The son of two prominent theologians, and a former star of Christian radio, talks about the social, professional, and moral challenges of losing God, and finding himself... http://www.thethinkingatheist.com
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I have on the line Seth, also known as The Thinking Atheist, which to me is redundant. | |
| It's like saying the same thing twice, but that's okay. | |
| It's a brand name on YouTube and on the web that is highly respected and I think well worth checking out. | |
| You can find him at thethinkingatheist.com. | |
| Thank you, Seth, so much for taking the time. | |
| It's a real pleasure. You know, it's funny, I take a lot of heat for the thinking atheist. | |
| For some people say it is redundant, and some people say it's an oxymoron. | |
| I hear it both sides. | |
| I'll tell you the reason that I chose it. | |
| Honestly, it's... | |
| It's that, number one, I never assume anybody, including an atheist, is thinking. | |
| I just don't. | |
| And secondly, it was only in my life when I started to really think for myself rather than assume the truth that I had inherited from my parents and my upbringing. | |
| Only when I started thinking for myself did I really become liberated. | |
| And so for me, that's what the thinking atheist means. | |
| But yeah, I take your larger point. | |
| It does sound a tad redundant in its context, yes. | |
| Well, hopefully, of course, we'll work to help build a world where it won't seem redundant, but unnecessary. | |
| So thinking and atheism will just go hand in hand. | |
| Sure. I was very interested in your journey from nestled deep within the bosom of the traditional church to where you are now. | |
| And I'm sure it's a tale you've told a million times, so I'm sorry to ask you to do it again. | |
| But if you could drop some of the highlight bombs along that landscape, I would really be interested in hearing how you came from there to here. | |
| No, not at all. It's funny because many of the people who now come to me and they say, how can you be an atheist? | |
| They say, you must not have been a real Christian to begin with. | |
| And I always say the same thing to them that Dan Barker says to those who come and say that to him. | |
| And I'm like, if I wasn't a Christian, nobody was. | |
| I mean, I was raised by theologians. | |
| Both of my parents met at a Christian university. | |
| They are both mastered, degreed theologians. | |
| My mother wrote a Greek New Testament study guide that is used at the college level even today. | |
| I was brought up in Christian school, raised in church. | |
| I was a spokesperson for Youth for Christ. | |
| In Oklahoma for a couple of years, I was a broadcaster. | |
| I was on the radio for a dozen years hosting a morning show in Christian radio. | |
| We played contemporary Christian music and shows like Focus on the Family with Dr. | |
| James Dobson, all these heavy hitter Christian names, you know, and I found a real security in it when I was younger. | |
| I really felt like I know something that other people don't. | |
| It's up to me to get the message out. | |
| It was missional. | |
| I felt like I had a purpose. | |
| I felt emboldened. | |
| And it's funny because when I began to hit my mid-twenties, I started to have more and more of a difficult time reconciling the facts and the science and my own senses with what I had been taught as a child, you know? | |
| And I began to... | |
| Sorry to interrupt, but what was the thin edge of the wedge? | |
| Because that, to me, it's almost like, you know, atheism is like a vampire. | |
| It doesn't come in unless you invite it, you know? | |
| I mean, that may not be the best metaphor. | |
| It sucks the blood of irrationality out of your soul or something, but... | |
| But that thin edge of the wedge, because a lot of people who are religious will will that away or will consider that a sin, something to be, it's a temptation from the devil or something. | |
| What was that? Do you remember that first thin edge of the wedge that just began to sort of insert itself in your faith and begin to widen it out? | |
| Well, there were probably two or three major things. | |
| I see. | |
| The first thing was, is that being involved in Christian music and being behind the scenes, it became apparent to me that the artists that I was playing on the radio, these people that I had just idolized, you know, I mean, I remember growing up having their cassettes, you know, albums, for those I remember growing up having their cassettes, you know, albums, for those of you under the age of 15 Don't worry, for our younger listeners, I will subtitle what that actually means. | |
| It's somewhere between eight tracks and an iPod. | |
| Strange magic. | |
| You know, don't try to understand it. | |
| But I began meeting these people behind the scenes, my heroes. | |
| And I began realizing that their lives were just as screwed up as everybody else's. | |
| I mean, many people were battling alcoholism. | |
| Several had had affairs and lost their career over it. | |
| But the instance that really lit the fire in me was regarding an artist whose name that only people who follow Christian music would probably know. | |
| And he's huge in Christian music. | |
| His name was Rich Mullins. | |
| And he wrote a song that's very popular called, Our God is an Awesome God. | |
| And he was just near deified in Christian circles. | |
| And I remember distinctly the day that I got the word that Rich Mullins had been killed horribly in a car accident. | |
| He had been in a Jeep with his buddy and fellow songwriter. | |
| And the Jeep had flipped over. | |
| Rich Mullins was thrown from the Jeep, and he was hit, as I understand it, by a semi-truck. | |
| I mean, just a horrible, brutal death. | |
| That's a closed casket, yeah. | |
| And that night, we went on the air, and we put a big picture of Rich on our Christian Radio website, and we said the words... | |
| Welcome home, Rich. | |
| As if God had called him home. | |
| We were saying words of comfort, but I'll tell you, the whole time I was on the air that night, this is the mid-1990s, I was thinking to myself, this was God's master plan? | |
| This was God's... | |
| God had his finger on the button. | |
| Let's tip Rich Mullins' Jeep over and have him horribly mauled to death by a semi-truck and a nation in mourning. | |
| And this just, to me, seems like chance, like there's no God involvement whatsoever. | |
| And it was that night that I began to feel that seed grow in my psyche. | |
