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Sept. 3, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:53
1140 UPB - Stefan on the Michael Badnarik Show Part 1

Bringing UPB to the (mostly Christian) masses.

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Everywhere around the world, they come into America.
Every time that flag's unfurled, they come into America.
Got a dream to take them there.
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Got a dream they come to share.
Wake up, America!
Your country desperately needs you.
And the duty of every patriot is to protect his or her country from government corruption.
Why stand we here idle?
The second American Revolution has already begun.
The ideological battle between tyranny and liberty.
The conflict between communism and the Constitution.
The assault by corporations against the individual.
I am your host, Michael Badnarek.
I am the self-proclaimed stepfather of the Constitution, the defender of everybody's individual rights, and your navigator back to the land of the free.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
I think we have a fantastic program scheduled for you today.
My co-host is going to be Stephan Molyneux, who is the host of FreedomainRadio.com.
He has his own podcasts, which are highly rated on the Internet.
And, more to the point, he has written a book.
The book basically continues a discussion that we were having here on this program.
Two weeks ago, tomorrow, we were having a discussion of what is the common good?
Does it even exist?
And Stephan has written a book called Universally Preferable Behavior.
And basically he has outlined what the common good is and how we can know that that is true.
And so today's program is going to be called This is the Common Good.
And so I'm guessing that we may have some Really lively conversation and debate this morning.
Our phone number, if you care to join us, is 512-646-1984.
You are highly encouraged to exercise your freedom of expression.
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And now, without further ado, my co-host this morning is Stephan Molyneux.
Good morning, Stephan. Good morning, Michael.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Well, thank you so much for being here.
I had a co-host, Edgar J. Steele, join me to...
Talk about the discussion of whether or not World War III was imminent.
And that was a Friday program.
It was so well received and there was so much interest that we continued it the following Monday.
Well, someone responded in an email to those programs and was talking about this concept of a common good.
Can we define what a common good was?
was.
So we had a program two weeks ago that asked that question, and my audience got highly involved.
And it was just a wonderful exchange of ideas.
And I am hoping that with your help and with your book, that people will be able to identify a universally preferable behavior That sounds wonderful.
Could you, first of all, introduce yourself to my listeners and tell them where you've come from and how you came to be writing books such as this?
Sure, I'd be happy to.
Well, my name, as you mentioned, and thank you for mentioning the website.
It's Stefan Molyneux. I was introduced to objectivism like many people when I was in my teens, which is, oh, so many years ago, we won't get into the details, but I rapidly ran through objectivism and was an objectivist for many years and still have huge, huge respect for what Ayn Rand did as a writer and really as a thinker, just a stone genius all the way through.
But I remained somewhat...
I had logical problems with her proof for ethics that life is the highest value.
That which serves life is the highest value.
Reason serves life, therefore we should be rational.
It just didn't quite sit too well with me, so I kept playing around with the idea of ethics.
And then, sort of by the by, I started a podcast a couple of years ago, which began to really take off.
And so about a year ago, I used to have a real job in software, and I quit to pursue philosophy full-time, survive on donations, no ads, and so on.
So it's all very exciting.
But having continued to work on that, and I have a graduate degree in history.
I focused on intellectual history and the history of philosophy.
And I kept playing around with this problem, with this challenge of ethics until I had, you know, I basically sat down one Saturday because this problem had been bothering me for 20 years.
And I just said, I'm going to sit down at this table and I'm not going to get up until I have a solution.
And, you know, there's nothing like that kind of pressure on the self to produce positive results.
So I did sit for a very long time and then eventually...
Did you lose any weight while you were sitting there?
I mean, I'm not sure how long you went without food.
Fortunately, it wasn't quite that bad, but it could have been, I think, yes.
So I worked and I wrote a short article, which ended up on Lou Rockwell, and that sparked some interest, and then I continued to work on the idea, and then produced a full-length book, which is available on the website for free as an audiobook.
Or a PDF where you can order a print copy.
And the book's been out for, I think, about eight or ten months now.
And so far it seems to have held up to some pretty tough scrutiny.
So the theory remains conditionally true, though you never know, right?
Some stone genius may come along and discover some huge flaw in it, but so far it's held up very well.
