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Oct. 17, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:46:54

2822 The Psychology of Trolls - Wednesday Call In Show October 15th, 2014

How can you identify cognitive distortions and bad arguments? Does your theory of "magic as madness" in fantasy stories have any additional criteria or is it universal? I’m religious – can you point out any holes in my thinking? Includes: string theory non-argument absurdity, free market thoughts on physics, self-detonating statements, Anita Sarkeesian’s death threats, facts can’t be racist, the psychology of trolls, the Sam Harris/Bill Maher/Ben Affleck situation, anxiety management through magical thinking, Harry Potter theory, giving Socrates an IQ test, sanity relative to social norms vs. reality, an emotional relationship to religion, the absurdity of death threats included in moral teachings, the vengeful podcaster, being erased in a relationship and marrying somebody with whom you have philosophical disagreements. http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/internet-trolls-sadists-psychopaths-lulz

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	Alright, so, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you doing well Wednesday night, October the 15th, midpoint of the month.
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	I'm sorry?
	My cardboard box is kind of worn.
	Well, if you'd stop scratching at it!
	Again, with the scratching.
	Always with the scratching.
	Yeah, come on, people.
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	Zanzibar philosopher, Baruch Bulsada, Von Vinegarhead.
	He said, he said, I can only sing as well as the crowd wants me to.
	And I think that's sort of a very true thing.
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	Actually, I haven't really checked them out in forever.
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	All right.
	Who do we have on first?
	Mr.
	Mike?
	Alright, Chris is up, and Chris wrote in and said, How should I approach identifying cognitive distortions and determining the appropriate action steps for untangling the knots so that my mind is no longer a source of suffering, but productivity and happiness?
	Oh, wait.
	Sorry, Chris.
	Are you making the suggestion that once you have figured out how to be more rational, your life will be like an unending sea of bliss?
	You'll just be like white water rafting down the endorphin stream from here to eternity?
	Do you see no suffering down the road for yourself should you become more rational?
	Definitely not.
	I definitely see some suffering at some point.
	You can always strive for the max.
	Let me tell you what life is like when you are not rational.
	Like when you're with the common herd of superstition and Patriotism and religion and magic and collectivism and so on.
	It's sex with zombies you think are hot.
	That's the way it works before you learn how to think.
	You think like, man, I'm like Hugh Hefnerville here.
	Oh, man, these women are smoking.
	These guys have abs.
	Everybody's hot, right?
	And then you...
	You take off the culture goggles, aka the beer goggles, and it's like...
	And you're like, oh my god, I've been having sex with a rotten armpit, not even a hot vagina.
	I'll never be clean again!
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, you're definitely...
	It's just a forewarning.
	A forewarning that when you...
	You're not really in Hugh Hefner's...
	I don't know what he'd call it.
	The mansion?
	The cesspit of bacterial transmission or whatever.
	Yeah, that too.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, you're basically at a big pile of zombie heads.
	And you're getting head, but it's the kind you can tuck under your arm and throw like a football, Kennedy style!
	So I just really wanted to mention that I don't want you to be disappointed.
	It's worth it.
	Don't get me wrong.
	It's worth it.
	But it's a bit horrifying when you first begin to really think about it.
	No, yeah, I definitely went through some of that when I first got exposed to some of your arguments.
	I definitely went through a couple of panics, I guess, a couple times, having a religious background.
	The shift to anarchy was super gradual, so I don't remember experiencing an intense panic, but with the religious stuff, I think I initially kind of...
	I had kind of a lashing out sort of moment at first, and then I kind of, you know...
	You mean it's sort of lashing out at me, or philosophy?
	No, not lashing out with bad arguments, kind of.
	I was thinking that just because if something's in a different realm, you couldn't disprove it.
	That was kind of where my head was at, and then I just realized, okay, well, that's something that pretty much every kind of deluded person says when they're in that scenario, and I just realized I was kind of, you know...
	That's kind of more of an agnostic thing to say, I guess, but I... I wasn't actually making an argument.
	I realized that I was just still working.
	What I thought was an argument was me working out just the fact that I was in that in-between phase, I guess.
	I don't know.
	It's hard to explain.
	No, I get it.
	Bullshit always comes down to one word.
	Magic!
	Why do people in the government have the power to initiate force and counterfeit?
	Why?
	It's magic!
	Why are 9,999 gods completely false and ridiculous, but my god is completely true and valid?
	It's magic!
	It's kind of magic!
	It comes down to magic.
	Why is my piece of dirt better than your piece of dirt?
	I mean, nationalism is just real estate fetish.
	That's all it is.
	Magic!
	It's just magic.
	And agnosticism.
	I'm going to move things beyond the realm of reality.
	So you can't possibly judge them in any way, shape, or form.
	And then I'm going to say, well, I guess we'll never know.
	It's like, yes, we do.
	Because magic is nonsense.
	But anyway.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, and I was kind of, I wasn't even full-blown agnostic.
	That was kind of the, to be precise, where I was at when I saw that video.
	Or not when I saw that video.
	I think I read the piece when I first was exposed to the argument.
	I can't remember.
	Anyway, I was actually just kind of in between Christianity and whatever was going to be next.
	Like, I was kind of, like, skeptical, disillusioned about certain things, and then...
	But I wasn't even full-blown agnostic.
	I was kind of just...
	I don't know what I was.
	I don't even know where I'm at.
	I don't know what I believe.
	That was kind of where I was when I read that.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, I mean, agnosticism is...
	I just...
	It's just annoying fence-sitting.
	I don't want to annoy anyone.
	I don't want the commitment of religion.
	I don't want the ire of religious people, so I'm just going to blank out.
	That's what Iran used to call the blank out.
	I'm just not going to think about this.
	But rather than admit I'm not going to think about it, I'm going to create some massive spiderweb of obfuscation and call it wisdom.
	Yeah, I've talked to people and said, you know, I was an atheist until I studied string theory.
	And I was like, you know, I haven't looked into it, but my gut's telling me that if that's a thing, that you aren't applying it in the correct way there.
	Oh, don't make me call it a physics rant.
	No, listen, many, many years ago, gosh, this has got to be, I don't know, 28, 29 years ago, I dated a woman.
	She was an engineer.
	She went to Queen's University, and we went out for a while.
	Is that in Queens?
	Sorry?
	Is that in Queens?
	I don't even...
	I was in Kingston, I think.
	I was in Kingston.
	I thought maybe it was in New York.
	Never mind.
	In Kingston town.
	Anyway, so she was into physics and sciences, and so was I. She had this...
	I don't know.
	It was a scientific American or something.
	And it was something like this.
	String theory.
	Imminent proof.
	Yeah.
	We're right on the verge of confirming everything there is to know about twine, string, rope, cord theory.
	Imminent!
	Trust us!
	It's right around the corner!
	You know, like all of those cures that are supposed to come from stem cells.
	Imminent!
	And, you know, I don't know if they're talking imminent in, like, fucking geological terms.
	Because I guess in 29 years in geology, it's pretty imminent, right?
	Right, right.
	But yeah, string theory was...
	You know, extraordinary, imminent solutions to unified field theory.
	It's all going to come together.
	Magnetism, gravity, strong and weak forces.
	It's all going to come together in one Studio 54 cocaine-fueled mosh pit of sexual unity.
	Still waiting.
	Still waiting.
	Global warming about to start!
	So, yeah, I just, it seems.
	And now, what's it?
	Some guy's saying black holes are bullshit.
	And back and forth we swing.
	And, you know, again, I just would invite these people to stop sending your fucking status propaganda drones into my wallet and go make me something that plays porn.
	That's all I'm asking for.
	Make me something that plays porn!
	Because I'm a man.
	And that's what we're looking for.
	VCR. Right?
	Plays porn.
	Takes over the world.
	Takes over the world, right?
	What drives the internet?
	The quest for human knowledge.
	The unity of the body politic.
	No!
	Squishy bits ramming together in improper lighting.
	Give me something that plays porn and I will consider myself well served.
	String theory.
	Does it play porn?
	It doesn't really, does it?
	Imagine your job when deciding camera angles is probably a little bit more simplified when you're doing porn, though.
	Right, right.
	Right.
	I mean, does it give me camera angles that would make a gynecologist go, whoa!
	I didn't know that did that.
	Well, no.
	Absolutely not.
	You know, is there eclipsing light at any point?
	Light dark, light dark, light dark, right?
	Is there one porn soundtrack that keeps getting replicated so as not to harm the porn actress's voice?
	Ah, ah, ah!
	You know, same thing, right?
	She can be drinking a glass of water, you know?
	Ah, ah, ah!
	I was like, wow, she's good!
	That's really quite impressive, right?
	Yeah, there'll be a whole person to get, like, 3D porn.
	You can, like, go into the theater and, like, People act like they got somebody riding them, but they don't.
	I don't know.
	That could be funny.
	Anyway, sorry.
	Yeah, I mean, just make me something that plays porn and stop fucking around with string theory.
	Don't give me string theory.
	Give me rope around someone in some sort of virtual reality holodeck, whorey deck or something like that.
	So, yeah.
	And, you know, give me something that allows me to avoid getting the puddle of Peewee Herman's Ejaculate on my shoe.
	You know, that's all I'm looking for.
	A little privacy and some headphones.
	Anyway, so...
	All right.
	So, yeah, so string theory, it's like quantum physics, all these, you know, experiments.
	Yeah, it's one of those things that you can literally add on the end of anything and then just be like, okay, well, then there's no point in talking about a thing.
	It's like, oh, okay, so the leads.
	No reason!
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's like, my name is Chris Day.
	Oh, but quantum physics, you know, there could be another world where you are not, in fact, Chris.
	So, you can't.
	It's not a fact.
	It's not your name.
	It's not your name.
	Quantum physics, it's not your name.
	Anyway.
	See, Quantum is like this evil superhero that people believe just slays philosophy.
	That's a great argument!
	But Quantum!
	You have been crushed!
	Quantum has crushed you!
	It's like, wow, that's quite a superhero you've got there.
	And it's all such complete nonsense and...
	I'm sure I'll look into it at some point.
	I just don't think it's being – I'm sure there's something to it just not being – I don't think it was meant to be used that way.
	It has nothing to do – it has nothing to quantum physics, nothing to do with philosophy.
	I mean philosophy of science maybe, right?
	I mean in terms of like how you validate all of this uncertainty and stuff.
	But all quantum flux and uncertainty completely and totally cancels out – It affects by the time you get even remotely close to sense data, like by the time you're touching anything, right?
	I mean, the whole world is flux.
	It's like you're using the stability of the world to communicate to me that there's no stability in the world, you know?
	You're using the properties of sound and matter and my hearing and your vocal cords and your typing.
	You're using the constancy of matter and energy to tell me that there's no constancy in matter and energy.
	Yeah, some freaky shit goes on down there deep among the atoms and so on.
	Yeah, absolutely some crazy shit.
	Partly because it's really tough to record anything without adjusting it because it's all so tiny, right?
	But the reality is philosophy is fundamentally concerned.
	This is my argument, so not, of course, everyone agrees with me.
	Not that everyone agrees with me on anything, including me.
	But philosophy, the goal is virtue.
	Now, virtue is about sense data.
	And, you know, like you stab a guy.
	Well, there's no quantum flux that is going to have you not have stabbed the guy or for him not to have been wounded or to have died.
	The degree to which you support or resist evil has nothing to do with quantum physics.
	Rape, nothing to do with quantum physics.
	Theft, murder, assault, nothing to do with quantum physics.
	And the purpose of philosophy It's moral health.
	Right.
	I'm just saying that's my experience with people.
	People use it in the way that you were talking about where they try and act like it has something to do with it.
	But I'm sure there are people out there that, you know, know a lot about it that don't do that.
	That's all I was trying to say.
	Well, and scientists themselves, scientists themselves, you know, like there was one, I can't remember his name, but some scientist who was saying, yeah, yeah, if you think that matter is indeterminate, you know, I live, my office is on the 19th floor.
	Fucking jump out of my office.
	Try to fly, you idiot.
	Ha, ha, ha.
	No, just try.
	Rely on quantum superhero of rational slaying powers to come and save you from the reality of physics and matter.
	No, Keanu, this is not the Matrix.
	Yeah, go jump.
	Go jump.
	Stand in front of a train and will quantum to save you.
	He's not going to show up and you will be bus bumper stain number three.
	Yeah.
	Well, yeah, definitely, definitely.
	Okay, so, but your original question was around, like, how do you determine bad thinking, right?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it.
	Yeah, I think that would have a lot to do with it, sure.
	I mean, part of it, yeah, I mean, I think thinking clearly, and I'm also, you know, I wasn't taught it growing up, obviously, and...
	Yeah, I mean, I'm new to it, so yeah, that's a good way to put it, but also kind of letting go of the past in some ways.
	That had a lot to do with why I was...
	I think we just had something called Scope Creep.
	I don't think I follow Scope Creep.
	So Scope Creep is not some guy in the bushes with nice breath.
	Scope Creep is when you start a project and then it's like, let's throw in a helicopter landing pad, right?
	I mean...
	I was just talking to a historian earlier today.
	He was saying to me that apparently the code for Obamacare websites or the Obamacare website is 500 million lines long.
	The code for Windows 8 is only 80 million lines long.
	So they had some scope creep.
	And so that is – scope creep is when something expands from the original.
	You know, like you say, I want a car, you know, and you pay for your car or whatever, and then you say, oh, and I'd like a moonroof, and I'd like leather seats, and I'd like, right, but I want to pay more, right?
	So scope creep is like, I'd like to talk about irrationality.
	Oh, and also if we can throw in letting go of the past.
	Right, right, right.
	Okay, fair enough.
	All right, well, let's start there then.
	Irrationality.
	Well, you know, I'm a relentless empiricist because reason is derived from The stable and predictable qualities of sense data, right?
	Of matter with regards to the senses.
	So for me, the first place I look to for bad thinking is ideas that don't attach to anything in particular.
	Like there's no string tying the thought to a thing, right?
	So when I look at the world, it's sort of like this fight club thing.
	You know, you look at the world, you see all this data, right?
	When I look at the world, right, so I'm standing in my studio, I'm looking at a microphone, and I see in my mind's eye, like a little line, like a spiderweb, and there's the word microphone, and it's attached to the microphone.
	Coffee cup, mouse, keyboard, you know, they all have these little lines, these little, you could call them like thought balloons, but they're not bubbles, they're lines that attach to the things, right?
	So, This is the nouns, right?
	Person's place or thing.
	And, you know, sometimes it's the verbs.
	Fast, right?
	I sort of see that, like, smoke going off behind someone who's running.
	The word fast just rippling out behind them, like a flag of ether or something.
	And so, to me, the first standard is somebody says something to me like society, right?
	And what I do is I say, okay, there's a word Is there a line attaching it to anything?
	Is there like a string?
	Hey, string theory, look at this.
	Is there a string that ties the word to something?
	Right?
	So, your name is Chris, right?
	So, you've got, you know, a little balloon.
	Chris, right?
	Which you share with some guy who's angelic.
	And so, you're an individual, right?
	Now, crowd has got...
	I guess it's got a concept, but it's not exactly a whole bunch of people with the lines, to some degree.
	A whole bunch of people with the lines going up to the word cloud and so on.
	And so for me, I look for the line that connects the word to something.
	And if there is no line, I'm like on high bullshit alert.
	Right?
	So, God!
	Okay, God.
	Big word.
	Big-ass word.
	Where's the line?
	What is it attached to?
	Well, it attaches to the imagination and predation of fantasists.
	So, right?
	That doesn't work.
	The collective, right?
	Society wants...
	Whoa, whoa.
	Once is a line that attaches to biological creatures, right?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	Like, I want...
	I want to...
	Yeah, it's a verb you can observe somebody do.
	Yeah, I want...
	Well, I mean, we're all alive because our ancestors wanted food and sex, right?
	Right.
	And so want is an aspect of biological life.
	So it attaches to biological life.
	But it attaches to individuals, right?
	There's no such thing as...
	The species, or sorry, the genus of some particular animal classification, that that genus wants to do something or other, right?
	No, no, no.
	That's a concept, right?
	That's saying, like, the word forest is something you can chop down and burn in your fireplace, right?
	Right.
	And so, with me, because I'm like, things have got to, like, they've got to anchor somewhere in reality, in sense data, in objective, lived, communicable experience, right?
	The sort of Shared, static sanity house we called reality.
	And so, for me, the first place that I look is, where's the line that attaches this to something?
	And it doesn't...
	So, concept mammal, right?
	I mean, it gives birth to life young and breastfeeds and warm-blooded.
	So, these all attach to the characteristics of particular entities, right?
	Individual rabbits and ferrets and whatever, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And politicians during election season do a fairly good imitation of mammal-like behavior.
	So the first place to look is, is there a line that connects this word to something, right?
	Resource-based economy.
	Those are three words I will grant you.
	What does it attach to?
	A giant computer.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Giant computer is not an argument.
	What does the computer do?
	Well, people input their needs and stuff comes out.
	Okay?
	And how are those needs prioritized?
	And where is the algorithm?
	And so on, right?
	Because people's desires are limitless and resources are finite, so how are things prioritized?
	So, since there is no...
	I've always been struck by how those people seem to get so testy with ANCAPs, considering that all we're saying is that we need an environment where different things can be tested and not have a monopoly on these different services.
	Do you think they want to be tested?
	Yeah, it's like we're the prerequisite for you actually getting to test your ideas.
	No, no, they...
	Look, I don't know much about the movement, but I do know how they react to legitimate questions and criticisms as a whole, not sort of individually and so on.
	Right.
	And, you know, we could go off on a whole tangent about that.
	Right.
	But that's magic, right?
	Right, right.
	Giant supercomputer magically meets your needs.
	Well, does that exist?
	No!
	Do you know how it might work?
	Not really.
	So, therefore, it's a word bubble, resource-based economy...
	Attached to nothing.
	Magic!
	Right.
	And, you know, how did God create the universe?
	Magic!
	We don't know.
	I mean, there's no answer.
	And so this argument is around looking for the word bubbles.
	And we so often get in, we climb into these word bubbles, like we're climbing into some alternate dimension or some matrix or some Let me climb into your brain where these words seem real to you and pretend we're talking about something tangible.
	We're not.
	We're not.
	So I look for how do these words – where do they attach to anything real?
	Giant?
	Yes, things are giant.
	Computer?
	Yes.
	Resources?
	Yes.
	The word based?
	Yeah, I get that.
	Economy?
	Okay, I get that.
	But where does this tie into something real?
	And if it doesn't tie into something real, I dismiss it.
	I don't even dismiss it as false.
	It's like, Chris, true or false?
	I don't know.
	I don't know, but it's kind of weird that you've got spittle on me.
	I don't know, but please stop spraying whatever you've got on me, right?
	Because that is not comprehensible.
	It doesn't attach to anything real.
	And people use these words that sound real, but what are they attached to?
	United States of America.
	What is that attached to?
	What in reality does that attach to?
	Well, frankly, it attaches to a whole bunch of government guns.
	That's the only thing that you can actually tangibly look at and say that's what defines America.
	It's not the land.
	It's not the people.
	They come and go all the time.
	It's the guns pointed at the people in a geographical region.
	That's all it attaches to.
	And so look for words that attach to no thing in particular.
	And like the proletariat.
	Right, right.
	What is that attached to?
	The workers.
	Are you saying that managers don't work?
	I mean, they don't attach to anything.
	Right, right.
	Ebola, well, that attaches to something, which attaches to airplanes and goes and gets half a million dollars of free medical care, and then people wonder why people are trying to get in.
	Anyway, so that's sort of the first thing, and that's a long way of putting it, but that's the first thing to look for.
	The second thing to look for, which is easier to talk about, the second thing to look for, so if somebody passes that, Then the second thing that I look for is self-detonating statements.
	I've done a bunch of these.
	Language is meaningless.
	There's no such thing as truth.
	No absolutes.
	There's no absolutes in this world.
	Everything is subjective.
	Everything is relative.
	Culture is whatever.
	There's no such thing as right and wrong.
	So, is it wrong for me to say that there is?
	Because then there is such a...
	Anyway.
	So, you have no choices!
	Everything is determined.
	So, you should change your mind about that.
	So, when people use these self-detonating statements, then I absolutely know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there's a deep con going on.
	Because there's nobody alive...
	Who's stupid enough to say, there's no such thing as truth.
	Like, to even think of that as a question, you have to have an IQ of at least 90.
	Right?
