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June 20, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:03:42

1684 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 20 June 2010

Dealing with a violent girlfriend, how to overcome a master/slave relationship with your kids, the perils of immortality, the sadness of dying, and three questions for fundamentalists...

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	Hello, everybody.
	It is the 20th of June, 2010, and less than a week to go until Porkfest.
	And I look forward to the opening speaker Thursday night, and Friday night I am having a debate on agnosticism.
	It will be an unfixed venue because we're just going to assume that the venue can't be finalized in any rational way.
	Just kidding. We're going to be...
	Unfortunately, we can't broadcast it.
	They don't have the... The broadband for it, but it will be recorded and publicized.
	So if you do get a chance to drop by Porkfest on Friday, we would love to see you there.
	So that's it for my intro.
	I do believe we do have somebody on the line with questions, issues, comments, mad praise for my hairdo, what have you.
	So I'm all ears, my fine friend, if you would like to speak up.
	Okay. Well, let's see.
	Where do I start? Okay.
	Basically, my girlfriend of three years, like I said, I don't even know.
	I guess I'll start with recent stuff and we can go back if we need to.
	Her father committed suicide recently.
	And so she had already had some emotional problems, I think stemming from abuse and so on.
	But things have somewhat gotten worse.
	So in any case, this is what happened most recently, which is sort of what's prompted my call because I'm sort of at my wit's end.
	She went out yesterday and had a few drinks and – I guess she had more to drink than I thought she did because we came back to her house and we were going to have a party.
	As childish as this is, we came home and there was people playing beer pong on this table that her father, who is now deceased, gave her.
	And it was unfinished and everything, so of course it was going to stain the wood, absorb the alcohol.
	And she completely flips out.
	I mean, just completely, you know, breaks bottles, throws everything everywhere, lashes out at everyone, physically assaults several people, including myself and her roommates.
	And so I just...
	Oh, and later...
	Sorry to finish the story.
	She... Apparently I left because she was not responding to me in any kind of rational way.
	So I didn't think I was helping the situation by staying there.
	And... I came back later, like a couple hours later, and nobody was home.
	Well, I found out...
	Later, even later, this is at like 2 o'clock in the morning or 3, 4 in the morning, she had been, she got a public intoxication.
	She was picked up by the police.
	I'm not sure if somebody called the police about the incident.
	In any case, she was outside and on her lawn or something.
	I'm not sure because I haven't talked to her, but she was arrested, put in jail, and then I bonded her.
	I realized that she, I don't know, I got lucky and called.
	She was there, bonded her, and That's why I haven't talked to her.
	I don't know where she is exactly.
	I know that she's been released.
	But I just, like I said, I don't know.
	I want to help her, but I don't know the best way to do that.
	Right, right. Sounds like you have more to say, and I don't want to interrupt your train of thought.
	No, that's okay. I think for now, I mean, I don't know.
	I think that's a good bit to start with.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Alright, and what would you like me to address as, you know, amateur advice dude on the internet?
	What would you like me... I mean, I have some thoughts, but I want to make sure that I'm focusing on what is most useful to you.
	Okay. Yeah, I just...
	I want to be able to...
	Well, there are several considerations that are important to me.
	One, is there something I can do?
	Because she has this sort of behavior.
	It's not uncommon to her.
	But the violence, that level of violence, which is not extremely dangerous physically.
	But what my real fear is is that if she had a gun, she probably would have shot somebody or could have.
	I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess there's no way for me to know that.
	But it was frightening.
	Well, I mean, I wouldn't discount your instincts in this area.
	You know, whether you're right or wrong, there's no way to know for sure, but you think it, and therefore I think it's important to take into account.
	Okay. And so, you know, I just want to know that if somebody close to her, what is, you know, I want to help her get beyond these sorts of explosive behaviors.
	I think it's something like a borderline personality disorder or whatever, which is always very tricky.
	But sometimes it appears that – I mean when she gets like that, it's almost like seeing a schizophrenic or a paranormal schizophrenic in action, so to speak.
	And so – I guess that's where I want to address it.
	Should I try to get her to get – I mean, does she need to be institutionalized?
	I mean, does she – I don't know.
	I mean, that's – do I need to withdraw?
	Do I need to get closer to her, further away?
	Is that there are lots of – Yeah, I mean, those are big questions now, of course.
	This is just an amateur philosophy show on the web, so obviously I can't talk anything about mental illness or institutionalization or anything like that.
	But what I can do, which may be of some help, is I can tell you the questions that I would ask myself if I were in your situation, and maybe they will be of some use to you, maybe they won't, but I can at least offer that, and that may help clarify some things, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, absolutely.
	That's the best way is to ask questions.
	I just... And I'm so...
	You know, I mean, this is such a recent thing that I'm sort of mind-boggled and, you know, some clarity would be...
	No, it's... I mean, first of all, it's a very difficult situation for you.
	It's a very difficult situation for your girlfriend.
	There are...
	There are times when I think that...
	Professional mental health resources, I mean, this is just my opinion, right?
	But they're pretty much necessary.
	I mean, they just have to be accessed.
	So, for instance, I've always suggested if people want to separate from their families or take a break from their families of origin, that, you know, don't do it without the guidance of a mental health professional.
	I would add to that, though I don't think it's come up in this show before, I would absolutely add to that If someone in your family commits suicide, particularly a parent, then I would say you have to talk to a counselor.
	I mean, that's just like, you know, if your toe falls off, you go to the doctor.
	And if someone close to you, particularly a blood relative, commits suicide, I think it's...
	I think you have to. I mean, obviously not you, but I think it's kind of a have to, because the possibility of acting out in the way that your girlfriend is would seem to be very high, and it's what is occurring for her.
	Obviously, she's going through an extraordinary amount of emotional stress and misery and anger, and obviously, as you said, it goes back a long way in her family.
	So, I mean, that to me is, it's kind of like a have to.
	From her standpoint, you just have to go and talk to someone.
	Particularly, I would recommend a mental health professional who has experience in dealing with suicides.
	Suicides leave unbelievable craters in people's hearts.
	It is an unbelievable act of destruction, obviously not only towards the self, but towards the mental health Of everyone around the suicide.
	It's hard to say victim, but the suicide, whoever commits suicide, leaves an incredible wake of devastation and destruction around them.
	And I think that it is not possible to functionally deal with that on your own.
	I think that going to a mental health professional is essential.
	So that having been said, I mean, you can make that suggestion to her.
	And, you know, she's either going to do it or she's going to not do it.
	You can't make people do stuff.
	Well, I have spoken to her about this, and she has gotten in contact with somebody, but she hasn't started seeing him yet.
	Right. So I'm not sure about how that is.
	Sorry, she's made an appointment, but it hasn't come about yet.
	Is that right? Yes, I believe that's what it is.
	I think so. She was supposed to see him walking around and this happened before that.
	So, I mean, I'm sure maybe it could be helpful, but this was quite an experience.
	Oh, yeah. No, I sympathize.
	I really do. It's a terrifying thing to go through.
	Now, so that would be the first thing which we'd be to say, okay, I need to make the very strong suggestion for this person to get to a professional.
	Now the second question that I would ask myself, if I were in your shoes, which again, may be a few shoes, maybe not.
	The second question I would ask is, what am I doing here?
	In other words, what in my life has prepared me or conditioned me so that this is a relationship that works for me?
	I'm not saying the relationship, who knows, right?
	But what I'm saying is that this obviously is a pretty extreme situation, and it is not inside the general bounds of normal and healthy relationships, right?
	To have a girlfriend who's throwing things and breaking bottles, and you're afraid that if she had a gun, she would shoot someone, right?
	So, let me pose that question to you.
	I mean, based on your own history, based on your own life, What has prepared you for being in this kind of situation or this kind of relationship?
	Because we always want to help other people and, I mean, Lord knows, I do too, right?
	But we can only help other people if we have, I think, a good amount of self-knowledge ourselves, right?
	So we don't want to be helping other people because we ourselves are in need of help, but we're not acknowledging it, or we are repeating patterns from our history that we're unaware of, because then I don't think we can really help people in the absence of self-knowledge, if that makes sense.
	Sure, sure. No, it totally makes sense.
	We, you know, had lived together Way too early.
	I mean, we were both in pretty bad shape, you know, psychologically, I guess.
	And philosophically, myself, actually.
	But that's a whole, you know, digression from the point.
	But, you know, but as time has moved on, you know, like, we stopped seeing each other because it was mutually...
	What is the word I'm looking for?
	It wasn't helpful. Yeah, yeah.
	For both of us. And we were both to blame.
	There's no point in, you know, it was just terrible.
	And so we separated from one another.
	And we really worked on ourselves, you know.
	I started reading a lot of self-help books and actually doing exercises in them and sort of, you know, Learning to restructure how I deal with reality, you know, being more responsible, taking care of myself, and so on.
	And I thought, and I know that she had been doing the same thing until this thing happened when her father committed suicide, and it's pretty recent.
	I mean, I guess it's about two months now.
	If that matters.
	So as far as conditioning in my experiences, it's like I'm very frustrated with myself because I feel like I've taken a step back to help her.
	It's like as we've grown, I've grown maybe faster than her in certain ways.
	And so then I thought, okay, well, I can help her through this.
	Sorry, let me just make sure I understand.
	So you're saying that you started to see this woman after her father, like you reconnected romantically after her father killed himself.
	Is that right? Yes.
	And what do you think about that?
	It was really much better.
	I mean, honestly, we'd both been pretty happy with one another.
	You know, we still are. She's been happy in the relationship since her father.
	What I'm basically asking is, do you think objectively, like trying to look at it from the outside, which is always tough, right?
	But do you think that objectively, she's in a position shortly after her father kills himself to enter into a romantic relationship?
	No, I guess not.
	I don't think so. Well, I'm not trying to lead the witness, so to speak.
	I'm just asking what you think.
	Well, I mean, it just... I mean, obviously, if she's going to, you know, act abusively towards me in such a way, it doesn't...
	But then, I don't know, it's hard to...
	It's...
	Strange, because she can be...
	I don't know. It's hard to...
	Well, you have good times, right?
	I mean, obviously, you're not a masochist, right?
	So you have good times with her and so on.
	And then there's these intermittent times of, you say, violent behaviors and so on, right?
	Right. It's like she'll be fine for, you know, weeks at a time or whatever, and then something like this will happen.
	Now, this is like, obviously, more extreme.
	So that's, you know, part of what makes this...
	Weird day for me. So, I'm not sure.
	Do you think you can be there for her as a friend without being romantically involved?
	Oh sure, I think so.
	Do you think that it would be better or worse for you to be there as a friend without romantic involvement during this time?
	I don't know. It would depend on, it would be something I would have to just talk to her about.
	Well, no, I'm asking you what you think.
	I mean, because when I asked you earlier, I asked, I'm not trying to entrap you, I'm just sort of making sure I've got my understanding of the situation correct.
	When I asked you earlier whether you thought she was in a good state to decide about a romantic relationship shortly after her father killed himself, you said that she probably wasn't, right?
	Right. And if that's the case, then it would seem to me to, you know, just using philosophical principles, it would seem to me to logically follow that if she wasn't in a good place to make a decision about a romantic relationship, then that romantic relationship may not be helping her in this situation.
	And what she may need more is a friend rather than a lover in this situation.
	Particularly if you have a history of problems, right?
	Of dysfunction in the relationship.
	It is putting another layer of...
