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Dec. 3, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2053 A Critique of Atheism

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, analyzes a recent article critical of atheism. http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming7.1.1.html Freedomain Radio isthe largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Debate Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	So, let's do an article, shall we?
	They seem to be relatively popular in the deconstruction thereof.
	Not read it yet, but it was recommended to me.
	This is called Animated Versions on Atheism by David Deming, or Deming.
	And he writes, Atheism is all the rage.
	Like Platonism in Renaissance Italy, it has become a lovely intellectual fashion embraced by all the snobs.
	Oh boy.
	I bet there's a rhetorical device called framing, which is where you put as many ad hominems into your opening argument in order to drive away the intelligent and skeptical and appeal to the biased and ridiculous and immature.
	Anyway, this is a perfect example.
	He writes on, especially obnoxious is something called the new atheism, which seeks to draw God under the umbrella of science.
	Prominent among the new atheists is biologist Richard Dawkins.
	Dawkins has proclaimed that God does not exist and that theism is a delusion.
	And sorry, by the by, that's actually not true.
	Dawkins says that it's extremely unlikely that God exists.
	He's not proclaimed that God does not exist.
	The Oxford English Dictionary defines atheism as, quote, one who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God.
	End quote. Atheism is distinct from agnosticism.
	The agnostic professes no belief in God, but does not deny the possibility of God's existence.
	The dictionary is of less help when it comes to defining God.
	God may be an entity, quote, the creator and ruler of the universe, or an impersonal principle, quote, the supreme or ultimate reality.
	There are as many definitions of God as there are religions.
	Actually, that's not quite true.
	There are actually many more definitions of God than there are religions, because some religions have hundreds or even thousands of gods.
	Cicero tells us that the opinions of men on this subject are various and different.
	For the purpose of this essay, I follow Almsum of Canterbury, 1033-1109 AD, in defining God as a being, a reality, or an abstract spiritual principle, of, quote, which nothing greater can be conceived.
	As a transcendent spiritual reality, God by its very definition must be beyond human comprehension, although not entirely beyond human apprehension.
	I am aware, for example, of the existence of many fields of higher study in mathematics and physics that I barely comprehend.
	I do not have to fully understand these subjects to be aware that they exist.
	Well, except, of course, that math and physics, I mean, the first rule is logical coherence, logical consistency, and secondly, of course, when you apply mathematics to something like engineering or physics to something like engineering, empirical validation and verification.
	And even within the fields of physics, there is empirical verification and validation is key.
	So, tying theology to mathematics and physics is really trying to mix oil and water, where the oil doesn't exist.
	Anyway. He goes on to say, Yeah,
	I don't... I mean... There's black and white and there's shades of grey.
	And lighter and darker grey.
	I understand that. But, of course, saying that nothing can be known for certain is one of the most boring, yawning, eye-rolling contradictions of philosophy, and anyone who states it without exploring this is a sophist.
	Sorry. I mean, anybody who states that nothing can be known for certain without dealing with the logical problem, the logical impossibility of that statement being true, nothing can be known for certain.
	I am certain that nothing can be known for certain.
	Anybody who doesn't deal with that contradiction up front but merely states it and moves on is philosophically pilfering your pocket.
	But maybe he will talk about it more.
	Let's find out. There is nothing new about either monotheism or atheism.
	Monotheism may have been known in Egypt and Babylonia as early as 1500 BC. The first of the Greek philosophers to reject polytheism and propose a type of monotheism was reportedly Xenophanes, 570-475 BC. Empedocles, 492-432 BC, described God as, quote, only mind, sacred and ineffable mind, flashing through the whole universe with swift thoughts.
	Yeah, because you really want to take the ancient Greek perceptions of the whole universe, before the telescope, before the heliocentric model of the universe, before atoms, well, Lucretius, but before any real theory of atoms.
	For Aristotle 384-322 BC, quote, the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality.
	It bothers me. I mean, look, Greek philosophers were geniuses and amazing people, but we can't quote Greek philosophers as true because they were Greek philosophers.
	Aristotle said, I miss this argument from authority that means nothing.
	I mean, we would not go to Hippocrates for the sum total of our medical knowledge now in the present, because there's been quite a lot of advancement since then.