| And it just got louder and louder over time. | |
| Right, right. | |
| And then probably after the events of 9-11, I remember I was on the air when it happened. | |
| I was doing Christian radio, and I was working for a Clear Channel radio station, and everybody came into my studio because I was the Christian. | |
| And they all were in tears and horrified about the attacks of 9-11, and they asked me to pray for them. | |
| And I remember the futility of the words that had come out of my mouth during that prayer. | |
| You know, the whole time I was thinking, How did God allow this to happen to begin with? | |
| How is this part of God's master plan? | |
| And I began to just start questioning everything after that day, and it came to critical mass a couple of years ago for me. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Now, a lot of Christians, and not just Christians, but other religious denominations, have that magical fairy spell called free will, right? | |
| Which is supposed to explain away evil, right? | |
| Like, God knows everything that's going to happen, but still somehow you have free will, and therefore God is not responsible for the negative choices that you make. | |
| Clearly that particular... | |
| Argument didn't exactly take, although I'm sure that you heard it quite a bit and were very aware of it. | |
| Do you know what about that didn't fit right for you? | |
| I used to make the argument, you know? | |
| Sure, I bet you did. No doubt. | |
| Motherhood's a theologian, I'm sure you did. | |
| Now, you can't expect God to do everything for us, you know? | |
| I mean, Satan is the Lord of this earth, and we're going to have to get through these physical lives so that we can achieve our heavenly reward. | |
| I mean, we used to chant this stuff like a mantra, you know? | |
| I think it was a way to sort of opt out of having to think about it. | |
| But in my own mind, I started to think about the relationship that a real parent has with his or her child. | |
| And I think about my own mother. | |
| I know what she looks like. | |
| I know what she sounds like. | |
| I know what she feels like. | |
| I know what she smells like. | |
| I know her. I know her personality traits. | |
| I know what she believes. | |
| I know that there's nothing in this world she wouldn't do to keep me from harm. | |
| And I think, how much more important is the relationship that I am supposed to have with my divine parent? | |
| He says I'm the most important creature in the universe to him, and yet his number one defining characteristic is Non-involvement, non-participation, invisibility. | |
| He's not even going to let me know what he looks like. | |
| He's going to keep us all guessing. | |
| And part of me thought, you know, if God decides his number one characteristic is not to be involved in my life in a tangible, provable way, well, then he probably isn't God at all. | |
| He's probably a figment of my imagination. | |
| And even if he was God, He's not acting like a true parent of mine, or someone who truly loves me. | |
| It sounds to me like he's off doing something else, and so should I. That's how I got a Christian. | |
| I think that makes good sense, and I think the argument that has always had some resonance with me is that people say, well, God doesn't like to get involved. | |
| It's like, well, God certainly, according to the Bible, God is all about involvement, because we would have no idea what the Christian God was like. | |
| If he wasn't involved, if he wasn't intervening, if he wasn't lighting people up, if he wasn't giving commandments, if he wasn't parting seas. | |
| And so if God was never involved, we would actually have no organized religion. | |
| So the fact that God is only involved when it's not verifiable In terms of history and hearsay and so on, and the more verifiable it becomes, like the double-blind experiments with regards to prayer that have proven the inefficacy of prayer, the more you test it, the less involved he becomes. | |
| It certainly puts the other side of the coin in terms of his prior involvement into some skepticism, to say the least. | |
| I did a video a couple of years ago called A House Divided, and it spoke specifically about Protestant denominations and how they couldn't agree on The basics of their own belief. | |
| How do I baptize? Do you sprinkle or do you immerse? | |
| Is hell a real place? | |
| Is it fiery pit? Is it eternal? | |
| Is it temporary? Is it mere separation from God? | |
| Is there a purgatory? Is sickness the devil? | |
| Or are we simply, are we supposed to be healed? | |
| Does God want us poor? Does he want us prosperous? | |
| I mean, if you go into any church and ask them the fundamentals of their doctrine and then you walk two blocks down the way and ask the next church, there's going to be disagreement. | |
| And I think to myself, what parent or leader or divine omnipotent God would allow all of this confusion to take place? | |
| You know, they said God's not the author of confusion. | |
| Can we think of any book more confusing than the Bible right now? | |
| It seems to me He would, of all people, of all beings, would want to pull back the curtain and solve the mystery and be clear about what He wanted and what we are supposed to do. | |
| Well, and I think you're right between the denominations, and I'm sure you're perfectly aware that even within any particular church, if you take any pew and you go up and down the 20-yard people sitting there, each person is going to give you a slightly different answer. | |
| People talk about Christianity or Islam or Judaism as if these are coherent and unified beliefs. | |
| Physicists all believe in the scientific method, although they may have different quirks and idiosyncrasies, they all believe in the scientific method. | |
| But I've never met a Christian who believes exactly what another Christian believes because it's so open to personal interpretation and cherry-picking that even to use the word Christianity I find to be somewhat misleading. | |
| And if you think about God's method for communicating, I mean, my 90-year-old grandmother could email her direct wishes in mere seconds all the way around the world, you know, in the year 2010. | |
| And yet God's method for communication is a Bronze Age document with unprovable authors in a language no one understands, subjectively translated, often inaccurately or in a contradictory way, over thousands of years, I think if this is God's best shot, we might want to shop around for a more competent God. | |