So I'm sort of putting my eggs in that basket for now, and I think we've got a good solid ground to build on.
Well, we talked two weeks ago.
My listeners called in, and many of them, at least at the beginning of the program, indicated that everybody is different.
Everybody has a different way to pursue happiness, and therefore there is not a common good.
Everybody has a subjective view of the way things should be.
During questioning, we talked about life.
Is life a valuable thing?
Most people, unless they are suffering some sort of psychosis, want to continue to live.
They have this built-in survival instinct.
We further talked about the fact of property.
Everybody seems to Understand that private property is important.
If you and I were to go to France and sit along the Champs Elysees and I pilfered someone's croissant, we would know what they were yelling about even if we didn't understand French.
And so, by the end of the program, we kind of came from, well, there is no common good, to, well, yeah, maybe there are some things which are universal to all people living on the face of the earth.
And I think that we left it with life, liberty, and private property, that the Founding Fathers had done a lot of philosophical debate and the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution We're fairly close to identifying those things.
So you have written an entire book and you've spent quite a bit of time studying philosophy.
Are there things that are common to all people on earth other than life and private property?
Well, I mean, I think that my approach was, I'm a big fan of Aristotle, who of course was introduced to me by Rand, and I tried to take the don't be too clever approach to moral philosophy, which is that if you come up with a moral theory that somehow can be used to prove that things like murder, rape, and theft are good, Then you've made a mistake somewhere.
So that's sort of what I tried to go with.
And in almost all societies that I've known of, that have legally codified their moral rules, there are prohibitions against murder, there are prohibitions against rape, there are prohibitions against theft.
So to me, happiness is very much like a good in the free market.
Nobody can say in the free market, this is the best good because what people prefer is different.
I mean, everybody, you might prefer an iPod, I might prefer an LP player, right, for my music.
Other people may not like music at all.
But what we do all value in the free market is the right to choose the goods, right?
So it's important not to look at the content, but rather to look at the form.
And libertarians of all stripes recognize The non-aggression principle, you know, you shall not initiate the use of force against others, and some prohibitions on fraud and property rights.
And that's really what I try to prove through this book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
Wonderful. In all of these cultures that you had studied, there is always a prohibition against murder.
And during my constitution classes, I tell my students that if we're walking down the sidewalk and we see someone being shot to death, we don't have to grab our copy of the constitution and wonder.
Whether or not it was against the law.
I mean, we all know instinctively that murdering someone is against the law.
Is there some philosophical underpinning for that?
Well, yes, there is.
And I'll just start with the example of theft very briefly.
The idea behind universally preferable behavior, or just to save us a mouthful or two, UPB, Is that any theory that is put forward has to be logically consistent with itself and also consistent with the evidence.
That's a basic principle of the scientific method that theories and mathematics, of course.
The theories have to be logical and they have to be consistent with the evidence.
So if I propose a moral theory which says stealing is good, Then clearly what everybody should be doing in order to be good in that system is stealing everyone else's property all the time.
And that leads to a huge number of logical problems.
In other words, you can't steal something unless it is someone else's property.
In other words, to steal something requires The principle of private property.
But if stealing is the highest virtue, then violating private property is the highest virtue.
Therefore, private property is both needed and destroyed in that theory, which is the contradiction.
That's how you know the theory doesn't work.
The theory of private property is logically consistent with itself.
And I'm not going to go into all the details.
But a thief, for instance, who steals your iPod, He's both denying and affirming the right of property at the same time.
Because he's denying your right to own the iPod, but he is affirming his own right to own the iPod.
So any thief is acting logically inconsistently.
No thief is going to steal your iPod if it is immediately going to get stolen from him.
So you can't have a theory which both affirms the value of private property, I want to keep what I have stolen, and denies the value of private property because that is a contradiction.
In order to analyze whatever theory we come up with, we need to use logic.
I tell my students that logic doesn't tell you what the correct answers are, but it does identify the wrong answers.
It cannot be true and false at the same time.
And we use that in our theory of law.
If someone is accused of murder in San Francisco, you can prove that you were in Chicago at that particular time.
That police don't know who the murderer is, but they know that it's not you, based on the logic that a person cannot be in two places at once.