	There are scattered reports of atheists among the ancient Greeks.
	Methodological naturalism arose among the pre-Socratic Ionians and Hippocratic physicians in the 5th and 6th centuries BC. Epicureans were atomists and materialists who rejected teleology in nature.
	Epicurus professed a belief in the gods, but his deities were abstract spiritual beings that never interacted with or took interest in the affairs of human beings.
	It is just inference to conclude that antiquity helped many atheists who nursed their convictions in secret to avoid prosecution for impiety.
	I don't know that it's inference.
	There were many, many trials throughout human history of impiety and the most horrendous punishments drawn and quartered, burned at the stake and so on for possessing a lack of belief in the gods.
	I mean, one example that may not be easy to forget is Socrates, of course, who was...
	Convicted of corrupting the youth, and partly corrupting the youth through arguing against the gods believed in by the political and religious leaders at the time.
	So... I mean, you could really make the argument that Jesus himself was convicted of a kind of impiety, because Jesus...
	It contradicted many of the moral rules and opposed many of the moral rules in the Old Testament, which is a form of impiety.
	I mean, if God is perfect, and God is all good, and God is all-knowing, God is all moral, and, you know, all that, then everything that God does must morally be great.
	And... The argument, thou shalt not kill, of course, in the Old Testament, is really reinforced by Jesus.
	Turn the other cheek to forgive is divine.
	If your enemy strikes you on one cheek, turn the other cheek to him.
	If he asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles with him.
	If he asks you for your cloak, give him your shirt as well.
	This love of the enemy is a direct opposition to the, not just moral commandments, but genocidal enactments of the Old Testament.
	And so, to propose a moral rule that contradicts the Old Testament, that turns the Old Testament from moral to immoral, from good to evil, is a form of unbelievably base impiety.
	Because it is reframing the God who is all good as an evil deity, as not a god but a demon.
	So, turn the other cheek as a moral rule, when applied to the Old Testament, turns God into a demon.
	And that is a form of astounding impiety.
	I mean, it's worse than being an atheist, right?
	To say that God does not exist is not to say that God is evil.
	To propose a moral rule that contradicts and damns the actions of God in the Old Testament is far worse in impiety than mere atheism.
	Let's keep going.
	In Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertes, 2nd century AD, informs us that Theodorus, 340-250 BC, quote, utterly discarded all previous opinions about the gods.
	In the 5th century BC, the poet Diogorus had to flee Athens to avoid prosecution on charges of atheism.
	Both Diogorus and Theodorus are also mentioned by Cicero as examples of philosophers who did not believe in the gods.
	From the scanty evidence, it is not clear if Diagoras or Theodorus were atheists in the modern sense, or merely skeptics who mocked the popular polytheistic conception of anthropomorphic gods.
	Western civilization has become increasingly more secular for the last thousand years.
	Really? I'm not really sure about that.
	I mean, I guess you could argue that, but...
	Sort of look at the religious wars.
	I think that was a time of great religious hysteria.
	The Salem witch trials and so on were, I think, increasingly religious.
	But anyway, yeah, yeah, well, maybe there's evidence.
	Okay. The process began when Christian theologians in Europe were seduced by Greek logic.
	Seduced. See, again, there's a phrase.
	It's not whether Greek logic is true or not, and calling it Greek logic is too, damn it, implicitly, right?
	You know, you could argue when Christian theologians rejected superstition in favor of rational thinking, right?
	That would be another way of putting it.
	We're seduced by Greek logic.
	It's like, you know, I don't know what kind of image he has of Greek logic.
	If it's wearing, you know, assless chaps and gripping a rose between its...
	Butt cheeks, I don't know, but it's not really a seduction, it's really an acceptance of truth and reality.
	Anyway, to go on. Alsem of Canterbury sought to construct an argument for the existence of God that was based entirely on logic.
	Anselm's approach was cemented by Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism became the predominant intellectual school in Europe for the next few centuries.
	Both Anselm and Aquinas claimed to place faith before reason, but in using reason to justify faith, they unwittingly acquiesced to the superiority of reason.
	In 1543, Copernicus's Revolutions, a technical work in astronomy, began the process of unraveling the unity of the medieval European world by removing the earth from the center of the cosmos.
