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March 9, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:14
1291 The Liberty Forum, March 8 2009

Some thoughts that I had about the conference I attended in New Hampshire.

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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's March the 9th, 2009, and we are Toodley Von Moseying back to Canada from the frigid, gray, dull inside of a ping pong ball state of New Hampshire.
Which we saw a brief moment of sunshine yesterday morning through roomy red bloodshot eyes.
And we are heading back.
I was the keynote speaker.
At the 2009 Liberty Forum in New Hampshire.
This is for the future, if anyone's interested.
I think I gave a really good speech.
I had a lot of participation.
I was up for around two hours.
I did about a half an hour of an introduction to the against me argument and then opened the floor to anybody who had questions and comments and I must say that however scruffy looking some of these fellows and ladies are, actually more the fellows than the ladies,
They are as sharp as a bag of tacks and I was very pleased to see such an enthusiastic and energetic amount of audience participation and I think it was nice actually for people to To have the possibility to interact with the speaker and we had a lot of fun and I even did some dancing.
You might want to listen to the audio unless you want to be truly traumatized by me throwing some shapes, having some moves.
I didn't get a chance to see a lot of the forum.
I was traveling with Christina and Isabella.
We drove down last Thursday and had a pretty lengthy trip.
It's about 9 hours, but if you factor in a baby, it's about 14 hours.
And it took a while for us to leave.
The gravity well of a baby when you're trying to break orbit is considerable.
And it took us a long time to get out.
We only got in at about 4 or 4.30 in the morning into New Hampshire, so that was a bit tiring.
And Isabella had two nights of much sleep, and then last night she actually slept well, which, you know, was good because I have a long drive today.
And so I was kind of tired and I wanted to spend time with Isabella.
I saw three presentations.
I saw one from an ex-army fellow.
Who was talking about his opposition to the Iraq war and why he signed up for the army and how he got out of the army.
And I certainly appreciated his analysis of foreign policy and so on, which I thought was great.
Not so much with, you know, we must now tax people to print money in order to pay reparations for...
To the Iraqis for what we've done.
That to me seems like a collective statist concept of guilt and of course requires the initiation of the use of force to pay for what I essentially would assume is this fellow's bad conscience about what he did when he was over there.
Which I sympathize with, but force is not the answer.
And he also wanted full benefits for all veterans no matter whether they were honorably or dishonorably discharged, which It doesn't really matter what my opinion is or his, I guess, because nothing's going to change anyway, but I certainly wouldn't support that as a solution to the problem of coercion.
So that was one of those, and this is true of a lot of presentations that I see where I'm smiling and then, oh, right, okay, he's going there.
Okay, let me note that and then I'll come back to when he's sticking to principles.
I saw that. I saw my good friend Mark Stevens do a fantastic impersonation of tough people from Brooklyn.
Way better than I could ever do in my wildest dreams.
And his talk was on passion and liberty, I think it was.
And his argument was that the government It does not exist, and citizenship does not exist.
Why? Because citizenship is defined as something which you provide, an obligation you owe to the government, because the government has the obligation to protect you and your property.
I won't go into his whole history, but he ended up doing a fair amount of studying in the law library, though he's not a lawyer.
Finding out that there are specific precedents that are universal, which establish beyond really any shadow of legal doubt that the government has zero obligation to protect you.
In other words, some court cases where the government mistakenly released some guy who ended up killing some kid.
The parents took the government to court.
And saying, well, you had a duty to protect us because we pay our taxes and here you endangered us.
It's the moral equivalent of letting a tiger loose in the street, right?
The tiger doesn't get charged with murder.
I do if the tiger kills someone.
And the court upheld that the government has zero responsibility for the actions of the criminal that it voluntarily, and I think mistakenly released into the wild, so to speak, and that these precedents have been set all over the Republic that the government can never be sued for any failure to protect you and the government knows you no obligation or no duty of protection and so Marx His response is that if the government has no duty to protect,
then I have no duty to the government.
This is not a contract. Therefore, there's no such thing as citizenship.
There's no such thing as a country.
There's no such thing as government. I thought that was an interesting argument.
I'm not sure it's wildly compelling.
It certainly is. I mean, if the government did have some sort of duty to protect you, that you had to sue it.
