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Oct. 28, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:44
2241 A Republican Calls for the Death Penalty for Disobedient Children
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Welcome back to The Angel Clark Show on RadioFreedom.us.
So I have on the line with me one of the ten most influential people in the alternative media, Stefan Molyneux.
And Stefan may be perhaps the most eloquent red pill in the alternative media.
He is a self-described philosopher.
With a strong knowledge of history, a core compass reading of freedom and non-violence, he has a popular radio broadcast of Freedom Ane Radio, which you can find by going to freedomainradio.com.
His YouTube uploads have been viewed over six million times on his channel alone.
His site claims over 25 million downloads, making his ideas the largest and most popular philosophical conversation in the world.
His articles can be seen on sites like Lou Rockwell and others.
He's published several books on the philosophy of liberty and nonviolence, and you can get many of them for free on his website, freedomainradio.com, free books.
You cannot beat free.
It's fantastic.
So, Stephan, I want to thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
You see, I discussed with my listeners this Republican.
His name is Charlie Fuqua, and he's a candidate for the House of Representatives in Arkansas.
And when I heard what he was saying, you were actually the first person that I thought of.
I even said so on the air.
I was like, I wonder...
I bet Stefan is just going crazy over this.
So thanks for joining me.
And do you know the story of this Charlie Fuqua guy?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, I've known it for a long time because he's not doing anything outside...
The boundaries of regular good old moral instruction from the Bible.
The Bible is very clear and very explicit and commands parents to stone to death disobedient children.
So it only sounds ludicrous to modern ears, but if you're steeped in biblical history and you take the Bible as the literal and most perfect and moral word of God, then he's entirely in line with it.
This is the Bible that says That you should sell your daughters into sexual slavery.
It condones slavery.
This is the Bible that thinks that a bat is a bird and doesn't know anything about kangaroos because they weren't around the Middle East.
This is the Bible that says that you should not suffer a witch to live, which of course has resulted in the deaths of probably hundreds of thousands of women throughout history.
This is the Bible that is just full of the most outlandish and obscene moral commandments that can be imagined.
And can go through the whole moral story without ever once mentioning in any of the Ten Commandments, where it seems to be very important to keep your donkey from your neighbor's covetousness, to not mention, say, that, for instance, child abuse or rape is wrong.
This is the Bible from an omniscient deity that never mentions that washing your hands is a great way to prevent disease.
So, it is strange to outsiders' ears, but if you've read the Bible, you're like, yep, okay, he's ticking off that one on the checklist.
But see, I thought that most people didn't follow the Old Testament.
This is something that's in the Old Testament, and I thought that people had kind of...
the people who believe in the Bible, they focus mainly on the New Testament.
Well, that certainly may be claimed.
And there is this idea that, you know, Old Testament is, you know, badass Jehovah and New Testament is dewy-eyed Jesus.
But the reality, of course, is that if the Old Testament is invalid, then the New Testament is invalid as well, because it's a domino, right?
Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament.
And Jesus, of course, explicitly and openly states that he supports all of the rules in the Old Testament.
He doesn't deny any of them.
He says, I have come to To fulfill all of the laws of the Old Testament, he rejects none of them, he corrects none of them, and it's his daddy who wrote the rules in the Old Testament.
So if you accept the divinity of Jesus, you have to accept the divinity of the deity in the Old Testament, and therefore you cannot reject, logically.
I mean, logic is a tough word to use in these situations, but you cannot reject the Old Testament if you accept the divinity of Jesus.
Yeah, you know, I will admit that when it comes to certain aspects of religion, I find logic to just have basically been thrown out the door.
But in this case, this Charles Fuqua guy, basically what he says is that children who are rebellious should get the death penalty.
And I mean, that horrifies me.
Like, what do you think of this whole concept?
Oh, I mean, it's unspeakably and unutterably evil.
A capital E, flaming hypertext, whatever you want to do, painted in the sky with the blood of the innocent, but it is unutterably an evil sentiment.
But the question is, what is he selling, so to speak, or what is the Bible selling?
If you are enthusiastic in what your irrational parents want you to believe, then you're called good, right?
