A debate between Stefan Molyneux and Johnson Rice on agnosticism versus strong atheism, broadcast on Free Talk Live 25 June 2010, at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in New Hampshire.
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| - This is Free Talk Live. | |
| You can take control of the airwaves by dialing in toll-free at 1-800-259-9231. | |
| That is the SACL CAI toll-free line. | |
| 800-259-9231. | |
| That number, though, will be reserved. | |
| For calls, at least in the first hour, and maybe longer, I don't know how long this is going to go on, but that number will be reserved for folks that might want to get involved in the conversation that's about to be had. | |
| You guys are going to be okay with that as I understand it. | |
| Absolutely. It's going to be a little experimental here, I think, because we're going to talk about atheism and agnosticism. | |
| And, Steph, move right on in on that microphone. | |
| I'm going to introduce you here shortly. | |
| Stephan Molyneux joining us again here. | |
| Johnson is also with us. | |
| Say hello, gents. It's been a while. Hello. | |
| Thank you very much for having us. Welcome back. | |
| Stephan was on last night. We had him on for about 30 minutes and now he's back. | |
| Johnson, you kind of put this together. | |
| Just before you explain what's about to occur, let me explain to our listeners where we are. | |
| We're at Rogers Campground in northern New Hampshire, Lancaster area. | |
| It's an incredibly beautiful place, and it is packed to the brim with, and this is, by the way, our largest audience, I think, so far here tonight. | |
| And this event is about half, not even quite halfway over. | |
| Right. So we've still got a whole other show tomorrow night as well. | |
| Incredible turnout this weekend at Rogers Campground for what is the 2010 Porcupine Freedom Festival put on by the Free State Project. | |
| Hundreds of liberty-minded people are already getting applause. | |
| Hundreds! Woo! Of liberty-minded people are here. | |
| And they're getting to know one another. | |
| They're building relationships. | |
| They're creating friendships that are going to, in many cases, last lifetimes. | |
| Because people are moving here to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. | |
| Many have already moved. Hundreds are already here. | |
| Thousands more are pledged to come up here. | |
| Over 10,000 people. | |
| Are signed members of the Free State Project. | |
| So that doesn't include all the really paranoid libertarians that don't ever want to put their name on anything. | |
| So we know there are at least 10,000 people. | |
| We've got one guy raising his hand over there. | |
| So it's just been an absolute blast here so far this weekend. | |
| The both of you have been here, Johnson, from the beginning of the week. | |
| Yep, right from Tuesday. Steph, you've been here from at least yesterday and maybe a little earlier than that. | |
| I mean, Stephan, how have you been enjoying yourself here? | |
| It's your first Porkfest. Oh, it's beautiful. | |
| Everybody here is fantastic, open and friendly and wonderful, so it's a great brain vibe to be around, if that makes sense. | |
| It is. It is a lot of fun, and they get to meet all kinds of interesting people, and we've had a bunch of them on the show throughout the end of the week here. | |
| So, with no further ado, Johnson, what's going on here tonight? | |
| Okay, well, I was listening to some Free Domain Radio. | |
| Let's plug the website, by the way. | |
| I didn't do that yet. Well, I'll let you quote your domain name. | |
| Free Domain Radio. Thank you. | |
| Dot com. Dot com. | |
| Dot com, yeah. And I was listening to that on the Liberty Radio Network, and I just heard some things. | |
| I heard Stefan dogging on agnosticism a lot. | |
| And, I mean, I'll just, just a quote, I view agnosticism as a reprehensible form of intellectual cowardice. | |
| So I heard that, and wow, I couldn't help but respond. | |
| So that's absolutely not how I feel about it, and so I had to jump in and say, well, maybe we can discuss this. | |
| And look, just to clarify, and we can get into the WWF throwdown language in a sec, but just to clarify, that to me is after you've heard the arguments, not everybody who's an agnostic is a coward, because... | |
| I was not an anarchist for a long time, but it wasn't because I was idiotic or cowardly, although those may be the case, but it was because I hadn't heard the argument. | |
| So to me, it's like once you flip the light on, then you're responsible for what you can see. | |
| So I certainly don't want anybody to think that everyone who is an agnostic is a coward. | |
| But if the arguments that I put forward make sense, and you remain an agnostic, then I think that's kind of dishonest. | |
| If the arguments I put forward don't make sense, then you're not a coward, I'm just an idiot. | |
| Now, I'll be here to kind of just maybe jump on occasion with some thoughts and clarification. | |
| Now, you're here, Stefan, to advocate atheism tonight. | |
| Is that right? Well, I'm here to advocate philosophy, which atheism is just a small subsection of, and I'll get into a little bit of why that definition is important when we start. | |
| Yeah, we should probably define at some point, because there's a difference between regular atheism and straight agnosticism. | |
| There are levels to these things. | |
| I would be what's called actually a strong agnostic or a positive agnostic. | |
| There's a difference. | |
| Your average agnostic just makes the claim that they're... | |
| That they take no stance on whether or not they believe there is a God or not. | |
| Whereas my stance extends a little bit further, which is to say that because it's unknowable, that any sort of attempt to define a deity is dishonest. | |
| And I feel that that's something that needs to be addressed. | |
| I don't feel that it's intellectual cowardice because I think that When anyone goes to define a deity, it's those definitions and where they're trying to take that which is what is the incorrect statement. | |
| I believe and I allow for the possibility for a higher power and for a deity because There is no definition for that. | |
| There is no way to define that. | |
| I don't believe that you can make a positive assertion that... | |
| Can I interrupt you? | |
| Are we talking about the existence of something that is superior to humans, or are we talking about a god, like an all-knowing, all-powerful? | |
| What are we talking about? | |
| I thought we were talking about the Federal Reserve, but is that... | |
| No? | |
| Okay. And it's different for so many different people that it's really hard to actually pin down a definition on that, which is why I maintain agnosticism, because when you say the word God, it's so loaded already, because are you talking about God? | |
| Are you talking about gods? Are you talking about a corporeal or an incorporeal intelligent deity? | |
| Or are you talking about something more like what you believe in, which is pantheism, which is, oh, the whole world is God, and everyone's kidding. | |
| No, panentheism, yes. Oh, panentheism, I'm sorry. | |
| There's an extra E-N in there. There are so many different definitions for what God means. | |
| So are we going to pick one tonight? | |
| No, I won't. | |
| Let's at least start with that. | |
| We have to understand that the concept of God has got to have something to do with two major characteristics. | |
| One is that there is a consciousness without material form. | |
| Because if the consciousness has material form, it's just a dude. | |
| No matter how spacey he is, he's just a dude, right? | |
| He may be a 50-foot tall dude who can travel through time, but he's still just a dude. | |
| So we have consciousness without material form is one. | |
| And we also have eternal. | |
| It has to be some kind of eternal, before the universe and after the universe. | |
| And there usually is some heavy amperage of muju juice in God, right? | |
| Omnipotence, omniscience, there's some incredible abilities that go infinitely beyond what is capable for a human being. | |
| Is that okay with everyone as a way of working with it? | |
| Because that's not specific to any particular deity, but that is a way that deities are generally presented, if that makes sense. | |
| I don't know that the eternal thing is necessarily true, because I believe that in certain religions, like the old Roman religions, it was sort of like a race of god-like beings, and they bred and... | |
| Yeah, and that's true. And in the Greek and Roman mythologies, gods could live and die. | |
| So, okay, yeah, that's fine. | |
| But let's at least go with omniscient, omnipotent, and consciousness without material form. | |
| Right. Okay. So what's next? | |
| So, I don't necessarily preclude the absolute possibility. | |
| And the reason why I do that is specifically because I allow... | |
| There are so many people that believe in these various silliness that what I want to talk about and the reason why I want to leave that open normally is because I like to actually have a conversation with these people and not preclude them right off the bat. | |
| And I want to talk about how they define beyond simple omniscience, beyond Omnipresence and all the other godlike powers, how they then give attributes and aspects to their deity. | |
| Like, for example, a lot of people will define God as being an old man who's white and has gray hair. | |
| It's a singular deity. | |
| And those are the questions that I like to ask and get people thinking about when it comes to religion. | |
| And so I just... | |
| Also can't necessarily abandon the idea that there's more, that there's the potential for something else out there. | |
| Come back with that. Hold that thought. | |
| Stefan, 800-259-9231. | |
| That is the SACL CAI toll-free line. | |
| We're here live from the Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010 edition at Rogers Campground here in beautiful Lancaster, New Hampshire, right next to the White Mountains. | |
| We'll continue with more of Stefan Molyneux and Johnson here on Free Talk Live talking theology tonight. | |
| It's Free Talk Live. Take control. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| It is the show that you can take control of and call in at 800-259-9231. | |
| Normally you can bring up absolutely anything, and we'll do that later on in the show. | |
| Sometimes we break format, and here at Porkfest, we break format. | |
| Every time we're here because we're just surrounded by so many interesting people that are doing so many wonderful things to advance the ideas of freedom. | |
| Of course, we're here at the Free State Project Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010 at Lancaster, New Hampshire's Rogers Campground. | |
| Been here personally since Wednesday and it's been an absolute blast so far. | |
| I was so out of it though today that I wasn't able to stay awake in Mark Stevens' excellent class that he was giving, which It's not because of Mark Stevens. | |
| He's an entertaining guy, and I highly recommend you visit his website at markstevens.net. | |
| We'll see if we can sneak him in here later on tonight. | |
| Anybody that didn't see Mark Stevens' presentation, which was most of you, shame on you, it will be available on DVD, as I understand it. | |
| We don't know when that's going to happen, but stay tuned over at markstevens.net for the latest on that. | |
| I'm looking forward to actually seeing the presentation that I paid to see today. | |
| So, yeah, there's a lot happening here, a lot of interesting folks hanging out, and we're talking about religion, or the lack thereof. | |
| And, Johnson, you are a strong agnostic, as you defined it. | |
| Now, define one more time quickly what that means for listeners just tuning in. | |
| Strong agnostic goes beyond the, I guess, the statement that... | |
| One can't say whether or not there is a deity or not, and goes further by saying that attempts to bring an objective definition to a deity need to be questioned. | |
| Attempts to bring an objective definition to a deity need to be questioned. | |
| In other words, because something in regards to a deity is not knowable, it's not definable, according to science and empiricism, that any attempt to do so, for the most part, needs to be questioned. | |
| So, if you're going to be a rational person, you need to ask those questions. | |
| And religious people should absolutely be willing to answer those questions and have that discussion. | |
| But this is what's so annoying about agnostics. | |
| This is a consistent pattern with agnostics, is that agnostics will always say, I can't define it, but I'm going to call it a god. | |
| And those two statements are logically self-contradictory. | |
| It's like saying, I don't know anything about X, but it's green and it's furry and it smells like chicken. | |
| You can't make those statements. | |
| If God is an unknown, unknowable, then you can't use the term God, because the term God has very specific characteristics. | |
| I absolutely agree. Agnostics will say, the question around God is, let's just take unicorn, because I don't think we have any unicornists. | |
| Okay, one in the back. | |
| One guy just says he's horny. | |
| But let's say there's a unicorn, right? | |
| Now, if you define a unicorn as a horse with a horn on its head, then no rational person in the universe would say there's no way a horse with a horn on its head can exist. | |
| Because on some other planet, some undiscovered place, Vern Gully, Avatar Land, wherever, right? | |
| There could be, in the universe, a horse with a horn on its head, so no problem with that, right? | |
| But if you say that a unicorn is a horse with a horn on its head that can live on the surface of the sun, is carbon-based, can travel through time, can burst into flames and be ice at the same time and lives in a square circle, then at some point you've defined it out of existence, right? | |
| If a god is like a unicorn with a horn on its head, then it's not a god. | |
| It's just a horse with a horn on its head. | |
| If it's a magical being full of self-contradictory properties like consciousness without matter, you can't have consciousness without matter. | |
| Consciousness is an effect of the brain the same way that gravity is an effect of mass. | |
| You can't have gravity without mass and you can't have consciousness without matter. | |
| So if you define a God or believe in something that is a self-contradictory entity, a square circle, then by definition it simply doesn't exist. | |
| And this is why agnostics, if you want to say, I can't know whether God exists, that's a statement that makes no sense philosophically. | |
| If you can't know something, you can't call it a God because that has already specific definitions. | |
| Well, I don't know that it does have specific definitions. | |
| I don't necessarily agree with that statement. | |
| I think that there are so many differing definitions that it becomes kind of nullified to say that there is a specific definition for God. | |
| Because there are so many different beliefs and so many different approaches to how deities work, I think it's sort of impossible to say that... | |
| Wait, so you're saying that when you use the word deity, what you actually mean is X, a complete unknown. | |
| Kind of, yeah. No, no, no, not kind of. | |
| Because if you say God, you're describing something that has some specific characteristics. | |
| Nobody confuses a God with an acorn, I guess, except a very small squirrel. | |
| But nobody confuses a God with an acorn, right? | |
| You don't say, I don't know whether gods exist, and when you go through the whole definition, somebody, oh, it turns out you're talking about acorns. | |
| When you say the word God, I mean, we all know that there's something that we're talking about here that's not an acorn, it's not an axle rod, it's not a Buick, right? | |
| It's some sort of divine, larger-than-life consciousness without material form, right? | |
| We're all on the same page as far as that goes. | |
| So something specific is being described. | |
| So you can't say that it's indescribable and then describe it. | |
| Here's the reason why I do approach it in that fashion, because from my personal experience and my personal beliefs, I would say that if there does exist some sort of a deity or whatever, that it has had absolutely no effect on my life other than what I can observe and what science can observe and objective reality. | |
