Jan. 31, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:50:15
3193 RIDING THE SANDPAPER RAINBOW - Call In Show - January 27th, 2016
Question 1: [1:28] - “I saw a lot of European leftist misconceptions dwindle away just to be replaced by non-stop fear mongering and a dangerous "friend-foe" mentality towards those of the same cultural and historical background. People received real means of causing massive physical harm or even death to those "traitors" whose political preferences are wrong, some can ruin lives or careers just by pointing them as a "separatist" out loud to the right people. Everyone is directed against each other through the heavy abuse of state propaganda. Do you think this is a possibility for the Western world? The rise of the new governments to replace those that are failing, just to use the huge already existing apparatus for oppression and militarization? Or is it more specific to societies with a historically different ideological leaning?”Question 2: [1:01:15] - “I understand what fiat currency is, what I don't understand is; Does the number of digits in all the bank accounts in our country match the amount of currency in circulation? And maybe you could explain negative interest to me?”Question 3: [1:22:33] - “I consider myself a scientific thinker, and like to dabble in some philosophy, I have also worked hard to maintain my Christian faith while doing this (an effort which most of my colleagues have seemed to abandon for one reason or another). I'm looking to challenge myself by talking to you. The scope of the conversation, I would prefer to revolve around the question "how can someone be both logical and a Christian" as this question seems to come up in my day to day life to whomever is unlucky enough to ask me; but if we divert, we divert. In what ways does having a Christian faith preclude a person from being scientifically minded?”
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A couple of great, great questions tonight.
Europe, leftism, multiculturalism, traitors, nationalism, and so on.
A good stew of what, to me, is pretty challenging aspects to where philosophy is meeting onrushing disasters in the modern world.
So, will the Western world survive?
How is it going to do that?
That, of course, is what we talked about.
Second question, and it's quite understandable, what the hell is fiat currency?
What are the numbers of digits in these bank accounts?
Does it match currency in circulation?
And really, negative interest rates?
What does that mean?
Negative interest rates, not just women's response to me as a teenager, but some pretty important stuff from an economic standpoint.
And then...
I'm telling you, I don't know what we're doing.
Attracting some absolutely delightful Christians.
We had a great chat about religion with a very nice young Christian man.
And I talked about some of my historical heartbreaks with regard to religion and God.
And it was a really, really enjoyable chat with some very good insights, I thought, about religion as a whole.
So I hope that you'll have a listen to that.
So, let's boogie!
Alright, well up for us today is Alexander.
He wrote in and said, People received real means of causing massive fiscal harm or even death to those traitors whose political preferences are wrong.
Some can ruin lives or careers just by pointing them at a separatist out loud to the right people.
Everyone is directed against each other through the heavy abuse of state propaganda.
Do you think this is a possibility for the Western world?
The rise of new governments to replace those that are failing just to use the already huge existing apparatus for oppression and militarization?
Or is it more specific to societies with a historically different ideological leaning?
That's from Alexander.
Well, hello, Alex.
How are you doing?
Hey Stefan, I'm doing alright.
It's very nice to be on the show and I very much appreciate the fine work that you do.
Thank you very much.
So, I'm not sure I quite understand Sure, I can elaborate since it's a little bit more of a personal thing.
I'm from Ukraine, so that probably should make it a little bit more obvious.
So, I think most of the point of this is the fact that a lot of the things that Europeans hold, well, apparently hold anyways in the...
In the values are the tolerance, the welfare state, all of that stuff mostly is not rampant around here and is, say, in the Russian media, for example, which I'm currently in Russia, so that's a little bit closer to me.
They actually pretty obviously state how wrong it is and they can very simply describe the problems with it.
At the same rate, you basically go into this kind of deal where all of those things, they just don't matter.
They basically ignore them to continue doing the same kind of growing autocracy thing.
And in Ukraine, it became way, way worse with the new government coming in and basically expanding the power To ridiculous levels.
So I guess that is the point.
The point is, like, is that a possibility for Europe, which is once you kind of change the government, once you go into, like, a different sort of state with a whole...
Well, we know that the current system can't hold.
So I guess my point is, once it actually does go into a bad state, wouldn't it We're very, very likely that we have the same thing as in Ukraine happened.
I'm very paranoid about it, as you can probably tell.
And describe to me what happened in Ukraine that you're concerned about happening in other places?
Basically what happened in Ukraine was...
So we had Yanukovych's government, which was...
It was just basically your regular kind of deal, like crony capitalism, you know, they were giving governmental monopolies to all of the friends of the local parliamentaries and all of that kind of deal.
Until, well, the whole instance with the European Union and joining the EU, programs and all of that came up with the conflict with the Russian government as well and basically the whole thing got turned apart and just to be replaced by something way way worse and that government that replaced it was kind of openly fascistic even I would say.
The media helped with that.
The media first elevated them and then began with Like entirely insane fear-mongering basically like oh it's all the Russians did it and we should be you know on guard about it and they started expanding the power and they started militarizing the country under the pretense of fighting the Russians which were supposedly attacking us which happened later mostly because of that so I guess what I'm afraid about is
It's kind of the similar types of problems occurring, which is the new governments that will be coming in starting on noble and right claims and then resulting in basically fighting against each other.
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to put out a couple of predictions and you can let me know what you think.
The first is that There are two ways to gain resources in this world.
One is to work for them, and the other is to take them from other people.
And this conflict between the makers and the takers is as old as human history, and it occurs within other species as well.
I mean, just think about the chickens who make the eggs and the foxes who eat them.
The chickens are expending energy to make the eggs.
And the foxes are expending energy to eat what the chickens have made.
So there's predators and there's prey in this world.
Now, the way that the predators work fundamentally is that they lie.
The predation is to lie.
And so there's a huge incentive in human society for there to be lies, propaganda.
If you can get people to believe that somehow it is a good moral thing for them to give you their resources, right?
If taxation helps the poor...
If Obamacare helps the sick, if pensions help the old, then you see you're not just a slave to the ruling class, you're the member of the royal moral army of infinite goodness.
And so people will buy the physical emotional kick of endorphins that comes with feeling that they're very good people.
And the ruling class are those who can set up this pellet of, I support welfare because I'm a good person.
I support social security because I'm a good person.
I want to help the Syrian refugees because I'm a good person.
That is a physical drug for people.
We talked about this with Dr.
Barbara Oakley recently on the show.
It's a physical drug for people.
They Desperately need it, they desperately want it, and they become addicted to it.
Now, this is not to say that everyone who tries to do good in this world is a drug addict, because those of us trying to do good by actually speaking the truth are not drug addicts.
We're actually interventionists, right?
We are those trying to get people away from the bad drugs and into the good drugs of reality.
And so if we look at...
Let's just take the European crisis right at the moment.
So everyone gets to say, I want to help the Syrian refugees.
I want to help the Middle Eastern refugees.
And they get to feel very good about it.
And everyone gets to pat them on the back as they pat themselves on the back and say, what a lovely and great person you are.
Wow!
I agree.
I agree.
And everyone feels really, really good.
But like all drug addicts, they don't look at the long-term costs of what it is that they're doing.
It's all about satisfying the craving for moral self-congratulation.
It has nothing to do with actually achieving good in the world.
These people, of course, are going to come to the West, and they're going to fail, by and large.
And they're going to fail for a variety of reasons, ideological reasons.
Islam is incompatible with Western values.
In fact, it's opposed to Western value.
It's one thing to say this plug doesn't fit this hole.
It's quite another thing when it gives you a vast electric shock.
Incompatibility.
There is unbelievable amounts of cousin marriage in Islamic societies ranging from 30% to 40% to 60% to 70% or even more in some countries.
And Cousin marriages are desperately bad for IQ. It costs 8 to 16 IQ points to have regular intermarriage between cousins.
And of course, Muslims are not allowed to marry outside the faith and so you just don't get that, you know, apparently there were some Europeans who boned Neanderthals and that seems to have given the European bane just a little bit of a jetpack when it comes to acceleration.
And so you have a genetically highly compromised population.
The Pakistanis in England have birth defects 13 times that of the white population.
13 times!
It's not gonna work.
It's not going to work.
Culture, language issues, IQ issues, religiosity issues, it's gonna fail.
This is not kindness.
Kindness is a lot tougher Then this sort of girly stuff goes on.
And inviting a genetically compromised population with opposing values and into the welfare state where they won't even need to adapt in order to stay.
It's a recipe for disaster.
And more than disaster.
And I feel so sorry for everyone there.
Like there's this Mike, can you just pick me up that story and give me the link.
This 22-year-old girl working in a migrant center got stabbed.
Yeah, this sounds like a death spiral.
This is kind of what I mean by this.
Hang on, let me finish my thought.
I'm sorry, it's taking a little while.
And this girl, she got stabbed apparently by one of these migrants.
And why?
Why is this all happening?
It's because cultures that adhere to reality, who make the tough choices to adhere to reality, those cultures become very productive.
It's a race between the makers and the takers.
And when the makers beat back the takers, then society can flourish.
But then, there's so much more stuff to take that it's like a convention of chicken eggs for a gang of foxes.
There's so much stuff to take.
Just think of it as a predator-prey relationship.
If something wipes out two-thirds or three-quarters of the predators, what happens?
Well, the prey species flourish.
And what that does is it draws in more predators, who then eat a huge number of prey species, and then, because they're not farmers, the prey species ends up half-starving to death.
They don't have the energy to go and chase the prey species, so the prey species flourish again, which then means that the predator species, right?
Nature, there's no balance in nature.
Everything's trying to screw, eat, and win.
And so, you have to look at this as far as the makers and the takers.
The makers of the prey species and the takers of the predator species and they have the same relationship.
If, for some either ideological or coincidental reason, the taker population is diminished, which is what happens when you have a small government, right?
A small government was, let's diminish the takers.
And therefore, the prey species flourished in the absence of predators, and that was the economic growth in the late 18th, 19th, early 20th century.
And then what happened was, because there were so many prey, the predator species began to multiply, and these are all of the politicians and the bureaucrats and the government workers and the people on pensions, all of the takers.
They all began to multiply, and now what's happening is the taker population Is running out of makers.
And so there is a huge cataclysm, and usually it's war, but it's not going to be this time.
And the take your population relies on lies.
Make a population relies on empiricism, rationality, hard work, grit, dedication, determination, and willing to risk failure, free market virtues, and all that stuff.
But the The taker population simply relies on lies.
And so the taker population is not just taking from all the makers, they're also lying to all the makers, which makes the makers less productive.
So what is the basic information that has been kept away from the European population with regards to this migrant crisis?
Well, that Islam has been trying to conquer Europe since the 7th or 8th century.
And this is a culture that does not forget.
You know, we all live in this blur of now.
Oh, that was last year's video game.
Who's playing that anymore, right?
But these people have these ambitions and goals into their very DNA. And of course, low IQ populations generally don't aggregate a lot of resources because they're low IQ. It's not a lot of...
The aboriginals in Australia have the lowest recorded IQ, an average of 67 or 68, I think.
They're not...
Competing with business moguls in the West, you know?
So these IQ discrepancies, IQ differences have been kept away.
The effects of interbreeding has been kept away.
The hostility of Islam towards non-Islamic cultures has been kept away.
And to some degree, that's a consequence of keeping away the hostility of some aspects of the Jewish faith towards non-Jews, right?
Who are referred to as goyim and cattle and hostility in, you know, not all Jews are called, but the Talmud has this, you know, they're the chosen people, other people should serve them.
The tribalism involved in the ancient faiths, which Christianity has to some degree overcome in many ways, at least since the disastrous wars of religion, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
But the embedded tribalism Within Islam and to some degree within Judaism where the ethics are not universal.
The ethics are for those within the tribe.
The original thou shalt not murder just meant thou shalt not murder Jews or thou shalt not murder those within your own tribe.
The tribe to hell with them, right?
So this tribalism has been hidden.
And that's because the Europeans, to some degree, have been the makers, and other cultures have been the takers, right?
I mean, other cultures want to come live in European countries, but they don't want to adopt European values.
Because if they adopt European values, then they're not the culture they came from, which they're not allowed to do.
They have to keep their own values, but they also want to live in European cultures.
But you can't have both.
If you bring...
Third world medieval cultures to European countries, well, it's killing the goose that lays the gold neck, right?
I mean, it's not going to continue in the way it has.
So, Europe has drifted so far from basic tribal biological reality because they've been lied to so fervently.
By the rulers, right?
And the rulers, the takers have to lie to have the makers cough up their hard-earned goods voluntarily.
It's so efficient.
And so the Europeans have drifted so far from reality and anyone, any culture, any group that denies basic biological, physical, cultural, philosophical, religious, ethnic and tribal realities It's doomed.
You know, if you walk up to a lion that's hungry and pet it as if it's your friend, well, you have forgotten what lions are.
And nature will deal with you.
Nature doesn't abhor a vacuum.
Nature abhors self-deception.
That's what nature's true enemy is, not a vacuum.
Nature abhors falsehood.
If you think you can eat a rock, nature will teach you otherwise.
If you think you can hug a hungry lion, nature will teach you otherwise.
If you forget the difference between predator and prey, nature will teach you otherwise.
If you run from a horse and attempt to ride a tiger, nature will teach you otherwise.
And so this tug and this pull The takers must lie to the makers, but the more they lie to the makers, the more nature is going to reassert itself by wiping out that gene pool.
This is back to the R versus K stuff.
So right now, I believe, I can't prove it, but I think that there's strong evidence for it, but I believe that we are right before a very large It's a reassertion of reality.
The longer you deny basic reality, the worse it is for you, the worse it is for everyone around you.
The longer you deny that smoking is bad for you or that drinking 12 beers a day is bad for you or eating bad food, the longer you delay it, the worse it is.
You can do it once in a while, it's fine.
The longer you delay it, the worse it is.
And we've had a couple of generations now of this soupy, collectivist, socialist, multicultural garbage That is literally getting people killed.
Where everyone is just interchangeable.
Everyone is just like water.
You just pour them in here and they go to that shape.
Then you pour them out of here and you go in there.
Everyone's just malleable.
Everybody's just a product of their environment.
And if you move someone from a desert country to England, they'll just like English.
They'll just pour from one place to another.
Completely interchangeable porn.
Of course, that's the view.
Of the communists.
The communists believe it's all economic determinism.
The only thing that determines who you are is your class, is your environment.
And the funny thing is, of course, that The leftists believe that everyone's a product of their environment and you can just change people willy-nilly, but they themselves steadfastly refuse to reject their own beliefs despite the mountain of evidence and bodies piling up against it.
