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March 1, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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3220 Migratory Patterns of Predatory Scientists - Call In Show - February 26th, 2016

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	Yo, yo!
	Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	freedomainradio.com slash donate to help out the show.
	If you haven't signed up for a subscription and you're up here in the stratosphere of new shows, you know you need to, you know you should, you know it's the right thing to do.
	So freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Had four great callers tonight.
	The first was an ex-Christian who's been studying rebuttals to the most common philosophical arguments for The existence of a deity and we dug deep into the cosmological argument which has been advanced by William Lane Craig and a couple of other arguments and it was a really really good workout and I hope that you enjoy it.
	The second is a caller from Germany who's very worried about the migrant crisis and he feels he can't protect his home and also that if he can't protect his home how could he protect We're good to
	go.
	And put on the good old philosophical verbal fight, and when is it time to cut your losses turntail and hit the road, Jack?
	Third caller, he is a creationist and finds the idea of evolution unconvincing.
	How on earth can life arise from non-living matter?
	And we had a good old back and forth about that, which ended a little bit abruptly for reasons that I'm sure will make sense to you as we go through the conversation.
	The fourth was an Indian doctoral student in Germany, and we had a discussion about if you take a lot from society in the form of consuming resources paid for by taxpayers, do you have any obligation to pay them back?
	It's an interesting question.
	I've certainly, I took some money from the taxpayer for my education, It always created a sense of obligation.
	For me, it's not a clear and convincing moral case, so we had a good set of back and forths about that.
	So, great callers, great listeners, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help us out.
	Let's get moving.
	Alright, well up first today we have Rick.
	And Rick wrote in and said, I am an ex-Christian.
	I've been studying rebuttals to the most common philosophical arguments for the existence of a deity, such as the Kalam cosmological argument, today popularized most notably by William Lane Craig, Or presuppositional apologetics, popular with Presbyterian scholars especially.
	Which philosophical arguments for and against the existence of a deity do you believe are particularly pernient, and what are your thoughts on these?
	That's from Rick.
	Hello, Rick.
	How are you doing?
	Hi, Stefan.
	I'm very excited to be on your show.
	I'm a big fan.
	Well, thank you very much.
	It's a pleasure to chat with you.
	As an ex-Christian, I'm just wondering why theological arguments are interesting to you?
	Well, I think it was...
	Primarily, I think, because at the time I was becoming a libertarian, I then began to think a lot more rationally about everything in my life, and I was questioning my theistic beliefs.
	I also haven't had the time to be studying the Second Temple period, which is, well...
	Leading up to Christianity, I suppose.
	And I began to question the Bible, but also just be more rationalistic, trying to philosophize about what it is that I do believe and what should I believe.
	And was there any particular argument that gave you the...
	End part of your theological beliefs?
	Like, was there any clinching argument that guillotined your faith?
	I would favor the more rationalistic arguments rather than speaking about empirical matters.
	So people would obviously want to talk to me about evolution.
	I've come to the point where I I know it sounds strange, but I didn't really see that much of a discrepancy between evolution and Christian faith.
	So I had come to the point where I was more of a liberal Christian, you might say, in terms of my attitude towards the Bible.
	So, speaking about empirical matters, so how old is the Earth, you know, all of those matters, and you've done some really interesting shows on this, spoken to some people, brought up a lot of interesting points, but I was more interested in things like the cosmological arguments, so the The first cause arguments, you know, were developed by Aquinas and various others because I felt that there was something a bit more concrete there.
	There was something that I could not deny.
	So when I was...
	I don't know, maybe feeling emotionally distant from God.
	That was how I was feeling.
	Perhaps if I was feeling depressed, basically, and I wasn't feeling full of spiritual joy and thinking, yeah, I'm going to go to heaven or whatever it is.
	I would always be able to positively justify my belief by going back to more rational arguments.
	And so I felt like an anchor Anchor my faith on those things.
	It gave me comfort, basically.
	It enabled me to stay within my comfort zone, which was that belief system at the time.
	You haven't answered my question.
	I'm really sorry if I haven't.
	It is gone midnight here and I have two children and plenty more excuses.
	I don't mind.
	I never mind these people.
	I'm not a Gestapo swinging lightbulb, rubber trenching.
	I like it to be acknowledged if you haven't answered my question or don't want to.
	But my question was, was there any particular argument that turned you away from religion?
	Oh, that turned me away from religion.
	I'm sorry, I misunderstood the question there.
	And by the way, I like the fact that you always bring it back to the question.
	You don't just meander away into a bush somewhere.
	Yeah, okay, so...
	An argument that brought me away.
	I think...
	Who killed God for you, Rick?
	Yeah, right.
	Who is standing over the ghostly corpse?
	Who is your Macbeth?
	It's not Nietzsche.
	I think it's probably...
	I can't say...
	Sorry, Nietzsche overturns arguments like a kid randomly hits a piñata.
	There can be a lot of connection, but I'm just not sure it's all very well planned.
	I would have to say that as I was studying particularly the Austrian economic side of libertarianism and thinking more about what can I actually be certain about I then realised that belief in God was certainly not axiomatic, as it is claimed to be by many, many Christians.
	I think that's a fairly dominant view, and Muslims as well, obviously.
	And I realised, well, I'm going to have I have to start bringing in a lot of empirical data here, and I'm really going to have to start testing what I believe.
	And it was then that I could really assess things like the cosmological argument, is there a first cause, and really then look at the empirical data and say, is it possible that we have a universe that's come from nothing, basically?
	And yeah, that is possible.
	That's entirely possible.
	Mathematically, it's quite possible that that could happen.
	So is it necessary then that I believe in these things?
	No, it's not.
	So if I could say, was it one person and one argument?
	I'm afraid I can't really.
	Perhaps there is, but it's not something that I'm consciously aware of.
	Right.
	So, for those who don't know, The cosmological argument has been phrased many times.
	It's sometimes called the unmoved mover.
	So whatever begins to exist must have a cause.
	You know, if a child comes out of a woman with, I think, only one exception in theology, there must have been some sort of sexual rope swing activity going on approximately nine months previously.
	If there is a hole in the ground with a shovel in it, a man was probably digging there.
	Something that begins to exist that wasn't there before and then is there must have a course.
	Now, the universe...
	14 and a half billion years ago, whenever it was, began to exist.
	And therefore, since everything which begins to exist must have a cause, the universe which began to exist must itself have a cause.
	Now, to avoid the problem of infinite regression, we cannot say everything that exists has a cause.
	Because if we say everything that exists, sorry, everything that exists has a cause, then God who exists must himself have had a cause, which was a pre-God, and that pre-God must himself have had a cause, which was a pre-pre-God, and you get this sort of infinite regression.
	It's turtles all the way down, you know, like when you stand in between those two mirrors in the funhouse and you slowly stretch away to eternity.
	And so the argument can't be whatever exists has a cause.
	It has to be whatever begins to exist must have a cause.
	And the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause, but the God who created the universe is eternal and therefore cannot have begun to exist and therefore does not need a cause himself.
	Is that sort of along the lines of what...
	Yeah, I mean, that's exactly...
	William Lane Craig, sorry, would put it.
	He would also then add, well, what can this sort of abstract thing be?
	And he said, well, it can't be something like a number or something like that.
	He comes up with some examples of it.
	It can't be the number seven, which is abstract and, I don't know, I suppose he argues could be You know, infinite or whatever.
	He says, therefore, it would have to be something that determined to bring finite existence into existence.
	Yeah, if something creates the universe, there are certain characteristics that we can assume that something has.
	First of all, it must be outside the universe.
	Yes.
	Because otherwise, it would be like saying a woman gets pregnant and ends up inside the womb of the baby, right?
	That's You have to be bigger than the baby to make the baby, and the baby is within you.
	So whatever created the universe must be outside the universe.
	It must have intelligence, because it has a purpose and a plan, and it creates something of near-infinite complexity called the universe.
	It must be enormously powerful, because to create the universe out of nothing would require an extraordinary understanding.
	Amount of power.
	It must be outside time because it's eternal, and if it creates a universe which is bound by time, it must have done so outside of the universe.
	The cause would have to have eternal aspects to it.
	It would also have to have as close to omniscience as we could conceivably imagine, because it would be able to create the universe.
	In other words, to create the universe which our relatively paltry intellects are contained within must be a plan or a purpose or an action by a being that's omniscient relative to our...
	So, outside of time, outside of space, all-powerful, all-knowing, these would be characteristics that we would assume or accept if we accept the argument as a whole.
	Is that...
	Follow it the way that you think?
	I'm starting to think maybe you're on Wikipedia.
	Yeah, that's exactly how he puts it.
	Yeah.
	And basically, I wanted to speak with you about that argument and also something called presuppositional apologetics, which maybe we can get into.
	Well, let's do one at a time.
	Exactly.
	Let's do one at a time.
	Yeah.
	So is your question, what is my evaluation of the argument?
	Yeah, I'd just be very interested.
	The shows that I've heard you do, you speak with people about how old is the earth, things like that.
	But I just wanted to have a discussion with you, really just for my personal benefit, just to hear how you would respond to someone else.
	I'm posing that argument to you.
	You're a very insightful person, very well read, and I knew I would get some good insight from you.
	Well, it's a long way from this argument to get up, go to church on Sundays and put something in the collection plate so you don't go to hell.
	That's my sort of challenge to the argument.
	Even if we accept this argument and even if we accept that there is some infinite consciousness outside of space and time, I don't know how you end up with religion.
	I don't know how you end up with personal salvation.
	I don't know how you end up with the angels and the devils wrestling for your soul.
	Because, you know, the deist argument, which was very common in the 18th century and which, of course, a lot of the founding fathers of America were quite keen on.
	The deist argument was basically God created things and set things in motion.
	And this is how I explain how things came to be.
	But after God came into, after God brought the universe into existence, God got drafted into Starfleet.
	And God was then subjected to the prime directive, which was not to interfere.
	So, there is a...
	Yeah, okay, we'll accept that this abstract intelligence, eternal, omniscient, all-powerful, and so on...
	Yeah, it created the universe.
	But that gives nothing to do with miracles, or Jews rising from the dead, or, you know, loaves into fishes.
	Nothing to do with that.
	Because if we accept that there's this consciousness outside of the universe...