| Or at least one who's wired up. | |
| Somebody who's on the internet and can communicate in real time anyway, yeah. | |
| Right, that's the fastest chatroom typist I think I've ever seen. | |
| And even when I close my eyes, the chatroom conversation continues. | |
| Now that, I would convert for. | |
| Indeed. Now, what, I mean, you are by far the most, I mean, barring spontaneous stigmata and actually walking on waters, you certainly are the most Christian to the least Christian that I've ever experienced. | |
| I mean, I'm a strong atheist, and I was raised religious, but I was never, of course, in depth in the way that you were. | |
| What has happened to your social beliefs? | |
| Well, you know, I really sat quietly on the information for a while, and I tried to slowly introduce these questions to my family, especially my parents. | |
| I mean, imagine, You know, they are true believers. | |
| You know, they honeymooned in the Holy Lands, for Pete's sake. | |
| You know, they have bookshelves lined with theology. | |
| I mean, this is what my mother and father have written sermons for pastors all around the area. | |
| They're the real thing. | |
| Imagine their son coming to them and saying, I no longer believe what you believe. | |
| I tried to tread lightly for a while by simply posing questions. | |
| Mom, Dad, I have some concerns and questions about this. | |
| And I did it for two reasons. | |
| One, because I honestly don't want to hurt my family. | |
| I want to live truthfully, but my goal is not to harm or break the heart of my parents. | |
| Secondly, I thought maybe they might have some great answers. | |
| I thought maybe they can help me make sense of this. | |
| And honestly, what they gave me in return was either using the Bible to prove the Bible, which a lot of Christians will do. | |
| They quote Scripture, but they don't actually prove the Scripture. | |
| They just quote it as if it is already approved. | |
| And secondly, I began to see them say, well, you know, that's a great question. | |
| I don't have the answer for that. | |
| You're just going to have to have faith. | |
| So when my study to parents weren't able to go there, that's when I felt like I might be on to something, you know, when I began to get hungry and go a lot deeper. | |
| And I began to get a lot bolder. | |
| And honestly, the fallout has been very, very significant. | |
| There's a wound that my parents, they pray for me daily. | |
| They pray for my eternal soul. | |
| They consider this fight an eternal one. | |
| My siblings are praying for me at this very moment. | |
| I have had people who've removed me from their circle of friends, not because they're bad people, but because they don't know what to do with an atheist. | |
| In their mind, the stereotype is someone who's rudderless and immoral and hellbound and a bad influence. | |
| In their mind, atheism is this poison. | |
| It's a poison that one drops poisons the whole well. | |
| And over the course of a couple of years, I have found out who my friends really are, who can love me through disagreement. | |
| And my parents and I have come to a kind of uneasy peace where we simply don't talk about religion unless we absolutely have to. | |
| We just don't bring it up and try to celebrate the things we do have in common. | |
| But I will say it is the elephant in the room. | |
| I mean, you just don't go to Thanksgiving dinner And you're the only atheist in the whole house. | |
| And everybody knows it. | |
| Everybody there is praying for your immortal soul. | |
| It just sort of lingers in the air. | |
| You know, it's like a haze. | |
| Well, plus they cook the regular food for the Christians, and then they have to whip up a nice baby salad for you to eat as an atheist. | |
| So that's inconvenient in the kitchen, of course. | |
| Plus, you've got to go and find the babies on eBay. | |
| It's a challenge. I used to think the same way. | |
| I used to think that atheists all just barbecued live puppies between orgies. | |
| That's just what they do. | |
| They're... And the truth is, is that having integrated myself into a circle of atheists, thanks to the internet and my website and the website of others, there are a lot of great people doing even better work than I am, for sure. | |
| I have just realized there are a lot of wonderful, moral, hardworking, loving, caring, compassionate, productive people on this planet who did not accept the concept of God. | |
| What an idea! | |
| And it's been a tremendous education for me, because I had to move past my own stereotypes of what an atheist was. | |
| And I really did want to express just very, very deep sympathy for the familial and social challenges and difficulties that you face. | |
| This is something that is very underestimated, I think, by people who haven't made That journey towards a greater rationality is that it really does cause a lot of problems in your relationships. | |
| And social conformity is a very powerful drive in all of us. | |
| And as you say, going against parental instructions and approval is very hard. | |
| You obviously had a career in the field and you had friends and business associates and so on, producers. | |
| And fans. So for you, I mean, it really is like watching a Mastodon trying to get out of a tar pit. | |
| There's so much that is adhering you to your existence. | |
| I just wanted to say, huge sympathy and huge admiration because I think people who have not gone through that or who have maybe parents who are agnostics or mildly Christian and it's not a big deal, but I really, really did want to just extend great sympathy and admiration for that. | |
| It's a huge, huge challenge. | |
| And if people haven't done it, Then they really, I think, have a tough time appreciating just what a tightrope walk it is. | |
| Well, I've lived a very good life, and I've been very fortunate in my life, my career, and my friends and family. | |
| And despite the casualties there, I would say to anyone who is going through the same thing or who is who is wondering how they can breach this topic with their loved ones, that there will be a fallout and there will be heartbreak and there will be tears and there will be a loss. | |
| I mean, there will be grieving. | |
| There will be it will disrupt the landscape of your life like you never imagined. | |
| But when the dust settles for me, there has been no substitute, nothing more gratifying than living truthfully, than not waking up and saying, saying, I have to take this whole God thing and live it today and shove it into the cookie cutter and try to walk the walk and try to take the nonsensical and make it make sense. | |