Of course, if someone does create the technology to allow that, then just about it, they can be in San Francisco committing the murder and being in Chicago at the same time.
And I think we're pretty confident that...
You know, the laws of physics will not allow that, at least not any of the laws of physics that I know.
But would you say that was a safe assessment for logic?
It identifies the wrong answers?
It identifies contradictions?
It doesn't tell us what the right answer is?
Right, and I think where a theory leads to an absurd conclusion, we can reject it as false.
So if you think of two men in a room, and there's an iPod, I don't mean to be advertising for Apple, but there's an iPod on the table.
If you have a theory that says stealing is the best thing ever, everybody should steal all the time, then you have two guys trying to grab the same iPod over and over and over and over again, which clearly would be an absurd situation for ethics.
Alright, we are here on We the People Radio Network.
My co-host is Stephan Molyneux, and we're talking about what is the common good, and we think that we've found it.
Give us a call. We'll be right back.
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This is our country.
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This is our country.
Welcome back. You are listening to Michael Badnarek, your defender of everybody's individual rights, here on We The People Radio Network.
And I want to thank all my listeners for joining us again.
My co-host this morning is Stephan Molyneux, and we're talking about universally preferable behavior.
a book that Stephan has written and as part of the book it says the reason that modern morality and morality throughout history has always had to rely first on the bullying of children and then on the threatening of adults is that it is a manipulative lie masquerading as a virtuous truth Is it possible to find out what is good without having someone,
you know, beat us over the head with it?
Absolutely. Yes, of course.
I mean, it's the same as saying, you know, in a Soviet economy, is there a way to have goods produced without coercive central planning?
Absolutely. Ethics should be part of the logical discourse of mankind in the same way that mathematics and economics and physical sciences are.
The challenge, I think, For libertarians in particular, the challenge that we face so deeply, Michael, all the time is the challenge of consistency.
So when we go to talk to anyone and we say, you know, if your kid was caught stealing a candy bar in a store, you would recognize that as wrong.
And everyone says, yes, of course, I would recognize that as wrong.
And you would go to your kid and you would say, stealing is wrong, and you would give some reasons, you know, like how would you like if it was done to you and so on.
In the details of our personal lives, we all recognize the basic moral principles, initiation of force and property rights and so on, and we correct the people in our own personal lives with reference to these abstract virtues, respect for property, respect for person, and so on.
But there's this zone in the middle, and in the book I call it the null zone.
And this is the zone that drives libertarians and other ethicists completely mental.
Because people say, yes, stealing is wrong in my life, and stealing is wrong in the abstract, but we need government taxation.
And that's where the huge short circuit occurs.
And the purpose of this book is to help give people the tools To make the case that what is wrong in our personal lives and what is wrong in an abstract sense, theft, the initiation of force, is wrong all the way through.
And there's no agency called government that can make a rock fall upwards, can reverse the path of the sun in the sky, and can make stealing or taxation moral.
And that's what I'm trying to do is extend these principles from the personal to the abstract all the way through.
So people have disconnects.
They know the answer, but then they always have exceptions to the rule.
You know, stealing is bad, but when I'm at work and I need a couple of paper tablets at home, I can go to the storeroom and take a couple of tablets from work because, well, the company is big.
They spend millions of dollars on stationery, and they're not going to miss a couple of tablets.
Well, yes. Sorry, I think that's true.
And sorry to be annoying, but I think that's true.
But I think that the challenge is not, you know, that the world is not in the state it's in because stuff is missing from a company storeroom or a stapler or something.
But it's because people have this huge short circuit around ethics.
There's this realm called the government, where up is down, black is white.
Stealing suddenly becomes...
A moral good.
People think, you know, well, society without taxation, without the welfare state, without the government building roads, we'd all starve.
People would die in the streets.
Therefore, the theft of taxation becomes good.
That's where I really want to focus people's attention, as I know that you do as well, on this problem that people just create this...
Bizarro universe of ethics called the government where suddenly the initiation of force is a moral necessity, a moral good, which is something they would never accept in their personal life.
In the book you said that we know that killing is wrong, but then we'll pay people to dress up in the same color clothing and we give them medals for going out and killing people.
There's this... Disconnect there with whether or not life is okay.
You know, killing is bad, but then we're going to be supporting the war.
