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Oct. 30, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:36
2519 Eradicating the Faith Virus - A Conversation with Peter Boghossian

Stefan Molyneux and Peter Boghossian discuss the new book A Manual for Creating Atheists and the steps that can be taken to eradicate the faith virus.

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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, back for round three.
Dr.
Peter Boghossian, professor of philosophy from Portland State University and...
A Manual for Creating Atheists Thank
you.
I appreciate that.
I want to say that it's really important not just that people buy the book, but they use it.
The book will teach you how to talk somebody out of faith and superstition and pretending and into reason.
Whether it's a loved one, a family member, it will give you tools for how to engage them to help them overcome faith and embrace reason.
So that's the bottom line for what it is.
And again, I said we went straight to paperback to save money to get the book in as many hands as possible.
Fantastic.
Now, let's talk about the mission that you have taken on, which is, you know, if you want to be the fifth horseman of the rationalist apocalypse for superstition and religion, why do you think this is such an important topic?
So a lot of people are saying, well, you know, religion is kind of on the wane as it is, you know, aren't you sort of pushing over a rotten fence and calling yourself a He-Man?
Why is this such a passion for you?
Why do you think it's such an important topic still?
Yeah, I don't think it's just about faith.
I think it's about sloppy thinking and helping people to reason better.
And so the faith virus, this is a species threatening event.
We have fringe groups.
Now, faith-based groups, and we see this.
I just read the other day that terrorist attacks are at an all-time high.
I see my own government.
I can't speak to the Canadian system in Canada, but I see my own government.
The Republican Party has been hijacked by religious maniacs.
I see this as an enormous problem for communities, for political bodies, for individuals.
People think that they're living a good life or they're making decisions on the basis of a good process.
It's not.
They're Scientologists.
You can leave the Abrahamic traditions.
And this is a tremendous problem for people who are trying to be good, decent people, but they're going by the wrong rulebook.
Right.
One of the things I've always found tragic about irrationality is the degree to which it divides us.
You know, science and philosophy and reason, they unite us in a way that superstition simply can't because irrationality is absolutism plus subjectivism, which, you know, are two opposites.
That which is subjective is not supposed to be absolute.
You know, I like jazz and ice cream is not an absolute.
So I think the degree to which we have absolute beliefs are That go against reason and evidence is the degree to which we actually kind of separated from other people I think it promotes a lot of human divisions that otherwise wouldn't exist Yeah.
So for example, I can guess what you think about an intervention in Syria.
So let's say that you present your evidence for an intervention in Syria and you say to me, well, what's your opinion about an intervention in Syria?
Well, whatever the opposite of yours, I want to go in tomorrow.
And you say, well, why do you say this?
So you've now constructed – Thoughtful, rational, careful arguments based upon evidence, and I tell you, well, I start quoting verses from my favorite ancient book, and I tell you I've prayed to my gods about it, and there you have it.
That's the end of the conversation.
There is no...
Yeah, unless we happen to agree, in which case we're both in the same kind of mental asylum, but...
You can't negotiate.
You can't change the mind of somebody.
It's an old statement which says you cannot reason someone out of a belief they've not been reasoned into.
And the lack of ability to change one's mind based upon better reason and evidence is one of the ways I think it sort of forms a cyst or a kind of bubble around human experience and human progress.
That's exactly right.
That's one of the things that's so tragic about faith is that it makes it more difficult for people to revise their beliefs.
Let's say that I could present to you overwhelming evidence to your satisfaction That there are good reasons for – I mean obviously I don't know what those reasons would be, but I present you this.
I show you data, satellite pictures.
I show you this guy is going to, I don't know, launch species-threatening biological weapons against – whatever the evidence would be.
We could then engage that and consider that because we're both in a rational framework.
But once you leave that framework, there's no way for the – not only is there nowhere for the conversation to go – But the additional problem is even if it's not just a discussion between us, even if it's a matter of public policy where our elected officials start trying to legislate these beliefs, we have a very – look, we are in a very serious situation right now.
Ecologically, politically, socially, and what we need is to make decisions on the basis of reason and evidence.
And one more thing, that should not be controversial.
It shouldn't be controversial.
There's no controversy in that.
But I think the reason people are so offended and can't really handle this is because when you don't formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence, I just tweeted about this today.
You have to find some other way to make up for the difference because it's not a reason and evidence.
So by definition, faith then is assigning a higher confidence value to a belief.
So how do we help people to be more humble about what it is they claim to know when they're masquerading as humble in the first place?
Well, the relationship between religion and humility to me is really fascinating.
I mean, for myself, I mean, there's so much that I don't know.
I mean, it's almost an infinity of things that I don't know.