| But to be able to wake up and say today, whether it's hard or easy, whether it's a tough road or an easy one, whether it's uphill or downhill, I'm going to live truthfully. | |
| To have that liberation in my life, I wouldn't trade it for anything, for anyone, anywhere. | |
| And that's the encouragement I would give to someone else. | |
| Testify, brother. All we can say is give that man an amen. | |
| I will pass it as well, if you love me. | |
| I wanted to ask just very, very briefly what I experienced with letting go of God. | |
| Was a very interesting feeling for me, and I just wanted to ask if you'd experienced it, whether it's more particular to my experience. | |
| When I was a believer in God, I never felt that I had any real privacy. | |
| Because, you know, the biggest eyeballs in the universe were staring straight down my spine all the time. | |
| It was real. I never felt alone. | |
| I never felt that I had any real privacy. | |
| Once I let go of the idea of deities that were omniscient and could see everything and so on, I really felt that my thoughts began to become more my own and I really felt that I had a kind of privacy that was almost like if you have somebody really intrusive in your life, it's really tough to get anything done because they're always, you know, tipping things over and raising their voice and so on. | |
| I felt that the absence of a God set up a kind of boundary around my mind that I had privacy, I had things that I could share. | |
| Did you experience any of that with letting go of somebody or some entity that knew your every thought, both past, present and future? | |
| Did you feel that there was sort of a delicious kind of privacy? | |
| You were no longer living in an open field, but you actually had a house of your own? | |
| Well, you know, Christopher Hitchens said it so well when he spoke about how the God of the Bible can convict you of thought crime. | |
| He can punish you or judge you for what you think. | |
| And I think in the arena of ideas, you have to be able to... | |
| We've all thought of saying or doing something we would never do in real life. | |
| That's what makes us civilized, is we have inhibitors that keep us, behavioral inhibitors that cause us to do moral things instead of just going crazy. | |
| But we've all had those moments where we're in a dark place in our mind. | |
| And I don't know that I ever felt... | |
| I don't know that being an atheist, I feel a tremendous sense of freedom from that, but I do recall that when I especially was a child, I would worry about every thought. | |
| I would worry about every sin. | |
| And I would say a prayer into my breath. | |
| Please, Lord Jesus, please forgive me for all my sins. | |
| I'm so sorry. And I found myself apologizing all the time. | |
| And that's a prison. | |
| I never realized that it seemed normal at the time. | |
| I was trying to cleanse my plate. | |
| God, forgive me. Wipe the slate clean, please. | |
| I'm going to start fresh today. | |
| And I think what I was doing is I was really in bondage. | |
| Because I was worried about even what thoughts were crossing my mind. | |
| And, you know, I understand your point there, and I think to a degree I have lived it, yes. | |
| Do you think that your parents... | |
| And this is a delicate question, and of course you can answer or not answer anything that you like, but... | |
| Go ahead. You were saying that you feel that you appreciate living the truth, not having to... | |
| I wouldn't say fake it, but something like that. | |
| that. | |
| I can't think of exactly the right phrase. | |
| That's accurate. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Do you think that your parents are faking it? | |
| And if you don't want to talk about your parents, you can talk about other people. | |
| Why are they able to believe something that, I mean, is obviously not true for anybody who's really researched it objectively? | |
| And even if you believe that there's something out there, the idea that it's specifically Christian, and I mean, that that's all just gets so specific as to be nonsensical, and everybody understands, I'm sure your parents do too, if they grew up in a Zoroastrian household, they'd be Zoroastrian. | |
| If they grew up in an Islamic household, they'd be Muslim, and so on. | |
| So it's very specific, even if you believe that there's something out there to go Christian. | |
| How do you think that they're able to sustain this, when once you pop out the other side, it all does seem rather ludicrous? | |
| You know, I've had this conversation with myself many times. | |
| I think I've phrased it in my mind the same way. | |
| How do these intelligent, degreed professionals Except the Creation Museum with a saddle on the triteratops. | |
| You know, triteratops. | |
| How do these people... | |
| I mean, that's a Happy Meal toy. | |
| How did they get from being really book smart and life smart in most instances to accepting a creation story where the Earth is 6,000 years old that involves a garden, two naked people, and a talking snake? | |
| How did they get there? | |
| And I began to wonder if, on some level, it's generational. | |
| They're both in their mid-70s, and it speaks to comfort and security. | |
| For them, life has a mission. | |
| And they would rather live a life that is missional. | |
| They have a purpose, a divine purpose. | |
| They're called. They're champions for God. | |
| And when they die, they're going to go to a wonderful place. | |
| And I think that's comforting for them. | |
| It gives them a sense of life purpose and comfort regarding death. | |
| On some level, when you meet people who are really studied and degreed theologically, they've done a lot of school, they've gone to seminary, they've been behind the pulpit in a pastoral role, I think sometimes their education and the time they spent learning all of this biblical knowledge works against them because they've invested so much of their time and their life and their money and their resources into being this studied theologian. | |
| That they're in too deep to get out now. | |
| They'd be undoing literally decades of work and tens of thousands of tuition dollars and life spent. | |
| And to be in that deep, to just throw it all out with the bathwater, I think is unthinkable to many. | |
| I think my parents may be there. | |
| They're really smart people. | |