We're dropping bombs on, you know, innocent civilians in another country.
Is that another major disconnect that people have?
Yes. I mean, I think that, I mean, you've touched really upon the heart of the matter, which is that the progress of any mental discipline, any science, is the application of consistency across all spheres.
So, in the Middle Ages, everybody knew that a rock would fall down if you let it go.
You hold it up off the ground, you open your hands, and the rock falls down.
But people didn't understand that the Earth was also, the planet, was a rock that also fell down.
It just falls around the sun, right?
And so the extension of the principle, things fall down, To the earth, to the moon, to the solar system, was an application of the consistent principle of gravity in different spheres.
And that's really what I'm aiming to do with this concept of ethics, is to take the basic ethical things which people already accept in their personal lives, no aggression, no theft, and extend them to all spheres of life, because that's what a consistent theory should do.
And of course, that's what science is still working on in terms of the unified field theory and physics.
So this extension of saying a man's moral nature does not change when he puts on a costume, a green costume for the army, a blue costume for the police.
A man's moral nature does not change based on the outfit he is wearing.
You put on a uniform, you don't gain the ability to fly, right?
You don't gain the ability to go back in time, and you don't gain the ability to initiate the use of force and have it be good.
I agree. Just because you're a police officer wearing a uniform, you don't have the authority to go around and forcibly have sex with women.
That is against the law, and you become outside the law or an outlaw.
That's a topic that we have discussed many times on this program.
Is it possible to...
Can you conclude this rational ethics if you have a tendency to not think?
Or is there some level of intelligence that is required for being able to handle these ideas?
I think at the highest level of abstraction, it does take some intelligence to grind through it.
But I don't think that's necessary for society to be moral.
And I'll give you a little example just taken from physics.
Hopefully it'll make some sense.
To understand why a ball that you throw travels in the arc that it does, to be able to describe that mathematically and physically takes a lot of training.
However, to be able to throw and catch a ball, we can all do that.
I mean, you can do that from the age of four.
And it's the same thing with ethics.
You know, they say easy is taking candy from a baby.
Well, if you've ever tried to take candy from a child, they get property rights right away.
If you try and put a tax on their Halloween stash, they will object most strenuously.
So I think that it's true that you need some intellectual abilities and some geeky obsessions with ethics to abstract it.
But we all get it.
And the real challenge of the ethicist is to get people to understand That there are no exceptions.
There are no exceptions to the prohibitions against the use of force.
Not costumes in the military, not IRS agents with papers, not FBI badges, not policemen's caps.
There are, I mean, all countries have laws against murder, but they all create massive exceptions, which is where the evils come flooding back into society.
So, nobody is above the laws of physics and nobody is above the laws of ethics.
You know, you're required to follow these ethics, and we think we have identified what they are.
This is our topic this morning.
Give us a call. 512-646-1984.
That number again, 512-646-1984.
This is a much better discussion when you are participating.
Give us a call.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
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Online and on demand, this is We the People Radio Network.
We'll be right back.
This is our country.
Welcome back. This is my country.
It is your country.
And it is our responsibility to protect it from all of the government corruption that we are surrounded with.
I want to welcome all of our listeners this morning.
We are talking about the universally preferable behavior, the idea that it's good to keep your hands to yourself and not take your neighbor's property, something that we all know instinctively.
I'm now going to Bert in Georgia.
Good morning, Bert. How are you this morning?
Doing very well. Our church does a lot of small group work, and one of the small group materials that we use is the Truth Project, the Focus on the Family thing.
And it takes a lot of time to go through truth and ethics and the difference between ethical behavior or moral behavior.
I really enjoyed it.
But one of the things that it goes through many contortions to lay out is this idea that ethical behavior has to have some basis in a universal.
And obviously from their point of view, that universal comes back to God.
And so what I wanted to ask the guest there is, how does that relate in his thinking?
Does he believe that ethical behavior, not just ethical behavior, but the idea of ethics requires a universal God?
Well, I certainly do agree that without universals, all we're doing is inflicting, in a sense, personal taste.
We're saying, I don't like stuff to be stolen, which is not a very compelling moral argument.
I have tried to avoid reliance on God in the proof of the ethics that I'm working with because obviously God means many things to many people both within a particular society.