The idea that human beings are flexible, which is necessary for leftist thought, is denied completely by the leftists who never change the mind about a goddamn thing.
So, Europe has just drifted very far.
From reality and from compassion.
There is only compassion in reality.
There is no compassion in fantasy.
There is no compassion in self-delusion.
There is only greed in self-delusion.
Greed for feeling good about yourself regardless of the consequences.
Because lying to oneself, self-deception, is an addiction.
It has all of the selfishness and cruelty of every other kind of addiction.
The difference is that nobody thinks the drinker is trying to help the world, but these people addicted to lying to themselves about basic reality, they are incredibly cruel, incredibly vicious, incredibly selfish.
And there are times when it shows up, and there are times, you know, this is what I want to ask people.
A young Swedish woman who was employed at an asylum center Died following an attack by a migrant at the center.
This is in Sweden.
The victim, a quite lovely 22-year-old, Alexander Mescher, was rushed to a nearby hospital after being stabbed repeatedly, but later died.
Swedish police have refused to comment on the identity of the man, who is suspected of murdering her, but have stated that he is under arrest and will be charged with murder or manslaughter, and that he was a resident of the center.
The center mostly for unaccompanied minors aged 14 to 17, I'm going to assume.
The motive for the attack remains unknown, and police have not commented to media extensively about the case.
This is from Breitbart.
Police spokesman did tell Swedish newspaper, blah, blah, blah.
The woman who was taken to the hospital this morning died because of the injury she received in connection with the altercation.
Relatives are informed.
And that's really what it comes down to.
Like when people say, ah, you know, I really want to help these migrants, these refugees.
I really want to just help everyone.
Okay, it's...
Is this woman's death worth it for you?
Because this is what addicts do.
They don't care about the consequences.
They don't care about the consequences.
I've got to get my fix.
I don't care if my children are hungry.
I don't care if my wife's out having an affair.
I don't care if my bills are unpaid.
I have to go get my fix.
I don't care about the consequences.
It's the fundamental selfishness of the addiction to virtue, the addiction to pretend virtue, the addiction to lying to yourself.
And stabbed and stabbed until she bled out and died.
So that you could feel good about helping others.
You think about this little boy, this sort of picture of him in the surf, right?
He died, I think, on the way to Italy, drowned.
His father was a human smuggler, vastly overloaded a boat, set out in a bad storm.
Why?
Because he wanted to get to Canada to get his teeth fixed.
They're not refugees.
Most of the people who've left Syria are already in camps in Jordan and in Turkey.
They're already safe.
Already safe!
They're not refugees.
Refugees are like one step ahead of the shrapnel.
These people are already safe, already out.
So is that young woman's death, does it mean anything to you?
Does it give you pause?
And for most people, that's why, you see, this is why the media has to keep things quiet.
And to say, oh, there's some nefarious scheme Maybe there is.
Maybe there is.
But I'll tell you what I think.
The reason why the media has to keep this quiet is because dead, stabbed girls' bodies tend to interfere with the self-congratulary addiction to endorphins that these moral takers need.
It's a roadblock between you and your drug dealer.
Nobody wants to look at the negative consequences.
In Germany, they're going to have to set aside billions and billions of dollars to try and fix the refugees' teeth, which are a complete disaster.
Dental work is extremely expensive, and a lot of dentists are saying, these teeth are so bad, you've got to pull them all and give them dentures.
Or implants, whatever.
Whatever it takes, it doesn't matter.
Which means German kids will go without.
So that people raised in an ideology that wishes to fundamentally destroy Germany can get dangerous.
And any preference for your own group, for your own nation, for your own ethnicity, is perfectly fine, of course, unless you're European, unless you're white.
It's completely evil.
But the reason why the media is covering this stuff up is because people are going from one addiction to another.
They're going from one moral self-congratulation to another.
And they don't care to see facts that interfere with them.
The addict does not want to be seen a picture of his hungry children or his crying wife because that interferes with the selfish path of his addiction.
And these people addicted to this multiculturalism seppuku don't want to see the effects of multiculturalism.
It interferes with their addiction.
So people are very unlikely to listen to reason at this point, which means the whole thing has to play out.
And what that means is that things are going to get worse and worse until there's a giant backlash.
And the giant backlash...
We'll then produce the next round of chaos and mess and all of the people who caused it by their own lying to themselves, lying to others, attacking anyone who speaks the truth, all of the usual hallmarks of petty, vindictive, selfish addiction.
All those people will be shocked, shocked and horrified, and will then attack anyone who's trying to defend themselves.
And the people who are trying to defend themselves will either listen to those people And be washed away in the endless scrub of history and evolution that nature reserves for those who steadfastly deny reality.
They'll either listen to those and be washed away or they won't listen to them and they will survive and they will emerge bloody, tragically, shakingly, horrifyingly victorious and Hopefully for a generation or two people will remember some basic facts about biology and culture and religious hatreds and hostilities and the true nature of the people coming in.
And then of course there'll be a temptation to start forgetting about it and the takers will emerge and start lying to everyone again.
And this is of course what philosophers, good philosophers, honorable philosophers are working to try to oppose.
Where the lies are, there are the takers.
Where the takers are, there are the predators on the species.
And where there are the predators on the species, there is the end of civilization.
So to combat lies is truly to save everything in the world that is worth saving.
So that's the cycle that I think we're stuck inside.
What do you think?
Yes, you really brought it home with this one.
I don't even have much to add.
And this is kind of The big problem here, because I don't think that people are fundamentally learning from this whole mess.
Like, in Ukraine, I still talk to people about the stuff that happened, and I generally get the response of, yeah, this government is just weak and directionless.
We just need a strong leader, and everything is going to be fine.
And they're just repeating the same mistakes, and it's terrifying to me.
I just don't know if there is anything to be done with it.
Well, the addict either stops the addiction because of love or they stop the addiction because of despair.
Either they look and say, wow, this is really going in a bad direction.
My children are hungry.
My wife hates me.
I'm in danger of losing my job.
Everything I've worked for.
All the people who rely on me.
There's an old Simpsons.
The Simpsons where Homer is drinking too much ends up going for a bike ride with his wife instead.
Either it's because of love.
That people stop their addiction.
Or they stop their addiction out of despair.
And most people end up, I think, ending their addiction out of despair.
At least that's the way it seems to be going right now.
You see, any truth teller who comes along, any truth teller who comes along who tries to stage an intervention in the collective Self-destruction of self-delusion that is occurring in the West.
Any truth-teller who comes along is interfering with the drug and must be attacked.
You know, try standing between a drunk and his drink.
I think you've had enough.
I remember when I was a waiter many years ago at a restaurant.
There was a little bar in the back.
I remember seeing a bartender have to take on drunk after drunk that he wanted to stop serving because they were too drunk.
Come on, man!
Give me a goddamn drink, or I'm coming right over the bar and get it myself!
Belligerence.
That's what happens.
So, when you look at people who are telling the truth about, say, ethnicity and IQ, or incompatible cultures...
I'm thinking about people like Ann Coulter, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfridson, Eric Turkheimer, other people who are trying to remind people about the realities of belief systems, of compatibilities.
They're attacked fundamentally.
Because they are interfering with the drug.
You know, this amazing new term that has emerged just over the last couple of months, C-U-C-K. Which is very close to cock.
Which is one of the reasons...
You know, the only difference is that there's a bent U in the middle, which is a flaccid cock.
A cock is a bent cock.
And there is...
There is an interference.
These people, they've become pathetic.
All addicts from the outside look pathetic and from the inside, all they do is they spend their entire life lying to themselves and justifying themselves and manipulating themselves and manipulating others.
It's all just to get the drug.
And anyone who says cultures that oppose each other are incompatible.
The fact that this needs to be said is so astonishing.
That importing millions of people from a culture that wishes your demise cannot end well.
It cannot end well because either these people are going to be true to their beliefs, in which case civil war will result, or they're completely manipulative hypocrites, in which case they're not going to succeed in a free market anyway.
So, the people who are reminding people of these incompatibilities They receive all of the pent-up and venting rage of people interfering with the drunk reaching for his drink.
And we're all just bartenders now.
Go home multiculturalism, you're drunk.
Exactly, that's the thing though, you keep doing that and it seems to have absolutely no effect.
Like, I've just seen that whole thing unfold for two years now and I think this was, basically Ukraine is like, for me anyways, a warning for what may just happen in Europe.
It's like, you know, guys stop relying on government so much, stop doing this, stop doing that.
And I talk to many Europeans these days, and basically they're repeating the same kind of statements that I heard from people before the whole shebang here went down, which is, you know, oh, why are you worrying?
Everything is going to be all right, and you're just being paranoid about these issues.
Everything is going to resolve itself.
Nothing ever resolves itself, though.
Well, in a way they're kind of right.
You know?
I mean, in a way they're kind of right.
Because they're saying, I don't have the spine to stand up for myself.
I don't have the spine to resist predation upon myself, my family, my gene pool, my culture, my history, my country, my nation, my group.
Okay.
So, it will resolve itself, you know?
I mean, if you're some villager and Genghis Khan and his army, and you're like, well, I'm not going to resist, it's going to resolve itself.
Well, it will, and it will resolve itself with you being killed and your women being taken as sexual slaves, right?
And so, yeah, I mean, they're basically saying, look, I'm going to hide out here, right?
Being a cuck is a perfectly valid evolutionary strategy in certain situations.
It's just kind of repulsive to anyone with a spine or self-respect.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, this idea of waiting it out is just also very popular in Russia these days.
Basically, it kind of mirrors Europe in this way.
It's just not in the multiculturalism way, but in the whole, we just got to sit it out and everything's going to be fine.
And we just got to keep giving up our liberties one after another, and then everything's going to be fine.
It's just ridiculous to me.
Right.
Right.
Well, no, I agree.
And of course, there is a very peaceful revolution that is available, which is, as I've talked about, the against me argument and confronting people on their statism, which, you know, if a lot of people did it, it would be very powerful, but if only a few people do it, it's not, right?
So that's, you know, having put the argument out there for I don't know, seven or eight years now, and seeing that very few people are doing it, well, that's, you know, people are, you know, I know people are sort of confused about my path and so on, and I don't want to get into it now because it's a call-in show.
It's supposed to be, I mean, it's about you, but the only thing I will say is that I have close to a decade's more information now than I did when I started.
So if I still advocated all the same things as when I started, that would be to say that massive amounts of new information and new changes in the world, particularly in demographics, should never ever change anything that I'm doing.
But as an empiricist, you have to adapt to reality.
And this massive migration of genetically compromised Western Haiti migrants, Yeah, that's kind of a factor.
You know?
You don't just keep playing tennis when bombs are dropping.
Sorry, go ahead.
I think this is just part of the larger puzzle, though.
It's just, you know, people basically doing the same thing, which is they allow others to make decisions for them.
They basically shift responsibility to others and then say, hey, I had nothing to do with it.
It's all them.
You just got to blame them and, you know, have somebody else come in and fix everything for us.
And it never happens.
And they just basically, we keep repeating that same cycle that you have mentioned.
Yeah, I mean, yes, absolutely.
And there are, you know, some disasters are a boost to truth, right?
People started listening to friend of the show, Peter Schiff, right?
Peter Schiff started getting listened to a lot more after the housing crisis, right?
So some disasters are a boost for truth.
And, you know, it's natural that when you are on the advanced vanguard of bringing a truth, in this case it's just bringing back a truth about cultural or ethnic incompatibilities, when you're on the vanguard of bringing truth back to people, the first thing they'll do is hate you.
Of course, of course they do.
Because if you're right, it's highly inconvenient for them and it interferes with their pursuit of their addiction, right, of their moral self-congratulation.
But what happens is you have to put the facts out before the disaster, because after the disaster, people's weaselly instinct for self-preservation will have them turn back to you and say, you're now our friend with no reference to them having attacked you for a long time.
And then they'll say, save us, right?
And, I mean, you can see this, I think, is going to start to happen.
You know, it's almost like I think the Muslim migration is the West's attempt to cure itself of radical feminism.
This is an interesting logical change.
Yeah, I see it.
You see, right?
You see.
I mean, what's going to happen is that these women are going to start to be increasingly preyed upon, and then they're going to have to start turning to Western men.
To save them, right?
Because women relied on the state.
Again, collectivization, lots of exceptions, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
But a lot of Western women have relied upon the state.
And because they have relied upon the state, they haven't had to be nice to men anymore.
But then if they start getting groped a lot, if they start being afraid to leave their house, they're going to start whining and bleating and running to the men.
Save us!
Save us!
It's like, no, no, no.
You don't need us.
You've got the government.
Just call them.
Remember how in Cologne and all the other cities across Germany, New Year's Eve, there were lots and lots of policemen around.
Lots and lots and lots of policemen around.
So why didn't the state save the women?
Because the state can't save the women.
The state can bribe the women.
The state can't save the women from this kind of stuff.
The government you loved, the government you relied on for your welfare and your health care and your old age pensions and all the other stuff, that women generally need a lot more than men, the government that you relied upon did nothing to save you.
So then I'm going to have to start turning back to the men and say, men, you've got to help us.
You've got to save us.
We need your help.
We need your protection.
We need your strength.
We need your martial abilities.
And the men, because they're well-instructed, By the Wizards of MGTOW and other men's rights movements, the men are going to quite rightly say, oh, okay, so you want me to saddle up and protect you.
What special benefits am I going to get in return for that little endeavor?
And then the women are going to have to figure out, oh, okay, well, we need the men again.
So I guess we're going to have to start being nicer to the men and give them some privileges because they have this danger called protecting us.
And so...
This is the kind of cycle in history that happens.
Women rely on the state.
So women don't need men.
So women can say, oh, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Yeah, men who...
Oh, wait.
Muslims around?
Ooh, can I get a...
Well, it's like that woman in Missouri.
The professor, or assistant professor of journalism, whatever the hell she was, when that student reporter was trying to report on this racism rally.
Can I get some muscle over here?
Ah, there's a strong and independent woman calling on men to come beat someone up for her, right?
But this is the reality.
They relied on the state, and then the state let these people in, which is making German women feel unsafe, so then they're going to have to start turning to German men for protection.
And that is going to rebalance some things between the genders.
Is this what I want to happen?
Hell no.
Hell no.
And of course the women will start by shaming, right?
They'll start by Attempting to get the men to...
Well, you owe me protection.
A real man would stand up and protect his woman.
Well, really.
And have real women been standing up to protect men from the attacks of misogyny and patriarchy and false rape accusations and early deaths and workplace injuries and predatory family courts for the last 60 years?
