An e-mail of the week for Christmas 2010 from Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web -- http://www.freedomainradio.com
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux with email of the week. | |
| Sorry I haven't done this for a while. | |
| I've been a little swamped. | |
| This is a great email, which is a question that I get quite a lot, so I wanted to deal with it in one central conversation. | |
| Hi, Steph. | |
| Hi back. I am a freedom fighter, and I really enjoy most of what you have to say. | |
| The only issue I have is that you seem to paint Christianity, Judaism, etc. | |
| with a broad brush. | |
| I agree with you that organized religion can be used for vicious purposes. | |
| However, it can also be a source for great good and freedom. | |
| Are you sure you're not creating a straw man of religious faith and spirituality? | |
| What about Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Mother Teresa? | |
| Surely they derived at least a good portion of their quest for justice and compassion from their faith. | |
| What about the great theology and creative lives of people like Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Merton, or Francis of Assisi, or Matthew Fox? | |
| Are you sure you aren't painting here with a broad brush or throwing the baby out with the dirty bathwater? | |
| Just something to consider and I thank God every day that there are people out there struggling with and sharing their belief in freedom like yourself. | |
| Now this is a common issue and a question that I get a lot so I want to sort of go completely on the record and tell people where I'm coming from. | |
| First of all, there's no counter-argument to my arguments against the existence of gods in this email. | |
| And this is something that I keep an eye out. | |
| You know, if you're going to criticize my arguments, I absolutely welcome it. | |
| I make no claim to be right by virtue of who I am, by virtue of my education, by virtue of my history, by virtue of my 30 years in philosophy. | |
| I make no claim to be right for any of those reasons. | |
| I make claim to be correct Because my arguments are rational and empirical and researched and hopefully hang together in a reasonably pleasing way. | |
| So if you have an issue with an argument that I've put forward, then you need to tell me where I'm wrong. | |
| So people who say, Steph, you know nothing about philosophy. | |
| Maybe so! I think that's a good place to start, but that has no bearing on any argument that I put forward. | |
| So if you want to disprove an argument or tell me that I'm wrong, fantastic! | |
| Then tell me where I've made the logical error, tell me where my facts are incorrect, and I will do my very best to correct them moving forward. | |
| I make no claim to be correct on any of those levels. | |
| This fine gentleman is not Telling me any way in which my rational arguments against the existence of gods are false. | |
| What he's saying is interesting because most times, and I impugn no malicious intent to this fellow, but most times when people criticize you, what they're doing is they're describing exactly the logical flaws That they're making. | |
| So if somebody tells you that you're strawmanning 99 times out of 100, that is exactly what they're doing. | |
| People say to me, Steph, you know nothing about the history of philosophy. | |
| You know nothing about philosophy. | |
| You're wrong on every level. | |
| Well, that's a mere assertion. | |
| And anybody who knows anything about philosophy knows that assertions are bullshit. | |
| Assertions are a confession of intellectual incapacity. | |
| And I don't engage with people who make assertions because it's sort of embarrassing. | |
| It's silly. You know, if I'm an expert to javelin thrower, right? | |
| And some guy comes up with no arms and says, your javelin throwing sucks. | |
| I can throw a javelin way better than you can. | |
| What can you say to such a person? | |
| I mean, can you say, look, you have no arms. | |
| You can't actually throw a javelin. | |
| I don't even know what to say. | |
| If I'm in a boxing ring, I think I'm a fairly good boxer, and some girl guide comes in with her arms tied behind her back and says, I'm going to take you down, baldy. | |
| I don't put on my gloves and go to work. | |
| You can't have a game with anybody who doesn't have any idea what the rules are. | |
| If you're playing chess and somebody says, breaker niner niner, what we really need here is an airstrike, calling in an airstrike, then they're clearly not very familiar with the rules of chess and you may want to vacate the premises as quickly as possible before said airstrike comes in. | |
| You can only play the game called philosophy with people who have some understanding of the rules. | |
| So I don't engage with people who are wantonly irrational, who simply make assertions without any content, because they have no idea what the rules are, so you can't play. | |
| What you'd need to do is sit down and educate them about what philosophy actually is, which is arguments from first principles with reference to empirical evidence, and of course conforming to rationality. | |
| People get disappointed and say, aren't you going to respond to this guy? | |
| Aren't you going to respond to this critic? | |
| I genuinely can't respond to critics who aren't making any rational arguments. | |
| I'm not going to pretend that they're making rational arguments. | |
| I also know from experience that if you tell people who make very strong assertions that they have no idea what they're talking about, All that happens is they get really enraged and they get trolley. | |
