitously the information It doth get worse and worse, right?
So here we can say that there is a very quick decline in the knowledge and understanding, and maybe there's a few scraps that sort of maintain themselves over time.
But here we can see that the decline in understanding of God's will from Moses onward, given the fallibility of the human mind in terms of memory and other kinds of political motivations and power motivations and so on, So here we can see that the knowledge of what God wants is declining precipitously.
However, it would seem that the standard remains or has remained the same, right?
So here we have a huge delta that is going on.
Let's find a nice delta color.
Let's try maybe a blue.
But here we have a huge delta, right?
And this delta here is the gap between what God wants and the amount of knowledge or information that we have which is accurate as to what God is asking us to do.
So it is inconceivable to imagine that people in 2008 who have, you know, a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of one percent and have a huge amount of misdirection that goes on, that these people can be subject to the same moral standards as somebody who has a hundred percent information.
This gap is just so ridiculously large by this point, this gap sort of in 2008, and I would actually say that the knowledge, it would probably be more accurate to say that the knowledge is in fact negative, right?
And what I mean by that is that the information that we have has actually gone way negative.
It's no longer just neutral.
It's actually gone way down so that we actually have active obfuscation and reversal of what God wants.
So, it's not that we used to know how to head north and now we're just standing still, or we're walking very slowly north.
We used to know how to head north because God said to Moses, north, but now we're actually heading south because there's so much hijacking and control over the narrative that we now actually have the exact opposite knowledge of what God wants.
So, it seems to me that, let's say I give you an execution order, and I give it to you directly and clearly and so on, and you go ahead and do it.
I tell you to order 10 widgets for me, and you go ahead and order 10 widgets.
I think that you can be reasonably held accountable for ordering the 10 widgets if you agree to do it, because you got the communication directly from me.
However, if I say to a drooling idiot, I want so-and-so in 5,000 years to order 10 widgets, and the idiots tell the politicians, tell the priests, tell the parents, tell the self-motivated jerks all over the planet, who are all going to distort the message for their own particular gain, right?
The widget maker is going to say, yes, he said, buy...
Billions of widgets! That's what he wanted, right?
And then the anti-widget makers are going to say, well, widgets are evil and you shouldn't order any widgets and so on.
And then widgets is going to be replaced.
Someone who makes spanners is going to replace widgets with spanners and there's going to be fragmentation.
And then it's going to be you shouldn't buy them, but you should sell them.
But then it's no longer going to be economics, but it turns out that there's a mythical bird named Spanner that you're supposed to ride by taking LSD. Like, there's just going to be nothing to do with the original order me 10 widgets.
If 150 generations, thousands and thousands of years of people misinterpreting, mistranslating for their own particular advantage, and then madmen are going to get control of the narrative and they're going to do this, that, and the other, when it comes time for you to get this message, right, and the message is something like, you know, there is a phoenix that flies up your ass and pecks wisdom into your brain, Can you reasonably be held accountable for ordering 10 widgets?
The first guy said, order me 10 widgets.
Thousands of years later, after it's translated by people with their own interests, can you reasonably be held accountable to the same standard of ordering 10 widgets?
Well, of course not, because there's just no possibility that the original message has remained unobscured through that passage of time and self-interest and so on.
So either God is sticking his hand up people's asses, telling them exactly what to say, in which case the accurate word of God could be received, or he has not done that, in which case nobody in the present is responsible for any of God's instructions, because... He wrote it on a lake where it was seen by madmen who screamed it to the skies.
It was retranslated, changed.
I mean, there's no possibility that the original statement of truth or anything in it has existed.
The final thing is that the test for this, of course, is consistency and accuracy.
We would assume that an all-perfect, all-knowing, omniscient, omnipotent God would consistently say what the rules are.
We would expect that if human beings simply made up all of these rules and changed them for their own political purposes and used them hypocritically and We would expect, of course, that the message that the story itself would mutate wildly over time, and that, of course, is exactly what has happened.
So, just in summation, I don't think that it's at all reasonable.
To say to people that God speaks to individuals, like spoke to individuals at one time and no longer speaks to those individuals anymore.
And that, I think, is something that we don't want to talk about, I think, because it just would make so little sense, right?
That just makes no sense at all.
So I would suggest that we don't even think about doing that kind of nonsense or making those kinds of statements.
It just doesn't make any sense at all, right?
So I think that we need to not do that.
I think that we need to understand that it is a purely human project.
And... Accept these ridiculous things that people say, and I'm going to mutate my own text here and just say that for more on this kind of excitement, you can go to freedomainradio.com for free podcasts and all this other kind of good stuff.
And I hope that you will drop by.
I wanted to mention, and I'll put another video out about this, that my book On Truth is available as an e-book for free.
You can download it.
You can read it. It's only 70 pages.
I would really suggest that you get a copy.
You can mail it out to whoever you want.
It's completely free.
It is absolutely open source.
It is the Linux of publishing.
I hope that you will read it.
I think it's a very, very important book.
Thank you so much for watching this.
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