| So when I speak about a deity or a god, it's because I'm speaking with someone who does have those beliefs. | |
| So, I'm talking to their language, and I don't want to preclude the very basis of their discussion and their conversation, so I'm trying to keep the definition open to whatever they believe. | |
| I don't understand that. | |
| No, I mean, look, if somebody is saying something, look, and I'm not trying to make enemies here, I mean, I hope that you understand, I'm just approaching this from a philosophically rigorous standpoint, whether I'm right or wrong, I'm really trying to be rigorous, and I was raised in a religious household, I went to church, and so I understand that it's a difficult... | |
| What sort of religion? Just curious. | |
| Satanism. I'm an atheist, so... | |
| The games of Twister were unbelievable. | |
| No, I was raised in England in religion. | |
| I was in boarding school and we went to, you know, God and hell and the devil and all of that. | |
| So it was the Church of Anglican, so it was Protestant, which is Catholic light, I guess. | |
| So, I mean, I understand that it can be really difficult, but I don't think that it's worthwhile to pretend that something exists which logically cannot exist, right? | |
| Because if, like, agnostics will often create, and I don't know if you're one of them, this alternate universe, right? | |
| Universe X. So, universe X, right? | |
| So, God doesn't exist in this universe, but there's some other universe, some alternate universe that God may exist in, and therefore we can't say for sure. | |
| But that's, again, that's nonsense. | |
| That's like saying, try that on a math test, right? | |
| So you say 2 plus 2 equals 5, and you get back, it's marked wrong. | |
| And you go back and say, you can't mark me wrong, because in some alternate universe it might equal 5. | |
| That's not how we approach knowledge and facts in any other sphere except religion. | |
| It's reality divided by zero. | |
| Religion gets this get-out-of-jail-free card where people dance around religious controversies. | |
| And I understand why, because it can be volatile and it can be difficult. | |
| But I mean, this is not a crowd that is afraid of volatile and difficult conversations. | |
| Of all the crowds I've ever talked to, these people have the swinging things to get it done, right? | |
| So I think that we do need to approach this really clearly. | |
| If there is this other universe, which is really the same as non-existence, if we say it doesn't exist in this universe, but it might exist in some other universe, that's exactly the same as saying it doesn't exist in this universe. | |
| Either this other universe is going to have some impact on our universe, The finger is going to poke through the hole, you know, and it's going to say, hi, I'm going to tickle you, I'm God, right? | |
| In which case, we can measure it by laughter or squeamishness or something. | |
| In which case, we will measure whatever is coming through from this other universe. | |
| What if we don't have the capability to measure? | |
| Then it's exactly the same as non-existence. | |
| It's like saying the door is open. | |
| No, it's closed, but I have the capability to walk through it. | |
| It's like, no, that means that it's open. | |
| If it's never going to be measured by anything, it's exactly the same as non-existence. | |
| But that's not what I said. I said, what if we don't currently have the capability to measure? | |
| All right, make a note. We'll come back to that question here in a moment. | |
| 800-259-9231 is the Sakel CAI toll-free line. | |
| We're live from Porkfest. | |
| It's Free Talk Live. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| You can normally bring up anything you want, but right now we're locking down phone calls only to people who are interested in talking about the topic that is on the air right now. | |
| And we're interested in sometimes alienating as much of our audience as possible. | |
| No, we talk about theological things on the show from time to time, and normally it gets us some very interesting phone calls from some very religious zealots around the country that have never heard our show before and are shocked and surprised that they would hear an atheist and an agnostic on the air here tonight talking on national radio. | |
| So I'm glad you came to me with this idea, Johnson, and you told me you were going to do this, and I said, let's do it on the air, and he said, I don't know. | |
| I don't know if it's right for the show. | |
| Are you kidding me? This would be great. | |
| Is this great or what? | |
| By the way, we're at the Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010. | |
| Go to porkfest2010.com. | |
| That's porkfest with a C in order to learn more about that. | |
| Also, if you want to get some legal stuff taken care of, thinking about starting a business, here's a word to the wise. | |
| Incorporate at LegalZoom.com. | |
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| So Johnson is with us here, our graphic guru, store sales manager, and former co-host. | |
| Current co-host tonight. And Stefan Molyneux joining us from freedomainradio.com. | |
| Perhaps the most popular philosophical podcast on the internet. | |
| Certainly the most popular libertarian or liberty-minded philosophical podcast. | |
| Welcome back, Stefan. Thank you. | |
| So, pick up. You had asked a question, I think, right before we went away. | |
| I want to make sure you can pick up off that. | |
| What I had asked was, what if the perception of... | |
| A god or a deity or deities is not something that is currently within our technological capabilities and is something, and I'm speaking purely in a philosophical sense, but is something that is potentially possible in the future. | |
| Well, that's a great question. | |
| There are two answers that I would give to that. | |
| Hopefully that makes sense and hopefully I can keep them short. | |
| You can hit me with the tranquilizer dart if I go over and I'll struggle to complete my sentence. | |
| The first is that all of the definitions of gods have rolled into us historically. | |
| We all understand that human beings have believed in about 10,000 different deities throughout the history of humanity. | |
| And it's important to understand that almost everybody, even the most fundamentalist religious zealot, as you said, is a 99.999% atheist because they disbelieve in all of the other gods except their own. | |
| So all the atheist says is, one more. | |
| Just one more. | |
| You've already thrown out 999,000. | |
| Just one more and you're all the way there. | |
| Given that all of our knowledge of God's has come rolling in from history, pointing to the future to say that maybe those historical fantasies will be validated is not rational. | |
| It's sort of like saying if we come across some caveman painting where some guy scribbled something that looks from a certain angle and under a certain light like E equals MC squared, That by heavens, he discovered Einstein's theory of relativity 20,000 years ago. | |
| We just say, no, that's just a weird coincidence, right? | |
| So looking at the future to validate that which has been created through fantasy and fear in the past is not valid. | |
| Because whatever is discovered will not be what those people came up with in the past about God. | |
| From what I hear Johnson saying, I don't hear him trying to validate any of that. | |
| I think he's just keeping an open mind about the possibility of my... | |
| You know, as an atheist, Stefan, if all of a sudden tomorrow, or maybe tonight, out in the campsite, a bolt of lightning crashes down and a bearded man appears out of nowhere and announces that he is the second coming of... | |
| Of Jesus Christ and then proceeds to begin performing miracles. | |
| I mean, what would you as an atheist think about something like that? | |
| As unlikely and ludicrous as it is. | |
| I would think that that would be really cool. | |
| Like, I think that would be, I mean, who, like, hey, five bucks, take me for a ride. | |
| You know, that is like, I'm in. | |
| I'd still probably say that I saw that episode of Star Trek. | |
| No, but here's the reality, right? | |
| Which is that if such a thing came down, then it would be measurable with science, with the senses, and it would not be supernatural, right? | |
| This is the key thing. Gods are fundamentally supernatural. | |
| If some guy comes down and his helmet looks like a halo, you know, as people sort of believe about the ancient religions, if some guy comes back and says, yeah, I was here before, my name was Jesus, I came from the planet Hooga Booga, and, you know, they misinterpreted me as a deity... | |
| Then we would look back and we would say, well, what was written down in the Bible about Jesus was not supernatural. | |
| It was a guy who, as Arthur C. Clarke used to say, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, right? | |
| So it would be primitive, desert-dwelling Bedouin tribesmen who saw a spaceship come down, a guy who could fly by thinking about it or whatever, and they said, oh, well, that was a deity. | |
| If such a guy came back and was casting thunderbolts around and so on, we'd say, that's really cool, but it's not a god, it's just an alien. | |
| And then we'd get a border fencer or something like that. | |
| Keep those people out. | |
| Put them in a cage. That's right. | |
| Coming across the border is okay. | |
| Coming down from the heavens, I don't know what we're going to do. | |
| If you could, could you repeat the point that you made before? | |
| You had said something about the defining... | |
| Characteristics of a god? Something along that line. | |
| Yeah, if you're going to use the word deity, it has to be common to some characteristics. | |
| It's not just a random word that means X. There's some specific characteristics, so you're claiming knowledge of the unknowable. | |
| Is that the point that you wanted to get back to? | |
| Yes, I suppose. And I'm saying that because you can't claim the knowledge of the unknowable, and I don't think that you can actually claim knowledge of the unknowable, that I sort of see denying it as... | |
| Not a necessary activity. | |
| I mean, it's one of those things I just leave it open because you can't know it. | |
| It's something I just feel like you cannot know that so... | |
| Why would you say that? | |
| I can know things about those definitions. | |
| I can know things about those properties, and I can say that doesn't make any sense. | |
| That's completely irrational. Because it's dangerous. | |
| Because if people... | |
| What part is dangerous? | |
| I don't feel it. A belief in a higher power has great danger. | |
| Has great danger to it. | |
| Because if there is, as I very strongly believe, no such higher supernatural power... | |
| Then what happens is people who hear voices don't get that they need professional mental health help, right? | |
| They think that there's something out there that's telling them what to do. | |
| People who have visions, people who have epileptic seizures in their brain and see visions and they think that something's going on out there unless there's a whole lot of people who say, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| This is all occurring in your head. | |
| There have been psychological studies that have reproduced almost down to the last detail of the kinds of angels in these visions through electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain that replicate certain kinds of epilepsy. | |
| They're able to reproduce religious visions within people's minds. | |
| In the Middle Ages, they thought an epileptic attack was a possession by a demon. | |
| We don't think that anymore. We don't say, well, I'm not sure, maybe. | |
| We say, no, no, no, it's an epileptic attack. | |
| So if you leave the door open, and I think agnostics are very irresponsible in this way, all due respect, If there's no God, then we need to keep closing the doors so that people can begin to deal with religious belief as an internally generated psychological phenomenon. | |
| But agnostics leave that one door open, and then everyone says, oh good, there might still be one, and a guy who's not even religious says so, so let's keep doing what we're doing. | |
| Well, I see, and this is really the fundamental core disagreement. | |
| Um, that I feel like if I have that door open that I'm keeping the conversation open. | |
| And the reason why I'm doing that is because the... | |
| I feel like that last door is a door that people need to close themselves. | |
| Um... It's the properties and the strange definitions that people have, even within individual religions, that are completely conflicting and completely contradictory, even amongst Christians, amongst Catholics, amongst Jews. | |
| They have very different definitions. | |
| Is that what you do with the state? No, when you're talking about the state with people, do you say, well, it may be virtuous, it may not be virtuous. | |
| The initiation of force may be good, it may be bad, it's unknowable, really, but you have to choose that for yourself? | |
| But this is something that's very different because the state has very definable properties, whereas religion doesn't. | |
| Religion has some definable properties, otherwise you can't use that word. | |
| If you're talking about a herd of chickens, you can't call it religion. | |
| Well, okay, maybe this is the wrong example. | |
| No, I mean, if you use the word religion and God, you are ascribing specific properties, right? | |
| Some, but again, there are so many different viewpoints on it that it... | |
| To me, it seems impossible to just say religion or just say God and expect that the other person knows what you're talking about. | |
| Alright, but let me ask you this. Could it be possible that in the future an ethical system that's perfectly rational and everybody accepts could be invented that justifies the existence of the state? | |
| No. So you're certain of that? | |
| Yes, I would say that I'm brilliant. | |
| But guys who walk on water and a god who creates a woman out of a river of a man and listens to a talking snake and like that, you're okay with it. | |
| But the state is absolutely immoral. | |
| But I didn't say I was okay with it. This is going to keep going here. | |
| And we will continue this because it's going very well. | |
| 800-259-9231 is the Sekel CAI toll-free line. | |
| Your thoughts are welcome as well. This is Free Talk Live, and we're at Porkfest 2010. | |
| Thank you. This is Free Talk Live. | |
| We're live from Porkfest 2010. | |
| You can visit porkfest2010.com to learn more about what it is that is happening here. | |
| We've talked quite a bit about it over the last couple of nights because we've been here since Wednesday night and it's been an absolute blast. | |
| Lots of people hanging out, enjoying each other's company, doing all kinds of activities. | |
| There was Buzz's Big Gay Dance Party today. | |
| I think a lot of people had fun at that. | |
| There's some applause there from our studio audience here. | |
| And so much else that has just been going on. | |
| It's impossible to cover it all. | |
| I'll just give you a quick recap of some of the things you might have missed today. | |
| This morning, there was a morning hike. | |
| There was a gun safety class, martial arts class, kids' gymnastics. | |
| There's all kinds of things to do if you're a family that is up here in New Hampshire. | |
| Of course, the Big Gay Dance Party, a talk on the New Hampshire Constitution. | |
| Ernie Hancock was broadcasting live here this afternoon from freedomsphoenix.com. | |
| And I think Freeminds TV is out there as well. | |
| I mean, there's just so much going on. | |
| Live music from someone named Jordan Page. | |
| I guess he's really hot within the Liberty community. | |
| I just don't listen to much music, so sorry about that. | |
| Anyway, Porkfest2010.com. | |
| You can go learn more and join us. | |
| It's not too late because Saturday is happening all day tomorrow. | |
| There's a little bit going on Sunday morning as well. | |
| And, of course, it's going to happen next year. | |
| So if you can't make it up this year, make plans next Sunday. | |
| Absolutely. I don't know when the dates will be announced, but I know that the dates for this year were announced at the very end of last year's Porkfest, so we may know sooner rather than later. | |
| And, of course, Porkfest2010.com is the place to go. | |