	That created the universe.
	Well, so what?
	Maybe we've explained how the universe came into being, but either that consciousness interferes with his creation or he doesn't.
	Now, if that consciousness interferes with the creation in the form of miracles and coming back from the dead and impregnating women without sexuality and so on, if that being interferes with his creation, Then this would be something that could be verified by science, right?
	We would see burning bushes that never consumed themselves.
	We'd see a whole bunch of loaves and fishes.
	We'd see water turning into wine, guys walking on water, and so on, right?
	So science would be able to detect the finger of God poking through space-time and interfering with that which occurs in space.
	In the tangible, sensual, material, objective, empirical world, right?
	So even if we accept, and there's arguments about that, which we'll get to in a second, but even if we accept this argument that there's an unmoved mover, the first cause, and there's a being, okay, so what?
	Does he interfere in any way, shape, or form with the University created now if he does this would be the realm of scientific inquiry We would look for miracles that could not be explained by any scientific laws and then we would have some indication That there is some external force acting in ways that are greater than natural forces natural laws,
	so we would accept that however science does not find such interference now if we say that there's some being that created the universe and that being In no way shape or form interferes with or adjusts or plays with or responds to entreaties or Provides blessings or curses for that matter sends people to heaven drives people to hell if this being in no way shape or form interferes or Adjusts the parameters of
	his creation if there's no ghostly fingers poking down to change things then Such a deity, even if we accepted his existence, would be synonymous with accepting his non-existence, right?
	So in other words, if the god never interferes in the reality that he has created, then this would be epistemologically identical to...
	There being no god at all.
	Does that make sense?
	Yes, yes, of course.
	Yeah, that's quite right.
	Okay, so again, even if we accept this argument, I don't think it leads anywhere productive towards religion.
	And again, I just want to run this through real quick in a succinct way.
	If we accept that such a being exists, either he interferes or doesn't interfere.
	If he does interfere, science will detect it, which it hasn't.
	If he doesn't interfere, that is exactly the same as him not existing.
	Yes.
	And then, of course, they would want to say, well, the Bible is the only book that says that there was a God outside of the universe and created the universe, which I don't think it necessarily says that, actually.
	But they would say that, and they would say, well, Jesus rose from the dead, and therefore he proved that he was that God that can interfere with All of that.
	And then, of course, like you just said, that brings into an empirical argument.
	Then you bring the empirical argument, and that is a perfectly testable hypothesis.
	And the empirical argument has been tested repeatedly, over and over and over again.
	You know, they get two groups, and they're sick people, and one group has their congregation pray for them, and the other group doesn't have the congregation pray for them.
	And there's no difference in the outcomes.
	There's been no statistical effect that prayer has.
	Now, prayer does have some effects, some positive effects on health, relative to nihilism.
	Religion has certain effects that are beneficial to health, notably, you know, community, a sense of purpose.
	I would argue that being virtuous is good for your health, for the most part.
	And, you know, when you're not in Islamic countries.
	But so...
	The empirical question is perfectly fine.
	Now, if religious people point to a particular religious text and say, this is proof of my deity, the problem is, why is only your religious text proof of your deity?
	There are 10,000 gods around the world that people believe in.
	If the principle is, religious text proves...
	A deity, then there are lots of deities floating around, you know, and why would you choose one rather than any other?
	Then what you have to do is create a special pleading category for saying, well, only my religious book proves my religious deity, and everyone else's is false and made by the devil, at which point you'd say, why would you have, what principle could you use to justify only your religious book and not other people's religious books, and it really just comes back To faith, I believe it because I want to believe it.
	And I can have some respect for people who say, I accept that faith is anti-rational.
	It's not just irrational.
	It's anti-rational.
	I mean, where rocks fall down a hill and land, that's irrational.
	In other words, there's no plan to it and it's not so logistical or anything.
	So if somebody says, I just, I believe because it gives me comfort, I believe because I like to believe, but there's, you know, I'm not going to claim there's any kind of objective truth in it.
	Now, that's a tough thing to say, because when people say, I believe in God, that is a mishmash of two epistemologies that oppose each other.
	Because I believe can...
	Be true or false.
	Lots of people's beliefs are true and lots of people's beliefs are false.
	And within each person there are true beliefs and false beliefs within me and within you as we continue to comb through reason and evidence to get correct answers.
	So when someone says, I believe, they're talking about a subjective state.
	But then when they say, in God, then they're talking about an objective reality.
	They don't say, I believe that there is the idea of God within me.
	They don't say, I accept the existence of God because that would require empirical proof.
	They say, I believe in God, and they unite a subjective experience called belief, which applies equally to irrational, anti-rational, and rational beliefs, with hooking it into an external objective reality called a deity.
	And those two things, I don't look at the moon and say, I believe in the moon.
	It's right there.
	You don't have to believe in it.
	It's right there.
	And you know they always have these stirring music movie trailers.
	Just believe.
	Just go crazy.
	Just imagine elves are dancing in your nostril hairs and you'll have a magical life.
	And so this believe thing means I believe in myself.
	I believe I could be a good philosopher.
	I believe I could bring lots of reason and evidence to the masses and find some way that they will enjoy the Somewhat uncomfortable prickly bush enema that sometimes characterizes the pursuit of wisdom.
	I believe in it and therefore I worked at it and sort of became true.
	So when it comes to belief, I have more respect for people who just say, Or don't say anything about it.
	They have a belief.
	They know it's incommunicable.
	They know they can't prove it.
	And they know the more they try to prove it, the more shaky it becomes.
	Because if they say, I believe in something subjective, then there's nothing out there for them to worship.
	If they say there's something out there for them to worship, then they have to prove through reason and evidence the existence of that thing, which they just can't do.
	I hear the sort of tortured grinding gears of this double think that it is about faith But the faith has to hook into something external and real which means it must be provable Yes, and I mean as we just seen here with this argument They need to bring in some empirical data need to bring in the all these arguments that you've dealt with with other callers on your on your show and
	Something else I wanted to ask you about, I don't want to digress too much, but do you think it's possible for someone to have a purely intellectual belief, a theistic belief?
	Or do you think that there's...
	What do you mean by purely intellectual?
	I don't know what that means.
	Well...
	I mean, I understand each individual word.
	I just want to make sure we're on the same.
	Yeah, okay.
	So, I suppose what's motivating me to ask that question is that with my own...
	Oh, no, no, no.
	Sorry.
	Sorry.
	It's not that I don't care.
	I want to know what the question means before your motivation.
	Sure.
	I want to illustrate it by saying that I... I can look back and I can say, I really think I had some emotional reasons for believing those things.
	I had some experiences that happened to me.
	I don't need to go into that.
	And then I can see now that it was for emotional stability, I suppose, that I... I've settled into that, and therefore I went about positively justifying that belief in order to keep myself in that place, if you like.
	And I've been thinking recently, is it possible that there are some people who just think, It seems most probable to me, it seems most rational.
	I think the empirical data definitely suggests that there is probably a creator, even one that interferes with the universe.
	Do you think there are people like that?
	You have a lot more experience talking with theists from various backgrounds than I do.
	Do you think there are people like that who would then objectively just look at the evidence and say, huh, well, I guess there's no God then.
	I'll just be agnostic now.
	Is that possible, do you think?
	I think agnostic means that you don't believe but you don't want to upset your parents too much who do believe.
	You know, I've done a whole book on agnosticism called Against the Gods, which people can get for free at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	But...
	First of all, it is a very important issue to decide about.
	And consistency is the bitch of philosophy.
	And to be a philosopher, you have to be made consistency's bitch.
	Oh, look, there's a new slogan for the show.
	But you have to be consistent.
	And...
	People are not generally agnostic about unicorns or leprechauns or the existence of hobbits or square circles and so on.
	They're not agnostic about these things.
	And so the question is, why are they agnostic?
	About the existence of God.
	Well, part of it may be hedging their bets.
	You know, I leave that door ajar in case when I get older I feel the need for that kind of comfort.
	I think that's also its insurance against loneliness.
	I'm going to leave that door open in case I end up in a place in my life where I'm very lonely and I need some comfort and I'm going to, you know, keep that, wedge that little door ajar so I can get back in it.
	But a lot of it has to do with just not wanting to take a stand.
	And I also would say that agnosticism is And this sort of goes back to Nietzsche who came up a little bit earlier in passing.
	The great danger of faithlessness is nihilism.
	That God has for so long in at least Western society, other societies too, but God has for so long been associated with virtue, With self-sacrifice, with restraint,
	with the deferral of gratification, with a conformity to social norms, with traditional families, with fidelity, piety, keeping your word, honor, keeping your vows to your wife.
	And one of the things that happened was the great meteor of faithlessness landed in the West in the 60s and smashed up the existing Judeo-Christian tradition That had been going on for, you know, 2,000 years, I guess, almost.
	And I've been thinking a lot about this, so I'll try to keep this short, but the nihilism that came along in the 60s, first of all, there was a lot of creative energy that was unleashed through that nihilism.
	It's impossible to hate the 60s but love its music, you know.
	There has to be good things in it.
	You can, you know, have a certain amount of distaste for the amount of, um, STDs that flourished in society, but you also have to admire a lot of the artistic merit that came out of the 60s, particularly in music.
	But in the 60s, the generation grew up who looked back at the first half of the 20th century and saw two unbelievably destructive wars waged by Christian nations with Christian leaders, where at the end of it, A Christian Democrat named Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an order to drop two atomic bombs on largely civilian cities in Japan.
	And that had to end.
	You know, like I have problems with the relativism.
	I have problems with the nihilism.
	I have problems with the political correctness.
	I have problems with the leftism.
	I have problems with all of that.
	And I have problems with the lack of...
	You know, I was trying to think, as I was talking with a lady yesterday about this, and she said, like, I'm proud to be white.
	And that's not, I don't think that's right or that's fair.
	It's an accident.
	But there's a lot that I admire about white culture.
	There's lots of aspects of different cultures I admire, but the white culture seemed to be so trashed.