But if you are enthusiastic in questioning or opposing what your irrational parents believed, then you're called like willful and disobedient and so on.
And the more irrational The beliefs of our elders, whether it's priests or teachers or parents or whoever, the more irrational their beliefs, the more aggression is necessary to force children to agree with irrational things, right?
So getting children to believe in things that aren't real is actually not very easy.
If you ever doubt this, and I'm not saying you should, but just try the thought experiment of Saying to your kid on his birthday, I got you a wonderful new present.
It's a great, it's the best present ever.
And then he unwraps it and opens it and it's an empty box.
And you say, no, no, no, it's an iPad.
It's just an invisible iPad that you can't touch or hear or taste or smell or anything like that.
But trust me, it's there where your child is going to burst into tears.
And how much aggression, how much threatening, how much bullying will it require to get that child to sit and pretend to hold an iPad?
That doesn't really exist and for years afterwards pretend to play with it and say, oh pass me the invisible iPad, I would like to play Angry Invisible Birds.
I mean it would take a huge amount of dysfunction within the family to get children to believe These things that are counter-intuitive, counter-logical, counter-experiential, counter-philosophical, counter-reality, in fact, anti all those things.
And so if you have a very strong irrational belief, the next step that you have to get your children to believe it, children are very rational and very empirical, is you have to threaten them, whether it's with hell or with murder or with rejection or with ostracism or something like that.
Irrationality from authority and threats Go hand in hand.
Whenever you don't have a good argument and you're in authority, you have to resort to threats, and I think that's the angle that he's probably coming from.
Yeah, well, you know, he does actually say that this passage does not give parents blanket authority to kill their children, but it's like this whole concept in general, you know?
If you're giving people authority to kill, then I'm sure that they will find a way to get around any kind of, any way that you want it blocked.
So they'll find a way, if you give them authority to kill, they'll find a way to kill whomever it is that they desire and find a way to make it quote-unquote legal.
Well, I mean, obviously this would be, if you don't video it or whatever, this would be the parents saying, well, he is a willful and disobedient child.
And the child's saying, well, no, he's not.
So, the other thing you would do if you were a crazy parent is you would provoke your child and then film the response, and so on.
I mean, obviously it's not going to happen, and obviously it's not imminent, but it certainly does happen in other places in the world, and it's very tragic.
Okay, well, hold on to that thought.
We've got to step away for just a moment.
The Angel Clark Show will return.
More with Stefan Molyneux, RadioFreedom.us.
I have on the line with me Stefan Molyneux, and you can go to his website, by the way.
It's freedomainradio.com.
There you can find videos, you can find podcasts, you can find plenty of his books.
You can actually download them for free.
Right there, freedomainradio.com.
And, Stefan, you are also telling me that in Canada there is a Liberty event that's coming up in, I guess, under two weeks now.
It's called Liberty Now.
Yeah, I'm going to be a keynote speaker and I'll be hanging around all day and going out for dinner with people at night.
It's libertynow.ca.
I hope that people will check it out.
It's November the 3rd at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in Toronto, Ontario, of course.
We welcome, we take the U.S. dollar at par now, so we welcome all of our Southern brethren and sistren as well.
So I hope that people will come by and check that out.
Okay, so, LibertyNow.ca is the website for that.
It is November 3rd, 9am to 5pm.
Now, Stefan, let's talk a little bit more about this guy, Charles Fuqua, who is a candidate for Arkansas State Representative, and he has written a book, and inside of his book, what most people are focusing on is that he believes that there should be A death penalty for children.
Now, not as many people are talking about the fact that he called for expelling all Muslims from the United States as well, but it's the thing that really has most people Well, I'm sorry, but just to be really clear, it's more correct to say that he accepts the biblical commandment for parents to kill disobedient children.
It's not his argument, it's a biblical argument.
Like, he didn't just pull this out of his butt.
I mean, it may seem that way.
But of course, in the Bible, there's just a brief list here of capital crimes in the Bible.
So, you must kill people who don't listen to priests.
I won't read The actual, you know, it doesn't really matter, but these are all from the Old and the New Testament.
Kill people who don't listen to priests.
