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Sept. 30, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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1757 Freedomain Radio - E-Mails of the Week, September 30, 2010

Thanks to all my very kind donators! What I love about Christians, how not to start an argument, and why atheism has nothing to do with communism or fascism!

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom and Radio.
	Hope you're doing very well. Here we are out in the beautiful outdoors at a conservation area, very close to where I live.
	This is emails of the week, September the 30th, 2010.
	Number one, first of all, I would like to thank you for Freedom Aid Radio and the positive impact it has had upon my life.
	To use your metaphor from practical anarchy, I have completed my journey across the desert and I am a happy resident of the village of truth.
	Actually, I have been wandering in the desert for some time.
	As a strong atheist with a love of freedom, I felt for years that I could not find A home.
	Many of the atheist cities were strongly statist.
	The conservative cities had a great message of the free market, but never talked about the nature of money.
	They were warmongers and heavily religious.
	For a while, I felt like I'd found a home and left the desert for a libertarian city, but the religiosity always bothered me.
	Amen to that, brother. I tried to solve this contradiction by telling myself that every group is infected with religion and that I should just ignore it.
	Then I saw you on Max Keiser's show, I watched several of your videos, and after listening to your non-fiction books, that Skyhook, I'd rather call it a very powerful crane to use Dennett's metaphor, instantly pulled me to the village that you created.
	Today I made my first donation to Free Domain Radio, and there will definitely be more donations to come.
	I'm looking forward to Achieving Anarchy.
	That's the book in a big way, and I hope that you're able to release it soon.
	Well, thank you everybody so much who really stepped up and sent some donations to Free Domain Radio.
	Based on my last show.
	I think it's important, and I'll tell you why.
	I mean, there are obviously reasons that I prefer to get more donations.
	I'm going to invest the money that was sent to me in a proper lighting setup so that I don't look like an undead anarchist zombie, which would be a good name for a band.
	Stay on target. Anyway, I'm going to get some proper lighting, so thank you so much for those donations, although it's pretty nice being out here until I get mauled by a dog or a bear or a wolf.
	We'll see all. So...
	It is really important, you know, over 90% of communication is non-verbal.
	In other words, to change the world, it doesn't matter what you say.
	It really only matters what you do.
	So if you're a voluntarist, or an anarchist, or even a libertarian who believes, say, that education should be privatized, well, people say, well, how will the poor be educated in a free society?
	And you say, well, don't worry, people will step up and charitably help to educate the poor in a free society.
	There will be kindness, there will be generosity, there will be all the beautiful milk Of human nature that will flow into the mental mouths of the poor to feed them the nutrients of education.
	Wow, what a worked out metaphor.
	Anyway, so if you say that, right, so let's say that you think that Free Domain Radio is a great educational resource.
	I certainly think so, and if you think so too, if you're watching this, and this is my 500 and God knows what video, Then the question is, have you supported whatever educational institution you think is really good for spreading philosophy or truth or libertarianism or anarchism or whatever, atheism? If you think that this show is the best, then you should donate, right?
	Because It will give you the ring of authority in making the case, right?
	So if you've actually donated to an educational institution that is really out there helping people get educated who otherwise couldn't afford to, and for sure this is the case with this show, Then when you say to people, don't worry, the poor will be taken care of in a free society, if you haven't actually donated, you simply won't have that ring of authenticity and people will hear your words, but they won't feel them and they won't believe you.
	So if you believe that volunteerism and donations and charity will help the poor, then help them out.
	Do it, because that will give you authority.
	In a way that you simply can't replicate unless you do it in your debates.
	So that's what I'm offering to you as a result.
	So I just wanted to say thank you so much to this very kind and passionate gentleman or lady.
	It is a beautiful, beautiful letter.
	I get so many amazing letters that move me so much.
	So, hi, I'm a listener of yours, and I could use your help and advice, since I have run into this debate on the internet.
	I also know that you're a very busy man, too busy to help, blah, blah, blah.
	The whole debate started when we were discussing about a blog text that mentioned green left-wing intellectuals, and this fellow asked me to define it.
	I tried to be a bit funny and replied as followed.
	Quote, green left-wing intellectuals are a parasitic cult that has infected every layer of society.
	The cult is very dangerous, hence it will suffocate the objective thinking of fellow men.
	And, shockingly, this debate didn't go well.
	Just grab my coffee here.
	And I sort of understand the humor of that, but I think it's not necessarily the best approach to do that kind of stuff in a debate.
	Look, if you're arguing within the paradigm, then you already have a whole bunch of definitions that people already accept, right?
	If you're arguing within the status paradigm, within the religious paradigm, within the collectivist paradigm, within the nationalist paradigm, within the army as staunch defenders of our liberties paradigm, the police as the thin blue line against violent chaos and so on.
	If you're arguing within the existing paradigm, then you have...
	A full set of mythological terms that you can use, right?
	So if you say, I support the troops.
	I may oppose the war, but I support the troops.
	The moment you say, I support the troops, a huge wave of propaganda flows through people's minds and veins, and they're kind of on board with you because they're swimming with the current of statist nonsense.