	There's a lot that I admire about white culture, but that couldn't continue.
	like like the belief system that had driven the west for 2 000 years had almost ended the west yes and those i mean the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century with more than 50 million dead not even counting the 20 million that died of the spanish flu or the people who died of starvation and disease in post-war europe that that had to end like whatever problems we've had since oh there's a welfare state oh there's migration oh there's problems with islamics and okay
	those are things i think can be dealt with i don't think that the west could not have survived another one of those wars i mean even discounting nuclear weapons that shit had to end Like that, whatever it was that was going on, and I don't want to get into too many details about it all, but whatever it was that was going on that led to the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, and the first use of nuclear weapons, and the capacity for human beings to use nuclear weapons, there could not be a Third World War.
	And I think nihilism, the nihilism of the 60s, was like the fuse blowing.
	Saying, we don't know what the hell went wrong, but things went seriously wrong.
	And we're standing on a mountain of bodies staring down into the future at the potential end of civilization as a whole.
	Not just in the West, but possibly even around the world.
	Nuclear winter and the idea that nuclear weapons would have kicked up so much dust in the air that a new ice age would have occurred.
	And we're back down to 10,000 people gnawing on chicken bones like we were in the last ice age.
	Whatever was going on, the 60s were like, well, the plane's heading towards a mountain.
	I don't really have a parachute, but I've got three blankets.
	I'm going to jump out, cross my fingers, and hope I hit a haystack, because if I stay in this plane, it's over.
	Now, Basically, for those who listen to the show a lot, I'm sure this isn't too much of a shock.
	The problem is statism, right?
	The First and Second World War were the result of statism, the result of surrendering one's moral autonomy and economic well-being and control to the state, to a tiny bunch of bloodthirsty narcissistic sociopaths who think nothing of mowing down human lives.
	You are to these rulers as a blade of grass is to a maintenance man on your lawn.
	Doesn't matter if you get thrown in the air, they don't care as long as they make their money and have their power.
	They are addicts and they don't care about others.
	They're addicts to power.
	So, the great challenge, the challenge which I'm Working feverishly on with everyone's assistance and interest, the great challenge is, how do we let go of God without letting go of good?
	What do we have to stand for, to fight for, in the absence of a deity and in the collapse of nationalism?
	Because those were the two things that died in the 60s.
	It was the collapse of God and the collapse of nationalism.
	Because the songs that I was taught as a kid were onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war with the cross of Jesus, marching as before.
	These were the songs that you were going to be conscripted into God's army.
	And you were going to mow down the enemies of Jesus.
	And the tragic thing, of course, you know, you say with one thing, but the Muslims and the Christians fight each other.
	But the First and Second World War were Christian nations all killing each other.
	That's a WTF moment for sure.
	And so it was God that you were supposed to follow and the king who you were supposed to obey.
	And the king wielded God like a lightsaber and you followed that sweep of light and killed whoever was commanded.
	And the end of God and the end of nationalism, which opened up leftism, right?
	I mean, because leftism is atheistic and international, right?
	But God and nationalism had almost destroyed Western civilization.
	Not just, oh, it's going to collapse, but like, holy shit, we've got nuclear weapons now.
	We're toast.
	If we continue down nationalism and religion, which led us to 1914 and led us to 1949...
	We're toast.
	Now, when you end God and you end nationalism, you open up a power vacuum, and the left rushes in, and that's what happened in the 60s, that's what happened with the welfare state, and that's what happened with political correctness and all of this kind of stuff.
	And the solution was, you know, reason, evidence, anarchism, peaceful parenting, atheism that is not the rejection of God like a fuse is blown— You know, the ship is sinking, and God is in a crate, and we can't handle the weight, right?
	The ship is sinking, God's in a crate, he's got to go overboard.
	The ship is sinking, and there are 3,000 wet flags in a giant box, and we have to push them overboard.
	It was mad self-survival that was the cause of the nihilism.
	Everything we believe gets us killed!
	And nihilism is the...
	That's the fuse blowing.
	If I believe in anything, I'm going to die.
	And so they had to cut off nationalism and religion in the same way that a guy who's got gangrene creeping up his calves has got to cut both of his legs above the knee.
	I don't want to, but the alternative is to die.
	And with that power vacuum, because in did not rush, you know, voluntarism, anarchism, the free market, peaceful parenting, all of the things that could have filled that power vacuum with people no longer thirsty for power.
	Nationalism and religion both create a massive thirst for power by creating a hierarchical structure.
	People at the top ordering everyone down below.
	Jail and hell and liberty and heaven and massive resource transfers and idolatrous worship of idiots in funny costumes whether they're priests or generals or politicians for that matter.
	These societies are all created by trauma and of course I've got the book The Origins of War in Child Abuse which people can find at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	So we had to shoot off the legs of God and nationalism in order to survive because another war would have been the end of not just the West, but possibly of everything.
	And so in rushed the leftists as they continue to do, I think the pendulum has swung.
	You know, the woman who demanded the muscle at the University of Mizzou.
	Can I get some muscle over here?
	Says the feminist who then calls upon guys to beat someone up.
	She disagrees with, ooh, how empowered.
	Have you not seen The Force Awakens?
	She finally got fired.
	That's, you know, it's a little thing, but it's not a little thing in some ways.
	And I think the world now just needs to accept that the rejection of the suicidality of gods and governments does not mean nihilism.
	Because if you simply reject things, you create a power vacuum.
	Yes.
	And if you create a power vacuum, there's going to be endless traumatized, greedy, fascistic style people.
	You know, the fascist criers and cry bullies and all of that, the weeping fascists of the politically correct left.
	They'll rush in and they'll order you about and lots of people will be happy to have it done to them.
	They don't have any internalized restraint or control in their behavior.
	Yet we all know we need to control our behavior because mere passion loosed upon the world destroys everything in its path in the long run.
	We know we need restraints upon our behavior because human desires are infinite and resources are finite.
	And if there's no restraint on behavior, well, you get fiat currency, self-immolation, In massive overconsumption in the present.
	We all know we need to restrain our behavior, and in the absence of any internal standards that will cause you to do that, what do you have?
	You have to create external structures of control, of fascism, of communism, of political correctness, where, okay, now I have to restrain my behavior because I'm going to be punished if I don't.
	And what the hell is the social ostracism Of the social justice warriors and their attack upon your relationships and your income and all the stuff that the left attacks.
	What is that other than a secular form of hell?
	Obey or be punished.
	It's the same in the church with hell.
	It's the same with government and jail.
	And it's the same with the social justice warriors and social shaming and stigmatism and an attack upon the sources of your revenue as they always do.
	Go for your advertisers or go for your boss or whatever it is.
	Try and get you fired.
	This is the same damn thing.
	It's all just control and order.
	Control and order because people do not have A rational positive methodology for organizing their own behavior and restraining the tyranny of desire.
	Desires are always infinite and everything which is infinite is tyrannical.
	Desires which are infinite are always tyrannical because infinite desires have no hierarchy.
	Like if you're an addict and you just got to have that cocaine you'll step on a child's face to get it.
	When you have an infinite desire and we all do There's no possibility of rational prioritization or hierarchical preferences.
	It's all just a chaotic grab for everything.
	And we see this, you know, the people who want welfare or the people who want government fundings or the Democrats who want their imported third world voters and the On the right, the Republican donors who want their imported third-world cheap labor.
	There's just desire, desire, desire, and no sense of self-restraint.
	And because there's no universally accepted standard of self-restraint, then there's no possibility of social enforcement at the moment.
	Rules need to be enforced.
	And the way that it used to be done is, for instance, I was talking to someone the other day, and his wife...
	Had an affair.
	Now in the past, if your wife had an affair, And people found out about it, she would have been ostracized.
	Nobody would have her over.
	Nobody would talk with her.
	Nobody would bring her bundt cake to make her feel better.
	She would have been shunned.
	And that's social enforcement.
	And that's why people didn't have affairs.
	Now, have an affair, divorce your wife, divorce your husband, get alimony, get child support.
	You get support groups.
	You get sympathetic posts on the Huffington Post about what a brave and strong woman, never the man, brave and strong woman, The woman you are, and how you're self-actualized, and your life's going to be great, and you didn't want to put up with second best, and it's all his fault, and everybody rushes in to support everyone on everything.
	On everything, because of this hyper-feminized society, right?
	Support, support, support.
	Although women used to be very tough in enforcing social rules.
	So because we don't have any internalized rules anymore, because of the nihilism and the idea...
	See, economic determinism is the opposite.
	poor people have made bad decisions, people get really enraged in me because I'm saying internal standards would help them.
	Get up, go to work, keep your job, save your money, don't screw around, don't have a child at a wedlock, get and keep your first job, finish high school, like all the basics that seem to me like 101, but for other people come across as 666.
	When you don't have those internal standards because you can blame everything on economic determinism, Well, I was born poor and I got no chance.
	The man has got it into me.
	The rich people are all assholes and they're all rigged.
	The whole game is rigged.
	This is Bernie Sanders.
	I saw this Bernie Sanders out the other day when I was watching a debate.
	The Wall Street controls the money for Wall Street and you have no chance and you have no hope.
	Okay, that means you've got to rely on Bernie Sanders and his socialist muscle to get you some cheddar because it's all hoarded by the cheesemakers and you barely get any scraps.
	And even though the fact is that there are more self-made wealthy people in America now than there was a generation or two ago, and they're not all making their money through finance and all that kind of stuff.
	So, to sort of sum up, the nihilism blew away external standards, but society still needs restraint.
	And so the left is a power vacuum rushing into the absence of internal standards.
	Now, they can say internal standards are lies.
	Internal standards are false class consciousness and you succumbing to the capitalist propaganda, wherever the hell that shows up, given the kids are in public government schools for 12 years straight.
	I don't know, well, there's capitalist propaganda.
	I didn't get a hell of a lot of it or any of it.
	In government schools.
	But when people give up their standards, when they give up their gods and they give up their nations and they give up their culture, they give up their history, they give up their ethnic pride, they give up their cultural pride, they give up their racial pride, they have nothing!
	Now, That's a power vacuum that the left rushes in to fill by saying, we'll organize your life for you now that you don't have any standards.
	Life needs to be organized and life needs to be strained.
	We'll do it by blaming everything on economic and environmental circumstances.
	And then, and then what we'll do is we'll just pass more and more and more and more and more and more laws.
	You know, there's an old saying that says when people stop believing God, In the big laws, they don't end up with no-no laws, they end up with a multiplicity of tiny laws, like an endless swarm of tiny laws.