| Johnson is with us here from Free Talk Live, and Stefan is here from Freedom Aid Radio talking about atheism and agnosticism. | |
| Steph, you're an atheist formerly of the Christian religion. | |
| Johnson, were you ever of a religion? | |
| No, I was not. Okay, so have you always... | |
| Actually, I should say, I was formerly an atheist. | |
| Formerly an atheist, now a strong agnostic. | |
| Yes. I guess I should give my backstory, is that even as a non-believer, I was brought to be an altar boy at an Episcopalian church And that lasted all of about two days because I started at a very young age actually mocking the pastor giving the sermon. | |
| I raised my robes and started doing a little Charlie Chaplin bit with my feet and started mouthing the words. | |
| I mean, I was a young child, but I started mouthing the words of the pastor like it was nonsense. | |
| And needless to say, my family was embarrassed and I never went back. | |
| So what made you, Johnson, decide to change your term of definition? | |
| Because I realized logically that I don't believe that you can... | |
| I don't know what the term is. | |
| Define a negative. You can't disprove a negative. | |
| And because you can't disprove a negative, I don't believe that the statement that there is no God makes any logical sense. | |
| And so what I feel is more important to address is the properties that people ascribe to a god. | |
| And therefore, just in consideration, and actually in consideration of more so religions like yours, not Christianity and anything else, but sort of scientifically based religions, I should say. | |
| Something like panentheism or something that's... | |
| I don't know if panentheism is scientifically based. | |
| It's just different. What I mean is that it's not... | |
| It's still a belief system. | |
| What I mean is that it's a belief system that isn't based in total nonsense. | |
| And I'm sorry, I apologize to the Christians, but talking snakes and men walking in water and turning things into wine, that to me is absolute and utter nonsense. | |
| Because it's something that is objectively... | |
| It is something that can be objectively disproven. | |
| It's something that can be measured. | |
| People don't walk on water. It's ridiculous to me. | |
| Whereas... Something like Dimension X or another universe is something that we can't necessarily prove or disprove. | |
| And science is something... | |
| We're getting more information. | |
| I mean, they're studying things like the supposed god particle at the Large Hadron Collider and... | |
| How about the different... | |
| Have both of you seen the 10 Dimensions video on YouTube? | |
| That's outdated. Is that outdated? | |
| Oh, long outdated. Okay, well, whatever. | |
| Yes, but I have seen it. You know, I'm not one of the... | |
| I don't keep up on the science scene, but... | |
| I gotta jump in. | |
| I gotta jump in. I was doing so well. | |
| I really was. But the suggestion of the ten dimensions video is that if you're in the third dimension, there's very little that you can really understand about the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and so on. | |
| It's sort of like, well, I'll do a little description about what this video says between the second and third dimension, because that's where it's most sort of relevant, is that if there were a being that was this sort of flatlander... | |
| A two-dimensional being. | |
| Two-dimensional, sort of imagine a creature that is completely flat, living on a piece of paper, that its house would be a square, and the being itself would be a dot, and if it were moving around, it wouldn't be able to see up or down. | |
| So a third-dimensional being that could interact with that sort of reality, the third-dimensional being would be completely imperceptible until the very moment where it interacted with that particular reality. | |
| It would be God, essentially. Essentially, it would be like a God. | |
| It would be able to remove walls and It could fold the piece of paper that it is on and create different connections that the being that was on the piece of paper would not have any idea with. | |
| Exactly. At which point there would be empirical, rational, scientific evidence for the flatland that something was interfering with its reality, which would be measurable and all of that would be great. | |
| In which case it would then be part of reality. | |
| If they were capable of measuring it. | |
| Well, they would know something was happening, because if nothing was happening, it would be the same thing as nothing happening, right? | |
| So something would be happening, right? | |
| Something would be happening. My God, we're being folded into an origami shape. | |
| Something's happening. I don't know who's folding, but it feels crinkly in here, right? | |
| Now, if I were to play devil's advocate, which I hate doing this, actually, but if I were to play devil's advocate for many of the Christians that I've spoken to, I would say something is happening. | |
| Look around you. You know, there are miracles all around us. | |
| You know, the miracle of nature, gravity, you know, all the laws of reality could supposedly be... | |
| No, no, no. Those aren't miracles. | |
| No, no. There's beauty. | |
| Of course, there's beauty in the room. | |
| There's beauty in the world. There's mountains. | |
| The sunset last night with the moon hanging over the mountains. | |
| It was absolutely fantastic. | |
| That's not magic, right? | |
| That's not supernatural. | |
| By definition, miracles are unusual. | |
| No, no, no. They're self-contradictory violations of the laws of physics, right? | |
| I mean, they're impossible. | |
| They're not unusual. It's unusual to see a three-legged dog. | |
| Oh, my God, let's follow it. | |
| A miracle is... | |
| Well, of course, miracles have mysteriously evaporated as scientific measurement has advanced, right? | |
| I mean, miracles are always just over the horizon. | |
| And God, you see, is always just over the horizon. | |
| God used to be in the thunder. | |
| Oh, that's God. And then we found out what thunder was. | |
| So, okay, he moved. Now, he's in the eclipse because when there's an eclipse, God is eating the sun because we didn't kill enough virgins or whatever, right? | |
| And then we found out, well, an eclipse was, oh, God is somewhere over there. | |
| It's like God is always in the next house that you haven't been to yet. | |
| The people say, now, God is in quantum physics. | |
| God is in the 10th dimension. | |
| God is, no, no, no, no. | |
| If you've gone to 10,000 houses and there's nobody there, 10,001, I don't think there's going to be anybody there. | |
| So people will always try and put God just over the horizon of human knowledge, right? | |
| So, oh, he's right before the beginning of the universe. | |
| Right? Because it used to be God created all the animals, and then we found out about evolutionists. | |
| Okay, he didn't do that. So he's always, wherever human knowledge ends, people put God just beyond that, and then human knowledge expands, and they find no God, and they put God one step further. | |
| We've got to get the habit that this is what keeps happening, and now you put him in another dimension. | |
| No, no, no, no. There is no God. | |
| There is no God. | |
| Just putting him right over the horizon doesn't solve any problems. | |
| But see, what you're saying there is you're making, and again, I'm specifically coming from the purely logical standpoint that what you're saying is a statement that there is no possibility, and that's just not true. | |
| Is there a possibility, Stefan? | |
| Is that what you're saying? There is no possibility by definition, because if God is in the real world, if he's measurable, if he's detectable, he's no longer supernatural, he's just some dude who looks like Morgan Freeman or whatever, right? | |
| It's just some dude, right? If God is never measurable, can never be detected in any conceivable way, that is synonymous with non-existence. | |
| That is exactly the same as non-existence. | |
| Non-detectable, non-rational. | |
| It's a square circle. God, by definition, consciousness without matter, omnipotence, omniscience, both of which are self-contradictory. | |
| Because if you know everything, then you know what you're going to do in the future, in which case you can't change it. | |
| So you can't be both all-powerful and all-knowing. | |
| It's all a square circle. | |
| I'm with you on everything that you say about religion, and I'm not a fan of organized religion and the things that it teaches, and I absolutely agree with you that it is destructive in so many ways. | |
| The wars that are fought and the governments that are created, a lot of it based on whatever the belief system is of those people. | |
| And so I agree with that, but as a panentheist here listening to this discussion, I feel a little on the outs, because the god you're talking about isn't the god that I believe in. | |
| Well, tell me a little about the god you believe in. | |
| Let's go to 1001 and see if we find something that's... | |
| As a panentheist, that means essentially that I believe that everything and beyond is essentially God. | |
| There is no man in the sky that is omniscient and all-knowing and deciding whether you've been a bad boy or a good boy and going to send you to a nasty place or a very nice place or anything like that. | |
| I've rejected that because I was an atheist for a long time and then I moved into this belief system. | |
| So wait, sorry, your God, is it synonymous with existence? | |
| Existence in everything that's non-existent as well, so whatever that means. | |
| Well, existence includes that which is non-existent. | |
| That's why we know there's something there, because there's nothing in between. | |
| Very well. You can define that however you want, but it's nothing that is above anything else. | |
| We are essentially parts of it, and the idea is that it is moving toward perfection over time. | |
| And this is a part of the evolutionary process, that evolution moves towards getting rid of the... | |
| Crap. And better. | |
| Moving towards the better. And essentially it's a very slow process here. | |
| Sorry, I'm just trying... | |
| Are you talking about... | |
| If you're going to say existence and evolution, I'm with you, but I'm not sure why you need to introduce a concept called God for that. | |
| I don't like the term God personally, because it has all that baggage attached to it. | |
| There's more coming up here, and we'll keep this conversation going. | |
| Your thoughts are welcome if you want to share them at 800-259-9231. | |
| One Hour Two is coming up in moments. | |
| One Hour Two is coming up in moments. | |
| You can bring up what you want as soon as this discussion is finished. | |
| Hopefully it'll be sometime tonight, because I do want to make some room for some calls, take some calls and get your thoughts here. | |
| But if you do want to get on the air with Stefan Molyneux and Johnson, who've been having a debate here tonight, a friendly debate, About agnosticism slash atheism. | |
| Johnson here as the resident strong agnostic. | |
| Is there such a thing as a strong atheist? | |
| I don't think so, right? Yeah, very much so. | |
| A strong atheist is not somebody who says the question is unknowable or unknown, but a strong atheist is one who says that God, by the very definition, cannot exist, will never exist in any shape or form in any way that can be detected. | |
| Okay, so there's no amount of evidence that could ever convince you otherwise. | |
| Evidence will convince me every single time, but if God is defined as a logical self-contradiction, like if, say, God is a square circle, well, square circles can't exist, because it's either a square or a circle. | |
| Evidence will convince me every time. | |
| I'm a committed empiricist, but you can't conceivably have the existence of consciousness without matter. | |
| You can't have complex intelligence. | |
| You said that last hour. Why couldn't one have consciousness without matter? | |
| Matter, sorry, consciousness is an effect of matter, the same way that gravity is an effect of mass. | |
| You can't have gravity indistinct or distinct from mass. | |
| And you can't have consciousness distinct from matter. | |
| Now, when I say matter, I mean matter and energy, right? | |
| Consciousness is also a form of energy. | |
| So let's say there was some being out there who was able to transform the physical and, you know, become pure liquid bolts of energy chasing around the cosmos. | |
| That would still be detectable intelligence in terms of it would interact with us, or we'd be able to detect it moving around, or it'd come up with some interstellar space opera that we'd watch or something, so there would be some evidence there. | |
| But what is really known about consciousness, really? | |
| I mean, honestly, I'm not, you know, like I said, not a scientist. | |
| Well, we do know that consciousness is not in the toe. | |
| And we do know that consciousness is not in an acorn, and we know that consciousness is not in a rock. | |
| We know that it's sort of around the head area, and it requires blood, and it requires energy, and when all of that goes away, why so do we? | |
| So we know consciousness, at least for us, is an effect of matter, and it's impossible to imagine that there could be such a thing as consciousness that would never have any physical imprint in the universe, because when there's no physical imprint in the universe, that's exactly the same as non-existent. | |
| If something is logically impossible, like a square circle, if it can never leave any imprint in the universe whatsoever, then it cannot conceivably exist. | |
| I think the point here is that it's nonexistent to your perspective. | |
| And the idea is that there would be other perspectives, perhaps in the other dimensions that we don't really know much about, that may exist. | |
| We know much about? What do we know about these other dimensions? | |
| It's all theoretical, right? | |
| Right. Now, either these other dimensions are going to have some impact on our dimension, in which case they're going to be like a guy walking through a door. | |
| A guy walks through a door, we go, hey, he's in the room. | |
| We know he's in the room, and I'll accept that as a guy being in the room. | |
| But if we say this other universe can never have any impact on our universe, then it's exactly the same as non-existence. | |
| If it can have an impact on our universe, then we'll measure it when it's there, and if God walks through that into our universe, That he's part of our material universe, subject to all the laws of physics and reality and logic, in which case he's no longer supernatural and not a deity. | |
| It's like a ghost, right? If a ghost can be actually measured and captured and so on on some sort of spectra detector from Scooby-Doo, I don't know what, right? | |
| But then he's no longer a supernatural thing, right? | |
| In the same way that, oh, look, I can see the bones in my hand. | |
| I have ghost vision. | |
| No, no, it's an X-ray, right? | |
| That it's just scientific. It's no longer supernatural. | |
| Well, they've been playing ghosts on the Discovery Channel all the time, so it must be true now, right? | |
| Right, right. Well, I suppose... | |
| I mean, my problem with that is if the whole dimension X... If this thing is real, then there does exist the possibility that a being could have intelligence that potentially could have matter that exists in another place and could affect this universe or this reality in a temporal capacity. | |
| In other words, you're talking about a long-term effect. | |
| Somebody walks into a room, you're perceiving it. | |
| And you also said that... | |
| That the moment that someone is affected by a god or a deity or whatnot, that the experience goes from being subjective immediately to being objective. | |
| No, no, sorry, not if they're affected, if there is some objective measurement of it, right? | |
| Right. Well, and see, I don't necessarily know that that would, you know, that necessarily could always be the case. | |
| I mean, if... Perhaps somebody is... | |
| I don't disagree with your sort of assertion that maybe that person should get medical counseling, but the possibility still exists that someone could... | |
| People see patterns. | |
| People see... Their own personal beliefs and their own life history that causes them to believe in a deity. | |
