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Sept. 22, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:39
1463 True News 52 - Anti-Atheism

Some facts and notes about the most hated and feared minority in the world.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is True News, number 52, current events clarified, atheistic bigotry, the most hated and feared group or minority and a path to peace.
So recently, a question or a statement was posed to a large segment of Americans, and the statement was, this group does not at all agree with my vision of an American society.
And various possible responses were available.
And of the people in this group who were given this statement, these are the percentage who agreed with it relative to various groups.
7.6% of Americans said that Jews do not at all agree with their vision of an American society.
12.5% recent immigrants.
13.5% conservative Christians.
20% thought Hispanics did not agree with their vision of U.S. society.
Homosexuals. 22.6% Muslims.
26.3%.
And, capping in the peak of the Himalayas, atheists at almost 40% that Americans felt that atheists did not at all agree with their vision of an American society.
The most... Disapproved of group in America.
And as you can see, there's quite a significant amount of bigotry.
When we also take into account that atheists, depending on your measures, can be 8 to 16 percent of the population.
And atheists are not likely to say that they themselves, or that atheists don't agree with their vision of an American society.
This is much higher a number when you take out most people who are secularists or more tolerant.
I think that it's a large number of religious, specifically Christian people, who have this disagreement, let's say, with the atheist minority.
And it's not a minority that you hear about people's intolerance towards quite a lot, but it is definitely there.
Here's another question, or statement, that was made.
Two Americans and they were asked based on which group would they agree with this statement.
I would disapprove if my child were to marry, wanted to marry a member of this group.
Not even did marry, just wanted to marry.
2.3% did not want their group to marry whites.
6.9% did not want them to marry conservative Christians.
11.8% did not want them to marry Jews.
18.5% no Española.
18.5% for Asian Americans.
27.2% of Americans did not want their child to marry an African American.
33.5% said ixnay on the Muslim nuptials.
And an astounding 47.6% of Americans did not want their child marrying an atheist.
Now, I, full disclosure, I am a strong atheist.
I don't think there's a possibility of God.
I specifically say there is no God.
No, and not this universe, not other universes, never has, never will be.
No gods, no gremlins, no ghosts.
So, yeah, I mean, I fall into this category, and I've certainly faced discrimination, considerable discrimination from a variety of sources.
It's just not something that's really talked about, but I think it's time we did talk about it.
Why are atheists so hated and feared?
I don't think that's too strong a way of putting it.
Is it because, as the tales go, if you don't believe in God, you just want to go around drinking the blood of cute kittens or something like that?
Well, no. I mean, the facts are quite the opposite.
This is data pulled from the World Value Survey, and it's the percentage of people in each country who say they are committed atheists.
And also the percentage of people who say that they go to religious service at least once a month.
And it's correlated with the violence in the country or in the country's foreign policy.
Peaceful countries have three to four times the number of committed atheists as violent countries do.
Exactly the opposite of what religious people would have you believe about secularism.
That if you don't believe in a god, you will just be a bad person.
Quite the opposite seems to be the case, statistically.
Among the countries where a majority of people or a large number of people attend religious services at least once a month, there's roughly twice as many religious people in violent countries as there are in peaceful countries.
And I have, as you can well imagine, a theory as to why this may be the case.
And we will get to that in a minute or two.
But let's look at another set of statistics.
Atheists are considered to be immoral or amoral by the religious many times.
But let's look at the facts.
Let's look at the prison population.
And atheists, of course, should be vastly overrepresented or significantly overrepresented from the 8 to 16 percent of the general population who are atheists.
There should be 30 or 40 or 50 percent because atheists are just so innately bad that they would not respect other people's property or persons.
But statistically it's completely untrue.
Quite the opposite is true. Catholics are 31.4% of the prison population and the links to the right, you have links to the sources for all this.
Protestants are 28%.
None refused and other can't really be called atheist because in this survey there was a specific category for are you an atheist.
None refused, other are I don't have a religion.
In other words, I could be a nihilist or something which is not the same as an atheist.
Quite the opposite. Or just refuse to answer or I'm a Wiccan or I worship my pinky or something.
So, 19.7% wouldn't answer or give an other.
7.6% of the prison population are Muslim or Islamic.
