Aug. 11, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:36:44
3047 Conquering Stefan’s Ancestors - Call In Show - August 7th, 2015
Introduction: Discussion of the accusations levied against Donald Trump by Megan Kelly in the Republican Presidential Debate.Question 1: You recently talked about the role of Donald Trump in the presidential campaign and I thought some comments were inconsistent with what I understood you stand for on political action as a method for achieving a free society. Don't you think we should pursue any type of activity that could get people closer to rational and philosophical thinking and that political action is one of those activities?Question 2: Discussion of God featuring the caller from the “The Challenge of Incomprehensible Bravery” show.
And we have got a great, great lineup, as always, of callers tonight.
You guys make my brain buzz with Frankenstein-like electrical excitement, and I appreciate that every single time.
And so we watched this debate.
Subjected ourselves to it.
Yeah, I mean, it's...
Someone called it a pageant.
That was the best description of it I've ever heard.
A pageant!
It really was!
I want to see Mike Huckabee in his bikini.
I don't know if you want, but I guess we must have had the same dream.
But first of all, Mike Huckabee, nice guy.
He really, really does look like a Looney Tunes character.
Is it Deputy Dog?
I'm trying to figure out who it is.
But anyway, it doesn't really matter.
So we watch this thing where, you know, solve all of the problems of the known universe...
In 30 seconds or less.
Which people see now, I guess because of intellectual weakness, seem to have a certain amount of difficulty with wimps.
There were some accusations leveled against Donald Trump.
Megyn Kelly, in full-on blonde Viper mode, was saying that...
All types of comments.
Yeah, it was a war on women.
So apparently he had this...
And you've looked into it a bit, Mike.
Yeah, I was curious.
This Twitter fight.
Twitter fight with Rosie O'Donnell.
It was more than just Twitter.
They were on a lot of mainstream news outlets.
I watched a Bill O'Reilly thing that Trump did with an interview he did on the whole Rosie situation.
And it's like, all right, I need to know, how did this whole Rosie Donald Trump thing start?
The things I never thought I would ask myself.
Or know about or care about.
Yeah.
And it turns out it's all the result of the Miss USA contest.
The person that won the Miss USA contest ended up getting caught by TMZ drinking underage in New York City.
New York's 21, right?
Uh, yes.
Then she was drug tested, and she tested positive for the use of cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, and they also had photos of her kissing Miss Teen USA. I guess TMZ grabbed those or something.
Where, um, where can I find these photos?
I'll email them to you later.
Later.
Oh dear.
Could you perhaps just keep this topic going for, say, 90 to 110 seconds?
We'll have the little buzzer go off like the presidential debate as you get close to the 90 seconds.
Do you know what that buzzer should have been?
Do you know what that buzzer should have been?
Oh.
The American electorate has climaxed and you must stop.
It was actually somewhat of a scandal at the time.
You know, Trump owns the pageants.
You know, people are like, is there a scripper of her crown or, you know, what's going to happen there?
Is her title going to be removed?
And he said, you need to go to rehab.
And I believe in second.
Second Chances.
He was actually later on Oprah Winfrey and said his brother Fred died from alcoholism and said, I believe in Second Chances.
Donald Trump's brother Fred?
Yeah.
Really?
Uh-huh.
He said, I believe in second chances, and sometimes it works when you give somebody a second chance.
So he sent her to rehab, didn't strip her of her title.
Wait, you paid for her rehab?
I don't know that, but I'd assume so.
Well, yeah, you can't send someone to rehab, right?
I mean, he may be able to break the minds of liberals just by being in the same hemisphere, but he still doesn't have the power to compel people to...
Can you believe he forced that young woman to go to rehab?
That monster?
Right, right.
What a monster.
He didn't strip of her title, gave her a second chance, let her go to rehab and, you know, heroin, crystal meth.
I mean, this is not just she got drunk.
This is, you know, bad stuff.
And now apparently she's working in drug treatment and with a drug treatment group off this.
So it seems to have had a positive effect on her.
But this started with Rosie on The View when this was a big topic.
She just came out and started insulting him, starting off by insulting his appearance, his hair, and sort of talking about his divorces and just rallied against who is he to be the moral conscience.
Moral compass, I think, is the term she used in situations like this.
But wait a minute.
Hang on.
Sorry.
Moral conscience.
I mean, I'm not an expert.
You know, obviously, girl-on-girl photos on the internet, yes.
But specifics of the contracts of the Miss USA pageant, but usually there's a morality clause.
Oh, I guarantee there's a morality clause in there because it's based...
I mean, this stuff makes its money off of TV rights and sponsorships and appearance fees and that type of stuff.
And do you want, you know, crystal meth smoking Miss Teen USA or whatnot coming over to your...
Well, until there's an actual state named crack whore, like, you can't have a winner from that category, right?
But enough about New Jersey.
All right.
So she broke her contract.
It wasn't like he was just some finger-wagging moralist.
She signed a contract basically saying, I'm going to put myself in public in a way that is not going to be shameful or harmful to the image of the blah, blah, blah, whatever it goes, right?
Yeah.
And she went off on him and, you know, insulted him pretty soundly, insulting his appearance, too.
And then he responded exactly how you'd expect him to respond if you've watched him in the public eye for any length of time.
Oh, yeah, he punches back.
And he was, I mean, he was vicious towards her, her appearance, and everything.
But Rosie did fire the first shot.
And over, over of all things, him suggesting...
That someone on heroin, crystal meth, cocaine, go to rehab.
Of all the things to get upset about, I'm trying to figure out why this is so triggering and why this is such a problem.
I mean, he didn't enable her really toxic behavior.
So she made fun of his appearance.
How often has she been accused of participating in the war on men?
You know, is Megyn Kelly going to ask Rosie O'Donnell to apologize for her foul, abusive, ugly attacks on Mr.
I don't think that's happening.
Yeah, I'm guessing no.
So, seeing the origin of the whole Rosie O'Donnell thing.
And then, of course, the claim is that, well, he's made these comments to other people, and he's certainly, you know, he's called lots of people idiots and slobs and all that.
I mean, it is Twitter.
He's got his usual insults, and they seem to actually go to all genders.
Someone pulled up a bunch of comments of him calling these exact same insults to men as well, so it seems like he pulls into his grab bag when he's going to insult somebody.
Which, you know, not great.
Not exactly a fan of that kind of stuff, but if people punch him, he punches back, and that is Donald Trump, like it or not.
That's Donald Trump.
I think there's something that the American public feels has been missing from the commander-in-chief, is a punch-backedness.
I mean, you can swing wildly at 9-11, miss completely, and hit Iraq, and that's not exactly punching back.
That's like the Hatfields and the McCoys, and then you go and you punch a Mennonite or something.
It's just like ridiculous, right?
So, I think that they're looking, and they're certainly on the right, because they've been, basically the right has an abuse victim relationship, a traumatized victim relationship with the verbal abuse of the leftist media, and they're looking for somebody to punch back, for somebody to not apologize.
I think that I've certainly read this huge numbers of people who are massively, massively grateful that Donald Trump did not apologize for the immigrants remark.
Right or wrong?
They're like, for God's sake, can we get somebody in here who just doesn't apologize and grovel and back down?
I mean, a lot of good it did Hulk Hogan, right?
Yeah, he's still exiled.
Then there's the other comment.
She referenced also something said during The Apprentice.
The person that he made the comment to was on media today talking about it.
Didn't remember the comment.
Had to look it up to see what was what.
In the context of the situation, it was after someone had referenced her begging for her job on her knees, and he said it in a clearly joking way, and people at the table laughed, and she kind of smirked.
Oh yeah, so he was going to fire her from The Apprentice, right?
And she was like, I'm begging you, I'm on my knees.
And he's like, well, that's a pretty picture, you on your knees, right?
And now suddenly this is like Fifty Shades of Grey, all kinds of sinister music, Death Star Destroyer music, he's in a Darth Vader costume, she's Princess Leia with her, you know, he's Jabba the Hutt.
It's just become all, it's just, it was a joke, right?
That's what she said.
Her exact quote is, I think he's just on television.
He's trying to be funny.
He didn't mean anything horrible by it.
And then she said she's always had a positive experience around him.
He's been encouraging.
He's never been disrespectful to me.
So context is everything with this type of stuff.
Mike, the important thing isn't whether it bothers people.
The woman it was directed at.
The important thing is whether it bothers Megyn Kelly.
Political correspondence years later, yes.
And the other thing too, I guarantee he's actually said, I can't remember all these comments.
I can't remember everything you've said when he's 67 years old, for God's sakes.
I mean, what the hell is he going to remember from something years ago?
People pull it out of context.
You can startle people with finding things they said, taking them out of context, and jumping them on them later.
Right?
I mean, it's like, I don't know, what did I say?
But it wasn't, didn't bother her.
She said she's always had a supportive relationship with Donald, so that's just a non-issue.
I don't know, if you look at the origin story of this stuff, and it's...
I mean, you can say you don't like his quote-unquote tone on Twitter with the insults and stuff, and I can understand that.
Calling him an outright misogynist when there doesn't seem to be any evidence that that's the case, and the person that he supposedly offended with this comment on The Apprentice didn't hit her as anything other than a casual joke, and she's always had a positive experience of guy.
It's like, okay, can we stop just trying to throw crap at people?
Can we actually maybe talk about a subject or an issue that's important instead of just muckraking?
But such is the media.
Well, such is the media with Donald Trump.
Yeah, well, Jeb Bush isn't getting raked through the coals.
See, the GOP, the grand old party, the Republican Party machine, it stays in business if Hillary wins.
It doesn't stay in business if Trump wins.
So Trump is a bigger enemy than Hillary.
For the Republican Party establishment at the moment, I think that's fairly clear, and that's why they're going after him harder than they're going after Hillary, at least it seems that way at the moment.
And he's got the power, because he could run independent if he wanted to, and that could severely hurt the Republicans.
So he's got leverage on the Republicans on the grandest stage, and I can't imagine they're too comfortable with that, as evidenced by the first question he was asked on the debate last night.
He's popular enough that he could start a new party.
I mean, he's successful and popular and smart enough.
And please, for God's sakes, people, will you stop saying he's dumb?
Like, oh my God.
Oh, God.
I mean, hey, if it's that easy, if you don't have to be smart, just go and make yourself 10 billion bucks.
Mm-hmm.
And also, the guy got into the Wharton School of Business.
That's not an easy thing to do.
And he was a good student.
Anyway, it's just...
Come on.
Disagree with the guy, sure.
And I have to remind myself of this too.
I mean, hair jokes are boring and all that kind of stuff.
But just dig into his issues.
Dig into his positions.
And there's stuff to criticize, without a doubt.
But you have to up your game a little bit.
There are people who just fling idiotic ad hominems with no basis.
You guys are just destroying Western civilization.
So anyway, and I'd like to stick around.
Again, I mean, the reason we're talking about this is because this is the symptom.
This is something that is very different than elections and electoral politics in the past in the United States.
This is a symptom of something within the American culture that is happening.
That is incredibly important.
What is happening in the American culture, this uprising of support for someone who is bucking the establishment, that is what's interesting.
You know, does this mean vote for Donald Trump?
Are we endorsing Donald Trump?
No, I'm not voting for Donald Trump.
I'm not endorsing Donald Trump.
But what he represents and what's happening in the American culture is fascinating.
And as far as psychology of large groups and mass movements, you want to pay attention to this because this is going to have a serious impact on what the United States looks like in the year ahead.
And anything that we can, like, we're an alternative media source, an alternative news source, an alternative idea source.
And frankly, the mainstream media is standing between us and potentially intelligent people who could benefit from our information.
So the mainstream media is showing its true colors with Donald Trump, and that is a fascinating thing to watch.
And the more that we can rip people's eyeballs away from the mainstream media, as our good friend Paul Craig Roberts calls it, the prostitutes, you know, the better off we're all going to be.
So was there anything else that we needed to rebut from that?
No, that's all as far as those comments.
Oh, his bankruptcies.
The guy has 500 companies.
Because, you know, 499 would be stupid.
501?
That's crazy.
500.
That's the sweet spot.
So the guy has 500 companies and four of them over the course of his multi-decade business career.
He's put through bankruptcy.
You know, the debts just get too much and so on, right?
And...
So out of, you know, this is of course less than 1% of his businesses over the course of his business career, he's completely legally put through bankruptcy.
And people, I mean, it takes somebody who stares at a camera for a living to imagine that this is somehow indicative of a bad business person.
You know, when the airplane is getting low because it's too heavy, you throw the heavy stuff overboard.
I'm not going to insert a Rosie O'Donnell joke here, however tempting it might be.
I'm not going there.
But, I mean, the fact that he jettisoned money-losing businesses, worked them through the perfectly legal bankruptcy system in order to continue and maintain the health of his...
He's like, well, hundreds of people were thrown out of work when you bankrupted this business, so I should have let them just take the whole organization and then tens of thousands of people are out of business?
What kind of sense does that make?
And he's never declared bankruptcy, personally.
But that's how it's portrayed.
Yeah, you declared bankruptcy four times.
I mean, that's simply false.