Kill witches.
Kill homosexuals.
Kill fortune tellers.
If you hit your father or your mother, you shall be put to death.
If you curse your mother or father, you must be put to death.
If you commit adultery, Both the man and the woman must be put to death, fornication, death to followers of other religions.
So we can actually commend this fellow for his tolerance in only wanting to expel Muslims and not kill them.
You must kill non-believers.
You must kill false prophets.
You have to kill the whole town, including, you know, children, infants, fetuses.
You must kill the whole town.
If one person in that town worships another god, then the Yahweh.
Kill women who are not virgins on their wedding night, kill followers of other religions, death for blasphemy, kill false prophets, kill infidels and gays, of course, kill anyone who approaches the tabernacle, kill people for working on the Sabbath, and, I mean, you could just go on and on, but...
It's a handbook for slaughter, the moral commandments.
And look, I mean, I fully accept that most Christians, the vast majority of Christians, would not countenance any of this.
But that's a really fascinating thing, of course, because what they're saying is, okay, it says this in the Bible, and we have the authority of God from the Bible, and we have the divinity of Jesus from the Bible.
It says this in the Bible, but it's wrong.
And therefore, I have a moral standard that is higher than what is in the Bible.
And because people always say, well, if you don't have religion, where do you get your ethics from?
But anyone who disagrees with even a single moral statement within the Bible is getting his ethics from somewhere other than the Bible.
And anyone who doesn't disagree with the moral statements in the Bible is morally repugnant, evil, and vile, truly a Hitler in his own right.
And, you know, you can't rationally discuss people who approve of all of this genocidal nonsense.
But using your own logic, I mean, you just said that it's not really Charles Foucault who made this up, the death penalty for children.
What he's doing is he's accepting the Old Testament and taking that literally as word for word, but then you also said that he is playing nice with Muslims for simply expelling them instead of putting them to death.
Considering that he's supposed to be taking the Bible literally, then he's breaking his own rules for expelling all Muslims.
I feel that it kind of makes it null and void.
Well, I agree, and I think here we see his moral courage in that children are generally less dangerous than Muslims, and so he's happy to talk about slaughtering children, but slaughtering Muslims might get him into a bit more secular danger.
Not in particular because the Muslims just ate their adults, right, so they can fight back.
But this is the problem, of course, is that the Bible is an old religious text, fundamentally, because they're not philosophical texts.
Of course they're ancient, of course they're ridiculous, of course they're old, and of course they're wrong.
I mean, to me, if you want to take your ethics from the Bible, fine.
You have to then take your science and your medicine from the Bible, too.
And, of course, nobody wants the biblical remedies for various ailments.
You want all that 21st century MRI scan-y laser x-ray-y stuff, and, you know, not to mention soap and antibiotics.
But, of course, the problem is that everybody has to cherry-pick from the Bible.
The Bible contradicts itself so much.
That you can't create any kind of consistent worldview or any kind of system of ethics that doesn't land you in jail in about 12 minutes, if not a mob hunting you with pitchforks.
And so you have to pick and choose from the Bible because you can't follow it completely.
It says up is down, black is white.
So do you want to go up or black, down or white?
That's really up to you.
But the dangerous thing about the Bible is that you get to cherry pick, and there's very few people I know who are Christians who've read the Bible cover to cover.
It tends to be a great cure for religiosity.
But what it does is it takes your own particular preferences and magnifies them to divine absolutes.
And so this kind of text, you know, if you're really into biblical fundamentalism, then this makes sense to you.
If you're not, it's repulsive.
But of course, if you're not, there's some other biblical commandment that you think is great, which has as little irrational basis as these ones do.
Well, you know, I guess part of where my own issue stems from is I have not read the Bible cover to cover.
I tried to once, and I think I read most of it, but I got kind of stuck in that whole, like, Genesis beginning part, right?
So that whole begat issue, like, just I couldn't focus on that part.
And for me, a lot of it was fables.
A lot of it was, it seemed like they were stories There were stories that set people upon the right path to behave in a moral way, but a lot of times there were so many examples of immorality and violence that I just couldn't believe it.
Yes, of course.