	Right, right.
	Now, if I hand somebody with an IQ of 70 a shoe and say, there's no such thing as shoes, what's he going to say?
	He would be with an IQ of 70?
	Yeah.
	So, borderline retarded.
	I mean, he'd just be like, okay?
	No, he'd say, there is a shoe.
	You have a shoe.
	If I hand a shoe to my 70 and say, there's no such thing as shoes, here, take this, he'd say, but you just gave me a shoe.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	He would get it.
	He wouldn't have to add, he wouldn't say, well, that's a self-detonating statement and blah, blah, blah.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, gotcha.
	Got it.
	But he'd say, there's no such, like, if I hand some, here, Here's a shoe.
	There's no such thing as shoes.
	That's a shoe.
	That's IQ of 70.
	These people can live alone.
	They can function.
	They know how to get to their jobs.
	They know.
	They can function.
	If somebody has the capacity to use abstract terminology and says there's no such thing as truth, That is a complete and total con.
	Because they certainly have the intelligence to listen to themselves critically.
	And rushing along people is one of the hallmarks of a con artist.
	Nobody tries to pick your pocket while you're standing still looking at a lake.
	It has to be in a big jostly crowd.
	Someone has to bump into you.
	So getting things moving and keeping you disoriented and...
	Crime occurs usually in flux.
	I mean, not like breaking into crime, but, you know, petty thefts and stealing stuff, right?
	And so whenever you feel in a hurry, whenever you feel hurried along, you're almost certainly being caught.
	Right.
	And when people make statements that are completely retarded, like so retarded that somebody who's borderline retarded could identify them as retarded.
	Here's a shoe.
	There's no such thing as a shoe.
	And then when you ask them to clarify or say, well, okay, so if there's no such thing as truth, is it a true statement that there's no such thing as truth?
	And then they just change it up, right?
	Right.
	I create one exception.
	It's like, but why didn't you tell me that?
	Like, now I'm pointing out that there's an exception.
	You're saying, well, there's one exception.
	It's just a con, right?
	Right.
	And I would say truth relative to what?
	Truth compared to what?
	Compared to falsehood.
	There's no such thing as absolute truth.
	Okay, what does no such thing mean?
	Does that mean that there's no such physical thing as absolute truth?
	Well, of course.
	Truth is the relationship between concepts or arguments and logic and or sense data, sense reality.
	And so they don't know what they're talking about.
	So when I was in Amsterdam for a speech earlier this year, I went to a party after the conference, which was fun.
	And I was chatting with this woman, and she was asking me about my master's thesis, and there was this other woman listening, and I explained the thesis, and she said, interesting, and the other woman said, yeah, that is interesting.
	And I said, well, what is it about that is interesting to you?
	Well, you know, it's just, what can I say?
	I mean, it's just interesting.
	Oh, he said the word interesting again.
	Well, that clarifies things, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And, you know, I do feel kind of sorry for people like that.
	I mean, you get a whole – you see their history.
	Right, right.
	Not able to admit that they're wrong, not able to ask questions, a lot of pretentious people around, faking it.
	Like, what a miserable existence, right?
	Right.
	Right.
	Right, right.
	I mean, sometimes people just don't care enough to process what you're saying, or sometimes...
	Well, then don't, right?
	Don't say anything, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So I said, well, wait.
	Is it interesting, interesting?
	Yeah.
	Interesting, or interesting, interesting, interesting?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Like, what kind of ratio are we talking about here?
	And then she got happy and walked off.
	Oh, man.
	Well, I'm sure you've at least got a few people that...
	That followed you.
	I mean, so what was the conference again?
	Oh, this was the NextWeb conference.
	Gave a speech on Bitcoin.
	Okay, good stuff.
	I own a little bit.
	Okay, so those are sort of the major...
	So if you get concepts not tied to anything real, plus self-detonating statements, you've just eliminated like 99.5% of the human race.
	Yeah.
	Well...
	Somebody just wrote in the chat room, Steph is the only one I know who goes to Amsterdam for a speech.
	Yeah, man.
	But you know, I totally had to inhale for that speech.
	Right, right.
	I'm assuming you've never given a talk on anything.
	Who would do that?
	Okay, so you wanted to...
	That's sort of my...
	That's sort of the quickest.
	I think you can study logic, logical fallacies, and so on.
	But is there a chord attaching this word to anything real?
	If not, forget it.
	Right, right.
	Cool.
	I think that's going to happen.
	That sounds like it has a lot of utility.
	So, I mean, since I'm wanting to… I'm sorry to interrupt, Chris.
	Sorry.
	One other thing I wanted to mention.
	Because… So self-detonating statements also occur in the emotional realm as well as the philosophical realm.
	That's what I was going to get to.
	Okay, sorry.
	Keep going.
	Okay.
	That was what I was about to go off on.
	So yeah, that's – anyway, yeah.
	Tell me now.
	This is your turn to work, right?
	So Chris, where is the self-detonating statement in this sentence?
	Steph, you're so arrogant!
	I mean, what jumps out at me is that it doesn't involve any sort of information.
	It's not a rebuttal to an argument.
	But that statement by itself, what makes it self-detonating, I actually don't think I'm 100% sure.
	Well, arrogance is...
	I mean, if you're right, you can't be called arrogant, right?
	It's not arrogant to say two and two make four.
	Right, right.
	So arrogance is when you assert correctness with no evidence and when you are, in fact, wrong.
	Okay, gotcha.
	Yeah, so that person has no evidence for the claim he's making about you and so it's just a bully tactic.
	But he's absolutely certain.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He's got no certainty.
	He's got no argument.
	And so he's using the word arrogance and he's displaying...
	The characteristics of the word arrogance while calling someone else arrogant.
	Right.
	Right?
	I mean, Steph, you're an asshole, right?
	Yeah, it's not a very nice thing to say to somebody.
	Well, no, it's only an asshole calls someone an asshole without reason, right?
	Without evidence, right?
	Like, if I can prove that someone has done all these terrible things, I can say, what an asshole, right?
	But if I lead off and end with, what an asshole, I'm being an asshole, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, you can't call anybody that without having it be a nice thing to say to somebody.
	Definitely.
	Sometimes it's true.
	I mean, there are times where you can fire that down.
	No, no, but then you need to establish it, right?
	Right, right, right.
	Right.
	Steph...
	You're a racist.
	Yeah, yeah.
	To call somebody that without having any evidence like you would – yeah.
	I've ran into some of that before.
	It's frustrating.
	Okay.
	Why is that a self-denating statement?
	Steph, you're a racist.
	Right.
	Well, to be a racist is to assign attributes to people without any evidence just based on the color of their skin, so you're essentially doing the same thing because you don't have any evidence for the person that you're talking about being a racist.
	Yeah, that's close.
	That's close.
	I'll just refine it a little bit.
	Okay.
	So when people say to me, Steph, you're a racist, are they saying that to me because I'm white?
	I mean, it...
	See, I don't know the context that they said you're a racist.
	I feel like that's like a...
	Trust me, there's no context.
	But okay, I have to be talking about another race, right?
	So if I say, I don't know, like Norwegians tend to be insular, right?
	Is anyone going to call me a racist?
	Right.
	I mean, I don't know anybody that would call you a racist, but I mean, there's probably got to be somebody else.
	Italians have slightly higher levels of involvement in organized crime.
	Is that a racist statement?
	No.
	Why not?
	Because they're white.
	Well, okay.
	But it's because, trust me, it being true has no barrier to anyone talking about racism.
	In fact, the more true it is, the more you'll get called a racist.
	The more true whatever you're saying about whatever group is, the more you'll get called a racist.
	So I don't get called a racist by making critical statements about white people, right?
	Right.
	So if I criticize George Bush, do I get called a racist?
	No.
	If I criticize President Obama, do I get called a racist?
	Yes.
	Sometimes, right?
	Or Nelson Mandela or whatever, right?
	Yes.
	So the reason why it's a self-detonating statement...
	It's because saying, Steph, you're a racist is judging me negatively because of my race.
	Because if I were a black person saying something about the black community, I could not really be called a racist, right?
	Right.
	They have their own terms for people who – like blacks have their own terms for people who – some blacks who criticize the black community.
	Uncle Toms, Oreos, you're acting white, you're a race traitor, whatever it is, right?
	But they don't say racist, right?
	So they're saying something negative about me because of my race, not because of my arguments, which could be rebutted by facts and evidence and so on.
	So, Steph, you're a racist is a racist statement because they're only saying it to me because I'm white.
	In other words, they're making a negative judgment about me just because you're white.
	Right, right.
	I mean, obviously it's ad hominem, but it's ad hominem in that way.
	It's an interesting concept.
	I've never thought about self-detonating arguments like that.
	Misogynist.
	I'm sure you can get this one.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, if you were a woman saying that, nobody's going to call you a misogynist.
	Right.
	So you are making negative statements about me because of my gender, and your negative statement about me because of my gender is that it's wrong to make negative statements about people because of their gender.
	Are you kidding me?
	Are you kidding me?
	People write to me and say, how could you survive all these negative comments about you on the web?
	It's like, because they're so bad!
	It's like, how can you survive the attacks of all these people who stabbed themselves in the belly?
	You know, with sorrow at their self-mutilation, but with no sense of danger from their typing, right?
	Right.
	I mean, I don't know what people think they're doing.
	You know, you're just a woman hater.
	You're a shill!
	Right?
	Right, right.
	You're Jewish!
	You're anti-Jewish!
	You're a sign of Jewishness with Jews!
	I don't know.
	Fuck, can I just do anti-Semitic somewhere in here?
	Would that help, right?
	Right, that's an empowering talk, because whenever you want to talk about some of this stuff, part of the reason that you did a lot of times, especially for me, I mean, being relatively new...
	Or I would say new.
	Probably been checking out some of your stuff for two and a half years, maybe.
	But, you know, one of the things that runs through your head is just what people will say.
	I mean, it's nerve-wracking, you know.
	And I think what you just said about how it's really nothing to really fear.
	They're not going to be doing anything to you.
	They're just going to be ultimately just saying stuff about themselves or revealing things about themselves.
	That's definitely an interesting perspective.
	I think that'll help me and hopefully some other people power through that.
	That's good stuff.
	There's nothing more paralyzing than wanting everyone to like you.
	Right.
	Nothing is more paralyzing.
	I have to be honest.
	I like it when people like me.
	I get that.
	And that's basic survival in a tiny tribe.
	But we don't have that anymore as a species.
	We're not all stuck in these tiny tribes, these claustrophobic little social cysts or whatever, right?
	Right.
	But by God, I mean, there's nothing more vile than having everyone like you.
	That simply means that you are a chameleon, that you simply reflect back to everyone what they like, that you're an empty manipulator of destroyed history.
	I mean, there's nothing more vile than being loved or liked by everyone.
	Because that's to say that there are no conflicts of interest among Christians.
	The human race.
	Of course there is.
	Massive conflicts of interest in the human race.
	And since there are massive and opposing conflicts of interest in the human race, if you stand for anything, you will be hated by some people.
	Right.
	It's what Churchill used to say when he said, oh, you're hated.
	Good!
	That means you've stood up for something sometime in your life.
	Right.
	Only if you turn yourself into a ghost do you offend no living thing.
	Only if you cease to exist do you offend no living thing.
	Offense is foundational to the ethical life.
	So it's so absolutely ridiculous that people think that they can harm a philosopher with self-detonating statements.
	That's like me attempting to take over a continent with Monty Python's crack suicide squad and We've come with a crack suicide squad to rescue you, and then they just kill themselves because they're a suicide squad.
	I had a conversation once kind of recently, and I'm curious of your thoughts.
	I kept it going, or we kept it going, but I think maybe it was just a spot where you walk away.
	I'm curious if you agree.
	They were saying that they were scared by my beliefs, and I was like, what?
	Basically, we were mainly talking about the state.
	My beliefs as they pertain to the state, and they...
	They said that I scared them.
	I said, well, I'm just really just taking a stand against the use of aggression.
	And they said, well, we have different definitions of aggression.
	I mean, at that point, you can't really have a conversation with somebody if they're going to start pulling stuff like that.
	But I don't know.
	I'm starting to wish I just ended it after that.
	But I don't know.
	It doesn't matter.
	They said they were scared of your arguments.
	Were they men or women?
	Both.
	And who's...
	Was it a man or a woman who said, I'm scared?
	It was a man and a woman.
	Sorry?
	It was a man and a woman.
	I was actually talking to...
	They said it simultaneously?
	No, no.
	The woman said, you scare me, and the man said, we have different definitions of violence.
	Oh!
	How did I know it was a woman?
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, no.
	How did I know?
	I don't want to...
	I mean, women are more emotional and more threatened by things in general, but I'm not – I can't answer how you knew specifically.
	Are you a woman?
	How do you know whether – we know that women say that they feel threatened more than men do, but how do we know that they actually feel threatened more?
	What we do know is that women says – when a woman says, I feel threatened, what happens?
	Here come the white knights to save the woman in distress, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So the woman says, I feel scared.
	Right?
	Right.
	You're really scaring me with these thoughts and patterns of sound in my ears.
	Oh yeah, that triggers the Calvary.
	Yeah, it's an easy little card.
	And then in comes the man saying, well, you know, I guess we, you stop scaring this poor little woman.
	Right, right.
	He's like a Smurf in your giant, jolly green, giant playhouse of thinking.
	So, I mean, so insulting, right?
	Right, right.
	So insulting.
	I can't imagine.
	Just because I can't imagine men saying, your argument is scary.
	I just can't imagine that.
	Because what happens when a man says he's scared?
	Suck it up!
	Man up!
	Right?
	Who gives a shit, right?
	Right?
	This woman, Sarkeesian, she had these Twitter threats.
	Threats to when she was going to go and give a speech that somebody was going to shoot in the area that she was giving the speech.
	Terrible, terrible stuff.
	Absolutely terrible stuff.
	Horrible stuff.
	And I can't rouse myself to care.
	I can't rouse myself to care because when the men's conference was receiving endless bomb threats, not one feminist spoke out about it.
	Hey, I'll run to your aid when you even notice that What happens to men?
	The moment that women say, oh my god, that's terrible!
	Men want to get together and talk about their issues and they're being hounded from place to place, have to almost cancel their conference because of death threats?
	That's horrible!
	The moment that women say anything about that, and I've talked about this on this show many times, Hundreds of thousands of people have listened to and watched just the Emma Watson thing.
	I talk about this stuff.
	Had looked at the comments the other day.
	How many comments do you think there were saying, it's terrible that this happened to the Men's Rights Conference?
	Almost none.
	You are almost correct.
	None.
	Zero.
	Right.
	Mike, did we get a bunch of emails after that went out and other times that I've talked about it?
	Just saying how terrible it was that Men's Conference had to operate under the threat of murder.
	I don't think there's been a single email saying that.
	Zero.
	Right, so zero comments out of the thousands of comments.
	Zero emails out of the God knows how many emails we get every month.
	Absolutely zero.
	Mike, have you seen anyone who's not a man talking about how wrong it is for Men's Rights Conference to receive bomb threats?
	Absolutely not.
	Zero.
	Zero.
	In fact, the mainstream media came out and wrote negatively and in a troll-like manner about a men's conference.
	So not only was there no support for a men's conference operating under the threat of bombings and assassinations, but the motherfuckers of the mainstream press came out and wrote bitchy, snarky little articles about this gathering.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, that's definitely sad.
	So yeah, I think it's terrible that women get these threats.
	And the moment that women notice that men get these threats too, I'll give a shit.
	I will.
	I will give an absolute shit.
	But I pay people in the coin they've earned.
	And men get bullied more online than women.
	And I don't see a lot of sympathy coming from women for this.
	So...
	Even to be left alone would have been better than what the mainstream media did with this conference.
	And so I just really felt that was important to point out.
	The misogyny thing is interesting.
	Because when I say something negative about certain types of women, or when I talk about women in aggregate having particular characteristics on average, and people say, I hate all women, they're actually the misogynists.
	This is another reason why it's a self-detonating statement.
	Because if I say, you know, lots of women hit their children, and people say, you're a woman hater, you're a misogynist, what they're saying is It's that they believe that all women hit their children.
	Right?
	Because I don't just hate the women who hit their children as I do.
	I do hate the women who hit their children.
	I understand it to some degree.
	I sympathize with it to some degree.
	But I, you know, I hate the sin, not the sinner.
	But I hate that women hit children.
	But if somebody says that means you hate all women, they're the misogynists because they're saying all women hit their children.
	Which is not what I'm saying at all.
	They have a far more negative view of women than I could conceivably have.
	So that's the real misogyny.
	The real misogyny is taking criticisms of a group on average and saying those criticisms now encompass everyone in that group.
	What a horrible negative thing to say.
	Blacks are disproportionately in America.
	Blacks are disproportionately represented in crime statistics.
	And yes, it's on the high end, right?
	Significantly.
	Now, if I point out this basic fact that blacks commit a huge amount of crime compared to – I mean particularly compared to Asians but compared to whites and to some degree compared to Hispanics – If people say – if I say blacks are more likely to be criminals in America at the present and people say, well, you're racist, that's an incredibly racist thing to say.
	Because I say blacks commit more crimes and they extend that to the whole race.
	What they're saying or what they're impugning is that all blacks are criminals because they're extending it to a whole race.
	So it's incredibly racist.
	To call someone a racist for pointing out facts, it's incredibly sexist to say that someone who criticizes women, particular women for particular characteristics, then hates all women.
	It's so transparent, it's so ridiculous, it's so obvious, and it's so unbelievably helpful.
	These people are doing a massive, massive service to humanity.
	They are, like, if they didn't exist, you'd have to invent them.
	Do you know why?
	No.
	Well, what kind of logs do you drop in the morning there, Chris?
	You know, if you've had, like, some spicy food, maybe a few too many garlic naan, maybe some mutter paneer, some sag paneer, whatever.
	Something that really opens up the B-52 bomb base for you in the morning.
	You drop a fairly serious deuce, right?
	Correct.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	What would you like to do with that deuce?
	I would like to flush it down the toilet and have to smell it for as little as possible.
	Make it go away?
	Yes.
	For the love of all its holy.
	Do you turn and look?
	I do sometimes.
	Curiosity does overwhelm me occasionally, yeah.
	Are you proud when you've got a floater?
	You know, yeah, I mean, the thought of taking a picture does run through my mind occasionally, but I typically don't.
	I typically do not.
	I do know people who do that, though, but yeah.
	Remind me not to subscribe to your Instagram account, for Christmas.
	Right, right, yeah, I don't use one, but yeah.
	All right.
	So, because, you know, you see those pictures of people like, I took a picture of myself every day for 12 years.
	Here's the kanji spelling of my shit for 12 years.
	I don't see those.
	With the pretty piano and, you know, the weird people in the background who keep popping up.
	I'm sorry?
	I said, notice how the composition changes.
	No, look, it's an important thing, right?
	I mean, you don't want to see...
	Composition of your shit, absolutely.
	Yeah, you don't want to see eyeballs in there.
	You don't want to see Chinese polygraphy.
	You want to see a nice ass...
	Which hopefully needs a manly double flush.
	Because we've got these ridiculous toilets now that basically have all the flushing fucking capacity of eye drops.
	It's a water saver!
	Only if you're a seven-year-old little girl.
	Because otherwise, you need three of those cranks to get any kind of stuff out, and then you need another one to scrub.
	It's like they're just not built for anyone over 150 pounds who doesn't just eat tofu.
	Anyway.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I just wanted my apartment to clogs up all the time.
	Oh, isn't it ridiculous?
	How ridiculous is it?
	I mean, I remember when I was a kid.
	Man, we used to have these toilets.
	Holy shit.
	They were like doorways to another dimension.
	They were like flushing a toilet in a B-52 when half the fuselage is missing.
	Yeah, no.
	Those bitches were loud.
	I know that flush you're talking about.
	Yeah, that thing was loud.
	Yeah.
	Don't take my intestines!
	Please, God!
	Don't take my memories!
	No, like, stand back.
	Like, I'd be flushing that shit with a broomstick because it basically just opens up a portal to another dimension.
	Like, very colorful tentacles come out and reach for your brain and then...
	That has to be a sound effect for, like, some sort of non-toilet-related thing in a movie.
	That flushing in of itself.
	Anyway...
	Oh yeah, no, I miss that.
	I also miss the showers that were, like, because now it's like just a series of eyedroppers in these sort of water-saving showers.
	It's annoying as shit.