When Donald Trump's business debt is forgived, bad.
When Bernie Sanders offers to scrub clear student loan debt, good.
Let's make sure we have that clear.
That's very important.
Yeah, I mean, a guy who...
Look, everybody look at the balance sheet of the goddamn United States of America.
You're all going to need someone who knows how to steer an organization through bankruptcy proceedings.
Because it's not going anywhere else.
Not going in any other fundamental direction.
You need this guy.
Yeah, I mean, if he'd done it 20 times, even better.
Anyway.
So yeah, I just wanted to continue to point out this...
Just tell the truth about the guy.
That's all.
Just tell the truth about the guy.
This is a big deal, folks, which is why we're talking about it.
Some people really don't understand why we're talking about politics.
Aren't you an anarchist?
Yes, anarchist.
This debate was watched by 24 million people.
24 million people.
To put that in context, Jon Stewart's final Daily Show yesterday did 3.5 million people.
This is a big deal.
And what's happening with Donald Trump and what it represents in the culture and in society is a big deal.
Those 24 million people in there weren't tuning in to see Scott Walker.
And so the world is interested.
Americans are fascinated.
And we're interested.
And we're not going to hide it.
We're not going to have this affair with Donald Trump and his effect on the media and his effect on the culture and his effect on the political landscape and then pretend, you know, oh man, that band sold out.
I hate them now.
I was only into them when they played small clubs.
Now they're playing stadiums.
They suck.
No, we're not going to be a do-for-a-hipster, cool person.
He's fascinating.
Sorry.
He just is.
And we're not alone in that.
And we may wake up tomorrow with Donald Trump tattoos on our foreheads wondering what the hell happened.
But he's interesting.
We're interested.
It's the newest thing that I've seen come along in the American political landscape in forever.
Maybe Ross Perot?
What was that in the 90s?
Yeah, he was running against George Bush Sr., I think.
And so, yeah, you know, give us a...
As I say in my novel, The God of Atheists, give us a small honky dick break.
Because...
He's really interesting.
Every 20 years, something really interesting comes along in the American political landscape, and we're interested like everyone else, and we're talking about it, so we're not going to hide that.
All right.
Let's move on.
Well, up first is Pedro.
And Pedro wrote in about the Donald.
He said, you recently talked about the role of Donald Trump in the presidential campaign and I thought some comments were inconsistent with what I understood you stand for on political action as a method for achieving a free society.
Don't you think we should pursue any type of activity that could get people closer to rational and philosophical thinking and that political action is one of those activities?
Nice to meet you.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Nice to meet you, Steph.
Okay, so I talked...
People can watch The Truth About Voting, which I recorded, I think, in 2008.
So, well, let's just say that's kind of a while ago now, seven or eight years or so.
Now, I was talking about mainstream politicians, and the whole point of it is that the mainstream politicians are going to promise you something that is stolen from others.
That's sort of the one argument.
It's not begging for scraps.
So that's more aimed at people on the left who want something for nothing.
The second, again, it's been a long time, but the second major argument is that the politicians are already bought and paid for.
I just saw this study that the heads of the major financial organizations are donating equally to Republicans and to Democrats.
I mean, they don't care who's in power.
So it's not a two-party system.
It's a one-party system run by bankers, right?
Basically.
And so that was all with the current landscape of the political people.
And I'm saying, forget about what they say.
Just focus on what they do.
Now, the reality is that no one like Donald Trump had come along Who had any chance of making an impact?
Again, this doesn't reverse my fundamental feeling.
But Mike, what was Donald Trump's tax plan?
Oh, put me on the spot.
Let me grab it.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying that you vote for Donald Trump and this is going to happen.
I'm not saying that at all.
But my belief is that, and I've said this since the very beginning, if you believe in political action...
If you believe that whoever, Kusich or Walker or Bush or Donald Trump or Clinton or Sanders or any of the...
If you believe that any of those people is going to make you freer, then you should...
You know, I've got my arguments.
If you don't believe them, totally valid, totally fine.
then you should put yourself 150% into doing that, into pursuing political action.
Don't just pound some lawn signs and cross your fingers.
Like, donate and get involved and try to make it happen and talk to people and try and drop up the vote.
Really, really throw yourself 150% into this kind of situation.
And so, yeah, to people who think that Donald Trump is going to buy some time or get them some freedom or turn things around and so on.
Now, Donald Trump of course, is not...
He says, I'm going to make America great again.
What he means is that I'm going to get the government out of the way between America and greatness.
He's got a very simple tax plan.
I think it's pretty much abolishing the IRS. It's one of these back of a postcard.
And I know other people do.
I think Rand Paul has one as well.
But the odds of Rand Paul winning are very low.
I wasn't paying much attention to Donald Trump until he became the frontrunner.
I mean, the guy's doing over 30% in a field of 17 contenders.
Has there ever been someone that high in the polls with a tax plan, even in the vicinity of this?
Okay.
Trump's tax plan.
If you make 30 grand a year, you pay 1% in federal income taxes.
If you make 30 to 100, you pay 5%.
If you make 100 to a million, you pay 10%.
If you make a million dollars or above, you pay 15%.
It pretty much bankrupts accountants and the IRS, and you can do your taxes on the back of a postage stamp, if need be.
It removes a lot of red tape and nonsense from the procedure, which seems to be in line with what he's talking about with essentially running America like a business.
Yeah, and so he's not like...
Bernie Sanders and Obama and like, I don't know, to some degree Clinton, Hillary Clinton, they're all talking about We're going to rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure, right?
We're going to spend trillions of dollars with shovel-ready jobs to get people back to work.
So that is not what Donald Trump is proposing.
He's saying I'm going to simplify the American business environment.
I'm going to let Americans create jobs rather than going around creating jobs myself with borrowed money and so on.
And Of course, lots of politicians will say that, but the reality is that he's not been bought out by any special interests.
This is kind of an unprecedented thing in American politics.
So Steve Forbes is another very wealthy guy who's had a flat tax idea for a long time and has funded a whole bunch of his...
A political work.
And spending money on a political campaign does not guarantee you an election.
There is an X factor.
There is a wow factor.
There is a charisma factor.
There is a great communicator factor.
There expresses the unconscious zeitgeist of a straining and strained population factor.
And Trump has that.
So lots of people have really tried to spend massive amounts of money to try and get elected.
And then some doofus with...
You know, the sophist skills of your average carnival barker end up coming along and sweeping into power.
So this idea that there's somebody who is not only wealthy, but has incredible name recognition, has such deep pockets that he is not beholden special interest groups, who shares a lot of libertarian views in the world, And he can't be ignored, which is the biggest thing.
You know, Ron Paul, because a lot of people bring up Ron Paul, Ron Paul is never polling at 30%.
Ron Paul was never a frontrunner.
And Ron Paul wasn't a big enough name on a national standpoint to the average person to where if he talked, people listened.
Ron Paul was able to be ignored by the media.
And they could laugh at him, and there was polls that he would actually do well in that was just – they wouldn't report him, they'd leave him out.
There was all types of stuff like that.
And they could get away with that because not enough people knew who Ron Paul was.
He didn't have a following.
He didn't call – he's not the type that could call a press conference and have all the New York City press show up and be excited to see him.
But Donald Trump has that because he's been in the national landscape for multiple decades doing all types of stuff.
So it's such a unique situation that it's just fascinating to observe because we called him the Frankenstein, the Frankentrump candidate.
But someone with these qualities, I mean, this type of tax plan, yeah, good luck making it onto the national stage with this type of tax plan and getting any attention and not being called a crazy kook.
Try getting some funding from corporate donors with this tax plan.
You're not going to get it.
He's only able to talk about immigration because he doesn't take money from donors.
This is the only reason that illegal immigration is even a topic in this debate.
And so, it's a remarkable and sort of unprecedented thing.
And of course, the other thing too is that Ron Paul, for all of his rhetoric, and I know he's got reasons as to why he did this, which I'll just touch on briefly, but Ron Paul was a massive conduit of federal money back to his home Writing.
I mean, he got $10,000 for this and $50,000 for this and half a million dollars for that, and he just showered his home writing, his district, with federal money.
Now, Rumpel's argument is that, well, this money was already spent.
It either goes to me or it goes to some other place and so on, which really isn't the point.
The point is that if you believe, like you cannot achieve good in politics if you're beholden to special interests.
You simply can't.
Because you're lying.
Fundamentally.
Because to be honest, you'd have to say, well, the people who give me money are going to get way more attention from me than some anonymous voter, right?
It's just the way it works.
I mean, I'll talk to you, but I'm really listening to them.
I guess my issue here is more probably sentimental than logic and it has to do with the fact that I myself am invested in political action in my country and for a long time I've been hearing speeches from you or calls from you guys Talking about how you know change will not come from political action and how
you know this very good argument about you don't change the mob by infiltrating and going up and you know and I'm guessing since I was already working on that I kind of didn't want to accept the logic behind that Although I don't have really great arguments against it.
And then...
Sorry, against what?
Against my arguments about you can't change the mafia from within and so on?
Yeah.
And then you come and start talking about Trump and how if he is able to delay the inevitable collapse, you'll take it.
So, you know...
No, no, hang on, hang on.
Did we ever say that?
It's an interesting possibility.
Yeah.
I think, you know, in this conversation you three guys had, I really think I heard from Steph if he, you know, maybe delay was not there, but I'll take it.
I think that's a phrase there.
I'll say this.
If someone can bump my taxes down to 1%, 5%, 10%, 15%, I mean, I would take that.
I would be very happy paying less taxes.
I'd be happy paying for less in insurance if you were to remove the restrictions that are currently in place that don't allow you to bid outside your state for insurance coverage.
Which increases competition.
That would make me happy as a consumer to have those increased options and have more of my money in my pocket.
I'd be happy with that.
And this is the difference between Donald Trump and Ron Paul and what we were talking about before and what we're talking about now is that Donald Trump in political action, this is not going to lead to a free society.
We are not going to get a free society, i.e.
a stateless society, a volunteerist society, through political action or through Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is not running to create a free society.
He's running to cut taxes, cut regulations in some case.
Is that a freer society?
Well, maybe it will be.
He's also pro-military, very strong military action.
Could that be really negative?
Yes, that could be really negative.
He's not running to create a free society.
He's running as a businessman trying to make the economy run like a business.
And there are some potential economic benefits to that.
There are some potential economic drawbacks to that.
But it remains interesting.
It remains interesting.
But as long as children are conditioned to submit to authoritative structures in parenting, As long as authoritative parenting like that continues, people are going to yearn as adults to submit themselves to authoritarian structures.
Changing that pattern with adults is incredibly, incredibly difficult.
We have a presentation which will be coming out in the near future called The Death of Reason, which pretty much explains how trying to convince somebody that something that they believe is wrong with reason and evidence just emboldens that belief more often than not, and there's a scientific basis as to why.
So even this rational debate with most people just emboldens irrational viewpoints that they hold.
Achieving a free society when we've had entire generations of children raise in authoritarian structures, I don't think that's going to happen in my lifetime.
I want to plant the seeds for that to happen in the future, but that's the difference there, whereas with Ron Paul and stuff, Ron Paul was promising liberty in your lifetime.
And we're not going to achieve a free society through political action.
That's the whole, you can't go into the mafia and turn it into a charity.
You can't join the KKK and turn it into a black rights group.
Sorry, let me just add one thing there because I've always made the argument, this is going back to my speech in New Hampshire in early 2009, I've always made the case that it's very hard for people to see the immorality of the state.
Very hard for them to see the evil of the state.
Even when Obama basically seems to have stolen an election by having the IRS target Tea Party groups.
Here's the thing.
Donald Trump versus the IRS. Donald Trump versus the grand old party.
Donald Trump versus the mainstream media.
You see, everyone who goes along, it's like if you're looking at perfectly still water, there's a tiny little current, and there's just a bunch of dandelion fluff, and everything's going with the current.
If your viewpoint follows the dandelion fluff, it just doesn't look like anything's moving.
You have to change your viewpoint.
Donald Trump gets into the political process.
Let's just say he tries to put in this tax plan.
Can you imagine the unbelievably staggering shitstorm that he is going to be subjected to if he even remotely tries to implement this tax plan?
He will be audited.
Everyone he knows will be audited.
Everyone who supported him will be audited.
I mean, I don't know what sinister stuff can go on.
I don't imagine that there's any limit to the amount of falsehoods that will be, you know...
Who knows?
It could be any number of things.
Drugs could be planted on his kids.
It could be any number of things, right?
And what will happen is people who are emotionally invested in a candidate who's trying to do something that they want will realize all of the unbelievable spears that will get raised against anyone who tries to break from the herd and fight back against the powers that be, even if he's president, even if he's worth $10 billion.
What will happen is as he walks into that lion's den, everybody will start to see the lions.
I think that's interesting.
Does he mean he's going to win against the IRS? I'd really doubt it.
The IRS is a lot better at taxing than he is at not taxing, right?
I mean, a lot more experience.
But what will happen is, let's say that he wins the presidency, and people are emotionally invested, they like the guy, he's popular, and he's doing a whole bunch of stuff that they want him to do.