Have a lot of women been standing up when it would come in?
Is it harder to stand up and physically protect someone or is it harder to stand up and verbally protect someone?
Well, the latter is easier and women in general have failed at that over the last 50 or 60 years and allowed the reputations and soul and Balls and happiness and pride and self-respect of men to be ground under the combine harvester of leftism with Neri saying boo to a mouse about it.
So women have failed to protect men and the men are going to say, okay, well, now you want us to protect you.
And this may occur out of attacks from other cultures.
This may also occur just because government runs out of money.
Governments run out of money.
You know, that's my thought.
So the women are going to start to, oh, you've got to protect us.
Like, okay, well, you failed to protect me.
Why the hell should I protect you?
And then there will be a giant, a giant, top of the arc moment in human history.
And I'm saying this to all the lovely ladies out there.
There will be A moment in human history that will be studied for thousands of years in the future, if there is to be a future.
And I will tell you what that moment will be.
At some point, if the men have any pride and any self-respect, and I strongly urge that they look deep inwards, re-scoop their balls from the graves of their fathers and put them back on, because at some point, the women are going to have to say to the men, In Europe and in North America and perhaps around the world as a whole, they're going to have to say to the men, we're sorry.
And I will tell you this, I dated a lot of women in my life, and I will tell you one great secret.
The first woman I ever found who could provide a genuine apology, do you know what I did?
I married her.
Because women are going to have to say to men, sorry, sorry we let all of the leftist feminist assholes chew your balls off.
Sorry about that.
Sorry we ended up relying on the state and treating you guys like crap.
Sorry that we ended up wasting our prime sexual attraction years on a bunch of pump and dump jerk boys before trying to attach like vampires to a dying leukemia patient to a beta male before then Grinding him through the court system and taking everything that's left of him when there wasn't much before.
Sorry!
Sorry!
Sorry about all of that.
But it'd have to be a genuine apology, because I don't think we should take anything less.
Yes, see, this kind of ties into the bigger issue, though, that I have, which is...
I don't think that apology is coming, quite frankly.
Not yet, no.
No, of course not yet.
That's a thing, though.
At some point.
Like, when you have those social explosions, and, oh, by God, that was proven here...
Whenever you have one, and it happened in the 90s and it happened now and in 2008 to some degree, basically what you have is people flocking to those with some degree of power to, hey, defend us from this and defend us from that.
I just don't know if it's going to end.
Basically, this whole thing, well, it's going to explode sooner or later.
But I'm just thinking that after the explosion, you will basically get the same thing just under different guys.
You know, just under different colors, you get the same people trying to attempt the same things.
And I don't think people have the capacity to say no to them at this point.
Oh, yeah.
No men will say no.
Yeah, men will say no.
Because women will first of all try to bully and try to shame, you know, all of the weakling manipulative crap that when one parasite tries to attach to another one.
But, you know, hopefully men will stay and say, no, no, no, you guys got a lot to atone for if you want us to strap on the vandalists and get busy.
I mean, you got a lot to atone for.
And I'm really hoping that men will hold out for that because this has been a brutal couple of generations to be a man, especially a white man.
Especially a white man.
I mean, just look at this guy who was shot Tuesday.
Just yesterday, right?
This Nevada Ranchers, right?
He was shot.
Now, eyewitnesses say that he was shot with his hands in the air.
We don't know.
We don't know.
But if it was, I don't know, let's say a young black thug who just robbed a convenience store In order to get materials to make good blunts and spliffs, the media would be all over it.
And the sympathy poured out for said young thug Michael Brown was horrifying, given who he was.
And let's just say you may agree or disagree with their cause, but they are fighting to keep their land and their homes.
They are fighting for the freedom of their Fellow ranchers, they're fighting against an increasingly arbitrary and expansive federal government power.
Oh, that's a bit more noble than the whole...
It's, yeah, a little bit more noble than I need to blaze something up and I gotta wrap my weed in it.
So I'm gonna push a little store clerk...
I was saying that it's also a bit more noble than basically what we have here, which is, like, people are not even, well, I mean, you know the whole Donbass thing, right?
So, the problem there is that Donbass, the civil war that happened in Ukraine, happening still, but, you know, we have the ceasefire right now.
But the idea is that you have...
You have kind of people from both sides and it's just a mess because they don't have any sort of stand to make, basically.
You have people who are fighting this bloody war and they don't even have a good reason for it.
It's just, you know, I was sent here from the Ukrainian side and, well, some a little bit more complicated stuff from the pro-Russian side.
But this whole idea is a little bit buffling to me because you just don't have ground to stand off.
Why are you fighting a war?
You know, this is giving me a little...
And men are very good at knowing when war is coming.
And I think one of the reasons why men are letting themselves get fat and just sitting around masturbating and playing video games is like, okay, well, I want to be medically unfit for war.
People think that it's going to shorten their lifespan.
I would argue that it may be an unconscious desire to extend and expand it.
I mean, the number of potential recruits that the army is having to turn away because they can't...
They can't pass any physicals.
They're too fat, too unhealthy.
Guys in their 20s.
No, no, we still have conscription here.
You have tons of people.
Oh, you're different.
I'm talking about America.
Oh, yeah, I know.
But I'm saying that here we have people who drop out of that consistently for a variety of reasons.
And now that this whole thing came up, basically you barely can get 2,000 people from a million people's town.
Because nobody wants to go there, because people are very good at knowing when their life is at a threat and when they have nothing to actually go and die for there.
It's, you know...
Right.
And so, there's been, for me at least, I've always had this principle, or at least since my college roommate provided it to me because he was studying biology.
This principle, you treat people the best you can, first time you meet them, and after that they treat you.
And...
And what that means is that if someone deals with you well, you deal with them well.
If they cheat you, you're not obligated to deal with them well anymore.
You can cheat them back with no bad conscience or whatever.
But if somebody who has cheated you then becomes better, then you can start to treat them better and so on.
That's generally the best winning strategy for this sort of prisoner's dilemma and all the other behind the fog stuff that we have to guesstimate at in life.
But, you know, I've said this before, but...
White people have tried lowering and eliminating white preference, in-group preference for white people.
We're gonna extend and expand, we're gonna sacrifice our own interests in the hopes that other groups will follow suit and that just really hasn't happened.
Where are the Black Lives Matter protesters when a white guy is shot by the police with his hands up?
They don't give a shit.
They don't care.
They don't care.
Why?
Because he's a white guy.
If this was a black guy, They'd be all over it.
I'd be down there protesting, chanting.
Newspaper would be curling.
So this is the relentless, and I hate being put in this position, but I have to follow the facts.
I have to follow the best practices and the best principles.
I mean, I'd be thrilled if there were Black Lives Matter protesters down there saying, you all shot this guy with his hands up who was trying to take a stand for something he believes in.
There was no need for it.
But they're not.
They don't care.
Along when this young man and his son got shot by two black cops, they don't care.
They don't care.
They don't care.
When this, I think, a Serbian fellow was beaten up by a bunch of black youths looking for a white guy to kill, and he was beaten to death in front of his fiancée by hammers.
They don't care.
They don't care.
They don't care because he's not black.
You know, and I hate being in this position.
In this position of saying, okay, if y'all don't care when white people get shot, why should I care when black people get shot?
Because to have no in-group preference among people who do have an in-group preference is to lose.
Is to lose.
And when Donald Trump says, I'm tired of America losing.
I'm guessing, I mean, I don't think this is anything in his mind, not that I know his mind, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of white people saying, you know what, we keep losing.
Especially white males.
We keep losing.
We keep losing because we've given up our in-group preference and nobody else has.
Who are the Muslims for?
They're for the Muslims.
Who are the blacks for?
They're for the blacks.
Who are the Hispanics for?
They're for the Hispanics.
Who are the Jews for?
They're for the Jews.
Who are the whites for?
Everyone else.
Which is why they're getting eviscerated.
Which is why they're getting exploited.
Which is why they keep on losing.
That's also kind of problematic because, well, like, thinking about this, we have Like, the in-group preferences that start appearing, for instance, among, like, here, among the Slavic people, are generally, like, the white group trying to divide itself, which is, and, like, basically fight others in that same group.
Like, oh, we have that cultural preference and you have this one, therefore we must fight for this arbitrary piece of land.
And I just can't comprehend it when you have bigger issues popping up all over the world that...
Well, it would probably be better if we would tackle them together rather than through all of those conflicts that we arbitrarily make for each other.
I don't know.
Right.
No, I agree.
I agree.
And, you know, it's a horrible thing to see the world in this, like with this clarity, with this reality, with this relentless glaring light of empirical truth.
But I think people are kind of getting it unconsciously.
Like, I mean, white people are tired of every time there's a conflict between a white person and a minority, everyone takes a side of the minority.
And it's got nothing to do with white fundamentally in this sense, in that there are minorities around the world, but if those minorities are white and Christian, nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
You know, the Christians who are in the migrants are being relentlessly abused and beaten up in these camps.
Nobody cares because they're Christians, you see.
So everybody else is relentlessly in-group focused.
In general, again, tons of exceptions, bloody usual caveats.
But in general, every other group has massive in-group preferences.
You know, like if a white person says, We don't marry non-whites around here.
Okay.
That's racist, right?
Bad guy, white supremacist, whatever, right?
But if a Jew says, we don't marry non-Jews, well, you see, that's fine.
If black women say that black men should only marry black women, well, that's what?
Pride in your own race?
But If a white man says that white women should only marry white men, well, he's a racist.
And, look, please understand, I'm not arguing for any of these positions, I'm just, this is the general anti-white hysteria of, and people are just tired of it, tired of it.
You know, white people, Europeans, Christians, they're very nice, very nice people, until they finally get that their niceness is getting them screwed.
It is rather interesting because this issue actually was a part of why the Soviet Union collapsed as well.
They tried to make this whole Soviet man thing in which you would completely tear down the border between the nations.
And basically what it turned into is those in the middle, kind of Russians, Ukrainians, basically getting the shorter end of the stick because, hey, you got to move the stuff to the poorer guys, right?
Well, this is, yeah, I mean, this is the, I mean, one of the many, many failures of communism was this idea that you should have no personal preferences, no preferences for your own advantage.
Right.
That's collectivism as a whole.
Sacrifice yourself for the sake of the group.
And...
It's antibiological, fundamentally, right?
And this is another reason why it doesn't work.
You can shame people into not having self-preference for a while, but it generally reasserts itself.
Closed borders for Israel.
Open borders for white countries.
Israel for Jews.
No white countries for white people.
It's sad.
All the multiculturalists are only screaming at white countries.
Where are all the protests that Japan has to open its doors for the Inuit?
These things don't exist.
It's the pathological altruism and self-criticism of the white culture that is not working well Again, I'm just most terrified of the fact that this whole thing, it can't end well, and it most likely won't.
And when worst comes to worst, it's Well, you get the idea.
It might be that people will just flock towards those that can offer them some goodies.
And basically, instead of realizing the underlying issues, you would instead get...
I wouldn't go as far as going World War III because we do have nuclear weapons and all of that.
But we would probably get a lot of civil wars and local conflicts, which would be terrifying, is what I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
I mean, the basic reality is that in the long run, self-deluded organisms die.
And there's nothing that can be done to stop it.
Right?
I mean, if an entire town suddenly believes that they can breathe underwater, they go running into the ocean, well, what can you do?
You can't.
Individuals, maybe you can restrain them.
Entire cultures.
What's going to happen?
Liars are going to become dyers.
That's all.
Liars are going to die.
Liars are going to die.
That's a grim note to end the conversation on.
I don't think I have anything to add.
This hits the nail on the head.
Honestly, this is basically what I wanted to ask.
Yeah, you got it.
All right.
Well, thanks, man.
Great call.
Keep us posted about what's happening on the far side of the whitey-verse, and we'll talk to you again.
Thanks, man.
Yep.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right.
Well, up next is Eric.
Eric wrote in and said, I understand what fiat currency is.
What I don't understand is, does the number of digits in all the bank accounts in our country match the amount of currency in circulation?
And maybe you could explain negative interest to me.
That's from Eric.
Some negative interest in the topic is occurring within my brain, but that's all right.
That's all right.
Happy to help if I can.
How are you doing, Eric?
Good.
You?
I'm good.
I'm well.
Thank you.
Well, I'm not going to go into—there's a bunch of different ways of measuring money, right?
There's money in circulation, money in savings, money in assets, and all that kind of stuff, right?
So, you know, the U.S. has like $30 trillion in assets, got a $15 trillion GDP, $20 trillion debt, $180 trillion unfunded liabilities.
You know, we can bat around these numbers, and if you want, you can look into M1, M2, M3, and I'm not going to—because, you know, trying to describe that stuff verbally is not that much fun for— Anyone.
But fiat currency basically is you can type whatever you want into your own bank account.
But only the government can do it, because if you do it, you're a counterfeiter and it's immoral, right?
The US basically is a...
Think of a hacker who can get into his bank account, right?
And can enter whatever he wants, but there'll never be an oversight, like nobody will ever have a problem with him.
Well, he'll just keep hitting zeros as long as he wants, right?
And, I mean, he won't make $10 trillion for himself because that would dilute the value.
And he'd, you know, do enough that he could retain his purchasing power, but not so much that he would completely destroy himself with inflation.
And basically, the U.S. has been hacking the currency for 100 years.
We've got a video called The Truth About Government Debt, which goes into this in...
More detail.
But it's a fundamental power that governments around the world constantly thirst for.
And most of the governments have achieved it.
And it simply is the power to create money.
It allows them to cover up the net loss that government programs are.
The government promises you $1,000 and they have to tax you $2,000 to provide it.
And that bad deal is very evident to everyone if there's no fiat currency.
If the government can print that $1,000 and hand it to you, Then you'll get mad at the shopkeeper 12 to 18 months later when the inflation hits and nobody will ever figure out that it was the government printing money.
So it is one of the most powerful, read, destructive powers that the government has.
For 170 years, I just remembered this from the Ted Cruz presentation, please go and see the truth about Ted Cruz.
And for 170 years, the government's money printing was to some degree limited by gold, and there were a bunch of other currencies, the greenbacks and some currencies during the Civil War that were introduced that became worthless Zimbabwe-style.
They just printed too much money, you know, like the Mark in 1920s Weimar Republic before Germany.
Before Hitler took over and created the Deutschmark and got rid of all of this money printing crap, it's just another one of the makers and the takers.
People make stuff, takers make money.
