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May 30, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:47
1375 True News 42: Morality and Atheism
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Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. Thank you so much to those people who made the trek up to Mississauga, Ontario for the Free Domain Radio BBQ Philosophy Weekend.
It was a five-day extravaganza of good eats, good conversation, good hiking, good karaoke, Niagara trips.
And up the CN Tower.
So thank you so much for coming. It was wonderful to have you.
Almost 40 people came and perhaps you will pencil it in for next summer.
It's usually around May, June, depending on how the weather's doing.
And it was absolutely fantastic to meet you all.
It was a great, great time.
Couldn't have been better. And thank you so much for making the trip.
So this is a video about ethics and religion.
And this is going to be...
I'm going to be taking a few source materials.
The first is Maclean's magazine, April 13th, 2009.
An article called Generation Tame.
For the first time in ages, fewer teens are drinking, using drugs and having sex.
What's going on? Here are some statistics.
This is from Project Teen Canada, an ongoing survey.
Whose in-depth portraits of teen life date back to 1984.
Alcohol use among youth has fallen seven percentage points in the last eight years.
Smoking has plunged to unseen levels, while marijuana use, though still higher than it was 20 years ago, is well down from its crest in 2000.
As for sex, well, if teenagers are having as much of it as some adults fear, they're certainly not bragging.
Fully 56% of respondents say they've never had it at all.
Drugs are readily available.
70% of teens responding to this survey say it's not difficult to locate marijuana or hashish.
Yet the proportion reporting regular or occasional use of the stuff has fallen by 16% in the last eight years.
That's good, in my opinion.
80% of teens rate honesty and trust as the most important values in their lives.
More neglected still is the role of individual parents.
While many moms and dads have grown up in broken homes or seen their own relationships fail, they're no less determined than previous generations to steer their kids onto solid ground.
This means teaching bedrock values such as honesty and trustworthiness.
This mom says, We may have chosen not to go to church, but a lot of our beliefs are still moral beliefs, and we're conscious as parents that our kids' values are going to have to come from us.
So that's good, in my opinion.
Very nice to have ethics without the fear of God.
Statistics Canada reports that fewer teens here are sexually active before the age of 15 than was the case in the 1990s.
Now, so there's some evidence, some significant evidence, that the ethical behavior of teens...
And, you know, before you write to me, it's like, hey, I'm pro-sex, I don't even mind a drink or two, but at the age of 15, perhaps not the wisest time to start engaging in making the beast with two backs.
So, what is correlated with this?
Well, what is correlated with this significant statistical rise in...
Better behavior by teens is the growth in atheism.
So, in 1984, no faith at all, which is atheists and maybe agnostics, well actually certainly agnostics, but people who do not have any adherence to an organized religion.
And this includes things like Wiccanism, right?
So people who are basically anti-supernatural and not into this kind of mysticism.
In 1984, no faith at all was 12% in Canada.
1992, 21%.
2000, 25%.
2008, 32%.
This is all correlated with improvements in behavior.
The less adherence, and again, I'm not saying this is all proven, but it's a very, very interesting correlation, the more adherence to rational secular values, the greater the improvement in ethical behavior.
That's really quite the opposite of what we're taught.
Without religion, human being, well, it will be a war of all against all and so on.
This is not the case.
And there's lots of reasons for that.
But it is very important to recognize that it's hard to see if you're in the United States, particularly in certain areas of the United States, but atheism Is crushing religion.
And thank heaven for that.
So, for instance, these are the upper limits of the statistics.
Sweden, 85% are either atheist, agnostic, or non-believers in God.
Vietnam, 81%.
Denmark, 80%.
Norway, 72%.
Japan, 65%.
Czech Republic, 61%.
Finland, Finland, Finland, 60%.
France, 54%.
South Korea, 52%.
Estonia, 49%.
Germany, oh, 49%.
Isn't it nice when Germans aren't religious?
Russia, 48%.
Hungary, 46%.
Netherlands, 44%.
Britain, 44%.
Belgium, 43%.
And so on.
37% in Israel and so on.
So this is all absolutely fascinating if we look at the decline of religiosity.
Roman Catholic in Canada.
1984, 50%.
1992, 41%.
2000, 39%.
2008, 32%.
Protestants have gone from 35% in 1984 to 2000...
And 8% down to 13%, from 35% to 13%.
