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May 11, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

22:05

2970 The Burden of Proof | Empathy Edition

Stefan Molyneux looks at the dismissive reaction of many atheists to “The Atheist's Burden of Proof” video and why it’s important to help people understand - what they simply don’t understand.

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	Hello, hello everybody.
	It's Stefan Maloney from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	To my atheist friends who have swarmed on my video, which is the atheist burden of proof, there seems to be, or there is a response, which is something like this.
	Why is this such a long show?
	All you have to do is simply assert That the burden of proof relies on the person making the claim.
	And that's it.
	End of story.
	Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so on.
	Well, I don't think that's enough.
	So, if you have a kid who believes in Santa Claus and says, there's a Santa Claus, would you say, well...
	The burden of proof relies upon he who is making the claim, and therefore if you cannot prove that Santa Claus exists, then you have to put that in the state of unproven and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
	No.
	You wouldn't do that at all.
	You would say, well, you know, if Santa Claus has to go from...
	Every house to every house in the space of one night, he would have to travel so fast that not only would Rudolph's nose be red, but the entire kitten caboodle would flame out in the atmosphere, burn up like some mismatched space shuttle tiles, and it would explode in a fiery comet of Christmassy death over the landscape the moment he started.
	Also, how would he know who's been naughty or who's been nice?
	How would he know what kids want?
	And what about the places with no chimneys?
	You get it, right?
	So you would step the kid through the reasoning so that the child would learn how to think and what to think and how to be critical and what reason is and what evidence is and so on.
	So that would be a very useful lesson.
	It seems to me, I don't know, this is an old word, But it seems to me kind of priggish to say, well, the burden of proof is required by the person making the claim, and therefore, yeah, right?
	It's kind of passive.
	And it seems to me, you know, frankly, I gotta call you out.
	Atheist trash talk time.
	A little chicken.
	Little, little chicken.
	If a child or someone says the world is square or banana-shaped or flat, you would set them through a series of reasoning and, you know, you would actually care about their mind enough, hopefully, to instruct them and not just retreat into this passive-aggressive, well, you're making the claim, you must supply the proof, and all that kind of stuff.
	I mean, if someone's a racist, says some particular group is, some particular race is inferior, well, would you say, uh...
	You know, this is unproven because you're making a claim, and therefore you need to provide the proof.
	And it's like, no, you'd say, that's racist.
	Right?
	I mean, that would be...
	I mean, the feminists don't say, well, you know, women's brains are different than men, and if someone's a sexist, the women are inferior.
	I mean, they don't sort of sit there and wait.
	Well, you know, you're making the claim, so the burden of proof is upon you, and I'm proven, and...
	I mean, I'm sorry, it's a very cheap tactic to mock people's beliefs by repeating their statements in a funny voice.
	I get that's not philosophical, so I will not just be annoyingly immature, but I will also attempt to make a case myself.
	Maybe even in the same funny voice.
	Sort of tired deputy dog voice.
	So, when people believe irrational things, saying that the burden of proof lies on them is not helping them.
	It's not helping them.
	It's sort of like if someone has got emphysema saying, well, you know, you shouldn't have smoked years ago.
	Well, okay, doctors can say that, but what's done is done, and you deal with the effects of what's happened to people.
	And religious belief is something that happens to people.
	It's something that is inflicted on people, right?
	I remember talking to a kid once who said, oh, you know, so-and-so believes in...
	In fairies, and so they're not that smart.
	And I said, well, you know, maybe their parents believe in fairies.
	Maybe their parents haven't corrected them, and they've seen a lot of movies about fairies and so on.
	You can't say that they're not smart because they believe in things that don't make sense at all or don't make sense to you.
	You know, I said, look, I mean, you've probably heard of Africa, right?
	And the kids said, yeah.
	And I said, well, have you ever seen it?
	And they said, no.
	And I said, well, what if Africa turned out to not be true?
	Like it was like a made-up world, like Middle Earth or something.
	Would you be dumb?
	It's like, no, you would be trusting in the people who were supplying you with information, in your caregivers and so on.
	And, you know, most people, most kids at least, believe in God the way that people believe.
	In Africa, except you don't go to hell for being skeptical about the existence of Africa.
	And so it's not something that people are reasoned into.
	It's something that people are propagandized into and frightened into and bribed into.
	It is not a belief that is rational or reasoned into.
	And as the old going says, you can't reason someone out of a belief that they weren't reasoned into.
	And I'm not sure that's entirely true, but what seems to me excessively superior, passive-aggressive, and so on, is just saying to people who have been propagandized into believing in a particular deity or a particular mythology or a particular belief system— I've
	been surrounded by people who believe in it.
	They are no more responsible for those beliefs than they are responsible for being born in Holland or Sierra Leone or Australia or wherever.
	That's just where they're born.
	And the belief systems, it's just the ecosystem of where they were born.
	And so, having, I think, some sympathy to the reality...
	That most people have as a relation to their belief system the same relationship that a guy in a forest who has a tree fall on his leg has to the tree.