I have a pretty good methodology for getting there, but even that is fallible and I have confirmation bias and make mistakes and get the wrong data, blah, blah, blah.
So I think there's constantly – you're looking at the – The compass, you know, you're checking the sun and the moon as you're navigating.
You're always looking at these things because we are fallible.
You know, I think philosophy is necessary because consciousness is fallible.
The same way nutrition is necessary because what we want to eat isn't always what's best for us to eat.
But there's this weird thing where religious people will talk about the value of humility, yet they believe that they are hooked into omniscience.
And now omniscience, you can't argue with omniscience.
I mean, it's perfect.
It's infallible.
It's eternal.
It doesn't even have to think.
It just knows.
So this idea that you have a pipeline to omniscience at the same time as you say humility is part of what you're about, it just seems such a rank contradiction.
Yeah, there are two things.
One is a philosophical plight and the other is the basic question about humility.
I mean, just think about How arrogant it is to assume that you know about the supernatural realms and what happens after you die and what you need to get there and what the creator of the universe wants people to do, wants people to do with their genitalia, wants people to face or to embody.
That is breathtakingly arrogant.
But the other thing you said that was really interesting is about an all-knowing being.
So Philosophically, this is interesting to me.
The only way that you could know that there's an all-knowing being is if you were an all-knowing being because you'd have to have some way to verify that this entity or some other being was all-knowing.
But you could be – but how would you – but we're not all-knowing.
So how would you know?
So you'd have to invoke again something for which you do not have evidence.
I mean, no matter what they say, and it's not a question of me being angry, or I don't think you're angry, it's we want to help people.
I want to live in a world that's more rational.
I'm not upset with someone who's caught the faith virus.
I want to help disabuse – I want to help liberate them of the virus so that we can have an adult conversation and sit at the adult table and rationally discuss a range of issues from public policy and how to build communities.
But that's not happening right now.
Well, what is it called?
I think it's called the Donnick-Kruger effect, where you have to be at least as good as someone or something to know if they're any good.
Like, only a really great physicist knows another great physicist because they can evaluate their work.
So you'd have to be a god.
You're right.
You'd have to be a god in order to know if God was, in fact, all-knowing.
And, of course, that's not possible.
Some of the basic contradictions, too, like you can't be all-knowing.
And all-powerful, because all-knowing means you know what's going to happen in the future.
And if you know what's going to happen in the future, you can't change it.
And therefore, these two are sort of opposites.
And it doesn't take a lot of thought to break these things down, but it does seem to be really hard for people.
And what do you think the major barrier is for people to disgorge this virus?
That's a fantastic question.
I've spent an unbelievable amount of time thinking about that and reading about that.
I don't I don't know.
I'm trying to be – stick to the integrity of the question and say the main barrier and give you one.
I think it's a social factor.
I think that it's a family or a community who has this belief and they want to – they either want to pretend as well that they have this belief or they want to receive some of the benefits for pretending they have this belief.
Or they're actually delusional and don't have the belief – and the question is whether a belief is a delusion.
I don't know the answer to that question.
But I think any barrier – I think it is possible to reason people out of beliefs that they didn't reason themselves into.
It just takes significantly longer.
It's just a matter of time.
Yeah, we know that's true for a fact because we know John Loft is Hector Alvarez.
I mean there's a long list of people who have actually reasoned themselves out of these really rather silly and completely preposterous beliefs.
Well, I mean, I started as a good Christian choir boy.
And it takes, you know, it takes a little work for sure.
And you really do have to, you know, run the gamut of significant social disapproval.
Now, out here in the West, you know, we can survive social disapproval because we have more independence, more multiculturalism.
You don't like me over here.
I can go over here and so on.
I think in some of, like, I think of the Islamic countries and so on.
I mean, the degree of social options that are available to people is so few that social ostracism, social attack, even if you take out the sort of Damocles theology that's hanging over these people, I think that they face unbelievable barriers.
There was some guy, a kid in Saudi Arabia, simply blogged something about skepticism to do with Muhammad.
The guy had to flee the country because the authorities were after him with a sword.
I mean, it's really, I think the barriers that people face overseas are just staggering.
Yeah, and that's another reason why we should never, ever, ever be angry with these people.
It's not their fault.
In a very real sense, they're epistemic victims.
They've come from crazy theocracies where any hint of dissent was punished brutally, where apostasy in many countries is punished by death.
And so, again, the idea is a gentle approach to help them to not be upset with them, but to help them to align their beliefs with reality and shed these delusions.
And we need to be very blunt about that.
Often people have never even been addressed in a blunt manner.