	You can give her the support as a friend without putting the historical baggage of complications and dysfunction on a person who already is clearly undergoing an enormous amount of strain.
	Sure. I mean, I guess it's my advice, right?
	For what it's worth, right?
	Again, just a voice of the internet, but I think...
	No, I mean, it's... Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
	No, go ahead, please. Well, I just, you know, I mean, it's sort of like one of those things that...
	You know, I tend to think that people, you know, sort of know...
	What needs to be done most of the time, just sort of instinctively.
	As rational creatures, we just naturally know what needs to be done.
	Now, whether we do it or not is based on our character and our past experiences and so on.
	So, you know, it's just...
	I guess I'm just saying that I've thought about this a lot, especially today, obviously.
	And, I mean, that's sort of the direction I was heading with things, you know, realizing that, okay, this may have been too fast, you know.
	I mean, I love her very, very, very, very much, but this is certainly a sign that something needs to change.
	And one of the only things that I can change about the relationship is that aspect of it.
	Right. And I would say that in order to preserve and maintain your capacity to love her, you need to not be exposed to this kind of behavior from her because it's certainly, as you know, I don't know if you've read my book on relationships, but it's my very strong belief.
	Right. So, if love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous, then, you know, if you're afraid she's going to shoot someone, that, at least according to my way of thinking, that is going to erode and diminish your capacity to love her in the long run.
	And so, I think that to not, you know, when people are behaving in a destructive manner, we need to not expose ourselves too much to that because that will erode our feelings of love towards them no matter what.
	And hope that they will get help and be there to support them, him or her, as a friend.
	I personally think, again, it's just my opinion, there's no proof, but I personally think that it's not a good idea to get romantically involved with someone when you have a history of dysfunction when her dad just killed himself.
	I think that's not a good time to get romantically involved with someone.
	I can understand it, of course, right?
	I mean, you have a history and, you know, she's probably in a very emotional state, but I would say that what she needs most of all is a skilled...
	A counselor and a friend who knows her, who knows her father, who can listen to her.
	I don't think that sexuality at this time in her life, particularly if there's been a history of dysfunction, is going to add anything positive and I think will detract from her capacity to make progress in this incredibly challenging area of dealing with blood relative suicide.
	Sure. I don't have anything particular more to add because, I mean, this is, again, something that's a very volatile and difficult situation, but I just wanted to put my two cents in for what they're worth,
	and I certainly wish you the best of luck, and I certainly wish your girlfriend the best of luck in getting to the help that she needs, and it really does sound like she needs it, and I hope that she will go and see a counselor and work, and I hope that you will consider at least the benefits of being there.
	A friend without benefits, I guess, is the way I'm putting it.
	The benefits of being there for her as a friend.
	Sure. Absolutely.
	Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.
	And Real Time Relationships is a wonderful book, by the way.
	It is very helpful.
	It's part of what's slowly drawing me towards this sort of conclusion.
	Well, thank you very much. And look, thanks for calling in.
	I know it's a difficult thing to do.
	I don't think we've ever spoken before.
	I know it's a difficult thing to do.
	And you were dealing with some very, very difficult stuff.
	So I really appreciate your trust in that.
	Okay. Well, thanks. I appreciate it.
	And maybe some other time I'll call and I've been wanting to talk about aesthetics.
	So some other time maybe.
	You're always welcome. Thank you, Michael.
	Okay. All right.
	Jimmy, jammy, jammy, boo.
	do we have anybody else I have no idea who you're referring to there but no I see we had a guest in the chat who said he had some questions but I haven't seen them yet so I have someone who wants to be added so Yeah, someone said women demand a lot of respect for wooden furniture in my experiences too.
	That's true. Sorry, did we just add someone?
	Just yet. I also wanted, while we're waiting, I just wanted to say Happy Father's Day to people out there.
	I hope that you are proud of what you have done as a father.
	I hope that if you have problems with what you've done as a father, that you will man up and apologize and listen to criticism from your children.
	Somebody asked me the other day, do I apologize?
	To my daughter. And the exact answer is, well, yeah, many times a day.
	I apologize to Isabella.
	If I'm trying to help her do something and she's learning, she's just climbing down the stairs, like face forward using her feet.
	And it's a challenge because she doesn't want help.
	And she's pretty good at judging when she's safe.
	But there'll be times where I think she's going to fall.
	And I try to steady her and actually make her more unsteady.
	And I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry.
	Here I was trying to help and I didn't help.
	Or today I was putting sunscreen on her.
	I think some of it went in her eye.
	And I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry.
	And like, I mean, even I think these are pretty minor things and certainly with the best of intentions, but I apologize quite a bit to my daughter because, or when I'm trying to understand what it is that she's saying and I'm making mistakes or not quite understanding what she's saying and I sort of apologize.
	So yeah, I think it's a very important social lubricant, so to speak.
	Anyway, but happy Father's Day.
	I think that fathers are an underrated but key component to the peace, mental health, and well-being of the world.
	And so I, of course, urge and encourage fathers to read books like Parental Effectiveness Training, even Watch a Super Nanny or Two Wouldn't Hurt.
	My own modest offering in relationships may be of use to you, the Real-Time Relationships book.
	But a huge, I'd say, 21-gun salute, but for a pacifist that may not be appropriate.
	A huge salute to the fathers out there who are doing a great job.
	Even if we are sometimes imperfect, we are, I think, essential to building a free and happy world.
	So I just wanted to say Happy Father's Day to everyone out there and I hope that you get everything that you want.
	Well, we have the guest question.
	And then I'll add on the caller.
	The guest says, my name is Melissa.
	I recently came upon your website and was amazed at the history that I never knew before.
	I homeschooled my kids because I knew something was wrong with the public education system.
	I never knew exactly what was wrong.
	How can I stop the master-slave relationship with my own children?
	That's a great question.
	It's a great question. This morning, Christina and Izzy and I went to a waterfront festival.
	Isabella really likes fairs, although she spends a good deal of her time just playing with the little ducks.
	But we went to a waterfront festival.
	And I love going out, but I do have a tough time because you kind of have to...
	It's like walking into a sandstorm sometimes.
	You just have to grit your teeth.
	And deal with the bad parenting that's out there.
	And I mean, I just have to be frank about it.
	I see at least half a dozen to a dozen instances of bad parenting.
	And I'm not looking for any of these things.
	In fact, you know, whenever a parent is not parenting well, I don't see anything egregious.
	I mean, then I would intervene.
	But this is just – I mean, it's raised voices.
	It's exasperation. It's aggression.
	It's dads leaning down over their four-year-old sons and with great emphasis, you know, wagging their fingers and with great intensity and so on.
	And it's just like, man, that's just overwhelming for a kid.
	So, I do have to kind of grit my teeth and get through it.
	And I'm still sort of mulling over about whether to intervene or not.
	But frankly, I wouldn't be able to leave the house without spending my entire time intervening and not parenting, which would scarcely seem to be in accordance with what I value.
	And so, you see a lot of it.
	And when you change Your approach to parenting, one of the things that is revealed, you know, like flicking the light on in a room where you can only see dim shapes, everything becomes clear.
	What is revealed is that there is a heck of a lot of aggression out there in parents.
	There's a lot of exasperation.
	There's a lot of short tempers.
	There's a lot of, you know, the parents, I saw this mom leading over today and saying to her, the kid had to be like two and a half, you know, why are you so moody?
	What's the matter with you today?
	I'm just like, oh man, come on, he's two and a half years old for Christ's sake.
	I mean, if you're having trouble with him being moody at the age of two and a half, why are you so moody as a 35-year-old parent?
	If you can't control your moodiness and aggression to the point where you're snapping exasperatedly at a two and a half year old, aren't you imposing a higher standard of behavior on a two and a half year old that you're actually achieving at the age of 35?
	Ugh! It's just, it's terrible to see.
	And you see it everywhere whenever you go out to children's stuff.
	So, that having been said, look, I really appreciate the question.
	I think it's an incredibly brave question and I just really wanted to, you know, really put out massive amounts of props and respect and I would send you a candy gram if I could, Melissa, because I think that is an absolutely fantastic question.
	So, how can I stop the master-slave relationship?
	With my own children.
	Well, I think there's a number of big answers to that and I'm not going to be able to do anything justice because I do want to make sure we have time for other callers.
	But I will say this.
	I think as a parent, as a human being, but as a parent, it's so essential to remain humble.
	If we assume that our children are empty vessels that need to be filled with our knowledge and our wisdom and our experience so that they can live correctly, in other words, if we believe that they're born empty or defective, then I think it's very hard to avoid the master-slave relationship.
	Anybody who is a teacher, and parents are fundamentally teachers in my opinion, but anybody who's a teacher who believes that he or she has nothing to learn From the pupils, we'll never be a great teacher.
	In fact, I don't think we'll even be a good teacher, because then it becomes about the one-way transmission of knowledge.
	That is catastrophic, in my mind, to the long-term health of the world.
	So, imagine this.
	We all went through more than a decade of public school, at least most of us did.
	How much did the teachers learn from us?
	How much was our input and perspective valued?
	Well, it wasn't.
	What happened was we were considered to be empty vessels that water, like the water of knowledge, need to be poured into the empty jugs of our heads slowly and carefully so it didn't spill.
	The idea of learning something from your students is antithetical to most, certainly to state-based education and to most modern forms of education and to most parenting.
	To give a tiny example, My daughter is currently going through a phase where she's quite manic about finding exit signs.
	You know those, you see them in movie theaters and malls and whatever, like those red exit signs.
	So she'll point and she said, exit, exit!
	And she'll see them.
	And I don't see them, right?
	And so I'm like, wow, that's cool.
	I didn't see that exit sign.
	You know, she's got the eyes of a toddler, so it's like four miles away through lead walls.
	She can see them.
	Or the other day I was taking her out of the car and she was like, vroom, vroom, vroom.
	I'm like, what is that? Is that vroom, vroom?
	Is that a car? It's like, no.
	Two streets over, somebody was sweeping their front porch.
	So she saw somebody with a vroom.
	And so I don't assume that I can see what she sees.
	I don't assume that if she's saying something, I assume there's a reason.
	And I need to learn what that reason is.
	That's humility. I don't just sort of, oh yeah, I know what it is, or she's just making a mistake.
	I have to assume that she's trying to tell me something that I don't know, and I can't just dismiss it.
	So I took her on a walk yesterday morning, and we saw a guy down at the end of the street.
	He was on his roof, and he was painting his eaves.
	And so we stopped and chatted with them for a while, and there was a ladder, and I said, you go up the ladder to get to the roof, and so on, right?
	So then, like eight hours later, we go for a walk again, and we go around the same corner, and she points to that house, and she says, up, up.
	And I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what she meant.
	And part of me was like, oh, I don't know, like, up the stairs, you know.
	But of course, what she meant was, somebody was up on the roof, and they used the ladder to get up, and that's what she remembered.
	I know that these sound like very small examples, but they're important because it's humility.
	I don't know what she's saying.
	She has something that's important to say.
	I need to figure out what it is.
	I want to learn what my child's perspective of the world is.
	I want to learn to understand how she thinks, the way that she sees the world, what is important to her.
	She loves gathering rocks and throwing them into the sewer.
	Heck, who doesn't? And so I want to understand why that's important for her.
	Why, when something spectacular is going on, does she care more about going up and down stairs than seeing some animal show or something like that?
	Well, because she can have something, she can manipulate that, so that's of interest to her.