| So what's the point of that? | |
| When somebody confesses complete intellectual impotence and you point that out, they don't thank you for that. | |
| They feel humiliated and they escalate. | |
| I don't mind particularly conflicts. | |
| But for me, conflict has to have some end. | |
| It has to have some purpose. | |
| I'll have debates with people, I'll have conflicts with people, but only if there's going to be some end that we can get to. | |
| I don't just sit there and pick the scabs of other people's empty souls for fun shits, giggles, and entertainment. | |
| So again, I'm not putting this guy entirely into this category, but what he's telling me is that he's concerned that I'm strawmanning Christianity. | |
| But this is a strawman argument that he's making. | |
| Because what he's saying is... | |
| You could take issue with the examples that Mother Teresa hung around with fascists, that Martin Luther King Jr. | |
| was a socialist and a fornicator, and it seems very likely had plagiarized his PhD, went to orgies. | |
| It's not the most noble and upright. | |
| You don't want to mistake the public appearance for the actual virtue. | |
| Gandhi ushered in an age of medieval socialism after the British left in the post-war period and handed that down to Nehru and created divisions and problems within the country that India is only recovering from now. | |
| So there are lots of issues. | |
| Mother Teresa hung around with fascists and was a big fan of fascists. | |
| I visited Cuba, was a big fan of socialism, so you could have significant moral issues with the people quoted. | |
| But let's brush all that aside and let's pretend that they did good works, that they were good people who did good works. | |
| Well, I've certainly never argued that Christianity, an acceptance of Christianity, or a faith in the existence of the Christian God, or gods, since there's more than one, That this means that somebody cannot act in a virtuous manner. | |
| I've never ever said that to have religious beliefs means that you're automatically evil or immoral or amoral in every conceivable situation. | |
| Christians give money to the poor. | |
| Christians can be very charitable. | |
| Christians do good works. | |
| Christians get involved with teaching illiterate people to read. | |
| There are Christians in the third world helping to build dams and bridges, and Christians are doing lots of great things in the world. | |
| And without a doubt, some of those good things are driven by their faith. | |
| Somebody says to me, Steph, you're strawmanning, or I think you're strawmanning. | |
| The first thing that I look for is their strawman. | |
| This is just the basic psychological process called projection, where you take the bad parts of yourself, you project them onto somebody else, and then you attack them. | |
| It comes from like the old scapegoating thing, like the old tribal habit of taking all of the evils of the tribe and putting them in the goat and then driving the goat out into the desert, or killing it, thinking that you're getting rid of that. | |
| I'm not saying this guy's evil, but projection. | |
| So the first thing I look for is projection. | |
| And lo and behold, we have it here. | |
| Sorry, I put that down. Let's have a look at this in a little bit more detail. | |
| Organized religion can be used for vicious purposes. | |
| A philosopher has nothing to say about that. | |
| It's like saying, well a knife can be used to cut your bread or it can be used to cut someone's throat. | |
| What does philosophy say about the knife? | |
| Well philosophy says nothing about the knife. | |
| So, the fact that religion can be used for ill or religion can be used for good is irrelevant. | |
| The only thing that's relevant from philosophy is, are the propositions put forward by religion true or false? | |
| That is the only thing that philosophy cares about. | |
| How it's used is completely irrelevant. | |
| It's sort of like saying, giving someone examples without arguments is wrong. | |
| Well, no. I mean, I'm teaching my daughter things about the world. | |
| She can't understand conceptual arguments as yet. | |
| There's nothing wrong with that. | |
| It all depends on the context. | |
| So what I will say is this. | |
| There was a When I did a Free Talk Live hosted a debate, which I thought was very courageous and great of them, on agnosticism, which we went at for three hours, and there was a woman who came up to me afterwards who said, you may not be a believer, Steph, but my God loves you. | |
| And I was very hesitant to accept that as a positive. | |
| The reason for that Well, it's great that your imaginary friend likes me. | |
| I guess that means that you like me, but you can't say it directly. | |
| And I think that's relatively nice. | |
| But the problem is, if I accept that your imaginary friend likes me, what am I going to say to the next guy who says my imaginary friend hates you and wants you to go to hell forever? | |
| I simply can't accept the reality of imaginary friends. | |
| So, imaginary friends that like me or dislike me really doesn't matter. | |
| People say, well, God motivates me to do a lot of good works. | |
| Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. | |
| It doesn't even have the slightest impact on philosophy, what the effects of your beliefs are. | |
| Hitler was a Nazi. | |
| Hitler was a vegetarian. | |
| There are lots of people who say being a vegetarian is good versus being a carnivore, and nobody would, I think, say that the road to vegetarianism is Nazism. | |