There are dozens if not hundreds of flavors of Christianity in different societies as well.
So tempting though it is and much though I understand that a lot of people base the universality of ethics I have tried my hardest to avoid basing the ethics on God.
And in that sense, I think it's complementary to a belief in God.
But I've tried to avoid it in the same way that a mathematician or a physicist will try to avoid inserting, you know, God does something here into his equation because it's not something that's part of the traditional scientific method, if that makes sense.
It does, and I appreciate that.
The one thing that I want to follow up with that, and this isn't to be argumentative, I was really interested in your answer to this, based on the morality or the ethic that you've laid out this morning, I find that in many ways the Christian God doesn't match up.
It doesn't measure up. And so whenever taking on an ethic that says, do not kill under any circumstances, it doesn't matter if you think God told you to, it doesn't matter if you think whatever, don't kill, First of all, how do you deal with that?
And second, is it transitioning society away from these beliefs that, you know, there's one rule for God and one rule for people or one rule for people who are following after God and others for infidels if you go down that path?
What's the plan? Is it possible?
Does it make sense? Well, again, I think those are excellent, excellent questions.
The challenge that ethicists have, and I'm sure that you face the same challenge, is that ethical arguments Almost never make a bad person good or a good person bad.
I've never heard anyone successfully convince a hitman to join the United Way as a chairman or something or vice versa.
So the problem with ethicists, almost always, is it's like we have this fantastic anti-smoking program or smoking cessation program, but we're only ever allowed to talk to people who've never smoked.
So we almost always are preaching to the choir when it comes to ethics.
The way that I try and solve that problem is to point out that it's not evil people who are the real threat in the world.
It is evil theory. It is not the lunatic with a shotgun who is the real danger in the world.
It is people who are good, who are well-meaning, who have a wrong theory.
Communism was a great evil.
National Socialism.
The people who thought they were doing good by serving the class or the race or people who thought they were doing good by joining the military for imperialistic wars or whatever.
It is the good people who are seduced by bad theories and then support the most atrocious evils.
That, I think, is where we really need to focus our efforts, and that's why I really focus on the theory, because it is, if we can uncouple the theoretical justifications for the evils of the world, for taxation, for war, and so on, we will do a huge amount, because the people who try to do the right thing with the wrong theory Who killed a quarter of a billion people in the 20th century.
It wasn't crazy guys with shotguns in a private society.
It was good, well-meaning, well-intentioned, honorable people who thought they were doing the right thing by serving their state.
Bert, when I was running for president, one of the questions I was asked frequently was a question about...
Abortion. And many people wanted me to use the Bible in a religious answer to support it.
And the problem with using a religious answer is that it only makes sense to religious people.
You know, if you're going to be talking to someone who's an atheist, using the Bible as your proof is going to have no effect.
And so the question is not Whether or not God exists, the question is, can we come up with an explanation that's going to make sense to people who do and do not follow the Bible?
Does that make sense? It does, and I'm in violent agreement.
I'm with you all the way with that.
Specifically, we need to find a way to communicate to people that best communicates to people.
But the fundamental difference that I have is that if it is true, That an ethical system must be based on an absolute, and that absolute has some form of character or whatnot.
Unless we admit up front that what we're talking about is our God, whatever this absolute thing is that is across all systems that we are aspiring to learn more about and to move in that direction of, unless we go ahead and admit that this is this thing that is our God, Then we run into all kinds of other problems.
And I've really appreciated the answer.
You've given incredibly honest and intelligent answers.
I appreciate that. I believe that there's a real core problem, and the core problem isn't necessarily because people don't know what's right or people don't know to do right.
It's kind of like your gravity illustration, which I thought was brilliant.
You jump out of windows, you're going to fall down whether you understand gravity or not.
You act immorally or unethically, you're going to suffer the consequences whether you understand why or not.
We're just giving people a system that works.
And if that system has a basis in a universal, then to the extent that we teach this universal as for what it is, people will be the better for it.
And to the extent that we don't, people will be to the detriment of it.
Yeah, that's true.
And so that's what we're looking for today, is what is that universal basis that everybody can agree on?
Well, I don't want to tie up your lines for the whole time, but my vote is that universal thing is a good, loving God.