	So I think that humility, the master-slave relationship comes about when we feel that children, it's a one-way street, that we are simply going to fill our children with knowledge and wisdom and maturity and perspective and facts and all of that, and then they're going to grow up.
	It's a non-reciprocal relationship, the master-slave relationship.
	And so I would invite you to...
	To be humble in the presence, in the face of your children's minds and spirits and souls and curiosity.
	And to try, really try to see the world how they see the world.
	To try and really get inside their heads.
	If they're pre-verbal you can do it through emotional empathy.
	You can also do it, I mean it sounds weird, but spend a little bit of time walking around the house at your child's eye level to see how the house looks like from his or her perspective.
	Imagine that everything was five or seven or ten times the size.
	You know, if Isabella wants to take a bath, she'll say bath time and she'll go up the stairs and she'll try to climb into the bath, but she can't make it happen for herself.
	Imagine how frustrating it would be if that was your situation.
	She really wanted a bath, you felt you were stinky, but you couldn't actually have the bath and you couldn't even make it...
	Well, I guess she makes it pretty clear now.
	But I think taking out the master-slave is really recognizing the full and essential humanity of your children, that they have things that they can teach you, that their originality of perspective That their truly empirical, reality-driven minds can surprise and absolutely delight you.
	Their capacity for humor.
	I mean, I think Isabella can be really, really funny.
	Their capacity for humor, their goodwill, their ability to forgive, their endless curiosity.
	To be humble in the face of that, to recognize children as full personality-bearing spiritual soulful beings that have as much to teach you As you have to teach them.
	And I'm not just saying that as a sort of rhetorical trick.
	And the reason that I say that, that children have as much to teach you as you have to teach them, is because I was not raised with empathy and curiosity.
	Quite the opposite. I was not raised with people expecting me to or hoping that I would teach them something in return, with people being curious about my thoughts and perspective.
	And so the reason that my daughter has as much to teach me as I have to teach her is because she is being raised in the opposite way that I was raised.
	And so she can teach me what it's like to be raised well.
	She can teach me what happens to a personality when a child is raised well.
	Without raised voices, without name-calling, without aggression, with love and hugs and kisses and cuddles and all the good things that human nature can do.
	She can teach me what a personality is like that is raised in a free and loving and peaceful and respectful and happy environment.
	I mean, heck, she can even teach me what a child is like who is raised with two parents, because I only grew up with one parent.
	So the idea that since she has such a different upbringing than I have, And that anyone I know had.
	She has such an opposite upbringing from anybody that I know.
	She has an incredible amount to teach me about what the world looks like to someone who's raised in this kind of way.
	I don't know what that's like.
	Nobody I know knows what that's like.
	Which is not to say everybody had equally bad childhoods.
	But she can teach me what peace and love and freedom in a family looks like.
	That's an incredible gift.
	So, these are just suggestions.
	It's a big topic and I'm probably not doing it a tenth of a percentage of justice.
	But that's how I would recommend getting out of the master-slave relationship.
	Your children, statistically, are going to be smarter than you.
	Isabella is going to be smarter than I am.
	Your kids, because genetically, right, kids just seem to get smarter every generation.
	So have that humility that they will make connections that you and I just can't make because they're just going to be smarter.
	And that doesn't mean that you're just buddy-buddy and complete equals with them, of course, because you are the parent and you have knowledge and experience and size and independence, so all of that is important in the equation.
	But give your children room to teach you.
	Room to surprise you.
	Room to make those connections.
	Assume that they are going to outthink you in the long run and sometimes even in the short run.
	Give them that room of reciprocity.
	Give them that room of reciprocity.
	And then, they will never be exploited in the future, because they will have grown up feeling that relationships should be reciprocal, that people bring different values, but relationships should be reciprocal, that it's never one way.
	It never should be one way.
	And who then will take advantage of them in the future?
	Exploitation is a language, like Mandarin.
	I don't teach my daughter that language.
	So she won't be able to speak it in the future.
	So it's like I never taught her Mandarin.
	So in the future, someone's going to try and rip her off by sending her a Mandarin email, but she won't even know how to...
	I don't speak that language, so I don't even know what you're saying.
	People will try to exploit her as people try to exploit everyone.
	Not everyone, but sooner or later, we all run into it.
	But if your children are raised with reciprocity and equality...
	And curiosity and respect and peace.
	They will not speak the language of one-sided hierarchy in the future.
	And Lord knows, we need to spit that entire language.
	All of those poisonous syllables need to be spit out of our collective mouths for there to be a peaceful and happy world.
	So, Melissa, I'm sorry for the long speech.
	And huge, huge, huge Respect and congratulations for the question that you've asked.
	I know that I've done scant justice to it, but this is the best I can come up with on the spot.
	And I hope that you will continue to explore this because it is just a fantastic, fantastic question.
	All right, should we move on to the next questioner?
	Hello? Hello?
	Hello? Hello?
	Are we ready? Sorry about the long speech, man.
	You're all on. All right, awesome.
	I wanted to ask something about my therapist.
	I was running back home because I love calling all that.
	I'm just like panting right now.
	Somebody else, I've been going to my therapist, this therapist that works with the IFS system for, I've had about two sessions now.
	And my dad, who is kind of, I don't know, he's not too He's keen on me going to therapy, but that's something else.
	But he told me something.
	He kind of struck a chord with me.
	He said that because he profited from me going to therapy, that that could lead him to prolong the sessions and not be as helpful, right?
	So what that pretty much translates to in my mind is that the therapist Kind of have an incentive to prolong therapy just because they're making so much money out of it, right?
	And so that's just kind of stuck in my mind right now and I just wanted to see what you think about that.
	Yeah, no, it's a great question for sure.
	And I think that if you can just mute for a sec and catch your breath, I want to make sure that you don't faint while I'm talking.
	I want my cell phone, so I'll try.
	Oh yeah, okay. Maybe James, you could mute him on the server, but I just want to make sure that you don't pan too much in my ear because it's distracting.
	I'm not even going to tell you why.
	Look, I obviously can't speak to you about your therapist, but I'll talk about therapy in general.
	And it's an economic proposition that is being put forward here.
	And it is not specific to therapy.
	So for instance, if you break your leg, you probably will need physical therapy to regain full strength and momentum, right?
	And a physical therapist, you could argue, has an incentive to retard the development of your strength so that you can continue to go.
	So maybe you only need three months, but she stretches it out to six months so that she can milk you for more money.
	The same thing is true, of course, of...
	Other specialists that we don't know much about what the hell they do, but they can be very expensive, right?
	So I just had to drop a bunch of money.
	My car is 12 years old, and I just had to drop a ridiculous amount of money to get the brakes all fixed and repaired.
	And do I know?
	I don't know. I mean, I just kind of have to trust the car manufacturer.
	We could go on and on, right?
	So if you have a doctor and you have some chronic condition, you could say that your doctor has a financial incentive to continue that chronic condition so you'll keep coming to see him assuming that the visits don't take too long so that he can continue to bill and so on.
	And these are all valid questions.
	And I'm sure that there are people out there in every profession who prolong things to make more money.
	So I think your dad is bringing up something that is worth taking a look at.
	And I will tell you, because I was in therapy for...
	I think it was about two and a half years.
	And for the majority of that, I was going for three hours a week.
	And this was not cheap.
	As anybody who's been to therapy knows, it is not exactly a cheap proposition.
	I shudder to think of everything I could have bought with all that money, except for what I bought was myself.
	So that really seemed like a good deal.
	So I'll tell you the way that I approached it whenever I would have doubts about the cost.
	First of all, What you can do is bring this up with your therapist.
	Because therapy is supposed to be a safe environment, right?
	It's a place where you can bring up whatever you're thinking and feeling, the doubts that you have.
	You could bring that up with your therapist.
	I think that would be a worthwhile thing.
	If you don't do that or you don't feel comfortable doing that, which may be somewhere further down the road in therapy, the way that I analogized it was around the question of physical therapy.
	So I said, okay, so let's say that I break...
	My leg and I have to go and get physical therapy.
	Well, I am first of all going to make sure that I do everything that's possible, right?
	So, if I'm told to do knee bends 50 times a day by my physical therapist, then I need to do those knee bends 50 times a day.
	I mean, clearly. Because if I don't, then the lengthy nature of my therapy is not the physical therapist's We can all understand that, right?
	So I would suggest if you're going to therapy and you want to make it as fast as possible, and who doesn't, right?
	I mean, it's expensive, it's time-consuming, it's destabilizing at times.
	So if you can race through therapy so much, the better.
	That having been said, you can't rush a creme brulee, right?
	So what I did to speed things along was I kept a dream journal, I talked about what I was thinking and feeling with my friends.
	I kept a thought journal.
	I had these, you said IFS, these internal family system conversations, though I didn't know it, that it was called that at the time.
	I did as much work as that as possible.
	So while I was in therapy for three hours a week, I was probably spending eight to 12 hours a week journaling and introspecting and thinking about stuff.
	And I even did some art therapy, just not art therapy formally, just I drew stuff and tried to figure out what was going on in my mind.
	And so there's a lot that you can do to move things forward.
	But most importantly, I think, in terms of figuring out whether your therapist is on the up and up, and I believe that the majority of them are, but that's just my belief.
	Is your level of enthusiasm.
	Do you feel enthusiastic about going to therapy?
	Do you feel, not always enthusiastic, but motivated to do the work that can help speed therapy along?
	Do you feel that the progress that you're making could be any faster?
	It could be any faster. There's a form of therapy, and you understand this is just us amateur hour of opinion-ville, but there are forms of therapy which are very neutral, right?
	Where you say, you know, well, therapist, what do you think about this?
	And the therapist says, well, why is it important to you what I think?
	And it's all very neutral and it all just bounces questions back.
	I'm not a huge fan of that kind of therapy.
	I did have one therapist like that.
	I actually only went to one session because I just found it kind of annoying and I felt like I was talking to Eliza, an old DAS program that would ask you back questions and pretend to be a therapist.
	It just felt like more of a game.
	So I prefer a more proactive kind of therapy where a therapist gets in and takes a stand.
	It's particularly a moral stand.
	I find that to be...
	That was more useful to me, which, again, it's just my opinion, right?
	So maybe this other kind of therapy is better for other people.
	But if you're motivated, if you're doing the work, if the therapist doesn't give you homework and you don't know what to do, ask your therapist about if there's anything that you can do to speed things along or anything that you can do that's going to make therapy richer and more effective.
	So if you're doing all the homework or you're doing as much work as you can reasonably do to move things along, I mean, what actually occurs in the therapist's office is the tip of the iceberg of the work that's going on outside the therapist's office, just as when you go to get your physical therapy, if you've had homework, you have to do it, right?
	Like, I mean, if you take guitar lessons and you don't practice between the guitar lessons, then of course it's going to take you approximately 12 million years to learn smoke on the water, right?
	So you need to practice, you need to do all that kind of work.
	If you're doing all of that work, And you feel frustrated at your progress in the therapy office or you feel that you're outstripping the therapist or you're going further than the therapist can go, bring that up with the therapist.
	If you don't get a satisfying answer, keep bringing it up until you do get a satisfying answer or you don't feel like going anymore.
	But I'm always around.
	Be as open and as honest with the therapist as possible.
	Push the envelope for yourself so that you get that practice of being open and honest with someone.
	And a therapist, of course, is supposed to be the safest person.
	To do it. And that's how I would pursue it, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely. That helps a lot.