	It's just, whoa, wrong place, wrong time, bad luck.
	And lecturing someone that they shouldn't have been in the forest, you know, when you pass someone by who's got a A tree that's landed on their leg and they're trapped and they're screaming and might say, well, you know, shouldn't have been in the fight.
	You know, that's kind of a dick move, if you don't mind me saying so.
	I mean, help the person who has the log on his leg.
	And error, irrationality, anti-empiricism, faith, all of these problems...
	Are logs that have fallen on people who happen to be in the wrong family or the wrong culture or the wrong environment at the wrong time.
	And we all have to have the humility to know that if we're raised as atheists, we're likely to be atheists.
	And if we're raised as Mormons, we're likely to be Mormons.
	And you get the pattern, right?
	And we can't...
	Be held responsible for knowledge we do not have and that we do not suspect.
	So if somebody who's religious has never run into a really competent atheist...
	And by competent, I don't just mean, like, has the right arguments.
	But I also mean...
	empathy and some sympathy.
	I mean, don't get me wrong, there's people in this world to be angry at.
	And I'm not saying, you know, the pacifism in the realm of intellectual combat.
	Oh, scarcely me for that.
	But in, you know, my particular view, and it's been pretty well validated in game theory, you treat people the best you can the first time that you meet them.
	And after that, you treat them as they treat you.
	I think that's about the best way to approach helping people, changing people's minds.
	And to understand the religious mindset is to understand that, for them, religion is the cure for sin, And atheism is the path to hell, right?
	So, that's a challenge.
	If you have a pill that cures someone, well, first of all, you have to convince them that they're ill.
	You have to convince them that it's a state of health that's better.
	Then you have to convince them that a very painful medication is going to probably make them better.
	And then you have to remind them that this painful medication will make them unappealing to most people that they grew up with.
	It's a significant challenge to get people out of a religious mindset.
	And it is...
	It is a real challenge.
	And I've mentioned this on this show before when I was younger.
	There was a guy I worked with who was religious and intelligent.
	And he made an argument for the improbability of the primordial soup producing life and all of the things that would have to happen together and so on for this to occur.
	And it's a good argument.
	And I brought it up with my atheist friends, and I was, like, attacked for even entertaining the possibility.
	Well, it happened!
	It doesn't matter if it's improbable, it happened.
	What are you going to say?
	It's God?
	It's like, no, no, I'm not saying that.
	What I'm saying is, here's an interesting argument, and it's worth looking into.
	That's all.
	But this, you know...
	I know.
	I mean, I pretty strongly suspect that if I had continued down the road of pursuing this argument, I would have been looked at as, you know, a traitorous, unthinking, break-the-ranks, superstitious, religious, whatever, right?
	And that's not...
	I don't think that's how we want to...
	I mean, we don't want to be those guys, right?
	We don't want to have intolerance and ostracism for curiosity, which we decry among the religious, right?
	You have to listen to the best arguments from the opposing viewpoint.
	And there are some good arguments against evolution.
	And I'm not saying that I accept them, but they're good arguments.
	You want to, you know, if you think you're the heavyweight champion, you know, get into the ring with Ali in his prime or whatever and go to town and just push over a girl guide and say, I am the champion!
	Right, that's not very realistic.
	So this idea that somehow religiosity is opposed by calling this burden of proof stuff, a burden of proof stuff, while it certainly has validity, It's not going to help someone whose beliefs are like a leg trapped under a log.
	Because saying to someone whose leg's trapped under a log just walk away from it is wrong and cruel and callous and cold and mean because the person is trapped under a log.
	So saying they walk away would only work if they weren't already trapped under a log, at which point you wouldn't need to tell them to walk away from anything, right?
	So just recognizing the basic reality that religious people have had their religion indoctrinated upon them under great social pressure, under threats of hell and promises of heaven and all this kind of juicy stuff.
	That is the reality of religion.
	The transmission of belief.
	So saying to someone, well, you need to follow this rationally constructed line of argument and you have to understand the burden of proof and blah-de-blah-de-blah, is saying, use your brain as if you were well-versed in rationality, although you have been raised in irrationality.
	Recognize when you're in Japan that most people speak Japanese.
	Learn the language if you wish to communicate, right?
	So, saying to someone, you need to speak English doesn't work if they don't speak English and is redundant and irrelevant if they do speak English.
	They won't understand you if they don't, and they already understand you and don't need to learn more if they do.
	You understand that speaking reason to people who speak mythology is not helpful.
	I mean, if they could speak reason, they wouldn't already be speaking mythology!
	You understand, right?
	Technically, it's kind of correct, but it's kind of a passive-aggressive superiority and coldness and so on.
	So, So for people who are sort of confused as to why I would engage in a rational series of arguments rather than just saying, well, you know, you have the burden of proof and I'm just going to sit here and do nothing.
	Well, it's because I recognize that It is really not this person's fault that he happened to be raised religious.
	Could we imagine if this person was Sam Harris' son or Richard Dawkins' son or Christopher Hitchens' son or whatever, that they would be saying all this stuff about religion?