	Because it's like, you know, I want to be sandblasted in a shower.
	Like, I want it to be like a fucking acupuncture.
	Just sort of pressure washing, yeah.
	Yeah, I want it to be like something that takes a tan off, and hopefully some moles, and maybe even some hair.
	I want it to be like A cannon firing fucking porcupines at my skin.
	I want it to be like, you know, like a really good massage is like just before you cry tears of blood, you know, like right up to the edge there.
	I had this Australian guy a couple of weeks ago.
	I don't get many massages, but I had an Australian guy.
	And you know when you get a woman, it's kind of nice, you know, but this Australian guy was like, fuck you for sending this all over as criminals, you limey bastard.
	Yeah.
	I really don't think it's supposed to be hanging from the chandelier and knee-dropping me in my tent spots, which is now my entire body.
	And of course, as a man, I'm like, can't admit weakness.
	Can't admit weakness.
	He was massaging my back, and when his thumbs are actually poking through my armpits, it's like, maybe I should say something at this point.
	But yeah, so I miss the showers that...
	At the back where the shower hits is a different color of the bathtub.
	It strips enamel.
	It strips paint.
	You can't open your teeth otherwise they get knocked back into your esophagus.
	I really like a strong shower and I love me a strong flush.
	I like actually flying airplanes for that because you never have to double flush.
	You never have to double flush in an airplane, right?
	Yeah, definitely not.
	I mean I don't know where that shit literally is going but it ain't coming back.
	So I miss the portal to another dimension flushes.
	So the reason why...
	I'm sorry, go ahead.
	No, I'm just laughing.
	That's pretty funny.
	So yeah, you want these golden shimmers.
	A portal to another dimension has opened up under your anal cavity.
	Anyway, so a proctologist's arm coming out and giving you a quick reach around.
	Anyway, so...
	So the reason why, like, trolls, idiots, vile, obvious manipulators are so helpful is they're the flushers, right?
	Because people, you know, they come over to watch a video of mine or, you know, everyone, you know, who makes any sense on the internet, right?
	These people, they come over and they hear sort of these arguments.
	Now, some people are kind of on the fence, right?
	Like, if they're hearing a new argument, they're like, whoa!
	What does that mean?
	Like, I've never heard anything like this before, right?
	Now, so when they hear me say that I want to empower women by helping them recognize their role, their essential role in the cycle of violence, stop Fainting on the couch and calling out for men to save you from violence you have nothing to do with and maybe stop hitting your children 900 fucking times a year and you'll do quite a lot to make the world a better place.
	That's my argument.
	That is empowerment.
	That is incredibly friendly to women.
	That is going to make women happier.
	It is going to make their relationships with their children better.
	I get shit on various...
	Doc and sinister corners of the internet known as Mordor for like this defooing, like this sort of family separation stuff.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	I work as hard as I humanly can to keep families together, right?
	I mean, if I was really into family separating, I'd be pro-spanking.
	Right, right.
	Right?
	I'd be pro-government schools.
	I'd be like, yeah, firm hands, spare the rod, spoil the child.
	I mean, if I was really into families breaking up...
	Jesus, I'd be like doing the exact opposite of everything that I'm doing.
	It's like saying, oh man, this guy, he hates marriage because he tells husbands and wives to listen to each other and to reason with each other and to never use violence with each other.
	That guy just hates marriage.
	No, if I hated marriage, I'd be, you know, woman needs a firm hand, you know.
	Women, unhappy with your man, withhold sex as a punishment.
	That would be my advice if I really hated these institutions.
	And so the reason why, yeah, and sorry, Mike just pointed out, we get parents calling in all the time.
	What do they tell them to do?
	Be peaceful, be reasonable, listen to your children, don't hit them, don't yell at them.
	I mean, if I really wanted families to break up, if that were what got me my jollies off, some sort of defu fetish, I'd be giving the worst possible advice that I could.
	Why would I get parenting experts?
	Anyway, this stuff is so obvious to anybody with an IQ over, say, your average midget's shoe size.
	It's so obvious.
	Like this, there's no such thing as truth.
	You're a racist.
	You're a misogynist.
	Like this stuff is so obvious that what it does is it's a flush.
	Because people like – oh, these are weird arguments, right?
	Now – so then people go down to like comments, which is I think really – without looking for – it's the only place where you can really see troll stuff, right, in this show.
	They go down to comments and they see, you racist cracker motherfucker, right?
	And if – first of all, they're looking at comments rather than thinking for themselves, which is not – does not speak well to their integrity.
	That's a new argument.
	I must see what other people on the internet think.
	Because everyone knows that internet thinking is the only real thinking that ever happens.
	I mean, that's just ridiculous, you know?
	I don't know if this woman is pretty.
	I'll ask the drunk horny guy.
	I don't know if the oil sands are good or bad.
	I guess I'll go to the oil sands manufacturers.
	Is coke good or bad?
	I don't know.
	I'll go watch some Coke commercials and find out.
	First of all, someone's looking at the comments rather than think for themselves.
	That's obviously not great.
	Occasionally, in the realm of aesthetics, I find that interesting.
	Sometimes I watch a movie and I'm like, you know, I don't know.
	I don't know whether I liked it or not.
	I'm not sure what it was about.
	Occasionally, I'll look up reviews and hear what other people have to say or whatever.
	But that's not philosophical.
	It's not moral issues, right?
	Art subjective, yeah.
	Yeah, so somebody looks down into the comments, which is like trying to earn the respect of philosophy while looking down at the comments.
	It's like trying to earn the respect of a woman by looking down at her cleavage.
	Right.
	It's just your baser instincts and all that.
	So they look at the comments, and then they're, you misogynist woman-hating, right?
	And now, then they're the fork in the road, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Now anybody with any brain says, this guy annoys abusers.
	Right?
	Right.
	I mean, I'm not a troll.
	Right.
	So if people are getting angry at me, anybody with any brain says, well, this guy...
	Really pisses off abusive people.
	Well, to be fair, some of the reason, or not the main reason, but a reason I enjoy your stuff is sometimes I can imagine how the layman person would react reading that or listen to that.
	For example, the post-analysis with Peter Joseph, it was just kind of...
	Part of it was just kind of laughing, just how he must be reacting to that.
	And sure enough, he comes up with some video where he is just fuming and flipping out.
	So to be fair, some of the banter and the back and forth is a fun part of the conversation.
	What's your phrase about liberals, Mike?
	I think I have more than just one phrase.
	Emotionally reactive liberals is kind of...
	Emotionally reactive liberals with all the free will of a trampoline when you drop a bowling ball on it.
	Boing!
	Up it comes, right?
	Emotionally reactive liberals.
	I'm going to approach you reasonably with evidence and facts.
	Okay.
	Well, I guess we switched weapons here.
	Instead of sword fighting, we're now just...
	We're just doing explosive vomiting.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But I laugh my ass off at the principle of, what was it, flibbity-jibbit-fetank biscuit barrel or something like that.
	It was good stuff.
	It was funny.
	Anyway.
	So, anyway, so the point, so then the person looks down at the comments and they see idiots throwing shit.
	Now, if they then say, well, I guess he could be a misogynist.
	Yeah!
	Yeah!
	This guy just put forward a recent argument with facts, evidence, and sources.
	This anonymous guy with a picture of a giant ass as his avatar, this guy thinks he's a douchebag.
	Or the guy who thinks he's a douchebag is on to something.
	Forget all those recent arguments.
	Douchebag!
	So you deserve to be over there.
	Don't clog up my bandwidth.
	Don't clog up my message board.
	Don't clog up my show.
	With your presence, go join the lynch mob of mouth breathers, right?
	Right.
	Go join the unibrows, you know, the people who find pants, you know, up to their waist a huge challenge.
	Go join the people who want slip-ons because, you know, it's a lot of work to tie shit.
	Just go join those people.
	Yeah.
	Flushed.
	Right?
	It's beautiful.
	Go to the sewage of the troll underworld and go and join them.
	He's a racist.
	No Holocaust.
	Ebola is a hoax.
	You're a shill.
	You're Jewish.
	You serve in the new world order.
	And it's like, yes.
	Go!
	Go to them.
	They're calling you.
	They will be your friends.
	That's what we need.
	A good, old-fashioned flush.
	Right.
	Right.
	Incredibly useful.
	That's why we don't turn comments off on the YouTube.
	I mean...
	Right, right.
	So the principle is anyone looking at that's going to clearly see that these people are just lashing out and don't really have any arguments to bear.
	And if you can't see that, if you can't see that, I think that zombie's pretty!
	Well...
	There's no hope for you anyway, yeah.
	That's because you're a zombie.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	If you think that zombie is pretty, that's because you're a zombie.
	Right?
	And so go.
	Go mate with the zombies.
	Go make your flesh-squishy broken bone sounds over there in a pile.
	Right?
	Don't trouble the people with intelligence and wisdom with your stuff.
	So, yeah, we're just – we're about triage, right?
	And the concern trolls are even better because they're – Wait, a what triage?
	Sorry, concern trolls?
	No, a what triage?
	You said we're a something triage?
	Oh, we're all about the triage, right?
	All about the triage, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Who can you save?
	Who can you not save?
	So if you're a battlefield doctor, triage is like, if this person is going to die in 10 minutes, I'm not going to bother with him.
	If this person is going to make it for a day, I'm not going to bother with him.
	But if this person can be saved, if I act in the next 10 minutes, that's who we go to, right?
	Right, right.
	So there are the concern trolls.
	What I find also, again, I don't check YouTube comments anymore, but when I did...
	It's pretty funny.
	One of my favorites, and Mike, feel free to chime in on this, but one of my favorites is the guy whose account has been created about eight minutes ago, who then posts and says, Steph, I have been a longtime fan of your show, and I've been watching it for quite a long time.
	I'm very concerned about the direction that your show has been taking lately.
	I feel that...
	And that's the concern troll.
	And those guys are just great.
	It's like, really?
	Eight minutes ago, your account was created, and you've been a fan for a long time, and now you're just concerned about...
	And people do that so that they're trying to create – and it's not for me.
	They're trying to create the impression for newbies that the show was sensible and rational.
	Now, well, it's just – it's gone weird.
	I don't know what happened.
	It's just gone weird.
	And that way people can be kind of scared off.
	Now – If people, again, does this take any brains whatsoever?
	Of course not.
	If somebody has been a fan of a philosophy show for a long time and then starts bleating about their fucking feelings as an argument, I'm concerned.
	Concerned is not an argument, douchebag!
	I've been following your mathematics podcast for quite some time.
	But I have a funny feeling in my left testicle that your new proof might not be quite up to scratch.
	It's like, I don't think you understand mathematics, and I'm pretty sure you haven't been following it for quite a while.
	Right, right.
	Unsubbed!
	That's my favorite.
	Unsubbed!
	Good!
	You know, it's like your shit saying, oh man...
	I'm flushing myself!
	I'm like, good.
	Good.
	You know what?
	It's YouTube.
	It's a public toilet.
	I don't want to touch that handle.
	Flush yourself!
	Unsubbed.
	Good!
	Can you take some other people with you?
	I don't know.
	People, do they not know how they appear to anybody with any brains?
	I guess they don't.
	It's this pompous tribe of idiot savants.
	You know, they can type.
	They know what letters, more or less.
	You know, your and you, apostrophe R-E, remains a constant challenge to those who deign to criticize the biggest philosophy show in the world.
	But do they not know how they appear to anyone with brains?
	I don't think so, because they probably just hang around each other, right?
	Right.
	They're probably just like, I told him!
	You did.
	You did.
	You flushed yourself, and now you're actually sucking all the other shit in the house into your toilet, and you're all flushing yourself.
	Great!
	Fantastic!
	Off to the sewers with you!
	Go play in the mucus and filth and syringes and shit and birth control pills.
	Go!
	Go!
	That is your playground.
	Leave us, surface dwellers.
	Leave us, Eloi.
	Up on the world...
	To enjoy the sun and the clouds and all the beautiful things the world has to offer.
	Into the underworld you go!
	Down you go!
	Into the lake of fire that is your own sick companionship.
	It is an incredibly useful and helpful device.
	Because, I mean, trolls in particular.
	I'll just sort of end up with this.
	I know we've sort of gone a bit over the first question.
	But there's something called...
	The Dark Tetrad.
	I don't know if you've ever...
	Have not heard it.
	Okay, okay.
	It's not the latest expansion pack to Skyrim.
	Tetrad.
	I'm just going to get the original article here.
	I read this, I don't know, quite some time ago.
	Okay, so internet trolls, right?
	So they've actually done quite a bit of studying on these Guys now, right?
	So there's a psychology paper that was released, I guess, relatively recently.
	And you can find this on Mother Jones and sort of other things.
	So Aaron Buckles of the University of Manitoba and two colleagues sought to directly investigate whether people who engage in trawling are characterized by personality traits that fall into the so-called dark tetrad.
	So the dark tetrad.
	Machiavellianism, which is a willingness to manipulate and deceive others, right?
	So this would be, you know, Steph, as a long-time listener, I must confess to being concerned about the way that the show is blah, blah, blah, all the way through to racist, right?
	This is the manipulate and deceive others, right?
	As a long-time follower, it's generally a lie, right?
	So Machiavellianism, narcissism, so, you know, just only concerned about your own feelings, no capacity to really understand or empathize with others, right?
	Psychopathy, the lack of remorse and empathy, and sadism, pleasure in the suffering of others, right?
	So, trawling is, for people who have these unholy personality traits, it is their porn.
	Like, they genuinely take deep pleasure in what it is that they do.
	And...
	The results are huge.
	The study found correlations quite significant between the dark tetrad traits and trolling behavior.
	It found a relationship between all dark tetrad traits except for narcissism and the overall time that an individual spent per day commenting on the internet.
	So the more people comment on the internet, the more likely they are to have all of these absolutely horrifying and appalling things.
	So, trolls were identified in a variety of ways.
	One was by simply asking survey participants what they enjoyed doing most when on online comment sites, offering five options.
	Debating issues that are important to you, chatting with friends, making new friends, trolling others, and other.
	And I can't show you the graphic here, but maybe we include a link in the video and audio.
	But non-commenters...
	We're kind of, you know, negative for these horrible personality traits.
	Debating issues, tiny, slight positive, sort of 0.1, 0.2.
	Chatting, pretty neutral.
	Trolling, you know, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8.
	And other were all negative.
	Now, only 5.6% of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoy trolling, but that's probably because other people were off trolling.
	Right.
	And...
	Even so, let's see.
	The researchers conducted multiple studies using samples from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, also of college students, to try and understand why the act of trolling seems to attract this type of personality.
	They even constructed their own survey instrument, which they dubbed the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, comprised of the following items.
	One, I have sent people to shock websites for the lols.
	Do you know what that last word means?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, shits and giggles, right?
	I don't know.
	I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.
	I enjoy grieving or griefing other people in multiplayer games.
	Now, here's one that's quite darkly poetic.
	Grieving people in multiplayer games?
	Yeah, I mean, it's pushing them off ledges, taking stuff that they want.
	Wait, are you laughing?
	A damage to your gamer rep at the expense of your gamer rep.
	Now, check this out.
	Check this out.
	The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.
	That's dark.
	Isn't that delightful?
	So suddenly we're going for the lulls, and suddenly it's like a dark tragedy here, right?
	The authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable.
	Both trolls and sadists feel sadistically at the distress of others.
	Sadists just want to have fun, and the internet is their playground.
	Last year, Popular Science did away with comment section completely, and YouTube has also taken measures to rein in trolling, and so on.
	The fix is not a realistic one, according to the study's first author.
	He says, because the behaviors are intrinsically motivating for sadists, comment moderators...
	We'll likely have a difficult time curbing trawling with punishment, e.g.
	banning users.
	Ultimately, the allure of trawling may be too strong for sadists who presumably have limited opportunities to express their sadistic interests in a socially desirable manner.
	Right, see, because sadists generally run out of victims in their personal life, right?
	Right.
	But, you know, the internet, there's always new people coming to the internet who have less experience and We're easy to snare.
	And so, yeah, it is a massive endorphin playground for these people with these dark-tread personalities.
	And very, very disturbed, nasty, nasty individuals.
	But essential.
	Certainly essential for this conversation.
	You know, trolls, love you.
	Love you.
	Couldn't live without you.
	Couldn't have grown without you.
	You are a wonderful, wonderful series of open-mouth toilets.
	So, good job.
	All right.
	I'm afraid I must move on to the next caller, but I hope it was helpful.
	I certainly appreciate the questions and the comments.
	Oh, yeah.
	Michael Jordan isn't spending his life typing YouTube comments.
	I can't remember who told me that, but it's true.
	It's true.
	I mean, people who are actually getting things done in their life are not out there typing.
	So, sorry, just to recap real quick.
	The first one was to see whatever you're talking about or thinking about is attached to, and the second one is to look for self-detonating arguments.
	And was there a third or a fourth that we just didn't get to?
	The second one was to look for self-detonating arguments, both logically and emotionally.
	Right.
	And, of course, to recognize that trolls...
	Are just trying to feed off your misery.
	They're vampires, right?
	They're trying to make you unhappy so they can be, I guess, what would be called happiness, right?
	That they can be happy, right?
	Right.
	Those would be my suggestions.
	Okay.
	Gotcha.
	Thanks a lot, Steph.
	Thank you very much, Chris.
	Jay wrote in, after hearing a listener call in with some criticisms of the Truth About Frozen review, and had a follow-up question.
	He wants to know, does your position that all depictions of magic and fiction are a portrait of madness have any criteria, or is it as indefinite and encompassing as it sounds?
	Does it only include overt magic?
	But if so, how do you interpret science fiction or magic and fiction which isn't understood?
	Well, science fiction is not portraying magic.
	If it was portraying magic, then it would be classified as fantasy, right?
	So science fiction, you know, as Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
	And science fiction portrays scientific advancements which have not occurred yet, faster than light travel, hypersleep, holodecks, and so on.
	Although Microsoft is working on something like a holodeck at the moment.
	So what they describe is not magic.
	It is science fiction, which means it still, you know, appears to be something to do with science, but it does not exist yet.
	So I couldn't classify science fiction as magic.
	Okay, absolutely.
	That answered that part of the question perfectly.
	And I actually was going to bring up that Arthur C. Clarke quote if you had disagreed with that.
	But see, the thing is, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, except to the people...
	Who created it.
	Yes.
	Right?
	Only if you're like a caveman, does a movie theater look like magic, right?
	Absolutely.
	To the movie theater manufacturers, it's not magic.
	If it was magic, they would be writing about it in fiction books, right?
	Not shipping it to...
	Theatres, right?
	Yeah, correct.
	Yes.
	In one of your previous videos, you brought up The Matrix and you were talking about bullet time and how it was magical in nature.
	But for me, I've always perceived The Matrix as a science fiction movie that had a heavy allegory with the Bible and stuff like that.
	But I never perceived The Matrix as a portrait for madness, so I was a bit confused.
	Yeah, I mean, The Matrix is, because it's virtual reality based, it is technology that can produce magic.
	Like the holodeck.
	You could play out the movie Frozen in a holodeck, right?
	Yes.
	And so you have a technology which can produce the illusion of magic, right?
	Like I mentioned Skyrim earlier, right?
	So Skyrim, you can shoot sparks and flames out of your hands.
	And you could steal from giants and you can breathe underwater if you have the right potions and so on.
	So this is technology that produces simulations of magic.
	But it's still technology nonetheless.
	It's not magic.
	It's just technology you don't understand.
	It's like the printing press that produces Lord of the Rings.
	It's just technology that produces an illusion of magic.
	So with The Matrix, it's basically a giant...
	Oh, spoiler!
	It's basically a giant holodeck, right?
	Yes.
	And so they have a premise...
	Which can produce quasi-magical results, but only because they're not in reality.
	They're in a simulation.
	So you can't get bullet time in reality, but you can get bullet time in Max Payne.
	You can get bullet time in a simulated reality.
	So this is technology that produces quasi-magical effects, but nobody's thinking that the bullet time occurs in the real world, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And it could, of course, it could be used as a portrait for madness, but it definitely doesn't need to be defined as such.
	Right, right.
	So I would put that as a fantasy inside of technology.
	Okay.
	That's acceptable.
	But it's not magic.
	Yeah, exactly.
	As long as we're defining that.
	Because when you had brought up The Matrix, you didn't elaborate on it.
	I wasn't sure what angle you were coming from.
	I was like, oh no, is he really saying The Matrix is like fantasy and not sci-fi?
