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Sept. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:03
2211 Only You Can Send Yourself to Hell - or Heaven

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Time to dip my toe into the running waters of theology.
I got a letter from a fine fellow who I met at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, and he took issue with some of the arguments that I made, so I hope to at least answer some questions, clarify, or perhaps even be swayed.
So, when I said, well, God will send you to hell for X, he says, God doesn't send anyone to hell, not one person.
Individual humans decide of their own free wills where they will spend eternity.
God does not force anyone to be with someone he does not love for all eternity.
A God who says, if you don't love me and don't want to be with me for eternity, I will force you to be with me for all eternity.
So, that definition of a sadist and so on.
So, I get the argument, I really do, and it's an impressive argument, but let me, you know, the job of a philosopher, like it or not, is to be profoundly unimpressed by history.
It doesn't matter how many ghosts all line up like dominoes behind a particular idea, leaning into it with all the force of their historical momentum personalities, what matters is the truth.
And the idea that it is not God who sends people to hell, but individuals who send themselves to hell, It's a very interesting one.
Let me tell you what I think of that, and I hope to open up the debate and the discussion with other theological types.
So, it's not a question of who sends who to hell.
The question is, are the laws just?
I mean, I've never met a libertarian anarchist voluntarist who says it is not the government who sends a drug user to prison, it is the drug user who sends himself to prison by disobeying the laws.
So it doesn't matter if it is your actions that end up with you in prison or in hell.
What matters is, is the environment or are the laws themselves just?
So, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as he describes in the Gulag Apicalago, sent letters, I think he was a captain on the Western Eastern Front, I guess, in World War II, and he sent letters criticizing the handling of the war and so on to some friends of his, and he ended up being hauled and tortured and sent to a gulag, a kind of concentration camp, for about 10 years.
I don't think anyone would reasonably say it was not the Soviet government who sent Solzhenitsyn to be tortured and brutalized for ten years.
He chose it of his own free will.
He chose the actions and so on.
I don't think that anybody would really make that argument.
We would recognize that the environment, the laws themselves, were unjust.
And that really is the question.
So, I've also not heard of libertarians who defend thought crime.
You know, that a thought can be a crime.
And Jesus very clearly says, as does God himself, that if you think, say if you look at a woman with lust, that is the same as having had sex with her.
So it is a thought crime.
And I don't know a lot of libertarians who defend the concept of thought crime.
So let's sort of put this into practice.
Hopefully this will make some sense.
So let's say that you have a wife and she just stops having sex with you.
And this goes on month after month after month.
And then you're having a bath.
Let's just say you don't masturbate.
You're having a bath, and in comes three salacious and scantily clad young ladies who then proceed to do a lap dance in your bath.
And you haven't had sex for a long time and all that kind of stuff.
And your wife is standing in the doorway, comes into the doorway, and she says, aha!
You have an erection.
That means you don't love me.
That means that we're gonna get divorced and it's 150% your fault.
You did this completely, utterly, totally of your own accord.
You are 150% responsible for our divorce.
We would get that's kind of a setup, right?
I mean, you have an involuntary response called an erection to the presence of sexual stimuli after sexual deprivation.
Not a lot you can do to prevent that, and so a situation...
Where you say, well, this, you know, you had the erection with the lap dancing trinity of sexy hotness in the bathtub and therefore you obviously don't want to be married and the divorce is 100% your fault and your wife is, right?
Well, she didn't have sex with you.
She hired the lap dancers.
She brought them to your house.
She sent them into you when you were a bath and then she gets angry at you for this, right?
And the reason that sort of using this metaphor is...
Sexual attraction is an involuntary stimuli.
You look at a woman, do you find her attractive?
And this is what God set up, right?
This is what God set up.
So it's kind of like a trap to have an involuntary mental or physiological response, which then becomes a sin.
This is sort of a trap.
It's not a very just situation at all.
And so that, I think, is something to...
I mean, there's this paradox, I guess, a problem that I have with the theological setup, which is...
God designs us, has created us with the specific necessary characteristics, abilities, and attributes called you have to be rational and empirical in order to survive as a human being.
You must be rational and empirical to survive as a human being.
If you hunt a tree, you're not going to get anything to eat.
If you plant stones, you will raise nothing that you can eat.
If you, I don't know, Plant summer crops in the winter and vice versa, you get nothing.
And if you Attempt to bring down your rabbits with a blade of grass, you are not going right.
So you have to be rational and empirical in order to survive.
And then God says that, but the ultimate in rationality, sorry, but the ultimate in belief is to believe that which is against reason and against evidence.
