Nov. 8, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing very well. I thought I would spend a few minutes with you today to help you to understand what is going on in California, where recently, by a slim majority, they voted to outlaw gay marriage. | |
| Again. So, this is something which is hard to understand, why such opposition to fear of and so on homosexuality. | |
| So I thought I would run through a way of looking at it that I think is helpful, which also explains a whole host of other phenomenon. | |
| Well, one of the things that's really hard In our own characters, within our own souls, is to understand all of the multitude of accidents that go about creating, or at least influencing, who we are. | |
| So... The fact that I was born in the West, that I speak English, that I'm relatively intelligent, have a good speaking voice, and so on, all of that has contributed to help me to communicate more effectively to people in this kind of context. | |
| If I had been born in Darfur or if I had been born in Zaire or if I spoke that Urdu clicking language or had no access to the Internet or was not interested in technology, of course, you would never hear of me. | |
| So a lot of what has... | |
| a huge amount of what has gone into what it is that I do is accidental. | |
| It's nothing that I could be proud of. | |
| It's nothing that I could take credit for. | |
| It is accidental. | |
| And that is really tough for a lot of people to process. | |
| About 20 years ago, I was doing some work for a fellow who was well-off, and I went to his house, a big beautiful house, and he was very well-off, and I said to him, this is a beautiful house, and he turned to me and he said, yes, God has been very good to me. | |
| And I thought, even at the time, I thought, man, That God has reached down and picked you out to be Born in Canada, to be of educated parents who paid for your university and got you going on a professional career, to have had good health. | |
| I mean, you're born with spina bifida, you have a whole different kind of life than if you're not. | |
| So, it just seemed to me the height of vanity and arrogance and foolishness, fundamentally, to say, I have been picked by God to be special. | |
| There's other ways that this occurs, right? | |
| So, if we look at The groups that are most traditionally anti-homosexual tend to be religious people and patriots, right, on the Republican side and so on. | |
| They tend to be the most hostile towards homosexuality. | |
| Well, why is that? One reason that I would say is pretty fundamental and explains why both patriots and religious people are opposed to homosexuality. | |
| Of course, in the Bible it says, kill homosexuals. | |
| In my free novel, The God of Atheists, I do have a plot point in which a graduate student who's an atheist says that he's going to bring the Bible up on hate crimes charges, because if anyone publishes That homosexuals should be killed. | |
| They would go to jail for hate crimes, and I'm not saying that would be right, but at least we could use the existing laws to ban the Bible as hate literature which cancels death towards atheists and sorcerers, whatever they are, people from other religions, homosexuals, and children who disobey their parents should be strangled. | |
| So, it is hate crimes and hate literature of the first order. | |
| So there's that aspect of it, where the hate crime of wanting to kill homosexuals is advocated in the Bible. | |
| So there's that, but there's also, and I think even more fundamentally, there's this aspect where you are considered to be special or good or better or nicer or more virtuous because of a complete accident. | |
| And the degree to which people base their vanity On accidents is the degree to which they become hostile to difference. | |
| Let me say that again. The degree to which people base their self-esteem, their vanity, on the accidental is the degree to which they become hostile towards differences, the degree to which they become hostile towards other cultures, other sexual orientations, other religions, and so on. | |
| To explain why that occurs, let's just understand that homosexuality is a hormonal condition. | |
| Fundamentally, it arises from a flood of a particular kind of hormone in the mother's uterus during a particular time in pregnancy, sometimes related to maternal stress. | |
| So, it is a hormonal condition. | |
| Of course, gender, fundamentally, is a hormonal condition. | |
| Sexual orientation, because we all start off female, and then, depending on particular hormones, we become male or we stay female, and the same thing is true of sexual orientation. | |
| This is not controversial. | |
| This is not far out. | |
| It is a hormonal condition that occurs within So it's like being short or being tall. | |
| It's just a physical characteristic that is not under people's control. | |
| It is simply the way that you are created through what we could call accidents of gestation. | |
| It's ridiculous to say that an innate biological condition is good or bad. | |
| We might as well say baldness is good. | |
| I can't think of another example. | |
| It's like saying brown eyes is evil or bad. | |
| Brown eyed people aren't allowed to marry and so on. | |
| It is, of course, just a kind of bigotry to ascribe moral or character-based Characteristics to mere biological accident or biological happenstance. | |
| It's like saying tall people are good and short people are bad, and it's completely made up ridiculous bigotry. | |
| But when we start talking about the mere biological basis of life, that we are created from a sperm and an egg, and we grow, and we are subject to a wide variety of genetic, hormonal, environmental, class-based, race-based properties or influences, which are accidental. | |
| It's completely accidental. | |
| Nobody chooses their family, or chooses their genetics, or chooses the hormones they're exposed to in the womb. | |
| And so when this basic reality of happenstance, of accident, of coincidence within life raises its ugly head, what happens is it threatens the idea that accident equals virtue. | |
| So if some, I don't know, fundamentalist Republican thinks that being a straight, Christian family man is a virtue, then when you begin to point out to him that homosexuality... | |
| He just happens to be straight, the same way that some people just happen to be gay. | |
| It's short, it's tall, it's hair color, it's eye color, it has nothing to do with choice or virtue. | |
| Then he can no longer... | |
| Take pride in his, you know, straightness. | |
| If you remind, of course, a fundamentalist Christian that he says, I am virtuous because I have accepted our Lord Jesus Christ, you remind him that if he had been born in Zaire in the 12th century, he would not be a Christian at all. | |
| And if he had born an Native American Indian from 500 years ago, he would not be a Christian. | |
| And if he happened to be born to an Islamic family anywhere in the world, The odds of him being a Christian would be virtually nil. | |