Like make money by creating money and that allows them to tax people in the silent theft of inflation which hits the poorest and those on fixed incomes the worst.
So that's Currency sort of in a nutshell, and there's a whole bunch of other complications, some of which I understand and some of which I'd rather shoot myself in the balls than understand, but that stuff as a whole, if you want to know what negative interest rates are, so interest rates occur because we're mortal, right?
Which means we would rather have something now than something later, right?
If I said to you, I will give you a computer now or I'll give you the same computer in a year, what would you say?
Computer now.
Right.
For two reasons.
One is that you get an extra year's use of the computer.
And number two, the computer is going to be less valuable in a year because it will have lost features relative to other computers, right?
It will have less RAM, less processing speed, less good screen, all that kind of stuff, right?
So because we want stuff now rather than later, and because everyone wants stuff now rather than later, the market has introduced a lovely little thing called interest, which is to gauge how much do you want something now rather than later.
So if I say, I would give you a dollar today or a thousand dollars tomorrow, what would you say?
I'd take a thousand dollars tomorrow.
You'd take a thousand dollars tomorrow.
Of course you would, right?
Yep.
And so, somewhere, but if I said I give you a dollar today or a dollar tomorrow, you'll say I'll take the dollar today, right?
Yep.
And so, in order to delay your gratification, you have to be paid.
Okay.
And how you get paid as a lender is through interest, right?
Yep.
Because if I lend you $100 for a year, that's $100 I don't get to use for the year, and you do.
Mm-hmm.
So I have to defer my gratification a hundred dollars worth and you don't have to a hundred dollars worth so you gotta pay me for that privilege because stuff now is better than stuff later.
So you're gonna pay me five percent.
You're gonna pay me five bucks on the hundred or whatever it's gonna be, right?
So that's interest in a nutshell.
It's just based on time preference and in a free market interest calibrates between present consumption and future consumption.
Like if everyone decided to save their money For five years, the economy would go haywire, right?
Because nobody would be buying anything, which means that there wouldn't be any price signals for what people should be investing in or creating or entrepreneuring their way into or whatever, right?
Whereas if everyone spent all of their money right now, right, there'd be no savings for anybody to borrow to start new businesses or to upgrade their equipment or anything like that.
So there's this fine balance that society needs between present consumption and future consumption and that's negotiated by interest rates.
So if there aren't enough people borrowing money, In other words, there's less demand for present consumption.
What's going to happen to interest rates?
They're going to go down?
They're going to go down.
I like that little valley girl question.
Like down, totally?
But yeah, they're going to go down because whenever there's not a demand for something, the price will tend to fall, right?
And so if everybody wants to borrow money now and doesn't want to wait, what's going to happen to interest rates?
They're going to go up.
They're going to go up, right?
And so if people aren't saving enough, then the banks will have to start paying more interest in the savings accounts, right?
Okay.
Because there's a demand.
Because the interest rates have gone up, it means they can lend out the money at 10%, which means they can afford to pay you a couple of more points on your savings account, which means you're going to put your money into your savings account rather than Yeah, okay.
So there's this whole fine calibration that occurs in a free market when interest rates are set by the free market, which is incredibly efficient at smoothing out our hunger for present consumption versus the value of deferring gratification.
It's an incredible thing to watch in the free market just how lightly and delicately this constant system is allocating all of the scarce resources to their greatest and most valuable use.
And of course, we haven't seen that for a long time, right?
Because the government sets interest rates in general, either directly or indirectly.
And the reason that the government, once the government takes open, sorry, once the government takes over the creation and production of currency, it has to immediately start controlling interest rates.
Why is that?
Because the currency has no value in and of itself.
Yeah, because no, no, it's because the government starts printing a bunch of money.
And what happens when the government starts printing a bunch of money?
Inflation.
Inflation.
Yeah.
So when there's inflation, what happens to interest rates?
They go down.
That is not correct.
So let's say if I put you in the driver's seat, you'll get this right away because your greedy mammal brain will kick in, right?
And that's good, right?
So let's say that you are going to lend me $100, but you know Or you're pretty sure that in a year, that $100 is only going to be worth $90.
In other words, there's 10% inflation, right?
Or whatever is close to that, right?
So, are you going to accept me paying back 5% if there's 10% inflation?
No, I'm going to want 20% because it's 10% inflation.
Yeah, so to make 10%, you've got to take into account inflation, right?
And so, when the government starts printing a bunch of money, inflation starts to kick in, and that means interest rates have to go through the roof, right?
Okay.
And the government doesn't like that, because the government also borrows money, and when you borrow money, if you're on a variable rate policy, then when interest rates go up, what happens to your repayments?
Yeah, when inflation goes up, the interest rates go up on what you have to pay back, and this is of course the This is the housing crash in a nutshell.
Yeah.
So, in your free market, the fractional reserve, how the bank loans out money that doesn't really exist, do you agree with that or do you not agree with that?
In a free market, I don't care.
It's like saying, should people ever gamble?
I don't know.
I don't want to pay their losses.
Fractional reserve basically goes like this.
If you have a million dollars in the bank, you can lend out More than a million dollars, right?
But this is the same in trading, right?
Margin trading, right?
So if I have a thousand dollars to trade, then what that means is I can cover any loss up to a thousand dollars, right?
So I can actually buy a lot more than a thousand dollars worth of stock.
I just have to cut myself off if I start to lose about $1,000.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So I might buy $10,000 worth of stock, but if they go down 10%, I've got to sell because I've only got $1,000 to cover the losses.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I got you.
Okay.
So fractional reserve banking, or what we're talking about basically is the bank's ability to loan out more than it has in the bank with the understanding that most of the loans are going to pay off.
And a few of the loans will be lost.
It's natural.
Hit by a bus or whatever.
But they lend out multiples.
Now, the value of that is that they can pay people a higher interest rate.
Okay.
Because by lending out a bunch of money, they can make more money if all goes well, right?
Doesn't that cause inflation, though?
In a sort of free market environment, I don't think that it would.
Because they're not creating money out of thin air because everyone is still going to have to be liable for the losses.
Because things will work out somewhat well and somewhat badly, if that makes sense.
Now, I have no problem with the bank lending out multiples of money I just don't want to cover the losses, right?
So, I mean, the way that it works for the government...
And that's what the federal deposit insurance...
Right.
Federal deposit insurance has meant that banks can go to town, and up to the 07 crisis, some financial institutions were like 30 to 1, right?
Lending out 30 to 1, which means if they lose...
If they lose...
3%.
Their entire capital is wiped out.
Now, that's way too risky for me.
When it comes to money, I'm like a hoarder.
Money to me is like, it's hard to make, right?
I mean, I rely on donations.
Mike and I work like dogs to churn our show.
We did like three shows yesterday.
We're doing two shows today.
I did actually three, but we're not published.
Four, but we're not publishing two.
But anyway, so we work like dogs.
Money's hard to come by.
Donations can be tough to extract from people.
And so I don't want to put my money I don't want to put my money in anything risky because I'm a podcaster.
It's already risky enough, thank you very much.
I don't need that risk as well in my money.
So myself, I would rather put my money into something that paid less interest and was more stable.
Now other people They want to put their money into a savings account that has more upside, but in the free market generally, that which has more upside has more downside, naturally, right?
You know, there's an upside in that you could win the lottery.
That's a huge upside, right?
The downside is that it's extremely unlikely, right?
And so if you want to...
Try and make, if you're willing to make and lose, right?
If you want a bank account that's going to pay you 10% real interest, then the bank is going to have to lend out an excess of its reserves.
It simply won't be able to generate that otherwise.
Because it'll be having to lend its money out at something higher than that to cover its overhead and all that.
So if you're comfortable, like in a real bank, let's say that you're comfortable with like a percentage or two of real return reserves.
By sticking your money in a bank.
Okay, well then the bank is not going to be able to lend out that much.
It doesn't need to lend out that much because it's not paying you that much.
But if you want to put your money into a bank that's going to pay you 10% a year, then you're going to have to recognize that that bank might go bust.
Okay.
Higher risk.
Higher risk.
Yeah.
Everything that pays more is more risky.
We all know that from Vegas, right?
Now what happens, of course, is that people get greedy and they want to keep the money That they win, right?
Yeah.
Sorry, I shouldn't say that they win.
I'm thinking back to the Vegas thing.
So people get greedy and they say, wow, this bank is paying 7% and this other bank is only paying 3%.
So I'm going to take all my money and I'm going to put it in this bank that pays 7% because that's like more, right?
And everyone's thrilled and excited and happy until that bank goes bust because the market zigged when they were zagging or whatever it is.
And then everyone's run screaming to the government, right?
Mm-hmm.
But the people who put their money in the 3% then are taxed to pay for the people who put their money in the 7%.
But the people, if the 7% bank hadn't gone bust, there's no way that the 7% people would have given some of their money to the 3%er, so why the hell should it go the other way?
Right, so John Allison, a guy who was on this show, who was head of a bank, has a great bit in his book.
Where some guy during the housing crisis calls up and he says, hey man, he calls up the bank.
He says, look, we've got to renegotiate.
You've got to renegotiate my interest rate because the value of my house just went down from like a million dollars to half a million dollars.
So you've got to cut me a break, right?
You've got to save me some money here.
And this guy is the CEO. He says, hand me that phone.
He talks to the guy.
He says, okay, tell me it.
Let's say, I'm the bank, let's say that the value of your house, instead of going from a million dollars to five hundred thousand dollars, had gone from a million dollars to two million dollars, would you be calling us up to give us some money?
No.
So don't expect it in return.
So people like, they want to do the stuff that is risky, that is high reward and all that, and then, if it doesn't work, They run to the government and want the government to cover their losses.
Now, of course, a lot of times, it's not just them.
In the 30s, the government was doing all kinds of crazy stuff with the money supply, which we've got a video about the Great Depression, which you can find on the channel.
All of that being said, negative interest rates are...
I don't even know what to say.
Negative interest rates are paying people To consume now and charging them to consume later.
In other words, I said, listen man, I'm going to give you $110 now or I'm going to give you $100 in a year.
What are you going to take?
$110 now.
Of course you are!
That's negative interest rates.
That's paying people to consume now rather than later.
And it's complete reversal of any kind of economic sanity.
And the reason, of course, one of the reasons that it's done is to stimulate consumer spending in the here and now while preying upon capital accumulation, in other words, that which can be used to upgrade worker productivity in the future.
Is there precedent for negative interest?
Has it ever happened?
Like for a federal bank?
I don't know whether it's ever occurred in a free market environment.
I could see...
I don't know.
I mean...
I can't see how it could occur.
Maybe that's a failure of imagination.
I mean, the only economic driver could be that everyone is saving so much that nobody wants to borrow money because it's so cheap.
So then you might as well try and get people to spend now.
But I still can't see why you would pay people to spend money in the here and now rather than the future.
When I wrote this question, it seemed like a possibility in the media that the Bank of Canada, anyway, was going to explore negative interest.
Right.
But that's a government thing.
And they'll do that right before an election, perhaps, to stimulate economic activity so people can say, look, the cocaine has cured everyone's depression.
So there won't be a crash later, I'm sure.
Right?
So, yeah, governments might have an incentive to do that.
Just as drug dealers have an incentive to spike their wares with baby powder and bleach.
I don't know.
Maybe there's some phenomenon where it's occurred, but I'm virtually certain that there's no way in a free market that money would be inherently worth more But people would be paying you to consume now rather than defer.
I can't see how negative interest rates could occur in a free market.
Maybe occasionally in a very specific area.
That's just weasel words.
I can't think of one.
Yeah, I don't see it happening either.
It sounds like leftists double think.
Right.
You know, leftists, of course, love to put government programs in and then say, capitalism doesn't work.
told you so uh are you you from America I think you're Canadian, eh?
Canadian.
Did you just say A because I'm Canadian?
I'm a boot nut.
No, I was born in Ireland.
I grew up in England and was dragged over to Canada when I was 11.
Although, I will say that I liked Canada when we first got here.
The snow was massive amounts of fun.
Like in England, when it snows, everybody just like goes, kids all go completely insane because it's so rare.
But yeah, so I basically mostly lived in Canada.
I went to school at York University at Glendon Campus and then I went to the National Theatre School for I guess almost two years and then I finished my undergraduate.
So I lived for four years in Montreal, which is then Ireland and Quebec.
And then I've basically lived in and around southern Ontario basically ever since.
So that's my rambling man statistics.
Yeah, I'm dying to talk about Kathleen Wynne and the gas plant scandal and the charges there.
I don't know.
I glanced at it.
I couldn't do anything remotely intelligent on it, so sorry.
No big deal.
Well, thanks a lot for answering my questions.
Was it something that you think might stick in your head?
It's like, oh, it makes sense now.
Tomorrow morning, I'm going to have the hell clue what he was talking about.
Just think of stuff's better now than it is later.
And that's usually how you can start working with interest rates.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate your call.
All right.
Talk to you later.
All right.
Well, up next is Tim.
Tim wrote in and said, I consider myself a scientific thinker, and I like to dabble in some philosophy.
I've also worked hard to maintain my Christian faith while doing this, an effort which most of my colleagues have seemed to abandon for one reason or another.
I'm looking to challenge myself by talking to you.
The scope of the conversation I would prefer to revolve around is the question, how can someone be both logical and a Christian?
This question seems to come up in my day-to-day life to whomever is unlucky enough to ask me.
But if we divert, we divert.
In what ways does having a Christian faith preclude a person from being scientifically minded?
That's from Tim.
Well, hello, Tim.
How are you doing?
Hi, good.
How are you doing?
I'm well, thanks.
Nice to chat with you.
Yeah, yeah.
I like your show a lot.
Thank you.
And just before we go on, I would really like to throw a hearty shout out to my Christian brethren.
Because I get some really, really nice messages from Christians.
And it is testament to the open-minded curiosity of a lot of Christians that they can hold their nose when stepping over the corpse of my stinky atheism to glean whatever nuggets they can from the show as a whole.
And I just wanted to say that I very much appreciate that.
And you know, the Christians are annoying when they're good Christians because they're just so nice to you that you think, well, there's got to be something to this.
You know what I mean?
You bastards, stop doing that turn-the-other-cheek thing, because you're really, really wearing down my defenses.
So, I just really wanted to point that out.
It's like, water wears away the stone.
It's like this relentless niceness and positivity, and, well, I'm not an atheist, but I really appreciate your show.
It's like, man, you people are messing with my head.
I appreciate that.
Not a lot of Christian trolls out there, I think.
Outside of the Pope.
Anyway.
But sorry, go ahead.
Okay.