	I don't know. That's interesting. Again, you've got to watch language with this kind of stuff.
	First of all, it wasn't Copernicus's book that removed Earth from the center of the cosmos.
	I mean, that was gravity and physics that did that billions of years ago.
	So, it didn't change to accurately describe the universe.
	It's not changed the universe into that which you describe.
	It wasn't like the Earth was the center of the universe and then this book came out and there was this massive cosmic shift.
	You've got to watch this kind of stuff, right?
	The unity of the medieval European world, which would be to say that there was no particular conflict in the medieval European world, which would be to say that there were no wars.
	There was no unity in the medieval European world.
	There were serfs pitted against lords.
	There were priests pitted against each other.
	There were priests pitted against kings.
	Kings pitted against nobles.
	I mean, it was a world of almost universal savagery and violence.
	There was massive, massive violence conflict.
	Just look at the lifespan of people in the medieval world.
	I mean, it was less than the Roman Empire, which itself was only 21.
	The average lifespan. Anyway.
	Many of the icons of the scientific revolution were devout Christians and fervent theists.
	Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton all viewed experimental philosophy as entirely consistent with and complementary to Christianity.
	Well... You've got to be really careful with this stuff, because, I mean, Galileo was holed up in front of the Inquisition and, you know, threatened with torture, as, of course, was Martin Luther, Luther, and there were records of literally hundreds if not thousands of scientists who were tortured, imprisoned, burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, just murdered in Han.
	So it's really tough.
	You know, it's like saying that there seemed to be quite a lot of Marxists or quite a lot of communists around under the Stalinist totalitarian regime in 1952.
	There seemed to be quite a lot of them around.
	Well, no, it's because if you weren't a communist under Stalin's Russia, you would be killed, you would be exiled, you would be thrown into work camps, you would be drugged as an insane person.
	Until there's free intellectual inquiry, it's really tough to establish the true philosophical positions of people.
	I mean, to take an extreme example, and perhaps an offensive one, but, you know, offense against an argument is just a sign of a guilty conscience.
	There seemed to be an unusual amount of obedience and deference to authority among inmates of concentration camps in the 20th century.
	Alright, let's keep going.
	But the scientific revolution replaced revelation by observation and reason.
	Consideration of final purposes was excluded from experimental philosophy.
	The epistemological revolution was completed during the 18th century enlightenment.
	Yeah, okay, so instead of making stuff up, you actually had to prove stuff, right?
	Because revelation is just...
	I thought of it. It occurred to me.
	I had a dream. I had a vision.
	I have... A brain injury, or I have problems with my neural network in my brain, and therefore I get these dilutions.
	And you can actually, by damaging the brain, or by injecting medication into the brain, or subjecting people to particular stimuli, you can produce religious visions.
	I mean, it is a brain injury.
	So he goes on. Newtonian physics explained the mechanical universe through the impersonal action of natural law.
	But scientists and philosophers still needed God to explain the origin of life.
	The proximity of God to the word explanation is mind-bending.
	God explains nothing.
	God explains less than nothing.
	God is worse than explaining nothing, because at least when you explain nothing, everyone knows you're explaining nothing.
	So if I say, Bubbles, my sock puppet, created all life, everybody knows that that is not an explanation that answers anything or explains anything, therefore they will continue to look for the source of life.
	But when you say, God created life, People think that that's some sort of explanation.
	So, if I were to break that down to its actual meaning, when you say God created life, what you're saying is some incomprehensible being containing entirely self-contradictory properties for some unknowable purpose, through some unfathomable means, created life in some way that we will never be able to understand, that can't ever be explained or observed or understood or fathomed or conceived of in any way whatsoever.
	And that's my answer.
	Null did X is not an explanation.
	All right, so...
	Newtonian physics explained the mechanical...
	Sorry. At the beginning of the 19th century, we find Richard Kirwan, the president of the Royal Irish Academy, maintaining that geology graduates into religion.
	In 1829, the Royal Society of England undertook the publication of the Bridgewater Treatises, works that were commissioned to illustrate the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.
	In 1859 Darwin published Origin of Species.
	Darwin's theory was proposed to explain the evolution of life, but was subsequently invoked to implicitly explain the origin of life.