Well, I think it's probably very apt to say that you cannot aggress someone out of a belief that they were aggressed into because the history of their aggression against them as children, their indoctrination that occurred, is so strong that the challenge with people who want to bring reason to the masses is that the masses don't even know that they're sick.
If you're a doctor, someone comes in and says, I've got this second head growing out of my elbow, and they say, well, that's not good.
But at least they know that there's something wrong.
Whereas we're kind of tackling people who are out for a run feeling healthy and the birds are singing and the sun is shining and we're out tackling them and saying, you're actually not well but you don't know it.
And that's a very startling thing for people to hear.
Yeah, and it's difficult.
I love your idea of if we're both in this insane asylum, which you said before.
There are entire communities that have made a virtue of pretending to know things you don't know.
And there are entire communities of pretending and faking.
And it's very difficult, both because people perceive that as a moral thing, that having faith is moral.
And we need to disconnect faith from morality and talk about faith as a way of knowing.
That's one way.
But the other thing is that those communities then reinforce the structures of pretending.
You know, the whole idea of having a crisis in one's face.
I've said it in my May 6th Mother's Day, in my May 6th talk, that just means that you're struck by the realization that you're pretending.
And so often what you hear religious leaders do is they say, well, you know, say this prayer.
But that's a form of asking you to put your belief first and going back into that bizarre epistemic nightmare that one is in.
So how do we gently bring people back?
What tools can we use?
And that's what I tried to do in the book.
The book really gives people the tools to talk people out of faith and into reason and rationality.
And there's absolutely no surprise whatsoever that there's been such animosity towards me personally and towards the book.
Those are defense mechanisms of the virus.
When you don't formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence, as I said, you have to make up that differential somehow, attacking me, attacking Portland State, crying, clamoring for more blasphemy laws, what have you.
The best defense of irrational ideas is always a good offense.
And it is – I've sort of thought like the way I deal with people who've grown up in superstition is if I met somebody from Stalinist Russia in 19 – they were born in 1950, they grew up in Stalinist Russia and they say, well, I'm a communist.
Well – I don't agree with communism, but I wouldn't.
I mean, that's just where they grew up.
I mean, you can't get any more mad at somebody for absorbing the cultural irrationalities around them than you can for, well, I grew up in China, therefore I speak Mandarin.
I mean, so I think that dismantling that lexical set, the language around the beliefs is really important so that you can look at them objectively.
And one of the great things that you've done, I think, is To really unpack the word faith, because faith, I remember seeing a concert years ago, Melissa Manchester was saying, faith is an acronym at meals.
It means feel as if there's hope.
And it's like, you know, even in the audience, great singer, stop doing the thinking thing.
But so how do you unpack the word faith so that people can look at it a bit more clearly?
So there are many, so okay, so to take one step back, Every time I engage somebody, I have the explicit hope for them, and it actually is a legitimate hope, but it's a hope that's based on evidence, and it's a hope that's based on evidence, that I can help them stop using bad ways of thinking, and at the very least, use mediocre ways of thinking.
So the answer that I would give you is in the context of one of those interventions.
So by definition, faith has—even if the evidence leads to something— Faith is belief that's disproportionate to the evidence.
One doesn't have enough evidence to warrant belief.
That's why one needs faith.
Now, that's the word faith in a religious context, but people use the word faith in a multiplicity of other contexts.
The other way that I would define faith, and I found that often even saying this can shake people Is pretending to know something you don't know.
Because a lot of people are precisely pretending to know something they don't know.
They're pretending to know about thetans trapped in human bodies.
They're pretending to know that the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri, like the Mormons believe.
They're pretending to know a whole range of things that they couldn't possibly know.
But they haven't had anybody say directly to them, you're pretending to know something you don't know.
So I would define it as belief on the basis of a lack of evidence or insufficient evidence.
And if you had enough evidence, then you wouldn't need faith.
You'd just show some of the evidence and then they'd believe.
Also, if you had enough evidence, then rational people could come to an agreement that whatever it is that is justified by the evidence would be justified by the evidence.
But we don't see that.
So it's either belief without evidence, belief on the base of insufficient evidence, or pretending to know something you don't know.
I prefer pretending to know something you don't know because I think it's more direct and more blunt.
Now, of course, a lot of people who are religious would – I've got a couple of balls to throw at you so you can limber up your back, take a couple of swings.
So people who are religious would say, I would imagine, something like this.
Oh, Peter, I think that's just a lovely string of word salad jumbles.
But the reality is that you believe that the sun is going to come up tomorrow, but you can't prove it because it hasn't happened.
happen.
So you believe a lot of things that aren't true.
Gravity could reverse tomorrow, yet still you build your house with your sofa on the floor.
I believe in something that I also can't prove, but how is that different?