And let's say he fails, which is the most likely outcome.
Well, what is that going to tell people?
Oh, do we just wait for another...
This guy's never shown up before in American history.
Ever.
So, are you going to wait another 200 years for someone like this coming along, or are you going to start to look for non-political solutions?
Again, I'm not like, oh, I hope the guy fails so that we get...
It's nothing to do with that.
If he gets power...
Look, I mean, if Jeb Bush gets power, the same rhino, Republican in name-only bullshit's going to happen where they sell the interests of the American voters to big business groups and to the race baiters and all this kind of crap, right?
I mean, all of the games in female employment since 2007 have gone to foreigners in America.
All of them.
Every single goddamn one.
Now, foreigners work for less than Local people.
In a free society, having more people come in is fine, but not in a free society.
So, the domestic population in the U.S. is dying on the vine.
They are desperate, and Donald Trump represents that desperation.
The Republic is dying.
You know, when he says, this country is in real trouble, he's not kidding, and the American population is Significant portions of it know that he's not kidding.
The Republic is on its last legs.
This is like end of the empire, fall of Rome, territory.
So if he goes in, well, if he gets voted in and he gets a bunch of stuff done, it will be the happiest meal of crow I will ever taste.
You know, I will eat my own hat and say, this tastes better than haggis.
Please don't look up haggarts.
There may be pictures.
Right?
So, the other thing, too, is, you know, do we want someone who's libertarian-minded in power when the shit hits the fan?
I mean, I've always argued probably not.
But my prediction was that the Ron Paul campaign was going to be a massive waste of time, energy, and resources.
I believe that was a fairly good call.
Now, the Donald Trump campaign, if Donald Trump gets into power...
Either he's going to get stuff done that is of benefit to the majority of the population.
Great.
Buys us some more time to continue spreading the message of peaceful parenting.
I'm not saying I think that's likely, but I can't say that it's praxeologically impossible.
It's not outside the fabric of the time-space continuum.
On the other hand, if he gets in, this like once-in-a-half-millennia political candidate, if he gets in and can't do anything...
These people that are already frustrated.
Can you imagine?
Oh, they'll give up on politics and then what?
At some point, libertarians are going to either achieve what they want through politics, which I don't think is going to happen, or they're going to give up on politics and get that it's about peaceful parenting.
But why can't we do all?
I mean, you can try to convince people about peaceful parenting and also try to get some other people which is not going to be interested in that message through politics.
And I don't know, I mean...
Well, you can, Pedro, if you want.
You can try and do both of those things.
We have some pretty good arguments and have made cases as to why political action will not be effective to bring about a free society to the point where neither one of us are interested in spending time and energy towards the political process.
But you're more than welcome to do it.
I mean, Steph has said many times, if you really believe that political action is going to bring about significant change towards a free society, go in with 100%.
Go for it.
I mean, there are opportunity costs, right?
You can't do two things equally well, right?
If you say, well, Steph, why can't I learn Mandarin and French at the same time?
Well, you can.
You can.
But you won't do as well at either.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
I mean, the thing is, I'm not completely convinced.
And maybe I was before, but then after listening to you a lot, I've been struggling to decide whether it's worth it or not.
And I'm involved in the Libertarian Party in Spain.
And we do some things.
I see some people getting closer to a free society mindset.
Sometimes it seems like we're making progress there.
I also, you know, many of that or, you know, most of those people don't have children.
But then I had other friends who are never going to be on one of those meetings, but they do have kids.
And then I can talk to them about this other thing.
So, I don't know.
I have no problem leaving out breadcrumbs, Pedro, for God's sakes.
We've done videos on Justin Bieber, for God's sakes.
Like, seriously.
I mean, we've done videos on Paul Walker banging everything over nine days old, right?
I mean, we talk about mainstream cultural topics because that's how you get people into your conversation.
It's called outreach, right?
So, yeah, we talk a lot about politics.
And I think it's valuable, right?
I can't say to people, you can't talk about...
First of all, I can't say to anything about what they should or shouldn't do.
I can make my case.
But, you know, so when you say, well, I can use politics to get people into a more intimate and actionable conversation about how they can be better parents or better people, I'm like, well, yeah.
I mean, that's pretty...
The show really began to grow when I began to do the True News segments.
I think we're brushing up against 2 million video views a month just on YouTube, not even counting the other channels, not even counting even more podcast downloads than 2 million.
And that's not because I'm going through the praxeology of UPB over and over again.
It's because we are laying out the breadcrumbs that lead people to an even deeper conversation.
UPV is like the Bible.
I mean, it should be mandatory.
Oh my God, I can't even imagine.
I can't even tell you how wrong at every conceivable level that is.
Except for the penis size of the author, which is infinite and frankly Old Testament-based.
I thought it would be unknowable.
Unknowable, that's right.
Wait, that means really tiny.
Unknowable.
It's quantum.
Wait, hang on.
That's not right.
It's cold.
That's more accurate.
No, you mean it's sort of an ethical argument or guide, whatever, but I mean it's not really very appropriate.
Your philosophy is like the apotheosis of superstition.
What I mean is it holds the highest standards I've seen on consistency and logic and And then it doesn't make concessions.
And I think that's great because that's really the message we want.
But then we talk about strategy and what you call breadcrumbs.
And I'm always debating myself on...
Should I just talk to people about anarchy and so on, or should I start talking about just lowering taxes?
You know, that's the internal debate I have.
I've always thought you were the hardcore anarchist, and, you know, this strategy was not important.
Just tell the truth.
Why would you think that?
I don't know.
Why would you think that?
You've seen me.
You've seen me.
I'm all over the...
The major news of the day, right?
Maybe you do it so well that I don't notice that's the strategy.
I don't know.
Now I see it.
You're talking about it.
Look, in terms of how to change the world, there's no such thing as an objective strategy.
Because changing the world is a conversation with two people in it.
At least two people, hopefully more, right?
And so when you say, well, should I do it this way?
Should I do it that way?
You have to listen to your audience.
You have to listen to who you're talking with.
Right?
So I was in a conversation a while back, doesn't really matter with who, but about Donald Trump.
And this person was taking the usual sneering, oh, Donald Trump, can you believe it, right?
I mean, oh, America, America!
You know, just this usual...
Just eye-rolling.
And, you know, I can guarantee you he watched a huge amount of snot me some Jon Stewart and makes my eyeballs roll and my brain shut down.
And he was like, he's just got this big New York personality.
If I chose to adopt that, I could make $10 billion too.
Now, this is somebody who's not far along the road.
Of critical thinking, at least in this particular area.
Or, you know, in the realm of self-knowledge or anything like that.
Nice enough person, you know, but do I sit there and start to talk about taxation as theft or the hideousness of the political process or the evil and immorality of the state and so on?
No.
He's like, I can't believe he said this stuff about illegal immigration, right?
It's like, well, you know, the illegal immigrants are consuming much higher I'm not saying I agree with everything the guy says, but this is the perspective that he's coming from, and it's quite a powerful perspective in the US. Disagree with it all you want, but you can't really sort of say, I don't understand why anyone...
We'd be talking about this, right?
It's like Pauline Kyle at the New York Times said years ago, I can't imagine how Richard Nixon got elected.
I mean, nobody I knew voted for him.
There's a world outside of your darkened door where blues won't haunt you anymore, right?
I mean, there's a whole world out there.
And so that's just like a couple of little nudges.
That's all.
Not confrontational, not you're a jerk, or you're just imbibing the mainstream media goop or anything like that.
It's just like, well, you know, here's where the guy's coming from.
Here's what resonates with Americans.
And I said, you know, I don't know that it's just that easy.
Lots of big, loud people in New York.
They're not all worth $10 billion.
I see what you mean.
Actually, you destroyed my main argument before we started because it was Trump dump and that was it.
And then I was going to follow and back that up with his hair looks like a raccoon and that was the main idea.
I am not going to make fun of anybody's hair.
It's all envy for me.
I mean, okay, raccoon's still better than the moon.
But no, I cannot for the life of me, and I'm really open to this, you know, we've talked about this a lot internally, and I welcome, of course, everybody's comments and feedback on this.
But Pedro, I cannot for the life of me figure out how having Donald Trump in the race is bad for long-term prospects of liberty.
I can't figure out how that's bad.
Does that mean go vote for him?
He's going to make you free?
No, I don't understand any of that.
Nobody has been able to grab the hearts and minds and balls of America like Donald Trump has.
And what's interesting to me is that it begins to shake the matrix for people.
So, you know, Ron Paul was not able, as far as I know, was not able to echo the sentiments of...
The American population in something as visceral as, say, illegal immigration, which is what first vaulted Trump to the forefront of the American media storm at the moment.
Ron Paul was not able to.
There is something in libertarianism at the moment that is very pro-multiculturalism.
And, you know, please don't get me wrong.
Everybody should be able to move in a free society wherever they want.
Who cares?
I'm not a busybody that way.
But we don't live in a free society and...
If you take the entire population of Japan and replace it with the entire population of Mexico, the Shinto religion is going to take a little bit of a blow.
And it's going to basically be Mexico surrounded by water with a nice mountain in the middle.
And so, hang on, let me just finish my point, and then I'll let you speak to your house content.
But what's happened is that Shaking people out of the matrix, out of this...
The mainstream media is hypnotic.
It's fast moving.
You ever look at those screens?
But there's a reason why I have a blank background and no ticker tape of upcoming news items and no scrolly shit and no, look, we're changing the picture quickly, right?
Like I saw an interview with, I think his name is Joe Scarborough, you know, the hunky college professor with the nerdy glasses.
They're having a phone call with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is not the most dull guy in the known universe, which is why 24 million people tune in to watch him debate.
They have the camera on the people.
Can they actually keep the camera on the people who are calling Donald Trump?
They cannot.
They have to have sliding pictures of Donald Trump.
And then they have to have pictures of Donald Trump at an airport.
And then they have to have video of Donald Trump getting into a cab.
And then they have to have a...
And there's this hypnotic thing in that there always has to be something distracting so that the words don't actually sink into you.
Look at TV. It's always moving.
It's like a kaleidoscope.
And it's trying to put your brain into this dissociative beta blocker mode Where things just absorb into you.
Well, look at the debate last night for a perfect example of that.
Every 60 seconds, next, next, next, next.
Don't get too attached to what this person's saying next.
We're moving on to the next thing next.
The debate moderators had 31% of the hour and a half.
The questions took almost a third of the entire time.
There were three questioners, ten guys on the stage...
And the question is, the narcissistic ass clowns took almost a third of the entire time and started debating and arguing with Donald Trump.
So, and I'm sorry about this, but I'll stop in a sec.
But it's fascinating.
I'm honest with you.
I'm completely fascinated by it.
But Donald Trump has been able to connect into something, and what that does is suddenly what people are saying is, wait a minute.
Is something being kept from me?
Wait a minute.
Why haven't I heard about immigrant crime waves, illegal immigrant crime waves in the South?
Did anyone know about Sanctuary Cities before a couple of weeks ago?
I didn't.
I didn't.
And I find myself to be pretty well connected to this kind of thing.
I had no idea.
I thought it was like the worst named punk band in history.
Or an old David Bowie song.
Here in Sanctuary City.
So what happens is when Donald Trump comes barging in and starts talking about illegal immigration, then suddenly, immediately, some of the media is full of these...
It's like when you talk about black and white crime.
Has anyone had this experience where you read in the newspaper, some cop got shot or someone got shot.
The suspect is at large.
Okay, so they're really looking for someone.
How about telling us which race that person is?
But you can't find it out.
I literally, like I read these things now, just like I know what's going to come.
They might tell you he's in a windbreaker, right?
They won't tell you he's in a hoodie, right?
But you can't, and so what you have to do is you have to take the suspect's name, and you have to copy the name, and you have to paste it into Google, and you have to click on images, right?
And then you will find out the race of the perpetrator.
And when people really begin to suspect that they don't get news, they get hidden.
It's not what they're talking about.
It's everything they're not talking about that matters, that counts.
Then what happens is they wake up and they realize that they're in a stealthily manufactured pseudo-reality Where everything that is kept hidden from them is essential to their long-term self-interest.
And so what happens with Donald Trump, why I'm so glad that he's doing what he's doing, is suddenly people are talking about illegal immigration, and they're talking about crime stats, and they're talking about welfare dependency, and they're talking about the...
Now, we've been talking about this stuff for years.
This is not a new topic for us.
We did the truth of immigration over a year ago, if I remember rightly.
Truth about the race war.
Now, this is not new stuff for us, but what's happening is that people, like a large sections of people, are going, well, wait a minute, why the fuck haven't I been told about any of this stuff?
Why do I know every single stupid thing that Justin Bieber has ever done, but I never heard that 3,000 people were murdered by illegal immigrants in Texas?
Why don't I know any of this shit, right?
Why do I know that Julia Roberts may be embroiled in a $225 million divorce, but I don't know about the prevalence of black-on-white crime?
Yeah.
And why do I only find out that there's even a vague interest in the prevalence of black-on-white crime when some crazy, evil son of a bitch goes and shoots up a church?