	It has fantasy elements, but it's not purely fantasy or purely a portrait for madness, in my view.
	Well, it's science fiction which can, within its narrative, support anti-scientific principles.
	Yeah.
	Right, so people can walk up walls.
	Right.
	Well, within the framework of the matrix, it works.
	Right, but people can't walk up walls in reality, but the matrix is not reality, but a simulation.
	And therefore, right, so therefore it can support magical elements within a scientific framework.
	I can't really get into the whole solipsism argument, because that's just a slippery slope, so I'll have to concede that.
	Well, no, but if you could imagine...
	Like, why can he fly in the Matrix?
	He can't fly in the real world, right?
	Correct.
	Even though there's some allusion to the possibility that even the real world was a simulation of sorts by the end of the third movie.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But, okay, so then, you know, the Matrix is like one of these Chinese doll puzzles.
	A dweem within a dweem.
	Within a Dweem.
	So, Dweemer.
	But anyway, so I would...
	The Matrix is one of these special cases where it's like magic wrapped in technology.
	Okay.
	When you say that it's a portrait for madness, so you're not saying that all fiction that has magic has to be interpreted that way.
	You're just saying it can be.
	No, I'd go with all.
	All.
	Okay, so...
	Look, I'm not much of a philosopher if I'm not dealing in universals, right?
	Oh, that's fine.
	Hey, I'm not disagreeing with you.
	I'm just trying to understand because...
	No, because if I say some, that doesn't solve the problem, right?
	Because then I have to say, well, why some and not all, and what's the demarcation line or the dividing line and so on.
	So, no, I would go with...
	Now, again, this is sort of complicated, but I'll really, really keep this brief.
	Okay.
	So, there are stories in which the magical powers are not certain.
	So when I was a kid, I watched – I just remember because I was necking with my then girlfriend at the age of 17 or 16 or whatever.
	And we were in her parents' basement and we were watching some show about a woman who goes back in time to King Arthur's court.
	And so she – if I remember rightly, she was shooting a movie where she was a medieval princess.
	She fell down.
	She bumped her head and she passed into a portal into King Arthur's court.
	And then she got a colored rag from Sir Lancelot or something like that, right?
	And so then it turned out at the end of the movie, she woke up in a hospital, right?
	Because she bumped her head, right?
	Yeah.
	And so of course everyone thinks – so the narrative is generally, well, okay, so she bumped her head and she had a hallucination, right?
	But then, what does she find underneath?
	And, of course, remember, I'm glimpsing this movie through various bouts of tonsil hockey, but I've seen movies that are similar.
	Yeah, but so what does she find underneath her blanket in the scarf?
	Yeah.
	From the guy, right?
	And so then it's like, was it real?
	Was it not?
	I don't know.
	Let's just keep kissing, right?
	But that's sort of the, you know, now of course the scarf could have come any number of ways and whatever, right?
	So again, it's left sort of ambiguous.
	And that's because they don't want to annoy either party, right?
	They don't want to annoy the mystics and they don't want to annoy the realists, right?
	Yeah.
	And this sleaziness...
	Oh!
	Oh!
	Tangent time.
	Can you give me four minutes?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I'm here all night.
	I believe I may have used that line at some point in the past.
	But, okay.
	Let me take four minutes.
	Okay.
	So, in the world of marketing, there is an innately anti-philosophical, anti-integrity driver.
	I don't know if you heard the recent...
	Brew-ha-ha-ha about Ben Affleck with Sam Harris on Bill Maher's show where there was dust-ups around Islam.
	And Sam Harris – so it basically started with Bill Maher saying, liberals, those on the left, we're really concerned with freedom of religion, freedom of speech and so on, but we don't apply those principles to Islamic countries very much or very consistently.
	And this was a very, very offensive to Ben Affleck, who said to Sam Harris, oh, so you're the expert on things Islamic?
	And he's like, well, actually, I'm pretty well educated in Islam and so on, right?
	And so that didn't really work.
	And so Ben Affleck did this thing where, well, you're saying that all Muslims are whatever are crazy and have all these bad ideas.
	And there was a two-part response to One was, no, we're talking about the Islamic ideology, the belief system.
	And as they pointed it out, or as they argued, they said, you know, it's pretty chock full of bad ideas.
	Now, if you're criticizing a belief system, that's not the same as criticizing everyone who holds that belief system.
	So when I say the Old Testament...
	It has a God who commands the death of unbelievers and people say to me, well, I know Christians who wouldn't hurt a fly.
	That's not the same argument.
	Saying an ideology has these terrible ideas is not saying everyone who claims to follow that ideology follows it to the letter, which of course is impossible in any religion because there's so many contradictory arguments, right?
	Yep.
	So they were sort of trying to point out we're criticizing the ideas, not every individual.
	Because he said, well, it's racist.
	It's like, well, no, criticizing a belief system can't possibly be racist because a belief system is not a race.
	So, Ben, he's so pretty.
	So, number one.
	Number two, Sam Harris pointed out, he said, look, in a recent survey, 78% of British Muslims thought that the Danish newspaper that published the cartoons regarding Mohammed, 78% of British Muslims thought that that publisher should have been prosecuted.
	Okay, that's a lot of people.
	That is.
	That's a lot of people who really don't get freedom of expression, who really, really don't.
	And so this was sort of the point, is that this is not going to end well.
	Right?
	This is a huge conflict that is going to play out in Europe.
	We don't sort of have to get it.
	It's going to play out everywhere, basically.
	It's going to play out.
	Yeah.
	And...
	I certainly know where I want it to go, because me and Sharia law, I don't think the best of compatibilities would occur in that situation.
	I think that's fair to say.
	So, why does Ben Affleck talk like this?
	First of all, I don't know.
	But secondly, I kind of know.
	Like, I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure I know.
	So, Ben Affleck is a huge movie star, and a significant portion of the profits of his movies come from overseas, obviously, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	So, does Ben Affleck want to piss off the Muslims around the world?
	Absolutely not.
	A conflict of interest.
	Yeah, I mean, dude, you're selling movies around the world.
	Of course you're going to not want to...
	If he said something about Islam, which coincided with what Bill Maher and Sam Harris were saying, I mean, he'd be getting a call from his agent during the show.
	Ben!
	What are you doing?
	If you want to make movies, Ben, you need lots of money.
	To get lots of money, you need to have the biggest marketplace possible.
	You just fucked up a huge proportion of your marketplace, Ben.
	So good luck getting your next 10 projects made, you idiot.
	I don't know that much about Ben Affleck.
	Your theory seems to make sense to me.
	I mean, there's always the chance that he...
	I don't know.
	If he's not dumb, then I'd have to say that your theory is probably correct.
	Look, anyone involved in the script for Good Will Hunting is a very, very smart individual.
	And anybody who rises to the top of his profession does not do so by pissing off enormous sections of the marketplace.
	That's my job!
	My job is to continually annoy and be the gadfly in society.
	But that's not a movie star's job.
	Good heavens.
	A movie star's job is to be as appealing as possible to the widest variety of people as humanly possible, right?
	Yeah.
	Anyway, I just want to...
	So there is this sort of conflict.
	When I was talking about like there's movies that leave it ambiguous, that's because they want to have as wide a marketplace as possible.
	So if it turned out that the woman did travel back in time and it was absolutely verified, then all the people who were more scientifically or rationally or, say, sanely configured would be like, oh, what a load of crap, right?
	And if they said, well, it was just a bump on the head, right?
	And you can see this struggle going on Yes.
	where he pretends to be a psychic, but he's just very observant.
	Yes.
	Well, that's specifically denying psychic phenomenon, right?
	And there are a lot of shows where they're continually debunking mysticism, Scooby-Doo being one of them, They're continually debunking mysticism off and on.
	And this is something that's really – because human beings are like people who have had a huge ball and chain tied to their ankle and they are thrown into the water.
	And down at the bottom where you drown is irrationality, is mysticism, is collectivism, is nationalism, is religiosity.
	This is where you drown.
	But that's your momentum, that the ball and chain is history.
	And we are trying like hell to get our feet out of that chain which is drowning us.
	We are trying like hell to get out of that and to get back, to get to the air, to get to the light, to get to reality, away from the dark, comforting, many bone-littered seabed of historical history.
	Intellectual.
	Seppuku.
	And I see this struggle going on all the time in the media.
	What is real?
	What is real?
	What is true?
	What is a fact?
	What is not?
	What is made up?
	What is honorable?
	What is good?
	What is decent?
	And you can see this going, right?
	There was a house episode that I watched the other day where He was saying, you know, patriotism or nationalism.
	He said, you're just an irrational patriot or a patriot.
	Because he's saying, oh, here's a piece of land, you know, it's changed hands 600 times over the last thousand years.
	But every single time it changes hands, the new owner is, we're the best!
	Yeah, that's likely, right?
	And so now he's allowed to say the truth because he's punished by personality and I
	think?
	Well, sometimes they use magic as a way of doing that.
	1984 is very different from Lord of the Rings, right?
	Yes.
	Very different.
	Right.
	So 1984 is an anti-philosophical society.
	And I've done a whole thing on 1984, a whole book review.
	But basically, freedom is the freedom to say two and two make four.
	If that is granted, all else follows, right?
	Yes.
	How many hands, O'Brien says, am I holding up?
	Right?
	And...
	Winston Smith wants to say four.
	I see four.
	And they keep hitting him with electrical shocks until he can't tell anymore.
	And that's progress.
	So the simple act of identifying reality for what it is, freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four.
	If that is granted, all else follows.
	That is very true.
	But you don't think that there's any… That's not magic.
	That's not allegory.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I'm sorry.
	You don't think there's any works of fiction that have overt depictions of magic that have allegories that are useful?
	Well, of course there are.
	I didn't say that, because there's no work of fiction that's all magic.
	Okay.
	Right?
	So, of course, yeah, there's useful...
	Look, don't get me wrong, I enjoy fantasy.
	I mean, I played Dungeons& Dragons, I've read I don't know how many armfuls of fantasy novels...
	All the way from the good to the Terry Goodkind.
	So I have no problem.
	It's enjoyable.
	It's entertaining.
	I haven't read it in years.
	But I mean, yeah, when I was a teen, I used to read a lot of that stuff.
	I even wrote some of it.
	So you only think that there's an issue with overt depictions of magic when the reader or the author are removed from reality to the point that there's just escapism, right?
	Well, but see...
	I'm trying to understand what your actual conflict with this whole portrait for madness thing is because perhaps I'm just not grasping it.
	What conflict?
	Other people have a conflict.
	Like the Frozen review where I first put forward this argument is like one of the most loved and hated – hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, loved and hated – I
	think?
	I'm talking about the things that are not true that you believe are true.
	That this is a kind of madness.
	And it is.
	So I don't have any conflict with it at all.
	But other people certainly find it quite...
	So you can correct me if I'm wrong.
	So your qualm is that there are people who read these books and it sort of becomes the reality.
	No, I don't think people go mad because they...
	Watch the movie Frozen.
	But they don't recognize that what they're seeing is a depiction of mental illness.
	Oh, okay.
	So you're just bringing to the table, hey, these overt depictions of magic and fiction can be a portrait for madness, and you can definitely interpret them that way.
	No, not can be.
	Are.
	Are.
	Not can be.
	Because...
	Look, imagine if the movie Frozen ended...
	With them panning back from an insane asylum.
	Perfectly viable.
	That could have been the ending.
	Imagine if Harry Potter, right, which an argument, a strong argument is easy to make, that Harry Potter is the story of a very violent child.
	My girlfriend's a big Harry Potter fan.
	And when I told her your theory, she's like, wow, that makes a lot of sense.
	I'm like, it does.
	I'm not calling in because I want to 100% disagree.
	No, no, wait, wait.
	It's just the middle of the thing here.
	Sorry.
	So if Harry Potter – the camera pans back and it's a kid in a straitjacket or a young man in a straitjacket, then that would be an explicit reference that we had been seeing the Harry Potter story through the eyes of a mad child.
	Yes.
	That his delusions of grandeur, his delusions of being able to magically affect reality with his mind – That if that had occurred at the end of the Harry Potter series, it would have been explicitly identified as madness.
	Yes.
	And people would have said that was a portrayal of madness, right?
	Absolutely.
	What I'm saying is that's always the case when there's magic involved.
	It's always an asylum because only crazy people think that they can affect reality with their minds.
	That is how you know someone is crazy.
	Like if somebody said, listen man, I got to cross the river to go to the grocery store.
	I'm just going to freeze it with my mind.
	What would you say?
	Yeah, you're probably crazy.
	You're crazy.
	Not probably.
	If the person genuinely believed that, that would be insane.
	Oh, if they genuinely believed it, they weren't just trolling me?
	No, no.
	Genuinely believed it.
	Yeah, they're crazy.
	Right.
	If I said, well, you know, it's summer, but I think I'm just going to make it winter by getting angry.
	Well, no.
	Or if I said, I'm going to freeze this waterfall into an ice sculpture, you would view me as incredibly delusional and really out of touch with reality, right?
	Absolutely.
	like.
	There have been times in my life, though, for instance, when I was a young child where I didn't fully understand our reality, I didn't know everything.
	An adult would do or say something that seemed purely magical to me, but that was because of my lack of understanding.
	Sure.
	When I was a child, I experimented with telekinesis.
	When I was a child, I'm like, wow.
	I was sort of dozing once, listening to some record, and 10 cc's The Things We Do for Life, if I remember rightly.
	And the old...
	This is you're young, right?
	This is old school stuff.
	So you put this.45 on, and at the end it would go...
	As it sort of kept bumping up against the label.
	And I found the noise annoying, but I didn't want to get up because I was kind of dozy.
	And so I thought, I would just try lifting that needle with my mind.
	Yeah, why not?
	Sure.
	Experiment.
	I'm an empiricist, right?
	And of course, nothing happened.
	I got up and moved the record, right?
	But...
	So it's always an asylum when madness is being depicted as magic, where nobody knows that it's madness.
	Because none of these things are physically possible, but they're portrayed as not scientific, and everyone accepts it.
	Now, there are usually a few people in all madness stories, there are usually a few people who show skepticism, and this is true of the movie Frozen as well.
	I've never seen Frozen, but I know a lot about it at this point.
	Yeah, so the guy says, the old man from Wesselton says, she almost killed me!
	Right?
	And Hans says, you slipped on ice.
	Right?
	So this is two very divergent views of what has happened, right?
	There's a sane person, and then there's lots of crazy people.
	And so, I mean, just off the top of my head, so Gandalf, after he dies, falls fighting the Balrog...
	He sort of reascends as a new person.
	He's been to a much higher plane, to a much different reality.
	He comes back much stronger and so on.
	Well, that's, to me, being outside the madness and then you're back inside the madness again and so on, right?
	So if somebody made the claims in a fantasy story… Yes.
	Yes.
	have a magic ring that can turn me invisible but unfortunately it also brings giant bat-like dead kings on enormous dinosaur-like winged beasts but it only works when no one's looking oh but whatever right I mean, like, if you said that and you genuinely believed it, you would be insane.
	Whereas if you said, look, maybe it's possible scientifically at some point to go faster than light, people would say, well, let's have some hyperdrive, right?
	Yeah.
	So in something like Aladdin… Is it possible to design a spaceship that loses every single battle that it gets into?
	Maybe.
	Shields are down, Captain!
	What is it, a sneeze shield?
	Just annoys the shit out of me.
	Captain, the giant paper bags that float around the Enterprise seem to be weakening.
	I don't know, just the Enterprise's shields are always failing.
	It just bothered the shit out of me when I was a kid.
	I've been telling you.
	Oh, my God!
	I mean, has every other weapon in the known universe just punched through that thing like tissue paper?
	Why do we even have these shields?
	So I can say they're failing.
	Really, that's the only point.
	It seems to be the only reason they have it.
	So, like, in Star Trek, you wouldn't say that the medical device that, like, Bones has is a magic wand.
	It's a scientific device that we don't understand yet.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Alright.
	And, like, in a movie like Aladdin, so...
	I mean, the genie in Aladdin is obviously influencing everyone around him and affects everyone and everything around Aladdin.
	So...
	No, but Aladdin is the story of a young man who's been so beaten down in life that he retreats into the madness called Delusions of Grandeur.
	Okay, so Aladdin was captured.
	Yeah, so Aladdin was captured and he was thrown in prison and he goes mad in prison and then he imagines that he found this lamp with this giant genie.
	He becomes fabulously rich.
	He gets the girl.
	He becomes king of the kingdom and blah-de-blah.
	But he's crazy.
	Yeah, it works.
	It's kind of like, another spoiler, sorry listeners, like Brazil, for example, if you've seen Brazil.
	It's been a long time since I've seen Brazil.
	In Brazil, he gets captured and then his mind escapes into this fantasy universe where he's freed and then he's triumphant and he gets the girl and then at the end of the movie it's like, oh yeah, he's still in that chair having his brain be dissected.
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	Okay, I remember now.
	So, the dissociation that occurs when you're being tortured, when your mind leaves your body and you go to your, quote, happy place, or rather you're dropkicked to your happy place.
	The dissociation that occurs in these kinds of situations and these kinds of stories is, I think, very commonly portrayed.
	Now, sometimes it's portrayed as a purely internal state, such as in 1984, and sometimes you are...
	There's a literary device called the unreliable narrator, where, you know, it's an I story, like I did this, I said that.
	And then it turns out Rashomon style that some of what the narrator says, other people contradict.
	Yeah, I love that, actually.
	It's very clever, and it's very engaging.
	And it reminds us of, you know, the challenges of objectivity and how we can be lied to and so on.
	And so, to me, all of the...
	Magic, in stories, is unreliable narrator 101.
	So the Harry Potter, well, you're seeing it through the eyes of Harry Potter.
	You're not seeing it through the eyes of the people who are trying to treat Harry Potter with horse tranquilizers in an asylum or something like that.
	Yeah.
	So, when you say portrait for madness, all works of fiction are a portrait for madness, but the writer himself- Wait, wait.
	All works of fiction that have overt fictions of magic.
	Sorry.
	All works of fiction that have overt fictions of magic.
	I'm sorry.
	I've written like three or four or five books of nonfiction with zero magic in them.
	They're not portraits of- I misspoke.
	I'm sorry.
	All depictions of magic in fiction are Portrait for Madness.
	But it doesn't mean that the person who wrote it is crazy.
	It doesn't mean that the people who are reading it or enjoying it are crazy.
	And it's still filled with rich allegory or whatever life lessons you might want to have in it.
	Yeah, it's hard to judge, obviously, what the mental state of the author is or of the reader.
	But if you wanted to do a service to humanity...
	One of the major points of science and of philosophy is the destruction of magical thinking.
	I don't know if you've heard the term magical thinking.
	It's a bit of a technical term.
	But magical thinking is basically wishing and thinking you're doing something.
	And so magical thinking is incredibly corrosive to the human spirit and incredibly corrosive to tangible, practical human ambitions and so on.
	Yeah, it reminds me of, in antiquity, when, like, the Egyptian people would pray to a certain god, and it's like, oh, well, hopefully he gives us rain.
	It's like, maybe you shouldn't be waiting on that, and hoping that your prayers are going to do that for you.
	Magical thinking is managing anxiety at the expense of achievement, at the expense of, right?
	So, I mean, I've used this before, so I'll keep it brief, but Way back in the day, the tribe who lost might end up living in the shadow of the volcano, right?
	Yeah.
	And they're scared because they live under a volcano.
	They're nervous about the volcano.
	Now, they can't move because they lost, right?
	So other tribes have all the area around.
	They're not able to fight.
	Maybe they lost too many men in the last fight or whatever.
	And Wonder Woman has yet to show up and save the day.
	So they lost, so they're stuck in the shadow of the volcano.
	And so...
	They're scared every day.
	Is it going to erupt?
	Is it going to erupt?
	Maybe it's a volcano that erupts fairly regularly or whatever.
	So what do they do?
	Well, they manage their anxiety by pretending that there's a volcano god that they can appease.
	Right?
	So somebody was dancing and the volcano erupts.
	And they're like, you know what?
	It's the fucking dancing.
	Fucking dancing.
	You son of a bitch.
	There's the correlation.
	Kill him.
	Yeah.
	They kill the guy who was dancing, they throw him into the volcano, and then they can pretend to themselves that the volcano god is satisfied.
	And he's not going to erupt.
	And so they can reduce their anxiety.
	Anxiety management at the expense of achievement.
	The achievement would be, let's stop living in the shadow of a volcano.