	Yeah, my mind was along those lines.
	I did feel a little hesitant about asking him about it, but I think I will anyways and just based my actions on how I feel after that.
	And yeah, thank you so much.
	That was very helpful. Oh, and I hope it works out.
	Again, I think that the majority of therapists are genuinely interested in helping people and so on.
	But you're right. I mean, your dad is right to bring that up as a concern.
	And I would also, I mean, if you had any feelings about your dad bringing this up without providing a solution, then it would be worth talking about that with your dad too.
	But I would really focus on the homework and being open and honest with your therapist.
	All right. I'll definitely try that and do that.
	Thank you so much. You're welcome and congratulations on getting into therapy.
	I think particularly the internal family systems model has great potential and certainly has, again, the way that I sort of floundered my way through it, inventing the wheel as I drove, certainly worked for me.
	Thank you for calling in.
	I wish you the very best of luck with your therapy and congratulations on taking that step.
	Awesome. Thank you so much.
	All right. Take care. Great, great conversations and questions today.
	So thank you, everybody.
	And we have room. James, do we have anybody else?
	Because we did have a question about atheism and deism just thrown in to the chat room.
	I just had one question sort of provoked from an earlier, the question about the master-slave.
	And we sort of touched on this before, and I was wondering, When you see parents behaving badly towards their children, I mean, just you personally, do you say anything?
	Do you sort of just judge the situation or how do you handle that?
	It's a big question.
	I've touched on it before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
	There are situations in which I will intervene no matter what, which is where I fear physical aggression against the child.
	So if I see a parent either hit a child or raise their hand in anger, then I will intervene, whether I like it or not.
	That to me is just kind of an essential.
	You know, an intense look, a shaking finger, like somebody wagging their finger in a kid's face.
	It's a tough call.
	It's a tough call.
	And I just rely on my instincts more than anything else.
	So for instance, if you intervene with a parent who is humiliating a child, the parent in turn may feel humiliated and may in turn take that out on the child later.
	And clearly you don't want to intervene in a situation that's going to cause even more aggression against a child.
	I mean there is this, as I talked about many years ago, this black obsidian biosphere around the family, right?
	Because you may intervene in public and then they may take it out against their children in private.
	So the times that I have intervened I think have gone well where I've intervened in person.
	And don't get me wrong, I'm no caped crusader.
	I don't wander the streets looking for people who are aggressing against their children, but where it has happened, probably over the course of my life, no more than a dozen or so times, I feel that it has gone relatively well, in that it has helped to diffuse the situation, and it has produced some sense from the parent that there's a problem with what they're doing.
	And I've, you know, just made a couple of suggestions and so on, right?
	So now, of course, I've not...
	Nobody's been beaten the hell out of their kid or whatever, right?
	In which case, it's probably better to just call the cops.
	We have to use the state for what it's there for at the moment, given the lack of alternatives.
	So that would be my suggestion. I certainly have phoned when I've heard children behind closed doors being hurt or yelling or whatever.
	And that's just a basic thing.
	A fair amount of what I do, of course, in the realm of parent-child relationships is somewhat conditioned by Living in three continents, knowing hundreds if not thousands of people in the immediate vicinity, and nobody intervening to help me.
	And so, you know, I sort of said to myself when I was a teenager, if I'm ever in a position where I can help somebody who's being aggressed against by a parent, then I will do that.
	And so I have. You know, sometimes well, sometimes not well, but that has been a pretty driving force behind me.
	You try to give to the world justly what was withheld from you as a child.
	And the culture of silence around child abuse was crippling when I was growing up.
	I still think it's pretty strong, but I always felt that was a very important thing to do.
	Now, but to me there's two categories, right?
	So there's children, like little kids, who are being aggressed against, and they're I think that it's important to try and get the parents to understand that there's a problem, that they shouldn't act in this kind of way to point them towards some resources because they still have the kids, right? Their parenting job is far from over.
	And so given that they're going to continue to have care, custody and control of the kids for 10 or more years or 15 years or whatever, then I think that's the way to go.
	I don't feel the same when someone's 20.
	And if they've had a history of being abused or they claim to have a history, and I don't doubt people in this area, to me that's a different situation because the parenting is done largely by that point and there's no chance of going back to sort it out.
	And I mean, that doesn't mean that it can't be repaired if people are open and willing to work hard enough at it.
	But I don't feel that it's the same situation in terms of how I would approach it.
	And of course, people have heard this in the show as well.
	So I don't feel the same.
	But I would trust your gut.
	Do not feel that you have to, for some external reason, intervene in a situation of child abuse.
	I would certainly say that if you see something that is illegal, right, like hitting a child or whatever, then Call.
	Get someone in security.
	Get, you know, if you're at the mall, get the mall security to go and deal with it, right?
	That's what they're paid for and so on.
	So I would not let that go by.
	But at the same time, if you just see someone, you know, sort of their neck kind of throbbing, you get that Klingon forehead and they're raising their voice a little bit.
	I would trust your gut on that.
	And I think that your gut will process.
	Remember, the unconscious can process millions of times more information than the conscious mind can.
	So I would trust your instincts on that.
	And don't feel that there's any external rule that has to have you darting from bad parent to bad parent.
	So bad parenting, let's say, to bad parenting to solve it.
	But at the same time, I think if you can do it in a positive way, I think that would be for the best.
	Thanks. Thanks for sharing.
	That was very helpful. So, I don't think we have anyone else.
	So, if you want to go on to the atheism-deism question.
	Yeah, okay. So, somebody has asked, can an atheist be a parent?
	Oh, somebody said, what about intervening while you're at work?
	That's tough. That is a tough situation.
	If you're at work and there's any security, I would refer it to security.
	Remember, we can't stamp out all the bad behavior in the world.
	And while it may be beneficial to intervene, it may be detrimental to intervene.
	I certainly do think, look, I mean, I genuinely believe that you can't have an intimate knowledge of somebody without asking about their childhood.
	You just, you can't, you can't, I don't think you can really love somebody without knowing the origins and forces shaping their personality.
	So I think as adults, it's really important if you have friends or family you want to be close to, or maybe this topic hasn't come up, say, hey, tell me, I could spend hours, if not weeks, if not months, listening to you talk about your childhood, because these are the forces.
	That shape us. I've been making notes about a podcast which I would like to do showing the forces in my childhood that have shaped my way of thinking just so that people can, you know, be aware of possible biases on my part or possible pockets or maybe more than pockets of irrationality on my part so that people can put what I'm saying in context.
	And I think people know a lot about my history, you know, I guess whether you like it or not.
	But I think that as adults, I think it's very important to ask people about their childhoods.
	And there is a solution to people who've had a bad childhood.
	And the solution is, I mean, from a non-therapy standpoint, the solution is moral clarity and genuine sympathy, right?
	So if they were abused as children, you'd say, damn, that was incredibly wrong, utterly immoral.
	What happened to you?
	And I'm deeply, deeply, deeply sorry that it did.
	And that is not, of course, a magic wand that makes everything better.
	But it is the kind of clarity that can really, really help people in the world.
	And I feel no differently about that now than I did when I started.
	So, we have a question.
	Can an atheist be a deist?
	Well, no.
	No. You can't have these two.
	To be sort of technical...
	Sorry, let me clarify that a little bit, not to give you such a ridiculously easy answer.
	And somebody has posted this in.
	It said, deism is a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme being created the universe...
	And that this, and religious truth in general, can be determined using reason and observation of the natural world alone, without the need for either faith or organized religion.
	Whereas atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
	So technically, no.
	If you're a deist, then you believe that a god created the universe.
	And generally, and this was really very popular in the 18th century, a deism is the belief that after creating the universe, the god retired to parts unknown, And no longer reaches in to deal with the universe.
	So praying is useless.
	And it's sort of like when you make a watch, you send the watch out from the factory, it goes into the world, and you don't sit there and say, who's wearing the watch now?
	Is the watch doing well? How's the watch doing?
	How's the watch feeling? Is the watch praying to me?
	Right? You don't do that.
	And that is...
	The deist perspective, that God created the world but does not interfere, the age of miracles is over, that God does not interfere in the current happenings in the world, and therefore religion is silly, is not true.
	So, in that sense, you could say that a deist is anti-religious in terms of, you know, Jesus Was born of a virgin and healed a bunch of lepers and threw a bunch of pigs off a cliff because they were possessed by demons and did this, that, and the other was nailed up and why did you forsake me?
	Come back to life, Jewish zombie, gets killed again, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So they would say, well, that's not true because that's God interfering or coming into this world.
	And so that's not true because God creates the universe and then we don't hear anything more from him.
	So a deist could very well be anti-religious.
	as in organized religion, but would not be against the idea of there being a God, because that would be the reality.
	Somebody has asked, you've mentioned it a couple of times, What is the difference between sympathy and empathy?
	I will touch on this real quick in a very empathetic manner.
	Please bend over. I will put on a philosophical rubber glove.
	Turn and cough. Well, this is the way that I formulate it.
	So this is the International Dictionary of Stephism, so you can take it for whatever that's worth.
	But sympathy and empathy.
	Empathy is correctly experiencing the emotions of another person.
	Whereas sympathy is positively evaluating those emotions.
	So to take a...
	I know that means very little bit.
	So to take an example, if a woman is walking down a dark alley and some guy is creeping up behind her and going, you know, like, you know, the average FDR barbecue, then...
	She knows that he's trying to frighten her.
	And she experiences that as, assuming it's not a friend or whatever, experiences that as threatening.
	So she is correctly identifying his aggression towards her.
	So she is empathizing with him.
	But she does not sympathize with his feelings.
	Similarly, if some guy jumps out...
	Of an alleyway and holds a gun to your ribs and says, give me your wallet.
	You correctly are empathizing with his desire to frighten you and you feel frightened and you empathize with his aggression and you assume that he's willing to use violence to get what he wants because otherwise you wouldn't feel any fear.
	And so you are correctly empathizing with his emotional state, his aggression, his violence.
	But you don't sympathize with it.
	You don't say, and that's great.
	And so that is an example of empathy, which is to correctly Put yourself into the skin of somebody else, but that does not mean that you have a positive emotional response to it.
	At the same time, when Isabella runs up and gives my leg a hug, or she tows me around like a huge pink helium balloon when she wants me to do something, like when we're at the mall and she wants to go down the stairs, she'll just grab my finger and drag me over.
	Well, not drag me, but sort of pull me over like a big pink balloon to the stairs so that I can...
	I empathize with her desire to go down the stairs and I sympathize with it because I think it's cool and I think that it's great that she's so interested in learning how to do that and so all of this kind of stuff I think is the way.
	So that's the way that I view the difference between sympathy and empathy.
	Empathy can create great fear, but sympathy usually is the positive, like love and affection and so on.
	There's more of the, quote, positive emotions or pleasurable emotions, I guess you could say.
	There's an interesting statistic that Rob posted.
	Fathers are the primary caregivers for about a quarter of the nation's 11.2 million preschoolers whose mothers work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
	There is actually an interesting article that you can find on the New York Times website about the degree to which fathers are now experiencing the similar work and family stresses that women have been dealing with since, well, since time immemorial, but more particularly since the 1970s.
	And I think that's very interesting.
	I think that if I were a father in a nine-to-five workplace, and of course, at the level that I was working at, and again, I'm not trying to pretend that I'm any kind of business guru, but I was, you know, a fairly senior In the business world, it would have been tough. I could definitely see the salespeople in particular who had young kids whose wives worked.