Native Americans, 2.5%.
Rastafarian man, 1.5%.
Jews are 1.4% of the prison population in the US. The Church of Christ, 1.39%.
Pentecostal, 1.1%.
Moorish, 1.1%.
Buddhists, 0.9%.
Jehovah's Can-A-Gate-A-Witness are at 0.7, Adventist, I guess Seventh-day Adventist 0.6, some kind of orthodox 0.4, Mormons are 0.3% of the prison population, Scientologists 0.2, and atheists clock in at a minuscule 0.16% of the population.
I mean, 16 out of every thousand people in prison report themselves as atheists.
I think that we have a lot more to fear from Christians and immorality than we do from atheists, and I think the reasons will become clear as we continue.
What about religiosity and social violence as a whole?
Well, a scholar has very recently come out with a very detailed and scholarly work, which has been reviewed by a number of other scholars, and found to be valid.
He's taken 25 separate social indicators, you know, things like murder and suicide rates, prison population, mortality, sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, marriages, deaths, Alcohol consumption, poverty, and unemployment, and compared them to the degree of religiosity within the society, and has found a clear, statistically significant relationship.
The more religious a society is, the worse that society is, or vice versa.
It is not proof, right?
Correlation is not causation, but it is evidence of causation.
And certainly, these two are highly related.
Religiosity and extreme social dysfunction in these kinds of ways.
Here's the graph. You can see from the sort of bottom left to the top right.
The more religious and creationist a society is, the worse it is in these social indicators, and the more secular and pro-evolution, in other words, rational, empirical, scientific, and reasonable a society is, the more it is likely to have a healthier society and fewer of these negative social indicators.
And I think fairly well established that wherever you have abstinence programs, you have extremely high degrees of sexually transmitted diseases.
Venereal disease in America is many many times where it is in less religious or more secular countries.
So religiosity is highly correlated with extreme social dysfunction.
Religiosity and child abuse.
Grieven psychologist notes abusive parenting styles have been driven by mainstream religious beliefs for centuries.
And religion-related child abuse often produces psychologically dysfunctional symptoms 1.5 to 2 times worse than non-religion-related abuse.
Why? Because the God gets in your head, right?
And you are damned from an external force that the parent doesn't have to lift a finger to have you self-attack for.
So dysfunction tends to occur much worse when religion is blended into child abuse.
Religiosity and child violence.
I won't read this in general, but you can pause it and read it if you want, and the links are to the right.
A sample, a fairly significant sample of parents were surveyed, and it was found that the more literal their interpretation of the Bible, the more they used beatings and other forms of coercive and violent punishment against children.
They're children, and statistically significant differences were noted.
And this is just comparing people who have a non-literal interpretation of the Bible with those who have a literal interpretation of the Bible.
I can say, as an atheist parent, I have never even raised my voice at my daughter, let alone hit her.
It's inconceivable to me.
But you can look at this in more detail if you like.
But again, there is a strong correlation between particularly literal religiosity and violence towards children.
Indoctrination is another form of child abuse heavily associated, if not downright dependent upon religion.
Hitchens and Dawkins, they use the term child abuse to describe the harm that some religious upbringings inflict on children.
I would go further, but that's not particularly relevant here.
This is from Wiki. They claim that children are especially vulnerable to mental harms related to religion, including things like being terrorized by threats of punishment, eternal damnation in a fiery hell for disobedience.
Extreme guilt about normal healthy sexual functions.
I mean the degree of sexual pathology in Christian circles is unfortunately quite high and innocent things like masturbation are considered to be evil in many in many sects.
Children through religion are trained to disrespect and oppose science and reason which is not healthy.
They're indoctrinated into a particular religious faith and they can't make their own free inquiry when they're old enough to know better and this is a real tragedy and Parents, Christian parents will very often not answer the honest question.
A kid says, why are we Christian? They say, well, because Christ died for our sins or whatever.
It's not true. You're Christian because you grew up in a Christian culture.
If you'd grown up on a desert island, you would not be Christian.
If you grew up in Syria, you would very likely be Muslim.
It is simply a culturally transmitted mental virus.
I would make the case in general, and I think there's some supporting evidence here, but feel free to look at it to yourself more.
I am somebody who reasons from first principles.