	Let's move somewhere, right?
	And so this, this, and you know, the next time, like somebody's yodeling.
	Fucking volcano erupts, the fucking yodeler, those bastards, those yodeling heretic bastards, right?
	And then they grab the guy who's a yodeler and they throw him in the mountain.
	Aha!
	No dancing, no yodeling, right?
	And this process just goes on and on.
	It's destructive, it is.
	It is, and it's a substitute for any real change.
	You could study the volcano and figure out what makes it erupt.
	Obviously a fairly lengthy endeavor, which may not end up with you being able to do a damn thing about it, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	You can move.
	You can whatever, right?
	But now, this, of course, is more common in the agricultural field, right?
	Is it a good crop year?
	Is it a bad crop year?
	Well, lives depend on it, right?
	Because, you know, historically, people had so many kids until one more would kill them all because they'd starve to death, right?
	Like one back from starvation.
	It's like that old Jerry Seinfeld joke, maximum strength Tylenol.
	It's like...
	As much as will kill me, just pull it back a tiny bit.
	Maximum!
	And it's like, maximum children.
	Human tribe, right?
	One more child, and we're all eating each other.
	And so, lives hung in the balance of a good crop and a bad crop.
	It's pretty stressful.
	So what do you do?
	Well, you attempt to create magical thinking.
	You know, that guy was whistling while he planted his crops, and the crops had a bad yield.
	So the crop gods don't like whistling, right?
	And this is literally how culture develops and how religious rules develop.
	Some of them make some sense, right?
	I mean, obviously, there's some that make some sense.
	But most of them, it's just some random shit was happening when other bad shit happened.
	So let's not do that shit.
	It's obviously correlation.
	It's not causation.
	And they just make up all of this crap.
	Yeah.
	And that's – you accumulate that for a couple of thousand years and you have the rich tapestry of irrational magical thinking prejudices we call culture.
	And again, some of it makes some sense like controlling women's fertility and doing that which can strengthen the family and all that kind of stuff.
	Without religion, our society wouldn't be where it is.
	I mean, in the absence of philosophy and, like, true morality, if these religions hadn't existed, they were kind of like training wheels that got us to where we are, kind of, in my opinion.
	Yeah, the idea that we could bypass that, to me, is not possible.
	I mean, human beings, they weren't just shorter in the past, they were way dumber in the past.
	I mean, there's some studies that say that 19th century – based on reaction time, some 19th century Europeans were smarter than contemporary people.
	But mostly – I mean, the Flynn effect of gaining IQ points over time, mostly people were just incredibly stupid in the past.
	And so the idea that we could have somehow bypassed religion to me is – it's like saying, you know, I want you to be born in puberty, right?
	It's like, nope, got a little bit to do beforehand.
	Sorry, you were going to say it?
	I wouldn't say that they had lower IQs.
	I'd say that they just didn't have as much knowledge.
	No, lower IQs.
	Really?
	Lower IQs.
	No, I'm sorry.
	You just look up the Flynn effect.
	Statistically, again...
	I'm familiar with it.
	I'm familiar with the Flynn effect.
	But people are becoming smarter at taking IQ tests.
	I mean, you can't give someone in antiquity, like ancient Greece, an IQ test.
	You can't know how smart they were.
	And if they said, oh, well, I can do this really well...
	I can play a field.
	I can do this.
	I can do that.
	IQ tests are pretty good.
	Again, I'm no expert on it, but as far as I understand it, they've worked a huge amount to try and take cultural biases out.
	They've got IQ tests that you don't even need to be able to read to be able to do.
	They're just pattern recognition and so on, like what follows after the shape kind of thing.
	And IQ tests – I mean if IQ tests are not particularly helpful or valid or true, then it's hard to explain how they're so predictive.
	I'm not saying IQ tests aren't true.
	I'm saying we couldn't give an IQ test to Socrates, and obviously the guy was really freaking smart.
	Absolutely.
	But why couldn't we give an IQ test to Socrates?
	Because he's dead?
	Come on.
	But look, way back, right?
	We're smarter than Neanderthals, right?
	Yeah.
	Right, who had a cranial capacity significantly smaller than Homo sapiens, right?
	We're smarter than apes.
	So we definitely started off less smart and, you know, there's some mixed data, but generally we've been getting taller and smarter over time.
	And then you have these giant epidemics, which some people theorize to wipe out dumber sections of the society and hopefully replace them with smarter sections of the population.
	So in Africa, in Ebola, there are some people there who are seriously dumb.
	And then there are people there who aren't dumb.
	And the dumb people will keep hugging the corpses and the smarter people will recognize that although it's a cultural tradition to hug and kiss the corpses, let's not do that.
	Right?
	So the dumber people will die off.
	And it's awful.
	It's tragic.
	It's horrible.
	I wish there was a different way, but I am not Mother Nature.
	I don't get a say in this stuff.
	So the smarter people will wash their hands, will self-quarantine, will recognize, and then the dumber people will go eat more bats and hug the corpses.
	I'm not denying that people have been getting smarter, but I'm not so sure that it's as drastic as the Flynn effect might suggest.
	I think that if you were to be speaking with a man from history like 2,000 years ago, and he had lived in our current time period his entire life, he'd be It's not more environment.
	I'm saying that the Flynn effect doesn't take into account that people in antiquity didn't have all the same stuff available that we have.
	It's not that their brains were so devolved, it's that they didn't have all the information.
	Well, yeah, but that's the chicken and egg, right?
	I mean, because maybe they didn't have the information because they weren't smart enough, right?
	I'm not saying I have the answer, right?
	But saying they didn't have the information and therefore they might have been as smart, right?
	It could be a bit of both.
	For me, I think of that quote, if I've seen further, it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
	And I feel like a lot of the great thinkers in our history, like, they're the reason why we are where we are today.
	And a lot of the people who are like, oh, well, I'm really smart, it's like, uh...
	Maybe you wouldn't be so smart if you had lived 1,500 years ago, even if you had the same brain capacity, because you'd have so much less available to you.
	Well, and so much fear.
	Yeah.
	And fear kills intelligence, yeah.
	Oh, my God.
	Well, even if it doesn't kill intelligence, it kills any tangible record of intelligence.
	I mean, how would I have done in the year 800 AD? Well, I'd have kept my mouth shut, or I'd have been killed with a rock.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I mean, because the only avenue for...
	Yeah.
	bars known as monasteries, right?
	So there really wasn't, there wouldn't be any scope for podcasting.
	I mean, none of whatever, whatever brains I have, they would have left no record in history in the past, for sure.
	Here's my question for you, Steph.
	So these people, historically, the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse people who had all these gods and things that they prayed to and that they believed in, they'd always subscribe supernatural explanations to their lack of understanding of natural phenomena.
	Would you say that all of these people were crazy?
	Well, again...
	Because there's two ways of measuring crazy, right?
	There's a way of measuring crazy which is relative to social norms, and then there's a way of measuring crazy relative to reality.
	Now, to me, in a culture that has no reference points to reality, you can't really apply the standard of sane relative to reality or crazy relative to reality.
	Yes, agreed.
	So, you know, that to me is like bringing ethics to centipedes, right?
	That poor leaf is trespassing.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I agree with you.
	Yeah, so I think – I don't think the concept of crazy – like in the Middle Ages, you know, people – some people say it was due to various environmental factors.
	But, you know, there was this thing called St.
	Vitus Dance where people would go insane and dance until they died.
	Is that crazy?
	Well, kind of.
	But they didn't really have a – their reference point was sanity is accepting the universal rule of Christendom I mean, that was what they called sane.
	They didn't have a scientific standard of sanity.
	Like, if there was only one person who believed in a particular religion, that person would be called insane.
	If you get enough of them together, if you get enough people believing in crazy stuff together, then they get tax deductions and the tallest building in the village.
	So, where there is a reference point Of sane relative to reality, then you can judge people according to that.
	But that's still a very tenuous belief in human society, that sanity is relative to reality, not to social norms.
	And there's a guy who said that it is no measure of mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
	But that is a very...
	A very new perspective that we can judge ourselves relative to tangible, objective reality rather than to whatever social bullshit passes through pseudo-thought in the tribe.
	That's very new, and it's very tenuous.
	Like, it can go like that.
	Yeah.
	So you're only as crazy as the asylum that you make your home.
	I mean, if you know that there's things outside of the asylum, then you are crazy.
	But if the asylum has a lot of reality, you're nuts.
	In history, a lot of the people who were the sanest were the ones put in asylums or killed for being crazy.
	Yeah, but they didn't make it their home.
	Yeah, in Soviet Russia, failure to believe in and praise communism produced – I mean you got thrown into an asylum and you got horse tranquilizers stuffed up your capitalist ass, right?
	Yeah.
	So a lot of people in history who were the sane ones were the ones persecuted and killed and so on.
	I was saying, you're only crazy if you make the asylum your home, meaning you want to be there because you don't accept the outside reality that's available to you.
	Yeah.
	I mean...
	I mean the question with Harry Potter – and I think I read the first two or three books like many, many years ago and I think I've seen one of the movies.
	But the question with Harry Potter is if he's in an asylum, who's treating him?
	That's the question for the asylum metaphor, right?
	So who's treating him?
	And it's the same thing with the Sixth Sense movie, right?
	I mean, if the kid is insane, who is treating him or her?
	I guess you could say the Bruce Willis character, whatever, right?
	But obviously it doesn't cure, right?
	It doesn't cure because the kid's still seeing ghosts at the end.
	But the question is who's treating, right?
	So to me, the Harry Potter thing is more of a metaphor that...
	To grow up is to accept insanity, right?
	Because when he's younger, he has something in touch with reality.
	After he goes through a particularly traumatic series of events within his abusive family, the owl comes and he's summoned and he walks through walls and develops magical powers and so on, right?
	So I think that childhood generally is having the sanity shit kicked out of you and replaced with insanity.
	Because I have, in my experience, children are incredibly rational.
	Yeah, they are.
	Like staggeringly rational.
	Like my daughter, like bang, bang, bang, bang.
	I mean, she just syllogizes like she breathes.
	And so to me, the Harry Potter thing is, well, you grow up.
	And to me, it's basically about going to government schools, right?
	Which are places of intense magical thinking insanity.
	And violence.
	So to me...
	And violence, yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely, with competing factions, right?
	Which are probably more to do with races than they are to do with houses, right?
	If you look at how, say, blacks and Hispanics get along in South Central LA, it's like, holy crap.
	Makes the magical wars in Hogwarts look like patty cake contests.
	But I think it's a lot to do with the reality that to join adult human society, you must either become mad or fake it really well.
	Because adult human society is an asylum, in my very strong opinion, and I think I could make a really good case for it.
	And I'd agree with you.
	Yeah, so I think nobody's treating Harry Potter because he is adjusting to the madness of society, and people who are well-adjusted to the madness of society are not treated.
	Only people maladjusted to the madness of society are treated.
	I mean, I view most of the kids who are receiving these horrible psychotropic medications of conscientious objectors to a shitty environment, whether it's at home or school or church or all three.
	What happens when you juxtapose that same mindset on something like The Matrix?
	Because obviously, it's a whole societal allegory of Plato's cave thing going on there.
	It's like, oh, well, he doesn't want to adjust to society, and now he goes to The Matrix.
	And it's very similar in that way.
	Sorry, say again?
	I'm not sure I followed the question.
	How would you perceive the Matrix in relation to what you just said about Harry Potter?
	I mean, with societal constraints and stuff like that.
	Like, Neo doesn't want to acclimate to society, and so perhaps he's just going off in this fantasy universe where there's this thing called the Matrix and he's the deity.
	Oh, yeah, no.
	I mean, I think the Matrix is fundamentally about...
	You have somebody who is skeptical, and when you have somebody who is skeptical, you must tempt them with fantasies of violence rather than critical thinking.
	What rules over us is bad ideas.
	That's it.
	Nothing more, nothing less.
	Bad, irrational, illogical, subjective objectivity.
	It's objective that counterfeiting is wrong, but we get the Federal Reserve.
	It's objective that theft is wrong, but we get the tax.
	Bad, contradictory, self-detonating, bad ideas, wrong ideas, irrational ideas, anti-rational ideas, that's all that rules over us.
	And the idea that we must learn kung fu to fight killer robots is a great way of distracting people with delusions of violence rather than getting them to think critically and oppose the bad ideas.
	That's the great combat.
	That's the great silent combat of the world is the grim, teeth-gritting opposition to the endless, seemingly endless flow of bad ideas that come out of traumatized, greedy, and narcissistic people.
	Standing against that tsunami of bad thinking and fighting back, that to me is the real heroism.
	Hey, look, I defined what I do as the real heroism.
	Well, of course I do, because if I thought there was something more heroic to do, I'd be doing that.
	So what the Matrix does is it says – because, I mean, the Matrix, of course, we're used as batteries.
	Of course.
	I mean, of course.
	I mean, we're used as livestock.
	I mean, this is the tax farm analogy that I did in the story of your enslavement many years ago.
	It's even more true to me now than it was then.
	And, of course, we are ruled and exploited and so on.
	And the combat is not Kung Fu.
	That's – Distracting, and that's easy for people, and it moves it into the body, thus making it impotent in the mindscape of the bad ideas that run us.
	So if you can get people to think that it's a physical fight, then they go in unarmed to the real fight, which is intellectual.
	So the matrix to me is, yeah, we're ruled, yeah, we're controlled, yeah, we live in this false reality.
	The solution?
	Kung Fu!
	Flying!
	I mean, it's like, oh, good, okay, so I guess we've pretty much gotten rid of anyone who might do anything useful in the fight against bad ideas by having them think that it moves, not thinking.
	But of course, it's very tough to dramatize that in a movie.
	I think you can do it.
	You could do it.
	But people much more gravitate towards Kung Fu than Mind Fu, right?
	Yeah, well, that's the language that they speak.
	They've been trying to use their entire lives since they were young kids.
	Violence.
	They're hit.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I mean, they're spanked.
	They're hit.
	They're beaten.
	They're controlled.
	They're, you know, when I was a kid, we were caned.
	We were hit with rulers.
	We were, you know, I mean, so of course they think that fighting is physical.
	Fighting is...
	By the time fighting becomes physical, it's only because the intellectual battle has been lost generations before.
	And so the idea that...
	The fundamental moral fights of the universe or physical is something that's pounded into kids literally by Yeah, so for rational people who have somewhat healed themselves through introspection and they want logic to dictate their decisions and morality and these things,
	for those people, learning information through allegory, through fantasy, isn't You don't need that.
	You can have a conversation.
	You can read a philosopher's book or something like that.
	But there are a lot of people out there who are severely traumatized.
	They can't get onto that same level.
	They need to be communicated through allegory, through the unconscious mind, through symbology, and through archetypes like Carl Jung.
	It's not bad.
	It's not bad to provoke stuff, but it's no substitute for thinking.
	I love art, you know, and...
	I think this stuff is all fantastic.
	I started as a poet and a playwright and a novelist and all that kind of stuff.
	So I have a pretty good appreciation of that stuff and I respect it.
	I think it's got a wonderful part to play in the human personality as a whole.
	We're not just neofrontal cortex.
	We are amygdala, medulla.
	We are layers and layers of deep brain activity and we can't just be satisfied with syllogisms.
	We are much deeper than that.
	Man cannot live by bread alone.
	And so I respect and admire and have participated in the artistic life of the species, and I think it's wonderful, and I love to read, and I love movies, and TV shows can be great, and so on.
	I think that stuff's all fantastic, but it's not philosophy.
	Art is not philosophy.
	There's a lot of philosophy in art, but it's generally unconscious, and because it's unconscious...
	It's like a sword you can't get out of its scabbard, right?
	And it can't get off your belt.
	It just interferes with your footwork in the necessary fight.
	Unless you're not in the fight at all.
	I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that there are certain people who aren't even in the fight and sometimes fantasy can stir things in them on an unconscious level that might open the door.
	You know what I mean?
	It might.
	But a lot of times, as I've written, as I've done the Heroism podcast, a lot of times it just distracts them and it makes them think that the fight is Wolverine!
	It's not, read some Play-Doh!
	Whatever, right?
	It's not, learn to think!
	It's all about, you know, phony.
	I could fight evil if I had giant swords where my knuckles are, right?
	I mean, then and only then.
	It's like, great!
	That keeps you impotent.
	So, anyway, let's move on to the next caller.
	Thank you so much for your call.
	Thanks a lot for having me on, Steph.
	And also, you know, to be fully clear, I don't consider myself as having won the debate, right?
	I just want to be really clear, right?
	I mean, I've made some cases, I've made some points, but I haven't sort of like, ah, you know, I've now proven my case beyond a shadow of a doubt.
	Honestly, after you clarified certain things, I very much agree with a lot of what you were saying.
	There were certain things that just hadn't been expanded on, and it makes a lot more sense to me now.
	But it's not conclusive.
	I want to be clear about that.
	For it to be conclusive, I'd have to write like...
	A couple of books, right?
	And even then, you'll probably find some exceptions or some gray areas.
	So I think it's a good argument, the sort of magic is madness stuff, but I'm not going to say that – and I still hold by it, but I'm not going to say it's sort of proved beyond a shadow of death.
	All right, Mike, who do we have up with the nextness?
	All right.
	Up next is Jonathan, and he wrote in and said, There seem to be some great arguments, as well as weak ones, both for and against religion slash the existence of a deity.
	Ever since discovering FDR, I've been on the rampage for truth, but my faith is the one thing I have yet to abandon, although my perceptions of it have rationally changed.
	What am I not understanding from the atheist side that is keeping me rooted in my beliefs?
	Hmm.
	You've got an interesting lexical set there.
	Abandoned, rooted in your beliefs and so on, right?
	I mean, you've got quite a lot of praise buried into your faith description there.
	And I'm not, you know, you could be right.
	I'm just sort of pointing it out.
	Right.
	So what's your emotional relationship to your faith?
	How do you view it in your personality?
	Can you kind of explain that a little bit?
	Well, so the language, you know, if you say, abandon my faith, abandon is what we use generally to things that we must regretfully jettison, because they don't, you know, our journey is too hazardous, or, you know, they're a You know, I'd love to keep the cows on the boat, but the storm's getting too rough, so we have to jettison or abandon them or something like that, or things we have to regretfully leave behind, though they have value for us simply because of dire circumstances and so on, right?
	Yeah, I guess I'm just kind of...
	I think the first caller kind of touched on this.
	I'm just kind of in that in-between phase of...
	I mean, I'm not really convinced on either side, but I guess I say abandoned because since I guess that's what I've known my entire life.
	Okay, okay.
	So you do have a sense of history and emotional comfort, and it's your environment, right, that is nice, right?
	A mixture of comfort and, I guess, condemnation, I would say, from, you know, I mean, I've grown up in the South, so a lot of, you know, the Bible says this,
	and respect your parents, and, you know, so a lot of battles here and there, and that's what I've mentioned in my question to Mike about my perspectives being radically changed.
	Just listening to arguments on both sides, and, you know, some of the I think I discovered your show probably a few years ago, and that's when I... The first month was a lot of fun.
	After that, I got to some of your arguments against religion, and it was tough to deal with, especially going 23 years and not knowing really anything else.
	I don't think I slept for a week, but...
	I know that – I'm familiar with the arguments on both sides, and that's what I want to get into is some of the more, I guess, intellectual arguments from Christian apologists and atheists.
	How – I mean, you sound kind of down to me.
	I'm happy to jump into the intellectual arguments.
	I just want to make sure I know where you're coming from emotionally first.
	I guess emotionally I'm just kind of torn.
	I guess that's why I sound down.
	It's a tough spot to be in, not really knowing what the quote-unquote truth is.
	Right.
	Stressful?
	Extremely.
	Right, right.
	Okay, alright, so what's the argument from the religious side that is the strongest for you?
	I guess it's...
	I mean, there's a lot to touch on.
	I mean, you know, some that I've heard, and I'll start off with, I've heard people mention that if religious people...
	You know, truly have faith and truly believe, then why do they need it to be true?
	Which I don't really agree with that.
	You've never heard that.
	Yeah, they say...
	Go ahead.
	I just heard an argument from someone sometime that said that if you were truly, I guess, that deeply rooted into a religion, then, I mean, why do you need...
	Why do you need it to be true?
	I don't know.
	Oh, so maybe faith is belief in that which makes no sense, or is the opposite of making sense?
	And so people say, well, I have faith, but then if you have faith, why do you need to prove it?