	I'm not sure what that means. After Darwin, God was no longer necessary to answer scientific questions.
	By the end of the 19th century, God had been expelled from the sciences.
	On April 8th, 1966, Time magazine published the infamous red and black cover that posed the question, is God dead?
	The secularization of Western society was not yet complete, but was certainly substantial.
	Alright. We see, after Darwin, God was no longer necessary to answer scientific questions.
	Again, God doesn't answer any scientific questions.
	Invoking the incomprehensible does not explain the rational.
	The atheist views this historical process as the inevitable triumph of human progress.
	Science, Carl Sagan assured us, is a candle in the dark that dispels the demon-haunted world.
	Religion and theism are to be extinguished the same way that diseases of polio and smallpox were conquered.
	God is just another superstition that must be eradicated to further the march of human progress.
	Imagine, the songwriter says, a world with no religion.
	Then we will all live happily together in a peaceful, communistic utopia.
	Yes, and it is, of course, enormously tragic that...
	Trying to get rid of religion tends to produce some pretty unholy abominations.
	It's like trying to push in one side of a balloon.
	All that happens is the other side bulges out.
	What needs to be gotten rid of is irrationality, not religion, not communism, not socialism, not fame.
	What needs to be opposed is irrationality.
	And... If you drive the priestly class out of religion, they simply re-emerge in another form.
	They re-emerge as the media.
	They re-emerge as psychiatrists.
	They re-emerge as political leaders.
	And all of these fields have the same paradigms, which is an imaginary disease is invented and inflicted, particularly on the young.
	And then you pay for the rest of your life for a cure from this disease.
	In politics, the disease is called selfishness.
	In other words, without the government, all will descend into evil.
	Nobody will take care of the poor.
	Without being forced to do the right thing, everybody will inevitably do the wrong thing.
	Those very same people are allowed to vote for their political leaders, which of course makes no sense.
	I'm so evil that I don't care about the poor at all, but I'm allowed to vote for a politician who's going to take care of the poor.
	It makes no sense, right?
	So, the disease called selfishness is invented and inflicted upon children through public schools and then you have to pay politicians until the end of time to cure you of this imaginary disease called selfishness.
	In psychiatry, of course, at least according to the experts that I've read, of which I'm not one, The disease is called mental illness and you have to pay psychiatrists and drug companies to cure you of this imaginary ailment for the rest of your life.
	In religion, of course, the disease is called sin and you have to pay the priests for the rest of your life to cure you of this imaginary ailment.
	Anyway, so yeah, I mean, if you can invent diseases, then you can be paid for non-existing cures.
	It's the oldest scam in the world and...
	The other thing, I mean, in communism, right, the disease is called greed, and you have to surrender all of your property to your masters to cure you of the disease called greed and materialism for the rest of your life.
	So, yeah, so you have to really combat irrationality, not any of its particular manifestations.
	Otherwise, you're just playing whack-a-mole, and unfortunately, millions of people get destroyed every time you have to hit that mall.
	To the atheist, religion, especially the Christian religion, is the spawning ground of horrors and atrocities.
	The witch mania and the Spanish Inquisition were perpetrated under the guise of Christianity.
	Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church and papacy were dens of iniquity and hypocrisy.
	In 1501, Pope Alexander VI presided over the infamous Banquet of the Chestnuts, at which fifty naked prostitutes danced.
	After the Reformation, Men had other men burned to death over disagreements on minor and obscure points of religious doctrine.
	Oh yeah, that was brutal.
	I mean, there was a traveler in Germany, I think in the 16th century, who said he could not pass a tree that did not have at least one body hanging from it.
	And I can't remember which group attacked the Anabaptists.
	The Anabaptists believed in adult baptism, so what they did was they simply drowned them and said, go to your God that way.
	That was just murderous. And one of the reasons the separation of church and state had to be affected was the amount of violence that was being committed against Christian-on-Christian violence was so extreme because they were all trying to gain control of the state and impose their religion on everyone else that everyone said, okay, we've got to take the power of imposing religion away from the state because it's the only way we're going to stop this genocide.
	So, not only did Catholics fight with Protestants, the Protestant sects fought with each other.
	In 1553, John Calvin had Michael Servetus arrested and executed.