I mean, you can't get your ethics from ancient texts.
I mean, this is pre-philosophical stuff.
I think it was the 13th century BC that the Ten Commandments came out.
All right, we'll hold on to that thought for just a moment.
The Angel Clark Show will return.
More with Stefan Molyneux, RadioFreedom.us.
I have on the line with me Stefan Molyneux, and his website is freedomainradio.com.
And if you go to that website, you will also find links to Stefan's own pages.
I know that he's on Facebook.
And, Stefan, are you on Twitter?
Yes, Free Domain Radio and, of course, youtube.com forward slash Free Domain Radio.
I think we're actually about 12 million hits at the moment, so we're churning them out, baby!
Seriously, that's amazing.
Oh, and also, also, libertynow.ca.
It looks like next weekend, on Saturday, November 3rd, you will be able to see Stefan, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 9 a.m.
to 5 p.m.
He is the keynote speaker.
I'm one of the few Libertarian speakers who comes with backup dancers and a confetti cannon.
So I just think that's really, really important for people.
Actually, I have once come with a confetti cannon in Texas because in Texas they do everything big.
Well, that would be hilarious, actually, I think.
It's coming out like Apollo Creed, baby.
But, you know, only one fewer ab.
I think that's the important thing to remember.
Yes.
Now, hey, so you wanted to talk about the upcoming election.
Well, I mean, I thought it was interesting.
You know, there was a panic a week or two ago after the first debate when Barack Obama appeared to be broadcasting from under a drug-induced deep coma underwater haze.
And what happened, of course, was that there was this big panic.
And I think, this is sort of my theory, I think that politics is a very challenging game.
Because it's one of the few games where if you really are going to win, you're probably going to lose.
Because what happens is, your supporters get complacent, your donors get complacent, and he was beating Romney, I think by a couple of points, significant enough that it was kind of in the bag.
And so what happened was, you know, I'm sure his donations fell off.
I'm sure the enthusiasm of all of his supporters kind of, you know, oh, we got it.
You know, we've got it.
It's in the bag.
You know, we don't need to keep running anymore.
He's so far behind.
And so I think, I don't know or not, but I mean, I could see it being a reasonable strategy to flub something.
Of course, the media loves it because the media wants it to be a close race so that people will stay tuned.
So the media love it and it really reinvigorated his support base and so on.
I think you have to be careful in politics if it looks like you're really going to win.
Also, what might happen is if it looks like it's in the bag, people will, you know, especially if it's raining or something on election night, people will say, ah, you know, my guy's going to win.
I don't have to go out and do it.
Whereas everyone else is like, we've got to get every last living carbon-based life form out there to scratch their name on the magic pad.
And so I think it could be that he wanted to equalize things to make sure that the momentum within his campaign stayed very strong.
Well, I'll be completely honest.
This is the first that I've heard of that.
I heard so many people whispering about him being on, what was it, methamphetamines people were talking about in order to give him a bit of a boost, as I would say.
And that near the end, they were wearing off, which is why he kind of slowed down and looked befuddled.
Technically, he is actually on drugs.
I mean, that's known for sure, that political power creates a massive rush and a fairly continual rush of happy joy juice in the brain.
This has been studied fairly well in apes.
When apes go up, baboons in particular, when they go up the social ladder, they get more dopamine and endorphins and all that stuff.
And then if they go down the social ladder, if they lose hierarchy, that diminishes and they actually get withdrawal.
This is one of the things that drives people It is a drug addiction.
Political power in particular is a drug addiction within the brain.
And so he might have just been coming down off some sort of high.
Maybe he had a political setback and he was coming down.
But this is the irony, of course, that people at the top of the political hierarchy are themselves addicted to their own natural opiates while fighting a war on drugs for everyone else.
Yet another reason why it's not going to work.
Well, you know, the producer, Famous Dave, he was nodding his head while he said that, and my mic was turned off, he says, that's true!
And I guess I probably should have known that.
I mean, I have some of the same stuff that happens, you know, when I do the show live, so I get adrenaline as I do the show, and if I ever have, like, a bad show, the instant that I'm off the air, I feel exhausted.