Okay.
So I have, and I talk about this in chapter seven of the book, Anti-Apologetics 101, and I go through every defense of faith, the main defenses of faith and then the secondary and tertiary defenses of faith.
So, so, In that context, the first thing you do in terms of an intervention is that you acknowledge, yes, you're absolutely correct, the sun might not rise tomorrow.
Maybe there's a meteor or something that I don't know, a massive meteor that's going to smash the sun.
So you validate.
We start with a validating thing.
The purpose of that is that, again, it doesn't create an adversary relationship.
I'm not calling anybody names.
I'm not saying that's silly or what have you.
And then I'll talk about the reasons that I have or what Or what would constitute reliable evidence for me that the sun was going to come up?
I will say that oftentimes – often you see a parody in which people will say, well, okay, I believe things in the base of insufficient evidence or I have faith, but you have faith in science.
You have faith your wife loves you.
You have faith the sun will come up tomorrow.
Well, my wife is a real person and she lives with me.
In fact, she's in a couple of rooms over there.
I can go in and it's not – I hope my wife loves me.
I think she does.
She certainly acts like she does.
So I have evidence for her existence and I have evidence for the fact that she loves me.
I could be wrong about the fact that she loves me.
It would be difficult for me to be wrong about the fact that she exists.
So it's equating the existence of a real person with the existence of something that's completely imaginary.
Now, you're right.
Again, again, a validating statement.
You're absolutely correct.
It could be the case that the sun won't come up tomorrow.
In philosophy, that's called the problem of induction.
But I have evidence to believe that the sun will come up tomorrow.
Excuse me, and that evidence is sufficient to warrant belief.
I could be wrong.
Could you be wrong about that belief that you have faith in something?
That's how I'd frame it.
Right.
And of course, if the sun didn't come up tomorrow, it would be as the result of universal and predictable physical laws, which form, I would argue, the foundation for reason itself.
I mean, we couldn't have reason if everything was chaos and flux.
We wouldn't even exist to have any kind of stable atoms to build ourselves with.
So even if the sun didn't come up tomorrow, it would not invalidate the arguments against the existence of a deity.
I mean, it's funny.
My daughter loves to hear about my shows.
And of course, she remembers when we came to visit you last summer.
And so I was saying, oh, I'm talking to Peter and he talks about, we call him the big invisible guy because, you know, it's a little easier than else.
I don't want to blurt it around to other kids until we've had a chance to prepare to them her beliefs about God.
And I said, you know, you have neighbors that you really like.
Do you believe that they exist?
Yes, I can go visit them, this, that and the other.
And I said, and if I said we have ghosts, invisible ghosts living in our house, would that be true?
And she said, no.
I said, well, why wouldn't that be true?
And she said, well, Dad, because I would have bumped into them by now.
In other words, even if I couldn't see them, there'd be another sense that would validate whether they were there or not.
And I said, yeah, it's like the wind.
You can't see it, but you know it's there.
You can see the effects on your skin, the leaves and the trees and all that kind of stuff.
And so I think that even if we say something may not occur tomorrow...
It still would only not occur because it would be following the laws of physics and logic and so on.
Now, then someone could say, well, but what if the laws of physics and logic were completely reversed?
But then to me, that's just getting to be, I mean, that's, you know, what if the world were the opposite of what it is?
Well, that's not, you know, that's no reason to believe that's ever going to happen.
You can see 14 billion years back in time and see the same laws operating.
I don't think they're going to change tomorrow.
Yeah, so two things.
What you said is just spot on.
And what you did with your daughter is you didn't tell her, I'm like...
Those who have been affected by the faith virus, oh, this entity exists, oh, you need to pray, or you need to do...
So you ask your questions, and those questions were rooted in epistemology.
Oh, well, how do you know that?
How would you know that?
Oh, I would have bumped into it, and then you ask a follow-up question.
So there's a chapter in the book about how to raise a child as a skeptic.
So one of the things you said that was very, very interesting philosophically, and I've published something apart from the book, is you're right.
If the rules of physics...
We're other than what they were.
In order for logic to be what it is, we need a stable metaphysic.
We need laws outside of ourselves that are stable.
Unfortunately, many people are sucked into this cognitive sinkhole, this trap in trying to justify Their own beliefs that are out of alignment with reality by attacking the sciences, by attacking something that we know is a very, very, very good tool to weed out falsity.
Someone's Twitter feed was pretty interesting.
It said something like, let Jesus into your heart unless you need open heart surgery, then let science in.
Oh, I can imagine the average person of faith going to a doctor and saying, doctor, doctor, I've got a pain in my chest.
What do you think it is?
And he's like, I don't know.