	Johannes Kepler was refused the Sacrament of Communion because he would not accept the doctrine of ubiquity.
	And there is much truth in the traditional view that religion and science are antagonistic systems of knowledge.
	No, there's no truth in that, actually.
	Religion is not a system of knowledge.
	Religion is not a system of knowledge.
	Because there's no external verification or test or reason or evidence that can be brought to bear against any of its doctrines.
	I mean, if religion is a system of knowledge, then my dreams at night are a system of science.
	Rational philosophy and the sciences were expelled from Islamic civilization in the 12th century by religious fundamentalists.
	I acknowledge the proceeding, but because something has been at times abused or corrupted does not convince me that it should be altogether discarded.
	Intolerance is not so much the product of religion as it is the normal human condition.
	You see, here now we have the sin that is invoked, which is why things go wrong.
	Religion, like science, can be both used and abused.
	Science tells us how to make both antibiotics and mustard gas.
	The science of chemistry informs the manufacture of explosives.
	Explosive chemicals can be fruitfully applied in mining and civil engineering, but they can also be used to murder.
	Science is inherently amoral.
	Perhaps we object more strenuously when religion is abused because religion has pretensions to moral authority.
	Well, it's interesting because mustard gas was produced by governments.
	not science. I mean, obviously science was involved.
	Explosives like bombs and grenades and landmines and rockets and so on, these are all produced by governments.
	So you wouldn't want to mistake government activity for human nature.
	The sciences complement our technology and satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but science does not inform morality or tell us how to build and order human civilizations.
	Impressed by Isaac Newton's physics, John Locke expressed the hope that morality could be made into an exact science.
	But like much Enlightenment rhetoric, Locke's hope has proven to be chimerical.
	Chimerical? We have social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, but these are not exact sciences.
	The extent to which they provide us with reliable information is constrained by inherent limitations.
	It is difficult to accurately and unambiguously define and measure psychological variables, or to have sufficient control as to separate the effects of multiple compounding variables.
	Controlled experiments with human beings usually cannot be conducted for ethical reasons, and the sciences can only tell people do act, not how they should act.
	And I agree. It was actually my direct ancestor who corresponded with John Locke about the need to build a rigorous and rational ethical system in the world.
	And I like to think that several generations I have done my best to achieve that task.
	And if you want to know my arguments for a rational and objective system of morality, You can download my free book, audiobook, and PDF for free.
	You've got to pay a couple of bucks for the print version because it cost me a couple of bucks.
	It's called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
	And I have lots of videos on it.
	I've debated it. I've presented it many times.
	And if you have questions or issues with it, Sunday show, 2 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time, come by and grill me on it, and let's work to refine it better.
	But so far, it stood.
	And I am very pleased with that.
	So, there is no science that addresses final causes or existential questions.
	It is religion that does these things.
	If atrocities have been perpetrated under the cloak of religion, it nonetheless must be admitted that religion and theism have had beneficial influences.
	What we call Western civilization today is largely the result of grafting Christian charity onto Greek rationalism.
	Christianity provides the notion that all men are brothers.
	This is the ethic of a global-scale civilization.
	I'm not sure that Christianity provides the notion that all men are brothers.
	You know, one of the challenges that...
	I shouldn't say Christians.
	And I mean, lots of very nice Christians that I know.
	But the problem with people who...
	Accept the ethics of the God portrayed in the Old Testament is kind of a big problem.
	And the big problem is that he commands the murder of people of different religions, of people who don't believe in gods, of sorcerers, of witches, of children who disobey their parents.
	I mean, it's a pretty genocidal doctrine.
	And it's something that atheists really aren't supposed to talk about.
	But as a philosopher, I have to talk about that which is important, not that which is popular.
	And so, I'm not sure how all men are brothers when you're supposed to stone to death children who disobey their parents or kill unbelievers and sorcerers and witches and so on and people who switch to different faiths and so on.
	You know, if somebody were to be part of a doctrine or was to profess the morality of a doctrine that said gays should be strangled and killed that way, it would not be crazy for me to say, if I were gay, that that's kind of offensive to me and that really needs to be rejected.
	Of course, the moment that you reject a religious commandment to morality, you're saying that morality is not derived from religion.