And that's my vote. All right.
Well, thank you, Bert. I appreciate that.
Thanks for calling in. Thanks.
Along those same lines, do all religions have basically the same universals, Stephan?
Have you examined the different religions?
Is there some common denominator between Christianity and Judaism and Islam and the hundreds of other religions that exist?
I've not found a lot of commonality between different religions.
And again, if you understand that there have been approximately 10,000 gods that have been worshipped by humanity throughout its Rather exciting religious history, if you look at the moral content of those religions, they tend to wildly diverge.
And of course, within the Bible itself, there is a large number of moral instructions, some of which we consider virtuous, I think rightly, and some of which we would consider appalling if instituted, especially in the Old Testament.
So it really depends...
What people focus on in the religious text, because they tend to have a lot of different accumulations of stories and moral lessons.
So it's because everybody knows that there's a certain amount of cherry picking in every religion.
It really depends what people are bringing to the table from their own personal preferences.
So I think that it is a real challenge, and it's not been successfully achieved in any society that I know of, to base a universal system of ethics on religious texts.
Wonderful. We are here on We The People Radio Network.
Our phone number is 512-646-1984.
The discussion today is, you know, this is the common good, a universally acceptable behavior.
We'd love your participation.
Give us a call.
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This is our country.
This is our country.
Welcome back. You are listening to Michael Bednarik, the defender of everybody's individual rights, here on We the People Radio Network.
And my co-host this morning is Stephan Molyneux.
And we are discussing universally preferable behavior.
Basically the idea that there is a common good and that we can figure it out logically and rationally.
I'm now going to Patrice in Texas.
Good morning, Patrice. Are you there?
Good morning. How are you?
Hey, if I was any better, I'd think I'd been framed.
You're in a good mood this morning.
I'm glad to hear that. I am.
I'm in a good mood because I hear things on your show this morning that only solidify and revalidate My thinking is that there is no common good because you can't please everybody, especially atheists.
Really? Of course, of course.
You know, you can't please an atheist if you're a Christian because they don't believe in laws that are based on anything that comes from anything higher than man.
And after all, man has never Ever agreed on anything.
That's why we have the different religions.
That's why we have different countries.
It's because people split up and they divide when they cannot live their lives as they see fit.
And this gentleman would have us believe that we have to change everything in the world to satisfy atheists or the non-common denominator of God in our country and in our laws.
Is that what you're saying?
Do we have to change everything, Stephen?
Well, I don't think we have to change everything.
But, I mean, for instance, up here, I think you made an excellent point earlier, Michael, about your run for presidency.
Up here in Canada, it's close to 20% of the population is atheist.
And since I'm trying to create an ethical system that can be applied without exception, I can't exclude a fifth of the population up here or I think it's a tenth of the population in the United States.
I'm trying to create a system that can be rationally processed and understood by everyone, right?
I mean, Christians are rational thinkers and atheists are rational thinkers and we can approach the science of ethics As a team, and this of course is nothing specifically against belief in God, but I don't think that we can, in an increasingly secular world, I just think it's not going to be something that could be universally consistent to create a system that is going to exclude a large section of the population.
This is ridiculous because, you know, ethics itself, it cannot be defined as anything scientific because it changes.
And it's deeply personal.
And there we go back to the individuality of man.
Overwhelmingly, the population in the United States is Christian.
Overwhelmingly! And so if you have an overwhelming basis, A population that is Christian or that it believes in some form of higher power, higher than man and higher than government created by man, then why can't those people meld in and be thankful that there is a rule of law that treats everyone equally if it's obeyed?
The statement that you made About the atheists, do you think that atheists universally think that murder is okay?
Well, no, I didn't say that, but I don't think that atheists ever said that it was not okay, because the overwhelmingly majority of those communist leaders who have been in charge and always seek to somehow find themselves at the top, they believe that murder is okay.
Sorry to interrupt, but I would just say, and the argument about communism, I completely agree with you.
I think communism is an irrational doctrine in theory and an evil doctrine in practice.
But I don't think that we would want to over-focus on the atheistic philosophies that are involved with communism.
Why not? Why not? You either believe or don't...
Well, because I don't think that you would want Christianity to be judged by religious leaders like George Bush or Tony Blair, right?