	Why do you need to bring arguments about prime movers and Augustinian arguments?
	Why do you need to bring these syllogistical or Right, but I heard that – I mean interestingly enough, I heard that from an atheist.
	He was asking me, if I had faith, why did I also need it to be true?
	It's proven.
	No, faith is the belief that it's true in the absence of reason and evidence, or in opposition to reason and evidence.
	So faith is the belief that it's true.
	I think what he would probably mean to say is, why do you need it to be proven if the whole point is to believe without proof?
	Right.
	Okay, okay, okay.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I mean, that's not particularly...
	I mean, did that help you?
	I don't think that's a particularly awful argument.
	It's an interesting...
	I did find it difficult to answer, so I guess that's...
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no, I get it.
	It's just that...
	Okay, so...
	But give me an argument that you find compelling for...
	And it can be as emotional as you want.
	It can be as whatever quote crazy as you want.
	What is an argument that you find compelling from the religious side or a perspective?
	I guess the history of it or the...
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Historicity of Jesus.
	That it being pretty much, I guess, almost unanimous that at least he was...
	He existed...
	Jesus of Nazareth existed as a historical figure, I believe is what...
	So you find that compelling that he existed as a historical figure.
	Do you find that compelling that he also walked on water, turned water into wine and did the miracle of the loaves and fishes and drove demons into pigs and cured people of leprosy with his touch and so on, right?
	I mean, yes and no, just because those are – I mean, those are not as agreed upon among scholars.
	Yeah.
	Well, okay, but so my personal belief is that, yeah, I have no problem with the fact that he existed as a historical figure.
	I'd be kind of shocked if he didn't, to be honest with you.
	I'm pretty sure that he was a very powerful and charismatic speaker.
	I believe that he had characteristics that people felt fulfilled prior prophecies and so on, right?
	So, you know, I don't have any proof, obviously, if I did, it'd be a different conversation, but I would be entirely shocked if the entire personhood of Jesus was complete invention.
	Right.
	And that was actually my original point to Mike when I originally asked this question was I wasn't ready to just dismiss my entire faith as something as fictional as the flying spaghetti monster.
	I'm sure Moses was there.
	I'm sure that these people – I don't mean to dismiss your faith at all, and this is an unfair analogy, but just from the logic of it, that would be like expecting – The Jonestown Massacre without Jim Jones.
	Right?
	That would be just weird.
	Jim Jones is also weird.
	He's got his picture taken with Jimmy Carter's wife and he was very welcome at Democratic – anyway, it doesn't matter.
	But so where there are these big movements, there are people who are real, right?
	I mean L. Ron Hubbard, real guy.
	Jim Jones, real guy.
	The guy who founded Mormonism, Joseph Smith or whatever his name was, real guy.
	I mean, I don't think that these things just pop out of nothing.
	And so I would be really surprised if Jesus – not that you could ever prove that he didn't exist, right?
	I mean, that would be kind of weird.
	You have a time machine or something.
	Hey, you Jesus?
	No.
	So I would be really shocked if it turned out that he didn't exist at all, right?
	Right.
	But what would that have to do with him being the Son of God?
	Because...
	Well, that was going to be my next point, is that if he existed...
	You couldn't throw a stone without hitting a messiah in those days, right?
	Right.
	The fact that he exists historically as a person, let's say we grant that, what would that have to do with him having impossible magical qualities, right?
	It's like me saying, well, Gandhi was real, and he could fly.
	So, Gandhi being real, we have no problem with that.
	Gandhi flying, well, then we have a problem, right?
	Right.
	So, him existing, I don't think is a very strong argument for the entirety of the Christian theology.
	No, not just him existing, but, I mean, it was him existing, the crucifixion, which I guess is just as equally as plausible.
	Or not hard to...
	Yeah, I have no problem.
	Maybe he was crucified too.
	I don't know.
	I mean, the histories were not written down until hundreds of years afterwards, so who knows, right?
	If you've ever played telephone, right, where you whisper things around a circle, what comes back to you is not even close to what you started with.
	But, you know, even if we grant that he was crucified, that, to me, is not a plus to the magic of the myth.
	You know, it's like, He's Superman, and he was tied up.
	Right.
	Right?
	If he's Superman, then he can break free of those bonds, right?
	If he's got extraordinary magical powers.
	I mean, if you look at what God is able to grant prior heroes in the Bible in terms of their powers, they can fucking part the Red Sea and do all this kind of crazy stuff, right?
	Right.
	Then the idea that he crucified and died...
	As I've talked about in prior podcasts, everyone's yelling, you're the son of God, use your powers!
	And then he just dies.
	That's not an argument that he's divine.
	Now, of course, you can...
	Well, he came back to life, but if he'd brought down a column of fire and destroyed all of the...
	That, to me, would be...
	But that was obviously not something that people could accept in that story.
	So the fact that he died...
	You know, if he lived and spoke and maybe claimed to be the Messiah and whatever, right?
	Maybe he touched someone and, you know, as illnesses do, there was some sort of spontaneous remission and this sort of tale grew in the telling and all that kind of stuff.
	And I'm sure he was, you know, one of history's great public speakers.
	But the fact that he was crucified and died is not, you know, while crying out for God to save him, is not, to me, a great reinforcement to his capacity for divine power.
	No, I understand.
	And what you said about him dying and people saying, you know, you're the son of God, use your powers.
	I guess alternatively, the argument there is the reason why he didn't.
	And the reason why is we're bad, right?
	Right.
	It must be our fault, right?
	He died for our sins.
	Of which we're put here in the first place by God, so...
	Right, yeah, no, I get all of that, right?
	It's...
	It's crazy, but that's exactly what you'd expect people who want to cling to a belief system to say, right?
	I mean, that's – if he's supposed to be the son of God and he just dies, then he clearly can't be the son of God.
	Because the whole point of being the son of God is you have extraordinary powers and don't die on a cross just like every other – like Barbarus and the thief and all the other people who died.
	Right.
	And so then saying, well, he must have died because we're bad is exactly how we would expect crazy people to cling to that justification, right?
	Because there's no null hypothesis then.
	Null hypothesis is how would you know it's not true, right?
	So one of the ways that you'd know that Jesus is not the Son of God is he dies.
	Like he's captured by secular authorities and he dies.
	He's he, right?
	I mean, how do you know...
	How do you know it's not Superman?
	Well, a bullet kills him.
	Now, you could then say, well, he was Superman, but he chose to have a bullet kill him for some whatever reason, right?
	But then you don't have any way of disproving that it's Superman.
	Superman, bullets bounce off his chest, right?
	So if a bullet kills Superman, and it's not kryptonite, and a bullet kills Superman, and then you say, well, but he must have changed his chest so that the bullet could kill him, then you have no way...
	Of disproving his Superman-ness, right?
	Because the way that you know it's Superman is the bullets bounce off his chest.
	If the bullet kills him, just like it would anyone else, then the Superman theory is destroyed, right?
	But then if you say, well, but it's, you know, he was supposed to do that because of whatever, right?
	Then you no longer have a way of disproving that this was Superman.
	Does that make sense?
	Sort of.
	So Superman can fly.
	I understand what you're saying.
	I guess I'm looking at it through my religious goggles.
	But certainly God could save him, right?
	God can do anything.
	So God could certainly save him.
	God has certainly intervened in the biblical stories.
	God intervenes all the time, right?
	Comes down in a column of fire, sets fire to burning bushes, tells Moses to do this, sends plagues of locusts, parts the Red Sea.
	God is constantly interfering.
	So to speak, right?
	He's not Kirk with the prime directive, you know, shagging nine-headed aliens.
	He's like down there pushing stuff around all the time, right?
	He's got his fingers on the scale, to say the least.
	So, if God sends a Messiah to lead his people to peace, the promised land, and, you know, fulfill all the ancient prophecies, God can certainly intervene to save Jesus, but God doesn't, right?
	And so, how...
	But then people come up with a reason as to why God didn't do that.
	But then you have no way of being able to disprove the divinity of Jesus.
	If he gets saved by God, then clearly he's some relation to the divine, right?
	More so than the average person who doesn't get saved, right?
	But if he doesn't get saved by God, that would be disproof of his divinity.
	But then if you make up a story which explains why he never got saved by God, then there's just no way...
	Then it's just, okay, so whatever happens, he's the son of God.
	If he's saved, if he's not saved, if he has divine powers, if he doesn't use his divine powers or whatever, right?
	Then there's just no way to disprove it, and that's not the mark of a good theory, right?
	Right, and I can accept that.
	I feel like every time I accept an argument, I run into something, because I've come to that conclusion as well.
	No, but tell me what comes up to you next.
	Well, the next thing is, I would say, okay, well, you know, maybe that's the case, that he wasn't the Son of God, but maybe he was just, you know, a good moral teacher.
	And then, I think, a few months ago, I stumbled across Lewis's trilema.
	No, no, but sorry to interrupt.
	Jesus can't be any more of a good moral teacher than he could be a good scientist or physicist.
	Because moral teacher is not, I'm motivating you to be nicer by telling you to love your neighbor.
	That's like me throwing you a ball, you catch it and I call myself a physicist.
	A moral teacher is somebody who reasons from first principles.
	Socrates, fairly able moral teacher, reasoned from first principles, applied rational standards to his arguments.
	Blessed are the peacemakers is not a moral teaching.
	It's a fortune cookie.
	So if you can show me where Jesus makes rigorous moral arguments as to why people should be good.
	JPB. Jesus or Jewish preferable behavior.
	If he can give me a JPB up in the house, then he is a good moral teacher.
	But exhorting people to be nice to each other, which is, of course, only one of the rather many dangerous arguments that he made, right?
	He also said that he has come here to set brother against brother and child against parent and create as much discord as humanly possible.
	So there's lots of things that he said that were problematic, to say the least.
	Not to mention that he drove demons out of people and put them into pigs who then ran off cliffs.
	I mean, if you can put them anywhere, what's the problem?
	Why the pigs, right?
	I mean, yeah, I don't want to sort of pick at this stuff forever, but a moral teacher is somebody who argues from first principles, right?
	A good scientist is not someone who says, balls fall down, right?
	It's a true statement, I guess, but it's not science.
	It's just an observation.
	And morality is the province of philosophy, not of sophistry.
	Not stuff that makes people feel good and might make a few people nicer and so on, right?
	That's not...
	That's like saying, if I convince you to put down a cupcake, that doesn't make me a nutritionist, right?
	Doesn't make me a nutritional scientist.
	And so for Jesus to be a moral teacher, it would be like saying, is he a good physics teacher?
	Well, no.
	He's not a good physics teacher because he doesn't understand the scientific method.
	He doesn't understand the null hypothesis.
	He doesn't understand the relationship between theory, hypotheses, and proof.
	He doesn't understand any of that stuff because there's no scientific method back in his day, right?
	So he could not be a good nutritionist.
	He could not be a good doctor because these disciplines were not even as yet in their infancy.
	So to be a moral teacher means that he has a deep philosophical understanding of and explication of ethics.
	But no, he basically was do what I say or my dad will beat you up.
	Hell, right?
	Jesus was the guy who came up with hell.
	Prior to Jesus, you just died and you were food for worms.
	Jesus was, do it or burn!
	Now, I can't consider myself a moral teacher if I say to you, listen, you've got to listen to Free Domain Radio and donate to Free Domain Radio or I'll fucking burn down your house!
	With you inside, locked from the outside!
	Look, Steph, he's a great moral teacher!
	Why?
	He's got matches!
	He's willing to burn you up!
	So, great job, moral teacher!
	He's a great teacher because you're flammable!
	No!
	That's not great teaching!
	That's a shakedown!
	That's not great moral teaching!
	That's a death threat!
	That's not great moral teaching!
	At all!
	Do what I say, because I say it, because I have a sky ghost who will send you to be burnt in hell forever by demons that he created.
	No!
	Not great moral teaching.
	Saying that Jesus is a great moral teacher is like saying that the mafia is really excellent at respecting property rights, because they don't burn down your store if you pay them off.
	Not great moral teaching.
	The moment that you bring a death threat in for non-compliance to abstract ethics, I think the moral teaching part has kind of gone out the window.
	If I'm a great math teacher and I say, hey man, you better do well on this math test or I'm going to kidnap your children and throw them into a volcano.
	Am I a great math teacher?
	Do it or else, be good or else, be good or burn?
	Come on.
	If I propose that or...
	Any other adults that you knew proposed do what I say or burn forever?
	Do what I say or my minions will throw you into a basement and torture you forever?
	That's not moral teaching.
	Right?
	That's like ultimate, eternal, infinite trolling.
	Do what I think is right and Or I'll get you.
	No, come on.
	That's not philosophy.
	So you're saying regardless of what else was said by him, the fact that in the midst of everything else that he said, there was still the linger of the threat of hell?
	So even if he had quotes that, like, oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense, or I agree with that, it's still...
	Excuse my French, but any state...
	This is what I'm basically saying, and murder is far less egregious than hell.
	But whatever comes before, or I'll fucking kill you, is kind of irrelevant, right?
	Or I'll burn you down, or I'll...
	Blow up your car.
	Whatever comes before that is kind of irrelevant, right?
	The moment you have or I'll burn you up, that's kind of the key point, right?
	Everything else that comes before that, to me, kind of gets eclipsed by the or I'll fucking kill you part, right?
	Or you'll burn in hell forever and demons will dig dessert forks into your eyeballs and Whatever, right?
	I mean, it's the or I'll torture you or I'll burn you up or I'll murder you and bring you back to life and murder you and bring you back to life and murder you and bring you back to life forever.
	You know, call me oversensitive.
	It's like that last part.
	You know, like if you go to a Ford dealership, buy a car, right?
	And someone says...
	You know, man, you really, really need to buy this car or I'll fucking kill you.
	Do you debate about whether the car is a good thing to buy or not?
	No!
	You're like, I'm sorry, what was that last part again?
	The part right after you suggested I buy the car.
	Right?
	The part where you said, or you'll kill me.
	You know, people want to sort of get into the debate about whether you should buy a Ford or not.
	I'm kind of focused on the or you'll kill me part.
	Revelation 21.8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderous, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters, and all liars, they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.
	This is the second death.
	Well, that's John.
	That's not...
	I was just specifically talking of Jesus.
	I thought the whole Bible was divinely inspired, wasn't it?
	Well, the entire Old Testament couldn't have been inspired by Jesus because he wasn't alive yet.
	But the whole Bible is divinely inspired, isn't it?
	Isn't that how we know that Jesus is the Son of God?
	Because God said, I'm the one true God?
	I mean, he wasn't Woden, right?
	He wasn't a spaceman with a helmet that looked like a halo.
	The whole Bible only has validity as a divine document if it is divinely inspired, right?
	I mean, we can't imagine that anything written down a few hundred years after the events could possibly be true if it wasn't divinely inspired, right?
	People can't even agree what the hell happened in Dallas when JFK was shot, and there's footage!
	You know, every time I say anything in this world, 9 billion people, it seems, tell me that I'm completely wrong and stuff never happened.
	Put out a video about Ebola.
	Man, I can't believe you're so naive.
	There's no such thing as Ebola.
	Put out a video about the Boston bombings.
	Faked!
	Adam Lanza, faked!
	People can't even agree...
	On stuff for which there's six million camera footage angles.
	Right?
	People can't agree on stuff that they saw in the same room.
	As I mentioned, my first day of history class in university, the teacher threw her glasses at me, turned to the class and said, what happened?
	Nobody had a clue.
	He threw his glasses at you, you threw a ferret at him, you released a bat that flew up his nose.
	People just didn't know.
	If you say something that happened in the real world, people can't even agree on what happened on 9-11.
	And there's video footage.
	And so the idea that where there's no video, no audio, and all of the texts are incredibly motivated by religious mania...
	There's no possible way to imagine that the truth about Jesus could have been written down without divine intervention, without God saying, this is what happened.
	And we only know that the divine intervention is true and valid because of the Old Testament, where God told people what the truth was about God, right?
	So, the Bible cannot possibly be, and this is where I do respect fundamentalists, The Bible must be divinely inspired.
	Because if the Bible is all divinely inspired, okay, great.
	Then we run into other problems which we can talk about later, perhaps.
	But if the Bible is not divinely inspired, then the amount of truth in it is almost negligible.
	Because people can't even agree on historical events.
	Jesus, go to...
	Yahweh, go to historians and say, dudes, dudesses, what caused World War I? You get 12 historians, you're going to get about 25 opinions.
	People don't even know what caused World War I. What was the cause of the greatest material advance in the history of mankind known as the Industrial Revolution?
	Nobody can give you that answer.
	And there's Unbelievable amounts of historical documentation relative to we don't even know if Jesus existed.
	Right?
	So people can't decide on anything about history in any consistency.
	It doesn't mean that everything's equal.
	I think there are still better and worse theories and so on.
	But people can't decide on a goddamn thing about history.
	And again, go to anything which...
	The Malaysian flight.
	There was no Malaysian flight!
	It was a A giant dragonfly that flew out of Vladimir Putin's ass, and anyone who says otherwise is a shill for the Zionist bankers.
	It's like, okay, so nobody can agree even on things?
	Anyway, so the Bible must be divinely inspired.
	If it is, lots of other problems, which we can get into.
	If it's not divinely inspired, then there's no truth in it of any verifiable kind.
	Now, the other option is some of it's divinely inspired and some of it isn't.
	That's what I was about to ask you.
	Ooh, that's even worse.
	That's the worst of all the possibilities, in my opinion.
	That's the worst possible possibility.
	Because imagine if I'm writing an instruction manual for how to wire your house, right?
	Right?
	And some of it is true.
	But some of it, I tell you to do stuff that will electrocute you.
	And I don't tell you which is which.
	Now, if I write a manual on how to rewire your house and it's all true, okay, great.
	I've done a service, right?
	If it's all lies, nobody's going to believe it, right?
	But if it's half true...
	If it gets you started and builds up credibility and then I say touch these two wires together while you're standing in a bucket of water and you get electrocuted, that's the worst of all.
	Half-truths with no indication of where the truth ends and the lies begin.
	When it is the essential manual for getting out of hell, which is far more important In the long run, then wiring your house.
	If there's an essential instruction manual for getting out of hell and getting into heaven, which is the most essential task within the Christian mythology, and some of it's true, and some of it's lies, and God could have corrected any of those lies at any time with no effort whatsoever, but he lets those lies slip in.
	That It's an act of unbelievable, divine, universe-spanning assholery.
	Here's how to get into heaven.
	Some of it's true.
	Some of it's not true.
	I'm not going to tell you which is which.
	Good luck getting into heaven.
	I mean, God, can you imagine?
	I mean, it's not like the stuff that's not divinely inspired is printed in red, right?
	Well, this stuff's just opinion.
	The stuff that God wrote...
	Is in black.
	The stuff that's just, I don't know, what the hell, right?
	That's all in red.
	There's no way to know.
	I mean, how terrifying.
	This is the most essential thing that you need to do.
	Get into heaven.
	Avoid hell.
	Here's the instruction manual.
	Some of it's true.
	Some of it's lies.
	I'm not going to tell you which is which.
	Now go save yourself.
	Oh my God!
	That would be an act of the purest sadism.
	This is essential.
	This will save your soul.
	Some of it will do the opposite of saving your soul.
	Some of it will get you into heaven.
	Some of it will put you in hell.
	I'm not going to tell you which is which.
	Now, get to heaven!
	What a nightmare!
	Active, unbelievable evil that would be.
	What a mindfuck that would be, right?
	Now, if it's all divinely inspired...
	Then the contradictions become untenable, right?
	It can't be divinely inspired because it's contradictory.
	Consistency is a hallmark of perfection, right?
	And opposites in the Bible, oppositions, things that are told that are true here but not true there, opposite instructions, different dates here, different years there, different ages here and all that, that must mean that God is telling the truth here, but he's lying here where it says the opposite or says something different, of which there are so many examples that don't even bother going into them.
	So God can't be telling the truth all the way through if there's contradictory information, so it can't all be divinely inspired unless an act of pure virtue is to both tell the truth and lie about the same topics.
	That can't be.
	So it can't all be divinely inspired if it's somewhat divinely inspired and somewhat Written by fallible human beings, but God does not bother to tell us which is which, then it's an act of pure infinite trollery and unbelievably evil.
	Because you're telling people this is the essential task of your life to get to heaven.
	Some of these instructions are true, some of them are completely false, and I'm not going to tell you which is which, but that would just be unbelievably evil.