	That's a very, very important point.
	Right? So, the moment you say, well, in the Old Testament, when God says to put unbelievers to death, that's not moral.
	Well, then you're no longer using religion as a source of your morality.
	And good for you. You know, thank you.
	I would really like to not be put to death.
	And of course, I'm not saying that most Christians would want to do that.
	But what you're saying, the moment that you reject some religious doctrine as put forward in the Old Testament or whatever religious text you accept as valid, the moment you say, well, that's not moral, I mean, wanting to put unbelievers to death, that is not moral.
	That is not right. Great!
	Then we've accepted that religious instruction is not the source of morality, that there's something you judge even the commandments and instructions of God by that is higher than the commandments and instructions of God, that that is immoral, that that is wrong.
	Stoning to death a woman who's been unfaithful is immoral, is wrong, is murder.
	And so the moment that you accept that, and I know all reasonable Christians and Jews and Muslims do accept that, the moment you accept that, then religion has lost its power to define morality, and you're looking for something else.
	You're looking for something else, and hopefully I and other thinkers have been able to provide that something else.
	Christianity was instrumental in uniting the diverse tribes and cultures of Europe.
	It fostered unity, the growth of nations and commerce.
	Francis Bacon asserted that the progress of the sciences required mass cooperation.
	It therefore seems undeniable that Christianity and other religions have synergistically promoted scientific activity to the extent that they have encouraged people to get along peacefully.
	Well, okay, so, I mean, this is a testable thesis, right?
	So, if religion promotes peace, Then the countries that are the most religious should be the most peaceful.
	And that's a correlation, right?
	I mean that's a correlation that would be pretty easy to test.
	If religion promoted free commerce, free trade or capitalism, as many theologians assert, particularly in the libertarian movement, again, that's testable.
	I've got a whole video examining the evidence for this.
	Then the countries that are the most religious should have the freest trade and should have the least amount of violence in them.
	There should be the least amount of child abuse.
	There should be the least amount of child mutilation.
	There should be the fewest laws.
	There should be the greatest liberty. The more religious a country becomes.
	And unfortunately, quite the opposite is true, empirically, right?
	The more religious a country is almost invariably, the more laws it has, the more violence it has, the more child abuse it has, the more genital mutilation it has.
	And so that is kind of a problem empirically.
	And again, I'll put a link to the video I did on this below if you want to look at more of the data around that.
	All right. We need both science and religion.
	Since Homo erectus walk the earth, humanity has been defined by its use of technology.
	We are not the only animal that uses knowledge and tools to manipulate the natural environment, but we do so to such an exaggerated degree that it virtually defines us as a species.
	And we are a social animal that lives in groups and, Aristotle says, is by nature a political animal.
	It's a tough translation from politics.
	Is by nature a social animal?
	The problem is that all human progress really relies and requires individuals to act against tribal delusions.
	And so, you could say that man is by nature a political animal, but to the degree that we enjoy the progress of the species, that is antisocial.
	That is the result of antisocial behavior on the part of individuals.
	So, people who come up with new moral judgments, so people who said slavery was wrong, they were going against the tribe of their time.
	People who said that women should not be second-class citizens and should be equal under the law were going against the interests.
	People like myself who say that adult relationships are voluntary, you do not have to spend time with abusive people, whether they're spouses or parents or anyone, and that child abuse is the source of moral evils in the world, we are going against that which is socially accepted and that 90% of parents bank, right?
	You could say man is a social animal for sure, but the only reason we're not in the caves is people who are willing to tilt against the windmills of social prejudice and conformity.
	Religion tells us what to do with our knowledge and technologies.
	It establishes rules of order, informs us what is right and what is wrong.
	People are not born with the values that promote culture or civilization on a high level.
	See, again, here we have original sin.
	People are not born with the values that promote culture and civilization on a high level.
	I don't find that to be true at all.
	And I'm a parent. I've been a parent, a stay-at-home parent for three years, almost.
	And my daughter is very kind, is very sensitive, is very eager to please, is very eager to share.
	I have not, and she didn't start off not that way.
	I mean, there are times where she has selfish moments and doesn't want to share, but that's not her essence.