Let's pray together.
I think that you would not pay much for that doctor's visit because you'd want them to run some tests and not just sort of try and get some answer from the sky ghost and so on.
So what do you say to the – if you push back the line of faith too far for people, they always attempt, it seems, to try and give you a stymie, a paralysis, a draw and say, well, maybe I can't prove the existence of God.
But you, you, sir, cannot disprove the existence of God and therefore we're at a sale bait that's agreed to disagree and both go their own ways with their own belief systems, which I find eminently unsatisfying.
And what's your – what are your thoughts about that?
Oh, boy.
There are so many, so many responses to that.
So basically it would depend on what the context of the conversation was.
One response is why assume it's 50-50?
That's kind of a classic problem of philosophy with Pascal's wager.
Why would one assume that the odds are there either is God or there isn't a God?
That's an odd way to conceptualize the problem, but...
You know, sometimes I would take that, oddly enough, as a victory.
I would take it as a victory if they started at absolute certainty, like a one on the Dockin scale, and after an intervention or conversation, their certainty was lowered.
But I would say that in the book, I advocate...
And I know this is an odd thing to advocate, given the title of the book and the whole purpose is to help people to think and disabuse them of faith.
But I advocate not going after God, but going after faith and talking about how they know things.
And so I think as long as the subject, as long as the topic and the questioning, like with your daughter, are kept with how they know that, That is – those things cannot be answered by reason because they weren't arrived at by reason.
There's really nothing anybody can say.
So people, again, will resort to non-epistemic reasons.
I feel it in my heart.
I feel it in my heart that it is true.
And that then opens up an entirely new conversation.
But again, depending on the starting point of the conversation, if they come around to saying, well, okay, it's 50-50 – Well, that could be some headway.
Well, and of course, that's the dichotomy that drives me mad, which is people say, I feel in my heart that it is true.
And one is a statement of personal experience, and the other is a statement of epistemology, that it is true.
And helping people to understand that these two are opposites.
I feel it in my heart.
It's like, yeah, it's a beautiful morning.
I'm happy or I'm crying or something.
That's a subjective experience and that's fine because when people say, I believe in God, this is so tricky.
It's such a swamp because I believe in God too.
It's a concept that exists in people's head.
I can write the word out.
There's books.
I see churches.
I believe that it's a concept.
But when you say, I believe in God like God exists and I'm merely receiving his existence in an objective sense, then you've moved from personal experience to...
Exactly.
And about something external to yourself.
And people really don't...
They kind of muddy these two things together, which is why it's so hard for them to think clearly about these things.
Exactly.
That is a fantastic point.
And so you're absolutely correct.
Most people...
And that's a problem of education and a social problem.
They don't understand the difference between objective and subjective.
And so, again, just to reiterate...
A subject of things are matters of taste – pizza, music, movies, sexual preference.
These things are – you're like a woman or a guy or whatever, a certain color hair or physique.
Those things are matters of taste.
You're not making a truth claim about the world.
You're not making a statement of fact and you're certainly not attempting to legislate that.
Yeah.
Right?
Which is often, tragically, where that consequence, a consequence of those very horrific beliefs lend themselves to public policies.
Right.
Now, what about the argument, again, which I'm sure you've heard about a bazillion times, which is something that happens once you've jettisoned the epistemological claims for the existence of a deity?
There's a general switch towards consequentialism, which is the consequences of not believing in a deity are so terrible, you see, that we simply – it's Plato's noble lie.
The masses would be Hobbesian nature, red in tooth and claw, rending each other in some zombie movie apocalypse without the restraining hand of the Ten Commandments.
So to me, that means that the God question is no longer there.
Because once you start talking about the consequentialism, then you've given up the epistemology.
And so when people have gotten to that point, then what they're basically saying, I think, is I get that it's not real, but I'm terrified of the social consequences of it not being real.
That's a wonderful step forward.
And what are your responses to that?
Okay, that's fantastic and that's a whole category in the book about that.
So if somebody switches to that argument, the first thing you need to do is you need to very – again, these things or these interventions are very gentle and say, hey, we were having a great conversation about whether or not faith is true and then you started talking about Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot.
So I'm happy to have that conversation about the consequences.
But let's see if we can move the conversation forward by explicitly acknowledging that faith is not a reliable guide to the truth.
And I talked about that in my Jesus, the Easter Bunny, and other delusions, just say no talk.
So once they do that, then we can have that conversation.
But very rarely, it's so rare that someone will actually acknowledge that.
But there'll be no clear line in the conversation.
They'll just kind of slip into it.
The only people who will acknowledge that Are people who themselves are atheists who are upset at you or me because we shouldn't be attempting to disabuse people of faith because the next thing you know they'll be raping and pillaging and killing everybody in the streets.