If it didn't, would that mean that it wasn't a government?
Well, no. It would still be a monopoly and so on.
It would just be that much less, I guess, profitable, but it would still be a monopolistic and profit-based system.
So my response to that is that that's interesting, and it certainly does strike a blow against the social contract, which is never a bad thing.
But that it's not a particularly compelling argument.
And he also did talk about the degree to which when you take away people's perception or understanding or belief or faith, I guess you could say, that there is such a thing as a government and that they are an American or whatever, that this strikes a significant blow against their sense of identity.
Which is true, and he did talk a little bit about the psychological ramifications of these things, but not talking about the family, not talking about all of the influences that strike children, I think is not really dealing with the issue.
Like, there was lots of complaints about the public school system.
And to me, it's not really the public school system that is the issue.
That's more of a symptom. And to take an analogy, If the government passed a decree that said you had to take your children to church and put them in Sunday school, and your parents sent you to church, and you say, well, why do I have to go to church?
Well, because we're going to get thrown in jail if we don't send you to church.
So, you know, this is the compulsion that we live under, and I'm sorry about it, but we are going to surrender to the infinite might of the state.
Then the kid at least would have some barrier to the propagandizing of the church, right?
Because he'd look at the priest and say, well, wait a second, you guys lobbied to have me put here through force, so I'm not going to take anything that you say seriously because you're not reasoning with me.
And in the same way, if you have children and you send your children to public school and they say, well, why do I have to go to school?
I say, well, you have to go to school because we're going to be thrown in jail if we don't send you to school.
So, you know, you're forced to be there and so on.
Then at least all the pro-state goo-headed propaganda the kid's going to be exposed to, he's going to be able to take with a grain of salt and put in its proper context, right?
Well, the state is there to protect you, this and that.
It's like, well, why is the state threatening my parents with jail if they don't send me to state education, right?
If the state is so good and voluntary and all wonderful.
And of course, that leads to a whole host of other problems.
Right, which is why...
How does a kid do in a state school if he understands why he's there, right?
Based on coercion. Is he going to get held back?
Is he going to be in constant conflict with everyone and so on?
And it's tough, you know, but I think you can't lie to your kids, right?
I mean, it's not our fault that the system is whacked, and we certainly would say, look, I mean, whatever you've got to say to get to the next grade, if you have to write 50 times, the government is God, the government is God, then let's do it together, you know?
It's not true, but this is the game you've got to play to get to the next grade, right?
And I think it's a shame. And I certainly would never want to inflict this upon you, but this is the system that we live in.
And, you know, we either all go and live in the woods, or we attempt to survive within the system that there is in order to get what we want in life.
And be honest with the kid about that.
And, you know, I'm sorry that I have to tell these truths to my kid, but I didn't make the system, and I'm not going to lie to my kid and say things which I don't believe in in order to protect him, right?
I don't think the children need to be protected from The truth, again, it needs to be age-appropriate, right?
But that, I think, is really the issue.
If the parents sent their kids to public schools saying, well, we're forced to do it, it sucks, and you're going to have to spew a bunch of propagandistic stuff to move on, but, you know, do it, and, you know, with tears in your eyes if you have to, with all of the positive...
Energy that you can muster, all of the enthusiasm you can fake, because that's the game, right?
That's the way you have to play it.
And then, yeah, public school would be gone in a generation, right?
And the government would be gone probably a generation and a half.
So, to me, it's not the public school that's a symptom.
It's the parents' praise of the public school and ignoring of the basic reality of the reason that the kids in public school is coercion.
I think that is closer to it, but as we all know, the family is a pretty radioactive thing to handle, and people want to stay away from it.
So that would be sort of my two-minute review of that, but at least his speech was consistent in a way that I really enjoyed, so kudos to him.
And then John Paul Gatto, who absolutely should be a mobster with that name, but John Paul Gatto I came and gave a very droney, red, very loud, unfortunately, speech, which I couldn't listen to all of because it was too loud for my daughter in there.
And this was a problem with volume as a whole.
I don't know if half the people in there are legally deaf or whatever, but I'm much more comfortable listening to someone when I don't feel that they're booming and shredding my eardrum because I'm then just tense and flinching and waiting for them to cough or hit a big consonant.
So I made sure when I did my speech that the volume was very low.