	That's not her nature. I have simply not interfered with the growth of that compassion and shown her compassion in return, which is really how it's taught.
	So if your children are selfish, you need to look in the mirror, not at this thing called human nature.
	But we always want to invent the demons that we have created and inflicted on our children.
	We always want to invent them as having come in from some other dimension.
	Ethics and morality must be deliberately inculcated.
	Absent moral indoctrination, people revert to their animalistic instincts.
	Wow.
	Well, I mean, that's a tough call.
	Again, you would have to find a correlation between high moral character and religiosity.
	Which would mean that...
	For instance, atheists would have to support unjust wars more than the religious.
	And you could look into that.
	How many people opposed the war in Iraq who were atheists, even if they came from the left, as opposed to religious conservatives?
	Well, I think you would find some interesting numbers.
	As a skeptic, I am sympathetic with agnosticism, but I'm skeptical of atheism.
	The atheist claims there is no God.
	How can he be so sure?
	One wonders if the motivation of the average atheist is anything more than base self-interest.
	After all, we live in an age of entitlement.
	Everyone is entitled to everything, free from all the constraints imposed by religion and morality.
	The death of God surely makes us judge.
	Makes us judges in our own cases.
	Well, actually, I mean, I sort of agree with that to some degree.
	The atheist doesn't claim there is no God.
	Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
	If I say to you, I have a five-foot spider clutching at the top of my head, Then you'd say, well, I can't see one.
	I'd say, well, no, the spider is invisible, you see.
	I'd say, okay, well, I will touch it.
	No, no, you can't touch that spider either.
	Okay, well, I'll try and see it on infrared.
	No, no, it doesn't respond to infrared either.
	Well, I'll try this. Well, I'll try that.
	I'll do x-rays. I'll shake some talcum powder over your head so that I can see the spider.
	Well, if every conceivable test to show that this spider exists fails, and the spider I claim exists is immune to all possible tests for its existence, and there's no such thing as five-foot spiders in the world that we know of anyway, at some point it's okay to say there's no five-foot spider there.
	I mean, you have a delusion, you have a problem, right?
	So, I'm not claiming that there's no five-foot spider.
	You've said that there's this extraordinary entity called a five-foot spider on your head, and you're resisting all claims to...
	Then there's no spider, right?
	There's no spider. I mean, otherwise, then anyone can say anything, and it's valid.
	But I agree that, as is argued in the video about boomers, that the fall of religion promoted the rise of selfish entitlement.
	Many of the arguments advanced by atheists are puerile.
	Most common is the invocation of the strawman fallacy.
	This is the well-known intellectual fallacy wherein one distorts a proposition into an absurd strawman that is easily knocked down.
	In medieval European art, God was invariably depicted as an old man with a white beard who lives in the clouds.
	The most infamous example of this was painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo.
	I am not aware of any better way to portray God in a painting.
	Actually, you could just paint the clouds.
	Anyway. But is there anyone older than three who believes that God is an elderly gentleman who lives in the cloud?
	A common type of atheist is the 18-year-old college student who is shocked to discover what he should have figured out by the age of 12, that there is no anthropomorphic God.
	The eager youth, in his ignorance and vanity, immediately concludes that all conceptions of God are null and void.
	This he declares to the world with the same impassioned fervor as the religious fanatic One is reminded of Macaulay's description of Thomas Aikenhead, the unfortunate youth who was hung for atheism in 1697.
	He fancied that he had lighted upon a mine of wisdom, which had been hidden from the rest of mankind, and with the conceit from which half-educated lads of quick parts are seldom free, proclaimed his discoveries.
	Anyway, I will give you the rest if you want to read it, but it's an interesting article.
	Again, there's no particular rational, logical proofs that are put forward, and a lot of it is sort of, you know...
	It's interesting. He says that atheism creates straw men, and then he says that atheists believe that God is a man who lives in the clouds.
	I don't know any atheists who believe that, even the young ones.
	So, again, that seems to me kind of like a straw man.
	I mean, this is something I have to constantly watch myself for.
	It is most tempting to ascribe to your opponents the intellectual errors that you yourself are unconscious of committing, and it's something I have to watch out for all the time.
	So anyway, thank you so much for listening and watching.
	I hope that you found this of interest.

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