So what happens is Jonathan comes barging in, And as he said in the debate, the most important thing Donald Trump said in that whole debate, in my humble opinion, is this.
You wouldn't even be talking about illegal immigration if I hadn't brought it up.
So now people are like, well, why the hell haven't I been told about this?
And that wakes them up to the degree to which they're being programmed.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'll shut up now.
It's all yours.
I don't doubt about the importance or freshness of this Donald Trump character bringing to the focus some important issues.
And I agree it's interesting and he's got something different to say.
You know, I'd like to comment on a couple of things I really don't like about his arguments, and also disagree with you on one other thing, which is not that usual, and that makes it difficult to argue with you, but okay.
Well, the real praise is to disagree, so go ahead.
Okay, you just mentioned how amongst libertarians you see some kind of leaning towards multiculturalism.
And I've heard your arguments about how tribalism and, you know, what a great tool ostracism is to enforce social rules and so on.
But let's say immigration and in a country like the U.S., I don't think it's really the same.
Meaning, even if you take the U.S. citizens right now, I don't think that's a, what's the word, homogeneous group of people?
You have like, I don't know, different Cultural backgrounds, Republicans, liberals, you have high-income, low-income.
So, let's say, even if you keep criminals from other countries out, you still have your own.
And even if you keep people who are not willing to reason and use...
Intellect instead of force to resolve conflict and people who are willing to treat their kids as persons and not as animals and so on.
You still have lots of those people inside who are citizens.
So I'm not sure building a fence is going to really fix that.
I don't know what you think about that one.
Hang on, fix what?
Fix, let's say, they're talking about start limiting the amount of people who comes in, start paying attention on if they're criminals or not, maybe building a fence, maybe...
I heard something which I don't know what it is.
Yeah, no amnesty.
No, but it's...
You understand, sorry, sorry, but...
Until 1965, America was like 95 to 97% European.
Okay.
And like Western European for the most part, right?
Now, in 1965, Edward Kennedy sponsored an immigration bill that shifted where the immigrants were going to come from.
They weren't anymore going to come from Europe.
They were going to come from the Third World.
Now, of course, the promise was that this wasn't going to change American demographics at all, but it has.
And I am evolving in this area, and I am not on certain ground because it's a very...
I don't care about the political correctness stuff and all that.
I just want to be accurate.
But, you know, I've had some significant criticisms of culture, right?
Culture is everything that's false and so on.
And I stand by that.
Philosophically, you can't argue with that.
If it's not culture, it's science or math or facts or logic or truth or reason or evidence or whatever, right?
But the reality is, European culture, particularly Western European culture, has for thousands of years been waging a battle against irrationality and has had some success, some significant success.
I mean, to take extreme examples, if you ask the average white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Frenchman how you determine the truth about the universe, he's probably going to have something to do with science, right?
Scientific method, empiricism, whatever, right?
If you go to a pygmy in the Amazon, assuming he doesn't try to eat you, he's not going to talk about the scientific method.
So for over 2,500 years in the West, in Western Europe in particular, there has been this battle against irrationality.
And that battle was fought at the cost of literally tens of millions of lives.
And the product has been a grudging respect for reason, to some degree the separation of church and state, and to some degree a still fading but still existing commitment to free trade.
And America was able to sustain those values when it had people coming in who were raised with those values.
However, it's funny to me that libertarians, for instance, are like, you know, let's let as many people from Mexico in as humanly possible, because I've been to a lot of libertarian meetings.
Not a lot of Mexicans.
And there are, you know, I went down, I think I gave a great series of speeches in Sao Paulo in Brazil, met some wonderful libertarians down there.
But they were complaining that they are in the kind of minority that the only Jew in Nunavut is experiencing.
Nunavut, look it up!
To be fair, libertarianism is also a minority in North America, isn't it?
Of course it is!
Of course it is, but it's less of a minority.
Okay.
In the United States, you say libertarian.
I think at least people understand vaguely what you're talking about, like the average person.
No, just go to libertarian meetups.
And count the gene pools.
I'm sorry.
I'm an empiricist.
No, no, I know.
I mean, maybe it's because I'm involved in the movement and I know many authors from South America.
In Spain, it seems to be growing.
Absolutely.
Look, please understand, I'm not...
But Spain is in Western Europe.
You're not arguing against my position here.
Okay, but let's say...
Y'all had the Spanish Inquisition, so there's some skepticism about the irrational power of authority over people.
We also have the Salamanca scholars, and some claim they are the root of libertarianism, even before Adam Smith and so on.
But see how crazy this conversation is, Pedro, because I'm saying that sort of Western Europeans have a history of tradition, and you're saying, well, I'm in Spain, Yes!
This is my point!
Come on over!
I'm letting myself be influenced by these Latin American people who say Spain is responsible for raping and this and that and we conquered there and then You know, in some sense, the cultural root, you know, we were...
The Inquisition, for example.
Fuck me.
I'm sorry.
I can't bottle this up anymore.
I can't.
I can't.
I just can't.
I'm going to regret this when I sober up.
I am.
But I'm going to say this shit anyway.
Can I? Yeah.
All right.
To all of the people out there across the world who complain that Western Europeans colonized you, let me get you in on a secret.
Western Europeans colonized you because you sucked.
You sucked!
Because if you didn't suck, you would have colonized Western Europeans.
And you know that's true.
Because every single culture throughout almost all of human history that had the power to dominate another culture went in and dominated that other culture.
Western Europeans, through a weird, wild variety of choice and circumstance and genetics and environment and who knows what crazy primordial soup went into making this rather aggressive and highly creative race, Western Europeans for a long time ended up at the top of the food chain.
And of course...
Yeah, they went over and they conquered the Incans.
Of course they did, because the Incans sucked!
Sucked!
They were sacrificing children!
They had games which involved kicking a human head around a pitch which hasn't happened in British soccer.
Actually, no, it happens a lot in British soccer.
That's a bad example.
We'll go with something else, right?
But the culture sucked.
You're like, oh, the Native American culture here.
It sucked!
It sucked!
Y'all traded Manhattan for a handful of beads.
You sucked!
And so you lost.
You lost.
Because the Western Europeans had gunpowder.
Which I'm sure they stole from the Chinese.
But guess what, China?
You also sucked.
Because you spent about 3,000 years photocopying every previous day and not getting bored of it.
Western Europeans are stimulus monkeys.
We get bored very easily.
We like new climates.
We like new species.
Which is the reason we go around cataloging everything.
Because it's boring at home.
And then when we get to some new place, we go about eight minutes.
This is the most glorious place I think I've ever...
I'm bored.
So yeah, the Spanish people went and kicked ass over in the New World.
Because the New World sucked.
Who stole the land?
Yeah, guess what?
Every single piece of land has been stolen.
I know white people have this giant guilt button and I know that everyone who lost likes hammering this white guilt button because we spit up resources so that you'll stop feeling guilty.
Every fucking person who lost to Western Europeans is like some new pope who says, give me shit and I'll try to stop making you feel guilty for about 15 seconds until I need more shit.
The countries that were colonized are doing far better than the countries that were never colonized.
You're welcome.
Not you're welcome from me, you're welcome from history.
Look, just in case anyone thinks that I'm not being objective, can I tell you a secret?
See, a long time ago, there was a Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire went north.
Beyond all sense and reason, they continued to go north.
Ooh, it's getting really cold and clammy, and keep going!
Why?
I'm cold.
My armor is...
Go!
Keep going.
I don't care.
Somewhere up there, there's a place called Scotland, otherwise known as the ass end of the planet.
And we've got to get there.
Why?
I don't know.
We just...
We're bored.
It's too sunny.
I don't like it.
Winter sports.
Yeah.
And so, they kept going north.
And let me tell you something.
My ancestors...
My ancestors were conquered by the Romans.
And, like, we had our shit down, man, and we were painted blue.
And, you know, like, when they go into Iraq, what do they have?
Do they have armies and shit?
No.
What they have is the fucking blue man group at the front because then you're impervious to everything because we painted ourselves blue.
You know, like, the only thing left living after a nuclear war are cockroaches and the fucking blue man group.
So they went north and they found these blue people, right?
The Picts or whatever they're called.
And we had a queen bow to cheer and she had a chariot and all this sort of shit and she had like swords going off her chariot.
Like she pimped out her mobile, that's what I'm saying.
Low rider with a lot of blood.
And the Romans came up and they came to the Bretons.
And we sucked!
We sucked and we were colonized by the Italians.
And that was so much better for my ancestors that we got our asses kicked by the Italians.
Because you see, the Romans were doing cool shit like reading and writing.
Whereas we were just looking for more stuff that we could roll in to make ourselves bluer and therefore more invulnerable.
We sucked way back in the day.
We were conquered by people who sucked less.
And I'm so happy that we were conquered by the Romans because the Romans left behind bridges and sewers and the aqueduct.
There's this great scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.
You can look it up, right?
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Brought peace, the wine, the aqueduct, medicine, science, writing, law, right?
Yes, all of these things.
And so...
You know, the fact that we were chasing the ass end of a wild boar every time we got hungry and then finding something inside of which we could use ourselves to look even more blue because apparently if our skin matches our eyeballs, we're invulnerable even more.
We sucked!
We had nothing to contribute, nothing to offer to the world stage.
We were stuck in the dull repetition of like halfway between caveman and whatever is one step beyond caveman.
I don't know, living in a mud hut.
We sucked!
So this isn't about the Incans, because my ancestors in England sucked!
And they got their asses kicked by people who sucked less.
And we hugely benefited from getting our asses kicked and having the great gift of civilization bestowed upon us, which we were unable to figure out for ourselves.
And that divine spark of civilization landed in ancient Greece, it landed in ancient Rome, and they spread it across the world, and the world has been immeasurably better because our asses were kicked by people in better fucking boots.
So all these people, all the Europeans that are colonized, yes, you're welcome.
Just as somebody calls out from Italy, And says, oh, the Roman Empire.
I'm like, oh, thank you, guys.
Holy shit.
We had no fucking clue what we were doing.
We didn't have a fucking clue.
We were like bonobos in the mist.
Because it's foggy in England.
So, like, thank you.
I mean, our ancestors, you know, I don't know, like, we were unable to invent the lever or the wheel because we were too busy having sex with knot holes in trees.
Hope there's no woodpecker!
Like we were doing nothing.
We were barely outside the realm of animals.
So this is not prejudicial towards any other culture.
I'm glad.
Can you imagine?
I don't look that great in blue now see and then they went into Scotland and they were like fuck that's enough Oh, shit.
These fucking people.
I don't care if they're going to invent golf in 1500 years.
They suck, but they're terrifying.
So they built Hadrian's Wall.
Hadrian's Wall was this huge structure designed to keep the Scots people from civilization.
As you can see from Trainspotting, it's done a very, very good job.
And then, everyone from Scotland and everyone from Wales...
Oh, fuck this shit!
And they went to America and they lived in the South where they transmitted their terrible values to the slave population, hence rap.
Even like the Ebonics, it's just Welsh and North England, Southern Scottish dialect.
You be, he that, you know, that's all.
They think that there's something to do with Africa.
Nope!
In fact, it's the complete opposite.
You ever seen a Scottish person dance?
Anyway, so, you know, just people who are like, oh, you Western Europeans, it's like, well, you know, if you hadn't sucked as much, you wouldn't have lost, as I say to my ancestors.
Thank God for the Romans.
Thank God for colonialism.
But do you feel like that also about the U.S.? It's been accused now because going to some other places using the military, even some people accused Coca-Cola to be an imperialist tool and stuff like that.
And I guess that goes with my other...
Oh my god, Coca-Cola.
Holy shit.
So hang on, hang on.
The British spread, quote, civilization with, like, cannons and gunpowder.
And people got blown apart.
And now, what's your big fucking colonialism?
I burped.
Are you kidding me?
This is their big problem.
Burp.
Oh no, I'm oppressed.
Shit.
You come up with your own brain-rotting goo to clean your own pennies and maybe we'll talk.
I don't know, that's just silly.
America sucks at being an imperialist power.
Because it doesn't have a civilizing mission.
And it also goes too far.
Democracy is bullshit.
Democracy is bullshit because it's just majority rule.
And America has this terrible habit of turning over the ruling of the countries it invades To the people who live there.
I mean, you didn't see Rome spend 10,000 soldiers taking England and let blue-painted assholes rule the place.
Because it takes a long time to civilize a culture.
Sometimes hundreds of years.
So America is too like, well, we're going to go in there and then we're going to turn the government back over to the traumatized people we just blew the shit out of, right?
It's not what the British did.
The British didn't go into India and then turn over the management of India to the Indians.
Again, I'm not talking right or wrong.
I'm just talking about, you know, tides and movements of history and so on.
If you remove a dictator, you know, it's like if a church falls down, it doesn't make the people that previously went to that church atheists.
It's what we were talking about, about authoritarian structures earlier regarding Donald Trump and achieving a free society.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think imperialism is a great idea.
The way that you spread virtues and values is through philosophy.
So don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying, like, imperialism is, oh, my God, let's go and invade lots of countries.
I think that's terrible.
I wouldn't volunteer for such a mission, and neither would I want my children going or my friends.