So, yeah, so basically, I've...
I've struggled with my faith when I was younger.
There was a lot of, just because I like to think logically and I like to, and which sounds bad saying that, but it's, you know, a lot of times, you know, when you're younger, people that are above you, like in religion, you know, in a In a church or whatever, they tend to just say, no, you just believe this, and then you sit down.
And then I'm just like, well, what do you mean?
I don't understand.
How can I believe this?
I'm not too happy with that.
That doesn't jive with what I feel a Yeah, no, I just wanted to point out there's not much that strikes a fear into the heart of a priest more than somebody who says, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down.
Okay, step me through this.
No, no, no, keep moving.
Like people who just hit someone in a blind, drunk, keep moving.
Yeah.
So...
Yeah, so basically, I took a philosophy course when I was in college.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Liked it a lot.
Yeah, I am so sorry about that.
Gosh.
I did enjoy it.
My parents thought that I was throwing my faith away.
And, you know, to me, myself, I'm sort of like, why should it be that fragile, you know?
Why should someone's faith be fragile?
And it should test...
There's a passage, and I've got a bunch of passages that I'll hopefully use, but I can send out the links to them if you want or whatever.
You mean stuff that you wanted to quote, to reference?
Correct.
That's fine with me.
You've got a good...
Connection and a decent microphone.
I'm happy to have you read.
Okay.
But paraphrasing this one, we're supposed to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.
And the idea is that there's four things listed there.
There's your heart, so it's kind of like your emotional side of your being, so to speak.
Your soul, which is your spiritual, and your And your mind, which is, you know, the kind of logical part.
And so I've kind of taken that, you know, there's people that are very emotional in their faith, and, you know, they'll speak in tongues, and they'll do all kinds of things that are, you know, that they feel that Jesus has just, you know, showered them with blessings, And they have this instant kind of, you know, very, you know, strong feeling of warmth or whatever.
And then, you know, you have other people that aren't like that, myself included, where I'm more like, well, what do you mean?
I don't feel that.
But I can appreciate, you know, if I understand how something, you know, if I see how something works or something in nature, I can appreciate that.
And that is also, you know, an aspect of God that I appreciate and worship, you know.
So my point is, is that there's a bunch of different ways that you can, you know, God is, you're supposed to love him in a whole bunch of different ways.
So, what I feel that I've been taught as a kid was more so just the emotional side.
You know, just kind of like, just do this, and then you believe in this, and then, you know, you'll have the joy of the Holy Spirit in you, and then you're going to be happy, and everything's going to be great.
And that's, you know...
I don't know.
There wasn't a big aha moment where I actually had this warmth and everything that people explain to me.
For me, it's always been a little more reserved of it with my walk.
But, you know, it's just a relationship and everything is, you know, everyone's got different friendship, different types of relationships with people.
All right, we're going to have to focus a little bit here, brother.
I'm sorry, sorry.
I think you may have tripped onto the tangent button, which I resist so manfully from time to time, but let's kick in a little, if that's all right.
Okay, that's fine.
Okay, so when it comes to rationality, you can be a Christian and be rational.
You just can't be rational about Christianity.
Christians can follow a GPS. They can do math.
They can follow philosophy.
They can understand a syllogism.
They can come up with valid arguments.
They can oppose invalid arguments.
They can do all these kinds of things because a person is not just one thing, right?
I mean, there's no such thing as somebody who's all Christian, right?
That's correct.
I mean, even Christians would say that because, of course, you know, the devil tempts and we're in the material world and we're not the spirits eternal dancing around the feet of God in the current manifestation of the life and the veil of tears we're pushed through.
And so there is no...
Nobody's just one thing.
I'm certainly not.
I like to think I'm rational, and I think in a lot of ways I strive hard towards that and achieve it a good deal of the time, but I'm not 100% rational.
I don't even know what that would mean.
Would that mean my dreams had perfect physics that never changed?
You know what I mean?
Would I never have impulses that are incomprehensible to me?
You know, like the other day, I just couldn't realize I didn't sleep for three days because I watched this stupid Making a Murderer.
I didn't say stupid.
I watched this highly manipulative Making a Murderer documentary.
I didn't know why the hell I wasn't sleeping, and I'm like, ah, that's why, right?
It's rational.
I got there eventually, but didn't know why I was having that trouble, right?
So, can you be a Christian and be rational?
Sure.
Of course you can.
Of course you can.
But when it comes to the religion itself, not so much.
And again, not all aspects of the religion, because, you know, if you...
It's not like if the Christian says, thou shalt not kill, and therefore ends up not killing...
But they really want to kill?
I'm glad they're a Christian, right?
And this sounds like an insult to Christianity.
I don't mean it in that way at all, right?
Because, you know, there are people, I don't know if you've ever had these arguments.
They're kind of weird.
They look creepy, in fact.
And people say, but without God, why wouldn't you just go around killing people, right?
And do you know what I want to say to those people?
For you, I'm glad there is a God.
Because if that's the only thing keeping you from running around killing people, I'm going to throw in a tooth fairy and raise you one Easter bunny if it's going to keep you from strangling hobos in the dark, right?
So you can have perfectly moral actions coming out of your Christianity, right?
If it's a thou shalt not steal, well, universally preferable behavior might take on ethics, which people can get at freedomainradio.com slash free.
Well, universally preferable behavior...
Also validates, thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not murder.
And the aesthetic part of it says, thou shalt not bear false witness.
Don't lie.
And so if a person is a Christian, and for the most part they focus on acting on the more philosophically validated aspects of the Ten Commandments, they're a good person.
They have an irrational source for a rational action.
Does that make sense?
And having an irrational source for a rational action is preferable for having a rational source for an irrational action or an irrational source for an irrational action.
So you can have an irrational source for a rational action and there's a lot of people in the religious world.
We're just talking about Christianity but others as well.
You know, there were some Muslims who tweeted about the San Bernardino killers, and they said, you basically, I'm going to paraphrase a little here, but they basically were saying, you crazy evil bastards, if that's Islam to you, if that's being a Muslim to you, I guess I'm just mistaking doing all of my charity and good works in giving to the poor and all that, right?
Yeah.
Because that's what Islam is to them, right?
It's not shooting people up, of course, as it is not shooting people up for a majority of people.
Muslims, but, um, so they have kindness and good works in their community that come from an irrational source.
And, um, you can have very positive actions coming out of irrational sources.
And if the alternative is negative actions, I'll take it.
Does that make sense?
Yep.
Yep.
So, so let me, let me, uh, I kind of, maybe I just needed to get warmed up or something.
Uh, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you for, thank you for, um, Thank you for that.
It means a lot.
It's good to hear it in that way, in the sense where, you know, you're saying that, you know, in a rational source for a rational action, you know, you have, like, you have God, you know, who's, you know, if you believe, you have to believe in God.
You can't prove God, you know?
So that'd be kind of irrational.
Is that, am I understanding, excuse me, was I understanding where you were going with that?
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Have you ever seen the movie Clerks 2?
No.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
So, in Clerks 2, there's a young fellow, I believe he's got a religious background, and he says basically he would really like to have sex with his girlfriend, but she has something called pillow pants.
And pillow pants is a pussy troll.
Hmm.
And according to this young man, his girlfriend's parents placed this pussy troll in their daughter's vagina.
And if a penis tries entering the vagina before the age of 21, then the pussy troll will bite it off.
On one's 21st birthday, the pussy troll vanishes forever and carnal knowledge can ensue.
Now...
I've heard of some strange things up there, but not pussy trolls.
But if you wish to keep your daughter a virgin and have her not get STDs or get pregnant...
And she believes this story, and her boyfriend believes this story, then that will occur, right?
They will not get pregnant.
And you can find this, and you should go and watch it.
Kevin Smith is like a jaw-dropping writer, and I don't want to get into my whole Kevin Smith thing about that.
But it's on YouTube.
You just search for Clerks 2, and it's Pillow Pants is the name of this girl's pussy troll.
And so here you have, quote, rational actions, right?
Whether it's rational or not, just desired actions that come from an irrational source.
And is that better?
And it's a weird thing.
So if...
The girl would have got pregnant and STDs without this story.
Is the story good or not?
Well, arguably, it has some value.
But you lied to her though, right?
You know what I mean?
It's still wrong because you lied.
The ends don't justify the means.
Well, I mean, let's say that the girl is mentally handicapped.
Okay.
And unable to be a mother in any practical sense, other than biologically, right?
Hard to say.
Now, I get this.
I'm talking about Christians in the category of mentally handicapped virgins.
So, please, like, I'm not...
This is just a pushing theory kind of thing.
So, you can get...
And I think Richard Dawkins has alluded to this as well when he's talking about the degree to which the absence of Christianity has created a relativistic moral void of nihilism that sees no difference between even very dangerous cultures, right?
Like the ones currently entering...
I think, to paraphrase, it's something like this, that Christianity was sort of like the immune system of the body, and a lot of atheists have talked people out of religion, but then they have nothing to defend against when more committed religious people come into the equation, right?
They have nothing to push back in, and they just smile and hand them candy and so on.
You know, there's that old joke about, what's the difference between Involved and committed.
Well, if you have bacon and eggs, the chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.
And so you can be very rational.
I mean, the head of the Human Genome Project is a devout Christian, and I wouldn't say that necessarily interfere with his scientific pursuits.
Yeah, and that's really where I want to touch on.
So...
Basically, the way I look at God in my life from a scientific point of view is, I believe in the Bible that he made the heavens and the earth.
In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
So he was the first guy.
I believe in the Bible, so I have to believe in that.
So that's kind of my axiom, so to speak.
So if I believe that, and I know he built the earth, you know he made the earth, it's not that unreasonable to believe that he knows how it works.
If you go and make all this stuff, and I believe that he did, I then would say that, okay, well then he would know how everything functions, how it's all put together, So on and so forth.
Essentially, the way I look at God is more or less kind of like a very rigid, almost like physics and math and all those things are our way of observing what he made.
So they all work in a very specific way.
Yeah, you don't have to necessarily worship God.
The watchmaker, I believe, that he walked on water in order to appreciate the beauty and genius of the watch.
Exactly, yeah.
So the thing is, God set up this physical system that we live in, and we observe it, and little by little we're just discovering more and more about how How he built it.
So the more science that we...
The more we explore into the scientific realm, the more we uncover, essentially, how he did it.
And listen, as far as that goes, and as you know, a lot of scientists have been motivated by that very desire to find and discover and understand the mind of God.
And I... I actually don't, you know.
I don't have a huge problem with that.
I mean, if someone comes up with a jetpack because they believe it reveals the mind of God to them, I'll take the jetpack and have a great deal of fun.
Right.
Yeah.
So, for me, it's not so much the physics that is troublesome in this belief system.
It is the biology and the ethics, which is where I think the greatest challenge to the idea of a moral divine creator shows up.
Uh-huh.
Well, and those are things—so the way I've always looked at God—you know, since I believe in the Bible, I believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the triune God, right?
And you've got God who is, you know, rigid.
He is the—he's the one who built the earth.
He's the one who made the laws.
He's the one— What do you mean by rigid?
Sorry, you've used that twice now.
I have, yeah.
Rigid is—so, meaning he doesn't waver.
He never changes his mind.
He's got a set amount of...
He's got set laws that he made, and either you play by them, or you lose.
Unchanging absolutist, right?
Yes, correct.
Okay, got it.
He loves us, though, right?
So we're...
He made us, and he said in the Bible that he made us in his image and called us good and that he loves us.
Yes, now, hang on.
Go ahead.
You're fine.
Because here's where the challenge arises for me.
Sure.
If God made us in his image and God calls us good, then the moral rules that God commands us to follow, God must also follow.
That's this basic syllogism 101, right?
Because if we're made in God's image, and God is good, then God must embody the moral commandments that he provides to human beings, right?
Like if I say to my daughter, don't hit, and then I go around punching people, at some point she's going to say, well, wait a minute, there's a discrepancy between the moral rules you're imposing on me and your own particular actions, right?
Especially if I claim that those moral rules are universal and not just don't hit because otherwise I'll hit you.
Like if I'm not saying it's a moral good.
Let me ask you.
Does he necessarily have to follow the rules he gives us?
Yes.
Because why?
I guess I don't quite understand that.
No, he does because he loves us.
We created in his image.
And he obviously must prefer us to be good, right?
He's not indifferent to whether we choose good or evil, right?
That is correct.
Okay.
So, he prefers us to be good, and we are in his image, and God is good.
Now, how do we know that God is good?
There's only one or two possibilities.
We either say that God is good because he's all-powerful, In which case, we're not actually worshipping virtue, but we're worshipping power, which is a very dangerous precedent set up in the mind of a human being, right?
And we fear him, you know?
No, I get that, but you can fear a good person.
I think you should fear a good person.
I think the problem is there are good people around who are too concerned about being...
Okay, go ahead.
point says of the cops you know i mean if it like if a cop okay but you know what i mean i mean that's too many hairs okay go ahead sorry well if the sirens come up if you just killed someone and the sirens come up then you're scared of the cops catching you right Correct.
Okay.
So, I mean, the fact that people are afraid of God, to me, does not mean that God is not virtuous.
I mean, evil people should fear the judgment and condemnation of good people.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'm with you.
So, the fear thing is fine.
So, we either love God because God is good or because God is powerful.
Now, I don't agree that we should love God because God is powerful, because that is the mere naked worship of power, indistinguishable from anybody who reveres a dictator, right?
Because dictators have power, and we should not revere or love or respect someone merely because that person has power, because that is the love of power, not the love of virtue.
And God is all-powerful, and therefore, if we worshipped power, we would love God the most.
But unfortunately, that translates into a human tendency to wish to submit to the most powerful ruler around you, because you're taught to love, revere, respect, and worship power.
So I reject that we could ever love God because God is powerful.
Therefore, there must be another standard by which we love God, other than the fact that He's all-powerful, and it must be because He is virtuous, right?
I see.
Because we can...
We can fear power, but we can only love virtue.
Okay, I know...
Okay, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Well, I know...
I do know that we are...
I mean, we are to...
I know we're supposed to fear God.
I do know that for a fact.
I mean, that's what's in the Bible.
It says that.
I'm a God-fearing Christian man.
It's a very common phrase, right?
Right, yeah.
Right.
But we fear the just punishment if we are punished in the afterlife, assuming we go with the hell thing, right?
Right.
We fear the just punishment of an all-good deity because we have failed to meet his clearly communicated standards for which we do the consequences.
Yeah, all of his standards that he has that we can't meet.