| And, of course, if he'd been born Jewish or if he'd been born to an atheist family, then the odds, assuming the arguments were good and the parenting was good, the odds of him being a Christian would be virtually nil. | |
| So the fact that he is a Christian is an accident. | |
| And it's the same thing with patriotism, of course. | |
| Patriotism is the belief that the proximity of certain dirt to your mother's womb makes you better than somebody else. | |
| But, of course, nobody chooses to be born American or Canadian or British or Libyan or anything like that. | |
| It's completely random accidental. | |
| But whenever people begin to found their virtue, their self-esteem, what makes them good on something that is accidental, whether it's geography or race or biology or upbringing or anything like that, Then they become really hostile to simple, universal, scientific, rational, empirical explanations of life. | |
| Why are you an American patriot? | |
| Because you happen to be born in America. | |
| Did you earn that? No, of course not. | |
| There's no mothership of babies that is floating over the world which you do. | |
| Oh, I want to drop there and not there. | |
| It's completely accidental where you're born. | |
| And the fact that you happen to be born in America makes you no better or no worse than anyone else. | |
| You just happen to conform to your culture the same way that everybody else conforms to their culture. | |
| Which is why these, you know, fundamentalist Christians, patriots, those generally on the Republican side of things who have strong religious leanings, why they tend to be anti-gay, why they tend to be, you know, marriage between a man and a woman, and it's all complete nonsense, right? | |
| And why they tend to be anti-immigrant, and why they tend to be very much within their own biosphere of culture, and why, of course, the question of abortion, which is a highly contentious issue I understand, but it is not clarified by imagining that there's such a thing as a soul that gets created with conception, where you have full humanity with a blastocyst measuring about 50 cells across. | |
| That is not a productive addition to the discussion of life, the preservation of, the prevention of abortion, and when abortions should occur. | |
| And so on, right? So, when you have something which is founded on life as biology, life as accident, then it really threatens the specialness of patriots and Christians and conservatives and so on. | |
| Look, I mean, and don't get me wrong, the liberals and those on the left have their own nonsense which they conform to, but we're just talking about this particular one in California. | |
| So, it can only be, like they say, well, it threatens the institution of marriage. | |
| Well, the institution of marriage doesn't exist. | |
| The institution of marriage is just a human conception, right? | |
| People live together or they don't, they have pieces of paper or they don't, but there's no such thing as the institution of marriage any more than there is the scientific method. | |
| These are just human conceptions and ways of working with the world. | |
| Doesn't mean they're subjective or anything, but there is no such thing as the institution of marriage, which means that You can't threaten an abstract, right? | |
| I can't get into a fistfight with the scientific method. | |
| I guess I could go punch a scientist, but I can't get into a fistfight with the scientific method, because it's just a concept. | |
| So, when people say, well, it threatens the institution of marriage, what it means is that it threatens them, psychologically. | |
| And why would a mere biological accidental difference threaten someone Psychologically, well, it must be because they have built, as the Bible says, their house upon sand. | |
| They have built their virtue, they have built their self-esteem, they have built their sense of honor and goodness on mere biological or geographical or cultural accidents. | |
| And thus, when you are reminded that a lot of what you consider virtuous within yourself is mere accident, that does threaten you, for sure. | |
| Right? Because if you think, well, the fact that I've accepted Jesus makes me a good person, well... | |
| Jesus didn't come down, or if he did, then go take some lithium and lie down. | |
| Jesus didn't come down and thunder to you, accept me, or the pigs get it. | |
| No, what happened was someone told you about Jesus, and if somebody had not told you about Jesus, or no one had told you about Jesus, then you would not be a Christian. | |
| It's an accident of birth, an accident of geography, an accident of family, an accident of culture, an accident of theology. | |
| And so if you base your self-esteem on these accidents, you're always going to be hostile to opposing accidents, right? | |
| If you're proud that you're straight, whatever that means, then of course you're going to be hostile to the basic reality that straight is not a choice. | |
| Because we can really only take pride in that which we earn and that which we create as virtuous through choice, through effort, through integrity, through courage. | |
| You can't take pride in that which is accidental, and if you do, you're going to be hostile to any reminder that it is accidental. | |
| So, you have to view gay as a choice, and as a moral choice, because you view being straight as a moral virtue, which, of course, is completely false. | |
| And it's a mad, deranged fantasy. | |
| And, of course, this is how people fundamentally control you in the world, is they get you to define your own virtue according to their mythology, whether that mythology is race or nation or culture or religion or the... | |
| You know, the religion of the Founding Fathers and so on. | |
| If people can get you to define your virtue by their mythologies, you're completely under their control. | |
| All they have to do is keep tweaking the mythology and they can get you to do whatever they want. | |
| You're completely programmed. So, I just wanted to help you sort of understand that This hostility towards gay marriage, this hostility towards immigrants, this hostility and fear of other cultures, this banding together in these little clusters of cultural biosphere bigotry simply occurs because people have founded their self-esteem on that which is false, on that which is accidental, which means that they must forever remain hostile to opposing accidents because it reveals the emptiness and the shallowness. | |
| of their own self-esteem, and we have to break all of that down, and we have to build our confidence and self-esteem up according to rational, objective, true moral criteria, and that's something which we can't do by referring to cultural bigotry and history and the dead inertia of old prejudices. | |
| We have to clear the decks and start anew. | |
| I hope that helps provide some clarity in the situation. | |
| Thank you so much for watching. | |
| I look forward to your donations. |
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