And he gave a speech that I thought was mostly drivel.
And it was a real shame because I was looking forward to his speech.
I've heard that he's quite big in the education movement.
And he told stories like Richard Branson, the guy who did Virgin Airlines, he's an entrepreneur, that when Richard Branson was four, his mother, who was a stewardess, Said to him when he was on the far side of town driving with him, do you think you could get home from here on your own?
And he said, yes, I think I could.
And so she basically turfed him out of the car and literally drove home.
Not even drove away off to see how he was doing, but drove home.
And he made his way home. And I think that's not good parenting, frankly.
That's just not good parenting.
And there's ways to teach children independence without having to go to those extremes.
And he talked about this fellow as a success who'd never gone to college and so on.
But if I remember rightly, and I'm not positive about this, but I think he's had a number of different marriages and he seems kind of manic and he doesn't seem to trust women very much.
And so I just don't know that that's necessarily, you know, he's made a lot of money.
It's not the definition to me of a successful human being as a whole.
And later he quoted Marcus Aurelius who said that nothing you can buy with money and nothing you can command with power has any real lasting value.
And yet the people that Jean-Paul Gatto was quoting as successful were all entrepreneurs who'd struck rich.
So, I don't know what the point he was making.
You can make money without going to college, to me, is not a damning of the educational system.
Lots of people make money who have gone to college.
So, there's an X factor out there that's not exactly the same as college.
And college, of course, has to...
I'm not defending college, you understand, right?
But just as a logical argument, college has to cater to the majority of people, and the majority of people are not Richard Branson or...
Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or who was turned down by the Wharton School of Business and so on.
All education has to cater to the majority.
That would be true of private schools as well.
You can't really design a school to deal with the one in a billion genius because you won't find them, you can't test who they are and there aren't enough of them to fund a school.
Looking at the exceptions and saying this dam's education to me is a real problem.
I would have much rather looked at the statistics of the majority in the past versus the present and so on.
Maybe that's all in his books, but he just basically literally spent an hour telling anecdotes of people who didn't go to college or didn't even finish high school who then had great success in business or some other fields.
Actually, I think it was all business if I remember rightly.
So I thought that was just very disappointing.
Anecdote is not argument, right?
And it doesn't prove anything to say that some people make a lot of money without going to college.
So there was that, and he had a bunch of handouts which I didn't quite understand.
And one of them, though, was 21 ways to improve public education.
Students should not be forced to write anything down from the blackboard more than once a week.
There should be fewer administrators These statistics were from the 90s.
For 941,000 students, there were 30,000 administrators.
Sorry? Yes, thank you.
I'm going to exit. This one here, exit 21?
It's what? Sorry, I'm just doing our exit.
Actually, I picked this up afterwards. So then I did my speech.
And it was the against me argument, which I did for about half an hour, the introduction, maybe 20 minutes, and then we just did it back and forth.
And it was a great deal of fun, actually.
The audience was very smart, of course, right?
Well read. Had great arguments and I really enjoyed their comments and questions and objections.
So that was a great deal of fun and then I went out for dinner with some people afterwards and that was interesting as well.
There was one radical relativist at the end of the conversation and a theist to the right of me and to the northeast of me diagonally.
And they had some interesting...
Comments, or interesting arguments, I guess you could say.
So, I thought I would reproduce...
We did actually have a recording of this, so we were trying to record it, but I think Greg's recorder ran out of memory space, so I will reproduce the argument.
Of course, entirely to my favor, with me triumphing in every way, shape, and form.
It's so great that there was no actual recording.
Actually, no, I think this is what happened.
So, the radical relativist...
We'll call him Jimbo. Jim.
Jim was saying that, you know, he can't be certain of anything.
And so, of course, I said, well, compared to what, right?
Can't be certain of anything. Well, you know, all my conclusions could be false, right?
And I said, well, that's very true, but it's important to distinguish a skepticism that you may have in the conclusions that Versus a skepticism that you may have in the methodology or in any methodology, really. So a scientist, of course, will have skepticism about conclusions, just as a mathematician will.
But what a scientist really can't have skepticism about is the scientific methodology, the scientific method.
A logician may produce an error, but The error can't be using logic in the first place, right?