| And I think they're just into the theology so deep that they would rather stay there. | |
| Then have to reject what they've spent so much of their life doing. | |
| Right, right. I mean, I think economically it's called the fallacy of sunk costs. | |
| If you spend two hours waiting for a bus, you sure as heck hate to start walking because you've just spent two hours waiting. | |
| Now, not to be overly nitpicky, but both of those arguments could, I think, not quite equally but significantly apply to you as well. | |
| I mean, obviously there's great comfort in you with a missional life and all of that larger purpose and raining down on you and guiding you. | |
| And, of course, you had a huge amount invested in your career. | |
| I mean, you had more transferable skills than a mere theologian, because you could do media without the Christianity stuff. | |
| But I think both of those arguments could apply to you. | |
| I was just wondering if you have anything in your back pocket that you're still working on as far as the difference, because I think that difference is a really fascinating thing, how some people are able to sustain fantasies and other people aren't. | |
| I find those two arguments, I think they're true, but I'm not sure how they're not pretty true for you as well. | |
| You know, when Dan Barker was speaking about how he had come out as an atheist, and it was very difficult for his family, but then his parents eventually became atheists as well, I think it is very possible for some people who are in later stages in life or who are very deep into theology to come to a moment of critical mass and say goodbye to a former belief system. | |
| And I don't know what the difference is. | |
| My parents, you know, it could be a pride issue. | |
| It could be anything. I know that they're We're good to go. | |
| All day, every day. | |
| Anyone who's seen my videos or website at The Thinking Atheist knows I love a good laugh and I love to turn that screw whenever I can. | |
| But I try to stay away from specific people when it comes to mockery unless they really have it coming. | |
| Because most people are just, I think they just want to live a good life. | |
| They inherited the faith of their parents, probably. | |
| They want to be moral. | |
| They want to be good parents to their kids, and this is how they know to do it. | |
| Go to church. Preach the Bible. | |
| Most people who live a Christian life do so casually. | |
| I think it's fire insurance. | |
| They're not on mission trips. | |
| They just want to avoid hell and help their grandkids do the same. | |
| But as far as, I think generationally, it's easier to reach younger people who are more, maybe more ready to think outside the box, outside of the box their parents have put them in. | |
| You know, I really don't have an answer, a cut and dry answer to that question. | |
| What sets me off from them, I really don't know. | |
| I don't either. That's why I thought you might be able to. | |
| I'm worthless. | |
| Honestly, I think it took me 10 years quietly to get there. | |
| It's just such a difficult thing for someone to do. | |
| I felt scared. | |
| When I questioned God, I thought, the stakes couldn't be higher. | |
| If I'm wrong, I am tortured in hell forever. | |
| It will never end. | |
| I will experience the worst, most unimaginable agony, separation from God. | |
| I mean, these are the types of things I would think to myself. | |
| And of course, for your parents, if you are an unbeliever, they won't get joined together with you for eternity in heaven. | |
| So you're vanishing forever into the pit. | |
| I mean, people who aren't religious do not understand how high stakes the game really is. | |
| And I think you're just pointing it out beautifully there that it's incredibly high stakes. | |
| Yeah, and what they do, they do out of love. | |
| I believe it is misguided, but I think they do it because they love me. | |
| Sometimes they love me to death, and I would like them to just, you know, let's talk about sports or the weather, please. | |
| I think a lot of people who are religious-minded feel the need to fix you whenever you're in their zip code. | |
| They just have to bring God up. | |
| And I think that's a challenge for those of us who just want to live real life and enjoy each other's company without having to go there every time we meet. | |
| Right. Yeah, well, I genuinely believe that human intimacy is not possible when we're lodged in fantasy. | |
| We can only really meet each other in reason and reality, but that's perhaps a topic for another time. | |
| Well, I had someone ask me, what good am I doing? | |
| It's a young lady who had seen the website and seen some of my videos. | |
| And she, in her mind, believes that there is a God somewhere. | |
| When she sees complexity and beauty, it's all about, there must be a designer. | |
| And that's about as far as she's gone with it. | |
| But I mean, in her mind, she's a feeler and that's how she feels. | |
| And she asked me, what are you really doing for people? | |
| What benefit are you in their lives? | |
| You're causing them doubt. You're causing them worry. | |
| You're causing them to question. | |
| You're a doomsayer. | |
| You're a naysayer. And I thought to myself, I'm not blowing sunshine at people, but I'm asking people to evaluate and question themselves and me because I think a truthful life, even if it's a harder life, is much more worth living. | |
| Well, I agree with you, and there are, I think, some very significant and practical consequences that come out of letting go of fantasy and the innate authority that is in fantasy. | |
| Since there is no God, you're really only listening to people I was, indeed. For how long? | |
| Well, I was raised Protestant, which is, I guess, Anglican. | |
| I don't know. There's some debate about whether that's Protestant or not. | |
| It's, you know, it's like Catholic light. | |
| It's atheism with a nice Sunday suit, or agnosticism with a nice Sunday suit. | |
| But I was raised, I was in the children's choir. | |
| I went to church a couple of times a week when I was younger, and I certainly fell out of it before puberty, for sure. | |
| I just... I really felt like I was lifting... | |
| It was like trying to lift a heavy weight at all times. | |
| Like walking around lifting 30 pounds of barbells above your head. | |
| I got mentally cramped. | |
| I got exhausted. And I just put them down to see how it felt. | |
| I just thought, let's just see if I don't believe. | |