| Absolutely. I completely agree with you there. | |
| I'm sorry to interrupt. And this is an important point. | |
| And it's true that every now and then I'll have a dream that seems to come true the next day. | |
| And you go like, ooh, that's kind of weird. | |
| Like, I dreamt that I was walking under this ladder, and there was a guy up there who dropped something, and then the next day you walk under the ladder, blah, blah, blah, right? | |
| And if I have a belief that I have some psychic abilities, I can't just say, well, this dream, because we forget all the dreams that don't come true, right? | |
| We only remember those couple of dreams, because, you know, otherwise we don't care. | |
| They just go out of our consciousness. | |
| In which case, if I believe that something is happening that's beyond the norm, that's contact with something bigger or greater, then I need to do the responsible thing. | |
| And I need to subject that to scientific testing. | |
| The amazing Randy has a million dollars out there for anyone who can prove higher knowledge, higher powers, prayer, works, supernatural... | |
| This, that, or the other, telekinesis, psychic phenomena. | |
| He'll give you a cool million dollars, a thousand grand, right in your palm of your hand. | |
| And this has been out there for, I think, 30 years or so now. | |
| So if you believe, not you, but if someone believes that they have contact with some divine thing, then put that down to a scientific test. | |
| Have God at least tell you what the next card is up on a random deck. | |
| If you can do better than random, then wow, you're onto something and let's talk about it. | |
| But that has never happened so far. | |
| If it does happen, then it will be evidence that someone is being contacted in some way, which is going to be subject to science and evidence, in which case it's no longer supernatural and not anything to do with the historical definition of a god. | |
| It could be aliens or something like that. | |
| It could be, yeah, it could be aliens, or maybe there is some deity from another dimension poking that guy in the brain, in which case you'll see a fingerprint in his brain, right? | |
| Like something, right? I don't know. | |
| It will be something scientific and no longer religious. | |
| But that's also... Okay, we're talking about presupposing... | |
| I brought up the example, and I guess I do suppose that's kind of a poor example, but talking about someone's personal experience, a lot of people have the perception, though, that a deity is... | |
| That could have been something that has started at the beginning of time and space and sort of set up the rules for how everything works. | |
| And so then could feasibly be someone who works outside of those rules because the deity is the one who created physics and light and energy. | |
| Like, this could be a big simulation? | |
| No, I understand that. | |
| I always know a computer guy is on the metaphor wagon because this is the simulation argument, right? | |
| Absolutely. But all you're saying, then, is that there's something that is beyond scientific knowledge that could be a god. | |
| And this isn't a trick. I'm saying you're pulling a trick, but it's a trick as old as human knowledge to say, well, we don't know where the thunder comes from, and therefore it's god. | |
| And we don't know how human beings evolved, and so god made us, right? | |
| So we don't know where the universe came from. | |
| We absolutely do not know where the universe came from right now. | |
| And God did it, or some other being did it, it doesn't answer anything. | |
| Because it's merely speculating about something that we have no knowledge about. | |
| And so to say that maybe there's an answer called God, or God's, answers nothing. | |
| It answers nothing. In fact, I would say it's a negative answer, because for a lot of people, it will preclude looking. | |
| But it'll shut down the inquiry, absolutely. | |
| Yeah, it's like, oh, well, God did it. | |
| Boom! Right? I mean, how long did it take for Darwin to come up with evolution? | |
| Well, a long time. It took human beings, thousands of years, to come up with evolution, because people had an illusory answer. | |
| It's called God. God is a barrier to human knowledge because God says, oh, we know where epilepsy comes from. | |
| It's demons, right? | |
| We know where people came from. | |
| It was a rib woman and a guy and dust and snakes. | |
| Oh, these are easy to make and all that kind of stuff, right? | |
| And so whenever you say God as some sort of answer, what you do is put a huge steel door at the end of human knowledge and say, well, we can't go any further because we've got an answer. | |
| I agree completely. I absolutely agree completely. | |
| I also agree with that completely, actually. | |
| Now I disagree with it. | |
| On second thought. | |
| But I don't think that... | |
| What you're saying there is when God is an answer to something. | |
| And that's not... What I'm talking about is that when God is the answer to something, that means that you have defined something by using God. | |
| And that's where I have the problem. | |
| I can accept... I'm an agnostic in that only that I can accept that there's this possibility out there of something further that we haven't defined and have no possibility of defining currently. | |
| That maybe there hasn't been contact or maybe... | |
| I don't know. I really don't know. | |
| Tell me how what you believe in as possible is different from a wildly powerful alien. | |
| We might come back to that here in a moment, but something else I want to suggest here is if there's anybody in this huge audience that we have, thank you for being here, by the way, that has a question that you want to throw in here, would like someone to come up if you are interested in joining in, and just throw the question in and let these guys answer it here. | |
| Please, yeah, we have to get some participation. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. Free Talk Live. | |
| We are here live at the Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010 edition in front of a crowd of a whole bunch. | |
| Bigger than we've had so far in the past two days. | |
| And this is what Porkfest does. It just ramps up and it ramps up. | |
| Some people come here on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. | |
| They get here early. It's a much smaller, more intimate crowd then. | |
| A lot of hanging out at campfires and socializing and things like that. | |
| Cooking out. That stuff goes on. | |
| And those activities continue throughout the weekend. | |
| And then folks came in here like Savannah Last Biscuit, Mandrick. | |
| We had them both on the show last night. | |
| Both delicious. The food here is just fantastic. | |
| You neglected to mention our food, your gullet. | |
| Our food. They're another food place. | |
| I haven't even made it out there yet. Cold pork sandwiches and whatnot. | |
| I will have to talk. | |
| Make sure you talk right in straight into that microphone. | |
| Thank you. So Johnson is with us here tonight. | |
| Stefan Molyneux also. But yeah, we got the food vendors showing up earlier in the week. | |
| And they have been so busy. | |
| It's amazing they haven't run out of food. | |
| I mean, Mama Allie said they went through like 76 pounds of flour or something like that in their first day. | |
| Yeah, so it's just been amazing. | |
| The people out here doing agorism, doing selling products and services without asking government permission. | |
| It's a wonderful model that is getting more popular over time. | |
| A lot of silver being traded around instead of Federal Reserve notes, that kind of thing. | |
| And of course, the best part about being here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival is not just the activities and the neat things that are going on, but it's meeting the people. | |
| It's making new friendships and meeting people that maybe if you've been here before, you've known before, and then you get to know them a little bit better. | |
| It's always easier the second time. | |
| So how many people here, by the way, in this room, I don't know, what do we got about 60 plus people here in this relatively small room? | |
| How many people first time at Porkfest? | |
| My goodness. That's more than 50% of the people in this room. | |
| That is like 60 plus percent of the people here in this room their first time. | |
| How many people are going to come back? | |
| Excellent. How many people are going to bring another friend next time around? | |
| Nice. Alright, so now you radio listeners can't see this, but people continue to raise their hands because this is a great event and it's obvious. | |
| So we'll continue with this discussion here. | |
| You guys have been talking about religion. | |
| Specifically the lack thereof, agnosticism versus atheism. | |
| And it's pretty much been between the two of you. | |
| I've thrown in a few thoughts here and there. | |
| But I wanted to make sure we had this tremendous audience here. | |
| And normally this is a very participatory show with us taking phone calls from anybody about virtually anything. | |
| But when we're here at Porkfest, it's always great to get live people here on our third mic. | |
| So, Steph, if you don't mind, just hand that third mic to the first person who's in line here. | |
| I know they came up here with questions for the two of you. | |
| So, first we have Pericles. | |
| Pericles, talk right into the mic and ask what you have to say. | |
| Okay, quick question, and I guess I'll use Johnson as an example if that works. | |
| I like to base my beliefs on evidence and empiricism, so I'm coming from the atheism side. | |
| And the question that I have is two-part. | |
| A, do you... | |
| Do you believe it's possible that there are undetectable green dragons floating around your head? | |
| If it is possible, do you believe that it is so? | |
| Why or why not? The reason why I don't believe there are undetectable green dragons flying around my head is because that is something... | |
| That is something that has very well... | |
| You've got a very well-defined definition for something. | |
| You've got a green dragon, and you've provided a definition for it. | |
| So, no, I don't, because... | |
| It's obviously not there. | |
| I mean, if there was... | |
| You're saying something is undetectable, okay, that's fine, but to me, the odds are just not there. | |
| I mean, would I say that I know that there are undetectable green dragons? | |
| That there are not undetectable green dragons around my head? | |
| No, I wouldn't, but I would ask you why you believe that there are. | |
| Okay, well, that was the second part of the question, which was you don't actually believe that there are. | |
| No, you believe it's... You gotta hold that mic real close. | |
| No, you believe that it's a possibility, but... | |
| If a hundred years from now it becomes possible to detect that there are actually green dragons that are undetectable now... | |
| I've actually seen the green dragons. | |
| They're called dragonflies, but they're not right here right now. | |
| Okay, so I guess what the question boils down to is... | |
| Right now, it could be possible that in the future... | |
| Well, you also said undetectable green dragons. | |
| Right, right now. Given our current technology, undetectable, yeah. | |
| But I guess what I'm saying is, if you don't have evidence for something's existence, then how can you argue that you believe it exists? | |
| It may be possible that it could exist. | |
| I'm not arguing that I believe it exists. | |
| Absolutely not. Yeah, I don't think I've heard anyone arguing that God exists tonight. | |
| What I've heard up here, at least, I'm sure some people in this audience would make that statement, but what I've heard up here is that the god that is being discussed, from both of their observations, Stefan says, definitely does not exist. | |
| Johnson says, yeah, he doesn't see any evidence of it, but it's possible. | |
| I'm only saying that I don't preclude the possibility. | |
| Okay, but could I say anything is possible, then? | |
| I could say anything's possible, we just don't, we can't detect it. | |
| You know, the green dragons are possible. | |
| What happens then is, philosophically, you can't limit agnosticism to religion. | |
| Agnosticism means that you can't say anything, for sure. | |
| Because in the future, the opposite might be found to be true. | |
| Now, see, I don't believe that at all. | |
| And actually, to a certain extent, though, that statement is sort of an homage to science. | |
| Because that is exactly what science is. | |
| We don't know whether or not things are true or they're constantly discovering new things and studying and proving things false or true. | |
| And there's never a defined answer. | |
| So that's what science is. | |
| It's sort of studying reality and... | |
| Making judgments based on new knowledge and new information, so... | |
| Yeah, but you don't want to mistake the content of science with the form of science, right? | |
| So it certainly is true that Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian physics, which may give way to some other kind of physics in the future. | |
| That is the content of science. | |
| The form of science, though, is not subjective and does not change, which is, you know, reason and experiment and evidence. | |
| But everything in science is based on, yes, evidence, but also on reasonable assumptions based on perceived evidence. | |
| The key thing being a reasonable assumption. | |
| I'm not sure what you mean by that. | |
| Well, it's reasonable to assume that, for example, the theory of gravitation is going to be constant throughout the universe, but we don't know that. | |
| But it's reasonable to assume that if I pick up this pair of headphones and drop them that they're going to fall. | |
| But there's not always a guarantee. | |
| Science is not... | |
| And, you know, they have a whole area of physics and science for, hey, what could happen if this just... | |
| Everything flies apart. | |
| I mean, it's true. There is state-funded science. | |
| Oh, damn! | |
| Where's my rim shot? But, anyway, let's get on to the next question. | |
| Thank you for that stuff. Yes, just take right over the whole show. | |
| No, I agree. Who is this? | |
| Chris? Chris, go right ahead. | |
| All right, so I was wondering... Could you clarify, if God's in the room and he's doing miracles and science can't explain it yet, then how long do we wait until we think that this is God? | |
| So let's say a guy walks on water, and we can see that he's walking on water, right? | |
| And maybe he's got cats who really don't like water strapped to the bottom of his feet, and they're kicking, right? | |
| I don't know. | |
| So we've got a video of the guy walking on water, and you can touch it, you can see it, you can feel it. | |
| So we know that something really unusual is happening. | |
| We don't know why, but the reality is that it's actually happening. | |
| So we wouldn't say that that's a miracle. | |
| We would just say, well, we don't know how that's happening, right? | |
| So when you're a kid, you first see an airplane, right? | |
| Like I live near an airport, right? | |
| Like the gods must be crazy. | |
| Right? Yeah, like the gods may be crazy, that Coke bubble, right? | |
| Yeah, the Coke bubble. So the first time you're a kid, you see an airplane, like, how on earth can this giant metal tube stay in the sky? | |
| But you know it's in the sky, but you just don't know how, and then eventually you learn. | |
| But you wouldn't say, as a kid, you might say that's miraculous. | |
| You wouldn't say God is keeping that up. | |
| Right. You would want to say, and we're out of time. | |
| Thank you, though. You would say, well, I'd like to know how that's happening. | |
| It may take you a long time as a kid to really understand the physics, but you still wouldn't call that a miracle, right? | |
| So if you've got the evidence, you may take a while to find the course, but that doesn't mean the course is supernatural. | |
| All right. We're going to continue here in moments. | |
| 1-800-259-9231. | |
| Phone calls are certainly welcome as well, in addition to the folks standing and waiting patiently here. | |
| In the studio. And we're at the live edition of Free Talk Live here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010. | |