And that's a type of consequentialist – that's a type of consequentialism.
And those people have no problem admitting that faith is total nonsense.
So that's a – they need a different – then you're defending a different claim.
You're defending the importance of helping people stop – Believing nonsense.
Yes.
And I mean, there's lots of responses to it, such as if religion made societies better than the most religious, the more religious a society should be, the more it should agree with commonly accepted moral standards, liberty for women, peace towards children, a multiplicity of perspectives in society being encouraged, not just tolerated, but encouraged, protection of freedom of press and freedom of speech.
Nobody wants to give these things up in the West, and therefore we should be able to look back in history and across the world, and we should be able to see the rise of religion and summits of religion being the most moral societies, and really it's around rationality versus irrationality, because you always get that, well, and really it's around rationality versus irrationality, because you always get that, well, But they just – they were as irrational and they just – they put God where – they put the state where God was and just, you know, continued with their irrationalities.
But I think that there's good reasons for anyone who's even remotely historically literate or simply knows about the modern world to say you can generally see that where religion tends to increase repression and a loss of rights also tends to increase at the same time.
And I think there's good reasons for that, but it doesn't really, I think, help their argument very much from that standpoint.
Yeah, two things on that.
One, I just saw a fantastic debate.
It was a devastating debate.
Dr.
Phil Zuckerman from Pitzer had a debate in a church and that question came up and he laid out some fascinating, really poignant, cogent arguments.
The second thing is it's never been clear to me.
I think we talked about this a little bit the last time I was on your show.
Why do people think that helping someone to reason better will lead to moral chaos?
I mean I can't think of a single example when that would be the case.
And wouldn't the effects of that just be magnified and aggregate when people stop formulating their beliefs on the basis of insufficient evidence?
their beliefs on the basis of evidence.
Again, these are not radical.
The only reason that people would think that these are radical is if they've been indoctrinated into some bizarre kind of set of beliefs which couldn't be true or are highly unlikely to be true in the first place because we have other beliefs that contradict those that literally millions of people believe in the first place.
So it's not clear – not only is it – let me even go further than that.
Not only is it not clear to me how helping somebody to lose a faulty epistemology is bad, it's crystal clear to me how helping somebody to reason better is good.
Yeah, and I mean, you can always ask the question of people, you know, how many homeless people have you strangled because you don't believe in Zeus?
Exactly, yeah.
And so that's the other thing.
Non-belief in a deity— It doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean you're a good person or a bad person.
It doesn't mean you're smarter than anybody else.
I know a lot of atheists would like to think that.
It's not true.
It just means that you don't believe in a particular deity.
There's nothing entailed by that.
There's a whole splinter group in atheism, atheism plus.
There's nothing entailed by not...
You can think of it like not collecting stamps.
There's nothing entailed by someone...
No behaviors or cognitive predispositions are built in or bundled with the idea that I don't collect stamps.
Well, I mean, I think that may be a disarmingly neutral way of putting at it because thinking better is a little bit more important than collecting stamps.
But you can also just look at kids, right?
So usually around the age of five or six, kids give up their belief in Santa Claus.
Now, Santa Claus is not a neutral.
It's not a mall camp.
I mean, this is if you're good, he brings you presents.
And if you're bad...
He leaves a lumber coal in your stocking or something like that.
And I have yet to.
And I worked in a daycare where we had like 30 or 40 kids from the ages of 5 to 10.
And I witnessed some of this.
I'd asked them some questions.
I witnessed some of this process where kids would give up their belief in Santa Claus.
And I never noticed a massive crime wave breaking out from the children once they no longer believed in this morally punitive pseudo-deity called Santa Claus.
They're just like, oh, okay, well, I guess it's not true.
I guess that makes sense and so on.
And they went back to playing with their things.
They weren't like, you mean I can be naughty and I still get candy?
And they just go out and, you know, twist their heads off puppies.
They just don't do that.
I mean, when you give up a false belief, it does not turn you into Charles Manson.
That's just a scare story that's supposed to keep you in the enclosure.
Yep.
That's exactly right.
That's another narrative that the faithful have woven to try to stop the curative or the palliative or to try to stop the inoculations from occurring.
It's combined with the angry atheist narrative.
Oh, why do you hate God?
Why are you so angry?
What are you talking about?
That's complete crazy talk.
That doesn't even make any sense.
But again, when you're – and I advocate for this in the book, when people do approach you with things, very rarely do people tell me I'm so angry anymore.
But I do hear – you only don't believe in God because you're so angry.