	They did a lot.
	They had a lot of two-hour lunches.
	And this wasn't because they were lubricating clients, but because they had some stuff to do with their kids.
	Their kid was sick. I would see these harried calls.
	I was in an office with one salesperson once.
	He was having this harried call back and forth between he and his wife.
	They both had to work late. Their kid needed to be picked up from daycare.
	The mom was not available. I mean, it's really stressful.
	Kids are like gravity.
	They are a complete absolute.
	And you can't really work around that sort of stuff.
	You can't sort of jump off a bridge and say, don't worry, I'll make a phone call on the way down and float.
	And the necessity of children to be fed, to be picked up, to be changed, to be put to bed is not something that you can postpone.
	We've all done those all-nighters where you postpone sleep to get something done at work or at school.
	It doesn't work that way with kids.
	You don't have that choice.
	I can forego a meal or two if I'm really busy or working on something.
	I used to end up really not.
	One of the ways that I dieted was just to keep writing books as I did during that blaze of productivity for the first 18 months of FDR full-time.
	I can forgo a meal or two, but you can't put that on a kid.
	They just can't do it.
	It's not right to do that.
	I think fathers are experiencing a lot more of what women have been experiencing in terms of the stresses of balancing work and family.
	I think that's helpful.
	I guess that's a kind of empathy, and hopefully that will lead to sympathy.
	Somebody has asked, why does suicide affect people like that caller's girlfriend, and why do people Fear death.
	Well, I don't think it's death that people fear, fundamentally.
	It's dying. I wrote many, many years ago in a poem I do not fear death.
	Where death is, I will not be.
	Where I am, death is not.
	We shall never meet. You can't fear someone you're never going to meet, or you can't fear something that you're never going to experience.
	And death, when you're dead, you experience nothing.
	You experience the 22nd century pretty much as you experience the 18th century, which is to say, not at all.
	And so, I think that...
	It's not death that people fear it's dying.
	It's the loss of pleasure. It's the loss of joy.
	It's the loss of happiness.
	It's the loss of all that is rich and beautiful about living in this world.
	With all the challenges, and perhaps because of all the challenges, this world is an exciting and deep and powerful and frightening and exhilarating place to be.
	And people don't want to give up on that.
	I think that's one aspect, which is when you have lived a life of great riches, then...
	You fear death is the end of those riches, right?
	I mean, if I were to get sick tomorrow, I would fear my death because I want to watch my daughter grow up, because I want to grow old with my wife, because I want to keep doing what I'm doing in this show, because I want to see where the world is going to go and how the world is going to go.
	And so I don't want to miss that any more than if you're...
	In watching a movie that you absolutely love, you just don't want to leave halfway through.
	How does it end, right?
	People want to see that. I think that's one aspect of why people don't want to die.
	But I think on the other hand, the procrastinators in life fear death because death is the end of all procrastination, right?
	So if you've put off honesty and integrity and truth and courage and all these kinds of things, if you've compromised perhaps too much for your own conscience, if you've done wrong but not made good on that wrong, created or put out restitution for that wrong, Then I think you are going to fear death because death reminds you that you do not have an eternity To live your life.
	You do not have an eternity to right the wrongs you may have done.
	You do not have an eternity to begin sinking your fangs deep into the gristle and meat and bones of life.
	And I think people fear that because death is a great prioritizer.
	Death is a great organizer of priorities.
	Because since nothing is going to happen after you die, since you're dead and done and gone and they throw you in a hole and they throw dirt in your face, they say a couple of words and everybody gets on with their life.
	Then it reminds you that you need to live, that you need to live, that you need to act, that fear, whatever is holding you back in your life, that fear is never a substitute for action, is never a substitute for courage.
	Because at the end of your life, everything that you're afraid of will seem meaningless.
	So why not try and apply that perspective now?
	I'm not saying I always do it perfectly, but I always try to remind myself of that.
	So, if you live a life well, you will fear death because it is the end of the good things that you've lived.
	And if you have not lived your life well, then you will fear death because it will erase your ability to live your life better.
	And so I think that, and you know, most people I think fall into one of those two camps.
	Hi, Steph. Hello.
	Hi. I had actually a sort of related question.
	I'm sorry, sorry, just before we go, I'm so sorry to interrupt you right at the beginning, but I just wanted to say to the caller, I haven't talked about why suicide affects people like that caller's girlfriend, and the reason is I don't know exactly how her father's suicide affected her because I wasn't talking to her, so I don't want to speculate about that, but I just wanted to let you know I'm aware that I didn't answer that because I don't think I can.
	So I just wanted to mention that, but sorry, please go on.
	Yeah, great. So what I was looking at was like a stateless society seems to be a sort of generational project.
	So it's because it appears that many people today just cannot accept these ideas of freedom, just like religion.
	I mean, you can try and convince them as much as you want, but they're not We're going to change their mind.
	So the ideas of a stateless society will be sort of incrementally introduced to new generations.
	Eventually, hopefully it'll be accepted itself evident.
	Sorry, I just want to mention one thing before you go on.
	My formulation is similar, but just with a slight difference that I just wanted to point out, and I don't want to derail what you're saying, but a stateless society is a relationship without...
	A legal or coercive hierarchy.
	In order for people to institute a stateless society in the world, they have to have experienced that as children.
	It is not an argument we will win.
	It is an experience we will reproduce for children.
	Once children have been raised as equal beings without a hierarchy of dominance from parents or teachers or priests, Then that will be completely natural to them.
	The language of equality and the language of mutual respect is simply the language that they will speak and that will change the structures in society.
	But it's not a rational argument.
	We're going to win. It is an emotional experience that we are going to create in more and more people until that simply changes the world.
	Yeah, I absolutely agree.
	So you need sort of multiple generations in order to sort of reach that state where you have new infants that are brought up in this environment that will be conducive to a stateless society.
	Yes. Yes.
	And in your opinion, how many generations would it take the best case sort of scenario to reach this sort of, to reach this stateless society?
	I mean, this is sort of very speculative.
	Yeah, very speculative.
	Just a ballpark number.
	It's all I need. I don't think it's going to be anything less than three generations.
	Alright, so about 75 to 100 years.
	Yeah, I don't think it's going to be anything less than three.
	Right. Because I don't think society is at the place yet where the value of treating children as equal human beings is even acknowledged, let alone people are struggling to implement it.
	So we're sort of like feminism, where feminism was in the early 18th century, when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the writer of Frankenstein, wrote Vindications of the Rights of Women.
	How long did it take for feminism to go from that perspective to the sort of late 60s, early 1970s power, feminist power stuff, where stuff really began to change in society, just in terms of the way people think.
	I'm not even talking in terms of government policy or whatever.
	Well, what was that, 180 years?
	I don't think it's going to be that long because we have the internet and we have all this great technology, but then so do the people who are talking a bunch of nonsense, right?
	I think the real challenge is it still remains philosophical and the personhood of children is still, even within the Western world, is still a great challenge for people to try to accept.
	And, of course, in the non-Western world, it's even further away.
	So, as far as a stateless world goes, I think it's got to be a couple of hundred years, but I think that we will have significant movements towards a far less hierarchical society within a couple of generations, if people are willing to take their courage in their hands and deal with their own If those histories have been destructive or abusive and just vow not to reproduce what was inflicted upon them, it will be far faster.
	But that is going to remain up to the choice of each individual and therefore eludes, I think, any effective prognostication.
	Right. So the basic idea is it seems to be that a stateless society sort of requires death, basically.
	I think I understand what you mean, but let me just make sure I do.
	I'm just following a sort of reasoning, but yeah, go on.
	You'll see where I'm getting. I think I know what you mean.
	I would argue that that's not particular to a stateless society.
	I think that is particular to human progress in general.
	So there's an old argument in the sciences, right, which says that believers in an old paradigm never change their mind.
	An old paradigm never dies, only their followers, only its followers eventually snuff it, right?
	That is sort of an old argument in the sciences and I think is...
	It seems to be somewhat true.
	It's hard to say for sure, but I think that there's good arguments as to it seems pretty true.
	And so I think that's true for most people in general.
	There are jokes that are made about older people.
	Comedians will say this all the time.
	If you listen to comedy at all, you'll hear it quite a bit.
	You know, granddad's mild racism.
	Or grandmother's mild racism or whatever, right?
	And the idea, of course, is that these people grew up in a time where racism was, or what we call racism now, was socially acceptable, and they've just been unable to change it.
	And then every now and then you just have to kind of bite your tongue when granddad says something about the chinks, right?
	Just because that's how he grew up.
	He's, you know, he's beyond the point of changing and you just kind of have to bite your tongue.
	And stuff that we would not find acceptable in a 20-year-old, we will put up with in a 70-year-old because, because, because, right?
	There are those arguments around social mores and you can't teach an old dog new tricks and so on.
	So I don't think it's particular to a stateless society.
	I think it's just human systems of thought in general.
	But I think this one is trickier because it has so much to do with how we're raised.
	And that can be some of the tougher stuff to change is how children are raised.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's just that I came across these sort of writers like Aubrey de Grey and you might have heard of Ray Kurzweil.
	And they speculate that immortal sort of humans are already alive today.
	So, I mean, of course they're speculating, but they're just looking at general trends in technology, and they say that the sort of aging process could be sort of initially slowed down, then even stopped.
	And then as time goes by, it could be reversed.
	And then with better medical technologies, then humans could live for 500 years, and then in 500 years we'll come up with a sort of new You know, sort of life extension technology and then they can live another thousand and so on.
	So if humans don't die, then there wouldn't be any new generations open to sort of new ideas and there would never be any people that would be brought up in this sort of stateless, how would I say, this sort of...
	Yeah, like an environmental paradigm, right?
	Yeah, exactly. So the sort of conclusions you would draw from what these people are saying is that we're sort of stuck.
	We'd be sort of stuck in our current society today because the people that are alive today would be alive forever.
	Have you sort of considered that?
	You know, I never have.
	But I think it's a completely fascinating and stimulating thought.
	You're absolutely right.
	And so if I understand your argument or your approach, it's a race.
	It's a race between progress and immortality.
	Because if human society is going to get frozen in whatever generation gets to live forever...
	Whereas if we have this continual renewal of new possibilities and new ways of raising children, then the human mind can continue to develop.
	So if we get immortality before we get statelessness, we may never get statelessness.
	Is that what you mean? Well, I mean, that's one way of looking at it.
	I personally think that we're sort of looking at this with today's vision of what humanity is.
	And in, you know, 500 years' time, I think a sort of...
	The human form will have changed.
	It will be more integrated with technology, so it will be somewhat different.
	I think that's sort of the exit clause that I'm sort of putting my bets on, is that we won't be just like humans today that are quite limited and that are stuck in beliefs, in their current beliefs that they sort of got when they were brought up, and that we'd be more open to accepting new ideas.
	Yeah, it could be. I think all it does is urge me to go even faster in terms of putting material out there that will help.
	But no, that's a fascinating idea that immortality may freeze human thought to...
	In a way that's, if not going to stop, severely retard the progress of new ways of thinking.
	So that is fascinating.
	The only thing that I would say about that, which may or may not be true, is that I don't believe that we'll get immortality prior to a stateless society because it will just be another government program that will fail, if that makes any sense.
	That would be my way of approaching it.
	But yeah, it's a fascinating thought.