Oh, yeah, it's like, oh, no, the recriminations come in, oh, why did I do that, or why did I have...
That bold Canadian on the show.
Whatever it is that's going through your mind.
The self-recrimination.
So yeah, it's a high end of crash.
Of course, I never thought that you could really get addicted to that.
It makes sense.
I guess I just never really looked into it.
Well, why would you want that job again?
I mean, I think Barack Obama has got more than enough money to retire.
Certainly, I mean, Mitt Romney never has to work another day in his life.
Why are they getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning, sitting on some stupid bus, going to talk at some, you know, half-deaf seniors in an old-age home?
Not to pick on the seniors.
It could be anyone.
But, I mean, why would you want that?
It has to be – and it's not because they think they can do all kinds of good.
I mean, they always end up doing all kinds of bad.
Why would you want this?
Because it's a high – That you can't come down from.
And you have to keep pursuing it.
And you have to keep it going.
Otherwise, you really crash.
And so, it's the only reason I can...
To me, that would be a job that I would sort of give my left arm, let's say, to get out of.
But these people...
Rick Perry, you remember the guy who couldn't remember which departments he was going to cut or whatever?
I mean, he was so exhausted, he had insomnia for months, couldn't sleep a wink, and, you know, he's driving himself, and it's terrible for your health, you get no sleep, you're traveling all the time, you gotta, you know, shake hands with people of dubious hygiene.
It's just a wretched, wretched thing to go on a campaign trail.
And people do it because, man, there's a hit of power, both during and I think definitely if you win.
I imagine that for the soulless, it must be the ultimate rush.
Yeah, well, you know, I would venture so far as to say, why would you want to get involved in politics really at all or begin with?
There's a guy who's running for a seat that's opening up in my district or in my area, not my district, but my area.
And he's been...
Well, he's a self-made...
He's got quite a bit of money, and he has donated to his campaign using PACs.
He had a PAC created, and he's found ways to get money into it.
But long story short, the guy has spent about $75,000 so far, running for a state that pays $20,000 a year.
Sure.
I mean, it's not about reason.
It's about the thrill of power and the thrill of, what is it Joe Biden said?
Stroke of the pen, law of the land.
That's pretty cool.
I mean, it's a real high to order...
I mean, we are, of course, designed to gain power over other human beings.
It's one of the natural impulses that we can't have a state because we're also addicted to having power over other human beings.
The greatest natural resource in the world is not farmland.
It's not minds.
It's human beings.
It's human capital.
And to own human capital was the great driving desire because it gives you resources, lets you reproduce more fluidly.
And so for a mammal, for any mammal or any carbon-based life form, gaining that kind of power is real high.
We're designed to gain power over other human beings.
The state, of course, facilitates that in a way that nature was never intended.
The state is like, The locally and eternally available sugar that we always want, but our system was never designed to handle this much of.
It's another reason why the state simply can't be allowed to exist.
It's candy for sugar junkies.
Yeah, you know, I believe that there's something to that.
So, long story short, because we've just about hit the end of this segment here, do you have any closing thoughts for my listeners regarding anything that we've talked about this evening?
My closing thought in general is that politics isn't going to save us.
Education isn't going to save us.
Education is a great thing, but what is going to save us is a steadfast and resolute dedication to the non-aggression principle within our own lives.
No spanking your children.
No yelling at your children.
No aggressing against people in your life.
We start local and we grow from there.
We want to be the shining example of non-aggression, peace, and voluntarism within our own lives.
That is the only way it's going to spread.
Trying to overleap the challenge of personal action and trying to skyhook some political thing, it really is like just trying to grapple with a cloud.
You can end up falling a heck of a long way and making a large whitey coyote stain on the inconsequentialities of history.
So act locally.
Yeah, think globally all you want, but it's all about the local issue.
Alright, Stefan Molyneux, thank you so much for joining me this evening.
It has been my pleasure.
Go to his website, freedomainradio.com.
See him November 3rd, libertynow.ca.
The Angel Clark Show will return tomorrow at 5 p.m.
Eastern.
Until that time, remember, no army can stop an idea whose time has come.
Angel Clark.
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