The way to deal with that is to just very slowly and very gently ask what they mean, why do they think that, and kind of use some diagnostic questions to – Help yourself understand why someone would believe that in the first place.
And it's very easy to just pull then that thread and unweave the rug from there.
Yeah, do you in fact wake up every morning enraged at leprechauns?
No, you generally don't.
I mean, things that don't exist don't.
Now, people who proselytize religion, particularly, you know, there's this terrifying scene in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a terrifying scene where he talks about that he has a priest describe hell in like skin crawlingly a terrifying scene where he talks about that he has a priest describe hell in like
There's something to be angry about that when children are subjected to that level of hysterical, mind strangling, I mean, we would never let a home for mentally deficient people ever be terrorized with those stories.
It'd be completely illegal.
You'd lose your license.
You'd go to jail.
So there's stuff to be angry about, but not because there is a God, but because there isn't.
And people find it so essential to transmit these beliefs that they sometimes will literally stop at no amount of abuse to transfer this virus.
Yeah, so that's interesting.
So think about that.
For all the people who say, well, what's the harm?
What's the harm?
Well, you just articulated the harm.
That is a form of extraordinary child abuse, to tell children that they're going to burn in eternity for not formulating their beliefs, for having a belief that couldn't possibly be substantiated on the basis of any evidence whatsoever.
It's a type of mental sadism and cruelty.
You're doing something about it.
I'm trying to do something about it.
Instead of everybody shaking their fists and getting angry, get the book.
It's ten bucks.
It's ten dollars.
It's in paperback.
It will tell you how to deal with questions when people talk to you.
And again, it's not enough that you read it.
When you hear arguments like the arguments that you've articulated, counter those.
Don't be bullied into not speaking up.
Don't be a coward.
Don't be afraid that people aren't going to like you.
This is a turning point right now.
We have the ability to help people, to disabuse people of these horrible ways of reasoning.
And we have the ability to bring people at the adult table so we can have these rational conversations.
But it doesn't do anybody – and that's one of the reasons I respect your work and I've said this before – You're trying to do something about this.
I'm trying to do something about this.
It's not enough that we just sit there and get angry.
We need to do something about this.
We need to act.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
I mean, I'm often asked, what do I think the future is going to be like?
Is reason going to win?
Is reason going to lose?
It's like, well, that's up to us.
It's up to people who – I'm not a movement of history guy.
I'm like individuals in history guy.
It's the choices that individuals make that determine the way the future is going to go.
It's the degree to which you're willing to take bullets for the course.
It's the degree to which you're willing to hang your flag out even in fiery winds.
It's the degree to which you're standing up in front of cannons and crossing your fingers that they'll miss.
It's those choices that individuals make.
One of the things that does really upset me about religion is especially the Old Testament stuff.
Like, I mean, all of the three, right?
The Islamic, the Judaic, and the Christian faiths.
It's the degree to which they co-join love and sadism.
That is a very unhealthy mix to have, right?
So, you know, God loves you, but boy, if you don't obey, you know, 10,000 semi-contradictory commandments, then you are going to burn in hell forever.
This idea that love can be co-joined with eternal sadistic punishment.
I mean, psychologically, if you went to a psychologist and said, well, you know, my husband loves me so much.
He'll bring me flowers if I cook his meal right.
But if I don't, you know, he throws me down the basement stairs.
I mean, the psychologist would say that that's not love.
And we need to sort of – there's a lot of psychological stuff that I think goes on when you say, you know, he loves you and boy, if you don't – and the stories of Noah and the Ark and so on and all of the stories in the Bible where they take a town and, you know, kill all the men and rape all the women with God's approval and kill all the men and rape all the women with God's approval and the very idea It's very unhealthy to even put this love and this vicious punishment together in the same mental headspace.
I really think that has a destructive effect on people's capacity for love itself, which is one of the great pillars of a happy life.
Yeah, I couldn't possibly agree more.
And you don't even need to read Deuteronomy or Leviticus for that.
I mean, you see that.
And I watched the last, what was that movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, or what was that, Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ?
Yeah, yeah.
I couldn't believe what a grotesque, homosexual, sadomasochistic – I was just – I just found myself to be totally taken aback by it.
But again, I've now read the Quran three times.
When I read – I read a religious book or actually for a while I was reading the books of L. Ron Hubbard and I needed a serious break from that or I read the Book of Mormon.
I just finished my second book, my second reading from my – researching for my book.
I'm always struck by the fact that the principles and the stories within – yeah, I mean you could interpret those any way you want.
It's astonishing to me that people would take those as perfect stories, as a perfect book, as an example of perfect beings, a love for us.
And it just really makes me – it engenders the state of aporia, they say in philosophy, like your state of perplexity.
Like it puzzles me.