| It doesn't matter what the effects of your beliefs are. | |
| The only thing that matters is are your beliefs true or false. | |
| Are they supported by reason and evidence, or do reason and evidence Destroy them. | |
| Whether it makes people do good things, or whether it makes people do bad things, or whether it makes people do somersaults, or whether it makes people get tattoos, or wear marlots on their head, it really doesn't matter at all. | |
| The effects of a belief are completely irrelevant. | |
| The only thing that matters is the philosophical truth or falsehood of those beliefs. | |
| And the philosophical truth is that religion is superstition. | |
| People can get mad at me. | |
| I'm simply the messenger. | |
| I'm simply telling you what thousands of rational thinkers, if not millions, have told you before. | |
| There is no such thing as one god or many gods. | |
| They don't exist. | |
| And I know these are mere assertions, but I've got the arguments going back years and years, so if you want to delve into them, go ahead. | |
| But the only thing that matters from a philosophical standpoint is what is true and what is false. | |
| I would love it if people who were religious were able to find virtue without The punishment and reward system. | |
| I don't think that there's a huge amount of virtue in punishment and reward. | |
| So, for instance, if somebody puts a gun to my head and says, give 10% of your income to the poor, I don't consider that a virtuous act. | |
| I don't consider bribery to be the source of virtue. | |
| So if somebody says to me, if you give money to the poor, I'm going to upgrade you to a penthouse apartment in the sky with clouds and harps and angels and so on, I don't consider that to be virtuous. | |
| So if it is because of the desire of reward or for reward from God that people are acting virtuously, I do not consider that to be innately virtuous. | |
| If people are acting in a virtuous manner because they want to get into heaven, then they're being bribed to be good. | |
| I don't consider that innately virtuous. | |
| If people avoid or refrain from evil actions simply because they're afraid of going to hell, I don't consider that avoidance anything to do with virtue. | |
| Anything to do with virtue at all. | |
| The only thing that has to do with virtue is a rational acceptance of true universal moral values and a commitment to living by them, not because you're going to be punished, not because you're going to be rewarded, not for social acceptance, but simply because it is a calm, peaceful, rational acceptance of that which is true. | |
| And an acceptance that reason equals virtue equals happiness. | |
| That is a simple Socratic equation that I have been promulgating these many years. | |
| Reason equals virtue equals happiness. | |
| You could say, well, happiness is a reward and so on, but certainly philosophy does not guarantee happiness. | |
| The philosophical truth, you have cancer, which is an empirically testable statement, does not lead one to great joy and happiness. | |
| So, for those people who are religious, the problem is that the beliefs are simply not true. | |
| And I really accept the biblical parable that if you build your house on sand, it is not good. | |
| If you build your house on rock, it is good. | |
| The rock is philosophy. | |
| The rock is reason. | |
| The rock is evidence. | |
| Everything that flows From truth, reason and evidence is good. | |
| Everything which is in the opposite way does not contain the good in the same way. | |
| You can be accidentally good, you can be consistently good out of fear and punishment and reward, but that is not the virtue that comes from within. | |
| That is the virtue that you are, is inflicted and aggressed against from without. | |
| The last thing that I will say is that I am of course a huge, huge, huge proponent of virtuous and peaceful parenting. | |
| I don't have the right to inflict my conclusions on my daughter. | |
| This is a very, very important thing to understand. | |
| I don't have the right to inflict my conclusions on my daughter. | |
| So I'm an atheist, or I accept atheism as a philosopher. | |
| I accept anarchism as a philosopher. | |
| It's the only valid application of the non-aggression principle, the only logically consistent way that society can exist in a virtuous way. | |
| I accept these conclusions. | |
| I am not an anarchist. | |
| I am not an atheist. | |
| I accept these things as rational, as true, as valid, as empirically verified. | |
| And even though I know that these things are true and correct, I don't have the right to inflict atheism. | |
| I don't have the right to inflict anarchism. | |
| I don't have the right to inflict universally preferable behavior, my theory of ethics on my daughter, although she has actually, at the age of two, grasped it, which is an incredible thing. | |
| There's a podcast on that in the early 1800s if you want to see. | |
| The only thing that I can responsibly, productively and morally do as a parent is to teach my daughter how to think, is to teach my daughter how to critically think, how to reason, how to compare statements, how to work through the logical evaluation of propositions. | |
| That's all I can do. I cannot rationally teach or productively teach my conclusions. | |
| Like if you're a math teacher, there's no point teaching a kid with no context and understanding to repeat the phrase 9 times 9 is 81. | |
| There's no point getting a kid to memorize E equals mc squared. | |
| Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. | |