	You know, when you drive off the dragon, all you do is get killed by 10,000 mosquitoes per square inch of skin.
	And so, when the rise of rational ethics, you know, my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, again, free domain, ready to come slash free, the rise of secular ethics is the pushback and saying we can organize ourselves rationally, we can restrain our desires, we can postpone our gratification, we can do what is right and necessary for society to survive.
	And we don't need to do it because a ghost is ordering us to or because a king or a president is threatening us with jail.
	If we don't do it, we don't need Congress.
	We don't need six million laws.
	We don't need punishments of heaven or hell.
	We don't need political correctness.
	We don't need bullying.
	We don't need endless regulations.
	And we don't need guys with guns running all over the place.
	We will internally organize ourselves.
	And that can't work without ostracism.
	People say, oh, Steph, why you focus on these relationships and people rejecting other people for evildoing or, you know, supporting evil institutions?
	It's because I want the world to survive.
	And if people are willing to ostracize evil, then evil cannot flourish.
	And you don't need a government.
	If people aren't willing to ostracize evildoers, then you need a government.
	And the government will then be populated by evildoers who will destroy your civilization.
	But if you're willing to ostracize, if you're willing to say to people, okay, I've spent six months now informing you of the truth.
	If you can't rebut my arguments, you need to either come over to my position or I'm going to have nothing more to do with you because your support of the state is going to end civilization.
	You think this is disruptive to our relationship.
	Well, me going to a gulag is also disruptive to a relationship, as is you going to a gulag or something else, even worse, that could happen.
	So when I focus on voluntarism in relationships, I'm attempting to replace the state of With the willpower of ostracism.
	We don't need the state because ostracism provokes as much emotional discomfort as people as physical torture.
	You can measure that psychologically.
	So if you aren't willing to ostracize, you have a state.
	And you have a big, powerful, ugly, vicious, brutal, self-destructive state.
	Or you can reject evil, you can spread the virtues of rejecting evil, and then you won't need a state because people can guide themselves by internalized values and the external cues of approval or disapproval but that has largely vanished and when ostracism raises its head everybody at the moment rails against it and threatens and fights and gets angry and makes up lies and spreads slander crazy about it because everybody who's power hungry knows that if ostracism wins they lose because they have nothing left to sell anymore
	because society can spontaneously self-organize by universal principles enforced voluntarily through ostracism that is the opposite of the state And that I think is the great opportunity that we have as a species.
	And frankly, I can't see any other opportunity that exists.
	Yes, agreed.
	Would you mind if I followed up with another question, just following this line of thought?
	I know primarily I was supposed to be bringing about these rational, theistic arguments, and I'm finding what you're saying absolutely fascinating.
	I hadn't quite thought about it in those terms before, but it was a sense of nihilism in the 60s that left this vacuum.
	The socialists feel that is a fascinating insight there.
	I'm thinking, I have a YouTube channel myself, and I interviewed Ricardo Duchenne, who is the author of Sorry, do you want to mention, sorry to interrupt, do you want to mention what that channel is so people can find it?
	Oh, yeah, sure.
	It's That Libertarian Chap.
	That's C-H-A-P. Wait, have you commented on some of my videos?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, plenty.
	Yeah, yeah, I thought I recognized the name.
	Okay, we'll put a link to that.
	I'm hoping you remember the good comments.
	I love your show.
	If I'm critical at times, please take that in the most lighthearted way possible.
	Oh, there is nobody alive who loves me who does not want to criticize me, including myself.
	So, no, I never, ever view criticism, I mean, unless it's abusive, which always never was, as far as I recall.
	No, criticism is wonderful.
	Okay, thank you for that.
	Yeah, so I interviewed Riccardo Duchenne.
	His book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, is a brilliant book.
	I'd recommend that to people as well.
	He tries to see the origins of the West and our Faustian spirit, as you could call it, and our restless kind of need to rationalize and then systematize our rational thinking.
	He links that all the way back to the Indo-Europeans, who are, of course, not a rational people, but they were very, very competitive.
	I don't know who the Indo-Europeans are, if you don't mind explaining.
	Well, they were nomads who came into Europe.
	In the north of Europe, they completely eradicated the population there.
	Europe at the time was populated by farmers from the Anatolian region, so modern-day Turkey, and some hunter-gatherer groups who basically just got exterminated along the way, so they're not really that important.
	So the Indo-Europeans came in.
	In the south of Europe, they didn't just eradicate the population.
	They found it was more beneficial to work with the native peasant farmers in establishing trade routes and things like that.
	They eventually formed an aristocracy in the south of Europe, but in the north of Europe they completely eradicated the population, so in the north of Europe it seems that people from the north of Europe are primarily descended from those earlier Indo-European groups, so Celts, Germanic people, that sort of thing.
	So he argued that with those people, their society was structured as an egalitarian aristocracy.
	So you never had one despotic ruler who was just telling everyone else what to do.
	That would have been considered something dishonourable.
	They had to lead, they had to show their martial valour, if you like, and then they were recognised in a sort of spontaneous order as being a king, effectively, the chief, if you like.
	That later developed into Germanic custom law, or in the south of Europe it was more a natural law kind of thing.
	And he basically says that this is what began the process of not allowing one leader to be a completely despotic ruler, and why there's been that trend in Western civilization.
	I would then argue that I think that it's the church and the creation of later constitutional monarchies who were sort of trying to harken back to the Roman Empire, basically, trying to centralise power.
	It was those groups that...
	Basically helped each other out and established a monopoly over judicial practices, judicial services.
	So you no longer had law in this kind of spontaneous customary sense.
	You had a private monopoly effectively over judicial power.
	And Hans-Hermann Hopper is also brilliant because he's shown how the rise of democracy then is simply the transition from a private monopoly over this judicial power where you have one person or one family or one group who is above the law, really, and legislates.
	They even claim to be able to make law, not to discover it, not having judges who are able to find the law through rational processes, which was the Western tradition before then.
	No, instead, what we have now is a publicly owned monopoly over judicial practice.
	And it just results in, rather than just being the church and the state getting at each other, we have everyone else's necks trying to wield the sword of the state, basically, to pillage each other, just to get more from those who have more.
	I just found it so fascinating what you were saying there about the fact that there was a power vacuum left as we felt as though we were leaving behind things that were really bad about the state.
	So the nation-state making war.
	That's very bad we're leaving behind.
	And the church as well.
	Oh, we're going to leave that behind as well.
	And...
	Then the socialists, of course, fill that gap.
	And they fill it with more of a...
	Would you agree with me?
	They fill it with a more positivistic philosophy.
	So they...
	Even to the extent where they say, well, truth is relative.
	And in terms of a legal sense, I think that's why we have so much legislation now.
	Because they really, really run with this idea that the state makes the law.
	It's not to be found.
	Laws aren't something...
	That are established through, in a sense of community, and there's ostracism and all of those things that you were discussing before.
	No, law is something that the state dictates to people.
	And so they basically perverted law, and they believe that legislation, and I think actually lots of people do believe that, I think it's a common belief, that legislation is all that there is.
	I don't think people are familiar with the idea of there being a private law system.
	Well, or internal restraints.
	Yes.
	That's the big challenge.
	And look, I can't really speak to all of the history.
	I mean, I thought it was interesting, and I can't really speak to that.
	I do think that there is one thing that...
	I'm just going to take my headset out.
	I do think...
	I'll put it back in a sec.
	I do really think that there's one aspect of Western civilization that differentiates it From every other civilization that I know of.
	And that is a visceral hatred of liars.
	When I think about all that is glorious and great in Western civilization, to me it arises out of Socrates.
	And Socrates had a visceral hatred of liars.
	He hated liars so much he dedicated his entire life to combating sophistry.
	The old story, I've told it before, I'll tell it again very briefly, is that a friend of Socrates went to the oracle at Delphi and said, who is the wisest man in the world?
	And the oracle said, Socrates is the wisest man in the world, and this man knew that the oracle couldn't lie.
	So he went to Socrates, and he said to Socrates, dude, the oracle at Delphi says that you're the wisest man.
	Alive.
	And Socrates says, okay, that makes no sense to me.
	Number one, I really don't know much of anything.
	And number two, the oracle can't lie.
	So I've got to go find out what this means.
	And this is the guy who'd stand in snow for a whole day thinking about a particular problem.
	It inspired my backdrop.
	So Socrates goes from place to place.
	And He goes to the great wise teachers, the people who teach the young how to debate, how to be good, how to obey virtue, how to achieve political power, how to make money, how to influence the population, how to achieve greatness.
	And he went to each of these people.
	And he said, well, you're considered to be a wise man.
	Tell me, what is truth?
	What is justice?
	What is virtue?
	What is reality?
	Who are the gods?
	And he kept asking people and asking people and found...
	That they had these thin veneers of answers that crumbled like a dust statue in the first poker swing.
	And he hated them.
	I think.
	I think he hated them.
	There are two things that motivate someone for their whole life.
	Love and hate.
	You know, the Jake and Albert Blues fist pump of love, the four fingers of love, and the four fingers of hate.
	And everything that you love is a statue of beauty that you raise that casts a shadow towards its opposition.
	If you love truth, you hate lies.
	Because falsehood is not the enemy of truth, because falsehood can be corrected.
	Liars are the enemies of truth, particularly committed liars who have developed their personalities such that lying is the only thing that they can do.
	And so if you love wisdom, then you hate the vicious foolishness of committed liars.
	If you love truth, you hate liars.
	If you love virtue, you hate evil.
	And someone as dedicated as Socrates, or Jesus for that matter, loved virtue and hated viciousness, hated evil.
	And evil presents itself as good, always.
	Always.
	Like the most dangerous illnesses are the ones that fool your body into not attacking it by being friendly to it, right?
	Cancer.
	And this hatred of liars, of manipulators, is to me singular to the West.
	And I'm not sure what it's driven by.
	And I don't know exactly how it arose, but I see it when I look at some of the greatest thinkers in the world.
	When you hate liars, you can only hate liars if you believe you have a methodology of determining the truth.
	If you're in one religion, you can hate another religion just as a competitor, like another liar whose lies might be better or more convincing or more believable than yours.
	You can hate another religion.