So don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying, yay, imperialism.
But, sorry, you know, European team won.
And they won because Europe is a really, really shitty environment to be stupid in.
Whereas lots of other countries are great environments to be stupid in.
Because in Europe, if you don't plan, and you don't defer your gratification, you starve.
Whereas lots of other countries, there's just not that same weeding out of the less intelligent.
So, if it's any consolation, you know, Western Europeans ended up kicking everyone's ass because nature had kicked their ass for about 50,000 years.
And also because we banged a bunch of Neanderthals.
But that's another story.
That's how we achieve freedom.
We need to find some Neanderthals and bang them.
I knew there was a reason that I was hoping the whole world was into banging people with giant foreheads.
I knew there was some reason for that.
But that's a whole other genetic story.
But anyway, massive suffering in Europe leads to a highly aggressive, highly cooperative, highly intelligent population.
And you can just look at the measurements of testosterone in various cultures around the world.
You can look all this stuff up if you want.
So there's the idea that I have something to do with any of this.
Ah, yes!
I cannot inherit my father's mere monetary debts, but, you know, 12 generations ago, somehow I inherit their moral debt.
And that's only vaguely believable to people who've been exposed to the toxicity and self-shaming called original sin.
Now the original sin is just being white.
Well, the only other thing I want to comment on Trump is he keeps on using the word we.
We this, we that, you know, and some others have commented on this a lot better than me, like Jeffrey Tucker, he's got an article, you know, comparing, like, Trump seems to want to rule the country as it is a company.
Wait, I haven't read this.
What does he compare Trump to?
He says he's got an article on this platform called LibertyMe, Liberty.me and he says Trumpism the ideology and you know he compares Trump's ideology to the fascists and you know nationalist guys and you
know Trump does say we a lot.
He's a collectivist.
He thinks The U.S., or at least that's the impression I get, is like a big group of people with the same goal, which is we have to do better than the Mexicans.
And we have to do...
China is winning us.
I'm not explaining it as well as he does.
Yeah, China is beating us.
No, I understand that.
I understand that because America is subjected to a common framework of laws.
And in that, he's entirely correct.
I mean, if the IRS raises tax rates 1%, the entire taxpaying population of America, which is down to like three guys now, is subjected to it.
So when he's talking about a we in a statist context, that's correct.
I mean, there's a we insofar as you can move to the 49th parallel, take one step beyond, and you're an illegal immigrant into Canada.
The first in known history outside of the French.
Ooh, I'm going to hear from you.
But...
But, I mean, there is a collectivism in America.
It's called the legal system.
It's called the voting system.
I mean, it's called the government schools.
It's called common core.
It's called everything that the government does that affects everyone.
So, I mean, identifying that there are things in common in a state of society is simply another way of saying it's a state of society and therefore the rules and the laws are common to a wide variety and a significant majority of people.
Again, I don't want to talk about Jeff's article because I haven't read it, but the idea that And, you know, from what I've heard about from Donald Trump, he wants to reduce the amount of power and interference that people have from the state to the citizen and all that.
So, yeah, okay, he's a collectivist.
Okay, he's a statist.
I get that.
He's running for president.
I don't think anyone that runs for president is not by sheer axiomatic definition a statist.
If you're running for chairman of the mafia, you are a mafia member.
This is part of it.
I'm willing to grant that.
I really can't see any way around that.
But anyway, let's not talk about Javka.
He's not here and I haven't read the article.
Alright, listen, am I going to move on?
Is there anything else that we wanted to...
Again, I know I haven't answered everything and I really can't because it's a big complex topic.
But I just wanted to share some thoughts.
It was great talking to you guys.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Up next is Jack.
And you folks may remember Jack from the Challenge of Incomprehensible Bravery show, where he read his letter that he wrote in...
You made me cry, right?
That's Jack.
You made me weep like an exploding fire hydrant in a girly convention.
Jack called in about his son leaving a military academy having to do with the show.
And a really powerful letter.
One of my favorite calls.
And Jack wants to talk about God.
Welcome back to the show, Jack.
Thank you.
What's going on, brother?
Well, I've been thinking about this call for quite a while.
I've got...
My last call was just...
Speaking from my heart and no real preparation needed.
But you just were ending that last call mentioning about the really unfortunate people that have been exposed to the idea of or believe in the idea of original sin and I'm one of those terrible people.
But I have a Kind of how I wanted to frame this discussion was in trying to present a belief in God that I feel is not irrational.
Alright, I'm all ears.
Because I very much believe that...
You know, I don't want to put a number on it, but a very large percentage of people's belief in God is...
Very, very irrational.
I believe that there's nothing more, no more powerful example of that which is not true than most of our churches, most of our religious teachings, certainly our schools.
And I don't think that a belief in God has to be those things.
So I'll give it a shot.
Make the case?
Yeah, give it a shot.
Now, sorry, hang on.
Do you want to make the whole case?
I'll take some notes, or do you want to stop as we go?
No, I'll stop as I go, for goodness sake.
I'm not very good at this.
I told Mike earlier that I was contacted by the Guinness Book of World Records after our last call for the number of times I set a record for the number of times I say no.
Tied to the family girls.
That's right.
And so I would very much appreciate you stopping me as often as you like.
Because your input and whatever direction you want to take this is...
I'm sure I'll get more comfortable as we go.
Yeah.
As a background, I was raised Catholic.
I went to 12 years of Catholic school, but I rejected that teaching in Catholicism when I was about 16 years old.
When I was about, I guess, 16, close to 17, I really started seriously searching for the truth, searching for the meaning of my life.
And that's a lot of years ago, so I'm not sure exactly the order that things happened.
But I remember being in a Catholic school, every year we had vocation week, where the Christian brothers would come and try to do a pitch to us to join the Christian brothers' order.
And as an aside, actually, that school has had something like 51 graduating classes And out of the 51 graduating classes, one person actually became and stayed as a Christian brother.
He was actually in my class.
So, vocation week didn't work very well, but...
Unless the vocation was atheist, or non-Christian brother, in which case.
Yay!
But it sent me to several long nights out at the park near my house, Just sitting underneath the stars and just trying to figure out if this was something I was supposed to do.
And it became pretty clear to me after thinking about this a lot that it was not.
But it it really I don't know if it was a you know again the order of events is a little sketchy but it it really got me thinking what was it that I was supposed to do really you know where was I going?
I also had a great admiration for...
Jack, I hate to interrupt you, but you did ask me to.
I think if we go backstory, we're really shaving time off from the actual argument.
Okay.
Is my concern.
Because you're telling me why it was in your journey towards the development of these ideas.
I'm going to continue for just a couple more minutes.
Tell me in a couple minutes if you think so.
Anyway, I had a great admiration for Jonathan Swift.
I thought he was really awesome, but then I looked at the world and said, what he did didn't change anything.
It didn't matter.
I came to the belief that for the world to change...
You know, this is like a 17-year-old thinking debt.
It really had to start with a person.
Somebody had to do it.
And then I thought, well, for that person to do this, they have to have really awesome parents.
So I wasn't sure which one came first, but I thought, you know, the parents or, you know, but somebody had to get this ball rolling and a person probably needed to be a good person and a good enough person to take on such a challenge.
They needed awesome parents.
So I had this idea that...
That it really came somehow from parents.
And this has really formed my, you know, later, my belief that, you know, when God created us in His likeness image, He created man and woman.
So, to be a reflection of God, you know, it has to be a man and a woman.
You know...
So...
I'm just looking here.
Sorry for a sec.
No problem.
So I set off after high school.
I had gotten accepted as a college, but I didn't go right away because I just felt like I needed to find more meaning to what I was doing before I jumped into college.
And I felt I found that.
And I studied and I came to believe a whole philosophy that most Christians would Would tell you, you know, when they heard the specifics that this person is not a Christian.
He's a whatever.
He's not good.
But I believe that God created the world with a purpose and that He wanted us to, you know, He created man in His image, as I said, man and woman, and that we were to grow and to mature and And to become a reflection of God,
and then maturity, when the time was right, to have children centered on God, and then to take dominion over the earth.
I mean, it's the three blessings, right?
Become fruitful, multiply, and take dominion.
But I do believe that there was a fall, and it was a, that, you know, before men and women were You know, man and woman were mature.
They had a relationship that wasn't centered on God.
They had children that weren't centered on God.
And then all of human history has been God's attempt to restore what was lost at that time.
So in doing that, you know, I don't believe...
You know, God...
In His creation, He wanted us to be in His image.
And to be in His image, we had to become creators.
And really, to be God-like, you have to be a creator.
And therefore, obviously, He had to give us free will.
Unlike the rest of creation, humans have free will.
And I believe that God is completely powerless.
To man's free will.
I believe that God is a...
If I have an image of God, it's a broken, miserable, sorrowful...
Being is kind of, I don't know the right word, but because human history has evolved so contrary to what his original purpose of creation was.
So he suffered as it would a parent whose children have completely evolved into this world that we have today.
The people that are killing each other and are Anyway, destroying each other in every way imaginable.
So it is...
But...
I believe that the restoration happens through, you know, we have a...
We say that, you know, rebuilding the kingdom of heaven through ideal families.
I mean, I believe that it is our job here on earth, not somewhere else, not, you know...
You know, something that we get later in life, but that we really have to build a, you know, that world that we're looking for here.
It's not, you know, do certain things and follow these rules and you'll get there later.
But really, what we create here is what we take with us.
Hello.
So, I'm just, anyway, I'm just going through.
I also, I've also, there's a, one of the things I sent to Mike, there's a book by someone I'm sure you know, Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich.
He also wrote a book called Outwitting the Devil.
He transcribed notes that turned into the book after he died called Outwitting the Devil.
It's a book that he says was inspired by an actual conversation he had with the devil.
It says in the beginning of the book, look at the principles of these books.
He didn't care whether or not you believed he actually had such a conversation, but the principles were the principles.
And so much of what he says just really rings true to me and what I believe.
Because he talks about, at one point, again, pardon me, it seems kind of crazy, but in this conversation with the devil, he says, who are your greatest enemies?
And he says, all who inspire people to think and act on their own initiative.
He also talks about science versus religion and how impossible it is for him to control scientists.
He says, true scientists are out of my reach because they think for themselves and spend their time studying natural laws.
They deal with facts whenever they find them.
Their religion is truth.
He says, what makes you worry?
He says, just even one thinker.
My only worry is that someday a real thinker will appear on earth.
And so I really believe that if God exists and God created us, obviously he can't possibly violate the laws of science.
He can't possibly violate...
I mean the greatest thing that we were given was our minds.
And our thoughts.
And so, you know, all of the, you know, the, we don't, I don't believe we need, we need religion.
I don't, you know, I believe that, I mean, religion can, you know, it's actually nice to have a community.
It's nice to have people that you can talk to about ideas, but, you know, you don't need, I mean, as I believe my family is my, is my tool.
I need my wife.
And I believe my wife needs me.
I need my children, because the family, I feel, is my reflection of what God is.
But I don't need a person telling me to follow him.
I don't need the priest, I don't need the whomever, because I don't believe that's how God operates.
So I guess this would be a good point for you to interrupt.
out.
Well, interesting backstory, but my concerns are sort of justified insofar as I'm still not sure what your argument is for the existence of God that's rational.
Okay, that's...
Like, you've told me that you think God is...
You know, is male and female, that God has a tripartite process, that God is sad.
But these are not arguments.
These are just thoughts that you have about a topic or a subject.
But there's no argument there, right?
Like, if you say, well, God, men and women together express God, well, if I say men and women together express unicorn, I still haven't proven that there's a unicorn, right?
No, you're right.
And I'm concerned that if those moral stance are bound up in the idea of God, that if the conversation results in a crisis of faith for you, that some of you may be in the bathwater, you know, the moral resolution may also go out with the idea of a deity.
No, you don't have to worry about that.
I'm quite certain I'm not going to have a crisis of faith.
Okay, good.
I've gone down this path for many years.
Alright, so with that having been said, let's move on to the argument.
So, first of all, what is the definition of what it is you're trying to establish?
What is your definition of the deity?
My definition of a deity...
Yeah, because there's lots of different ways to define God, right?
I mean, God, some people say, oh, it's the universe and everything and so on, which is just a synonym for the universe and everything, don't need something additional.
Some people say that he is a blue elephant-headed man with eight swords in certain Hindu traditions, and some people say that he's got mortal elements or a demigod like some of the ancient Greek traditions, so what...
I guess, I mean, God to me is the...
I guess the universal prime force...
I mean, he's the creator.
He is the...
You know, the force behind the universe.
I mean, he's the...
Well, no, that doesn't...
Again, if I say...
If somebody doesn't know what a unicorn is, and I say, well, a unicorn is a creator and a force behind the universe...
I'm not adding anything to their knowledge base, right?
If I say a unicorn is a magical horse with a horn on its forehead, I'm a little closer, right?
So what I mean is instead of, I don't know, it needs to be something concrete and specific that can be proven or disproven.
Like, for instance, if you're going to say God exists, and then you say God is the force behind the universe, how on earth could you prove or disprove that there's such a thing as a force behind the universe?
You can't.