I get struck by – why would somebody think that?
I mean it's so horrific and grotesque.
There's nothing lovely about it.
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't some stories or some wisdom to be garnered from that, just as there are in Shakespeare's plays, for example.
But the problem becomes when people take those stories, like you said, and they think that there's something objectively true in those, and they need to act on those and manifest those in their lives.
I mean, that's tragic.
It is, and I mean, it's important to recognize that these come from a very primitive prehistory of our species, these stories.
It's weird how we carve off our lives, you know, and we say, well, you know, I want 21st century technology, I want 21st century medicine, I want 21st century science, but then for my epistemology, my psychology, my ethics, I'm going to go back to like the 6th century BC or something like that.
I mean...
You'd never imagine if somebody came up to you with a bucket of leeches saying, hey, let's deal with that heartburn.
If we also be like, ah, it runs screaming.
But then we sort of spiral back down through this hole of time to the most important elements of our thinking.
I mean, science is an outgrowth of philosophy, of a correct metaphysics and epistemology, yet we spiral back down to this incredibly primitive anti-rational state for the most important building blocks of our society.
It's...
I mean, I don't know.
In the future, they'll look back, I swear to you, they won't know how we managed to put one foot in front of another as a culture sometimes because we're so split in this way.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And remember, the faithful, there are entire bodies of literature that teach people how to talk others into faith.
Mormons have a lot of literature.
You know, the Catholics have a whole process for this, the Catholic catechism, and there are Not just books.
There are instructional videos, DVDs.
So those exist.
People are proselytizing and they're doing so aggressively when they're coming to your door on Sunday or – and we could talk about the whole tax status that makes the problem worse.
So – Instead of talking people into silliness and unreason and superstition and irrationality, we need to change the tides that we start talking people into reason and rationality and out of faith.
And it's not – it's less difficult to do than you think that it would be.
As you know, as you've read the book, it's less difficult to do.
And so these are real people who are getting hurt and their lives are affected in profound ways.
Right.
Finish your thought, please.
No, and I think that some people think, oh, it's futile, or it won't work, or they get angry, or they want to have a debate.
It's not about a debate.
It's not about winning.
It's about helping people.
There are people who are cognitively ill.
They have very, very serious, something as of yet undiagnosed symptoms.
Some epistemological sickness.
And we need to help them to align their beliefs with reality because not only are they making their communities worse and hurting their children, as you said, but they're destroying their lives based upon something that's completely without merit.
And I did say intentionally it's completely without merit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in fact, because it is so without merit, yet it is considered a guide.
It's like a backwards map.
It actually gets you to the wrong place.
So I really want to make this...
I love that.
I love that.
Yeah, so I really want to make a pitch for the book too because one thing I keep telling the skeptical community is the future belongs to whoever works harder.
It's Malcolm Gladwell's thing.
You just need to put the work in.
It's like that old joke about a guy, you stop someone in New York and say, hey, do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?
He's like, practice, practice, practice.
And so it's really, really key that people in the skeptical community, let's work at least half as hard as people in religious communities to learn our stuff and get out there.
Every time I go to a hotel, then there's a Gideon's Bible.
They'll pay for these Bibles and put them in the hotels.
Go buy Peter's book.
Nobody's asking you to go to Peter's house Sunday mornings for two and a half hours and bring your kids in a shiny suit and listen to him brisellatize, though I'm sure that would be fine.
He has a wicked brunch.
But it's simply a matter of – spend $10, buy the book, buy a couple of copies, leave them around, put them places, hand them to strangers on a bus.
People come to my house like three times a month trying to convert me to some damn thing or another.
Nobody's asking you to go door to door.
Buy the book, read it, put it into practice because otherwise we'll lose even though we're right because we just haven't put the elbow grease in necessary to raise the sun over this darkened landscape.
So I just really wanted to put that – just go act it, buy it, do it, buy 10 copies.
It doesn't cost you much.
It costs you less than most people pay for a month in a synagogue.
And this is how we get the information out there.
There's no shortcuts.
There's no magic.
Peter's not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it for you.
This is something for you to do in your life.
I'm just one guy.
You're just one guy.
Buy the book.
That's great.
But use the book.
Use the book.
Use the tactics.
Find someone who's been infected by the faith virus.
Go through the template.
Go through the questioning techniques and try to help them.
And they will thank you.
Well, Peter, I really, really appreciate it.
I appreciate the book.
And let me know when the audiobook comes out and I'll help sort of pump it out into the world.
And great, great job.
Great chat.
Anytime you want to do it again, you're more than welcome.
And all my best to your family, of course.
Thank you very much.
I very much appreciate it.
Thanks, Stefan.
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