A mathematician may calculate something incorrectly, but the discipline or the reasoning or logic of mathematics is not something he can be radically skeptical about.
Now, of course, the fascinating thing is that if someone is radically skeptical about not just conclusions but methodology, then radical skepticism completely collapses.
Because if someone says, I cannot be certain of anything, even a methodology, then certainty versus uncertainty becomes impossible.
Truth versus falsehood becomes impossible.
So since there is then no standard of certainty, there really cannot be any standard of uncertainty, and therefore radical relativism collapses in on itself if It's entirely appropriate, I think, to have skepticism relative to conclusions, but it is not rational.
It's actually irrational, if not anti-rational, to have radical skepticism with regards to methodology and conclusions.
If you have skepticism to methodology, obviously you have it to conclusions, but then the whole thing collapses in on itself.
So the proper, I think, logical approach is to have skepticism for conclusions according to an objective methodology, reason, evidence, or whatever.
Now, he had trouble following this, and so what I said was, I said, okay, well, let's look at something that is radically subjective, which is your dreams, right?
So, if you have a dream about an elephant tonight, is that correct or incorrect?
Right? And when you understand that question, you understand that the question or the criterion of correct or incorrect is meaningless when applied to a dream.
Is it morally right or epistemologically or logically correct to have a dream about an elephant tonight?
Well, clearly, there's no way of measuring that correctness or incorrectness because there's no external standard of ideal dreaming.
It's not like, well, the ideal dream is about a piranha, and therefore, since an elephant is pretty far from a piranha, you can't have, you know, it's incorrect, or morally incorrect, or logically incorrect, or empirically incorrect to dream about an elephant.
Sorry, slight baby break there.
To continue.
To continue.
The, um...
Since there can be no standard of correct or incorrect relative to a dream, I think that we can understand the problem that we have When we apply radical skepticism to a methodology,
right? Since there is no objective methodology to judge the correctness or incorrectness of a dream, then if by dream we mean everything, then there's no such thing as true or false, correct or incorrect.
Now, this doesn't mean, of course, that we can't have skepticism for some methodologies.
So, there is a methodology called tarot cards that, for instance, I have more than skepticism but downright disbelief in.
There's another methodology called water divining or reading the entrails of sheep to figure out who's going to win the lottery.
And none of this is a valid methodology for Gaining any kind of knowledge, like prayer to do something, I don't know, to move an arrow in flight.
It doesn't work.
So, we have to have an objective, rational, empirical methodology to work with.
Not all methodologies are valid, but all methodologies can be measured relative to the validity of reason and evidence.
So, that's, of course, the problem with radical skepticism, where you are radically skeptical...
Of all conclusions, which I think is valid, and all methodologies.
In other words, every single statement, every single methodology that can be developed by the human mind from prayer to the scientific method, everything, every single statement that mankind can make is about a dream.
Every single statement that mankind makes is, I dreamt about an elephant.
Two plus two is four is, I dreamt about an elephant.
You can't say correct or incorrect if all methodologies are suspect because you have no compared to what.
You have nothing to be skeptical about because there is no standard which can be used To measure any methodology against.
Every methodology is suspect.
And suspect compared to what?
Compared to everything.
Compared to nothing. So the statement just collapses in on itself.
And that kind of radical skepticism turns everything into meaninglessness.
And since it is a statement that is supposed to contain meaning, i.e.
the value and virtue of skepticism, The fact that you are attempting to establish a meaningful statement that everything is meaningless, well, you have a problem.
You have a huge logical problem, and the argument collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.
So that was sort of one thing I think that is useful to look at or to think about when you're dealing with radical skeptics.
And they will generally, since I believe it's just emotional scar tissue, they will generally withdraw from that kind of statement, right?
And say, well, I don't mean that kind of skepticism, I mean another kind of skepticism, and you chase that one down and so on, right?
So, you know, I just put that out there.
And the guy, of course, seemed skeptical, right?
And didn't want to process, so are you certain that you should be skeptical of everything?
Are you not even skeptical about that?
It's like, yeah, I'm skeptical about that too.
It's like, so you're skeptical about whether you should be skeptical.
That means that you're certain that you should not be certain about anything, which means you at least have one certain...
So anyway, I mean, these basic things.
And what I do is I look for...
It's just my approach. I look for, is this person going to notice this contradiction?