And if it can't be disproved or proven, it's not in the realm of philosophy.
If you're going to prove that something exists, there has to be a possibility that that thing does not exist.
Otherwise, it's a tautology.
You're just defining something as existing, and then it turns out that everything exists because this thing exists, this thing exists because everything exists.
So if you're going to say that something exists, Like if I'm going to say a rock exists, then there has to be a way of measuring whether the rock exists or doesn't exist.
Otherwise, I'm not saying anything.
In other words, if I say something exists, there has to be the capacity for non-existence and a way of measuring or testing for that non-existence.
So if I say a door is open, you can walk through it.
If the door is closed and I say it's open, you can't walk through it.
That's a sort of basic test.
For determining the truth or falsehood of what it is I'm talking about.
So my question is, what is the definition of the deity, and how would we know whether we've established proof or disproof of that deity's existence?
Well, I mean, I don't think, I mean, quite simply, I can't.
I mean, I cannot, I mean, I didn't come on here to talk to you and to prove to you that there's a God, because I knew that wasn't going to happen.
Hey, wait, hang on.
I thought that's what we were going to do.
Maybe.
Mike, did I miss something?
I thought that you said that there was a way of establishing a belief in God that was rational.
That was my impression, too, Jeff.
Okay.
I mean, I did say that.
I did say that.
I mean, so much of what...
You know, in your talks of disproving God, like you say...
One of the things you say is, you know, God's all-knowing and all-powerful, and that contradicts itself right away.
Right.
And...
So I don't...
So is the deity that you're talking about all-powerful?
Can the old question...
No, absolutely not.
As I said, he's completely helpless to our free will.
Okay, so your deity created...
We'll just say God.
Obviously, your deity sounds disrespectful to your relief system.
So God has created human beings who are capable of exercising free will, but...
It's impossible for God to change that free will.
Is that right?
Yeah, He has no control over our free will.
Correct.
I don't think that's entirely true.
And again, I don't know whether this is part of your belief system, but is there any divine reward or punishment for virtue or vice after death or in life?
Well, we have to...
There is...
When you live with virtue, when you live with goodness, then you become a better person.
And you become...
No, I agree with that.
So are you saying that is there no afterlife?
Is there no reward or punishment for following God's commandments or being a good person?
Is there no divine reward or punishment in the afterlife?
Not reward or punishment in...
Here you get the gold star, and here you don't, and here you've got to go sit in a corner because it is, you know, God is doing everything He can to bring, you know, everybody back to win us back from, you know, a fallen state.
Okay, but what does it mean to say, hang on, so what does it mean to say God is doing everything He can?
What are the things that God is doing?
He has determined to fulfill his ideal that he created the world with.
Because of the fall, we went in a different direction.
Sorry, again, I don't know what it is you're talking about in any specificity.
What does it mean to say, what specific actions is God taking or not taking to attempt to influence us to follow his will or his preferences or his values or virtues?
Because, I mean, you know the standard Catholic answer, which is that you go to heaven if you do good, and you go to hell if you do bad.
And, of course, that is not allowing us free will, right?
And any threat of punishment or any offer of reward is no longer allowing us free will.
Right.
Right, because, you know, if I say, tell me that two and two make five— Or I'll torture you, right?
This is the 1984, right?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.
And O'Brien in his torture of Winston Smith, we don't imagine that O'Brien is offering Winston Smith perfect freedom and intellectual integrity and following his own path of righteousness and truth because he's torturing the guy with electricity and with a helmet full of rats.
If you reject this, that's fine, but in the Catholic model, you cannot coincide the promise or the threat of infinite torture or infinite reward with a respect for free will.
Because free will, when conditioned by such punishments and rewards, can scarcely be called free.
No, I believe that in the end, when...
Humanity is restored when the ship is righted, that everybody will be in the same place, that the kingdom of heaven awaits everyone.
So the murderer and the moralist both end up in the same place?
Yes.
So there's no punishment to no...
I didn't just...
No, no, I think there is punishment in that, you know, you, you know, as they, you know, was bound and was bound to have a human, you create, and it's a long...
Restoration happens most easily when we have a physical body, when we can, you know, when we can become, you know, good human beings and we can further God's will on this earth When we don't, I believe there is a process of restoration that is long and incredibly difficult.
Did you mean something like limbo?
No, I just think that there's a spirit world, and spirit world has an infinite, just like people on Earth, there's an infinite number of layers of where people are emotionally, spiritually, where they are spiritually.
So if they were bad people, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin are in really, really bad places, but You know, the process of restoration, it may take, I don't know, you know, I mean, years kind of is a weird idea in the spirit world, but, you know, restoration will continue to happen until, you know...
So there is punishment for misdeeds, then, after death?
A punishment in that...
I wouldn't...
Yes.
In that, you know, if you destroyed, you know, if you burned yourself badly, then you have scars.
And you yearn for goodness when you realize what the hell you did and you begin a process in the spirit world to restore yourself to that goodness.
Okay, so I understand.
So there are punishments.
So it's not quite the same as free will.
You say God wouldn't do anything to interfere with free will, but God has set up a system where if you do evil, then you're consigned to the spirit world for a certain amount of time, wherein you are not as happy as if you weren't.
I don't think God would consign you to.
I mean, he...
It's his system, right?
Well, you have to grow.
You have...
I mean...
You know, human beings have to go through stages of growth, and you have to go through them sooner or later.
And if you, you know, dig yourself an incredible hole, then you have to, you know, dig your way out.
No, but it's God's system.
Like, if somebody says that spitting on the sidewalk is illegal, and you spit on the sidewalk, and you go to jail, then it's the person who's defined that as immoral and established the punishment and enforced the punishment who is doing that to you.
So the spirit world would be part of God's system.
Well, the spirit world is...
I'm just saying everybody.
When we die, there's a physical world and there's a spiritual world.
Right.
But what I'm saying is that God has set a system up whereby you are punished for failing to adhere to God's will.
Well, I don't...
I wouldn't put it that way.
I think that there was a...
There's a...
You know, there's a place where Satan has control.
There's a, you know, Satan and God are, in my mind, quite literally at war for our, you know, for us.
And so, you know, God created a world in which he, you know, I certainly believe that he knew the possibility of the fall happening and men, you know, Being rejected and having this world come to being as it is.
He didn't say, okay, I'm going to create this world and then if people deviate, I'm going to punish them this way and that way.
It's just that we were put on this earth and we had to grow into the beings that He created us to be.
We had to grow into creators.
We had to become God-like.
In our character.
And when we fail to do that, we had to get there one way or another.
And so long as we have a physical body, we can get there, like I said, get there more quickly.
But there's still a vehicle.
God gave us a vehicle.
Certainly there's still a vehicle when we lose our physical bodies to restore ourselves to what, at that point, we'll know where we want to go.
But, you know, we still have mangled...
We have created, you know, for ourselves, we have created, you know, a...
Sorry, there's your no again.
We have created a mangled mess.
And...
Okay, hang on.
So, again, this is just a bunch of language, which I'm not saying is of no value, but it's not philosophical.
So let me ask you this, Jack.
Does everyone start off with the same opportunities and capacities for good and evil?
No.
Is that fair?
Originally I think so, but if your parents are really miserable drunks and your dad went and had sex with everything he could find in the worst places ever and found the worst people ever and then they had children and they did the same thing,
you're gonna create a I mean, that's just, you know, those people don't have the same chance as somebody who, you know, has a great family and raises their kids right, and then they have kids who raise their kids right, and they study, and they give their children opportunities, and then they have children.
And would it be fair to say that, say, my daughter versus Freddie Gray, right, the...
The young man who died on the police van ride, who grew up in a single mom household with leading lead paint off the wall and stuff like that.
Would it be fair to say that we would not have equivalent capacity to exercise free will?
They absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yes or no?
Yes or no?
For sure.
I'm sorry?
Your daughter has a huge advantage.
Yeah, because, of course, people who are raised in very abusive households, if their brain flips over and they become sadistic, I mean, there have been very clear brain studies that show that the pleasure that you and I or the happiness that you and I would feel from doing something virtuous and so on and being good people...
That they pretty much have the same happy, joy, joy, dopamine centers that light up through cruelty.
So in the way that our body is telling us, is rewarding us for virtue, their body is rewarding them for vice, for cruelty.
And they gain significant amounts of pleasure and happiness out of sadism.
So it's, you know, given that sadism has always, like, cruelty has always been revolting to me.
Like, even as a kid, the idea of, like, harming animals and stuff is just, like, hideous.
And so, you know, can I really claim to be, wow, I've really fought that devil of wanting to blow frogs up with cherry bombs and, you know, strangle kittens and all that kind of stuff.
I never wanted to do any of that stuff.
I always found that stuff just hideous in the extreme.
And I always gained a fair amount of pleasure from, you know, trying to be a decent person and all that.
So my body is sort of leading me in the right direction.
But, of course, other people have the opposite emotional apparatus.
And virtue makes them enraged and angry and hostile.
And cruelty makes them, like, coked up happy.
And that doesn't seem really like a fair...
It's okay to have a running race.
People should start at the same place.
They should at least be pointed in the same direction, whereas biologically we're kind of not in a lot of ways.
But it's certainly not fair.
And it's strange terminology, and probably you won't like this, but I do believe in our parlance we say that there is the original sin, which separated man from God, and really Basically put, you know, Satan in charge.
But there's also, you know, as we were talking about, that kind of sin, you know, Freddie Gray is his name, or those people, I mean, what I would call that is inherited sin.
And it's the fact that they, yeah, they had a bad, you know, dealt a bad hand, but it's the reality of, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years of You know, this world being a pretty fucked up place.
But if I were a deity and I wanted to design beings to pursue virtue, wouldn't I also design an emotional apparatus that would encourage them to do so?
Right?
Like, if I want a robot to head north, then I should build in it a compass, and I should build into it a motor, and I should say, when the compass heads north, that's where you go.
Now, if I built an emotional, like a robot that I programmed to head south, could I really then get really angry at it for not going north, right?
And so if God created the emotional apparatus, evolutionarily we can understand why cruelty would beget cruelty, because that would be what the tribe lives on and how to get reproduced and all that.
But so biologically, this sort of sadism versus the emotional apparatus of virtue makes good sense.
But if we're talking about God can design humanity, then it would not seem fair to have, you know, say, all the robots that go north get a prize, and all the robots that go south get broken up, and then program some robots to go north and some robots to go south, and then say, oh, the robots that are going south are really bad, bad robots, I'm going to break them up, right?
That would be kind of rigging the game, right?
Well, yeah.
And so...
So that's true, but that's not what I believe happened.
I mean, there was, you know, the original human ancestors that fell, and, you know, generation and generations are, you know, however it happened, and I'm, you know, that's the whole...
But they, you know, people went their own ways.
I mean, God created humans with the capacity to become...
To grow to perfection, to grow to oneness, where that stuff didn't exist.
Because once they became one with God, their actions would understand God's heart and God's love, and they would create families certainly closer to what you are creating today.
Okay, but no, see, again, I think we're just getting a lot of word fog out of this, right?
Look, the idea of me hurting my child is horrifying, right?
I mean, it's inconceivable.
Yet, there are lots of people who take great pleasure in hurting their children.
Now, God could have designed the human emotional apparatus to, as you and I are, to be repulsed by evil doing and to love virtue, right?
He could have designed, no matter what, you know, you raised up bad, you raised up good, He's God, He can design you any way you want, any way He wants.
And so He could have given within human beings, regardless of the peace or trauma of their upbringing, the same emotional apparatus to yearn for virtue and to recoil emotionally from wrongdoing.
But the reality is that if God designed humanity, Then he designed humanity to adapt to an evil environment by having a strong emotionally positive reaction to evil doing and a strong negative emotional reaction to virtue.
Which is not fair.
If you're going to punish people for vice and reward them for virtue and then some people are made happy by virtue and made horrified by vice and some people are made horrified by virtue and made happy by vice Then it's not a fair fight.
It's not a fair race.
It's not a fair judgment, right?
Well, I'm not sure why what I was saying is just words, because I tried to counter that by saying that...
I mean, I believe that God created us all with the capacity...
You know, created man with the capacity to do those things, but they had to grow.
There was a growth period that they did not fulfill, but it will happen.
I mean, there are...
People will change.
I mean, people...
I believe that...
The reason I'm saying word fog here, Jack, is that I'm putting forward an argument and you're not addressing it.
Okay, so the argument is some people love virtue and hate evil.
Some people love evil and hate virtue.
And it has to do with how they're raised, or the trauma, or negativity, or hostility, or rape, or whatever it is that they're exposed to as children, right?
Okay.
So if some people...
Love virtue and hate evil, and some people love evil and hate virtue, and it's not their fault in many ways.
Then how can it be fair to punish people for actions of evil when those people have been programmed to love evil and hate good?
I'm not talking from a human civilization.
I'm talking from a A deity standpoint.
I understand.
Because God designed the emotional apparatus.
Well, I don't accept that God is punishing him for that.
God is...
And we all have to grow to completion, perfection, whatever you want to call it.
And we can do it more easily.
We can become better people more easily in the physical world.