Because he is the absolute, yes, yes, absolutely, yeah.
Right.
Hang on a second.
Let me just finish this part of the argument up.
So if we reject that we worship God because He is all-powerful, and I've gone into this in more detail in an early podcast called Power or Virtue, a Love Story, so people can refer to that more.
So then it must be that we love God because God is good.
Now, since we are made in God's image, what is good for us Oh, boy.
I know he doesn't—I know that's not—I mean, I get where you're going.
I'll let you play it out.
No, see, now you're jumping ahead, right?
And this is, listen, the great challenge— The great challenge in philosophical conversations is to take it step by step, right?
Because what happens is you're emotionally recoiling from where this is going and you're like, throwing up all this static, right?
Which is totally understandable.
But this is, you've got to grit your teeth and go step by step.
All right, all right.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I mean, like, so when I first started looking at a race and IQ differences, I was like, but you've got to grit your teeth and you've got to go, to be philosophical, to have wisdom, we've got to grit our teeth and go step by step, right?
Follow the steps, regardless of the consequences.
All right.
It cannot be...
And there's a couple of reasons why.
Some practical and some philosophical and some consequentialist, but we'll throw them in anyway, right?
So...
It is very...
Would you agree that it would be harder for my daughter to love me if I violated the moral rules that I instructed her in?
Yes.
Okay.
So, if God commands us, or...
I shouldn't say that's not the right way of putting it.
If God prefers that we love God, then God cannot rationally give us moral standards that He Himself violates and then also request or require that we love Him.
That's kind of asking the impossible.
And so, what is good for human beings must be good for God.
Because otherwise, we're not worshipping virtue, we're only worshipping power.
Okay.
And we're also made in God's image, and we're also so emotionally constituted that we cannot love evil.
We might have allegiance to evil, like if we're in a gang or something, we might have some sort of allegiance or whatever.
You can't, in a positive way, love evil.
You can worship evil, you can join evil, you can have some allegiance to evil, but you cannot love evil.
And you also cannot love moral agnosticism.
Yep.
The way that I formulate it is love is our involuntary emotional response to virtue if we are virtuous.
And the degree of our love will be proportional to the degree of the virtue that we ourselves have and that we are observing.
So the greatest love is the most virtuous person with the most virtuous person.
That's why when we strive for virtue we are obviously striving to have the capacity to Experience and receive love.
That's the prize.
There's a lot of thorns along the way, but that's the prize, right?
You write the sandpaper rainbow down to the pot of gold at the end, which is...
I don't think that's showing up in a Hallmark card any time soon.
You are the pot of gold at the end of my sandpaper rainbow, honey.
But wear your lederhosen.
So if we sort of take this argument to the end...
Then the degree to which God manifests the values that He demands of us is the degree to which we can love and worship Him for His virtues rather than His power.
But the challenge, and the final challenge is this, is that if something is not chosen, can it really be a virtue?
I'm not following that, I'm sorry.
Could you say it differently?
Yeah.
So, if a man is an alcoholic and realizes the damage it's doing to himself and those around him, and he then...
Decides to quit drinking, grits his teeth, goes to get therapy, does whatever he needs to do, grits his teeth.
And we can say, okay, you just did a good thing there, right?
However, if his plane crash lands on a desert island with no alcohol, he has no choice in the procurement of more alcohol, right?
Right.
So would it have the same virtue if it had simply become impossible for him to get alcohol as if it was all around him but he chose not to have?
No, absolutely not.
Right.
So the degree to which virtue is harder to achieve, the degree to which we can admire people for achieving it, is the degree to which our love will grow.
The degree to which our virtue is harder to get is...
The degree our love will grow.
Let me put it to you another way analogously.
Okay.
Nobody, much to my chagrin, applauds when I walk down the street.
Okay, yeah, that's right.
Even though I've got a pretty good philosophical pimp role, you know, like carrying two cans of paint down the street to funky Bee Gees music, but nobody applauds me when I walk down the street.
Me, occasionally, but mostly nobody, right?
Yeah.
If I had been in a wheelchair for 20 years and I got some treatment or something happened and I worked really hard to be able to get out of my wheelchair and I got out of my wheelchair in front of loving friends and family and I walked down the street, would they applaud me?
Absolutely.
Of course.
Yeah.
Because it's not hard for me to walk down the street but it's hard if I've been in a wheelchair for 20 years to get up and walk down the street, right?
That's right.
And so that which is harder to achieve in terms of virtue is that much more admirable, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
And so we, I think, admire virtuous people To the degree that their virtue faces opposition, is tough, you know, you take the high road, not the easy road, right?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there's wonderful Christian sayings that I remember from my childhood in the choir, right?
Which is all about the, you know, the road of thorns, the straight and narrow, right?
That it's a lot easier to roll back down the hill, like we're these boulders, and you've got to push virtue up the hill, and it's always trying to totter over and roll back, right?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And so, if love requires virtue, but virtue requires choice and willpower, then can God actually express virtue that we love in the way that human beings do?
Because God, presumably, does not have to struggle with temptation or opposition to his manifestation of virtue.
Okay.
Okay, so you're saying...
In other words, we're reporting a guy walking down the street rather than a guy who just struggled out of a wheelchair after 20 years.
I see.
I see.
Yeah.
Well, I guess...
Yeah, I suppose...
I suppose we...
Yeah, I mean, he does...
He obviously can...
I believe that he has more power than I do, obviously.
So for him to accomplish a task or for him to...
Oh boy, I think I lost you there.
No, these are very tough questions, so let me give you some more.
Yeah, could you?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so here's the other one, which was at least to me the final nail in the coffin as I was sort of mulling things over in my teens.
And it goes something like this.
Even if we put aside all of these other objections and we say, okay, it's fine, we'll love him even though he doesn't have to work to be good, he just is good or whatever, fine, okay.
But, thou shalt not kill is a moral commandment.
We are made in God's image, therefore it cannot be wrong for us to kill, but right for God to kill.
And so I mulled over a whole bunch of those challenges.
But hang on.
The one that really got me, and then I'll obviously give you a chance to...
Right, but the one that really got me was the Good Samaritan.
Oh, that bastard.
The Good Samaritan was not good to me, right?
Because in the parable of the Good Samaritan, as you know, there's a man...
I don't know, where's he going?
To Damascus?
He's a man who's set upon by highway robbers.
They beat the hell out of him, and they leave him bleeding...
And dying in a ditch by the side of the road.
And a Samaritan man comes along, sees this man, stops, finds his wounds, gives him some water, gets him to a doctor, saves his life.
And this is a powerful story which everyone thinks about.
You know, you raised Christian, as I was, and you think about it, right?
You know, you're driving, like I used to work up in the north of Canada, and you're driving by the road.
And I remember driving by the road in the middle of nowhere, and there was this woman walking along by the road, like 20 miles from the closest town.
I would go into town for what they used to call a shit shower and a shave.
Because, you know, living in the tent gets a bit grotty after a while.
I am a sentient fungus.
She wouldn't even want you to pick her up.
Well, no, see, but I was just concerned.
She was kind of stumbling along the road, and of course I remembered the parable of the Good Samaritan, and I pulled over the...
I was driving a pickup truck.
I know, I don't have the right accent for it, but I pulled it off anyway.
I did have a baseball cap on backwards, so hopefully that helps people.
That takes care of it.
Gun rack, but no gun.
But anyway, we had a shotgun, actually.
We did have a shotgun for bears.
Anyway, so this woman, what she told me was that she was a native Canadian First Nations people, Aboriginals.
And she said that she was driving back to a reservation with some guys, and they were in the back of a truck, back of a pickup truck, and they demanded that she give them blowjobs.
And she refused, so they slowed the truck down a little and threw her out of the truck.
Naturally, I picked her up, put her in the car, we talked, and I... You got a blowjob.
No, I brought her to the hospital.
So I brought her to the hospital.
And anyway, then she invited me to come out drinking with her buddies the next night, which I respectfully declined and reminded her that it might be better to seek better companions in the future.
I'm not sure what her options were up there.
You know, that's the soft biosphere of hell that the welfare state descends upon these people in these reservations.
But anyway, topic for another time.
And I've told this story before the show.
So, the Good Samaritan, the principle, of course, is that if you see somebody suffering and you can, to a reasonable degree of safety and security, help that person, you should do it, right?
It's a good thing to do.
Well, lots of people suffering in the world.
God could intervene.
It costs him nothing.
It costs him nothing to intervene.
Innocent people suffering all over the world.
How can the parable of the Good Samaritan apply to human beings With whom it is costly and dangerous sometimes to help people, but the parable of a good Samaritan to help those in need, how can it not apply to a deity who suffers nothing and suffers no diminishment of his time or power or energy, and suffers no risk whatsoever to helping anyone?
Okay.
Okay.
So, alright.
Well, yeah.
So, yeah, he certainly has a bigger stick to...
To go and, you know, to make things happen.
You know, in my belief, you know, I believe that he has the power to do those things.
And I think the question is...
You have a very phallic God.
You have a rigid God with a bigger stick.
I just wanted to mention that.
Right, right.
Well, this is the thing.
And this is kind of...
So this is part of where I was going with this.
So you have God the Father and you got...
God, the Holy Spirit.
So God's three people, three God heads in one, right?
And you've got this, you know, God's rigid.
He's got laws that you got to follow.
You know, period.
That's it.
Then you've got the Holy Spirit who, you know, works in our bodies and allows us to accept, well, works in our hearts and softens us or, you know, allows us to believe in To believe in Jesus, to believe in Him, believe in God, works in our life, so on and so forth.
And then you have Jesus, who's the Son.
And God sent the Son to live a perfect life.
Basically, essentially...
Hang on, hang on.
Go ahead.
I feel like we're not dealing with the question itself.
Unless you've got a roundabout way, but this is going into...
You know, Trinity theology rather than the sort of philosophical issue.
Oh, okay, okay.
Well, I mean, I guess you kind of answered my question with regards to the science thing.
Because my basic—I had never really talked to any—like, when I tell people the fact that I'm essentially just, you know, trying to figure out how God has made things, you know, like figure out more about God's creation— Um, I get a lot of perplexed, uh, a lot of perplexed, uh, looks and they sort of, you know, it's kind of look at me like, like, you know, well, yeah, but I mean, there's no, like, you know, uh, they, I don't know.
I don't, I don't know.
I guess I just get a lot.
I, I don't, I don't get a lot of, um, uh, no one, no one seems to understand really what I mean by that.
And, um, I think, well, listen, look, look, I can virtually guarantee you that you're the smartest person around where you are.
And verbally acute, verbally astute, and positive, friendly, and engaging.
It's a great combo.
I really respect you for having those characteristics.
They're not always easy to come about or to maintain in this world.
And here's the challenge.
When people call into this show, They often have had a history of being able to out-talk everyone around them.
And you said that you called in and wanted to be challenged, and that's what I'm doing.
And that's why we can't go on the tangent, right?
So the question basically is, how can I... And I put this question out to friends and foes, religious and non-religious alike.
I'm open to the answer.
Maybe I just can't find my way.
But how can I love a deity who does the opposite of what he morally commands me to do and call him good?
I don't have a standard of good that encapsulates both an action and its opposite.
I cannot have a standard of good that encapsulates helping somebody who's suffering and not helping somebody who's suffering.
That encapsulates not murdering and murdering.
Because God, as you know, in the Old Testament is a pretty primal killer, right?
So hang on.
So that's the challenge that I can get to.
Now, I can understand if you say, well, we don't know what God's virtue is.
We can't judge it.
He has his own standards.
Okay, that's fine.
Well, that means then that we are just crossing our fingers hoping he's good, although we can't prove it.
We know he's not doing, even though we're made in his image, we know he's not doing what he commands us to do.
And in fact, he's doing the opposite.
A lot of times.
Like, if a human being pulled a lever and drowned the world, except for a few people on an ark, that would be a monstrously evil genocide.
True.
And that's worse than Hitler.
I mean, worse than Stalin, worse than Mao, worse than the unholy trinity of mass murderers in the 20th century.
Right.
And so, that's the challenge.
If people want me to worship a deity, they have to square this circle for me.
Because we hold our friends close...
We hold the truth closer.
We hold the truth must be even greater than God.
Otherwise, all we are doing is worshipping power.
Sorry, go ahead.
Okay.
Well, one of the things that I was going to comment on, you know, the Old Testament isn't something that we—I mean, that was a stepping stone.
The Old Testament was a stepping stone to get to what we have today as the New Testament.
No, no, no.
See, introducing Stepping Stone, I'm sorry to be annoying and interrupted.
I know I've had these long speeches, and now I'm interrupting you, and I recognize that imbalance, and I apologize for it.
But Stepping Stone is not a philosophical term.
Oh, okay.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
So, did God do that which is described in the Old Testament?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
That's all we need to puzzle with, stepping stones and New Testaments and so on, because people say, well, you know, Jesus came along, yeah, but the only reason that Jesus is God is because he's the son of the God of the Old Testament, right?
So it doesn't say, well, Old Testament guy was bad, but Jesus fixed it, doesn't really solve it, because Jesus gains his authority as being the son of God.
So we can't ignore the Old Testament descriptions, right?
Obviously the New Testament has some significant modifications.
I would say it's a significant virtue 2.0 upgrade over the Old Testament.
Still a few iterations short of UPB, but...
So if God did what is described in the Old Testament, and, you know, there's countless examples which I've gone into before, but, you know, just taking the flood as one, right?
If God did kill just about everyone in the world, including babies, including children, including fetuses, that is...
If a human being had done that, we would call him the greatest mass murderer in history, right?
Yep.
So how can I worship that as virtuous?
So how I've rationalized that, and it is a rationalization because, you know, I don't know for sure.
I mean, I don't really know for sure what God's intentions were.
I do know that he knew us before we were born, everybody.
So if he knows everyone's heart, I say that that is his, as God, that would be his choice.
That's his, what's the word I'm looking for?
That's his prerogative.
So he knows that the people are going to do bad things, so he's justified in killing them ahead of time.
Yeah, that's his prerogative, as God.
So he knows for sure...
And this is great.
I mean, I really appreciate this.
This is a great answer.
It's a great answer.
So he knows for sure, like, so if he kills this fetus, he knows for sure that the fetus is going to grow up and do evil things.
Free will.
No, no, no, I'm not trying to trap you here.
I'm sorry.
I'm not trying to trap you, but that is the logical consequence, right?
Yes, correct, correct.
Okay.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So if he knows, then of course, as you know, this is a challenge for free will.
Yes.
Yeah.