| Because you've taught them nothing. | |
| You've taught them simply to repeat sounds or diagrams. | |
| You need to teach. If you're going to teach math, if you're going to teach physics, you need to start from first principles and you need to teach the child how to think. | |
| How to think critically, how to evaluate evidence and arguments and propositions. | |
| In its very essence, religion is the infliction of a conclusion. | |
| A very culturally specific conclusion. | |
| called God created the universe, God inspired the Bible, Moses was X, Jehovah is Y, there was no light, and then there was light, and Adam and Eve, and the rib, and the original sin, and the Jesus, and the walking on the water, and the running the pigs off the cliff, which doesn't seem to be a very good thing. | |
| All of these things are conclusions. | |
| They are not arguments. | |
| And because arguments reject and refute these conclusions, you must inevitably, as a parent who is religious and who wishes to indoctrinate his or her children in religion, you must teach conclusions and not reasoning. | |
| You must teach your religion and not other religions. | |
| You must teach your child that something is true despite every shred of reason and evidence against it. | |
| You must say, well here's how we know that Santa Claus is not true and real, but it's completely different for Jesus. | |
| Because you are teaching or inflicting conclusions and must studiously and specifically avoid the rational evaluation of those conclusions, you must inevitably substitute either your aggression and authority or the aggression and authority of an imaginary being called God on and to your children. | |
| It's absolutely inevitable. | |
| I've never met anybody who was religious who didn't go through this process because if you teach your child how to reason from first principles with reference to evidence and logic they will never ever come to the conclusion that your God out of the ten thousand gods is utterly true and all the others are completely false Because reason leads in the complete opposite direction. | |
| So my position that religiosity is fundamentally child abuse is because it is the aggressive infliction of empty and bigoted conclusions upon the minds of children. | |
| And you don't have the right. | |
| You do not have the right as a parent to inflict your bigotries and preferences and faith on your children. | |
| You simply don't have that right. | |
| You don't own their minds. | |
| You don't have the right to inflict your superstitions on your children any more than you have the right to brand them. | |
| Or to bind their feet. | |
| It is hurtful to a child's mind to receive aggressive or socially conspiratorial conclusions as truth rather than to be taught how to reason critically and think for himself or herself. | |
| It is bad for the child's mind. | |
| It creates a fearful, fear-based, socially paranoid hole in the center of the child's mind that will lead that child to be open to exploitation and predation for the rest of his life. | |
| It is not good for children. | |
| It is very bad for children to teach them your religiosity, your superstitions, as if they're true. | |
| So, yeah, religious people may do good things, but if their motive is religious, if their motive is the praise or condemnation of God, then it is not an intrinsic adherence to rational values, it is not consistent, and what What religion does is it takes people's prejudices and escalates them to absolutes. | |
| So if you are into treating your children kindly, you'll find support for that in the Bible and that becomes you're following the Word of God. | |
| If you're angry and crazy and you want to hit your children, you'll find support for that in the Bible and that becomes you're following the Word of God. | |
| We understand that religion is a topography. | |
| It takes It takes the spiky three-dimensional map of human prejudices and stretches each one of those spikes up to infinity as a God-given absolute. | |
| Whatever your particular preferences are, you will and can find support for them in whatever religious text you come across. | |
| You will find that those religious texts develop in precisely those ways, that they will provide some support for everybody and their dog's crazy belief. | |
| That's how they last, right? | |
| If religion only ever said, beat your kids, then the people who don't want to beat their kids would leave those religions. | |
| So they have both. They always have both in there. | |
| That's why you have an eye for an eye versus turn the other cheek. | |
| That's why you have a tooth for a tooth versus... | |
| Walk a mile. If your enemy asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles. | |
| If you ask for your cloak, give him your shirt as well. | |
| Because religion has to have every moral commandment in it in order to attach and escalate people's original prejudices. | |
| And that's what's so dangerous about it. | |
| So yeah, people who are good will find support for that goodness in religion. | |
| But so what? I mean, whatever strengthens both good and evil can't be innately good. | |
| And certainly evil people are strengthened by religion. | |
| And that is the fundamental issue that I have with it. | |
| So people who are good say, yeah, religion supports my goodness. | |
| Well, that's great. But if all religion ever does, which is all it ever does, is turn everybody's prejudices up to the divine eleven, then it is not doing good in the world. | |
| It is simply taking people's prior prejudices and escalating them to absolutes. | |
| Not healthy. Not good. |