	But that's not the same as being somebody who knows what the truth is, who knows how to separate truth from falsehood.
	You can hate a liar and you can promote The truth and you can promote, in a sense, the resulting hatred of lies that's going to spread around the world.
	But once you have a methodology for determining truth from falsehood and the Socratic reasoning, which I talked about some moons back with Peter Boghossian, the Socratic reasoning is the way that you do it.
	You look for contradictions, you tease out hypocrisies, you tease out, and you have to see if someone is honest enough to say, I don't know, when they don't know.
	You see if they make up an answer or if they don't know.
	Religion is one giant made-up answer.
	Where do we come from?
	God!
	What does that mean?
	Dunno!
	It's a magic word I use to blow away doubt.
	Well, no, doubt is very important.
	And when you blow away doubt, that's like ignoring a lump in your body.
	It's not going to end well, usually, in the long run.
	And it's the same thing.
	How do we organize society?
	Government!
	State law!
	Guns!
	Police!
	Military!
	Jails!
	Courts!
	They're all government programs, and they're all disastrous in the long run.
	And so, in the West, You pose challenging questions to people, and you can see this in the debates, presidential debates all the time.
	You pose challenging questions for people, and you find out whether they're honest enough to say that they don't know.
	When they don't know, and when they obviously don't know.
	Are they honest enough to say, I don't know?
	And if they're not honest enough to say they don't know, then they're manipulators.
	And they're dangerous.
	And this visceral hatred of liars and manipulators was first bequeathed to us by Socrates and has erupted at various times to save civilization.
	I am very encouraged, which I wasn't even a week or two ago, I am very encouraged by the belief that we're at the end of this hysterical pendulum of political correctness.
	And the way that the Planet is self-regulating.
	Like, oh, more CO2. Okay, more plants will eat up the CO2 and produce oxygen.
	Like, the way that the planet is somewhat self-regulating.
	I think that Western civilization, which has swung from extremes to extremes, is self-correcting because there is this underlying skepticism.
	As Richard Feynman said, great physicist, all science rests upon skepticism of those in authority.
	I will not accept received answers, whether they're in priests or other scientists or whatever.
	It doesn't matter, fundamentally.
	This methodology of Socratic reasoning, reason and evidence, science and so on, this can all be performed by individuals, which means we do not need a central arbiter of truth telling us, like a Bible or a law set, telling us what is true and what is right and what is false and what is evil.
	We don't need it.
	And so, the only way to take down Western civilization is through insecurity.
	Because when people in the West, maybe people elsewhere, I can only really speak to the West at this level, But when people in the West, when you end up doubting that you know what is true and what is good, then you create the ultimate power vacuum, which is filled by totalitarianism of one form or another.
	When the individual can determine truth from falsehood, you don't need a central authority to tell him or her what to do.
	Why?
	I don't hire someone to lift my legs if I know how to climb the stairs.
	I don't hire a cook if I know how to cook myself and I have time and willingness to do so.
	This hatred of liars, it goes into abeyance from time to time.
	In the dark ages it went into abeyance and in the early middle ages it went into abeyance and it's been going into abeyance since the 1960s.
	This Hatred of liars that arises out of a fear of liars.
	Because liars manipulate you.
	They try and get into your head.
	They try and twist your soul and use it against you.
	They try and fashion a weapon out of your own virtues and use it to choke you to death.
	These liars, this resurgence of the priestly class in the form of leftism.
	I think that we're done with it.
	I think that because of a lot of work of a lot of people, myself included, a lot of information has gone out into the world to allow people to fight back against these vicious, bladed tentacle up the nose, scour your brain, replace it with empty conformity based on fear and compliance, all these leftist politically correct hysterics.
	I think that the pushback has come.
	I think that...
	It is not going to be pretty, but it's better now than later.
	And it sure as hell is better now than never.
	And the West has survived world wars and plagues and invasions and ice ages and you name it.
	And it will survive the challenges that our own fears and insecurities have brought upon us.
	But the tide is turning.
	I'm incredibly proud to be a part of that.
	And those of us, yourself included, I hope, who have been a part of pushing back against this unrushing tidal wave of blood, conformity, and tyranny, those of us who have been a part of this, have great honor around us like a halo and bring great honor to our tombs wherein for a thousand years flowers shall be laid.
	Because it was at this time that we stood up and pushed back against the inevitable disasters.
	It was at this time that we reasserted the Western spirit of skepticism towards authority and hatred of liars and a giant cosmic F you to bullies.
	Because bullies will replace you with terror and self-loathing.
	And in any healthy person, fear is healthy and To a small degree.
	When fear becomes chronic and turns to conformity and turns to obedience, then you have a choice.
	You can either say, I obey these bullies because they're right, they're good, and I'm bad, in which case you provoke self-loathing.
	Or you say, I don't respect people who bully me and who don't reason with me.
	And all these leftists who say, ah, there's no such thing as truth, but racism is bad.
	Well, racism is bad, sure, but then that's the truth, right?
	Everything is relative.
	But sexism is bad.
	Okay, well, which is it, right?
	You've got absolute morals, but everything got to be relative and so on.
	But when we realize that we're surrounded by soffits who are simply inventing principles in the same way that a safecracker puts on his stethoscope and listens to a safe, they only manufacture principles to see which one of us are virtuous enough to fall for those principles and to surrender our own conscience to the bullying and viciousness of others under the guise of doing good.
	And...
	They always go too far.
	Addicts always go too far.
	And in the West, there is significant pushback.
	There was pushback against the Catholic Church and its practice of indulgences.
	And the pushback was the Martin Luther and the Reformation.
	Then there were excesses on the Protestant side with religious warfare.
	There was the Counter-Reformation.
	And then there was a separation of church and state because of the endless religious warfare.
	And there was, the nihilism was a pushback against the suicidal nationalism plus Christianity that produced the two great world wars in European history and world wars in fact.
	And now there's hopefully, we're coming close to the end of this cycle.
	God, I hope so.
	But hopefully this pushback that we've got going on here with reason and evidence and self-esteem and integrity and courage Hopefully this is the last pushback that's needed.
	And we just have to make sure we don't go too far.
	I don't know if you can go too far with reason and evidence.
	Maybe you can.
	But when this pushback is done, hopefully we have reclaimed enough liberty that We can finally end up in a stable social situation without feeling like a pinball bouncing back and forth from here to there forever.
	I hope so.
	And that's what I wake up every day striving to achieve.
	With your help, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	Thanks, Emil.
	I really appreciate your call.
	It was a great pleasure.
	Feel free to call back anytime.
	Thanks very much, Stephen.
	Alright, well up next we have Felix.
	Felix wrote in and said, if I can't protect my home, Germany, can I protect anything else?
	Is it immoral to leave my family behind as I anticipate a civil war in Germany?
	I still have three grandparents in a civil war situation.
	They would die in a rather unpleasant way—starvation, medical mistreatment, etc.—without a proper death ceremony.
	If the ethnicity of my mother tongue dies, will I die too as my quote-unquote German soul cannot properly address my feelings to someone else?
	What matters more?
	Raising healthy offspring, leaving Germany, or protecting my culture, staying in Germany.
	And that's from Felix.
	Hi Felix, how are you doing?
	Hey, I'm doing fine.
	Thanks for having me on the show.
	I appreciate the automatic response, but based upon that message, you're not doing fine, brother.
	Yeah, um...
	What can I say?
	Yeah...
	And generally, everything is fine right now.
	I feel the storm coming, you know?
	It's like people are playing outside and I say, you know, don't you see the clouds?
	There will be a thunder, but they're still playing outside and they don't want to go in and somehow...
	I can't convince the people around me that they should, you know, maybe go to Stefan Molyneux or to go to libertarian ideas to fix some stuff in society.
	So probably, yeah, Germany will be overrun by refugees or we with a, you know, you probably know that we have a strong pro-refugee part of society and a strong Contra-refugee part of the society.
	And we won't fix this in a very pleasant way as now thousands of migrants streaming in.
	So for me right now, I don't know, I would like to hear your opinion because I'm a quite efficient guy and I would like to go now because now maybe I could migrate to Iceland or to Paragrae or somewhere else.
	Because I think next year probably other countries will tighten their border regime, you know, as Sweden does or Norway does now or maybe Australia will say no way.
	Yeah.
	Well, Australia, I mean, if you arrive there without legal immigrant status, they'll They'll throw you on an island, basically, which is bat guano piled up on the sea, put you in their detention camp for a couple of years, and then resettle you somewhere else or send you back home.
	Maybe.
	But I think I have a business degree, and I'm doing a master in business information systems, so I'm quite a skilled worker.
	But if I migrate now, I'm alone there.
	My family is not very international.
	They are all based in Germany.
	I don't have really relatives somewhere else.
	What do your grandparents think about the migrant crisis?
	The other one gives a shit.
	He's like...
	He's like a really country guy.
	He's just, you know, he's watching sports.
	And if he sees something like bad, he just like turns off the TV. And it's not a big deal.
	I don't know what any of that means.
	What does that mean?
	He's like, just like, he is occupied by his own life.
	He's like...
	Oh, he's indifferent?
	Or avoidant?
	He's indifferent or avoidant to the issue?
	He's indifferent.
	Yeah, avoidant.
	He was never really...
	Okay, so he's earned his own fate, as far as I would see.
	And what about the others?
	Like, the others are like, my grandma, she's on pills, or she's like, you know...
	What does she think of the migrant crisis?
	Oh no, she's nothing.
	But my grandpa, for example, like...
	What do you mean she's nothing?
	Hang on, dude, I'm just trying to get some answers out of you.
	I don't know why this is so complicated.
	Does your grandmother ever talk about the migrant crisis?
	Does she express any concern?
	No, no.
	They don't see really the threat of the issue because they don't use the internet.
	They just have...
	Well, you're telling them, I assume, right?
	Huh?
	You're telling them about some challenges, I assume?
	No, no, because my mother not even get it.
	So I will be lost with my grandparents.
	And my brother not even get it.
	And they have access to the internet.
	Does your brother have a girlfriend?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	And what does your brother's girlfriend think of this?
	She's like helping refugees, so she thinks like...
	Right.
	She's sentimental about the refugees.
	And women as a whole in Europe, and in particular in Germany, women are sentimental about the refugees.