Because if they're interested in the truth, then they'll say, well, gosh, there is a problem with that.
But if they're simply trying to be clever or one-upmanship, or they just have been raised by somebody who was destructively, quote, certain, i.e.
bigoted, and this is their defense, is radical skepticism, And they're not interested in the truth, then they'll just make up, they'll just fog or make up something else or wriggle or change the definition.
In which case it's like, hey, okay, well, I've put my argument forward, you can mull it over if you like or not, right?
But I'm not going to continue to debate if the goalposts keep moving, right?
It's no fun for anyone. Now, there was a fellow to the right of me who I found a little pretentious and pompous.
And that's my opinion, of course.
I'm sure he found me annoying too, but...
I was talking about Catholicism, and somebody mentioned Catholicism, and I said, you know, there's one faith system that I just have no respect for at all.
Like, there's nothing about Catholicism I find anything other than horrendous and hellacious, right?
And particularly the...
The virgin priests, you know, the sexual repression always leads to perversion.
It seems to be a pretty common road to hell.
And the attack upon the natural life and the sexual instinct in Catholicism I just find virulently cancerous.
You know, it is a metastasized religiosity.
And I didn't go into all of that, but I said there's nothing redeeming about Catholicism.
I can find a few things in other religions, but about Catholicism, there's nothing redeeming.
And, of course, the use of women as, you know, reproductive Catholic machines, Catholic reproduction machines, just vile.
Anyway, so he said, well, that's interesting, because he said...
There are conclusions in the Bible, you know, which the Catholics believe in, that I'm sure you would agree with too.
And I said, I don't think so, right?
And then he's like, aha, right?
Because I guess he's a clever guy who's used to winning all his debates, right?
And so he said, aha, so you don't believe in thou shalt not murder.
You don't think it's true.
I said, well, it has no truth value at all.
He said, so you believe it's false?
I said, no, no, no. What I said was it has no truth value at all.
He's like, well, what are you talking about?
I said, well, it is a mere statement.
It is a mere statement.
And a mere statement with no evidence and no reasoning behind it is just a statement.
It cannot be true.
It cannot be false. It is just a statement.
You know, my great-great-great-grandfather liked ice cream.
True or false? Well, it's just a statement.
There's no way to verify it.
Just a statement. I like ice cream.
Ah, but you never eat it.
Well, maybe I'm lactose intolerant.
but there's no way to verify it.
Ah, but you can hook me up to the pleasure centers of my brain up the pleasure centers of my brain up to X, Y, and Z but I'm talking about, you know, in the normal course of conversation.
gentlemen.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Somebody says, murder is bad.
True or false? Well, neither.
I mean, to me, it's exactly the same.
As looking at a sentence in Mandarin or some language that I don't understand at all, and somebody says, is that true or false?
I don't know. I don't even know what it's saying.
There's no context, there's no evidence, there's no understanding, there's no logic, there's no reasoning, there's no syllogisms, it's just a statement.
And it is a series of random squiggles on a page.
But is it true? Well, true or false is reason and evidence.
A mere statement cannot fall into the category of true or false.
True or false?
I don't know.
I couldn't tell you it doesn't fall into that category because I don't understand it.
There is no God.
True or false?
False.
Well, there is no truth or false statement.
There is no truth or falsehood in a mere statement of opinion.
And anything that is not reason and evidence is a statement of opinion.
Someone had a dream about an elephant.
That means it's about their father.
True or false? I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
You can't say that. It doesn't apply.
I mean, if some guy doodles, and before Einstein or whatever, he's just doodling while he's, I don't know, waiting for the phone to be invented, and he just doodles E equals MC2. Just random...
True or false? Well, it doesn't apply.
Right? Imagine, there's just E equals MC2. E equals MC2. That he takes this to someone who's not a physicist, right?
English teacher. Doesn't even know E for energy, M for the speed of light.
Sorry, M for mass, C for the speed of light.
Doesn't know what any of these words mean.
E equals MC2. True or false?
Is that correct or incorrect?
I don't know. You can't say.
Depends what the variables mean.
Depends what the reasoning is. Even if you work out the reasoning, it depends what the physical evidence is.
Do you sort of see what I mean?
What it is that I'm talking about here?