This again, this is kind of like a setup.
So everything that you need in order to survive as a human being is reason and evidence and objectivity and all of that kind of stuff.
But then the complete opposite is necessary.
In order to be virtuous in your belief of a deity.
And so, again, this is just kind of like a setup.
It's, here's everything that you need in order to survive.
I'm not going to give you...
If you use faith in hunting, you will die.
If you use reason with God, you don't believe.
This is a paradox.
I think we can kind of charge a deity with not being particularly consistent or helpful in these kinds of areas.
To have heaven and hell hinge upon faith when faith in all other contexts of your life will get you killed.
Okay, I've fallen the last 20 times, but I'm going to have faith.
This time I jump off the brick wall, I'm going to fly.
I have faith that it's going to rain milk and honey and make me, right?
So if you apply faith to every other area of your life, you die or you starve or bad things happen.
So it's kind of a setup.
Human beings, reason and evidence machines, and then you have to believe in a deity for whom there's no reason or evidence.
In fact, it's the opposite, right?
So that's kind of like a setup.
Now, he also talks about in here...
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
One of the panel members was scandalized that children were being taught to fear God.
And this I thought was interesting.
He says that there are problems with the translation.
And you see this quite a bit.
Spare the rod, spoil the child.
The rod is supposed to be maybe the staff of a shepherd's crook or a lead and teacher and so on.
And, you know, the Virgin Mary...
The old word was a young woman, could be a virgin, why not?
And the translation thing is kind of a problem from a rational standpoint.
So God inspires people to write down the right words, right?
That's good.
And then there's a lot of translations.
But then why doesn't God inspire people to write down the correct translation?
Right?
It's kind of important, wouldn't you say?
And we already know that God will intervene because he intervenes to set bushes on fire, to make all the world die in a rainstorm except for Noah and some animals and Bill Caspi.
It's been a while since I read it.
And so he already intervenes like crazy.
And so why wouldn't he just...
And he intervenes to create the text, to inspire people to write the text down in the first place.
So why wouldn't he intervene to...
Inspire the translators to use the correct term in the translation.
That's kind of important, right?
If it's a life-or-death law, and people have had it mistranslated and have been given the wrong idea, right?
So if, spare the rod, spoil the child, or where they say, if you, you know, if you beat your son, he won't die, but if you don't beat him, he's going to go to hell forever.
If those are all mistranslations, if, you know, fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, if you're not supposed to fear God, it's supposed to be something else, kind of important.
If we've got these rules that we go to heaven or we go to hell based on, it's pretty important that God get the right rules to the people.
Otherwise, He's punishing them for something that they can't possibly understand because the meaning has been reversed.
But that's not fair, right?
I mean, people who get the first translation do great.
Then people who get the opposite translation, do they go to hell?
It's not their fault they got the opposite translation.
Do they go to heaven because it's not their fault they got the opposite translation?
It doesn't matter what you do.
If the IRS puts out in everybody's, like in all the laws, in everybody's 1040 or whatever it is, that you're allowed $30,000 of deductions instead of whatever it is, right?
Let's say it's $15,000.
You're allowed $30,000 worth of deductions.
And it's consistent.
Except for, you know, one or two memos on someone's computer, they don't get to say to everyone next year who followed the letter of the law, oh, sorry, it was a typo, it was a mistranslation, so now you all owe us $50,000, right?
That you can't retroactively impose a law if you yourself make a mistake.
So the argument that translations Solve problems in the text doesn't make any sense at all.
You can't reverse the meaning and then hold people responsible if you have the infinite capacity to get the correct meaning across.
And God, of course, has the infinite capacity and is perfectly willing to intervene.
Has in the past, will in the future.
That's what prayer is all about.
So, the idea that you can get out of problematic texts by claiming that they are mistranslations doesn't work.
Either God allowed the mistranslation, in which case he's allowing people to be proselytized and led with completely incorrect moral beliefs and then holding them responsible for the original moral belief, which they've never heard of because they don't speak ancient Aramaic or whatever it was in.
There's one possibility, which is obviously manifestly unjust.
Or he is supporting the new text, which means he's contradicting the old text, right?
See, When it comes to moral judgment, the first thing, I strongly argue this, the first thing is not to study the effects of the law, to study people's responses to the law, or to study the law itself.
The first thing to study is the lawgiver.
Don't study the effects of the law.
Don't study the law itself.
Study the lawgiver.
I mean, to take an example, If you're a smoker, you really want to quit smoking, you sign up to a quit smoking seminar.