	If you look at the support for the parties, the political parties, the pro-refugee parties have overwhelming female support, and the parties, the political parties that wish to close the borders to the refugees have very low female support.
	It is women that are driving the migrant crisis in Europe.
	It is female voters who are driving the migrant crisis in Europe.
	This cannot really be repeated often enough.
	Yeah, what shall I do?
	Should I like...
	No, no, no.
	We just started diagnosing.
	We just started diagnosing.
	Let's not rush off to solutions.
	Okay?
	We just, we got to diagnose a little bit more, right?
	No, but I would be...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Is what I'm saying, does it accord with your experience that the men, at least the men who aren't currently owned by women, right, who don't have maybe overly bossy wives and girlfriends or moms, is there any difference in the concern about this issue between men and women in your experience?
	Let me think.
	In which generation?
	Like in my generation?
	Let's start with your generation, sure.
	My generation is like the educated Germans are like left and they come from the like world youth perspective.
	They had the money to fly around the world before they're 21.
	Like, you know, they think like, oh, all those migrants who are coming, it's like holidays in Morocco, you know?
	So many Germans have a lot of positive experience outside of Germany.
	And so they, I think they think that those guys who are coming will bring like the positive image or the positive experience they had abroad to Germany.
	Especially because I think many appreciate the, you know, a bit of like lazy lifestyle abroad, maybe Mexico or something.
	And I think that's why they're quite positive.
	And additionally, we are like brainwashed because of the Nazi past, you know?
	So when I talk with young Germans about migration, it's like, do you want to shoot them at the border, you know?
	And you see in their faces that when I make like...
	I see all the Hitler movies they saw in their lifetimes, probably 50, you know, rolling down.
	And they see me at the concentration camp, you know, putting 1000 Afghans into gas chambers, maybe, you know, and then it's like...
	Well, they must be, boy, it's...
	I got to tell you, what you're telling me is provoking a certain amount of relief.
	For, like, you know, amount of relief for Germans.
	Yeah, good heavens, look.
	No, no, listen.
	Okay, you've got to let me talk a little here.
	So, what's great about this is that, clearly, they do not want laws enforced through violence, right?
	So, Germany has borders, and you cannot come into Germany if you're not from a visa...
	Reciprocal nation.
	You cannot come into Germany particularly to live, particularly to get social welfare benefits.
	It's illegal to do what the migrants are doing, right?
	So these people do not want the laws enforced by guns, right?
	They do not want any laws enforced by guns.
	What that must mean is they're very much against taxation.
	What a huge relief that is for me as a voluntarist to understand and to accept how many people across Europe don't want there to be any taxation at all because taxation is enforced at the point of a gun.
	Oh, he doesn't pay his taxes.
	What do you want to do?
	Kick his door down and drag him off to jail?
	How wonderful!
	They finally have become voluntarists in that they do not want laws enforced at the point of a gun.
	Minimum wage laws, property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, regulations, forced enrollment in government welfare schemes and pension schemes and healthcare schemes.
	They don't want the state to use violence To enforce laws.
	What a wonderful thing to hear about because then you could say to them, well, then you must be against taxation because taxation is also achieved through violence.
	Yeah, but in many discussions, you leave a logical point.
	And I notice for so many, they just avoid discussion with me, or they don't want to get political, or it's too emotional already.
	Because especially those people who are pro-migrant, they are pro-base income ideas, for example.
	Or they say, I live on state benefits to be a DJ. So...
	You mean they're so bad at being DJs?
	Unlike Pauly D? They're so bad at being DJs that they need government money?
	Yeah, they probably can't stand the competition or something.
	How do they think this minimum income is going to be paid for if all these migrants are coming in and sucking up all this money from the government?
	They don't think that far, I think.
	Okay, well, So then what's happened is we've just kind of moved back in time.
	That's all.
	We've moved back.
	So originally, intelligence was developed in Northern Europe because people who weren't smart and able to defer gratification and see the results of particular actions like eating their seed crop or not planting any crops or, you know, eating their last cow, they died.
	They died off and they, you know, the people who Evolution gave slightly longer windows of delay gratification and smartness and planning and so on.
	They survived.
	So all that's happened is these people have kind of gone back.
	It's gone back in time.
	And the security of the environment has made them are selected.
	And they don't see threats coming.
	They don't understand what's going to happen down the road.
	They probably have never picked up and read any excerpts from a Koran or what Muslims generally do when they get to other countries in enough numbers.
	Oh sure, it's the religion of peace when there's four of them.
	When there's 40 million of them, it's not really that way.
	Just ask the Pakistanis who weren't Muslim at one point.
	Or most of the Middle East, which wasn't Muslim at one point.
	So all that's happened is they've got a really comfortable environment.
	They've got really lazy.
	Their antennae of danger has completely vanished.
	So they've kind of become like...
	The welfare state turns cold climates into the biological equivalent of the tropics, right?
	I got tons of food.
	I got shelter.
	The check comes every month.
	Like, why would you need...
	To be case-selected in an R-selected environment.
	The welfare state is the R-selected gene sets way of producing more R-selected gene sets, which is perfectly valid from a biological standpoint.
	So all that's happened is they're genuinely unable to process danger because they have grown up without the intelligence that gives you the unease when danger is coming, like you say.
	There's a thunderstorm coming, but, you know, in your analogy, you have some place to go inside, and here you don't.
	So all that's happened is that...
	The people in Germany and in Europe, a lot of them, have become very sentimental and don't understand that it's better to turn people back at the beginning than it is to try and solve problems of civil war later on, right?
	I mean, nobody wants to point guns at people and turn people fleeing from war zones or fleeing from uncomfortable Turkish tent cities or whatever.
	Nobody wants to turn those people back.
	Of course not.
	I mean, it's not fun.
	Any more than people want to go to the dentist.
	Yay!
	Dentist time!
	It's fun, you know, like every six months I got to go and check my blood.
	I got to go have my blood checked to see if there's any cancer coming back.
	Not a lot of fun, but it beats the alternative, which is to have your teeth fall out or have a cancer return and you don't notice until it's too late.
	So, of course, you know, yes, do you want to point guns at people and say, sorry, you've got to turn back?
	Of course nobody wants to do that.
	But so what?
	What the hell does that have to do with what you want to do?
	It's compared to what?
	Compared to what?
	To having people swarm in, go on welfare, rape people, create these no-go zones, and then foment Sharia law, like a hundred plus Sharia courts in England.
	And a woman I was talking to the other day estimated about a million women have been targeted by these rape gangs and so on.
	So, good lord, I mean, what do you want to point?
	It's like, well, no, any more than I want to go to the dentist, but what's the alternative?
	Just in 2015, German taxpayers end up paying 500 billion dollars, so 450 billion euros, for the upkeep of the million migrants who arrived just in 2015.
	This goes to a trillion euros if they arrive in 2016, and that's just the direct cost.
	The indirect costs will be probably much, much higher.
	And so, this...
	It's not that people want to do this stuff.
	Nobody wants to do this stuff.
	But what's the alternative?
	And what's going to happen if this stuff isn't done?
	Well, we'll find out.
	But the reality is that, at least according to the data that I have seen, it is overwhelmingly, at least in terms of political party affiliation, it's the women who don't We've had a whole bunch of people from Europe call into the show talking about uneasy.
	What proportion of those people, my friend, do you think have been women?
	0.5, maybe?
	Zero.
	Yeah.
	Zero.
	And look, evolutionarily speaking, we can understand this.
	So, two tribes...
	Run into each other and there's a big fight.
	Yeah.
	What are the roles of the men?
	Protect the tribe and kill as much from the others as possible.
	Okay, so let's say there's the Blonde tribe and the Brunette tribe.
	Just picking arbitrarily.
	Okay, hang on.
	So there's a blonde tribe and there's a brunette tribe.
	They fight, and do the women go to fight?
	No, the men go to fight, right?
	And they die.
	And let's say that the brunette tribe kills the men of the blonde tribe.
	What happens to the women?
	They go to the overlasting tribe.
	Yeah, they're taken as concubines and as sex slaves by the brunette tribe.
	Historically, that's generally what would happen, right?
	So, now, evolutionarily speaking, if the brunette men can beat the blonde men, it's a step up for the women to mate with the brunette men.
	Because they're tougher, because they're stronger, because they're more dedicated, they're smarter, they're more coherent, they've got better weaponry, better technology, better organization, better skills.
	They're trading up.
	So, evolutionarily, women have loyalty to the victor.
	Okay.
	Ah.
	You understand?
	Doesn't matter who dies on the battleground, they take the guy with the gold medal.
	Anyway.
	That's who wins.
	Okay.
	And that's who gets the women.
	Now, women who said, I'm loyal to the blonde men that I grew up with, I will never sleep with the brunette men.
	I would die rather than sleep and have sex with the brunette men.
	What happened to that woman's jeans?
	I don't...
	Who...
	Dead.
	Dead, okay.
	I would die rather than be impregnated by you.
	Here you go.
	Behead.
	Right?
	And those genes end.
	The genes of the women who are able to, let's just say, make the transition from the blonde men to the brunette men, those are the genes that survive.
	Look, we all know what happened in Europe when the Nazis took over.
	There were lots of women who slept with the Nazis and became concubines of the Nazis and became the girlfriends of the Nazis.
	The same thing happened in Japan.
	You mean like French women or Polish women or...
	Wherever the conquerors are, there are women spreading their legs for them.
	In Japan!
	The Japanese women spread their legs.
	Not all, right?
	Spread their legs to conquerors because that's what women do.
	I'm not blaming them.
	It's evolution.
	Spread your legs for the conquerors.
	Whoever wins gets the vagina.
	But you don't talk about rape.
	I mean, rape is something different than spreading legs for me or...
	Oh, I don't know anything about that.
	I mean, but I'm just pointing out, and look, I'm not saying this is true of all women.
	I'm certainly not saying it's all true of German women.
	But I will say this.
	What on earth would be the point of women who don't fight and have to submit to the conquerors?
	And even if they do it unwillingly, even if they hate it, and I'm sure a lot of them did.
	Let's say they've got two kids.
	And they say, I'll sleep with you, brunette conqueror, dude.
	Conan.
	Not O'Brien, but anyway.
	Cimmerian.