How can you punish someone for something you know for sure they're going to do?
Right.
I guess the Old Testament is really hard.
And this is the thing.
So I was going to open this up.
When I was going to open this up, talking about this, I was going to say, I think I did even, is...
I believe in the Bible wholly, the entire thing, as it's written.
And I have to, because if I'm going to...
You either believe in the whole thing, or it's all gone.
If you're going to believe in it, you might as well go all in.
Because if you're going to believe in something, there's no room for rationalization in the...
Well, I mean...
No, I agree with you.
I'm a very big one for commit to your beliefs because I prefer, again, outside of genuine evildoers, which is certainly nowhere near that category, but I prefer people who are committed to something.
You can change a man...
You can change a man's movement if he's in movement already.
You can change his direction as he's moving.
You can't change the direction of the inert.
This is why I prefer talking to you than talking to a lot of atheists who are just cynics and nihilists cloaking themselves in anti-superstitious rhetoric.
But the Old Testament is a challenge, and it is a challenge because God does what he defines as evil.
Yeah.
And the only way to rescue him is to say that the people he's punishing had no choice in the matter.
That free will is an illusion.
Now, of course, the other thing too is that if God designed human beings such that, if we're created in God's image, but the vast majority of human beings are irredeemably evil, Well, I guess I gotta have a chat with the engineer.
I mean, that does not seem like a very good design, if that makes any sense.
No, it does.
It does.
And this is gonna sound...
So I've been trying to think about that, this idea.
And the best I can do is...
And I don't know.
I don't know for sure.
There's some things that I... I don't know if there's...
If anybody really...
I don't...
This is...
It's challenging me, okay?
But...
but, um, so to, to look in the Bible more, but, um, what I've always thought, I mean, I've got, I have a, I have two pet turtles.
Okay.
And they, yeah, you're telling, you know, no.
Um, so I've got, I've got these, I've got these, uh, these turtles and they, you know, one of them, one of them hates the other one and, and just will bite at it and do all these terrible things.
And I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm kind of their god, so to speak.
I give them I clean their tank, feed them, do all that stuff.
As far as they're concerned, I'm the main guy.
I could drug up the turtle so it just sees daisies all day and doesn't attack the other one.
I could do that, but I don't.
And why?
I guess the same argument could be said for parents and Ritalin.
I just wanted to get this off my chest before I forgot that when you say turtle god, I think of the ultimate anti-circumcision league.
But anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
Just to get it off my chest.
You've got to get that shit off your chest.
Otherwise, it's just going random.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so you could drug the turtle, right?
Yeah, you could drug the turtle.
And that's not the point of having...
I don't want to have some lethargic pet that just sort of kind of meanders around.
What are you, a public school teacher?
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, you know, I mean, would it be that hard?
Would it be that...
And this sounds...
Basically, my argument is that he just might be very cavalier with...
It seems he's very cavalier with people's lives.
He's very, you know, just whatever.
I'm just gonna, you know, like, hey, this batch didn't work.
Let's just throw them all out, you know?
Can I just tell you something?
Yeah.
If you ever write a book on theology, I have your perfect title.
Okay.
He's just very, like, whatever.
Yeah.
I just wanted to point out that it's really a great book on theology.
Go on.
I just, like, I can't...
Did I say that?
You did.
Oh, God damn it.
But he could...
I mean, I don't know about all...
There's a lot of accounts of him doing things like that that I have a hard time defending.
And can I just mention one other thing?
Correct.
Because I agree with you.
This is an appeal to my younger audience.
Yeah.
Is he splinter-drugging the teenage mutant Ninja Turtles?
Mike just wrote that in a messaging app, and I don't know what that means, but apparently the young people do.
Is he splinter-drugging?
I like how I own the young people.
Is he a bad person?
Yeah.
Oh, you know this?
I don't.
You don't?
I mean, I know Ninja Turtles, Splinter is...
Mike, do you care to explain yourself at all?
Ninja Turtles are...
The hell did I just say?
Is this some secret code?
Splinter trained the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
He did.
Oh, oh, okay.
So, you know, if they were ninjas and he drugged them so they couldn't go out and do bad things...
Ah, I gotcha, I gotcha, I gotcha.
I watch lots of cartoons.
Can I mention something?
I think I have a plot movie for the most boring Ninja Turtles movie.
It's the Ninja Turtles in an opium den.
So man, why are we named after these painters?
And our shells aren't even painted.
Well, they do eat pizza, so they may be stoners.
That's very possible.
Oh, God.
So yes, God is doing some stuff that's kind of hinky, and this is the challenge.
Let me tell you something.
Like most good people, and I think yourself as well, but like most good people, I'm desperate for something to love.
My favorite song, and by the way, anybody who wants to hear 48 seconds of fantastic singing, just type this into YouTube.
Somebody to Love, live Milton Keynes.
M-I-L-T-O-N-K-E-Y-N-E-S, I think it is.
Milton Keynes.
Freddie Mercury did this amazing piano intro.
I've listened to a whole bunch of these, just the piano intros.
He just did a different sort of scat piece at the beginning of my favorite song, Can Anybody Find Me, Somebody to Love.
It's my favorite song in the whole world, ever.
And believe it or not, there are people out there who have stripped just the vocals.
You can listen to just...
The vocals.
I can't believe this.
Freddie Mercury.
I had to lose the greatest singer in the world because some asshole in Africa decided to eat a chimpanzee.
Yes, I know it's a long way from one thread to another, but you can figure it out if you want to.
But there are things that are challenging.
I am hungry to find somebody to love.
Something to love.
To worship.
To worship.
Now for me, reason, philosophy, virtue, my wife, my daughter, my friends, my listeners, often.
Sometimes not, but often.
And to create.
And I want to be that person.
For people in the world too, right?
Someone that they can look at and say, that's admirable.
I admire what this person is doing.
You know, disagree, agree or whatever.
But, you know, putting himself out there and tackling the tough issues and following wherever the data leads with as much integrity as possible and not shying away from difficult topics.
You know, the stuff that hopefully is going to be a light in the dark which spreads, right?
I've always loved this idea that you share Your candle flame, you don't lose your candle flame, right?
You know, if I give you a piece of chocolate, I'm one piece of chocolate down, but if you light your candle from my candle, I still have light.
We just both have more light.
And that, I think, is knowledge passing from mind to mind.
So I've always been hungry for someone to love.
And I've gone through phases of worshipping people.
You know, I mean, I was an objectivist for a long time and still hold to most of the tenets of objectivism.
Ayn Rand!
And then I read about her life, I felt desolate.
You know, I'm looking for someone to admire, for someone who's not going to break my heart.
Now, unfortunately, God, kind of early, broke my heart.
He broke my heart because I was told all of this goodness and I read all of these stories and I'm like, wait a minute here.
Am I In a marriage?
Or am I in an army?
And that's a big question.
If you're in a marriage, then you're voluntary love and so on.
But if you're enlisted, if you're conscripted, if you go into an army, then you don't necessarily worship the army or obey the army because they're so innately virtuous.
But certainly for most of human history, you obeyed your commanding officer because if you didn't, he'd shoot you.
People say, well, it took a lot of courage to go out into the trenches in World War I. Well, yeah.
Yeah, because if you didn't go out, it's like possible death versus certain death, right?
And just by the by, before I forget, because I can never find good places to wedge these sideways splinters of knowledge into conversations, but I was just reading about how in the First World War, they had to keep moving the troops around because the troops kept not shooting at each other.
And so they had to keep moving them around because the troops would be like – and literally a gun would go off and the Germans would shout over, sorry, we were just cleaning it.
We didn't mean to shoot.
Why the hell would they want to shoot at each other?
How the hell did that gain, right?
So anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
This is how – Difficult it is to get people to kill each other.
But anyway, so I wanted someone to love.
And I was told it was supposed to be my mother.
That didn't work out so well.
I was told it was supposed to be other family members.
That didn't work out.
Told it was going to be God.
That didn't work out so well.
Ayn Rand, that didn't work out so well.
So finally you give up and you end up becoming the hero that you hoped to worship.
That's, I think, the final stage of self-actualization is instead of finding somebody to inspire you, You become someone who inspires, hopefully.
Anyway, so that's sort of my thoughts and the challenge around God's actions and God's consistency and God's ethics.
If we are made in God's image and most of us are evil, I don't think that really says much for the deity.
So, yeah.
So, because if I can't...
So for me, I have tried to explain God's actions in the Old Testament in saying that those were different times.
You needed to—and I know you already told me that Jesus, God, they're all the same person, so therefore they all have to uphold the same moral standard.
I'm paraphrasing what you said.
But I get every Everyone who's virtuous must follow the same moral standard.
I can't say I'm virtuous while doing the opposite of what I command other people to do to be virtuous, right?
Yeah.
I guess, for me, I've tried to...
When I read the Old Testament, it's very difficult for me...
If you believe everything in the Bible and you're reading stuff in the Bible that's like, whoa, what's going on here?
There's a mismatch somewhere.
So either it's me, either it's with my understanding of it, or it's just screwed up.
Or what I'm reading screwed up.
And I guess what I... I've been trying to work out some of the accounts of the Old Testament and sort of figure out where they...
I guess my biggest argument, I guess, with regards to the things done in the Old Testament, like I said earlier, was the whole stepping stone argument, which I understand that that's not really a valid argument.
A valid point, or at least it's not a philosophical point.
I guess I hadn't really thought of that being an invalid philosophical term or idea.
You can't say, since the origin of Christianity is the Old Testament deity, you can't say that he got improved on Because that's the whole—like, if there's no Old Testament deity, then there's no divinity of Jesus, right?
So the whole concept—since Jesus rests entirely upon the authority and virtue of—like, sorry, let me put it to you this way.
If Jesus—and, of course, Jesus proposed moral standards which the Old Testament God fails.
Now, you could say, well, the Old Testament God turned out to be kind of a devil, and Jesus is the new God, but that's not what Christianity is, right?
Christianity is—he's the son of God.
That's right.
He's an upgrade.
That's correct.
So, I guess for me, the idea that I have in my head with regards to the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, that they're the same people, whatnot, you know, so on and so forth.
But I guess in my head, what I've always kind of understood is that, you know, God...
The laws of the Old Testament and the actions in the Old Testament, again, were to meet people, they were to try to kind of ease people into what the New Testament teaches.
So it was in a different time, and there was a lot of terrible things going on in the East, in the Middle East, when When these laws were written, and it says very clearly that the laws—there's several passages.
I told you earlier I was going to cite some passages.
There's Romans 10.4, or I'll start with Galatians 3.23.
It says,"...before the coming of faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up under the faith that was to come would be revealed." So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.
Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.
So the idea there is that that's one passage that states basically that, you know, when, during, before Christ's death, we had the law, we had the Ten Commandments that you had to abide by.
And we had, you know, that us people had to abide by.
Well, I guess evidently, you know, because apparently God does—I mean, you can't—there's no way around that.
God did kill people, you know.
But we certainly were held to—I mean, we definitely—certainly had a law that we had to follow.
So those were things—I mean, in that time—in that time frame, we—they needed— They needed those laws.
And God's laws were rigid.
You had to follow them perfectly.
And that didn't work.
No one can do that.
So God sent Jesus to live the life perfectly.
The one that God intended them to live.
Us to live, rather.
And then died on the cross forever.
And then ascended into heaven, or went to hell and then ascended into heaven.
So paid the price for us.
So be kind of like...
So, hang on.
So God can make someone who can live perfectly?
That is right.
So why didn't he make people who could live perfectly?
Because then we wouldn't have...
Well, he did, originally.
But we have free will.
Well, no.
But he could...
Like, if I can make one watch that keeps perfect time, and all of my other watches explode...
Is the fault the watch?
No.
No, it would be the watchmaker.
So if God can make somebody who can act in a perfect manner, and I must say that for Jesus to be able to perform miracles makes it a little bit easier to believe in God.
Like if I could walk on water, it would be a little harder to be an atheist.
So Jesus had a couple of legs up.
You know, if I could turn water into wine and have infinite loaves of fishes, first of all it would be a Different kind of restaurant chain that I'd be opening, but this is...
You know, he had...
Jesus had some advantages, right?
It's not really fair to ask everyone else to live like Jesus when nobody else can perform miracles.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I agree that it's hard.
I agree that it's...
I... Yeah.
I think that...
I think, you know, for what I've kind of thought of with regards to this...
The whole, you know, Jesus performing miracles and everything.
Have you ever heard of the passage, if you have faith like a mustard seed, you can move mountains?
Yes.
Okay.
I've actually read, believe it or not, the whole thing.
The whole Bible?
That doesn't mean, of course, I remember it all, but when I was working up north, spent a winter in a tent, had a Bible, and I'm like, Well, I was going to be a novelist, originally a novelist and a poet, and boy, you can't go wrong reading some of the best prose in the world.
It's Shakespeare and the King James Bible.
So, yeah, I went through the whole thing.
So, what I think, and this...
But this is...
I'm trying to rational...
Like I said, I'm trying to love the Lord my God with my mind.
So I'm trying to understand...
I sort of have kind of thought about it is that God so if Jesus Jesus' miracles were a direct result of his perfect faith and nothing more no Jesus didn't need faith because he could do miracles Thank you.
In other words, it was easier for him to believe in things that were supernatural because they weren't supernatural for him.
You know, I can walk on wood.
I don't need faith to believe that I can walk on wood because I can walk on wood.
So the degree of faith needed by Jesus, who had divine powers, was infinitely less than the average person who has no capacity to act in any way that approaches the divine.
Well, I mean, look at the story of, what is it, Peter or Paul?
Peter walking on the water himself.
The minute he, you know, Jesus asked Peter to look at him, to look at Jesus as he was walking in water.
The minute Peter looked away from Jesus, he sank.
And the idea there is that I've been told, okay, so this is, again, people reading, you know, it's hard to...
Basically, what I've been told, scholars, I guess, say that that is...
Essentially, the lesson there is that Peter could do that if he believed it.
No, no, I get that.
But here's the challenge, right?
I mean, when I was a kid and believed, I couldn't walk on water.
So the challenge is, look, I mean, this is how you train, and I hate to diminish it this way, and I get the seriousness of what you're talking about, but this is how you train a puppy, is you give them treats when they do the right thing, and you don't, or you hit them with a rolled up newspaper if you're mean when they do the wrong thing, right?
True.
So if you're getting that kind of empirical verification, I'm looking at Jesus, I can walk on water.
I look away from Jesus, I fall into the water.
That's a lot more empirical validation than anyone gets since.
Right.