	Not much we can do anything about other than to continue to try and progress human thought as much as possible.
	But it is a fascinating thought.
	It's definitely something to mull over.
	Yeah. So, I mean, I'm just sort of looking at what, reading their books and trying to see if there's, you know, any answers there.
	But of course, it's all speculative.
	So, you know, it's all, we really don't know if we'll have immortality and if we do, what sort of, what we'll be like, if we'll still be human.
	So, if these things already matter.
	So, it's hard to say.
	Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting.
	It is one of these things that's probably not going to change much of what anybody's going to do in the moment, but it is definitely a very interesting thought to, and it certainly never occurred to me, which, I mean, that sounds terrible.
	Well, it never occurred to me, so it must be brilliant and fascinating, but it really is a very interesting thought.
	But it certainly does put some spurs to the heel of my horse, so to speak.
	Right. Cool.
	All right. Thanks, man.
	Yeah. Thank you. All right.
	Take care. Bye.
	Fascinating. Just fascinating.
	You are the smartest group of people around.
	Actually, somebody posted that on my YouTube channel.
	Just saying that they seem to be the smartest and wisest group of YouTube listeners.
	And, you know, who am I to argue with the internet?
	Alright, I didn't see another question in the chat room.
	We do have time for another question or two.
	We have another 35 minutes to go if people are interested.
	There is a conversation that's been going back and forth in the chat, and I'm not sure how you want to address this, but there's a question brought up by the same guy, actually, who brought up the atheism-deesim question, about how does atheists deal with non-matter-producing matter, in terms of the Big Bang Theory?
	And I'm not really sure how to approach that question, frankly.
	Well, it's an interesting question, and it is a question that will be answered by science, of course, right?
	I mean, I'm still trying to dig up someone competent and willing to talk about the origins of the universe in the show, which I think is a very interesting topic.
	But it is something that's going to be answered by science.
	It's not going to be answered by goblins or unicorns or ghosts or Gods or anything like that.
	It's going to be answered by science, and there's no other explanation that we'll be dealing with.
	Certainly, of course, the idea that something comes from nothing is not at all solved by religion or the invention of a god, right?
	Because that's just the problem of infinite regression.
	It's turtles all the way up, baby.
	So if you think that there's a problem with the universe coming from nothing, then...
	If you invent a God, you've done nothing to solve the problem.
	All you've done is you've just invented one more thing that has to come from nothing.
	So what we do is we look at the edges of human knowledge at the beginning of time, at the edges of the universe.
	We simply rely on scientists to do the research, to try and figure things out, and we just patiently await the answer.
	We don't jump to conclusions like, aha!
	That's where God lives, right?
	As far as pattern recognition goes, and I'm not speaking to anybody specifically in the chatroom here, I think it's important to understand the pattern here of religiosity, right?
	So originally, you see, God lived in the thunder, right?
	That the thunder was evidence of God's existence, and epilepsy was evidence of the demons at work.
	And so God lived in the thunder, and God lived in the lightning and the storms, and then God lived for, that was for people more inland, for the seafaring folk, God was, what, Neptune, and God lived in the waves and the storms and the tsunamis and all of that, and that's where God lived in the depths.
	So God lived in the clouds and God lived in the depths.
	Until, you see, we went into the clouds and we went into the depths and we found no God.
	It's like, okay, well, God doesn't live there.
	God lives in the soul.
	God is that which animates, makes the brain and the mind work and animates human beings.
	Until we opened up human beings looking for the soul with all of the investigative equipment that science is capable of showing.
	And there's no soul there.
	So God doesn't live in the soul.
	God was the origin of the animals.
	God created the animals.
	You know, as that old Gary Lawson cartoon, God with his pieces of plasticine making the snakes saying, hey, these ones are easy.
	True. So God, you see, was in the origins of life until Monsieur le Darwin came along and it's now...
	It's irrefutably proven that evolution is what happened.
	Just read The Greatest Show on Earth if you're interested in more.
	I was really stunned by the amount of evidence there is for evolution.
	I thought it was a fantastic read, though I had no doubts about the theory beforehand.
	And so God does not any longer live in the origin of the species.
	And God used to be, when there's an eclipse, God was getting angry and God was sending the moon to eat the sun because people had been bad.
	And then when we learned about the solar system, we found out that God does not in fact live in the eclipses, right?
	So you could go on and on, right?
	But you get the basic idea that God is always given a house.
	And then that house is examined, and we say, well, sorry, there's no God here.
	And then people say, oh, okay, he's not here.
	He's two streets over, right?
	And then you go over to that house, and you open it up, and you take out your spectra detector, and Scooby-Doo licks the walls, and you say, hey, there's no God here either.
	Oh, no, no, no, he's four doors down.
	And you go down. Like, at some point, I think even the most committed deist has got to accept that We're all getting a little tired of this shell game.
	We're all getting just a little bit tired of this con game.
	That saying that God is just over the horizon of human knowledge has been going on for about a hundred thousand years.
	And I guarantee you that he's now been evicted from about 10,000 houses.
	10,001 is not where he's going to be living.
	It's just this continuing con of he's just over the horizon.
	He's not just over the horizon.
	He wasn't over the last 10,000 horizons, and he sure as hell isn't going to be over the next one.
	There is no God.
	There are no gods. There are no gods.
	And the moment that we find out that there are gods, they won't be gods because they'll be part of this material universe in one form or another.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	It's a game that's run by people who don't want to face up to this absence of gods.
	As they say, well, God lives just beyond the reach of human knowledge.
	Ah, he's just beyond the reach of human knowledge.
	Well, if he's just beyond the reach of human knowledge, don't talk about him because you don't know anything about him either.
	So anyway, I just wanted to sort of point that out.
	Yeah, God's address. 10,000++, Horizon Street, Neverland, Nevermore.
	Somebody's asked, how did you deal with or address the sadness of dying?
	To me, it's such an overwhelming fact that I can't get any relief from it.
	It's such a brutal fact. It's terrifying.
	Oh, it is. Look, I'm no Kierkegaard.
	I do not float above the sadness of death and view it with a mere Galilean Equanimity, right?
	Galileo said that we should not be unhappy at death because death is the only reason we're alive.
	Because if people never died, we wouldn't need anybody to be born, which means you and I would not be born.
	So we should, in a sense, be thankful for death for giving us the opportunity to be alive.
	But I do not follow that.
	I am not a big fan of death at all.
	I am not peaceful at the idea of death.
	I am not serene in the idea of death.
	I eat well.
	I exercise. I lost weight recently.
	I want to stay healthy.
	I don't want to miss a day with my wife.
	I don't want to miss a day with my daughter.
	I don't want to miss a day with you wonderful people.
	I don't want to miss a day of the excitement and passion and power of doing these philosophical conversations.
	I don't want to miss it.
	I don't want to miss it.
	I love life. I love life so much that I don't want to.
	Lose it. So I am not peaceful about the idea of death.
	And I don't think that anybody has really...
	I think to be peaceful with the idea of death, you have to, I think, be pretty unhappy to where death is going to come as a sort of relief.
	But I'm not that way constituted.
	I'm not that way inclined.
	And the only thing that I can...
	Suggest, and this was actually my very first video, I think.
	I won't talk about that since you can live like you're dying.
	But the only thing that I can suggest is we don't know how many days we have left.
	Nobody does. But we can be pretty secure if we're over the age of five that it's going to be pretty lengthy.
	We don't know. Well, obviously, don't do stuff that's going to get you killed, right?
	I mean, that's sort of an important thing, right?
	For fear of the end, don't hurry it along, right?
	So, yeah, don't smoke, don't drink much, eat well, exercise, get your medical health checkups, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	You know the drill, right? Don't motorcycle...
	On the gulf because it's very oily.
	So things that are just dangerous and unnecessary, I would try and stay away from them and do things that are healthy.
	And that's going to raise your chances considerably and so on.
	Try, try, try to manage your stress.
	That is very important when it comes to long-term health.
	Stress has been called the silent killer by people, of course, with infinitely more expertise than I have, which is none.
	But try to manage your stress, try to keep destructive and abusive relationships out of your life, because that is, particularly if you've had an abusive history as a kid, you just don't want to reactivate all those neural pathways if you can avoid it.
	And try to live richly.
	Try to live with courage, with fierceness of experience, of fierceness and hunger for experience.
	And I think that you will end up with as satisfying a life as you can possibly get.
	And that, I think, has got to take some of the sting of death away.
	At least, you know, if you have to leave the party, at least eat, drink, and be merry while you're here.
	And I think that's the only way that I know.
	And of course, paradoxically, as I talked about earlier, that increases to some, like, the happier you are, the less you want to die.
	But to surrender happiness for the sake of that which is inevitable anyway would seem to be just a net loss in terms of life.
	So have the life that you want while recognizing it's going to make you more nervous about or more afraid of death.
	But to surrender your happiness for the sake of the inevitability of death would, I think, be a tragedy of anti-biblical proportions.
	Our question, how do you address miracle stories that are given as proof?
	Well, I would apply standard legal practices.
	I'm not talking about status legal, but, you know, common law legal practices, which is that hearsay is not proof.
	A hearsay is not proof.
	And I mean, I remember having this debate many years ago with a very strong religious believer who had all these arguments which said, well, lots of people died because they believed in Jesus, right?
	They were put to death by the Romans.
	And eaten by lions and so on, right?
	And so why would they be put to death?
	Why would they be willing to die for something that wasn't remarkable, for something that wasn't, for them at least, proof of a deity?
	And isn't that some evidence that People saw something remarkable in Jesus because they were willing to die for Him and so on.
	And of course, this was recently shortly after these nutjobs had cut their own balls off to go and join some comet floating through the solar system.
	And it's like, well, they killed themselves for their religious beliefs.
	Does that mean that those religious beliefs are valid too?
	Hearsay is not evidence.
	Everything that comes down through the Christian tradition, for sure, of course, in the Old Testament traditions, there's no proof for any of it.
	It's words on a page.
	It's words on a page.
	They can't even conclusively figure out whether Jesus existed, although it seems to me quite likely that he did.
	But, I mean, it's nonsense.
	And, of course, if you accept miracle stories of proof of any particular religion, then you cannot logically deny that they are proof of any and all religions.
	So you can't say that the stories of miracles with Jesus prove that Jesus is divine without also asserting that the stories of the miracles of Zeus and of Horus and of Ra and of Set and every other deity of the 10,000 deities who have all done miracles, that they're all true. They're all valid.
	And so there's no way that any particular religion can rely on a proof of miracles without equally proving that all religions are true and therefore invalidating itself if it is a monotheistic religion.
	And if it is not a monotheistic religion, it still has to then explain why opposing religious stories are equally true.
	In other words, monotheistic religions.
	So, unfortunately, stories of miracles don't do anything to serve the cause of religion, any particular religion or religion as a whole.
	Yeah, somebody poached, does that mean that the 9-11 suicide bombers are also evidence of Allah?
	Well, that's a good point.
	Oh, if they say it happened to them?
	Well, I mean, I'm not particularly diplomatic about this stuff.
	I just call bullshit.
	I don't know how to put it in any finer way, right?
	There is a staggering amount of bullshit in the world.
	I mean, we've tried to reduce it to at least 47% to 48% in this show, which I think is a fairly remarkable achievement.
	But there is a staggering amount of bullshit in the world.
	I mean, James Randi, who is an illusionist, has for many years had an offer of a million dollars for anyone who can prove psychic phenomena.