| I'm young. So I can always get back on the bus. | |
| It's not going to go too fast that I can't get back on the bus. | |
| I thought, let me just try putting these weights down. | |
| Let me just try living through my senses and through my mind rather than through my imagination and through my obedience. | |
| I thought, let me just try. | |
| And the moment I put it down, if you've carried a heavy weight for a while, you feel like you're walking on air. | |
| You feel like you can jump up onto the top of a tree. | |
| I really felt that. | |
| And I guess I was a bit of a hedonist that way, in that I really felt something that feels that much of a relief, something that feels that positive, Just can't be a bad thing. | |
| And so I thought, well, I can always catch up with the bus later. | |
| You know, the bus of religion. I'm still so young, but I'm not going to get hit by another bus. | |
| I'm not risking hell when I'm eight. | |
| So I thought, let me just go a little longer, a little longer. | |
| And it was like there was this thread between me and the bus of religion. | |
| And I just let it go longer and thought, well, I'm really enjoying thinking and reasoning and having this privacy. | |
| My thoughts are my own. I don't have to judge everything I'm doing. | |
| I don't have to judge other people and everything that they're doing. | |
| And And I'm not involved in this blood-soaked cosmic drama of eternity. | |
| And eventually there was just like this little bing! | |
| And that thread just broke and I just watched that bus go away. | |
| And I was like, you know, I'm just not on the bus. | |
| I'm not thinking about the bus. | |
| I'm not aiming for the bus. And since then, I've certainly, of course, vastly improved my knowledge of these things. | |
| But for me, it was just about putting down those barbells of fantasy and maintaining things which just made no sense. | |
| It was such a relief that I just did it a little longer, a little longer, and then it was done. | |
| I can relate to that. I was 38 when I did it, as opposed to a kid, but that's exactly right. | |
| I think that's a great analogy. | |
| I felt like I was lifting a weight, and I was weary from it, and I finally felt the courage to set it down and breathe normally and live normally. | |
| When I was a kid, we used to My parents would warn us of the books and writings and TV shows that had to do with Carl Sagan and many of the popular biologists and evolutionary biologists at the time. | |
| And it's funny because as an atheist, I've seen Carl Sagan's work in a fresh light and I think it's beautiful. | |
| It's brilliant. I interviewed a YouTuber named Aaron Raw a while back, and he said something profound. | |
| He said that throughout our ages, superstition has always come up with some explanation for where the sun, the moon, and the stars came from, and how the earth came around, and any flood, any natural disaster. | |
| There was always a supernatural explanation. | |
| But when science unlocked the mystery, And we discovered the real reasons behind these things. | |
| The scientific answer was always better. | |
| And if there's something out there we don't know that now we're superstitious about, I'll bet when science unlocks that mystery for us and we discover what's really happening, the scientific answer will be magnitudes better than any superstition we've ever had. | |
| I think that's very true, and it has struck me on occasion that when men, many men are younger, they have this fantasy about the kind of woman that they want to be with, you know, and she's You know, hot and sexy and exciting and all of that kind of stuff. | |
| And we have this kind of fantasy of what kind of partner we want to have in our life. | |
| And then, you know, hopefully when we grow up, we become more realistic and we become more healthy and we don't pursue these destructive fantasies and idealizations, but we actually begin to connect with a real woman or a real man and settle down and build a life together. | |
| To me, science is like the woman you want to raise your kids, and religion is like the sort of hot and dangerous fantasy of a younger man, as far as that goes. | |
| I think it's something that we need to outgrow. | |
| There's nothing better than a great spouse in your life, and the sort of playboy fantasies that people have, these idealizations, which is to some degree what religion is. | |
| They have their certain excitements, but they're just never a substitute for what is in reality. | |
| I would completely agree. | |
| And when you look at the Bible objectively, and you look at it after having been inside the faith for so long, I feel a little bit ridiculous that I used to believe a document that spoke about 900-year-old men and talking donkeys and, you know, boats built by 600-year-old men that had penguins that walked 8,000 miles to the desert of the Middle East aboard. | |
| And all of these nonsensical, crazy things that are in Scripture that I used to say, absolute truth! | |
| And now I look back and I look at it through the liberating prism of science, and I have to sort of chuckle at myself. | |
| Yeah, it's like, shouldn't this be a pop-up book? | |
| I mean, there's nothing wrong with this sort of stuff for kids. | |
| You know, and Noah's Ark, when I was growing up, was a happy story. | |
| When they told it to us as kids, animals are two by two, and there's a dove with an olive branch, and God saved humanity. | |
| And of course, when you go back and look at it through the eyes of an adult, you're talking about mass murder, you know, the murder of the drowning of infants, and And animals, and you're talking about incest, and oh, it's just an absolutely atrocious story, and that's true with a whole bunch of content in the Bible. | |
| They teach it to you in morsel form when you're young. | |
| When you're older, and read it objectively, if you have any morality about you at all, you should be absolutely horrified. | |
| Yeah, I remember we had the King James Bible, of course, and it had these little pictures, which I guess were more designed for kids, although they seemed sort of classically painted. | |
| And there was the picture of Noah's ark on the water, and I remember asking in Sunday school once, I said, but isn't everyone else underwater? | |
| Which, I mean, it haunted me. | |
| It haunted me. All these bodies rolling around in the deep. | |
| I just thought, oh my God, babies bumping up against their cribs and the water. | |
| It's like, oh, it horrified me. | |
| And yeah, it was not... | |