	So she's got two kids and she says, hey, I'll sleep with you if you let my kids live.
	Maybe it's horrible.
	Maybe it's unwilling.
	But nonetheless, that is what women do to adapt to survive.
	So given that women don't fight and they're probably going to be taken as concubines by the victors, what was the point or what would be the point Of women being really, really good at being able to forecast long-term martial war-like problems.
	They can't do anything about it because they don't fight.
	And so they're just going to...
	Like, what's the point?
	What's the point of knowing in advance something that's going to happen that you can't really do much to affect?
	What they will do is they'll rouse guys to fight for them, right?
	The White Feather campaign.
	So they'll rouse guys to fight for them.
	But evolutionarily speaking, it is to their genetic advantage to reproduce with whoever wins the fight.
	And so this is the funny thing, is that German men are giving up their best chance for the hottest goddamn sex they could ever have in this or any other universe.
	It's a giant shit test.
	I can't believe that German men don't see this, but, you know, I guess they've been cucked for a generation or two.
	The women are saying, oh, why would you want to defend the country or the culture?
	And if the men step up and do that, like, say, sorry, you know, we got to go.
	This is our thing, not your thing.
	You know, you've got your own skills and abilities.
	Ladies that have been fine-tuned over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, but we have our own specialties which have also been fine-tuned and we know this shit and you don't.
	So step aside.
	We're gonna go and deal with this.
	Do you know what kind of sex they'd return home to?
	Because the women would be like, Oh, you're now the conqueror because you've defended this.
	You've won.
	Let me give you some seriously serpentine humping now.
	I'm going to twist you up like a pretzel storm of interchangeability.
	It's going to be like a...
	Twister game in a tornado.
	You are just going to get slammed against the wall, and I'm going to peel you back like a banana.
	So, I mean, this is what, you know, like, just don't listen and follow your instincts.
	Know what the thing is and demand that this problem be solved and fixed.
	And the women will be like, oh, alphas, I thought they were extinct in Europe.
	Yeah, but maybe I just moved to Switzerland because they're keeping the country clean, or at least they are more checking which guy of another tribe goes in.
	You can, of course, you can do that.
	And what can I say?
	I just wanted to hear your...
	You can abandon your tribal ancestry lands.
	And you know what's going to happen if enough people do that, and a lot of people are thinking of doing that for sure, is that the migrants will take over.
	Yeah.
	So right now it's not like...
	And then you can wait.
	You can wait until they get all the weaponry that's in Germany, and then what's going to happen?
	Yeah.
	But I don't think...
	I don't have a big estimation.
	I think we...
	There are still a lot of K-selected organisms here, I also know.
	Oh, so you're going to rely on them to do it?
	On the K-selected organisms?
	Like you'll go to Switzerland and help other people?
	No, no, no, not other people, but I have to rely on German-speaking people because, like my mother tongue, I can express, like you have a lot of information density, you can organize really fast and stuff.
	Sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.
	Give me something succinct.
	Are you going to stay or go?
	And listen, by fighting, I don't mean anything violent.
	Of course not, right?
	What I mean is stand up and try to convince people to stop listening to women about stuff women don't really understand.
	I'm not saying go fight anyone.
	It's not going to do any good, especially given the current climate.
	Plus, you know, it's not the migrants' fault.
	I mean, if you had the opportunity to leave Swaziland or wherever the hell they're coming from or some Turkish semi-internment camp where all the religious sects are beating up on each other daily and go party for free in Germany for the rest of your life, well, of course you're going to go.
	It's not the fault of the migrants.
	And it's not the fault of the politicians.
	It's the fault of the voters.
	And the voters can be convinced to vote something different.
	And the politicians, they're weather vanes, right?
	They just wet finger the wind and go any way the wind blows.
	So, if you can convince enough people about the reality of the situation, and you do that with the power of your rhetoric, and simply not being afraid.
	Just don't be afraid.
	Listen, let me tell you the great secret.
	But do I sound afraid, yeah?
	To you?
	You're talking about running to Switzerland, dude.
	Yeah.
	Yes, you certainly sound really fucking afraid.
	Unless you just like mountains and don't like Germany, in which case you're a liar, because you're leaving, right?
	It's like my perfect climate.
	It's fine.
	Okay, here's the secret.
	Society has no way to know who's right and wrong, because they've abandoned philosophy, reason, evidence, history, culture, religion, empiricism, whatever you name it.
	They've abandoned all standards of knowing who's right and who's wrong.
	What that means is that all you have to be is certain, and you're going to win.
	Now, it doesn't mean you will win 100% no matter what, but you have to at least be as certain as your enemies are.
	So all you have to be is certain.
	Now, when you come along and you're certain, people will rail against you.
	You may have noticed one DJ Trump.
	On the planet, which this seems to be happening to.
	You come forward and you're certain.
	Now, certain doesn't mean you're right.
	I don't agree with everything he says.
	But if you're certain and you don't take any shit and you simply keep marching forward and you don't get distracted by the little ankle flare tickles of stupid people shooting idiot flares saying, your certainty frightens me because that shows that I don't really exist.
	Most people are just ghosts.
	Haunting the houses built by their betters.
	That's all they are.
	People in Europe are living in this gigantic cathedral and regularly just swinging stupid sticks around, smashing into stained glass windows, filled and forged by the blood of their ancestors.
	This is all the people in Europe are a shadow of their former selves.
	It doesn't have to stay that way, but that's the way it currently is.
	And what that means is that they'll follow anyone who is certain enough and strong enough and committed enough To speak the truth and screw the consequences.
	Speak the truth I was told as a child.
	Speak the truth though the skies fall.
	Speak the truth though the earth cracks in two.
	Speak the truth no matter what.
	That's what I was taught and I really absorbed that lesson.
	So all you have to do is screw your courage to the sticking place, know that you're right and speak your truth in public and shame the shit out of people Who lie.
	And shame the shit out of people who prevaricate.
	And shame the shit out of people who falsify.
	And shame the shit out of people who use abusive names without proof.
	Without proof.
	You know, people...
	Oh, Steph's identified empirical facts about racial differences.
	He's a racist.
	No, Mother's Nature's a racist.
	I'm just shining the light.
	And people call me a racist like, okay, if you're calling me a racist...
	Without explicit and clear proof that I am a racist, you're the racist.
	And you just have to keep repeating this kind of stuff.
	You walk towards the fire, as Breitbart said, not away from it.
	There is going to be a vicious conflict, but the reality is people try bullshit.
	And if you walk through their bullshit, do you know what their backup plan is?
	No.
	It's nothing.
	There's no backup plan.
	That's it.
	I'm going to use names at you.
	I'm going to spit verbal acid at you and hope that melts your spine.
	That's all they do.
	And then if you just walk through that, which you can, you know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
	If you walk through that, if you walk through that, their backup plan is, okay, I'll follow you.
	And you want to do it, not some Hitler 2.0, right?
	Because that's what's going to...
	If people like you step aside, who can understand the truth and who can speak and communicate the truth, if people like you run, stand aside, and so on, someone's going to come along and deal with the problem.
	I'd rather it be you starting that process than Hitler 2.0 coming up, because that's going to be really not pleasant, to put it as mildly as humanly possible.
	Yeah, good arguments.
	I just wanted to hear your thought about language and the connection to the soul, just as my last question is like...
	Well, language, you're right.
	Language is identity.
	Language has a lot to do...
	The language that you have is the vessel through which you not just communicate, but also think.
	I think in certain kinds of images, and I make intuitive and verified leaps in syllogisms, but it's all according to language.
	You know, I'm just like jumping from stone to stone across a stream, but the stones are all composed of the English language.
	And if I was suddenly disallowed the use of English and had to work in some other language, you know, Urdu or French or Spanish or some African clicking tongue, I would lose a significant part of my identity and my finely tuned brain and communication center would be wrecked for years because I would have to learn another language as fluently to be able to process on the fly as quickly as I do to be able to know how to weigh particular analogies as
	rapidly and as delicately as I do and to know what's funny and what's too much and what could be misinterpreted and what's less likely to be misinterpreted when dealing with highly contentious topics.
	This, you know, 12 spinning plates in any particular conversation, I'm trying to be engaging, entertaining, listen, communicate stuff, keep people interested on very challenging and abstract and possibly career-destroying topics for other people.
	For me to have to reproduce that in another language would take me...
	Years and years of intense study at which point or through which point I would be pretty much unproductive in terms of what it is that I do.
	So language, particularly if you are a language-based life form, you know, like if you're a gardener, you probably get away with it.
	But if you are a language-based life form like I am, writing and speaking, basically...
	Then what are you going to do if you can't use your language?
	You lose the beauty of your history and your heritage.
	You know, there are some languages where the words and the concepts we use in the West, they don't even exist in some other languages.
	There's not a very strong Arabic term for secular, which, you know, is pretty important if you're thinking about doing something like separating church and state.
	So, you know, we had a guy on who says, I'm an ex-Christian.
	Oh, yeah, he's an ex-Christian.
	All right, so that's allowed in the West.
	In Islam, that's called a coffin, because they're dead, because the punishment for leaving Islam in a lot of these countries for apostasy is death.
	And so, atheist, philosopher, rationalist, I mean, how would I even use, or how would I do this kind of show if I had to do it in Arabic, or some very limited language, you know, some of the, again, African clicking sounds and so on, or if I had to do it in Arabic?
	Inuit.
	You know, it's great that they have 27 words for snow, but I need 27 different ways to say, think, people, for yourselves!
	And I don't know that they have that particular nomenclature, so you're right.
	Language, when you leave German, you leave Goethe, you leave Schopenhauer, you leave the great writers in German.
	Yeah, also good musicians you probably never heard of, but I've grown up with, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So no, it is, you know, I do think that there are some things that are worth fighting for.
	I don't think that using violence is the way to do it, for reasons that I've gone into a million times before.
	And it's not only wrong at the moment, it's counterproductive, and it is unnecessary because it would simply arouse reaction against whoever did it, and It's not necessary because all you have to be is strong and assertive and people will fight you and then when they can't fight you or when their tricks don't work they just comply and follow.
	You just have to push through that.
	But if they react with force so I just had an incident two weeks ago someone tried to punch me and Like, threatened with physical violence?
	If this, like, accelerates?