I'm not a psychologist or professional in the mental health field, but I definitely would make the following claim, which you can accept or not, depending on the quality of the argument.
Religion is absolutist bigotry.
You know, if I have some bigoted opinion that all Chinese people are thieves and for which there is no evidence, then I'm called bigoted for holding an opinion about something that is true, whether in fact it's counter-evidence to that.
But when people tell children that they must praise and worship an undead Jewish zombie who came back from the dead to feed them a piece of his flesh throughout time because A rib woman listened to a talking snake in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago, and God told them not to eat from the tree of knowledge, though he knew that they would punish them anyway because he did, but didn't want them to be good.
And all this kind of nonsense, I mean, that is an insane, mad kind of bigotry.
And it is absolutist and is not told to children as conditional, right?
Parents will tell their children, Jesus loves you, died for your sins, blah, blah, blah.
Then when they meet an intelligent atheist, they start retreating into, well, it's not literal and it's metaphorical.
You know, just tell the kids the truth.
It's all nonsense. And the reason why religion tends towards aggression and violence, as we saw in the earlier statistics, is because there's no third-party arbitration in religion.
You don't hear of science wars because scientists can use the scientific method to arbitrate between truth and falsehood, between valid and invalid theories or claims.
Mathematicians can use logic and reason.
Engineers can use tensile strength and logic and reason.
Philosophers can use logic and reason.
The free market can use the arbitration of price and charity and cash.
But in religion, it's absolutist, it's superstitious, it's irrational.
And there's no third party absolutes.
And so it just ends up being bullying, domination, and willpower, particularly inflicted against children.
The anger, manipulation, indoctrination, aggression are the hallmarks of superstitious and bigoted absolutism.
And this can be Marxism or it can be religion or whatever, but wherever there's an egregiously asserted absolutism without proof or with counterproof, you end up having to bully rather than prove because you can't prove.
There's no God. The effects of child abuse, you know, most criminals, public or private, were abused as children.
This doesn't mean everyone who was abused as a child becomes a criminal, but it does mean that most, if not all, criminals were abused as children.
And this is a quote from a study.
A number of studies show that those who are exposed to negative child-rearing practices, varying from punitive to lax...
Parenting to severe punishment and abuse in childhood tend to be antisocial, aggressive, and commit violent crimes later in life.
There's a clear link between child abuse and later violence.
And religion is not the only form of such abuse, of course, right?
Since we see that the more religious a society is, the more violent it is, we would assume that the religiosity is something that is abusively inflicted upon children, which makes them more aggressive and violent later in life.
And this, I think, is fairly well established, but you may want to look into it in more detail.
I have podcasts, and there are lots of materials on the subject.
The fact that religious indoctrination, the brutal infliction of lies about reality and morality and the existence of deities and privacy and life after death and punishments and hells and demons and so on, right, all of this Lord of the Rings bullshit.
The fact that it is abusive to tell children these kinds of destructive lies does explain why children who are told these destructive lies more often end up inhabiting and creating a society that is more violent later on.
For more, you might want to check out my free audiobook reading of Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War and Child Abuse at freedomainradio.com forward slash psychohistory and also go to psychohistory.com for more material on this.
Look, reducing violence is the goal of every sane and civilized human being.
Violence is a cancer within human society and we need to do whatever we can to oppose it.
The key element to reduce violence is to reduce child abuse.
Children who are raised in positive and pleasant and reasonable and rational and curious and scientific environments don't tend to grow up with the kind of brain scarring and brain damage that child abuse causes and they have fewer problems with impulse control and rage and so on.
So you reduce child abuse, opposing religious bigotry and exposing it for what it is, which is the bullying and often a violent indoctrination of children into a set of entirely false and destructive, mentally unhealthy and destructive beliefs.
You have to oppose religious bigotry and expose it for what it is in order to help build a more peaceful and productive and cooperative society.
A free world can only be achieved when parents stop lying to children about the universe and gods and reality and morality.
And we expose these bullying falsehoods for the primitive superstitions that they are, which should have been discarded with the childhood of our species, along with imaginary friends and all the 10,000 other gods that everyone except, say, Christians believes in, and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
It is something we must outgrow and stop inflicting upon our children.
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Have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.
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