	If you're going to go against The general current of society.
	It's really, really, really important that you start off by defining your terms, that you start off by making the arguments, that you start off by accepting and understanding that the person is going to have a challenge hearing what it is that you have to say.
	Slow and steady wins the race.
	Be a tortoise. Be a tortoise, not a hare, and that will make all the difference in the world.
	Alright, so yeah, if you're going to oppose, say, something like environmentalism, then you need to define your terms.
	Fundamentally, nobody opposes environmentalism.
	The only thing that rational people and moral people oppose is the initiation of the use of force.
	It finds its expression.
	In many, many different areas.
	But it's very, very important to work from opposition to the use of force, get acceptance of the opposition to the use of force, and then, and only then, work to show how statist environmentalism is subject to the initiation of use of force and therefore is immoral by definition.
	It's a whole series of dominoes that need to go down.
	Don't start with the last one or it'll just blow up in your face.
	So somebody has said...
	You keep pushing the point that religion is all a myth, and of course you have a lot of points.
	But what is so contrary to religion about voluntarism?
	I would suggest that the church in many aspects would be a great ally.
	There's the idea that all life has values, that people have rights, man is fallible and not perfectible, and most importantly that the ends don't justify the means.
	Even the Old Testament has a direct warning against central government.
	1 Samuel 8 We're good to go.
	Which one poses a greater threat, the Salvation Army or the American Army?
	I think it's the latter.
	Those are all excellent points.
	Now, this argument seems to have taken root like some sort of stubborn infection, that communism was somehow defined by atheism.
	No, communism was not defined by atheism.
	Communism was defined by totalitarianism, by statism.
	Communism... Did not believe in Zeus.
	And therefore, to say, well, anybody who doesn't believe in Zeus is a proponent of mass starvation and genocide and totalitarianism, and so anybody who doesn't believe in Set or Baal or any of the Norse gods or who is not waiting with bated breath for Ragnarok, you know...
	If I don't believe in the Sarastrian deity, that doesn't mean that you can't reason from that that I therefore support the slaughter of the kulaks in the 1920s in Russia.
	I don't believe in leprechauns.
	What can you extract from my non-belief in leprechauns about my views on genocide?
	Well, you can't extract anything.
	You can't extract anything.
	You don't know why I reject leprechauns.
	Maybe I reject leprechauns because I was beaten by a big bag full of leprechauns when I was a child and therefore I have an aversion to leprechauns.
	You don't know if it's a recent argument or not.
	The atheism that was embedded in totalitarian dictatorships, or that was a sort of theoretical characteristic in some of the books that led up to those totalitarian regimes, it has nothing to do.
	A rejection of God has nothing to do with one's final political perspectives or viewpoints.
	I would hope that a rational rejection of the existence of God leads you to a rational evaluation of science, of the world, of morality, of politics, and so on.
	I would hope so. But, I mean, there certainly is no guarantee that that is going to be the case.
	Sorry, planes are flying a little low today.
	The other thing that's true as well is if you look at the societies that communists took over, and we'll just take two, or the communists and fascists took over, and the two that spring to mind, of course, is Soviet Russia 1917 and Germany in the early 1930s with the National Socialists, right, the Nazis. Well, Russia was the most Christian country in the neighborhood.
	It was an incredibly Christian country, and it was taken over relatively easily by communists, very much against the theory of Marx.
	The theory of Marx was that a society had to go through capitalism before it could embrace communism, and that you could not go from feudalism to communism, which is essentially what happened in Soviet Russia.
	The fact that an irrational ideology called communism displaced and then took over an irrational ideology called Christianity in Russia is very, very important.
	Germany was by far the most religious country in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
	They completely or almost largely missed out on the Enlightenment because of the Hundred Years' War.
	And Germany, of course, has been a hotbed of religious violence ever since Luther nailed the thesis to the church door in Wittenberg.
	So, the fact that these poisonous, demonic, secular, totalitarian ideologies, and Nazism, in fact, was not secular.
	Hitler was a Christian, and the Pope was very happy to accommodate and praise Nazism.
	So, Christianity was heavily embedded within Nazism.
	Christianity was not embedded within communism, but these ideologies took root in an anti-rational society, in the anti-rationality of German mysticism and medieval and feudalistic.
	The ways of looking at the world, ways of raising children in particular, and religiosity.
	And communism also took over in Russia.
	So it's not whether these ideologies were atheistic.
	The question is, what was the nature of the society that took them over?
	The societies that proved most resistant to communism were those that had gone through the Enlightenment, where there was separation of church and state, where there was increasing and growing secularization within society.
	And the 19th century was an incredible leap forward in secularization.
	Religion was really on the outs in the 19th century.
	And fortunately for the religious people and unfortunately for everybody else, it staged a considerable comeback in the 20th century.
	But I think it's really, really important to look at this myth that somehow atheism through communism produced the deaths of millions is complete nonsense.