	Well, of course not.
	It's just luck of the draw.
	Where did you get born to?
	And also luck of the draw, like, you know, how much native intelligence do you have?
	I mean, if I give somebody who's math illiterate a vector calculus question and saying, well, you know, you just have to figure it out, well, they're not going to, right?
	That's an exercise in me just pointing out how much I know about math and humiliating people who don't, right?
	Come on, the answer's right there.
	Just do it.
	Come on, let me film you.
	Right?
	That's just kind of a dick superiority move.
	And so people have not been instructed in rationality, they've not been instructed in skepticism, and they've received a lot of false answers with regards to the atheist position.
	So then just tossing the requirement for logic at somebody who's been explicitly trained to reject logic, just tossing the logic Onus over to them and saying, all right, go for it.
	It's literally like, I take you up.
	This actually happened to me when I was a teenager.
	A guy took me up in a glider.
	And it was beautiful.
	And he said, you take the stick, right?
	And I didn't know what the heck I was doing, so I just tried turning it this and that.
	And he kind of grabbed control of the stick back from me.
	Right?
	Because he knew how to pilot a glider, and I did not.
	And so if you're up in a plane with someone and someone just says, here are the controls, and you don't know how to fly, it's kind of like a dick move.
	I mean, this guy did kind of a dick move to me too, right?
	Because he should have explained it beforehand or told me what to do or whatever, but it was just one of these...
	You try.
	Oh, you're incompetent.
	I'll take back over, right?
	It's just a dick move.
	Sorry.
	You know, technically correct, but not helpful.
	And a vanity pumping exercise, which...
	I think we can be bigger than that, right?
	We can be greater than that.
	We can be more humane than that.
	We can be bigger-hearted than that.
	I mean, if you are...
	I was raised very early on.
	I was raised in a very religious environment, in boarding school and so on.
	But certainly by...
	I guess 9 or 10 or 11, a lot of the religion was not as central, and I would certainly still go to church, particularly when I would visit relatives, but then when I moved to Canada, or when my family moved to Canada, when I was 11, after that, I mean, there was virtually no religious instruction in my life.
	I think we did the Lord's Prayer every morning, and the State's Prayer, which is the national anthem.
	But that was about it.
	It was very little religious instruction.
	And so I, you know, I had a fairly small log land on me, I guess you could say, and I learned how to get it off, and it was easier for me.
	I didn't have a Some giant sequoia ironwood fall on me.
	I'm sapling, you know.
	I got it off and also, you know, it lightened over time and so on.
	But, okay, so I had a small tree land on my leg.
	Other people have giant redwoods land on their legs.
	And me saying, well, you know, just lift it and walk it away.
	I mean, it's just not having empathy for the degree of...
	Hysteria that a lot of people have been exposed to and had inflicted upon them in matters of religion.
	I'm virulently and violently opposed to taking accidents of birth and making them into personal virtues.
	I mean, I'm virulently opposed to that.
	That is really...
	One of the most central foundations to human corruption is to take an accident of birth and turn it into a personal virtue.
	Right?
	I'm fabulous because I'm pretty.
	It's like, well, you're just born pretty.
	Good for you, but didn't earn it, right?
	All immorality, as the saying goes, is a desire for the unearned.
	And would I have my current relationship with religion had I been born into some fundamentalist small town in Pakistan?
	It's incomprehensible.
	And I happen to be lucky enough to be born into a time where religiosity is not inflicted by the state, is not inflicted universally by social norms, where I don't face ostracism for thinking for myself, where there's freedom of speech, where I have access to great books like Atheism, The Case Against God, which I read as a teenager and had a big influence on me.
	I mean, so I didn't invent all this stuff.
	You know, it's the old standing on the shoulders of giant stuff in a society where there's freedom to do it and so on.
	I mean, it's...
	I'm lucky.
	Now, some things I've earned and some things I've worked hard to achieve, and I'm proud of those things, and I think reasonably so.
	But if you look at the ideology or the formation of your own beliefs...
	I think the humility that comes from just recognizing how much of it was just good luck on your part.
	I was a minicus for many years and just never been exposed to it.
	I ended up having to reinvent the wheel, but I could have saved 20 years if I'd been exposed to a couple other thinkers ahead of time.
	So, I don't know.
	I mean, you can't help people who can't think by telling them to think.
	I mean, that really is unjust and unfair.
	And I'm not saying atheists are bad for doing it.
	I'm sure that a lot of atheists who feel that way have themselves been subjected to maybe humiliating attacks or condescension from religious people.
	So I get it.
	I get it.
	But We like to think, and I think it's reasonable to say, but we like to think that we are atheists because we are empiricists and rational.
	It is rational to be empirical about people's lack of rationality and their opposition to reality and so on.
	And I think just sitting back and saying, well, the burden of proof is on you, what happens is then people say, well, I guess God isn't disproved, therefore faith can continue.
	And, you know, just to help people out, I think.
	Treat them with sort of compassion and, you know, help them get down and lift the damn lot.
	It hurts.
	It hurts, for sure.
	But it's better than staying trapped.
	Freedommanradio.com slash donate.
	If you would like to help out the show, I would certainly appreciate it.
	And I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful day.
	And go and help out somebody in the woods.
	You'll feel better for it.
	Thanks everyone so much.

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