| more coming up this is free talk live this is free talk live live from the porcupine freedom festival 2010 edition It is just a lot of fun being here, and if you haven't ever made it out before, start making plans to come out next year. | |
| Of course, the Liberty Forum also happens once a year. | |
| That's kind of the other event that the Free State Project puts on. | |
| Let me talk briefly here about the Free State Project. | |
| In fact, I've been neglecting all of my business-y things here. | |
| The Free State Project. | |
| is your chance to get together with other like-minded people, people who understand what liberty means. | |
| Get together physically with them in the same general vicinity and get active in order to achieve liberty in your lifetime. | |
| Because, in my opinion, it's not bloody likely to happen where you are because, at least where I come from, there was hardly anyone else besides myself who was really interested in doing anything significant besides the usual run a candidate every two years and get 3%. | |
| No one else was interested in doing anything more than that. | |
| And so now that I'm here, there's so much to do. | |
| There's so much activism happening. | |
| You can take your pick. | |
| If you like the politics, there's plenty of that. | |
| And it actually seems to be within reach. | |
| They just legalized knives here in New Hampshire. | |
| So it's a success story. | |
| Yeah, you can carry a switchblade. | |
| No problem. And if you like civil disobedience, man, do we have that in spades here in New Hampshire. | |
| That's something that's never existed in the liberty movement before, period, that I know of at least. | |
| And we've got media creation all over the place. | |
| We've got obscuredtruth.com, which we know Sam. | |
| He does some great video work and newspapers. | |
| We've got blog sites. | |
| We've got video and audio. | |
| And it's all here in New Hampshire now with only a few hundred movers. | |
| How cool is it going to be when we've got 2,000 people that have moved here or 5,000 or 10,000? | |
| So please go to freestateproject.org. | |
| And move. And please move. | |
| Get signed up at freestateproject.org so we can tick that counter up one more and then get yourself up here to New Hampshire sooner rather than later. | |
| Also, please visit our website at freetalklive.com. | |
| You'll find a lot of features. They're all free, including our webcam, which is not going to give you a picture tonight because we're on location, but you'll still get audio if you're listening via the webcam, and it's totally free. | |
| And there's also a chat room built into the same page so you can interact with some of our other listeners, a few of whom are actually here in this room tonight. | |
| And it's, by the way, brought to you by MemoryDealers.com, where you can get the world's largest selection of discounted optical transceivers, including all kinds of things like SFPs, GBICs, XFPs, Zimpaks, and X2s that are 100% compatible with all major networking equipment manufacturers. | |
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| For all your networking and telecom accessory needs in stock and ready to ship via overnight delivery, memorydealers.com. | |
| Johnson, with us here tonight, Stefan Molyneux as well, fielding questions at this point in their lengthy discussion about, and successful discussion I would say, their discussion about atheism slash agnosticism, the differences between the two, and who do we have here? | |
| Michael. Michael, what's your question? | |
| Yeah, I just wondered if you guys thought that we were still developing instruments in order to be able to diagnose certain things, whether they're medical instruments or electronic instruments or anything, in any field at all. | |
| I mean, we're still developing certain technologies. | |
| Sure, absolutely. Seems obvious, yeah. | |
| Obvious question, right? Okay. | |
| How long do you think human beings have been around, if you want to give it a good guess? | |
| About 100,000 is, I think, biologically. | |
| And we've only had, what, lights, the ability to produce electricity for how many of those years? | |
| About 100. Over 100, yeah. | |
| So I would say that we still have a ways to go technologically before we can eliminate our... | |
| before we can make a statement that we've finished coming up with diagnostic tools in order to say that we can preclude anything. | |
| Thank you for the thought, Stephan. | |
| Thank you. That's a good point, and I understand that, although I do, again, find that kind of an annoying argument. | |
| Not to say that you're annoying. The argument is annoying. | |
| I'm not talking about you. The reason is that you can't use science to prove ancient superstitions. | |
| That, to me, is just using the wrong tool for the wrong thing, right? | |
| So you can't say, well, science is developing, science is advancing, and therefore science can't preclude ancient superstitions from 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago. | |
| Science is moving in the opposite direction of those things, right? | |
| It's disproving all of these superstitions are falling like dominoes in the face of science. | |
| And you're going to say, well, the next one is going to confirm all these ancient superstitions. | |
| That's missing the whole trend of science. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Let's get our next question in. Science never said the earth was flat. | |
| Religion said the earth was flat. | |
| I'd like to respond to that as well, though. | |
| Now, while I agree with you that science is moving in the opposite direction from precluding all the ancient superstitions, I don't preclude the possibility that we might discover something completely different. | |
| And you need to use a different word than God, because God is inherited as a word from all these ancient superstitions. | |
| You can't use the word if you're saying we're going to go in some different direction. | |
| Got a better one? I've been using the word deity, actually, for the most part. | |
| The unknowable, the unknown, the incomprehensible, the inconsequential, the non-existent, anything that you want, but you can't use the word God if you're going to talk about something which we can't know anything about. | |
| Because the moment you use the word God, you're giving it characteristics. | |
| Let's talk to Stu. Thank you for coming up here with the question, Stu. | |
| What is it? Thank you. | |
| I've found it's easiest on my own conscience and tension and also best in polite society to just throw out the entire God inquiry as irrelevant and unfruitful and not useful by taking a couple pages out of Steph's book. | |
| One, if there was a God somewhere out there, how would you know? | |
| And if there was a God, what difference would it make? | |
| If he interacts with the physical world, then let's deal with the interactions in the physical world where we can all agree. | |
| If he's out there somewhere else in Dimension X, that's not relevant. | |
| I agree with you 100%, which is why when I address and I keep that lane of traffic open, what I want to discuss when I have religious discussions typically is the definitions and properties that people ascribe to their deity. | |
| Because those are the things that are relevant. | |
| Those are the things that they're talking about that are objective and based in reality or the reality that this person perceives. | |
| So that's where I like to answer. | |
| Next question from Andrew. | |
| Andrew from Michigan. Hey, I was wondering, the three of you, a question. | |
| Now, we've got, like, atheism on one side and, like, I guess evangelical Christianity on the other. | |
| You guys are, like... | |
| A hair's length away from atheism, just it seems. | |
| I was just wondering, or two of the three of you, just the social stigma. | |
| It seems like there's a lot of stigma around the word atheism, and I was wondering what you guys, all three of you thought of it. | |
| Thank you. I don't agree with the statement that evangelical Christianity is on the opposite side. | |
| I think evangelical Christianity is one of many, I guess, belief systems that can be tyrannical in how they treat either nonbelievers or how they proselytize. | |
| And I think that there are many other religions. | |
| I would immediately say Muslim or the Islam religion. | |
| I think that there are... | |
| A lot of anti-freedom sort of backwards beliefs in many different religions. | |
| And while there may be social stigma on being an atheist or being an agnostic, I'm not concerned with it because... | |
| If we were concerned with social stigmas, we sure wouldn't be here. | |
| Right. I'm coming from a position of principle and what I see as logic and reason. | |
| If I were to abandon that, I would just want to end my own life, because there would be no point to existence. | |
| Since I'm closer to the mic than Steph, I'll take that next. | |
| I would say that I don't feel like the social stigma is there as much as it used to be for atheists. | |
| I mean, having been an atheist for a long time. | |
| I certainly didn't feel, I don't feel the same way now as I did when I first came out of the closet, so to speak, as an atheist. | |
| And I know that, I think, Johnson, you've shared with me some statistics that at least over in Europe and other places, being unchurched and certainly being an atheist, I think there are different levels, right? | |
| I mean, there are people that call themselves religious, but they don't go to a church. | |
| I think that's a step in the right direction. | |
| I think that, you know, there are people that are unchurched, that, you know, they don't call themselves religious, and they don't really have any, they're not really agnostics either, they just don't really care. | |
| So I think that's part of it. | |
| And then there are people that are, you know, out-and-out atheists, and I think they're becoming more accepted. | |
| That's my experience, but Steph would love your thoughts. | |
| I've got a video on YouTube, a discrimination against atheists, where I pull from some pretty recent surveys. | |
| It's brutal for atheists out there, particularly if you have kids. | |
| And there are neighbors around who have kids who are Christians. | |
| Most Christians would rather their children marry... | |
| I mean, whites would rather marry a Hispanic or a black. | |
| They'd rather their children marry a Muslim than an atheist. | |
| So you don't think it's gotten any better then over time? | |
| Well, I think it's gotten better since, say, the Spanish Inquisition for atheists. | |
| I think that, you know... | |
| Well, they're not burning Quakers either. | |
| Yeah, I know. I mean, we're a lot less flammable than we used to be, and I think that's definitely a step away from the pyre and towards the light, or the other light, I suppose. | |
| But I think that atheist discrimination, it's the double A. If you're an anarchist and an atheist, it's very tough. | |
| There's more coming up. | |
| This is Free Talk Live, live from Porkfest 2010. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| You can take control of the airwaves and dial in toll-free at 800-259-9231. | |
| The questions for our guests will be given preference here tonight. | |
| And thanks to everybody who has come out here to the Porcupine Freedom Festival, which is from where we are broadcasting. | |
| Thanks especially for coming here to observe this conversation tonight. | |
| And of course, if you missed some of it, maybe because it's been a little too loud in here, that kind of thing, we're trying to remedy that situation. | |
| If you've missed some of it, it will be available online a little bit later on tonight. | |
| Usually takes me about an hour or so to get it done via this incredibly slow internet connection that we're dealing with here. | |
| Porkfest2010.com is where you can go to learn more about the event that we're at. | |
| There's so much coming up. | |
| We'll talk more about what's happening tomorrow because there's a full day of activities and things happening that deserve to be discussed. | |
| So we'll talk about that coming up in hour number three. | |
| But I first want to tell you about the jurisdictionary. | |
| So every contest involves rules and every winner knows the rules and how to use them to their advantage. | |
| And the jurisdictionary explains how to use the rules. | |
| In court, step by step. | |
| Forms, how to get evidence, and how to move the court, set hearings, do research, draft pleadings, etc. | |
| It's all there, and the claim is that an average 8th grader can grasp it all in less than 24 hours. | |
| created by a lawyer who wants to try to save you some money by not having you to pay a whole bunch of money to hire your own lawyer when you can just do most of that stuff yourself. | |
| So go to Jurisdictionary.com, I believe is the website, Jurisdictionary.com, to learn more about that. | |
| Stefan Molyneux, joining us from FreedomainRadio.com. | |
| Make sure you go over there if you haven't yet and subscribe to his podcast. | |
| You also do the video thing with YouTube as well, so audio, video, your preference, it is available at FreedomainRadio.com. | |
| Plus, Freedomain Radio appears on the Liberty Radio Network at LRN.FM. | |
| So make sure you can, and we're talking about, can we announce what we're talking about? | |
| Maybe taking Steph's show live. | |
| Would you like to hear Steph do a live show in the future? | |
| That would be pretty cool, huh? We're working on that. | |
| And Johnson's here as well, former co-host, graphic guru for the show, and webmaster type. | |
| So you wanted an additional comment to the last question. | |
| Can you recap the question and continue? | |
| The last question was about whether or not atheists were still being discriminated against. | |
| And I just wanted to continue that discussion by saying that I had done a... | |
| I read a blog post on my YouTube account written by a blogger by the name of Greta Christina, who is... | |
| She had just recently attempted to get married. | |
| She's a lesbian and an atheist. | |
| And so she wrote a blog post about why for atheists and the new atheist movement, which includes such atheist luminaries as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and other positive atheists who are very active and vocal about questioning religion. | |
| And she was talking about why this new atheist movement These atheists are often criticized as being too angry. | |
| You're so angry. Why are you angry? | |
| Why do you hate God? | |
| Why do you hate everything about religion? | |
| And so her response is, well, let's look at behind every political movement that has ever happened ever, there is some sort of Time where the person who's involved has gotten angry and why anger sort of drives every facet for change in society. | |
| And I don't necessarily mean anger as in like taking out violence and bomb throwing and whatnot. | |
| I just mean getting angry and getting motivated. | |
| And so her post about why anger for atheism as being valid, valuable, and necessary brings up such points as the fact that it's accepted and there was very little outrage over when, say, President George Bush said that there are no atheists in foxholes or the fact that there are several states that still won't allow an atheist to run for office. | |
| Those are just two examples of a litany of things that she cited in that blog post, and you can Google it. | |
| I don't know the address off the top of my head, but is there still discrimination against atheists? | |
| Unquestionably, and it's probably atheists are the most discriminated against group based on a belief. | |
| Alright, we're going to hold off on the in-studio questions, because Vince has been waiting patiently in Indiana, and Stephan, or actually I guess you'll be able to hear him over the speaker. | |
| So, Vince, you're on Free Talk Live. | |
| Do you have a quick question? Yes, I do, Mark and Stephan. | |
| I wanted to say something here, see what he thinks about the biblical verse that's on the front page of the newspaper. | |
| And it says here where the spirit of the Lord is. | |
| There is liberty, and that's in 2 Corinthians 3.17. | |
| And there's quite a few. Isaiah 61.1, John 8.32, Galatians 5.1. | |
| We don't know what all those are. Let's just start with the first one. | |
| You're asking what they think about that statement, wherever there is liberty. | |
| What was it, one more time? It says here, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom or liberty. | |