| Of course, you get these embarrassed evasions. | |
| You know, people can't... You just can't talk about that. | |
| And that always raised my suspicions as kids, you know. | |
| Well, they Change the rules for God. | |
| Now, they'll say, God doesn't exist by our rules. | |
| You're putting God in a box. | |
| You're making God exist according to man's laws of physics. | |
| God can do whatever he wants. | |
| Now, given those sets of rules, they can have God do anything. | |
| They can have God subjectively fit any scenario. | |
| And part of me thinks if God designed the laws of physics, he would certainly want to make sense within them, I would think. | |
| Well, let alone the laws of morality, this is the other thing too. | |
| It says, thou shalt not kill, but God lays waste to most of the planet in the Old Testament repeatedly. | |
| And so this is the question I had, was that, well, if thou shalt not kill is virtuous, and God does quite the opposite, then how, why would we even think that God is good? | |
| God is describing himself as the most immoral entity in the universe. | |
| And then people would say, well, the rules change for God. | |
| It's like, but then how do we know that he's, then the terms good and evil don't even apply. | |
| How do we know that we worship him for good or anything? | |
| But once you crack that ice, it's like the whole city just goes into the water. | |
| And the equivocation begins. | |
| Either they say, well, you need to pay attention to the New Testament. | |
| There's the happy book. | |
| Just ignore the Old Testament. | |
| And of course, if you read the book of Matthew, it says he came to confirm the law. | |
| He came to validate the Old Testament. | |
| He says, yeah, he is not rejecting one iota of the Old Law. | |
| And he has come to fulfill it. | |
| Jesus has his aggressions even. | |
| Why cast the demons into the pigs? | |
| You could just cast them into the rocks. | |
| You don't have to drive the pigs off a cliff. | |
| Anyway, I mean, that's sort of nitpicking, but there's still things that you and I, I think, with a perfect standard of virtue would hold even Jesus up to— He would hold His feet to the fire about certain of His choices. | |
| And I think people need to not be afraid to look at— I mean, think about it. | |
| I actually ask someone, if God came to you and told you to plunge a knife into the heart of your child, into your firstborn, you know, is the Abraham story— Would you do it? | |
| And he looked right at me and he said, absolutely not. | |
| There's just no way. I would rather be judged by God than I will not harm my child. | |
| Well, the reason he said that is because he's moral and because the request of God was immoral. | |
| And I think we have to be able to read these biblical stories and not be afraid to say, no, that's wrong. | |
| That's immoral. That's unjust. | |
| It's not the kind of God, even if He did exist, I would ever want to follow or emulate or worship. | |
| Which, of course, is true of the story of Job, which is a story of pathological insecurity and vengeance, right? | |
| Where the devil says to God, Job only loves you because he's rich, and it's like, blows away all his wealth, but he only loves you because he's healthy, and he puts boils all over him and just reduces him to a quivering, mucked-up medieval wreck. | |
| This is what really insecure people do with everyone that they love, is they continue to torture them until they no longer love them. | |
| And they say, aha, I knew you never loved me. | |
| I mean, this is the portrait of pathology, not of the highest ideal of virtue. | |
| Well, I would agree. And I think, honestly, the people I have met who have rejected the notion of God, whether it's the Christian God or another God, another superstition out there, are some of the kindest, most moral people I know. | |
| I mean, they'd take a bullet for you. | |
| They are the kind of people who you could easily give your absolute trust. | |
| I think morality exists and often flourishes well outside of the boundaries of religion. | |
| And I think that's, you know, to be fair as well, that it's certainly true that some Christians can be absolutely wonderful people. | |
| It's just that the parts of the Bible they focus on are the parts that reflect and reinforce their good natures. | |
| And so that's great. | |
| You know, if you look in that mirror, then it shines back your virtue even brighter. | |
| The problem is, of course, is that people who are vengeful or malevolent or hypocritical or evil in other ways, We'll then look at the Bible and have other things reflected back. | |
| It's almost like it's a massive amplifier for whatever your innate tendencies are, which produces some great virtues. | |
| And there's no doubt that Christians do some wonderful, other religious people do wonderful things around the world. | |
| Unfortunately, it amplifies evil as greatly, sometimes it seems, more so than it does amplify good. | |
| And I think we just need to turn the volume down on both so that we can have a more sensible discussion about the challenges of virtue in a secular world. | |
| And understand whatever actions are taking place, be it good or evil, they are being perpetrated by the hands of people. | |
| It's not God feeding the hungry in third world countries. | |
| It is the hands of men, women, and children who are on these mission trips, who are doing good work. | |
| I know they're doing it because they say they are the hands and feet of God. | |
| But the truth is, God never showed up. | |
| God's not a part of this equation. | |
| The actions that are being taken there and the good that's being done are being done by man for man. | |
| And that's the difference. And I wish, I would wish for the people who are missionaries and who do good works in the third world, what I would wish for them, Seth, is almost that they cast aside the false humility of extrapolating their own virtues to a non-existent being and actually take genuine pride for what they themselves are doing to help people. | |
| And I don't mean, you know, become vain or anything because that's not actually what happens. | |
| I mean, atheism is really around humility. | |
| It's around what is true rather than what do I prefer. | |
| But I almost wish that they would just look in the mirror and say, I did some real good today. | |
| I can go to bed very proud, very satisfied. | |
| It's almost like they pass it along to their imaginary friend. | |
| All the goodies that they get, which they should get, I think, out of a genuine moral pride, they pass it along to other people. | |