And other faiths, particularly Islam, has grown, but of course that is important to remember that a lot of those are immigrants who have not been exposed to the second generation secularization.
That is one of the best characteristics of Western philosophy.
So this is quite the opposite of what religious people would have you believe, that in the absence of religion we also have the absence of ethical behavior.
And I'm going to say why I think this is the case, and you can let me know if it makes any sense or not.
But first and foremost, to all of the Christians who like the anti-statist Videos that I produce and then get all kinds of knickers in a twist when it comes to my atheism.
Please don't take it personally.
I'm not anti-God.
I'm not anti-Christ.
I'm not anti-religion.
I'm not anti-you.
It's not my fault there's no God's.
And it's not my fault that you were raised to believe these fairy tales as if they were true, which creates a lot of emotional problems in letting them go.
I really am sorry for all of that.
I really am sorry that your parents did what they did to you, and your elders and your priests did what they did to you.
And this is one of the reasons I have such utter contempt for religion, which is that when you go to a Sunday school, You are told Christ died for your sins and walked on water and turned loaves into fishes and came back from the dead and original sin and whatever it is, hell and heaven and all this nonsense.
You're told all of this stuff like it's completely true and uncontroversial, right?
And then these same people who stand over children Filling their heads with irrational filth.
When they then meet an adult, competent, assertive philosopher, suddenly get all foggy and retreat into the comforting realms of metaphor and otherworldly agnosticism and other dimensions and so on.
And you have to take the Bible in its cultural context.
This is what I find so vile about religious people, that they will sink their intellectual fangs into the tender trusting and helpless minds of children, filling them with all of these lies as if these lies are absolutely true.
And then when somebody who can actually reason and is competent and assertive comes along, then they immediately retreat, like all bullies do, into the realm of fog.
And then they emerge again to prey upon the children, which I think is absolutely disgusting.
Absolutely disgusting!
If you're religious, don't tell your children about God.
Let God tell him.
Tell them about him.
Let God do it.
Don't put it into your incompetent, mortal hands.
Or, if you're going to tell your children about religion, and I certainly will tell my daughter about religion, I think?
about science, reason and reality, and that it is highly controversial.
See, Sunday school teachers don't point to the rows and rows and rows and rows and shelves and shelves and libraries of books debating the existence of God and say, well, you know, it's highly controversial.
Lots of people have problems with it.
There is no proof, blah, blah, blah.
They don't present it the way that it actually is.
They present it like it's a complete fact.
Thus torturing and warping the children's minds forever.
So this is one of the reasons why.
It's not against you personally and I'm very sorry that you went through this.
I went through it too.
I was certainly raised religious and went to Sunday school and so on and was in the church choir and this, that and the other.
And then at some point you...
You grow up, right? You put away childish superstitions and you look at the world with clear-eyed rationality.
I'm not against your god.
Human beings believe in 10,000 gods.
Are you going to tell me that you're a complete atheist with regards to 999 gods?
To 9,999 other gods and then a complete believer with no problems with the one god that you were raised to believe in.
All the other gods in history and throughout the world, oh, they're completely false and how ridiculous it would be to believe in them.
Ah, but my god, you see, is completely true and real.
So you understand how I view it.
If you hear that there's some cult in Greece still worshipping Zeus, and you say, well, that's just silly...
You don't hate Zeus.
You don't hate the people who believe in Zeus, right?
I mean, you may feel kind of sorry for them, and you may, you know, if they're torturing their children's minds with lies about this kind of stuff, you might be negatively disposed towards them.
But the accusation of being anti-Zeus or hating Zeus or hating Zeus' followers in singularity would make no sense to you.
It would just be like, well, Zeus is silly.
Right, because he's an old guy with a beard who lives on a mountain.
I mean, how silly could that be?
He flies, he changes into animals, he has sex with humans producing children.
I mean, that would just be crazy, wouldn't it?
Right, so the way that you look at Zeus is the way that I look at Christianity or Islam or Judaism.
I mean, It's just nonsense and the people inside it, inside the matrix, don't know that it's nonsense.
I mean, they do deep down, of course, which is why you all get so angry.
But it's not, I'm not against your God or you.
It's just, it's not there.
It's not real. And it is a dedication to the truth that leads me there.
It's not my fault. There's no God.
It's not my fault you were lied to.
So just, you know, cool your jets, read a little bit about atheism and start to think for yourself.