	It's complete nonsense. Atheism cannot be used to predict one's political beliefs and also the countries that were the most susceptible to the virus of communism, fascism and totalitarianism were specifically those societies that were the most religious to begin with because the individual sovereignty of reason and evidence and individualism had not taken root.
	And so it was the religiosity that paved the way to totalitarianism, empirically.
	So I think that's really important.
	Now, as to why not join forces with the religious people who, you know, there's a lot that I like about Christians.
	There really is a lot that I like about Christians.
	I think the Christians are very good at introspecting in a way that many secularists are not, because Christians pray to a God.
	I don't believe in a God, but certainly you can ask questions of yourself through meditation and through dream analysis and so on.
	The unconscious has been calculated as having 7,000 times the processing power of the conscious mind.
	The unconscious picks up and notices things far before the conscious mind can reason them out.
	So we do have a virtual omniscience within us called the unconscious.
	And it's very important that you know yourself, you explore yourself, you examine yourself so that you can figure out What's going on in your unconscious and harness the amazing power of your whole brain in order to navigate your way through life, particularly if you're taking countercultural stances or arguments such as philosophers do.
	So, when Christians pray to God, they're asking questions if they're unconscious, and very often they will get a kind of answer, a feeling or instinct or a dream or intuition, which helps guide them and gives them a great deal of strength that many secularists who don't recognize the power of the unconscious and who sit in the mere conscious mind, which has amazing power and fantastic abilities, but...
	It's more like a laser.
	It can burn through concrete, but it is the unconscious that provides the general sunlight that we use to navigate the world.
	You would not want to drive a car by waving around a laser in the same way that you would not want to cut through a steel door using sunlight.
	So the two work hand in hand, but I really do respect the pseudo-introspection of...
	Christians and other religious people, the prayer, I think, has some great value.
	I hugely, hugely, hugely respect the fact that Christians are willing to be embarrassed for their beliefs.
	I get people knocking on my door for Jehovah's Witnesses, here you by the Watchman, and come join Jesus, and so on.
	I mean, that takes some balls. How many people are going to go up and down the street and flog philosophy and knock on the door and, you know, give some free domain radio books or other books of philosophy that you find of value and sit down and talk to people about philosophy?
	Never seen it happen, right?
	So religious people, they get that you need to invest time, money, and energy to help swell your belief.
	Secular people really don't.
	They rely on a few people to just go pounding away, like myself and others, but they don't actually get down and really get behind their beliefs in a very, very powerful way.
	Christians do. So, you know, kudos to them.
	They've won because they're more committed.
	They've won because they're more generous.
	They've won because they really get behind their beliefs in a way that secular people really don't.
	So I wanted to point that out.
	There's a lot that I really like about Christians.
	But unfortunately, I'm not here to achieve an end.
	I am not here to achieve an end.
	My life, my thoughts, my brain, my willpower, my abilities are not here to serve an end.
	They are here to be in the moment.
	They are here to examine truth, to pursue truth, to live with integrity, to do what I consider to be courageous, not to achieve an end.
	And so, If I want to go uptown 20 blocks and there happens to be a Christian driving a cab, I will get in and let the Christian drive me because my goal is to go 20 blocks.
	But that's not my goal as a human being.
	My goal is not to achieve some end because that is to say I'm now going to defer my happiness until I achieve that end.
	And I'm simply not going to do that.
	I'm not going to defer my happiness Until the world is free or until the world is rational or until people are more generous or until secularists get how much they need to get behind their beliefs and really take them seriously and act in the real world.
	I'm simply not going to do that.
	My happiness is in the moment.
	My happiness is the savage and beautiful and deep and righteous joy that I find in the pursuit and expostulation of truth.
	That is what I achieve in the moment.
	There's nothing that I would rather be doing right now than sitting on this log and talking to you about philosophy.
	So I'm not going to join with people who have some commonalities of ends because that is to say that the ends are more important than the means.
	The ends are not more important than the means.
	There is no such thing as ends.
	There is only the moment.
	There is only what is happening now.
	There is only the integrity that I can bring to now.
	And if I forego the integrity for now in order to join forces with people who I fundamentally disagree with, in order to achieve some nebulous end, all I have done is given up the integrity of now for the sake of a goal which can't be achieved if you give up On the integrity of now.
	So you simply need to avoid compromising with fundamental values.
	Fundamental values, empiricism, reason, and evidence, all of those fundamentally destroy even the very concept of God as a valid entity.
	It's not personal. I would love it if there were God.
	I think it would be very fascinating and interesting.
	I think it would be a pretty exciting, if somewhat crazed world, if we lived inside the mind of a deity, but we don't.
	We live in the...
	Real world. There's no ghostly figures walking on water behind me.
	There is only the real.
	And God is not real.
	And so to join forces when you are an empiricist and a rationalist and a philosopher with people who are superstitious and anti-rational and bigoted in their approach to truth.
	Faith is bigotry with icing on it.
	I mean, that's all it is, right?
	And it only looks sane Because craziness in the support of tradition looks like moderation and sanity, but only because tradition is such a large weight and momentum.
	So I'm not going to join forces with religious people.

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