Guy comes up and says, you know, quitting smoking is the best thing ever.
It's the most important health decisions.
It's absolutely essential.
And I have a foolproof way with which you can quit smoking.
Guaranteed to make you quit smoking no matter what.
And then he lights up a cigarette.
Would you spend a lot of time trying to figure out his...
Methodology, his way of doing it, of course not.
He'd be like, well, this is ridiculous.
This is like having a 350-pound guy show up as an expert on dieting.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, but come on.
I mean, this is not how we spend our life.
The guy who shows up In a giant chicken suit to an executive-level interview at a Fortune 500 company might be the smartest businessman in the history of the world, but there's nobody in the world who will hire him and try and figure that out.
They'll be like, look, if you don't have the judgment to show up at least not in a chicken suit, it doesn't have to be a three-piece suit, maybe not even a two-piece suit, but not a chicken suit.
You don't judge the resume.
You look at the person and how they're presenting themselves.
You don't judge the diet.
The first thing you judge No matter what.
You don't stick around.
I mean, just go.
Go look at all of the diet books.
See if you can find one obese guy on a diet book, one guy puffing on a diet book.
I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
So you judge the lawgiver.
You judge the person presenting the arguments or the entity presenting the arguments.
And this is a very, sadly, it's a very quick process with the Old Testament deity and with Jesus.
But Thou shalt not kill.
Not killing, not murdering, is a great virtue.
And to murder is a great evil.
It's a mortal sin.
Not even a venal, it's a mortal sin.
Okay, well, God kills everyone except Noah and his family and some animals.
Murders everyone.
The children in the womb, the babies, the innocent little children, the good people, kills everyone.
So, the thou shalt not kill If it's true, then God is evil.
He's violating thou shalt not kill.
If thou shalt not kill is not true, but it's being presented as a moral commandment, then it's meaningless, because it's being presented as something that is true, but it's not true.
So you look past the laws to the lawgivers.
This is the essence of voluntarism.
I care what the laws are.
Do the people in charge have to follow them?
If yes, Then we have a state of freedom.
We have no state.
If no, then the laws are being given to you so that you will not compete with the evildoers.
Right?
Thou shalt not steal is given to you so that you don't compete with the tax collectors.
Right?
Thou shalt not murder is given to you so you don't compete with the military-industrial complex.
You understand?
Thou shalt not assault and kidnap and imprison is so that you won't compete with the police force.
Not because...
They want to do good, but because they want to do evil, and they don't want you to do evil, because if you do evil, their evil is left profitable.
If everyone steals, everyone starves.
The greatest thief is the one who can convince you not to steal, but that stealing is good for him.
You will then voluntarily give your stuff to him.
It's incredibly efficient, and so on.
So you look at the lawgiver and his adherence to the universal law that he proposes.
That's very, very important.
Thou shalt not kill.
God not only does kill, but encourages killing.
He encourages the murder and the rape of innocents when towns are taken over.
I mean, again, you can read tons of quotes about this.
Evilbible.com is a good place to go.
And that's the problem that's really hard to overcome.
If thou shalt not kill is true, Then God is evil.
And sorry, but, I mean, this is, he kills.
He kills and murders the innocent all the time.
Or approves it, encourages it.
If thou shalt not kill is not true, then God can be good, but we have a problem because we're being told something, we're being told not to do something that is evil.
Good, which is a bad commandment.
Don't do that which is good.
So, if thou shalt kill is good, God gets rescued, but then he becomes bad for telling people to do bad things.
If thou shalt not kill is true, then God is telling us to do things that are good, i.e.
don't kill, but he himself is killing wantonly.
So, again, these are just problems that you can't overcome.
You can't overcome.
So, I just wanted to sort of point out some of these These issues around this letter that I got.
It was a long letter, and I really do appreciate, really do appreciate the time that people spend to send me theological questions.
These are my perspective.
I'm certainly not going to claim that they're the ultimate final answer on everything, but this is where I think philosophy leads us to.
We have to be profoundly unimpressed with history, with grandeur, with tradition, all of these things.
This comes out of my life as an entrepreneur.
You have to be profoundly unimpressed by your greatest achievements from last year, let alone the most monumental cathedrals of achievements from your culture for thousands of years.
I always try and look at it from a blank slate.
And I must, sadly, I must judge the lawgiver by the law that he gives, no matter how big and powerful the lawgiver is.
The lawgiver is bound by the law, or evil and hypocrisy are the inevitable conclusions.
Thank you so much for watching.
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