If there's no reasoning and there's no evidence, true or false, right?
One more example. Because I've run into this before, and it seems to be a big thing, right?
There's a guy gets killed, right?
I'm the prosecutor. I drag some guy in and say, he did it.
Now the jury has to render a verdict.
I don't produce any evidence.
There's no confession. There's no...
Where were you on the night of January the 16th, right?
It's none of that, right? It's just...
Bob did it.
Bob killed the guy. Now, did he or didn't he?
Well, I don't know. You haven't given me anything to work with.
I don't know whether Bob did it or not.
You can't come to a conclusion because no reason and evidence has been presented.
Bob, guilty or innocent?
I don't know. Probably innocent, but could be guilty, but there's no way to judge.
Alright. Bible Thumper points at the Old Testament.
Murder is wrong. Do you agree?
I don't know. I don't know what that means.
Murder is wrong. E equals MC2. Do you agree?
Is it valid?
I don't know.
Bob killed the guy.
I don't know.
You're not providing any reason or evidence.
Somebody comes along and says, I believe in God.
I believe in God.
Is that true? It's like, well, I assume you're not lying, so sure, you believe in God, right?
God exists. Is that true or false?
I don't know.
It's a meaningless statement.
Right?
It's like saying unicorns are blarty.
Well, what does blarty mean?
Mythical? Horses with horns?
Right? Real?
It's a meaningless statement because there's no reason and evidence and no context.
It's just a free-floating little scrap of nothing.
Some guy comes up to you and says, True or false? I don't know.
Right? Do you mean inferior in strength to elephants?
Well, yeah, but aren't we all, right?
This is an important context.
And I didn't go into this level of detail because I could see that he was going to, you know, resist to the death, right?
But he said, but the methodology, you know, you have a methodology that you use, because I told him a bit about UPB, you have a methodology that you use to come to the conclusion that murder is wrong.
I said yes. And he said, And religious people have a methodology for coming to the conclusion that murder is wrong.
And if we both agree that murder is wrong, and if you go down through the Bible, you'll find a lot of stuff that atheists also accept.
Go down through the Bible.
And since we all come into the same conclusions, there must be some commonality in the methodology.
And I swear to God, those kinds of statements just make me want to ask for a long, cool napkin on a chopping block so that I can lean my head slowly down into it and cool my offended forehead.
As you can imagine, it's a fairly substantial offense.
Because there's just so much that is brain-plody in that that it's really not very valid.
It's like dropping an atomic bomb into a swamp.
Just get a shower of goo.
And, you know, where do you even start, right?
So I said, well, if I reject the methodology, then the conclusions are not conclusions.
They're just meaningless statements, right?
Meaningless sound statements.
They're sound poems of no meaning.
So I said, the theist quote methodology goes something like this.
God exists. God is all perfect.
God is all good. God, I cannot lie.
God told man that murder is bad, and therefore murder is bad, right?
I said, but even if I accept that God is good and God is all perfect, God cannot lie, and God said murder is wrong, That is still not a methodology.
Because all I'm doing is saying that murder is wrong becomes true because God says so.
That's just an argument from authority.
And even if I believe that God is all good and God is all-knowing and God cannot tell a lie and God told us this, it still doesn't help me reason.
There's still no methodology other than Defining murder is wrong as synonymous with truth by saying it comes from a perfectly truthful being.
So all I'm doing is saying, well, I'm going to wrap this statement in it's true and call it true.
And the wrapping is God and perfection and statements and so on.
I still don't know why it's true.
I still don't know how it's true.
I still don't know on what grounds or in what circumstances.
It's true because there's this being who tells us who cannot lie.
Well, try that in any debate, right?
I mean, it sounds silly, right?
But logically, it's the same.
If I'm in a debate and I'm getting my ass handed to be on a silver platter, And I repeat my points with a hand puppet saying, my hand puppet cannot lie, and it's always right, so I win.
I mean, that would just be silly, right?
If I say 2 plus 2 is 5, and I get it marked wrong, and then I go up to the teacher with a hand puppet and say, my hand puppet cannot lie, 2 plus 2 is 5, right?
Or I have some friend saying, well, my friend cannot lie, and he's all perfect and all good and the best mathematician that the universe will ever see.
2 plus 2 is 5, he says, and therefore it's true.