Or if we don't do that, we have to do it in the spiritual world.
And those people who are in that situation just have a longer course because they have to, one way or another, they have to develop that character.
They have to change.
Let me put it another way.
Let's say that I give you...
Somebody gives you and I a...
What's the scavenger hunt, right?
And for me, they've marked everything correct on the map, and my GPS is working perfectly.
Whereas for you, everything is marked wrong on the map, and your GPS is reversed.
Yeah.
Is that fair?
That's not fair.
Okay.
That's my point.
Emotionally, things are marked wrong on the map.
Vice is pleasurable.
Virtue is horrifying.
Their GPS is reversed in that their emotional apparatus is telling them to do all the wrong things and punishing them for doing the right things, which is the opposite for good people.
And because it comes out of their environment, it's hard to...
And again, from a God standpoint, it's hard to blame them.
They're not responsible for their environment.
So it's not fair.
Yeah, so, and?
I mean, so God, there is, you know, Satan definitely took more control over some people than he did over others, because there was a condition to do that.
And God is working towards bringing those people back to him, bringing those people back to an enlightened state.
So it's, they've got a longer course, they've got a more painful process than you or I, but Not saying that, you know, I don't have my own problems, but that they certainly have a more painful process, but they will get there eventually.
And how do you know any of this?
Like when you say the spirit world, how do you know about the spirit world?
How can you prove or disprove its existence or non-existence?
Well, I certainly would never be able to prove it to you.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, no, no.
You can't say to me.
No, you can't say to me because if something is proven, it's not proven to a specific individual.
Like, you can't go to a science conference and say, I have fusion in a jar, but only for Bob, not for Sally.
So, how do you know that there's such a thing as a spirit world?
Yes.
I mean, I have had experiences, I've had several experiences in my life that lead me to believe that the spirit world is very real.
I guess I don't need to, you know, very silly.
Okay, it's real.
You know, I could tell you experiences that I had that led me to believe that that's true, but I don't know if that would do any good.
Well, that's not verifiable, right?
I'm not putting you in this category, of course, right?
But there are people who think that they're Napoleon.
There are people who hear voices in their head.
There are people who have detailed psychotic visions of other worlds.
There are people who dream so vividly that they believe it's real.
There are people who have waking dreams.
There are people who get hit on the head.
There are people who have brain tumors.
There are lots of ways in which people have very vivid experiences of things that aren't real.
But I don't believe that my inability to prove to you that the spirit world is real is a disproof of the existence of God or the spirit world.
It is.
It is, because you're proposing something that is radical.
When it comes to existence and reality.
Like if I say to you, oh Jack, there's a stone somewhere in China.
You'd probably say, yeah, I'm down with the stone in China.
Because what I'm proposing is not really out of the ordinary.
Right?
But if you say that there is a realm...
That is immaterial, that people's souls can go to, wherein there are spiritual paths of healing and growth and surrounding of evil and so on.
You are proposing something that is metaphysical in nature.
It is about the very nature of reality.
And you're saying that there is a ghost within me.
Which is a very radical thing to say.
You're not saying, Steph has a liver, right?
Because, yeah, people have livers.
It's not that remarkable a statement.
But if you're saying, Steph is a robot, like if somebody were to say, Steph is a robot, a very well-put-together, hyper-verbose robot, well, that would be kind of an unusual thing because there's no robot technology that can do this kind of Work in the world.
So that would be a kind of remarkable thing.
Or if you were to say, Steph is a space alien from Betelgeuse, that would also be a remarkable thing to say.
Or if you say, Steph can live without lungs because he processes and receives his energy through photosynthesis, that would also be a remarkable thing to say.
So when you're proposing something that is remarkable, then the burden of proof lies on you.
And if you fail to establish that burden of proof, Then the person who disbelieves is not obligated to do anything else, but can reject your proposed belief.
So if you say, Steph's a robot, but I can't prove it.
Well, I don't have to go around cutting up Steph to find, don't do this at home.
I don't have to do anything.
I don't have to lift a finger.
And if you say to me, I have a pet invisible unicorn.
Then you have to provide me proof of that pet invisible unicorn.
I don't have to run all over the universe to disprove this idea of a pet invisible unicorn.
If you say to me, I have lived for 10,000 years, I'll say, okay, that's a pretty remarkable statement.
If you say, I've lived for 30 years or 40 years or 50 years or whatever, okay, human lifespan, you may be lying to me, but I'm not proposing anything hugely radical.
If you say, I've lived for 10,000 years, well...
That is a remarkable statement that would seem to fly in the face of everything that we know about biology and longevity and cell decay and so on.
In which case, I would require proof in order to believe this extraordinary statement.
It's the old thing, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And if you were to say to me, I have lived for 10,000 years, but I can provide to you no proof, Then your assertion doesn't even sit in the realm of maybe.
It sits in the realm of no way.
Like, no.
It fails.
It cannot be sustained.
It's not up to me to disprove that you have lived for 10,000 years.
Because, I don't know, I'd carbon date you or something, and it turned out that you lived for 50 years or whatever, and you'd say, oh, well, carbon dating, my 10,000-year-old body has cunningly reorganized itself so that carbon dating doesn't work.
Or whatever, right?
So every time I'd come up with a way that I could disprove it, if you keep moving the goalpost, your claim is false.
It is invalid.
Like if I say, I have found a way to travel at the speed of light by running.
Well, that's a pretty extraordinary claim.
And if I then said, well, I'm never going to show you how that works, is it like, well, maybe he can run at the speed of light?
You've exhausted the need to come up with examples.
I get what you're saying.
But, you know, I wish I had a better response.
I mean, I remember, and I don't even know if this is fair, but I remember listening to a podcast you did when, and I don't remember his name, a great libertarian thinker died, and you were...
Oh, Harry Brown.
What's that?
Harry Brown.
Yeah, Harry Brown.
Sorry, thank you.
I was drawing a blank.
And you said, you know, so if, you know, I don't know what you said exactly, but it was like, if If heaven doesn't exist, I hope he's in a great place, or if God doesn't exist, I hope he's, you know, whatever.
And clearly you don't believe in God, and yet the thought entered your mind enough to make that statement that, you know, if there's even a tiny chance that there's, you know, there's life out there after death, then I certainly hope Harry Brown is in a wonderful place.
I probably said if there were life after death, Harry Brown would be in a wonderful place.
Anyway.
No point in arguing that, but yeah, I think you said if there is.
But even if I did say what you said, and if in a moment of grief I allowed sentimentality and my early Christian training to overwhelm me emotionally, I would not consider that to be any proof of the existence of an afterlife.
No, I understand.
It was a way of me expressing my grief.
I understand that completely.
But what I'm saying is that we would never say, God, if there is a chance that 2 plus 2 is really 14, then...
I hope I wasn't wrong that it was four.
So I have a hard time...
I mean, I get your examples.
I do.
But I don't know that if God existed, if God exists, which I very clearly believe he does, or it does, they do, whatever.
Pronouns are difficult.
Yeah.
Then, uh, I don't know how you would prove that.
Right.
If it were true, uh, that there was a...
Well, I know, I know.
There's many, sorry to interrupt, Jack, there's many different ways that the existence of a deity could be established beyond any shadow of a dead.
I mean, I can just give you one off the top of my head.
Please.
So if, if, if, uh...
If we have some conception of a deity, of a god, it must be because that god has impressed himself into our consciousness in some manner.
So God can't talk about free will if there's punishment and reward.
God can't talk about free will and then command us to do stuff and give us the Ten Commandments and hover over us and judge everything.
You can't have free will and that kind of eye-in-the-sky, constant-scanning Gestapo stuff.
You can't.
One or the other, right?
Free will is the prime directive.
You don't interfere.
In fact, you know, you're not even supposed to know that James T. Kirk is up there having, well, bonobo sex with multi-tentacled space alien twins or something, right?
You're not supposed to know.
So if there was a God and he gave us free will, we would never, ever know that there was a God.
Because once we know there's a God and he's told us what to do and he's punishing and rewarding us, we don't have free will anymore.
And so, you know, it's like saying, well, rats have free will, but I'm going to shock them if they do this and give them food pellets if they do that.
Well, then they don't have free will anymore because you're conditioning what they do, right?
And so, if God did create humanity and God truly bestowed free will upon humanity, then God would never appear within the mind of humanity because that's putting your finger on the scale.
That's fudging the experiment, so to speak, right?
And so if you believe in God, it's because God has impressed himself upon your mind, which means you no longer have the free will that God was supposed to have given you because he's telling you what to do or giving you this idea of the spirit world with punishments and rewards and virtue and commandments and all that.
But since God has now impressed himself upon your mind, you have access to divine knowledge.
And the way that we would establish the existence of a human being's capacity to be a conduit to divine knowledge is we would simply keep asking questions that only omniscience would know.
And if I kept asking you questions that an omniscient being could only have the answer to, and you kept answering them correctly, then either A, you are that omniscient being, in which case, kudos, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Give me the world!
Or, B, you have a direct conduit to that omniscient intelligence, and that omniscient intelligence is giving you the answers to the questions that we're asking that only an omniscient entity would know.
That's just one very simple...
Maybe I don't completely understand that, but I believe somebody could get a divine inspiration about something and not Then be suddenly all-knowing and be able to answer all your questions.
No, no, but, like, God knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, because God knows everything.
And so if I ask you, where's Jimmy Hoffa buried, and you ask God, and God tells you, and we go to where Jimmy Hoffa's buried, then either you kill Jimmy Hoffa, or you're God, one of the two, right?
Or, you know, you could come up with any, you know, what's the price of Apple stock going to be tomorrow?
Okay, well, an omniscient being would know that, and if you had the answer to that, and we verified that it was correct.
How many strikes of lightning are going to be in this thunderstorm?
You ask God, God tells you, you tell me.
And if we keep asking you these questions, you keep getting them exactly right, including knowledge which no human beings have at the moment, right?
Like, I don't know, whatever scientific problems there are, what's the unified field theory equations and all that kind of stuff.
That would be a way of saying, well, look, you clearly have a conduit to higher intelligence, whether that's space aliens, whether that's God, or whatever we would call it.
That would be an example.
Yeah, but I don't believe that the price of Apple stock next week is something God knows.
So he's not all-knowing?
No.
I mean, no.
Because, again...
Okay, but hang on, hang on.
Because it's free will, right?
What would be an example of something that didn't involve free will that God would know?
Like unified field theories.
I mean, God designed the universe and all the laws of physics, so God would know all the laws of physics.
Yeah, right.
Right?
So if I asked you...
Physics questions which no human being had the answer to, and you kept providing more and more answers.
Yeah, that's a better example.
Thank you.
Yeah, okay.
So that would be a way of establishing the presence of a wildly intelligence, a wild intelligence or an unfathomable level of intelligence and knowledge that you would have a conduit to.
So that would be a pretty clear way of establishing it.
Especially if there was no known method of communication, like we put you in some lead-lined, you know, like no microwaves, no cheats, no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi or anything like that.
If we put you in some sealed chamber, a bath escape or something, a lead-lined whatever, right, and you were still able to provide all these answers, that would be a remarkable support to the idea of a deity.
But that also, to me, turns God and the idea of God into some carnival act.
But, I mean, I... No, no, that's just...
You know, God has designed us to be skeptical, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
So, it's not a carnival act, right?
If I say to you, you know, give me $500 and I'll send you an iPad...
And I send you an empty box, and you say, hey, man, you've got to provide the iPad, and I say, man, you're just turning me into some conjurus trick, some, like, what am I supposed to be, some sort of pen and teller magic show where just iPads pop out at me randomly?
It's like, no, you've got to show me the iPad because that was the deal, right?
And if God says, you need to obey my commandments, but I'm not going to show myself in any way, shape, or form to you, then that's not very fair, right?
Well, I certainly believe in a more enlightened state, we would have an ability to communicate more directly with God.
Okay, then there must be someone after 10,000 or 50,000 or 150,000 years of humanity, there must be someone who has reached an enlightened enough state to be able to communicate directly with God, in which case we ask that person for the answers to these physics problems that no one can solve and we're on our way.
I don't believe that that's necessarily true.
So if after 150,000 years, Jack, there's no one Who is spiritually enlightened enough to talk with God, maybe the standards are a little off-kilter.
If you've got a project called Bring People Close to You, and after 150,000 years, they're still not close to you, you may not have designed the experiment very well.
Yeah, things are pretty fucked up.
I mean, you know, it says, you know, he was sorry he made man, and then it says, no one is righteous, no, not one.
I mean, there's a...
So God is very bad at creating good people.
No, hang on, hang on.
God is very...
Hang on, hang on.
So if I say I want to produce a car that works, and after 150,000 years, I still can't produce a car that works, does that sound like I'm a very competent car manufacturer?
No, it does not.
So if God has this plan to create virtue, to create good people...
And after 150,000 years of human history, there's not one?
Doesn't he kind of suck at making good people?
Well, I believe that it's happening, but I believe that the fall of man basically allowed Satan to Claim ownership of, you know, humankind.
You know, you are of your father the devil, you know, and the battle has been long.
But this is just another way of saying that God is very bad at making good people.