| I think that's a real shame. I think that if your virtues accrue to you, I think there's almost more motivation to be virtuous. | |
| If your sins accrue to you, but your virtues accrue to somebody else, it seems like a very negative proposition. | |
| You know, I hadn't thought of it in that way, but I totally agree. | |
| I think that if they could have that warm feeling of accomplishment in their hearts, knowing that the world is a better place today because of what they did, and because of what their community had done, as opposed to projecting that onto an invisible Father figure out there in outer space, I think it would be a liberating thing for them. | |
| You know, I've come to the conclusion in my life that I don't need an afterlife to have a wonderful life here. | |
| And many people say, if you're an atheist, what do you have to live for? | |
| Your life has no meaning. | |
| It has no amber. | |
| You're just taking up air. | |
| You might as well put a gun into your head, you know? | |
| And I say, I vehemently disagree with that. | |
| I don't need an afterlife. | |
| I don't need to feel like I'm at the pearly gates singing praises for eternity in a large mansion with streets of gold and harps and angels and clouds and happy sunshine all the time. | |
| I don't need all of that to have a good, fulfilled, constructive, meaningful life now on this earth. | |
| I'm here for a short period, a blip in the grand scheme of things, and I'm going to make the absolute most of it because this is the only life I have. | |
| That's, I think, beautifully put. | |
| And I was just sort of reminded my daughter is 19 months old and a song came on the radio that she liked and she just leapt off the couch and began dancing around. | |
| And she has no idea about anything to do with religion or original sin or Jesus died for her or anything like that. | |
| And she is a joyful and affectionate and happy person. | |
| I don't think that you could ever explain to her what meaning in her life is missing when she's flailing her beautiful little limbs around to a song that she absolutely loves. | |
| I mean, in that moment, what would anybody say to her is missing from her life? | |
| And I think that we can achieve and sustain that kind of joy. | |
| But really, we can only achieve and sustain it through the intimacy that we can get through connecting in reality, through integrity, through courage in the face of error. | |
| That, I think, is where we gain the happiness. | |
| The purpose of life is not meaning, but happiness. | |
| And that's where we can get that stuff. | |
| I always find that surrendering myself to a fairy tale and inevitably to the subjugation of other people who are much less informed about reality than I am 2,000 or 5,000 years ago, Surrendering myself to fantasy and to other people does not give me meaning. | |
| It gives me the illusion of meaning and I think that is really dangerous for people because it does enslave them to fantasies and to other people and I think you can see that certainly in some of the people that you grew up with who've continued down that path. | |
| I know I've seen that. There is a real downside You know, we always talk about Pascal's wager, you know, like, well, you might go to hell, but that's true. | |
| But you may enslave yourself to a very dangerous fantasy, live an emptier and less integrated and less intimate life because of that. | |
| And I've never seen any hell, but I sure have seen the living hell of addiction to fantasy. | |
| And I really, really wanted to encourage other people who are listening to this to think about steering clear of that. | |
| There is a downside to religiosity if it's not true. | |
| And I think there's every reason to believe that it's not. | |
| And if you come to the point where you're on the fence, maybe religion or your relationship or whatever, however you package it, gives you comfort. | |
| If you were at a point where you think, I shouldn't be asking these questions, I have guilt, I have fear, I'm ostracized, I can't tell anybody I'm thinking these thoughts, just understand at this moment right off the bat that you are not the first to go through this. | |
| Trust me, there are pastors who have gone through it. | |
| I read a book by Charles Templeton, was a former associate of Billy Graham, was one of Candidate's biggest evangelists, and he came to that very point of critical mass where he couldn't take it anymore, and he just wanted to live a truthful life. | |
| And he rejected the idea of God, wrote several books on the subject, and took his stand. | |
| Just understand that no God worth worshiping or loving would ever punish you for asking why. | |
| For asking what? For asking for truth? | |
| For asking for proof? God would be big enough to survive all of that. | |
| So understand it's okay to begin asking those questions. | |
| It's okay to begin doing the homework. | |
| And for Pete's sake, above all, if you're a Christian anyway, read your Bible. | |
| That's probably the first step to understanding that you may be living A non-truth. | |
| You may... And cover to cover. | |
| No skipping. No flipping about. | |
| No... Right? Cover to cover. | |
| I've done that and there's no better cure for it. | |
| Reading my Bible was one of the first... | |
| I used to cherry-pick scripture. | |
| We memorized the scriptures at one at a time. | |
| Cherry-picked happy scriptures. | |
| It was reading the Bible objectively as an adult for the first time that sent me on my way. | |
| And that's an encouragement I would give to anybody. | |
| Read your Bible and see what happens. | |
| Well, Seth, I wanted to really, really thank you for your time. | |
| It was a very, very enjoyable conversation. | |
| I also wanted to extend my admiration for the work that you're doing and the work that you have done and the immense... | |
| You had a heavier load to drop than I did, and that sounds easier, but it is, in fact, much, much harder. | |
| So thank you so much for taking the time. | |
| It's been therapeutic. Producing these videos and doing this has sort of been an outlet. | |
| It's been like basket weaving for me, I guess, or music or whatever else other hobby would give you joy. | |
| This has given me joy to be able to have this as an outlet, and it's helped me connect with a community online that I just wouldn't trade for the world. | |
| You're very kind to have me today, and I sure appreciate it. | |
| Thank you. All right. Take care. |