	That'd be like saying, you know, here's how to not get Ebola.
	Wear protective gear and lick the corpse.
	I mean, and you have to do both.
	I mean, that would be insane to put out, right?
	Incredibly destructive.
	So it can't be divinely inspired all the way through.
	It could be half and half, but that would mean God is unbelievably evil.
	And If it's not at all divinely inspired, then it's no support for religion, right?
	I'm still not understanding how if it was half and half...
	I mean, I think that's a bit much to say half and half, I'd probably say.
	I mean, because there's not...
	There's not 50% of the Bible...
	How would you know which part is true in divinely inspired and which parts are not?
	I'm guessing the parts that The majority of it that is in line with what we believe to be Jesus' teachings.
	So, hang on, hang on.
	But would your argument be that God is incapable of dictating the document?
	No, not incapable.
	But then why wouldn't he?
	Because the entire Christian religion is based on free will and him creating human beings with free will.
	Right, but if I give you bad instructions, I'm interfering with your free will.
	So first of all, the fact that God gives man instructions automatically interferes with free will.
	But secondly, if he gives bad or contradictory instructions, that further interferes with free will.
	Like if I say to you, you can do anything you want, but you have to go north or I'll kill you.
	Am I interfering with your free will?
	No.
	Of course I am.
	Come on.
	Of course I am.
	Now, if God says, either directly or through Jesus, follow these Ten Commandments, do this, do that, do the other, honor your parents, or you'll burn in a lake of fire forever, is he interfering with free will?
	Of course he is.
	Because if I say to you, you can do whatever you want, but if you don't walk north right now, I'm going to shoot you in the kneecaps.
	And you say, well, I guess he's not really interfering with my free will because I have the choice to get shot in the kneecaps.
	Come on.
	Of course I'm interfering with your free will.
	Eternal torture as a punishment for disobedience is a massive interference in free will, particularly if the commandments are contradictory.
	So if I say to you...
	You have complete free will, but you have to walk both north and south at the same time, or I'll shoot you.
	I mean, clearly I just want to shoot you, right?
	Because I'm giving you impossible instructions.
	And so if God is clearly as all-powerful, is clearly capable of dictating.
	I mean, I can dictate, and I'm just a guy, right?
	And so God is clearly capable of dictating his commandments to mankind.
	And so if he kind of does but kind of doesn't, then he must choose to give human beings inconsistent, half-divine, half-man-made, with men who he says are fallible and evil because of Lucifer and Adam and Eve and original sin,
	So, he is half giving instructions, or maybe 80% giving instructions from a place of virtue, and 20% he's allowing evil people to give instructions to humanity, because human beings are fallible, and if he's not divinely inspiring them, so he's mixing poison in with the food, right?
	And calling it a great meal.
	This is not sustainable, logically or morally.
	And the threat of hell...
	It destroys the concept of free will.
	Otherwise, Nelson Mandela had perfect freedom during his time in jail.
	27 years in jail.
	Because he was punished, but he still had choice.
	He could have killed himself.
	He could have, you know, pounded his head into the wall.
	He could have, right?
	So he had choices.
	But no, he was being confined and punished.
	So the moment you put insane incentives like heaven and insane punishments like hell...
	You're not giving people free will anymore.
	Free will would be, listen to these arguments without negative consequences.
	I am giving people infinitely more free will than God will grant them because I'm saying, here are my arguments.
	I will punish no one who does not follow my arguments or does not agree with me or, right?
	I punish no one.
	So I grant infinitely more free will than God does.
	So the idea that this is some sort of foundation for free will is, I think, not even remotely consistent.
	Because if it's moral, it must be universal.
	And if a human being were to do it and would be unutterably evil, we can't suddenly say that, well, if God does it, it must be good.
	Because then we're saying that God can do the opposite of what is moral for people and still be moral.
	In other words, God can be the exact equivalent of perfect human evil and still be moral.
	That can't be true.
	Because if according to universal morality for human beings, God is evil, because if I give massive punishments to people for failing to follow my moral reasoning, If I go burning people up and torturing people and killing people because they don't accept UPB, that would be immeasurably evil of me, right?
	And so if it's immensely and irrevocably evil for me to torture and kill people for not following my moral arguments or commandments, then it must be equally evil for God.
	Unless we say whatever God does is good, but then we're not worshipping virtue, we're worshipping power.
	Well, if the president does it, it's not illegal, says Nixon, right?
	Then we're not worshipping a moral deity, we're praising someone who has the power to harm us because they have the power to harm us and we're scared.
	But that's not moral.
	It may be prudent, right?
	I mean, I'd be bobbing...
	Like an accelerating seagull at King Yong Il's picture if I was in North Korea, because otherwise you'd get killed, right?
	But I wouldn't consider that to be moral.
	I would consider that a tragic adjustment to a brutal dictatorship.
	And what do you think of what I'm saying, Jonathan?
	What are your thoughts?
	It makes sense.
	I guess I'm getting confused on – because I'm thinking that what I was trying to say was if we say that the things that God was saying were what we consider to be moral,
	and I guess the things that were immoral are what we consider to be immoral now – If those were, I guess, kind of misinterpretations or just put in there by the original writers.
	I mean, because I know there are some, I think Rob Bell was one of them, popular pastors that, I mean, Rob Bell taught a lot about stuff and I think he got big into this on doing a lot of background research on it,
	and he came to the conclusion that there was no hell based on—I think there were some other texts that were written with certain books in the Bible that weren't.
	But I'm sorry to interrupt, and I'm sure that's probably a sort of interesting exercise, but God can correct all the Bibles— And give very clear instructions to everyone and talk to everyone directly and tell them, there's no hell.
	Or, there is a hell, right?
	God can do that at any time, can make those instructions perfectly clear.
	Let me put it to you this way.
	If I say to the cab driver, take me to the airport, but he hears, take me to the barber, And then he starts driving the opposite way from the airport and starts driving towards the barber.
	What am I going to say?
	Can you say that again?
	You kind of skipped out.
	So, if I jump into a cab and I say to the cabbie, take me to the airport.
	But he hears me say, take me to the barber.
	And he starts driving the opposite way from the airport towards the barber.
	What am I going to say to him?
	That's not the way to the airport.
	Yeah.
	You misheard me.
	I'm going to have to correct you.
	Right?
	Uh-huh.
	And so, if God, if there's no hell, and people start writing in the Bible that there is a hell, what would God say?
	God must tell the truth, right?
	And he knows that people are writing in his name.
	So what would he say?
	You've got that wrong.
	There's no hell.
	I must correct you.
	Because I'm bound to tell the truth as a virtuous being, and what you're saying is going to have a huge influence on a huge number of people, so I must correct you.
	If somebody is writing a press release for Free Domain Radio, and the press release is going out in my name, and it says, Free Domain Radio is very big on kitten eating, and then they say, listen, man, this is what we're about to put out, what am I going to say?
	I think I was sitting on my headset cord.
	They pulled the...
	Alright.
	You can hear me now, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So, if somebody is writing a press release for Free Domain Radio, and in the press release they say, and they're writing it in my name, right?
	And they say, Free Domain Radio very much supports kitten-eating.
	And then they send this to me and they say, listen, I'm about to send out this press release in your name.
	What would I say?
	No, you're not.
	That's wrong.
	Right?
	We are not so much with the kitten eating.
	Kitten petting?
	Yes.
	Kitten eating?
	No.
	Right?
	So if people are writing in God's name and they get something wrong, what would he do?
	I mean, you can say that he would correct it, but I guess at the same time I'm wondering what, wow, I mean, now we're two millennia after the fact.
	No, we're not.
	No, no, we're not.
	Jonathan, come on.
	God is outside of time.
	There is no after the fact with God, right?
	There's no before, there's no during, there's no after.
	God is outside of time.
	And so God can correct at any time with no effort whatsoever.
	It takes him zero energy because he's infinite and all-powerful and all-knowing.
	And so he can at any time correct any piece of text or any individual or anyone writing in his name.
	He can correct it.
	He could take over every television station in the world and broadcast his exact thoughts and ideas and arguments and preferences to the whole world in every language that was completely native to their understanding, right?
	There would be no effort to him whatsoever.
	So there's no possibility that if God wants to be comprehensible, that comprehensibility would not happen.
	So incomprehensibility or contradictions in the Word of God Right.
	Right.
	Right.
	To have contradictory and unclear information published about the most important message that he has to mankind, which is how to get into heaven and to avoid hell, right?
	Or to avoid not getting into heaven.
	The most important thing to God, according to the theology, is that human beings obey him and do right and get to heaven and so on, right?
	And so that's the most important thing to God.
	And he has an infinite capacity to make his instructions on how to achieve that completely clear to every human being at any moment in time, right?
	And so either he's not capable of making his message clear, which is impossible because that would mean he's not God.
	He's limited then.
	And he's more limited than Google Translate, which, you know, is obviously a deity of a kind.
	Or he actually prefers and likes confusion about how to be virtuous and how to achieve heaven, which goes against his stated goal, which makes him both a liar and a hypocrite.
	Thank you.
	I mean, I guess I understand that.
	Also, what about Socrates?
	I mean, God could have sent Jesus at any time.
	Why did he wait until after a number of very good and virtuous and fine and noble men and women had lived before sending the salvation, right?
	Let's say I have a cure for Ebola.
	In a couple of years, when a couple of hundred thousand people are dead of Ebola, I say, here's the cure for Ebola.
	I've been sitting on it the whole time.
	I've been sitting on it since 1960 before it even showed up.
	What would people say to me?
	I don't know.
	Yes, you do.
	Come on.
	Now's not the time to play dumb, right?
	Of course you do.
	If I had been sitting on this cure for decades, and I wait until a couple of hundred thousand people are dead, and then I say, oh, here's the cure, what would people say to me?
	I guess why you didn't bring it forward sooner?
	Mm-hmm.
	Well, and I said, oh, I could have done it at any time, and I could have done it at any time, so why didn't I do it sooner?
	So if there was a, I mean, human history, I mean, arguably has been going on for, you know, 50,000 years, 70,000 years.
	Depends, you know, the spread from Africa or whatever.
	Depends when you want to start measuring it.
	But let's just say 20,000 years.
	Whatever, right?
	10,000 years.
	Doesn't really matter.
	So, you know, 8,000 BC, let's just say human history starts.
	I mean, you could make the argument further back.
	But whenever human beings had moral responsibility, I don't know when That starts.
	I don't think anyone knows.
	It's impossible to know, probably.
	But let's just say 10,000 years ago.
	So, what that means is that for 8,000 years, human beings had moral responsibility, but no instructions on how to get to heaven.
	In other words, God had the perfect cure for immorality and had heaven...
	He had the cure for Ebola, but withheld it for human beings for 8,000 years and then finally gave it to people in the Middle East who spoke a certain language, right?
	Not worldwide.
	Jesus didn't go to Australia.
	He didn't go to Iceland.
	He didn't go to South America.
	He didn't go to Hawaii.
	He didn't go to the Seychelles.
	He didn't go to the Outer Hebrides.
	So it's like I have this cure for Ebola, which is a worldwide plague, let's say, in five years, but I only give it to Palestinians.
	And not to anyone else.
	I just let them die.
	Could this remotely be considered the actions of a virtuous person?
	Unless they fell under who was innocent.
	So then God doesn't have to send anyone to hell.
	In fact, if he'd never told anyone about heaven and hell, then they would never have gone.
	Then I'm infecting people with Ebola in order to cure them.
	What the hell sense would that make?
	Right?
	Yeah.
	It's like what the natives said to the priests, the Christian priests who came over, right?
	The natives said, so now I have to obey your God or I go to hell.
	And they said, yes.
	And they said, well, what if you'd never told me?
	They said, well, then you wouldn't go to hell.
	And they said, why did you tell me then?
	Why?
	Well, of course the reason they tell is because of money, right?
	Because if you can infect people with an imaginary disease called sin, then you can get them to pay for an imaginary cure called salvation.
	It's a mind virus.
	The virus is imaginary and the cure is imaginary, but the money is real.
	And the power is real.
	Magic always has money as its goal.
	But there's no divinity.
	It's just tragically...
	Common human avarice and manipulation.
	And the fact that it's inflicted upon children is the most horrendous aspect of it at all.
	You know, I've said this before, years and years ago, I was dating a Christian woman.
	I didn't actually know she was Christian at the beginning.
	This is before I knew how to have important conversations.
	And I dated this Christian woman, and I was interested, you know.
	I was an atheist, but not, you know.
	Right?
	Right?
	And she said, oh, you know, my dad's an atheist.
	You know, my mom just takes us to church.
	He sleeps in.
	That was the offer, right?
	And I said, well, you know, if we had kids together, you couldn't tell them that religion was true while they were kids.
	I wouldn't tell them, you know, I said, I'll make the same deal.
	I won't tell them that it's false.
	But you can't tell them that it's true when they're kids because they're too young.
	You know, when they're 18 or when they become adults, when they become independent, then they can choose, right?
	But you can't inflict it on them when they're children because they...
	And she's like, no.
	No, no, no, no.
	Can't work that way.
	Extremely immoral.
	You were taught about it as a child, right?
	Right.
	What would have happened if you'd had these kinds of questions?
	Would you have the scope to exercise your natural reason and skepticism?
	What would have happened if I'd been whispering in your ear...
	If I'd pulled a Cyrano de Bergerac and was whispering these skeptical questions and perspectives in your ear, would you have had the freedom to exercise your thoughts and your rationality, your skepticism, your criticisms?
	Not really.
	I don't think so, no.
	Come on.
	You don't think so?
	You think there's a question about that?
	No religious person alive can answer these questions to anybody's satisfaction.
	The only thing that religious people can do is retreat into the fog of mystery.
	The Lord works in mysterious ways.
	It's a divine mystery.
	Faith!
	Faith is nothing more or less than an allergy to reason.
	It's not an argument.
	It's saying, I can't answer your arguments, so I'm going to call my error truth.
	But calling error truth is too obvious, so I'll invent a new word called faith and pretend that I'm not just saying that lies are true.
	I'm going to make a virtue out of the rejection of reason and evidence.
	But I don't want to call it like that.
	Faith is to lying as taxes is to theft.
	It's just another word for the same goddamn thing.
	And the fact that this stuff is imposed upon children is deeply immoral because children are dependent.
	They cannot...
	They cannot resist the intellect of their caregivers.
	They cannot resist the prejudices of their caregivers.
	I am aware of this.
	I try with my daughter to have as light a touch as I humanly can when it comes to arguments and ideas.
	I did not tell her there's no big invisible guy, as we call him.
	I did not tell her that.
	She asked me what I thought.
	I told her what I thought, but I did not tell her that I was right.
	She examined the question from every angle.
	And the reason I'm fluent in this is these are conversations that I have with my daughter.
	No one alive can square the circles of these mad paradoxes.
	It's not possible.
	It can't be done.
	And to inflict these paradoxes On children under threat of eternal damnation.
	Were you told about Hell as a child, Jonathan?
	Yes.
	What age were you when you were told about the eternal torture of an all-loving God?
	Too young to remember.
	I mean...
	Yeah, I was five.
	At least that's the earliest I can remember.
	I was five.
	When I was told, and then six in boarding school, I was told about the devil and hell.
	We went to church two or three times a week, and I was in the choir and all that kind of stuff.
	And what possible resistance could I put up at that age to this kind of indoctrination, to this kind of death threats, right?
	Hell is a death threat.
	It's worse than a death threat.
	And if anybody attempted to instruct children using the threat of setting fire to them, that person would be regarded as an immoral monster.
	Unless he's a priest, in which case he's a lovely guy, right?
	You cannot instruct people by threatening to set fire to them.
	By threatening to separate them, right?
	What is it that they say to children?
	If you don't believe, your parents will go to heaven and you'll be separated from them forever, right?
	Is that fair to say to children that they'll be separated from their caregivers forever and be eternally tortured?
	Is that moral?
	Is that right?
	Is that just?
	Is it even remotely humane?
	If I say to a child, a five-year-old or a six-year-old, I say, I'm going to separate you from your family and set you on fire, would I not be perceived as the most immoral monster?
	Yes.
	So, this is how parenting worked 2,000 years ago, right?
	So it makes sense that this is what parents would use, right?
	But it's got nothing to do with the existence of any deities or sky ghosts or anything.
	It's just, this is how insane and hysterical and vicious and violent parents were 2,000 years ago.
	So, it's a lot easier to say, obey my invisible friend, rather than obey my craziness, right?
	Right.
	But in a culture, I mean, because I'm going to go back and listen to this, because a lot of what you said answered a lot of my questions of things that I was struggling with.
	But, I mean, still living in a culture in the South, I mean, I guess I'm just, at this point, more afraid to accept what you're saying than anything else.
	But why do you need to keep living in the South?
	I don't.
	Look, I'm annoying this way, and I'm not saying I'm right at all.
	But I've never understood this.
	Maybe it's because I moved around so much as a kid.
	But I just...
	I don't understand the attachment to the geography.
	The geography of...
	The country of a good man is the company of good people.
	The country of a rational man...
	It's the company of rational people.
	Home is where you can surround yourself with thoughtful people.
	Your family is the family of thinkers.
	I mean, years ago, I was really infatuated by some woman, and she was going away.
	And my friend said, oh, that's a bummer, right?
	And I said, yeah.
	He says, well, what are you going to do?
	And I said, well, if I want to make it work, I'll move there.
	Well, where's she going?
	I said, I don't know.
	She's going, I don't know, one of five places.
	And he said, well, you're just going to move there?
	I'm like, well, yeah.
	If I love this woman, if I want to make it work with this woman, I'll just move there.
	And...
	Well, I'm getting married in less than a month as well, so...
	And your wife is?
	So your fiancé is what denomination...
	Christian.
	Really?
	Oh my god!
	Why are you dropping this stuff at the end for?
	Is she going to keep her Bibles off the kids?
	You better get this shit squared away before you get married, my friend.
	I mean, there's a lot of stuff we've discussed.
	I've discussed with her.
	Is she going to keep the Bible off the kids?
	Is she going to keep hell out of the kids' hearts?
	Is she going to give them the respect of saying, when you become an adult, you can choose what you believe, but I'm not going to impose my beliefs on you because you're a helpless, dependent child?
	No.
	And how do you feel about that?
	I knew you were down for more than just, oh, you know, I've got these abstract questions.
	Man, I wish people would tell me more up front.
	Oh my god, you're killing me.
	Remember I said at the beginning you sound down?
	Mm-hmm.
	I mean, I worked for my parents.
	Yeah.
	Did you give me the full story there about why you were down?
	I'm guessing not.
	Thou shalt not lie!
	Don't make me set fire to you!
	For I am a vengeful podcaster!
	I'm not really vengeful, but anyway.
	So you work for your parents who are religious and you get married to a religious woman?
	What the?
	Fuck are you doing calling up this show?
	I do not understand.
	Do you really want to like...
	Well, tell me what.
	What do you want me to tell you?
	I'm sorry.
	Why are you calling up?
	I'm not saying it's bad that you did.
	I'm just genuinely curious.
	Why...
	What do you think is going to happen out of this conversation?
	For your fiancé?
	I'm not sure.
	I mean, we've talked about it a lot.
	I mean, I've got some cousins that are much more intelligent than I am that we've had these kind of conversations and I don't know, I'm just kind of lost, I guess.
	Yeah, I don't know what that means, lost.
	I don't know what that means.
	I don't either.
	Okay, good.
	Let's not use words that neither of us think it means.
	Does she know about your doubts?
	Yes, she does.
	And?
	What does she think is going to happen?
	Neither of us really know.
	You mean if I, I guess, were to denounce Christianity?
	I mean, again, you're using religious language for, right?
	I mean, if you just stop believing things that aren't true.
	If you stop accepting things that you were simply told true for financial interest and for interest of unjust authority, both your parents and the state and the priests and so on, I mean, if you just...
	If you become an ex-communist, right?
	If you recognize...
	If you say, oh, communism is a contradictory theory and an immoral practice.
	Are you denouncing communism?
	This is not true.
	It doesn't have to be...
	Some sort of anti-inquisition, so to speak, right?
	But if you just say, look, this is not true, would your wife call into this show?
	Oh, sorry, would your fiancé call into this show?
	Probably not.
	Why not?
	She's a little insecure.
	Go on.
	I mean, I'd be, I'd tell you, it would be a very important call for you both.
	And not fundamentally because I try and talk her out of her faith.
	That's not sort of my...