| Okay, thanks Vince for the call. | |
| I appreciate hearing from you. I'm not really sure how to answer that. | |
| Well, the only thing that I would say is that there's things in the Bible that I agree with. | |
| I think that it's hypocritical to attack other people for their moral failings if you have moral failings yourself. | |
| So if you're without sin, cast the first stone. | |
| I think that's a great... But it's not philosophy. | |
| It's a fortune cookie. And that doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable and it's thought-provoking, but it's not philosophy. | |
| Philosophy is reasoning with reference to evidence from first principles, rigorously, painfully, and consistently. | |
| So there's stuff in the Bible that I would agree with. | |
| I don't know where the spirit of the Lord is. | |
| There's probably some smoking atheists, frankly. | |
| Right. Philosophy isn't taking a book, looking at it and saying, yeah, this is true. | |
| But this is an interesting thing about religion as a whole, is that there's so much cherry picking that goes on, right? | |
| Oh, yeah. That's one of the things that sold me as an atheist. | |
| It was all the contradictions. | |
| And this is how you know. It's a mirror. | |
| So if you're an angry guy, you're going to be into the Old Testament God. | |
| And if you're a nice, loving, hippie dude, then you're going to be into certain parts of the New Testament, right? | |
| So this is how you know. | |
| It's a mirror, a psychological mirror of people's personalities. | |
| They pick and choose what they want, and they call it religion. | |
| There's no such thing as a Christian, because every Christian picks a different verse and assembles it in a different way. | |
| I'd like to add that there's a bit of science that's come out very recently that... | |
| Religious folk are a lot more likely to have a very active part of their brain as far as pattern recognition is concerned. | |
| And they've tested both atheists and non-religious folk and religious people by showing them series of patterns of random noise. | |
| and series of patterns where there is an object that is meant to be in the noise that you can pick out. | |
| And the religious people were ten times more likely to pick out something that just wasn't there. | |
| And so what I would say is that where there is the spirit of freedom, there is liberty, and perhaps you're anthropomorphizing that and perceiving that as a deity, perceiving that as this imaginary friend. | |
| One last thing I just wanted to mention before we get to the next question. | |
| I'll keep it very brief. Atheism is a terrible word, and I really, really dislike it because it sounds like I have something against a god. | |
| I don't. I don't have anything against a god or any number of gods. | |
| I don't have anything against God more than I would have against a unicorn or a leprechaun or Santa Claus or anything. | |
| I don't have any prejudice against God any more than I have against anything else which doesn't exist. | |
| It just doesn't exist. | |
| So you're not an angry atheist then? | |
| No, no, not particularly, though I certainly understand it. | |
| Were you angry at one time? Yeah, I stubbed my toe this morning. | |
| I mean, religion. All right, let's take the next question here quickly. | |
| What's your name? I'm Melina from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. | |
| All right, Melina, what's your question? | |
| My question is, I am a Christian, and I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I also believe in Romans 1.16 that I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. | |
| And I deeply believe that both of you At some point, we're introduced with the Bible and understand the deepness of the spiritual message and your connection with your Creator, whatever your final destination on this journey is. | |
| My question to you is... | |
| Christians are very humble. | |
| Sometimes they pray. | |
| Sometimes you don't know how much they pray deeply in their heart, wishing you well. | |
| You see just some fanatic groups that embarrasses other sincere Christians. | |
| So I just want to tell you I love you both. | |
| And my Jesus, my Creator, loves you because there's a reason why you are here. | |
| I have a question for you. | |
| Do you believe they're going to hell? | |
| It's not my judgment. | |
| I don't want to say the answer to that because it's a relationship between Him and His Creator. | |
| It's not my decision to judge Him. | |
| No. Alright. I appreciate that. | |
| But I just want to say, how do you see yourselves as a humble human beings? | |
| Where is your humbleness? | |
| Thank you for that. Well, first of all, I appreciate the sentiment and I appreciate the affection. | |
| That's always a good thing to get. I would submit that there's nothing more humbling than science and philosophy. | |
| I think because you have to take what you believe and subject it to external reason and evidence, which is a very, very tough thing to do. | |
| I think that there is a very great deal of humility in subjecting your even most treasured beliefs, which I think everyone who's into philosophy has had to do pretty regularly, to external things and saying, it's not up to me whether what I believe is true, it's up to what is actually true, what is actually real. I think that to say I want something to be true and therefore it is true, that to me seems a lot more arrogant than saying, well, I can't determine whether there is... | |
| I can't say that what I want to be true is true. | |
| I have to submit it to reason and evidence, and I think that science and philosophy is much more humble than religion in that way. | |
| Lovely. More coming up here. | |
| Hour number three on the way, live from the Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010 here at Rogers Campground in Lancaster, New Hampshire. | |
| You can go to porkfest2010.com. | |
| And we're going to keep this going. | |
| We've got a lot more people. | |
| They've got questions. The discussion is still hot. | |
| Stefan Molyneux, you can stick around, right? | |
| All right. And Johnson will be with us here in moments. | |
| Hour three coming up. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| You can take control of the airwaves, at least theoretically. | |
| Tonight, though, we've kind of broken format, and we've created a show here, which is, I'm calling it the Great Atheist Agnostic Debate with Johnson and Stefan Molyneux. | |
| You guys have graciously sat in for the entire show, and it's clear that that's the case. | |
| Stefan is hungrily feeding his face with... | |
| With one of the gyros from Mandrake, who we had on the show last night, talking about his agorist business enterprise where he sells baklava online via eBay and via his website, which was a great example of somebody who is supplementing some income because, well, he just decided it was time to not ask permission to do what it is that he loves to do, and that is make food. | |
| And he's made some darn good food. | |
| And we're here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival. | |
| You can come up and sample this very gyro. | |
| Maybe not the exact one, but the same model... | |
| You can have the same model because it's going to change forms here in a few hours. | |
| But, yeah, come on out. | |
| Go to porkfest2010.com and learn more about the Porcupine Freedom Festival and then come out and join us. | |
| Saturday is packed full of things to do. | |
| I don't know where there is my schedule. | |
| I'm going to retrieve it here so you can get some idea for what it is that is coming up shortly here. | |
| We've had two days packed full of interesting things happening. | |
| Tomorrow, one of the things I'm looking most forward to is seeing the, what they're calling, old school ghost pot. | |
| It's going to be a debate between the kind of the political side and the more outside of the system side, because we've had the 420 celebrations that have become so popular in Keene, New Hampshire. | |
| Rich Paul being one of the more prominent people behind the 420 celebrations, people going out smoking cannabis in public every single day in Keene, New Hampshire, in the center of town. | |
| And it's gone beyond 420s now with nightcaps people. | |
| You can pretty much go any time to this park, and actually we expanded to a different park, so you can go pretty much any time to any park in Keene, New Hampshire, smoke cannabis publicly, and nothing happens to you. | |
| So within a matter of weeks, literally, Central Square Park in Keene have become a demilitarized zone for cannabis. | |
| And it's an incredible success story, and it's based on the civil disobedience, the courageous civil disobedience and non-cooperation that was done. | |
| And, of course, the other side of the debate is going to be the side that says, well, we just need to be asking permission. | |
| We need to go to the government, and we need to beg them. | |
| We need to get down and kiss their ring and their boots, and then maybe our masters will allow us to smoke pot. | |
| And so that will be the position. | |
| You'll have the political side going up against the let's just do it side, and it should be a lot of fun. | |
| And I think former governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, is expected to govern the debate, I suppose. | |
| So that's happening tomorrow. | |
| Larkin Rose is also going to be speaking tomorrow, one of the heroic tax freedom advocates who actually believes so strongly in his beliefs that he went to jail for them. | |
| So he'll be telling his story and I'm sure taking your questions. | |
| Of course, Free Talk Live Broadcasting Live for the final time tomorrow night. | |
| We've got everything from Pimp My Activism, which will teach you how to deal with situations like dealing with the cops, the Porcupette Olympics. | |
| I don't know what that is, but it sounds interesting, and a whole bunch of other stuff I won't have time to tell you about. | |
| Go to Porkfest2010.com to learn more about what we're doing here in New Hampshire. | |
| Now, there was a question asked. | |
| We've been talking about atheism and agnosticism throughout the night tonight. | |
| I didn't know how this was going to go. | |
| I thought it was going to go well, and it's gone splendidly. | |
| Superb, if I might say. | |
| So we're going to continue this discussion here, because there are other people that have questions. | |
| I invited some questions up from the audience, and thanks everybody for being here tonight. | |
| And there was a question that was asked before the break. | |
| You didn't have a chance to answer it, Johnson, so if you would, please. | |
| The question was about how we're humble as people, that Christians are humble people, and I just wanted to address two things about that. | |
| The first is that I agree pretty strongly with a book that was recently written by a very vocal atheist by the name of Richard Dawkins, and that book is entitled The Greatest Show on Earth. | |
| And it talks about Mother Nature and what's going on and living a life without religion and how that is possible and how it is to appreciate nature and science and how one can derive their morality without a God. | |
| And I feel humbled daily and all the time by feelings which I think that a lot of people would ascribe to God. | |
| That I don't necessarily, I describe them to philosophy and beliefs and people, and I'm humbled constantly in that way. | |
| But I would also add, though, that you collectivized Christians by saying that Christians are humble people. | |
| And I think that's a hairy area to get into, because you don't want to collectivize people as a group. | |
| People are individuals. That's how I see them. | |
| Okay, thank you. I'm sorry, we don't really... | |
| I appreciate that. We really don't have much time for further comments. | |
| I just would say, individually, I've met some Christians that are just not very humble. | |
| Some people are definitely, and I absolutely agree with you. | |
| But I think everyone needs to be addressed on an individual basis, and that's sort of how I handle people. | |
| And I do think humility is a very important trait to have. | |
| But I definitely wouldn't say that all Christians are... | |
| Thank you for that. Let's continue here with Peter with the next question for our panelists. | |
| Hello. Carlos Castaneda offered anecdotal evidence of God. | |
| And he said, anyone can see God if they want to pay the price. | |
| Just 10% of your income. | |
| Here's the price. | |
| You have to have a clean and pure life, no sex, and walk between 20 and 50 miles every day for 20 years plus. | |
| Anyone can pay that price. | |
| Who's going to do it? | |
| Not me. So he saw God and saw it first as the burning bush. | |
| And then second as a humanoid shape, which he said was a reflection of his view. | |
| In other words, he was looking in a mirror. | |
| And then he also said that any warrior who gets to this level can ask God for anything, but most of them are just too stunned to ask for anything. | |
| So if anybody's interested, check it out. | |
| Start walking. I think that was more of a comment than a question. | |
| I don't know where the question was there, Peter. | |
| No, no, I appreciate the sharing of the sentiment. | |
| The question, we can't hear you now, because he doesn't have a microphone. | |
| Is anybody going to try it? | |
| I'm not going to walk for 30 years to see a humanoid. | |
| My life is good right now, so thank you, though. | |
| In fact, if I look around the room now, pretty humanoid, so I think we're already there. | |
| Right, and by my belief system as a panentheist, I'm always seeing God because it's everywhere, if you want to use that term. | |
| Anyway, Nick is with us here. Oh, Johnson. | |
| Just a quick address to that to give it a little bit more time. | |
| I would say, though, that a lot of religions have various tenets and various paths to God, so there are so many different paths in so many different ways. | |
| The reason why I can so quickly answer no is that I don't think that choosing one makes any particular sense over any other path. | |
| So... Unless you can provide sound evidence and reason for that particular path, which I don't believe you will, but then no. | |
| Nick is here with what appears to be our final question from the audience. | |
| We're still opening, phones are still open as well at 800-259-9231. | |
| Nick. Hi. This is more for Stefan than anybody, but I'm leaning, in this debate, I'm leaning more towards Stefan. | |
| I guess... Thank you. | |
| I guess, as he's a strong atheist, I would consider myself more of a weak atheist, in that I would consider myself... | |
| I'm not sure if this would make sense to you guys, but it makes sense to me. | |
| Agnostic atheism, which is basically, I don't believe in God, but I don't see any objective way to prove or disprove that there's a God. | |
| So I'm sort of like in between Johnson and Stefan, although I think Stefan is... | |
| How do I say this without him patting me on the shoulder? | |
| My hero! Anyway, I just think Stefan has more of the solid points. | |
| Was there a question in there somewhere? | |
| Yeah, I was going to make my question. | |
| So I was just wondering, for Stefan, how does he objectively see how he can disprove the existence of God? | |
| Because that's where my hang-up is, basically. | |
| Why do you have to disprove the existence of God? | |
| The burden of proof lies on whoever is proposing the existence of something. | |
| You don't have to prove there aren't unicorns, because it's clear. | |
| Yeah, I don't... The people who are more on the agnostic or the religious side will say that God is like the unicorn with a horn, like the horse with a horn on its head. | |
| We've got to go all over the universe and see that there aren't any, and then one may have popped up when we weren't looking so we can never establish it. | |
| But we don't have to do that with things like square circles. | |
| Or if you go to a biologist with the proposition and say, can human beings live unaided on the surface of the sun? | |
| He's going to say no. And there is no place in the universe where a human being is going to stand on the surface of the sun and do fine. | |
| I mean, we have trouble even with old coals, right? | |
| If somebody's going to come up to you and say, I think human beings can live on the surface of the sun, you don't have to get a whole bunch of people, throw them into the sun and find out whether it's the case or not, because it's just not going to happen. | |