We understand that that would not be an acceptable methodology.
In fact, that would be the entire absence of a methodology.
Hand puppets and perfect friends don't replace reason and evidence.
It's like calling a witness to a murder trial, and you're only witness, and the only evidence that you produce is you say, okay, I've got a friend who never lies, and he's going to tell you that Bob killed the guy.
Bob killed the guy. You see?
He told you Bob killed the guy.
He never lies, therefore Bob killed the guy.
Well, you understand, there's no reason and evidence being forwarded there whatsoever, right?
In fact, there's rather an embarrassing absence of reason and evidence in that situation.
So, even if we accept the methodology that God is all perfect, God is all good, God cannot lie, and God said, gosh, don't you know, that murder is wrong.
Amen.
Sorry, just passing a cop car.
They're out in force tonight, my friends.
I always feel like the antelope that gets away, you know?
Some antelope brought down by a hungry lion.
Keep moving here, nothing to see.
Wow.
Here we have a truck stopped on the road.
How very exciting. And I said, so even if we assume that, sorry, just to reiterate, even if we assume that God exists, God exists, it doesn't mean anything.
There's still no meaning behind the statement.
You're just wrapping it in a methodology which is a tautology, which is saying that my perfect friend said that this statement is true, therefore it's true.
Well, that's not a methodology. That's just a statement of another opinion called God exists and therefore, right?
You don't know. A prosecutor calls a friend and says, my friend says, Bob did it.
And he thinks he did.
The news of two people who have an opinion but no evidence, right?
Doesn't magically change anything, right?
And I said, and so, even if I did accept them, but I don't accept the methodology.
God does not exist, is not all perfect, and even if we accept that God exists and is all perfect and says, thou shalt not murder, well, God murders all over the Old Testament and the New Testament, and therefore, the argument completely fails, right?
Because God has...
You know, you say God cannot lie and God is all perfect and all moral.
God says, do not kill. But then God goes and kills everyone, right?
I mean, that would be embarrassing, right?
And you put that... I mean, put that in a mere court of law.
A court of law. Jeez, court of law.
Which we accept as having lower standards of truth value than a divinely perfect being.
Where you say, well...
Murder is...
Murder most foul...
And then you praise murder as the most moral thing in the world, right?
In other words, should we give this guy the electric chair or a million dollars for killing someone in cold blood, in premeditated, with no provocation?
So, I just wanted to sort of point that out, that statements that are made in the Bible, I mean, To me, they're meaningless because they're mere statements of assertion.
And they can't be correct because there's no evidence being presented for them.
And so it's like the E equals MC squared, E equals MC2. Correct or incorrect?
Well, there's no evidence.
It's a meaningless thing. Now, if somebody understands what all these symbols mean and goes and provides all the evidence, well, good, right?
But the problem with thou shalt not murder being just a commandment is that nobody knows how to apply it because there's no methodology or reasoning behind it.
So people just apply it.
Some people say, well, it was just the Jews saying thou shalt not murder Jews, but everyone else, you know, tastes Mr.
Scimitar. And we can't apply it consistently.
Because it's a mere statement, a mere blanket statement of opinion.
So, from that standpoint, you know, he says, well, don't you agree that murder is wrong?
Well, no, I don't agree with the bald statement, murder is wrong, because it's meaningless.
It's just a statement of opinion.
Unicorns are the best mythical creatures.
Do you agree? Is that a true statement?
Unicorns are the best mythical creatures.
It's like, well, it's meaningless.
There's no proof, there's no standard, there are no unicorns.
I mean, I could say I like unicorns, or I think unicorns are the best mythical creatures, but as an objectively true statement, unicorns are the best mythical creatures means nothing.
Less than nothing.
It's a complete waste of time.
Anyway, I just wanted to reproduce this interesting debate.
I did get the guy to agree to read UPB, but I don't think that his gas baggery will allow the oxygen of reason to come through.
We'll see, though, perhaps so, but since he's already raising his kids religious, it is only my hope that his kids will find it, since he probably won't find the truth, since he probably won't.
And thank you so much, as always, for listening, and thank you so much, particularly to those donators and subscribers who Gave me the opportunity to go down and I think rip off a nice victory for philosophy at the Liberty Forum this weekend.
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