	That wouldn't be sort of my major intention, but you guys have a serious simmering incompatibility here.
	And I'm not talking about your belief versus her belief.
	Or your perspective versus her faith.
	I'm talking about kids.
	Do you guys want to have kids?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	If you really sort of understand that threatening kills with Threatening kids with the ultimate hellfire defu is wrong.
	You're going to have a huge pitch battle on your hands, aren't you?
	Yeah.
	I mean, if you stop believing and your kids ask you what you believe, which they will, what are you going to say?
	I mean, I would be honest with them.
	You'd say to them that there's no big invisible guy out there.
	It's all made up and it's wrong.
	Now, off to church with you and your mom.
	I mean, if I'd come to that conclusion, I guess, yes.
	Do you not think that you maybe want to postpone the marriage until you come to this conclusion?
	It's a pretty big deal.
	Listen, and I'm saying this, look, I'm not saying that people who have differing opinions on theology can't be married, whatever that would mean, right?
	Well, that's the opposite of what I'm getting back as well.
	The preacher that's marrying us won't marry us if we're both not Christians.
	Right, so if you have doubts, if you have skepticism, then you have to lie to the priest, right?
	I actually wasn't going to.
	I had a questionnaire and I filled it out with some of my questions on there.
	And she kind of threw it away.
	Wait, you said Beyonce...
	Hang on.
	Why are you laughing about this?
	You wrote down some objections or some questions and your fiancé threw them away?
	Doesn't sound too fucking insecure to me, brother.
	Well, it's really the pastor of her mom's church.
	I mean, she's not really close to him, so...
	Wait, but she threw your questions and objections away.
	Right, because it was just about...
	The questionnaire was basically mostly about what we wanted to discuss as far as finances.
	Dude, it doesn't matter.
	She threw your perspectives and questions away.
	But she didn't throw it away.
	You told me.
	She just told me she threw them away.
	Well, I technically threw it away.
	She whited out something that I wrote.
	Oh my god.
	Are you going to fucking nitpick me to death here?
	She threw your questions and perspectives away.
	And objections away or whited them out or eliminated them.
	Doesn't matter.
	Right?
	Mm-hmm.
	What does that mean?
	These are your genuine, sincere, honest questions.
	And they are inconvenient to her and she erases them.
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	Do you have a blender in the house?
	Is it penis-sized?
	No.
	It's called a foreshadowing.
	She erased your doubts and skepticisms and questions because they were inconvenient to her and you call her insecure?
	That's called being a bully.
	That's called erasing you for her own convenience.
	Are you kidding me?
	Look, can you imagine if I was your friend and you had questions that you wanted to submit to an atheist, your skepticism about atheism, can you imagine me tearing that shit up?
	I'd be like, yeah, go, go for it.
	Of course, get your questions answered.
	Well, I don't – she's fine with my questions because I have – I mean, I actually have a – No, no, no.
	I'm just going to interrupt you every time you say something that's just not true.
	She's not fine with your questions.
	Did she wipe them out?
	Yes.
	She's not fine with your questions, okay?
	Don't give me the party line.
	Don't give me the crap that you tell other people or maybe even you tell yourself, right?
	I'm not the sharpest tool than the shed may be, but I'm sharp enough for that, alright?
	That's what's going to happen to you, man.
	It's not fundamentally about religion.
	It's about respect for you as a human being.
	It's not about the priest.
	It's not about God.
	It's not about Jesus.
	It's not about the Bible.
	At all.
	It is about respect for you as a human being.
	Her first loyalty, her last loyalty, her only goddamn loyalty is to you.
	Not to the fucking priest, not to her family of origin, not to her daddy, not to her girlfriends, to you.
	Do you understand?
	Her first loyalty as your wife must be to you.
	Nothing should come between you and her.
	And if she's More than happy, and I imagine self-righteously so, if she is more than happy to erase your fundamental crisis of faith for the sake of social fucking convenience, then she is placing the loyalty of others above her loyalty to you.
	Which means you're not coming first in her life.
	You're not even second or third or tenth.
	Whatever is inconvenient to her in you is erased.
	This is a huge red flag, Jonathan.
	I'm telling you this.
	We get people that call in here all the time.
	Got married.
	Lost my faith.
	Now she's got one of my kidneys in most of my house.
	I don't see my kids anymore.
	And I'm paying $12 million A month in child support and alimony.
	I'm living in my Chevy Nova.
	How pretty is she, Jonathan?
	She's a nine.
	I'm sorry, she's a nine?
	And what's your number?
	I'd probably say eight.
	And how long have you been dating?
	It'll be...
	Two years in January.
	So we dated for a year and then got engaged.
	Right.
	And how old are you guys roughly?
	I'm 24.
	She just turned 28.
	Right.
	Do you know why you called me today?
	You know where this is going without intervention, right?
	This engagement, this marriage?
	And you didn't...
	I don't think you called me up because you don't want to get married.
	Maybe not even to this, you could get married to this woman.
	It's not that.
	But sorry, you were about to say something?
	Well, that's what I was going to say.
	I mean, I don't...
	I guess if we're insinuating that I don't want to marry her, I would...
	I mean, because I think we can disagree even on religion or like thereof.
	And still be happily married.
	I mean, that's just one issue.
	Are you allowed to disagree?
	Didn't she white out your questions?
	Yeah, I mean, yes.
	I'm a very assertive person.
	I mean, that's in my...
	Sorry, you said you're a very assertive person?
	Yes.
	Oh, so then you just rewrote the questions and submitted them then?
	I told her that that was absolutely wrong, that she's absolutely not allowed to erase essential aspects of your personality and your mind and your questioning, that it's incredibly disrespectful, and she better sit down and figure out where her loyalties lie.
	If she's going to get married to you, you better be her number one loyalty just as she is your number one loyalty, and she better not ever try and erase you again for the sake of her own goddamn social convenience.
	Is that what you did?
	We had almost a verbatim argument like that.
	Great.
	So then you were able to resubmit the questions.
	No, you weren't, right?
	I mean, I could have.
	I chose not to.
	Oh, my God.
	So you're very assertive, but she won.
	Well, she didn't win.
	It's that I have a relationship with her.
	I have no relationship with this pastor.
	No, it's not about the pastor, Jonathan.
	No, it's about...
	I mean, I know what it's about.
	It's all about your relationship with her.
	Does she know that you're going to be lying to the pastor?
	Lying about?
	Because you're supposed to fill out a questionnaire, and you filled it out honestly, and now she's saying, lie to the pastor.
	Wipe that shit out.
	She knows you're going to be lying to the pastor, that you're going to be admitting fundamental questions and issues that you have about religion?
	She knows you're going to be lying to the pastor.
	Is she okay with that?
	She's a Christian, right?
	Aren't you supposed to not bear fucking false witness?
	Oh, white it out.
	I'm sure God is looking elsewhere at the moment.
	How is she a Christian if she's asking you to lie to a priest, for God's sakes?
	A priest?
	About God?
	About faith?
	About Jesus?
	She wants you to lie to a priest?
	And this is just fine with both of you?
	Well, it wasn't fine to me.
	That's what I brought up to her, is if that's the man that's marrying us.
	Is it fine for this wonderfully moral Christian lady to tell you to lie to a priest?
	She didn't tell me to lie to him.
	Yes, she did.
	She erased it, and she's telling you, or she wants you to not resubmit it.
	In other words, she wants you to lie by omission when you're being directly asked about your religious beliefs, right?
	No.
	No, what?
	That's not what she asked.
	So when she whited it out, it was so that he could see it better?
	I'm not sure.
	What is the x-ray vision?
	Does he read things up against the light?
	I mean, what does that mean?
	She whited it out because she didn't like what you were writing to the priest.
	Right, and I didn't get into what she didn't like about it because what she erased was...
	Almost identical to something else that she left in.
	Like, I'll just tell you what I said.
	I just said that I had always been a Christian, grew up a Christian.
	A few years ago, I got into philosophy, yada, yada, yada, struggled with my faith.
	You know, I still consider myself a Christian, and even more so now than I did then.
	But I also have more questions now than ever.
	The only thing she whited out was that I have more questions now than ever.
	She was still fine with me telling him that I had my doubts and everything else, which I didn't understand.
	I tried to get that from her.
	Oh, wait.
	So, hang on, Jonathan.
	So she was fine with you saying to the priest that you're more of a Christian now than you were before?
	Right.
	That's what I pointed out.
	She didn't want him to know that I also had...
	She wanted me to stop it right there, that I was a Christian more than I am now from ever, period.
	Well, of course, there's nothing controversial saying to a Christian priest that you're more of a Christian now than ever.
	I mean, how is that controversial?
	I mean, but if you say you have more questions now than ever, that's a true statement, right?
	And she didn't like that.
	So the only thing that was controversial was the one thing that she erased.
	And she did not want you to say.
	In other words, she wanted you to lie to a priest about the nature of your faith at the moment.
	And why did she want you to lie to the priest?
	Because that's the priest at her mother's church.
	Right.
	Because she's ashamed of that.
	Because it brings her social shame because it will have negative social consequences to her.
	Right?
	Because she's ashamed of that.
	Or she's fearful of the negative consequences or whatever, right?
	Right.
	I think she's just more afraid of I mean, I can understand that because that's where I'm at as well.
	Because I'll give you an example.
	Somebody in her family is dating a girl, and she's an atheist.
	And that's all I heard from her family was that she's an atheist.
	But they've mentioned some other things.
	Nothing good.
	I never heard anything good.
	And then I met the girl.
	We had a family, I don't know, get together or something, and I remember leaving and I was like, she was actually kind of nice.
	I mean, she made a lot of sense and she was a nice girl.
	I don't know what y'all were...
	That's the kind of background that she's coming from, yes.
	Yeah, so they're bigoted, right?
	Like, I mean, if she was dating an Indian guy, or if a guy was dating an Indian girl, they'd be like, oh, she's a dirty Indian, right?
	When you meet the Indians, you're like a perfectly nice person, but they're prejudiced, right?
	They're bigoted.
	Right.
	They don't like me, right?
	They don't like my kind of people.
	They don't like rational thinkers and skeptics, right?
	Right.
	Which I'm perfectly found with.
	I mean, that's what I've told her many times.
	They don't have to like me or, you know...
	What do you mean they don't have to like you?
	I don't understand what that means.
	Her family doesn't have to like you?
	No, I mean that doesn't matter to me because...
	Oh my god, you so don't...
	Oh my god, listen, Jonathan, is this your first time being married?
	I see you in 24, right?
	Okay, so you don't understand marriage.
	I'm sorry, I'm going to pull the 11 years experience card on you.
	You don't understand marriage.
	It doesn't matter Right.
	Right.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	No, seriously.
	You're going to get married, which means you are going to be at one with another human being in a way that you can't possibly comprehend at the moment.
	It's sort of like before and after kids.
	It's incomprehensible, the change.
	So you think that you can have this independence, well, I don't care what other people think?
	Yes, you do.
	Because if your wife cares, the only way that you cannot care is to not care about your wife.
	Right?
	Right.
	And your wife really, really, really cares what other people think of you, right?
	Which is why she whited out that you have more questions now than ever before.
	So guess what?
	Her problems are your problems.
	Her prejudices are your problems.
	Right?
	Her desire to erase you for the sake of other people is your problem.
	You can only not care about that by not getting married to her.
	Once you get married to her, they will be your problems until the day you die.
	And you will have to not Speak about what's on your mind at family gatherings.
	You will have to not speak about what's on your mind most likely to your wife.
	You will most likely not have to speak about what's on your mind or have to avoid speaking about what's on your mind to your children.
	You are going to be wedded, which means you will no longer have an independent existence of Of any kind whatsoever.
	Everything that you decide has a massive impact on your wife.
	Everything your wife decides or prefers has a massive and foundational impact on you.
	This, well, I could just toss it aside and what do I care what people think?
	You will care.
	And it will be a huge issue if there is incompatibilities.
	You called me up Tonight.
	To talk about marriage, not to talk about religion.
	You called me up, and we don't have time to talk about your family, but...
	You called me up because you need someone to see what your fiancé is very, very clearly telling you.
	Which is that if you...
	As a human being, as an individual, if you interfere with her social convenience, you will be fucked.
	You will be screwed over and betrayed.
	She will erase you.
	If your thoughts lead to social inconvenience for her, You will be erased.
	She couldn't make it any more clear than if she shouted it into your face with a bullhorn.
	And you cannot escape that problem because you will be married.
	You've got a month.
	I wish she'd call in here, but obviously that's her choice.
	But I'm telling you, man, I'm not telling you what you can do or should do or what I don't know.
	Everyone's life is their life to live.
	But I'll tell you this, absolutely clearly and totally, I would in no way, shape or form, I, not you, I, I in no way, shape or form would get married to a woman who felt that erasing the reality of a significant portion of my intellectual life for the sake of social convenience, I would not get married to someone who thought there was nothing wrong with that.
	I would not get married to a moral hypocrite Who thought that the best course of action for two Christians is to lie to a priest by omission or commission.
	It doesn't matter.
	God doesn't see the difference.
	That founding a marriage on erasure and hypocrisy, you're going to stand in front of a priest.
	You say that you're more of a Christian now than ever.
	You are going to stand in front of a priest and God is going to know that you are lying to that priest and you have lied to that priest.
	And you are going to get married by that priest in the eyes of God.
	And God will know, and you will know, that you lied to that priest and that you actually wanted to tell the truth, but your Christian lovely bride bullied you into lying to the priest who marries you.
	Come on.
	Don't you think that's a little bit of a sin?
	If you believe it, yes.
	You said to me, you are more of a Christian now than you were before.
	That's what I put on the questionnaire.
	Wait, was that a lie too?
	Well, I was saying that.
	That was one of the responses I came up with in dealing with my family in general.
	They would, I guess, question my faith because I had questions, and my response was, I'm more of a Christian than you are because you've just blindly followed something your entire life.
	I've at least questioned it and came back to it, which is irrelevant anyways, but that's what I felt like.
	When people hear that you're more of a Christian now than when you were younger, do they think that's because your doubts have risen?
	You know that you're manipulating people when you say that, right?
	That's not what they think you mean.
	If you have questions and then you've overcome them and reaffirmed your faith in Jesus and God and so on, then you could make that claim, right?
	I wrestled with the The devil of doubt, and I overcame the devil of doubt, and now I have achieved true faith because you have not even experienced doubt.
	I have experienced doubt.
	I've overcome it, and I'm more of a Christian now than I was before, and I'm more of a Christian than you are because you've never even gone through doubt, right?
	That's what people think you mean, but that's not what's happening, right?
	At the moment, no.
	Okay, compared to when?
	No, you had doubts before this call, right?
	Well, I mean, you're going to have doubts in anything.
	I mean, not anything, I shouldn't say that.
	Really?
	Is your fiancé doubting that she's doing the right thing by asking you to lie to a priest?
	Has she ever expressed any doubts about that, whether that's the right thing to do, or whether that's moral, or whether that's a sin?
	I mean, does she even know what religion is?
	For fuck's sake, excuse my French, but does she even have a clue what religion is?
	Does she not know that God sees her lying and counseling you to lie to a priest who's marrying you in the eyes of God?
	Does she not know how this works?
	Has she expressed doubt?
	You say everyone has doubts.
	Has she expressed doubts about counseling you to lie to the priest who's marrying you?
	I mean, she apologized about it.
	Apologized about what?
	About doing that and Asking me to do that.
	Because it was wrong?
	Yes.
	Because she was lying?
	Or she wanted you to lie?
	Both.
	Okay, good.
	So then you can resubmit the questions so that you're not lying to the priest who's going to marry you.
	Oh, you've decided not to do that of your own volition, right?
	I brought it up in our first counseling meeting.
	Yes, but the written down part, right?
	Right.
	Well, I'm telling you that I would not get married to somebody who counseled me to lie against her own moral values and who felt that it was perfectly justified and just.
	Now, let's say that she had a turn of heart and let's say that she suddenly realized that she was lying, then she should be insisting that you hand in what you handed in before, right?
	And has she done that?
	Can you say that one more time?
	If she truly understood that she was wrong to erase what you wanted to say to the priest, then she would insist that you hand it in again, right?
	I suppose.
	Well, no.
	I mean, if I'm wrong to steal a candy bar, shouldn't I bring the candy bar back?
	If I say, well, I guess I was wrong to steal it, and then I eat it, Haven't I kind of not admitted that it was wrong to steal it?
	Well, I couldn't submit what I'd written to begin with because I'd already ripped it up.
	Oh my god.
	Okay, well listen, if you're going to start arguing at this level, I'm pretty close to ending the call.
	Because saying you ripped it up and therefore it can't be resubmitted is such an insult to both of our intelligence that I'm just not willing.
	If you're that defensive, I can't.
	I mean, I can't insult both of us by pretending that that's anything sensible, right?
	Right.
	There are other forums, right?
	Right.
	No, she didn't do that.
	Right.
	Right.
	Which means that if she's perfectly comfortable with lying to the priest, then it means she's not Christian.
	I don't know what she is.
	Right.
	Social metaphysician, social conformist, I don't know.
	But it's not Christian, right?
	If she had – she would have my respect and she'd have more of my – well, not that that matters, right?
	But she'd have more of my respect than even many atheists if she'd said, I can't believe I was so tempted by vanity and fear of consequences.
	That I actually counseled you to lie to a priest.
	I feel absolutely terrible about that.
	I've prayed about it, and God has chastised me for that, for placing the opinions of others over and above the salvation of my husband's soul.
	How shallow, how vain, how petty I was, how wrong I was.
	And now, not only do I want you to submit your question to the priest, in fact, I've written it out for you, But I also want you to amend it because I think that people are misinterpreting what you say when you say that you're more of a Christian now than ever.
	And I want you to sit down and have a frank discussion with my family.
	I don't want there to be any secrets between you and my family.
	I've prayed about this.
	I've recognized the errors and wrongness of my ways.
	I want you to sit down with my family.
	I am going to stand by you.
	I am enthusiastic about your doubts.
	I am enthusiastic about your questions.
	Because I don't want dumb faith.
	I want intelligent, aware, enlightened faith.
	And I am so sorry that I let vanity and fear of negatives...
	That I encouraged and even commanded and demanded that you lie to the priest who was going to marry us.
	I can't imagine what you think of me.
	I can't imagine how low you must think I descended at that time or during that situation.
	And you go tell the priest.
	I'm going to tell the priest.
	I now have my own doubts because I thought I was a good Christian girl and here I am telling you to lie to a priest who's going to marry us, defending it, attacking you.
	The hell is wrong with my faith?
	I must be missing something very essential if I succumb to that kind of temptation.
	I want you to sit down with the priest while I'm there.
	We talk about it all.
	I want you to sit down with my family.
	Let there be no secrets.
	I never ever want you to feel that I'm ashamed of you.
	I love you.
	You're going to be my husband.
	Hopefully you're going to be the father of my children.
	I never ever want you to feel disrespected.
	I never ever want you to feel that you come anywhere but first for me.
	And I'm going to work hard to earn back your trust.
	I'm going to work hard to earn back your respect for me because I fell pretty hard there.
	And I made a serious moral error about a very important day.
	And I asked you to lie to a priest while he was marrying us.
	I asked you to withhold information.
	And I also let you portray yourself and encourage you to portray yourself as more Christian when I actually know you're going through significant doubts.
	And I did all of that for the sake of vanity and for the sake of just wanting to look good, which is not what Jesus did.
	There are six things doth the Lord hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto him.
	A proud look A lying tongue and hands that shed innocent blood.
	A heart that diviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief.
	A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.
	Proverbs 6, 16-19 A false witness that speaketh lies.
	That is what God himself hates.
	Not is mildly annoyed by.
	Not stubs his toe on in the dark.
	Hates.
	So, if you guys are going to be Christians, then be Christians.
	And speak the truth.
	Alright.
	Will you let us know how it goes?
	I will.
	All right.
	Keep us posted, brother.
	And thanks very much for your call.
	I appreciate that.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	And thank you.
	Thanks again for everyone who called in.
	A long show, but I think a useful and powerful one.
	I really, really appreciate everyone bringing these challenges to the attention of the world.
	And have yourself...
	Have an absolutely wonderful week.
	We will speak to you Saturday night.
	FDRURL.com slash donate.
	Please, please, please, as I mentioned at the beginning, do help out at this show.
	It is very motivating for us and it does give us what we need to continue to improve everything about the show.
	FDRURL.com slash donate.
	Have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.

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