	Now think of the millions of psychics in the world.
	Millions of psychics in the world.
	Millions, and this is not even to say religious people of whom there are billions, right?
	But millions of psychics in the world could each walk away with a tiny and cool million dollars if they sit down and subject themselves to scientific evaluations of their Of their gift, right?
	Of the wares that they are selling.
	And this has been going on for decades now.
	And they regularly have six to eight people going through this process who claim to have these abilities.
	Imagine the publicity. You would be the world's greatest psychic.
	You would make... The million dollars would be nothing.
	It would be a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of the money that you would make if you were able to prove psychic phenomena.
	Millions of psychics in the world all claiming that they have these abilities.
	They could become billionaires if they took this Randy test and proved what it is that they are selling, even to a tiny degree, even to a slightly better than random degree.
	And none of them have proven it, and almost none of them would ever take the test.
	And so these are millions of people who are all bullshitting for the case, for the sake of profit, for the sake of immediate profit upon the gullible, and spreading crazy, Turbo-douchebaggery ignorance and superstition around the world.
	Destabilizing people's relationships with reality, destabilizing their relationships with science and rationality and empiricism and philosophy.
	They are a virus, they are a cancer, and they are entirely so full of bullshit.
	It's shocking to me that all their eyes aren't brown.
	So when somebody says, well, I believe in X, Y, and Z because a miracle happened to me, Well, A, I call, have you researched it?
	Have you checked the evidence, right?
	I mean, there's an example in Religious.
	Where a guy says, I asked for rain, and it began to rain, and therefore I got it as a sign from God.
	And it's like, have you explored any other possible alternatives?
	Now, if you said, I wanted to rain ancient pharaohs, and it rained ancient pharaohs, then I would say that's a pretty good indication that something rather unusual is going on, assuming that some airplane from a museum didn't blow up over your house.
	But the fact that it started raining when you wanted it to rain is not an indication that there's any kind of God.
	It's just an indication of a coincidence, right?
	In the same way, people say, well, I had a dream that I was going to see a clown in a red car today.
	It's like, well, but you have hundreds of dreams a year.
	And of course, you're only going to remember the one that, quote, came true, but that's selective coincidence recall.
	That's not anything scientific or objective.
	And so, to me, thinking that a god is into you, thinking you have psychic phenomena, I mean, it's just a desperate, desperate need to believe that you're special without actually having to do anything substantial or courageous or fundamental.
	So, first of all, I call like, gosh, that's very sad that you need a god to look at you to feel like you're visible in this world or Oh my god, that's so sad that you need to invent some magical third eye called psychic phenomenon in order to feel that you have some gift or some value in this world.
	How unloved you must feel.
	How unappreciated you must feel.
	How you must not like yourself very much that you need to invent these magical superpowers in order to feel that you have some value or some worth in this world.
	How tragic, how sad, how awful.
	Tell me about your childhood. That would be my first approach.
	If people resist that and continue, then I just call bullshit.
	And there's empirical evidence that the world runs almost entirely on bullshit, since to me, culture is just bullshit with paintings on the ceiling.
	Yeah, as Richard Dawkins points out in The God Delusion, there's a site called Why Does God Hate Amputees?
	Because the supposed cures and miracles, they're all things like, you know, cancers and so on, things which can spontaneously remit of their own accord, but God has yet to regrow in any verifiable way an amputated limb because that actually can't happen.
	And so that would be another thing that you could point out.
	Someone has asked, what are the top three questions you would recommend bringing up when confronting a defoutly religious person about religion?
	Is there an equivalent tactic as the against me argument in the realm of religion?
	Well, yeah.
	In fact, it is called the against me argument in the realm of religion because the Old Testament, which of course is the foundation of Judaism and Islam and Christianity, the Old Testament commands Followers of God to kill a child who disobeys his parents, to kill sorcerers, whatever they are, witches, we all know who they are, unbelievers, atheists, people from other religions and so on, to kill these people.
	It also approves of rape and so on.
	So, as I've argued before, The Bible...
	And people say, well, but Jesus, blah, blah, blah.
	But no, Jesus said, everything in the Old Testament, I fully support.
	I fully support everything in the Old Testament.
	So, invoking Jesus doesn't help.
	So... And, of course, this has happened regularly, right?
	That religions kill or severely discriminate against unbelievers.
	So the way that I would explain is say, look, I'm not asking you to believe me on intellectual levels, but I would at least hope that you would understand this.
	Even if you don't agree with it, I hope that you would at least understand this.
	That you can understand that a black person would have some issues with people who support it A KKK manual that said, we need to put all the blacks to death.
	You can understand why a black might find that offensive, right?
	Might find that just a little bit offensive.
	But there's a book out there that says, put all the blacks to death.
	We can understand that, right?
	Like, Jews can reasonably have something against Mein Kampf, right?
	We can all understand that.
	Even there, he doesn't particularly talk about death camps, but we can understand that a black would have some problems.
	The KKK manual that said put all the blacks to death.
	So, an atheist, you know, whether you agree with me or not, I would say to this person, an atheist, at least you can understand why an atheist might have some problems.
	With a book that says, put all the atheists to death.
	That we might find that offensive, particularly since it has happened in history.
	And you can understand that homosexuals might have a problem with a book that says homosexuality is a sin and an abomination and a crime against the eyes of God and that homosexuals should be put to death as well.
	You can understand why we might find that just a little offensive.
	And he's going to say, well, I don't believe that.
	Because I don't know any Christians who want to put atheists to death.
	Right. Okay.
	Got it. So you reject significant parts of the Bible.
	So what you say is that every part of the Bible that says, commands you to do things that are clearly immoral, like killing atheists, that you reject all of that, right?
	What proportion of the Bible and the Bible's moral commandments do you reject?
	And if the person says, well, I don't know, it's like, well, I think you should look that up.
	Because at some point, you're just not a Christian anymore.
	If you reject 90% of the moral commandments of the Bible, You're kind of saying that God is 90% evil, right?
	At some point, you're just going to have to recognize that there's a problem in your faith, right?
	You can't cherry pick, right?
	At some point, if I say, well, I'm in the KKK, but I believe in the equality of all the races, and that nobody should ever initiate force against a minority, and we should never burn crosses, and we should never wear white sheep, at some point, guess what?
	You're just not in the KKK anymore.
	And that's what I would say.
	Understand that it's abusive and offensive that you believe that a moral God commands these things.
	Recognize that your morality has no basis in your religion if you reject parts of the Bible based upon a higher morality.
	Because if the Bible is morality, you shouldn't be talking with me, you should be trying to strangle me.
	If the Bible is not morality, then it has nothing to do with ethics.
	In fact, it is quite offensive to any objective...
	Virtue. Most of the Bible is incredibly offensive to any objective virtue.
	People selling their daughters into sexual slavery.
	I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, for now, for the time, sadly, this is when religion was at its height.
	This was the norm in many ways, right?
	So, you know, get them to recognize that they have a higher standard of morality than that which is contained in their Bible.
	They reject most of what the Bible says is virtuous.
	They reject it as utterly immoral.
	But it's incredibly offensive to atheists for people to say, I worship this being who commands me to put them to death.
	You know, and if you reject that, then that's fine.
	They just say, okay, so you reject this commandment of God.
	You reject this commandment.
	You probably reject this entire chapter.
	You reject this parable, this example, this, this, this.
	At some point... You're just not in that club anymore, right?
	So, I mean, that's just one way to approach it.
	That's not an intellectual argument.
	That's just an argument from basic human respect.
	So, somebody says, what if they do not reject it, as in orthodox people?
	Well, I mean, this is the against me argument, right?
	If somebody says, I think you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me, then say, well, I'm not going to debate with you anymore.
	If somebody says, well, I think that you should be put to death for not believing in God, it's like, well, I'm not going to pretend that we're having a debate anymore.
	I'm just going to back out of the room slowly and try not to make any sudden movements towards my upside-down cross, right?
	I mean, you do not grant the veneer of civilized discussion to people who've unmasked the brutality of their lust for violence.
	You just don't do it. I mean, you don't jump into a boxing ring with syllogisms, right?
	You don't pretend that the boxing ring is a debating forum, right?
	What would be the top three questions to ask a religious person to make him sort of see the inner contradictions of his views within one minute or so?
	Well, you're really testing my ability to clarify, synthesize, and, for heaven's sake, not make long speeches.
	That's a real challenge.
	I'm going to drop the one minute or so thing because if somebody has only got a one-minute fuse to discuss the existence of God, then I wouldn't bother discussing anything with them because...
	They're either a ferris on a double espresso or they have the attention span of one, so I wouldn't bother discussing.
	I mean, people have got to be a little patient when examining things like the nature of truth and reality and so on.
	Top three questions.
	Well, I would say that if you're proposing the existence of a being, then the burden of proof lies upon you.
	And if you fail the burden of proof, you have to accept that you have failed the burden of proof.
	So I would say, you need to establish the existence of this being, go for it, and then listen to their arguments, and you would just have to do that usual patient puncturing of holes in all of the arguments.
	So they may have the ontological argument, which is to say that because we have the idea of a supreme being, the supreme being must exist, which is, of course, very silly, and a very bad argument in modern philosophers, at least, since Can't really have recognized that that's just a really bad argument.
	They may come up with other arguments, right?
	It's not your job to disprove religion.
	Religion disproves itself.
	It's your job to put the burden of proof upon them, if you're a rational thinker, and say, okay, establish this thing to me, this thing called a god.
	Define what is the god.
	Well, you know, supreme being, all-knowing, all-powerful, intel, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, so you have put this thing forward as a thesis.
	Where's your proof, right? Because I could define anything as anything.
	You know, I have a square circle that rides on the tip of a unicorn's penis, and all we need to do is come up with an example of that, and we're away to the races.
	And... Quite possibly have the most surreal porn film that you can imagine.
	But the burden of proof lies on the person proposing the existence of something, particularly when it is extremely self-contradictory.
	But the other thing that I would ask, and once they start stumbling around with that, just say, well, why do you believe what you believe?
	So if somebody's a Christian, you say, well, why?
	Why do you believe that Christ died for your sins and rose and blah, blah, blah?
	Why do you believe that? That's an important question to ask.
	Because they don't have an answer other than I was told to.
	And most probably, or at least quite likely, threatened with punishment if I didn't.
	So, why do you believe what you believe?
	This is true of patriotism.
	Why do you believe that America is the best country?
	Why do you believe that Canada is the nicest country?
	Why do you believe that Greece is the greasiest country?
	Whatever it is that they believe.
	Just ask, why do you believe what you believe?
	It's a fundamental question.
	This is the whole basis of philosophy and of self-knowledge, right?
	Why do you believe what you believe?
	Well, people who are Christians or Jews or Muslims, they believe because they were told this.
	They were threatened with punishment and they were praised with rewards if they accepted this.
	So, you can't reason someone out of a belief they weren't reasoned into.
	If people don't even understand that they have no objective or rational or empirical basis for accepting their particular local superstition, you can't reason them out of it.
	Because what you're doing when you reason people, and you try to reason somebody who's very religious, or even religious, what you're doing is you're basically saying to them, and this took me a long time to understand, so I hope I don't sound condescending, because this took me a ridiculous amount of time to understand.
	But... When you say to somebody, when you begin to uncover the irrationality of their particular cultural superstition or religion, what you're basically saying to them is that everyone around you lied to you as a kid and exploited you, right?
	That's what they hear deep down.