| It's completely impossible. It's biologically impossible at every conceivable level. | |
| The physics, biology, everything you could imagine. | |
| A horse cannot live in deep space unaided. | |
| And so if somebody's going to come up with a... | |
| We are back in a moment. Sorry to interrupt. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. This is Free Talk Live. | |
| We're here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, the 2010 edition. | |
| It continues on throughout the weekend, wrapping up Sunday afternoon, so still plenty of time for you to get up here. | |
| If you're in the New England area, this is worth the drive. | |
| It is, first of all, an amazingly beautiful drive up through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. | |
| That's where we are, right next to the White Mountains in Lancaster at Rogers Campground. | |
| We'll be here for the rest of the weekend broadcasting live tomorrow night as well. | |
| So come on out. | |
| There's so much to do. One of the things that Curtis, one of the organizers here at the event, pointed out to me that I forgot to mention tomorrow is the Soapbox Idol, which was an incredibly popular event last year where each participant gets three minutes with which they can essentially rant about whatever it is that they want up on stage in the pavilion here. | |
| And it was so popular last year. | |
| It was in high demand. It was brought back. | |
| And so that's going to be happening tomorrow night. | |
| Also, other great events. | |
| There's a cook-off. There's going to be a conference I don't know what the prize is, but that's going to be, I'm sure, a very tasty event. | |
| Lots of great food, great socializing here, amazing people to meet, new friends to make. | |
| It's a great place to be. So come on up. | |
| Porkfest2010.com to learn more about it. | |
| That's Pork with a C. P-O-R-C-F-E-S-T 2010.com. | |
| An old school Porkfester has another question here. | |
| We managed to sneak another one in for our guests who are discussing atheism and agnosticism. | |
| Theology kind of in general here, but Rob is with us. | |
| Rob, welcome to Free Talk Live. | |
| Thank you. I am so confused about... | |
| Talk right in real close to that mic, please. | |
| I am so confused as to what is and isn't God and what is and isn't consciousness and what its roots are. | |
| Don't look at Steph. Talk to the mic. | |
| Extraordinarily fascinating that you said something about a super dude. | |
| If God had material consciousness and had some sort of material form, that there could be some dude out there. | |
| And I was wondering, in your ideal delusion, what would that dude look like? | |
| What would he be capable of? | |
| What sort of wisdom might he be able to impart? | |
| And what sort of universe would he be living in? | |
| Good question. Well, he'd be living in our universe because if he wasn't, he wouldn't exist, right? | |
| If he's not present anywhere in our universe, that's identical to non-existence. | |
| So he would have amazing things to think about, amazing things to say. | |
| I assume he would be for the non-aggression principle. | |
| It's how we know there are no UFOs. | |
| The only way that UFOs will ever come here is to trade. | |
| Because no government program is ever going to produce insta-stellar travel. | |
| The only people that are going to come here are traders. | |
| So if they're not opening a mall, they're not here. | |
| That's sort of my argument about UFOs. | |
| Superdude is going to be in the universe, part of the universe, may have amazing powers, may be transcending certain kinds of physical things. | |
| But you know what Superdude won't have is any connection to any god that had been thought of or defined in the past, unless he'd visited before. | |
| So what you're saying is you accept the possibility of Superdude. | |
| Of course. Of course. | |
| But that's not a god. But you wouldn't call it god. | |
| No, of course he's not a god. He's not supernatural because he's a dude with amazing powers, right? | |
| We would look supernatural to a caveman, but we're not gods because we're humble. | |
| Johnson, do you have an answer to the question? | |
| About the Superdude? I mean, I think Seth answered that pretty... | |
| Much the way I would say it. | |
| I mean, I absolutely agree with the non-aggression principle and everything like that. | |
| I mean, I would think that Christians have already sort of answered that question as well with Jesus. | |
| So I can't really expound upon that. | |
| Well, I would like to say that, you know, I think that mankind is sort of moving in that direction, that we're constantly improving our surroundings and improving ourselves and hopefully moving in a more peaceful direction. | |
| So I think that eventually, you know, we are becoming more super over time. | |
| I don't know if that really answers the question, but that's my perspective on it. | |
| Let's go to your phone calls here and talk to Dave in New Hampshire. | |
| Dave, you're on Free Talk Live. | |
| Hello there. Hi. | |
| This is my question. | |
| Like, agnostics and atheists don't believe there's a God. | |
| So, I'm just wondering, if there's no God, then how can you be relative? | |
| Then there's no atheists and agnostics, because you can't be relative to nothing, right? | |
| Gents? Well... | |
| The fact that there are no unicorns doesn't mean there are no horses. | |
| The fact that there are no goblins doesn't mean that there aren't short Irishmen. | |
| So we don't define ourselves relative to that which doesn't exist. | |
| So the fact that God doesn't exist doesn't have any bearing on our existence. | |
| It just means that the soul probably doesn't exist, but it doesn't mean that I don't exist. | |
| Johnson? I'm just wondering if that answered his question or if he has a follow-up. | |
| Dave? I don't really have any followers. | |
| That's all I was thinking. | |
| Glad you're out there. Thanks for the call, Dave. | |
| Appreciate it. 800-259-9231. | |
| You can get your questions in. And we'll just open the lines up here at this point. | |
| Any questions about anything certainly are welcome. | |
| Also, there was one question that came up from the audience. | |
| Someone too shy to actually come up and use the mic. | |
| What happens when you die? | |
| Well, that's easy. Well, I've got an easy answer, too. | |
| I don't know. Well, no. | |
| You know, if you had a radio, like you had a radio and you went to some really primitive tribe, and there were voices coming out of the radio, and they go, oh my God, there are people in the radio, there are gods speaking through the radio, and then the batteries wore out. | |
| Well, it's not like the voices have left the radio and gone to some higher plane or higher dimension. | |
| The energy that's powering the radio has simply run out. | |
| The voices haven't left. | |
| They've just stopped. And that's what happens when we die. | |
| The energy that animates the blood flow and the flow of energy within our neurological system and our brain, it simply ceases. | |
| And we don't go anywhere else, and we don't become something else any more than the radio voices leave the radio and go to some higher radio paradise, of which I'm sure Free Talk Live would be a core exhibit. | |
| How you doing? But the energy runs out and we're done. | |
| We go into the ground, they throw dirt on our face, and we don't know anything more about the future than we did about the 17th century because we weren't there for that and we won't be there for the future. | |
| And I would say that this is where I agree with you as far as the danger of religion. | |
| This is the basic crux and the core of all religion is that believing in a secondary afterlife and believing that you move on For a great deal of people means that they aren't necessarily living for this life. | |
| They're living for the next. | |
| And basing their behavior and their whole philosophy and their belief system and their actions on... | |
| Something that they may have been programmed into because a lot of people who I know who are of a religion based their religion on a book that was written by what I believe to be other human beings. | |
| Many people say that they believe that their Bible or their Torah or their Koran is the inspired word of their deity, but... | |
| I agree completely. I think it's a large scale and also personal tragedy that so many people are basing their personal choices on what an old book says or what some guy in a white robe has told them when they could be living their life to the way that they might otherwise live it had they not been given these silly prohibitions that they've cut off themselves from experiencing. | |
| I think it's a shame. Now that said, I don't preclude, again, the possibility of an afterlife. | |
| I don't preclude the possibility of reincarnation. | |
| I wouldn't say for sure on anything. | |
| I can't say for sure on that. | |
| I can't define that. | |
| I can't know that. So I very definitively answer, I don't know. | |
| I'll tell you what, we actually have another call here. | |
| Brent is in Charleston, West Virginia. | |
| Brent, you're on Free Talk Live, listening to WVTS. Yes. | |
| I mean, how can you say there's not a God? | |
| I've had two strokes. | |
| First stroke, I couldn't walk. | |
| Second one affected my speech. | |
| And with prayer, they told me from when I had it that I would never be all right. | |
| I start walking again and talking again where people can understand me. | |
| Tell you what, we're going to address that here in a moment. | |
| You can hang on if you'd like. | |
| Strokes, personal tragedies, recoveries, we'll get back to it. | |
| How can you say there's not a God was the beginning of the question there. | |
| And we'll return with more with Freedom Aid Radio's Stefan Molyneux. | |
| Ann Johnson is here as well from Free Talk Live. | |
| This is Free Talk Live, live from the Porcupine Freedom Festival, and we'll tell you how to get yourself some gold and silver. | |
| If you want to go to gold.freetalklive.com, place your orders. | |
| We have some great deals for you there, and check it out. | |
| More coming up. | |
| It's Free Talk Live. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| We are here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival 2010 here at Rogers Campground.com. | |
| In beautiful New Hampshire, right next to the White Mountains. | |
| An amazing view, but more amazing than that are the people that you'll get to meet when you're here. | |
| Has anybody made any new friends here this weekend? | |
| Yeah, I see a few hands going up there. | |
| In fact, a bunch of hands. Lots of great people here at Porkfest. | |
| It's put on by the Free State Project. | |
| It's a once-a-year event, but it's not too late for you to make it up here. | |
| We've got a full day of activity scheduled for tomorrow, so go to Porkfest2010.com to get a clue for what those might be as we continue our discussion here, taking your calls. | |
| Also, we had a bunch of questions from the audience, which I thought were pretty great. | |
| For Stefan Molyneux, who is here joining us from freedomainradio.com, and our very own Johnson, former co-host on the program, graphics guru, designer, etc. | |
| and so thanks both of you for sticking with us here because I didn't know how long this was going to go on and it's going on for the whole show which is pretty cool it's very rare that we spend a full three hours on one subject so you can tell you've got a really successful topic on your hands and so by the way I want to let you know also that coming up here in moments apparently right after the program or shortly thereafter Chartarm still scheduled John Shaw to premiere the The sneak preview of Chartarum here, not the full movie. | |
| Maybe that'll be next year? | |
| I don't know. But the sneak preview coming up here tonight by Think Twice Productions and John Shaw. | |
| You can also get your copy of the Porkfest-only limited edition of the original soundtrack. | |
| And I believe the composer himself is signing it tonight back there. | |
| Yep, anybody who wants a signature can get one. | |
| Plus, the Porkfest commemorative beer mug, I believe those are still available as well, so don't miss your chance to grab one of those. | |
| That's tonight, right after the show is over here on Free Talk Live here at Porkfest 2010. | |
| Now, we've got Brent on the line, listening to WVTS in Charleston, West Virginia. | |
| And Brent, are you still with us? | |
| Yes, I am. Okay, Brent. | |
| Now, just to recap your question, your question was basically, how can you believe, and it was to our panelists here, how can you believe that God doesn't exist? | |
| Was that your question? Right. | |
| And you gave your personal example of recovering from two strokes. | |
| Steph, did you want to share your thoughts? | |
| Well, first of all, I'm very happy that you've recovered from the two strokes. | |
| I'm very, very pleased. | |
| That is a terrifying thing, and of course, when you get medical opinions that turn out to be not true, it is a great relief when your body gets back in shape and gets back in line, so congratulations for that. | |
| This is not any kind of philosophical proof for a deity. | |
| Unfortunately, I'm very happy that this has happened to you. | |
| And you hear a lot of these things. | |
| Strokes can get better. | |
| Cancers can go into remissions. | |
| People in wheelchairs can get up and walk around because medical science doesn't know all of the complexities and possibilities of the human body. | |
| What doesn't happen is, and I take this argument from Richard Dawkins, but what doesn't happen is people's limbs don't regrow. | |
| So somebody who's had a limb amputated doesn't have their limbs regrow, and you can actually go to WhyDoesGodHateAmputees.com for a philosophical examination of this. | |
| I am very, very pleased that you have recovered, but your recovery is not outside the realm of possibility. | |
| For a limb to regrow, or for a man who's been decapitated to come back to life, That is not medically possible, and that would be evidence of something extraordinary. | |
| You fall within the realm of probability for which you can be very grateful, but that does not mean that God likes you and healed your illnesses and then didn't like all of the millions of people who died yesterday from other illnesses. | |
| Because if you're going to take His love and His existence as being your healing, you have to accept that He is then not healing other people, and I think that is the kind of God that is not a good thing to believe in. | |
| I'd like to get Brent's response. | |
| Pardon me? Go ahead, Brent. | |
| Your thoughts? Yeah. | |
| Well, I'm just saying that I was on a prayer list at the church in a prayer chain, and I was all the way over Florida, Wyoming, Colorado. | |
| People were praying for me. Brent, are you suggesting that if people don't pray, that your God does not assist them? | |
| No. Why did I make a recovery then? | |
| They said I wouldn't. I don't know what happened there. | |
| I think we lost the call. | |
| No, I'm still there. Is that a sign? | |
| Thanks, Brent, for the call. I appreciate hearing from you. | |
| Johnson, you want to field that? Yeah, I just wanted to make a brief statement. | |
| I don't necessarily believe this, but... | |
| I would say that if there was a potential deity that was trying to hide and not necessarily reveal themselves, who's to say though that the possibility doesn't exist that healing certain random people and doing it in a random fashion and hiding in the random noise of certain events Couldn't shape the entire sort of fabric of how things work, the sort of God's plan theory. | |
| I'm afraid I wasn't at your 420 celebration, so I can't really follow that argument. | |
| But that's not really a real answer, is it? | |
| That's not really a real answer, though. Yours isn't a real hypothesis. | |
| Okay, so maybe some random static out there could prove some sort of deity. | |
| That's not an argument. That's just saying maybe what's random isn't random, but you have to prove that. | |
| People have done double-blind studies on prayer groups to find out if prayer helps. | |
| It doesn't help. It's been scientifically proven over and over again. | |
| You know what helps? It's not randomly healing people and not healing other people unless you can find some statistical anomaly. | |