And then punishes people for God's design being so flawed that after 150,000 years he can't even find one good person when that's supposed to be his express goal and intention.
How the hell are we to blame for a bad design?
If I throw all of my seeds onto concrete, do I then get to jump up and down at them for being bad seeds and refusing to give me food?
No, I'm just a shitty farmer.
And I don't know how to say it more clearly.
Again, I don't feel he's punishing you for being bad.
Well, this is the problem with religious, right?
Because you've already said that those who are bad go to the spirit world rather than someplace better and have to work things out.
No, everybody goes to the spirit world.
But for different lengths of time.
What's that?
But for different lengths of time, depending on their...
No, no.
The spirit world is just a word for where we go after we die.
Everybody.
Same thing.
So my failure to communicate...
So, everybody goes to the spirit world, and we're just wherever we were, you know, whatever we created for ourselves on Earth is where we're at.
Right, but it's for those who are murderous, because we already had this part of the conversation, and this is the talking in circle stuff that drives me nuts, but religion, whenever we feel we've got something nailed down, it seems like the definition changes underfoot.
Because I asked you if there are punishments and rewards, you talked about the spirit world, and the bad people, it takes longer for them to work out their bad deeds.
Or become enlightened or become better souls?
Spirit world is just, there's two places, the physical world and the spiritual world.
So I did say that we all go to spirit world and we all are, whatever level we created for ourselves is where we're at.
And we have to continue to grow until we become whole.
Right.
And so those who, you said if you dig a hole, right?
So those who've done evil in the world have more to grow in the spirit world, right?
That's correct.
And I assume that it's a negative experience not being all the way grown.
Well, Steph, I mean, if you're, so if you're, you know, some person who's born in, you know, the projects in Baltimore, First, you know, verse your daughter, that person's going to have a much, much harder time becoming a good person than your daughter is.
But is that, is that punishment?
I mean, or is that just, that person just has a rougher course to become, that person still can become a good person, but he's going to have a much, much more difficult path.
Is that God punishing that person?
It's a circumstance that that person is in.
I don't know why I... I mean, I just can't...
I don't accept that God says, okay, you're bad, I'm going to punish you.
I mean, yeah, that person's got a really bad situation from years and years of, you know, evolution that brought him to a really bad place.
And your daughter got a straight flush.
So...
So the people who are saying to the children and to everyone, really, about heaven and hell, they would be of the devil, is that right?
They would be what?
They would be motivated by and ruled by the devil because they're spreading lies about punishments and rewards that God doesn't agree with.
Oh, I think so.
Right.
Right.
So that's not fair either, right?
Because children are growing up with people saying, I represent God, the Bible represents God, And God is telling you this, and hellfire and damnation, or heaven and reward, and so on.
And that's how children grow up.
And because of a belief in God, they don't bring the same amount of critical faculty to these arguments than they would if some philosopher came along.
Like, if some philosopher comes along and says, Here's virtue.
Let me finish.
So, if a philosopher comes along, if there's no religion, a philosopher comes along and says, This is goodness, this is evil, this is right, this is wrong, this is truth, this is false.
What does everyone say?
Bullshit!
Don't believe you!
Prove it!
But when there's a deity involved, when there's a god involved, when there's religion involved, people's critical faculties take a nosedive.
And so if you really want to spread virtue, you want people to be critical so we get the best theories of virtue, the best theories of good and evil, the best morality.
And so, one of the basic problems I have, why we're on opposite sides of the fence as far as this goes, Jack, is because by promoting religion, you are demoting people's critical faculties.
And by demoting people's critical faculties, you're actually kind of serving the devil.
Because by promoting religion, you are promoting the transmission of these ideas of heaven and hell.
And damnation, and the Old Testament, and hell punishment, right?
Whereas if you were against religion, and against the idea of God, then it would be up to philosophers to tell people what good and evil is, and you wouldn't have priests slithering in to indoctrinate children, which is supported by your view of God.
You're actually serving God much better by rejecting God, having people be skeptical, having them not swallow uncritically the punishments and lies of religion.
Because I don't get to give heaven and hell to people.
I would consider it highly immoral to threaten people into accepting an argument that would no longer be accepting but merely complying under force.
And so by promoting the idea of a deity, you indirectly promote the idea of religion.
Through that, you promote the transmission of anti-rationality through threats of heaven and hell.
So I can't understand how you're not serving the devil if you say, well, religious...
Priests serve the devil.
Okay, how do you oppose priests?
With reason, with evidence, with philosophy.
but you still want the religious stuff, which gives all the power to the priests and lowers people's capacity for critical thinking, which transmits the very ideas you say are the most pernicious.
If you said all morality must come from reason and evidence, I am going to reject the idea of a deity so that people can use their reason and their evidence. I am going to reject the idea of a deity Because surely the idea of faith and eternal punishment and reward scratches and destroys and undermines and shreds free will far more than reason and evidence and philosophy.
So if you were to push back against the idea of a deity and say philosophy must be the arbiter of that which is good and that which is bad, people will be radically skeptical, which is great, because skepticism is the whetstone upon which the blade of reason and evidence is sharpened.
So if you were to reject the idea of a deity in a spirit world and this and that and the other, people would have to approach the questions of good and evil with critical free-thinking, rationality, and skepticism, which would actually give them back the free will that you claim you want them to have so much.
Just a possibility.
No, I mean, so most of what you just said, I'm with you.
You use religion and God a little bit too interchangeably, for my liking.
Um...
But I certainly understand why people do that.
I certainly don't promote religion.
And I do believe that science I've got to be careful what I say here.
I do believe that most priests and anyway, I don't know, rabbis, I don't know, I don't have background, but they are very much certainly if they preach fear and hellfire and You know,
and eternal damnation are doing an incredible disservice.
And anybody who does anything to get people not to think is doing bad, a bad thing.
I also don't know.
I've had this discussion.
I tried to have this discussion with several people.
And if I have it with people that don't believe in God, if I have it with my son, it's a duh.
But I say, you know, let's have a discussion.
Would the world be better off if no one believed in God?
And try to have that discussion with a bunch of people who do believe in God.
And I very much believe in God, but I'm not sure what the answer to that question is.
Oh, I don't think it's necessarily true that the world would be better off if nobody believed in God.
But I think it's an interesting conversation.
Because certainly a lot of...
I mean, just to have the discussion of how much bad has come from people not believing in God and how much bad has come from people believing in God.
I mean, there are two very different kinds of bad.
But, you know, we've had...
So I don't...
I accept the fact that, you know, a lot of what you said, the whole idea that, you know, Pushing people to thinking critically and thinking rationally and all those things are good.
But I... Anyway, I haven't done a good job, but it pains me that when I listen to this disproof of God and those things, that if there was a creator, I just don't think that...
That Creator is done justice by, you know, most any religion of the world because they're so off-base.
They so misunderstand the nature of that God.
So, you know, I guess now we are going in circles and I'm not doing, you know, justice to this.
Well, listen, I mean, have a listen back to this conversation and...
I will, too.
Have a listen back to this conversation and just see whether you feel that it's promoting rational, independent, empirical, skeptical, critical thinking or not.
On your side.
I'll listen back to it, too, because maybe you've made great points that, for whatever reason, I've missed.
And if that's the case, of course, we'll get back on and continue to chew it out.
But...
Because you've basically said, I've got a bunch of beliefs that can't be proven or disproven.
To my way of thinking, and I think it's fairly clear, it's not encouraging people's independent, critical, or rational thinking.
If they feel that what you say is true, then they'll agree with you.
And if they don't, then they won't.
But it's not a really capacity to build a bridge of reason across this chasm.
So that would be my suggestion.
But I don't do that.
i mean i you know i uh...
i don't i mean i have this conversation and i i i i i started on this path I mean, actually, originally, my first thought was after my conversation about my son was to have a conversation with you about the whole series of, but my parents are nice, because that's what really was a big hurdle for me, a difficult, and it's certainly something that I want to talk about, but I really did hesitate about going down the God path.
I'm glad you did.
I find these conversations very enjoyable, so I'm glad you did.
If I talk to somebody on a personal level, then I will tell them specific experiences I had that led me to believe that God exists.
And I don't...
I don't promote religion because I don't think in an ideal world there is no religion.
I mean, come on.
And we don't have priests who we have to go through to get to God.
And we all have to grow.
And we either do it now or we do it later.
And that's all I'm saying.
I'm not saying that it's...
I don't believe that it's a punishment, that there's somebody out there doling out rewards and punishments, and you get your gold star and you don't.
I don't believe that there's somebody out there building you, so you head north and this person heads south.
I believe that there is a God who created the universe, that it went horribly wrong, and he has spent human history trying to reverse that.
I believe that we are at a time when that is being reversed.
I believe that...
I hesitate to sound like I'm blowing smoke up here, but I believe that the power of this show is part of that process, that people are becoming enlightened, people are becoming people.
150,000 years seems like a really long time to you or me, but things could You know, there could be, you know, a major dam breaking.
And I believe that it really takes, you know, a couple generations.
I believe that if people start, you know, raising our children nonviolently, if people start thinking rationally, if people start doing, then we will have a absolute, you know, watershed moment.
And I believe that that's happening.
So, 150,000 years is a really long time, so you could say, oh, he sucks at this, but things could change, and 1,000 years could be about a day.
Well, and I certainly, of course, want to recognize and respect from earlier conversation the degree to which You have contributed to that positive change in the world is stellar.
It is like a supernova.
And for those who don't know, Will, We'll put a link to the earlier conversation that we had.
And so, you know, wherever we disagree in this realm of the deity and so on, I'd rather have a billion people like you than a bunch of atheist, socialist, whack jobs who don't ever talk about parenting in any sensible way.
So I just really wanted to, you know, we're far closer to me on the stuff that matters.
No question about it.
We are distant on the stuff that is less important in terms of practical application, if that makes sense.
No, there's no doubt.
I have no doubt about that.
Excellent.
All right.
Okay, well, have a listen to this.
Let me know what you think, and perhaps we can talk again.
And again, I really, really appreciate the call.
I'm going to bring the show to a close.
clothes.
I'm sorry for the person who's waiting on the dream, but those take a long time.
And as I exposed myself to toxic political processes last night that didn't sleep as well as I wanted, my energy should not be peaking, and I always want to give a better show with more concentrated mind than to have a longer show with a less concentrated mind, because, you know, every listener deserves as much attention as I can bring because, you know, every listener deserves as much attention as I can bring to bear on the question or So, I promise it will be better later than it is now.
So thank you everyone so much, of course.
And Steph, real quick before we go, can you just explain a little bit, because I'm sure people are going to be curious, why the world would not necessarily be better if everyone was an atheist?
Just a short bit to parse it out for everyone.
Well, I mean, atheism is the rejection.
Of a particular form of superstition.
It's a rejection of a particular form of irrationality.
Now, of course, people who are raised in irrational and authoritarian environments, whether they're schools or churches or the family structure, the sort of family of origin structure, if you're raised in an irrational and authoritarian structure and you get rid of the idea of God,
And you don't also at the same time confront the trauma of having been raised in a bullying and authoritarian structure, then you will run to another bullying and authoritarian structure.
Whether that is socialism, or Marxism, or radical feminism, or political correctness, or the usual lynch mobs and witch hunts of the modern religious person without a god, Then we are not particularly better off.
Religion is safer than statism because your neighbor can have a religious belief.
It does not directly impact you, but when your neighbor believes that your taxes should be doubled, if you get enough of those, you have half your money, so to speak.
So merely saying I reject one form of irrationality is not enough to say I have now embraced Rationality in all of its forms and manifestations.
And it's sort of like pushing in one side of a balloon.
It just pushes out the other side of the balloon even more.
And if you have been raised and your emotional apparatus is tuned to submission or dominance within an oligarchical, hierarchical, aggressive structure, whether it's the state or A church, if that's where your emotional apparatus is, if you take out God at the top of the pyramid, the pyramid still exists.
And it creates a power vacuum.
And into that power vacuum generally rushes the state.
Which is why when Marxism gets rid of religion, it doesn't bring freedom.
It brings secular tyranny.
And we've got the truth about Marx, if you'd like more on some of the mental mechanisms by which that reproduces.
But as I said to Jack, I'd rather have a lot of parents like him, who I strongly disagree with in terms of metaphysics and epistemology, but strongly agree with in terms of ethics, than some atheists who I I may have more agreement with in metaphysics or the nature of reality and epistemology or the study of knowledge, but in terms of ethics, we wildly diverge well.
The ethics is the whole point of philosophy, and so I am much more content with those with whom I share the ethics rather than those who I diverge on the ethics but share more on the epistemology.
Epistemology isn't going to throw me in jail.
Ethics will.
Epistemology is never going to get me sent to a gulag.
Ethics will.
Does that sort of make sense?
Makes sense to me.
Staved off some of the emails I knew he was going to get, so thank you.
Thank you for parsing that out.
And if anyone still has questions about that, feel free to write in.
Happy to schedule you for the show.
And thanks to everyone that called in, and thank you, Steph.
I know you didn't sleep a ton last night.
Thank you for staying up late with us.
My pleasure.
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