Well, no, but I said that the overwhelmingly majority of people, including Nazis like George Bush and his family, That find themselves at the top, they believe that murder is okay.
But the overwhelmingly true Christians, who never, almost never make it to the top, they don't believe in that at all.
So when we were following the Constitution, there was nothing wrong with that.
People weren't, you know, killing each other until Lincoln, other than in defense.
And the other man who was on the line earlier, I think it was the last caller you had, said that God doesn't measure up in some way.
Well, that's rug wash.
It's people that don't measure up.
Okay. Well, don't go away.
I'm going to go to Texas.
And who's on the line?
Aaron. Aaron.
How are you, Aaron? Doing well.
How about yourself? I'm well, thanks.
Did you have something to throw into this mix?
I look at also what she's saying.
I can understand where she's coming from.
I was actually raised by a Southern Baptist woman, and I have nothing against Christianity, except when it comes to Christianity, thinking that Christianity unto itself is the only religion that's correct.
Now, she even mentioned that people are going to have differences Just because that's the way humanity really runs, and I think she's making a lot of blanket assumptions as far as Christians are concerned.
And when Christians hold up to the light, like you were saying, cherry-picking, you know, what could be considered a belief system, that really starts to turn into something that a lot of people don't want to hear because who wants to hear that they're wrong?
No Christian wants to hear it, and no atheist wants to hear it.
I don't think when you make an assumption that all atheists think just because they don't mention That murder is not okay.
Who's deciding that they're wrong?
You? Just because you say so?
No, I'm not saying that they're wrong.
This is what I'm talking about.
In order to have a true dialogue between people, I think there should be a general respect.
And I personally saw a lot of the shortcomings of Christianity.
A lot of people, they also see that if you...
You mean because you get your ass kicked in a conversation, you feel like people don't have any respect.
I don't have any respect for people who are trying to tell me that they know what I should believe in, and that what I believe in is wrong, and what they believe in is right, and that they're the only ones that know how to get together and make something common for everyone.
I have something... What if they're speaking from a manner of experience?
Like, I personally really do study religions.
And I study all religions.
I study all religions in the respect that At least if I cannot agree with what you're saying, I can understand where you're coming from and I can have enough respect, then not point my finger in your face and tell you that you're wrong because of the shortcomings of your own religion.
Every religion, even faiths, and I personally, I don't believe in Christianity as far as a religion that is true unto itself.
I think there's a lot of things that are left out of the picture as far as what Christ's true teachings were.
I personally had to leave the church just because of a lot of the Hypocrisy that was left behind because of the church.
And I personally went Buddhist because the responsibility is on your shoulders.
And I'm not saying that Buddhism is the way to go.
I'm just saying that was my choice.
And I think that if people really took on the personal responsibility, if people actually really said and did what they said, I think Christianity would have a better name.
I think a lot of people ran from the church because people say a lot, but people don't do a lot.
That's how I look at it.
One of the things that I would like to interject at this point is that the number of people who subscribe to a theory does not constitute its validity.
Before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World, most of the people in the world thought the world was flat.
And that was a generally, you know, held belief.
And, you know, you could say at that time that, you know, all these people can't be wrong, but in fact they are.
And so when we can point to photographs of the Earth from space and showing that it's a sphere, we have conclusive proof that the world is round.
And although there are very few people these days who think the world is flat, you know, you can continue to believe the world is flat whether or not that is true.
The question is, can we come up with a subset of ideas that both atheists, Christians, and other religions all agree on?
And I'm asking the very simple question, can we agree that killing other people is wrong whether or not you believe in God?
Patrice, do you think that's possible?
Absolutely not. I already said why.
I said that communist people always find themselves at the top, and people who are atheists, and they see nothing morally wrong with taking a few people out, a few million people out.
Well, during the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church executed a whole lot of people.
Well, if you think that Catholicism is not Christianity.
A lot of people think that it's under the guise of Christianity.
I mean, their focal point of almost every cathedral is the dead body of Christ on the cross.
Well, we have a commercial break which is going to be foisted upon us by the computer whether we are ready or not.
So we have a 90-second conversation here listening to station identification, and then we'll be back with our discussion.
Please give us a call, 512-646-1984.
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