And he even says, like, you know, God even says, you know, blessed is the one who believes and does not see.
You know?
So there's, you know, I do...
Yes, but Jesus didn't need that.
Because Jesus could perform miracles and could also allow other people to perform miracles.
So his belief in a deity was quite a bit easier.
Yeah, okay.
Does that make sense?
It does.
No, it absolutely does.
I'm arguing it from the opposite side, from the opposite point of view.
I'm saying that it was kind of a chicken or the egg type of thing.
So I believe what I'm saying is that he had faith and therefore could do miracles.
So I'm just saying the opposite.
But the miracles were validated by his faith.
Right?
Listen, you and I are talking over the internet, right?
Yes.
So I don't need faith to believe that I'm talking with you.
However, if you and I were both holding up shoeboxes to our ears and still talking to each other across hundreds or thousands of miles with no connections, that would be a little trickier.
We have empirical validation and verification of what we're doing.
So I don't need to have faith that I'm talking to you on the internet.
Does that make sense?
It does.
So if you have physical evidence for supernatural power, it's no longer supernatural.
Like miracles were just the physics for Jesus.
And he no more needed to have faith to believe in God than I need to have faith to believe in electricity.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I understand exactly what you're saying.
I guess I was...
What I was saying is...
Yeah, because he has an immediate...
It's just like I can test...
I could drop my phone right now, and it's going to fall.
If somebody told me that there was no gravity, I'd be like, oh yeah, well, here's to your theory of no gravity.
I can go and, you know, if I have, you know, Jesus certainly was able to perform miracles, which obviously no other person could do, so therefore he had to have gotten power from something else.
But I guess what I'm saying is that he has perfect faith.
Because he's perfect.
By Jesus.
Jesus is perfect, right.
So the idea is that we have faith, but we don't have perfect faith, right?
So we can't...
Because, I mean, it's like, just believe in yourself.
It's like, well, there's a lot of things out there.
If you talk about...
Self-suggestion or hypnosis.
If you want to train your subconscious, you have to believe that what is happening is right.
You have to believe it fully.
Yes, but you still have to be open to empirical evidence.
I believe I can fly.
You can believe.
Look, I think that having what you would, I think, call faith...
You know, I wanted the biggest and best philosophy show the world has ever seen.
Now, I had to believe in that before it came about.
That's right.
Absolutely.
And so you do have to use your imagination to project forward in time things that you think you're capable of.
However, you know, I also wanted to be a rock and roll singer when I was young.
And then I listened to myself.
And I'm like, I'd actually pay to not hear that.
So that's important as well, right?
Okay, yeah.
So, the sort of believe in yourself kind of thing is great, but also test yourself in the marketplace.
Believe to get yourself ready for the marketplace and then let the market decide over the long run.
If people were paying me a dollar a year to do a philosophy show, I'd need to be aware of that, right?
Right.
But here's the thing though, is that if God wants everyone to be perfect and he was able to make Jesus who was perfect, why wouldn't he just make everyone like Jesus or give everyone the kind of empirical verification of the existence of a deity that Jesus has?
Listen, if I could wander around a hospital regrowing limbs by touching them, Damn!
I'd be all kinds of down with that, as far as religion went.
Yes.
Look, everyone, I can walk on water.
Do you feel like having a little faith right now?
I hear you.
So, if God can do it with Jesus, by creating someone like that and giving Jesus all of the empirical evidence as to the presence, majesty, and power...
Of the divine, and virtue of the divine, apart from some questionable stuff with moneylenders.
I mean, a lot of what Jesus did was some pretty damn fine stuff, right?
You know, I love the story, apocryphal though it may be, of him saying that he who was without sin cast the first stone and preventing a woman from getting stoned to death, you know?
It'd be nice if 14 centuries later a couple of people in Saudi Arabia might come around to the same conclusion, but you know, sometimes it takes a little while for whispers to go around the circle.
But I think that...
Jesus had it pretty easy as far as faith went because he did have divine power flowing through his veins.
Okay.
Okay, I can see that.
And why not just, if the cold is, why not do everyone that way then?
I kind of go back to my turtle argument, I guess, at that point.
No, no, because Jesus is what everyone should aspire to, but God knows how to make everyone Jesus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right?
So it's not back to free will.
Because Jesus did not have the requirement for faith that people with no physical evidence of a deity have.
Because Jesus could perform miracles, therefore he knew of the existence of a deity.
Because he could do things that were physically impossible.
I see.
I see.
I follow.
Right?
So if the way to make someone perfect is to give them the power of miracles...
Yeah.
Then why not just give everyone the power of miracles?
Plus then, it's a lot easier for people to help out other people.
Yeah.
You know, in the Good Samaritan kind of way.
God gives us miracles and then we go around healing children of leukemia.
Yeah.
Or like to fly.
Like I would love to fly.
It would be awesome.
You know what I mean?
Just to be able to like, you know, just take off like a, you know.
You selfish bastard.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm talking about healing children of leukemia in your life.
I'm going to fly and find out if this son of a bitch of a planet is planning.
No, no, no.
To your point.
It's all about you and you're flying.
To your point.
No, to your point, I get what you're saying.
I know you are.
I know you are.
I get it.
Yeah, I haven't really...
I've never thought about the possibility of...
I never really considered him having a parts bin in heaven, so to speak, and being like, I'm going to make him part this, part that, part this, and assembling people.
Why didn't he have superpowers in there?
Why didn't he give us those superpowers?
The ability to...
Superpowers Jesus.
How about a little less cancer, big guy?
Right, right.
How about you don't build watches that blow up regularly?
Yeah, yeah.
And here's the thing, right?
I mean, the only way that we know about the existence of God is because God has revealed himself to some people, right?
Well, the natural...
So I've got to actually have...
I mean, the Bible.
He dictated the Bible, right?
Well, he did, but he also shows through nature, though.
No, no, no, no.
I'm not talking about this secondhand.
They found this ninth planet out there.
It's got like a...
Orbit of 20,000 years or something, and they can't see the damn thing.
All they can do is they can infer it based upon its actions, like its gravity well-announced.
There could be photographs of it around, but they can't find it because it just looks like another star, right?
Like the guy who found Pluto in like 1937 did so by just spending endless hours poring over star maps and finding a star that moved.
I think that the original planet, the name of it was wandering stars is what they originally called it.
As opposed to, sorry, I was philandering stars.
But anyway, so if God reveals himself to some people, which is how we know about a deity, but then he has the same standards of belief to other people he's never revealed himself to, that doesn't seem fair.
True.
And they say, well, the people who were really devout were...
Jesus, of course, the apostles, John the Baptist, and other people who saw divine impacts and effects according to the stories directly.
So for them, it was not faith, because it was the physics of the world they lived in.
And so to say, well, these people you should emulate, I showed myself directly to these people.
Not in, oh, how lovely a tree is, but in, hey, look, a burning bush, you know, or I can walk on water or whatever, right?
And so to say, oh, ye of little faith, And to hold people who God has revealed nothing of himself to, to the same standard as people who directly have experienced, seen, and conversed with the deity, that's not...
So he does say that he reveals himself, obviously not in...
I mean, it takes faith to believe that what he...
This all boils down to faith.
It wasn't like Jesus got powers because he believed, because there are tons of people who believe devoutly in a deity, and none of them have any supernatural powers.
So it's not like faith breeds supernatural powers.
It's not like, well, if I think I have sticky stuff coming out of my wrists, I'll turn into Spider-Man, right?
Because there's tons of people, billions of people with exceedingly devout faith in a variety of deities, and none of them have superpowers.
That's certainly not perfect faith, right?
What does perfect faith mean?
Well, I can't define it.
I'm saying that Jesus...
It's kind of a moving the goalpost thing.
Because I'm saying, well, where's the evidence, right?
If faith provides superpowers, and you say, well, the reason people don't have superpowers is because they don't have perfect faith.
Well, that's kind of a pathology.
There's a no-null hypothesis for they can't disprove it, right?
But certainly, I would argue, and I think you would accept, that it's a little easier to believe in a deity...
When you get superpowers, right?
That's true.
That's true.
And God has certainly...
God has a policy of revealing himself to mortals.
He comes down and talks to them.
He inspires them to write great tomes.
He has them, of course, to mistranslate the word maiden to virgin and whatever, right?
So God comes down and speaks to people and provides signs and gives people superpowers.
Just nowhere that there's verifiable scientific measurements around, which is also a little bit suspicious.
But those people, yeah, I get that they believed.
I mean, if Jesus could walk on water, it's a little easier for him to believe than those of us who are looking around at a wretched world full of disease and war and suffering and nobody walking on water.
It's a little harder, right?
So the standards are way higher.
For people not directly influenced by God.
Now, people will say, oh, but God talks to me and so on.
But, you know, lots of people believe that...
I don't want to say all schizophrenic.
Lots of people hear voices and so on.
But my question would be, look, if I suddenly woke up tomorrow and wrote out some incredible scientific thesis in ancient Aramaic, okay...
I have no idea how I would do that and that would be something that would really give me pause about the possibility of something supernatural.
And then it wouldn't be supernatural because it would be some empirical evidence that I did something that would be impossible for me to do.
Whether that would be past lives or whether it would be something beyond what was possible, right?
Right, right.
And so, God is certainly beyond the empirical.
He's certainly beyond the rational.
He's certainly beyond the scientific.
And to then say, well, you all have to believe in what I have constitutionally designed you to not believe.
Right?
Because God has designed us to survive in the world that God created.
And in the world that God created, anti-empiricism is death.
Right?
Because if you say, well, I don't think that's a real tiger...
Right?
And you just kiddie snack, right?
Or if you say, I believe I can walk on water, so I'm going to step off this boat without learning how to swim, then you're going to drown, right?
And so God has created a world that demands rational empiricism, or you die, and then says, I'm going to hide myself from you, and you must believe against the world that I have created for you, that I have specifically designed you to survive in.
You have to use all of that apparatus and do the exact opposite.
That's like a trap.
That's like a troll trap.
I gotcha.
I hear you.
Okay.
Yeah, I can see that.
And then he reveals...
He knows how empirical we are, which is why he needs to reveal himself to some people in order to get the whole religion started.
But those people have such a ridiculous advantage over everyone else.
To judge us by their standards and say we're falling short...
No, they even...
Yeah.
Yeah, I can see that.
Yeah, I guess I've always...
I mean, even the people that...
I mean, even...
Was it Peter?
I can't remember the guy's name.
You know, when he walked on water, even he doubted, even though he was doing it.
You know what I mean?
So, I mean, there's...
Even if you have proof, you know, it's really...
I guess it's really hard to believe in things.
I don't know.
It's...
Yeah.
I guess I have...
I don't know.
I struggle with it.
I think it's important.
I feel that it's...
It gives me...
I like to struggle with it.
It's work.
But it's fun to talk about.
And there's a certain amount of...
It hasn't really steered me wrong.
Well, it's leading you to good, positive actions, right?
It is, yeah.
And I certainly would not want to do anything to take away those good, positive actions.
But you called up and wanted to be challenged, so I'm going to chase you down on the subway.
But this is where things sort of break down philosophically, because In philosophy, you're bound by reason and evidence.
Yes.
Like in science.
Yes.
Right?
You can't say, I have faith that two and two make five and get very far in the mathematical profession, right?
That's correct.
And so you have an escape hatch.
You have an eject button, right?
Out of conversations, right?
When things get...
Impossible to continue from a rational manner, you have the escape valve of faith, right?
And this is why, I mean, I knew what we were going to get here, right?
Which is where the arguments have mounted to the point where they're unanswerable, and you have...
You're out the escape hatch, right?
And that's where philosophy and religion have to regretfully part ways.
Because I don't have that escape hatch.
Like, this is why, you know, the things that are uncomfortable for my audience...
Oh, yeah.
And so I don't have an escape hatch.
I can't say, well, the evidence clearly and directly points towards this, but I'm not going to follow it that way because of X, right?
I don't have that escape hatch.
And so this is where philosophers and theologians, the reason-based and the faith-based belief systems have to part ways.
I have to sort of grimly track on through reason and evidence, and I don't have the option to reject a rational argument because I don't have the backup, you know, break-in case of emergency faith alarm.
You do, and so we can only go so far as companions, right?
Because our road goes divergent.
Yep, I can see that for sure.
Absolutely.
And if you ever do decide to say, well, I'm not going to take this exit.
I'm not going to pull the...
Right?
Then we can go further.
But at this point, you're sort of peeling off from the...
That's right.
...the squadron, right?
Yep.
He's gone rogue.
I can't...
No, I can't...
Yeah, I can't...
I can't refute some of those.
Some of what you're saying.
Like, I don't...
It just feels better for me, I guess.
So that's...
In the end, I knew it was going to go...
Like, I was going to write in that thing, like, you know, we're going to basically agree to disagree or...
No, I'm not doing that.
No, what's going to happen is I'm going to keep...
You're going to say, I reject reason.
I reject reason, yeah.
And once you say that, then there's nothing else for me to say.
And again, it's not a hostile thing.
It's just a recognition that if you switch to Swahili, we can't keep chatting, right?
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
I gotcha.
Okay, I think...
I think I'm good.
I'm all philosophical.
You're filled with philosophy.
I'm filled with philosophy.
Your cup, yeah, we say, runneth over.
Yeah, the cup runneth over, exactly.
Well, listen, look, first of all, I appreciate the chat.
I mean, I really, really appreciate the chat.
And you have, in my opinion, a very good heart.
And that sounds like a consolation prize for the mind.
I don't mean that at all.
Like, good-hearted person, right?
And I appreciate your curiosity and interest in these matters.
And I appreciate your pursuit of the truth in these matters.
And I get how hard it is to not...
Like your finger's been on the button for a little while.
One more!
Okay, I'll do one more.
But I appreciate the conversation.
And I also appreciate the fact that it's a public conversation.
So other people can hear your struggles and listen.
I'm always open to new arguments.
The damn annoying thing about philosophy is not only do you have to follow reason wherever it leads, but you can never say never.
There could be great arguments.
So if people do have great arguments to restore my broken relationship with my childhood deity, I am more than happy to hear them.
And I really do appreciate you and I having this public conversation because that is also in the Christian tradition.
I mean, I have focused much more on the Greco-Roman tradition of discourse, but...
It's hard to avoid the number of theologians who have also wrestled with these very topics in very public forums, and I appreciate your contribution to that great Christian tradition.
Well, thank you.
Thank you very much, and thank you everyone for calling in, for chatting, for listening, for arguing, for debating, for loving, for Hayden.
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