	And this is why people fight so doggedly.
	They're not defending God.
	They're defending their family.
	They're defending their priests.
	They're defending their teachers. They're defending whoever, that nice Sunday school teacher who made them laugh.
	They're defending their family.
	Religion is just the fear of the punishment of disapproval for not believing in religion.
	That's all that religion is.
	And so it's not about the existence of God.
	It's about, did mommy and daddy tell me the truth or not?
	And if mommy and daddy didn't tell me the truth, that makes me feel very anxious, very uncomfortable, angry, frightened, confused, and hostile towards whoever is pushing me into this excruciating emotional corner.
	So if you ask someone, why do you believe what you believe?
	And they say, well, because I happen to be born in a Christian country to Christian parents in a Christian community.
	Then they're displaying some kind of self-knowledge.
	That it's not some eternal truth that has been handed to them, but rather a local cultural quirk based on complicated series of historical coincidences.
	The reason why religion is so tough on the human condition, one of the many reasons, It's because it cripples one's capacity for empathy.
	So your average Christian can't emotionally, fundamentally process that he would be a Muslim if he were born in a Muslim country and a Jew if he were born to Jewish parents and a Zoroastrian if he were born to Zoroastrian parents.
	And a Hindu, if you were born to Hindu parents, etc., etc., etc.
	And we're just talking about the present.
	In the past, he would worship the Greek pantheon if you were born in Greece 2,500 years ago.
	You have to build up a lack of appreciation, a hostility towards the accidental circumstances.
	Patriotism does the same thing.
	You have to build up a hostility towards the accidental circumstances of your belief systems in order to believe that they are somehow universally true.
	You have to crack, break, shatter.
	Your empathy for others.
	Because you have to believe that you're good because you're a Christian.
	You have to somehow imagine that you would still be the same kind of Christian even if you were born to a Muslim family.
	When, of course, the odds are tiny.
	Well, the odds are non-existent that you'd be the same kind of Christian.
	They're tiny. They would be tiny that you would be a Christian at all.
	This basic lack of empathy for other cultures, right?
	Whenever you live in a culture and you elevate that culture, those lies, the superstition, the falsehoods, the anti-philosophical irrationalities, when you elevate them to absolutes, you immediately shatter and break and crack.
	Everybody else is doing the same thing.
	It's the same thing with those stupid goddamn sports movies.
	Ah, we follow this plucky band of underdogs as they fight their way and they resolve their conflicts and they overcome their past and they fight their way through to the championship, right?
	Well, cameras on the other team, it's the same goddamn story.
	You have to crack your empathy for the other in competitive sports, in patriotism, in religion, in superstitions, in false identities of all kinds.
	Yeah, no way the other team is so unethical.
	That's right. In my opinion, in your opinion, F, how important is the motivation for these people to hold false beliefs simply to upset or irritate logical thinkers?
	It seems to me like a lot of conservatives only utter statements to irritate lefties and vice versa.
	And it seems to be like this with religious people toward atheists.
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
	Do not underestimate the hostility of the world to rational thinkers.
	Now, and I say this in a time when rational thinkers have by far the best life of any rational thinkers in history.
	I have the best life of any philosopher in history.
	I have an amazing life.
	I have a fantastic life. Which is not to say it has its stresses, it has its difficulties to be sure.
	But do not underestimate the degree to which people have a lot of anger towards rational thinkers, a lot of hostility towards rational thinkers.
	And so one of the ways in which people try to maintain the value of their religion is to create negative emotional experiences to people who don't believe what they believe.
	This is standard in and out group thinking, right?
	I have a gang, and we're gonna beat up people who aren't in our gang.
	This makes being in the gang valuable.
	Of course, it's complete negative economics, but it is there nonetheless, right?
	And so, to frustrate and baffle and bewilder and annoy atheists is kind of important to religious people because it makes being religious less irritating, less annoying, less frustrating.
	And I think I did a podcast on this recently that try not to let yourself get frustrated by the irrational because that only lends power to the irrational.
	Religious people are healthier and live longer, happier living in their midst.
	I think that's disputed.
	I don't think that that's a complete fact.
	Of course, we talked about this once before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
	This is all self-reporting, at least a good deal of it is.
	I certainly do agree that a community can be very, very helpful for people in life, in general.
	But I think it's also important to understand that To take a parallel example, I'm not going to say it's identical, but it's a parallel example.
	Blacks in the antebellum South, right, in the slavery South, blacks lived shorter lives than whites and probably reported a whole lot less happiness.
	Does that mean that we should all be bigots?
	Well, no, of course not.
	The reason that blacks lived shorter lives was because they were incredibly discriminated against.
	Stripped of their legal rights, sold as human livestock.
	I'm not saying that's the same with atheists, but atheists face an incredible amount of discrimination in society.
	It is one of the last groups that it's okay to hate, that it's okay to put down, is atheists.
	It's one of the very last groups where this is not only okay, but good.
	And so the degree to which atheists experience significant discrimination Despite being statistically generally better, better educated and smarter than most people, as you would expect, the fact that atheists experience such a lot of discrimination and hostility may have something to do with why atheists seem to be less happy.
	But that's not an argument for religion, that's an argument for atheism, which is that people should stop discriminating against atheists.
	Anyway, I just want to mention that.
	Could I comment on the Hiroshima bomb and the mentality of so many Americans who say it was justifiable?
	Well, I mean, this is just propaganda, right?
	The history of This is the 20th century, which I may do more on at some point in the future.
	The history is just not explained, right?
	So in the standard view of the American public, Japan, fiendishly and devilishly, those slant-eyed sons of Satan, they attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.
	It was completely unprovoked.
	It was impossible to anticipate.
	The U.S. had done nothing to provoke Japan.
	And then Japan tortured and murdered and killed all of these American soldiers as they began to fight their way towards the Japanese...
	Mainland and then the US was contemplating the losses of upwards of 100,000 men to invade the Japanese homeland or more.
	And Japan refused to surrender and refused to offer any peace terms.
	And therefore, in order to avoid the invasion and the loss of hundreds of thousands of American lives, America was forced to bring Japan to its knees by dropping two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
	In 1945, and that ended the war in the Pacific and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and it was regrettable but necessary.
	And that is the general steaming pile of cow dung that is fed to the American public, which has about as much truth as Pravda's description of the West under Stalinist Russia.
	We can go into the true facts of the history perhaps at a deeper level some other time, but...
	Nobody ever asks, well, why on earth would Japan attack America?
	What a crazy thing to do. Especially after the example of being an American ally in World War I. They saw how incredibly powerful America was.
	They saw America's productivity, its machinery.
	They knew that they couldn't win.
	So what the hell were they doing?
	That would be a basic question.
	Well, they're crazy and evil and that's all we need to know.
	Well, that's all nonsense.
	America was heavily involved in an embargo and a blockade against Japan that was starving it of oil and of rice and was causing a collapse, a potential collapse of the existing government and society.
	And that was the desperate lash back and Japan was suing for peace in the weeks before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.
	The only thing the Japanese wanted was to keep the emperor on the throne because he was considered to be the divine leader of society.
	And so Japan said, we will absolutely unconditionally surrender.
	We just ask that we get to keep the emperor on the throne.
	And America said, that's not good enough.
	And I think, memory serves, and please check all of these facts out yourself, but I think that Japan had even accepted that the emperor may not stay on the throne to continue the negotiations for surrender when...
	100,000, more than 100,000 Japanese were lit up from the inside with the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
	And, of course, the ridiculous thing, tragic and ridiculous and horrendous thing, was that after the war, the emperor was allowed to stay on the throne anyway.
	So the original terms of Japanese surrender were honored by the Americans even after the two bombs were dropped on Japan.
	The other thing that I would say as well, and this may be even more contentious, is that The Japanese civilians in these two cities had nothing to do with war plans or war aims.
	They had nothing to do. I mean, this was not a democracy in the way that we would understand it in the West.
	I mean, you could even argue, you could arguably say that the average American citizen had far more control over his government than the average Japanese citizen.
	And therefore, the American embargo against Japan that was starving it of needed resources was more the responsibility of the American citizen than the war against America was the responsibility of the Japanese citizen.
	But, of course, you're not going to hear that in public school.
	And so it is just a piece of propaganda.
	And it's very difficult for people to look at the real reasons why America dropped the bomb, and I don't know if anybody knows for sure.
	There are a number of theories, one of course of which is that they wanted to frighten the Russians.
	If they wanted to frighten the Japanese into surrender, they could have dropped it on an atoll, as they did for all the testing, all these little islands of coral.
	They could have dropped it on an uninhabited part of Japan.
	And this would have been equally powerful.
	But in the same way, the Treaty of Versailles, right, they killed hundreds of thousands of Germans after the war had ended by continuing the blockade for food and medical supplies after World War I. And they continued, and they killed, basically after the war was over, when Japan offered to surrender, they just wanted to kill Japanese.
	I don't think there was a big geopolitical strategic reason to frighten Russia, blah, blah, blah.
	I think that you just got a lot of kill bots in the military, and whenever you can get people to kill and die for a cause, you set yourself up for the war of perpetual vengeance, the Hatfields and the McCoys forever, so...
	I would say that it's just because they've been given the wrong information, which is no information, that they have these particular perspectives.
	Well, I do believe we've gone slightly over, but I really do appreciate...
	I gotta just tell everybody how much I absolutely love these shows.
	You guys are fantastic to talk to.
	It is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
	Thank you, of course, to everybody so much for subscriptions and donations.
	Summer can be a little bit dry, so if you have some extra shekels rolling around, I really do appreciate it.
	I'm not getting paid.
	For my speech in Porkfest, so if you could throw anything in, I would really appreciate that.
	So, donations, I guess I'm saying, always welcome as the costs continue for Free Domain Radio.
	They're great pluses, though.
	I mean, the True News series is doing quite well.
	I will try to get back to doing more of my shorter videos, which seem to have the most impact, although they do take an enormous amount of time.
	But I really, really do appreciate Everybody's support and encouragement in this conversation.
	The subscribers...
	Oh, I'm going to send out a subscriber podcast.
	So if you don't get it, if you hear this and haven't gotten one, if you're a subscriber, please let me know.
	It's a short video on my history with ethics.
	And also it will be a podcast or two, including one which is a preview of my Porkfest speech.
	So I hope that you will enjoy that.
	And... Oh, I've also got a good UPB podcast that's out.
	And I would like to start UPBU, which is University Preferable Behavior University.
	And I hope that we would get people who'd be interested in bringing more challenges and problems.
	Certainly, Economics Junkie brought some great questions up around self-defense, which I really appreciate.
	And we can hopefully get more to help flesh out the theory and make it a little more palatable to people who are still confused, which I can completely understand.
	If philosophy was, like, if rational ethics was easy to understand, it would kind of suck that we hadn't had them for 10,000 years.
	So I hope that it is kind of tough to understand, but I hope that we can make it clearer for people.
	So thanks. And thanks again so much, James, for handling it.
	It is so much easier to concentrate on what people are saying when you're manning this stuff.
	So I really, really do appreciate that.
	Thank you so, so much. And if you're going to be at Porkfest, I completely look forward to seeing everyone there.
	I'm so sorry, James. After thanking you, I then talked over your reply.
	No, make your announcement, please.
	No, that's it. I look forward to seeing people at Porkfest.
	And you are very welcome. All right.
	Take care, guys. Have yourselves a fantastic, fantastic week.

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