And the reason that I mention this thing about children is that clearly we understand that, heaven forbid, if my wife were to die and I were to say to my daughter, mommy died because you were bad.
That would be staggeringly abusive towards my daughter, right?
And it would pile a sick and festering load of guilt, shame, rage and terror onto her tender young mind and would be almost the very definition of abuse to say to my darling daughter, mommy died because you were bad.
But this is the story of Christianity, right?
That Jesus died for your sins because you were bad.
Or Adam was bad and you inherited it.
We understand, right?
This is very staggeringly abusive towards children.
Or what if I said that to my daughter, there is a skeletal squid tentacle beast called Mr.
Eyeball Plucker that lives underneath your bed.
And if you think any bad thoughts...
It will slither and clank out, creep up the wall, land on your face, and suck out your eyeballs.
We would understand that that would be staggeringly abusive towards my child.
And yet, of course, this is the exact conception of hell, with the exception that it doesn't go on forever, right?
So this, I mean, this is just two little examples.
You could really go on and on.
But religion is...
It's child abuse. It simply cannot survive without preying on the helpless, tender, trusting, independent minds of children.
And that's, of course, why when you stop infecting children's minds with these nightmarish, psychotic, delusional, destructive, evil, malicious fantasies, that they can actually start to be good because they're not cowering in terror or rage before an imaginary beast that stares them down from eternity for all within their very souls,
within their very minds forever. So, when you don't have adherence to a fearful or monstrous imaginary deity, then you can actually start to think about that which is good for you, that which is good for others in a karma, more rational, more sustainable, more long-term, more trusting, more happy, more rational way.
And you can come up with ethics that work for you and work for others and work for society without Mr.
Eyeball Plucker and toppling corpses into the cribs of little children in order to get them to behave.
Because all you're doing when you're doing that is you're saying that you don't believe that human beings will ever be good.
And so you have to use a staggering, psychotic, mentally abusive, tortuous excess of metaphor, terror and fear stories in order to get children to be good.
And all you're doing is you're saying to children you won't be good on your own.
It's impossible for you to be good on your own.
So all you can do is cower under the terror and guilt of Of gods who died because you were bad and gods who watch and will torture you forever because you might think the wrong thoughts.
So religion is actually entirely counterproductive to the progress of human virtue because it scars children, it frightens children, it enrages children, it unseats reason and reality in the minds of children, which renders them to be overly prone to Being conformist and overly prone to the externalization of the conscience, which really is the hallmark of totalitarian societies.
Everybody says, oh, well, Hitler and Stalin were atheists, and that's what made them bad, which, of course, Hitler was not an atheist, and Stalin was, though, of course, he was raised by a theist and was originally going to be in the seminary.
But they missed the whole point, right?
The whole point of Germany and Russia and other totalitarian dictatorships is not...
Hitler and not Stalin.
They are mere symptoms of a mass delusion and a mass hysteria and a mass rage and a mass terror.
Stalin can't do much to kill people.
He requires tens of millions of people who have the capacity and the desire to externalize their conscience into a cult of personality that rests upon some fantastical leader.
Right? And so the reality of Nazi Germany and communist Russia, and why it happened the way that it happened, was because these two countries by far were the most religious countries in Europe.
You can look for this.
I've got a video on this. I will post the link to it just to your right.
But Japan and Italy and Germany and Russia in the 1920s were by far the most religious countries in the neighborhood.
And it is this very religiosity, this belief that conscience is something that is terrifyingly inflicted from the outside, that it's not rational, that you must simply obey those in authority, whether it is God, priest, parent, politician, dictator.
The fact that you do not have your own internalized moral compass, that is...
The footprint, the foot stamp that religion leaves on the face of humanity, and that is why religiosity is so strongly correlated to paving the way for totalitarianism.
So it's not that Stalin was an atheist that made his evil so possible.
It's that he was ruling the most Christian country in the neighborhood.
Was it Hitler's Roman Catholicism that made him so evil?
No, of course not, because Hitler by himself could not have started a war.
It was that he was ruling A country of hyper-religious Christians whose moral conscience had been extracted and removed into an external authority figure which rendered them unable to resist the shrieky commands of those leaders.
Religion is poison.
Religion is child abuse.
And fundamentally, religion is totalitarianism.
And that's why I oppose it.
Because peace and joy and happiness and reason should be both our lives and our legacies to those who come after us.
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