| But there's no way to prove that. You know what helps? | |
| Dogs. Bringing dogs in for people that are in a hospital bed, you know, brings their spirits up. | |
| A dyslexic god. A dog. | |
| There you go! God is God. | |
| Hey, you know what, Johnson, I know that you wanted to make some final thoughts, that kind of thing, and I can tell you that people have been calling in here, so I'm going to put the phone calls on hold. | |
| If you guys want to wrap up your thoughts, I want to make sure that we can get to your final thoughts kind of here in advance, that way we don't run out of time in the very last segment. | |
| Related to the conversation we were on, one of the quotes that I have from you is that you said that the synonym for that which exists outside the universe is non-existence, and can you prove that? | |
| Sure. That is by definition. | |
| If there's no physical evidence and there's no empirical evidence and it's logically contradictory, that is exactly what is meant by non-existence. | |
| But that doesn't answer something. | |
| If something is supernatural and beyond, then it would be beyond. | |
| No, not supernatural. It's just saying, okay, something doesn't exist, but I'm going to create an alternate realm where it does exist. | |
| That's not scientific. | |
| That's not logical. You're just creating something which says, error equals truth. | |
| I agree. The whole premises of a deity, the whole premises of God is that it is outside science. | |
| That's the premises of it. Right, which means that it doesn't exist. | |
| Outside science, outside evidence, outside reason means non-existence. | |
| You can call it God, you can call it flamboozy deity if you want. | |
| It still doesn't exist. And then the other, okay, well, the other question that I have as far as this goes is that you also have said that you've never seen an agnostic say that a Christian should stop believing these silly things. | |
| Well, you can't say that anymore. | |
| And I guess what I want to address is that a lot of what you've said about agnostics is in regards to weaselly cowardice and not wanting to confront religious people. | |
| And what I want to know is whether or not you continue to have that exact same problem with strong agnosticism and those that are willing to question the Not necessarily the principle of the existence of a deity, but the properties, everything else. | |
| Well, I think that you've said a number of times that you like to stay in the conversation with the religious people, and you don't like to shut that door. | |
| Well, I think that's not courageous, frankly. | |
| I think that you should take a stand on reason and evidence. | |
| I don't think you should be on the offensive, but not be offensive, as I... I consistently try to remind myself, but I think you need to take a strong stand. | |
| I think the most consistent position in any debate will always win. | |
| I think that backing down from the irrationality of any kind of deity, using the word God, which has been inherited from desert Bedouin superstitions from 5,000 years ago, is a cheat. | |
| You need to use the term which is to say there's something that is the opposite of existence that may exist, which is a contradictory statement. | |
| You can't use the word God, you can't use the word deity, you can't use the word religion, you can't use the word consciousness, because all of these are ascribing properties to that which you say you cannot ascribe any properties to. | |
| You need to take that stand. | |
| Let me say this. I used to be an atheist, and I used to argue in the same fashion, and at the moment that I opened that door, I began to have entirely new conversations. | |
| And got to a level with the people who have these beliefs and these very specific beliefs about their deities and about their religion that I had never achieved before. | |
| And to that end, what would be more important in your mind, Steph? | |
| Would it be to take, you know, a position that helps the very religious perhaps reject their organized religion and move in a certain direction? | |
| Or would it be to simply say, you know, you should reject it all. | |
| Reject the concept of God, period. | |
| I would never say to somebody, you should reject the concept of God, period, because it is a long and It's a patient argument. | |
| You don't just dump the conclusions on people's laps and say, oh, you're a fool, you're a living... | |
| Okay, except for you people. And because you're so smart, you see, and so pretty. | |
| But you don't... | |
| It's a long series of patient arguments. | |
| I would never just rail against a religious person and say, because... | |
| What is religion? Religion, it comes from the indoctrination of the young. | |
| Of course it does. We all understand that. | |
| It's man controlling man. Children of Muslim parents, strangely, are mostly Muslim. | |
| Children of Christian parents, strangely, are mostly Christian. | |
| So it is the indoctrination of children, and I think we need to be patient bringing people out of that. | |
| But we don't do that by pretending things exist that don't. | |
| There's more coming up here. | |
| We've got some folks waiting patiently on the lines. | |
| We'll take their questions quickly for our panel, our lovely panel here, and wrap up this particular edition of Free Talk Live, live from Porkfest 2010, here in moments. | |
| This is Free Talk Live. | |
| We are here at the Porcupine Freedom Festival. | |
| Porkfest2010.com. That's Pork with a C-P-O-R-C-F-E-S-T-2010.com. | |
| It's an amazing event. | |
| One that if you love Liberty, you should be at. | |
| Why aren't you here? It's not too late. | |
| In fact, there's a whole lot scheduled for tomorrow, so come on up if you get the chance to Lancaster at Rogers Campground and join us. | |
| Free Talk Live will continue broadcasting live tomorrow night for our final show from this year's Porkfest, but I'm sure we'll be back next year. | |
| I think we've been here, this is our fourth year now, if I am not mistaken. | |
| It has been an absolute blast, and it's been really cool watching the event grow over the years. | |
| It's just tremendous. | |
| This is another record-setting year. | |
| The best Porkfest yet, as is being said. | |
| And yes, we're hearing a smattering of applause. | |
| Give it up for Porkfest! And our wonderful guests here tonight, changing the format of Free Talk Live to dedicate the entire show to one particular discussion, which is going off in different directions as we normally do, and I think it's fantastic. | |
| Stefan Molyneux here with us from freedomainradio.com. | |
| Make sure you check his podcast out for some very continued thought-provokingness on not just theology, but a variety. | |
| Give us a quick synopsis of Freedomain Radio, if you would, please. | |
| Well, it's a lifelong interest that I've had in philosophy and that's what I studied up to the graduate level at the University of Toronto. | |
| And I've taken it and have tried to apply reasoning from first principles to economics, to politics, to ethics, to religion, to personal relationships. | |
| And I found it to be very fruitful, as I have a number of listeners. | |
| It is the largest and most popular philosophy conversation in the history of the world. | |
| Let me ask you another question, since we're talking briefly about the Porcupine Freedom Festival. | |
| You've now come here a couple times to New Hampshire to speak. | |
| You were at the Liberty Forum. It was a year ago, yes? | |
| That's just over a year, yeah. Yeah, a year ago you were at the Liberty Forum. | |
| Kind of a different feel there. | |
| Everybody's stuck in the hotel in the wintertime, and it's just a totally different event. | |
| What are you thinking about the Free State Project these days? | |
| Because I remember when we first started talking to you a few years back, you were like, eh, it's all politics, nah. | |
| But then I explained to you, no, no, Steph, there's more to this than just politics. | |
| And now that you've actually immersed yourself in the community to some extent, what do you think about this movement? | |
| Well, I'll tell you that people look a lot more tanned now than they did in New Hampshire in February, March of last year. | |
| I'll tell you what I really, really like that I didn't get before I really came down, which is that when you move among the muggles, when you move among the non-liberty people, you always find that there's this part of you that's waiting to clench. | |
| You know, like, oh, oh no, here comes a difficult or dangerous topic, right? | |
| And in politics, you'll be at some dinner party, right? | |
| And somebody will be like, Man, I thought Obama was going to do so much better. | |
| I mean, I still have hope, and part of you just goes, am I going to go there? | |
| Am I going to, you know, do I going to pull off my Superman uniform? | |
| Here we go, right? And so what's nice here is that you just know that's not going to happen. | |
| I think I've only seen one Obama supporter. | |
| Nobody, right? So the great thing is you can have conversations with people without waiting for that cricket bat of unreality to whack you on the side of the head. | |
| I say cricket bat, that's baseball bat for you colonists. | |
| And that's really nice, to have that state of relaxation and open communication. | |
| And that's something I didn't get before coming down here a couple of times, and that's something that's easy to underestimate. | |
| Cool. So you think there's actually something happening here then, yes? | |
| Oh, yeah. All right, very good. | |
| All right, cool. Freedomainradio.com. | |
| Let's go back to the phones and the fun here. | |
| Folks have been waiting patiently, including Dave in Montana. | |
| Dave, you're on Free Talk Live with Stefan and Johnson. | |
| Woo! I'm sorry, guys. | |
| Dave is getting more applause than the both of you have gotten so far tonight. | |
| Hey, what's up? Hey, great discussion tonight. | |
| I wanted to just give you my witness and then hear your opinion. | |
| Me and the girl was hitchhiking back from Mexico to Montana. | |
| Her name's Amy. She wanted to get a ride in an RV. I said, okay, let's pray. | |
| So we held hands and we prayed so an RV would come and pick us up. | |
| Two minutes after we're done praying, an RV pulled over and picked us up. | |
| I hitchhiked like 20,000 miles and RVs don't pick you up. | |
| We get in the RV. The guy hands Amy a Coke. | |
| She drops the Coke, looks at me, and says, Dave, I prayed for a Coke, too. | |
| So you tell me, man. | |
| I can't top that other one to say, what about the free will of the guy driving the RV? I mean, wouldn't it be nice to not feel like a pawn of God's being moved around the highway like a little train? | |
| Well, no. That guy told us that he was going to this mission somewhere and stuff. | |
| And that... We're on a mission from God. | |
| Check this out. Check this out. | |
| Check this out. He turns to me and he says, my son left something in the jacket in the back closet. | |
| Go get it. They're in the jacket. | |
| So I went back there, reaching the jacket. | |
| There was like three joints. | |
| I knew that was what was coming. | |
| And you prayed for that too, right Dave? | |
| It was the best weed I ever had, man. | |
| Thank you for the call tonight. | |
| I appreciate it. All I can do is surrender to that story. | |
| I can't analyze it. | |
| I can't poke at it. I can only surrender to that story. | |
| Let's continue to talk to Todd in California. | |
| Todd, you're on Free Talk Live. | |
| Todd, go in once. | |
| Hello, Todd. It's actually Tyler. | |
| Oh, Tyler, you're on with Stefan. | |
| Go ahead. I wanted to interject and just kind of, you know, ask what you think about the spirit world. | |
| And, you know, if someone's really looking to find, if God exists, I would almost say that they should look in the other direction and see what's on the other side of that line. | |
| You know, like, why does some houses not sell? | |
| Why does nothing grow near Auschwitz? | |
| Why is there, like, more and more encounters with spirit entities, in fact, that are kind of free-floating in this world? | |
| I mean, you can find them, but I have to warn people that it can be dangerous. | |
| Well, let me see if I understood your question here, because I found it a little confusing. | |
| You're suggesting that there's something going on mystically that is preventing a house from being sold? | |
| No, I think the Auschwitz one was interesting. | |
| He was saying that nothing grows near Auschwitz and that's an evidence of a spirit world that has a moral interest in the world. | |
| If that's the case, I would really expect the spirit world to have done something a little bit more, and a little bit sooner at Auschwitz than just having plants not grow 60 years later. | |
| Why do plants grow in Washington, D.C., then, if that's the case? | |
| Just weeds. Any answer, Johnson? | |
| My question would be, I would wonder if there's some sort of chemical properties of I'm sure you can talk to friends and find out things like this from their personal experiences, | |
| but You know, it actually was built on an Indian burial ground, and the house had burned down three times, and they had a lot of incidents in the house before they sold it, and I would just say, hey, you know, if you really want to go around and really, like, kind of talk about how this stuff doesn't exist, like, the spirit world is real to some people, and if you really wanted to prove it to yourself, you should check out some of the new ghost shows that are on, and I'm sure that would be a great way to spend your time. | |
| Thanks, Tyler. I appreciate hearing from you. | |
| Zombie cats. I don't know if that even deserves any more. | |
| Let's go to Scott in Indiana. | |
| Scott, you're on Free Talk Live. | |
| Hello. Hello. | |
| Great debate, you guys. Hey, Scott. | |
| What's on your mind tonight? I want to get your thoughts on something. | |
| When I try to dismiss the existence of God, there's one thing that I wonder about. | |
| I look at people's behavior and what we do and how we think and usually you can find some type of evolutionary reason for it. | |
| In other words, we've developed that behavior or that belief or that pattern of behavior because it provides some advantage for our survival or reproduction. | |
| Why in the world would we as human beings have evolved this tendency to sit around developing angst about whether there's a god or not or what the meaning of our existence is? | |
| It doesn't help me. | |
| It just provides a lot of angst for me or induces me to waste time that I could use in a more productive manner. | |
| Good question. Yeah, the evolution of religious belief is a very big and complex subject, and I'll just touch on two thoughts very briefly here. | |
| The first is that storytellers don't like to work, and so they want to tell stories that are so vivid and so powerful that Frighten and encourage people to such a degree that they'll pay them. | |
| And the best way to do that is to say that somebody's going to punish you, somebody's going to after death, and it's such a great story. | |
| And so they become the priestly class, and storytellers don't like to work, and telling stories is a lot more fun than Hoenn the Back 40. | |
| That's why I started in radio. | |
| The second issue, which I think is a bit darker, is that if you can convince people That God will reward them in an afterlife for sacrifice to a secular ruler in the here and now, you end up with a very powerful group of warriors who are willing to die for a cause, which helps spread that belief in some pretty ugly ways. | |
| I have actually another answer based on, again, some recent science that has shown that When, in humans, they're competing for a mate, the religiosity of certain groups of people, certain groups of men, increases when there is superior competition in physical prowess or physical stature. | |
| Other men around will increase their religiosity. | |
| And the reason for that could potentially be to create a philosophical or social negative stigma on the superior male that would then attract the female. | |
| With that, we are out of time for this edition of Free Talk Live. | |
| Join us again tomorrow night for our final Porcupine Freedom Festival episode here live from Rogers Campground in Lancaster, New Hampshire. | |
| Porkfest2010.com to learn more. | |
| That's Pork with a C. Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. |