	Well, you avoid those people.
	I mean, I don't suppose there's much point reporting them in the current political environment, but...
	But no, stay away from those kinds of people, but, you know, and don't...
	You know, if the mob is following you, then...
	You know, if they got torches and everything, okay, fine.
	Then leave them to their fate.
	No, listen, and the last thing I'll say is that the reason that you fight to protect people, the reason you fight to protect people is to find out if there's anything worth protecting.
	Right, if you say, I'm going to stand to protect the hard-won freedoms of Western civilization from the fundamental delusions of universal, human, absolute, our selected equality.
	Whatever your barbaric yawp is that you'll cry at the rooftop of the world.
	What you do is you try to help people as much as humanly possible.
	You work as hard to protect your culture and your history and your freedoms in order to find out if there is in fact anything worth saving.
	In other words, if You're defending people from arrows and all the arrows hit you in the back.
	If it's all the people that you're trying to protect who are shooting you, the great thing is you can walk away and leave them to their fate and you'll sleep like a baby and you can wake up whistling.
	And you'll see what will happen to their country and to their culture and to their freedoms and their history.
	And they will cry and they will scream and they will complain and they will have their tantrums and you will feel fine because you gave it everything you've got.
	They attacked you, they attacked you, they attacked you.
	You finally said, okay, fine, I'm gone.
	And then when they're screaming and complaining and, oh, you've got to help us, you've got to, nope.
	Your conscience is clear.
	You are generous and you are kind and you protect and you try and save and you work as hard you can to free people so that if they finally reject you, Then you can be like Socrates, who his last words were, take this chicken and kill it for this god.
	And that's what you do when you've been given a great gift.
	And you leave the stage, however you leave it, with Socrates it was Hemlock, with you at Switzerland perhaps, you leave the stage and you leave nothing behind.
	No loyalties, no desire to protect, no sympathies.
	And you free yourself from regret through commitment to protection.
	And if that commitment to protection is rejected and railed against and scorned and attacked and slandered, then you step aside and you let the fate befall those who have attacked you and you walk off whistling.
	And that's the real freedom.
	Nice.
	Yeah, thanks for your advice, Stefan.
	Europe is going to eventually have to have its never again moment.
	You know, the Jews did.
	We'll see.
	All right.
	Thanks, man.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah.
	Let's move on to the next caller.
	All right.
	Well, up next is Curtis.
	Curtis wrote in and said, As a creationist, I find the idea of evolution, especially atheistic evolution, unconvincing.
	Why should I believe that life can arise from non-living matter, atheistic evolution, or that one living organism can reproduce another organism of another kind, i.e.
	a bacteria producing a non-bacteria, even though neither have ever been demonstrated in a lab?
	That's from Curtis.
	Hello, Curtis.
	How you doing?
	Hello, Stefan.
	How's it going?
	It's going well.
	How are you?
	I am fantastic.
	Been looking forward to this conversation for a while.
	Excellent.
	I'll try not to screw it up then.
	Let's cross our fingers, shall we?
	Well, the question is pretty much exactly what I'm trying to say.
	There's nothing really complicated about it.
	I always hear from atheists and people from that side that one of the main reasons you go to atheism is because you like to follow things that only have evidence.
	And I have never seen any sort of evidence that life can arise from non-living matter and I've never seen any actual evidence of the claims in evolution.
	They'll get evidence of say, evolution can turn a single cellular organism into a multicellular organism and they say the evidence of that is that moths change from black to white depending on whether it's pollution or not.
	Which is a fraud.
	That one is a lie.
	Which I know you know it's a fraud.
	But that's what I mean.
	There's never really any kind of actual evidence of the...
	Are you white?
	Yes I am.
	Why are you white?
	I was born that way.
	I know, but why is your skin white?
	I have less melanin in my skin than I guess people of African descent.
	Why?
	Why?
	Why would you have less of this melanin?
	I don't really know why, because I am.
	And it's okay, I didn't know why until recently either.
	The reason that you have less pigmentation than people from Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, is because your ancestors grew up where?
	Well, everybody came from the Middle East, but...
	No, no, your ancestors.
	My more recent ancestors migrated to Europe, and that's where they came from.
	Okay, so Europe.
	So, in Europe, is there more or less sunlight and sun strength than there is in Africa?
	Less.
	Less, okay.
	And so the best way to absorb vitamin D, which is necessary for survival, is to have less skin pigmentation, right?
	The paler the skin, the more your skin is able to absorb vitamin D, right?
	Okay.
	So the Africans, and there's a reason why the slaves in America and in South America were in the South, and there was a reason there really weren't that many slaves in the North or in Canada.
	It's because they died of rickets and other things that are the result of vitamin D deficiency.
	And so when your ancestors moved North, Those who had lighter skin were able to absorb more vitamin D from the scant sunlight, particularly in the winter months.
	And as you go further north, you tend to get lighter and lighter skin because you need to absorb more Vitamin D from less sunlight.
	Whereas in Africa, you have to balance between the need for vitamin D and getting a sunburn, right?
	So in Africa, they have dark skin, which means it's harder for them to get a sunburn, and they give up the vitamin D absorption to a large degree, which they don't need as much because the sun is very strong.
	Does that make sense?
	I'm following.
	Okay.
	So if you want to know, if you want to see an example of evolution Look at your hands.
	You know, that will be a pretty good example of evolution.
	And that evolution occurred, you know, 40, 50,000 years, relatively recently.
	Okay, right there.
	That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
	Now, within evolution, or especially atheistic evolution...
	The requirement is that eventually a single cellular organism can become a multicellular organism.
	Saying that...
	No, hang on, hang on.
	Listen, dude, are we just jumping from...
	You said give me an example of evolution and you just immediately changed the subject.
	Well, no, I'm trying to address what you're talking about.
	Well, no.
	You're going off on another topic.
	Let's talk about the skin for a second here.
	Do you accept that your lighter skin is the result of evolutionary pressures on your ancestors in a less vitamin D-enriched environment?
	No.
	No?
	Okay, what's the other explanation then?
	Well, it wasn't evolution.
	Well, this is the point I was trying to make.
	What you're talking about is adaptation.
	A species, staying a species, a human staying a human and changing its skin color is not evidence that a human being can eventually reproduce a non-human.
	You understand that this occurs at the realm of genetics, right?
	Yes.
	Okay, so here we have genetic changes based upon environmental factors, right?
	Yes.
	Okay, so that's an example of evolution of a kind in that there are genetic changes based upon adaptation to local circumstances, right?
	Yes, I completely understand and agree with adaptation.
	So now you're talking about transitional species, right?
	Well, not even transitional species, just anything.
	Just some evidence that can show...
	I don't know what that means.
	Again, can you ever give an example of a bacteria reproducing a non-bacteria, or the actual process of evolution as a state?
	I don't know, but I mean, are you looking for transitional species, like one animal becoming another kind of animal?
	Yes.
	Okay, great.
	You don't have to look at this right now, but it's a pretty cool website called transitionalfossils.com.
	And in that, you will find significant links.
	And we've done this before on a call.
	I don't know if you've heard it or not.
	But there are significant links of transitional species.
	Now, the reality, of course, is that...
	All species are transitional species because all species are constantly subject to evolutionary forces.
	But there are dozens and dozens and dozens here of transitional species between particular other species and so on.
	And, you know, there's lots of evidence of this kind of stuff as well.
	So, for instance...
	Whales and hippos are two different species, right?
	But whales in their flanks have leftover bones from their legs, right?
	From their hind legs.
	I've actually heard this before.
	I've actually heard this before and those bones are actually used for mating.
	It's used for mounting the females when they have sex.
	It's not a leftover leg bone.
	Is that right?
	Yes.
	My apologies.
	I will just, I'm sure you're right.
	I just, this is what I've heard and I'm certainly happy to be Corrected.
	Leg bone.
	I thought they were pretty deep in the skin, and I can't imagine how they would be...
	Well, I've heard these type of examples before, and this is what I was talking about.
	What I was trying to say earlier is that...
	Showing, well even fossils are a completely different story because the only thing a fossil proves that there was once an animal that was alive and is now dead.
	It doesn't prove that it ever reproduced and it certainly doesn't prove that it was related to anything else in any sort of evolutionary sense.
	It just shows there was once a living animal that is now dead.
	But I'm talking about if evolution, if life changing from one form to another, one species to another, is a natural, observable, testifiable, verifiable process, it should be something that you can recreate in a lab.
	I mean, you can say that it takes millions of years.
	No, no, no.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Okay, first of all, I'm just looking at this.
	Hang on a sec.
	Hang on a sec.
	That's a big, big leap to say if something is true, we have to be able to recreate it in a lab, right?
	Reproducibility is a fundamental act.
	Okay, dude, dude.
	Are you going to let me finish a sentence?
	If not, I'm going to move on to the next caller.
	You keep interrupting me just to say start a sentence.
	If there's a lot you want to say, have your piece and then I'll have my piece, but I'm not doing this cutting me off thing.
	Continue.
	Alright, well maybe we lost it.
	Okay, so I'm going to read this thing about the hind legs of whales.
	It says here, although whales lack external hind legs, they do have internal rudiments of the hind limbs and pelvic girdle.
	This is from whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com.
	And let's see here.
	And it does look like there is any particular...
	These are tiny, tiny little bones deep inside the skin, and it does look like they're leftovers from the hind legs.
	I can't conceivably see how they could be used for mating.
	Can I read you something from discoverynews.com?
	I didn't hear your response to my earlier thing about whether I could finish my sentence or not.
	And then you just interrupted me again, so I'm pretty sure that you didn't hear it.
	I was just trying to reply to what you were saying.
	Well, no, but do we have an agreement that you're going to let me finish my thoughts before interrupting?
	Okay, I thought you were done.
	I'm sorry.
	No, no, because I asked you if we could do that.
	That was sort of a condition of continuing the conversation from my standpoint.
	If we have that agreement, that's fine, but you didn't actually respond to what I said.
	Okay.
	I didn't think I was interrupting you last time.
	I thought you were done.
	I apologize.
	Okay.
	When you listen to this again, you'll see that I had about four sentences out of my mouth and you interrupted me.
	So please don't tell me you thought I was done because that means you simply don't have any idea how to converse to human beings.
	And that's not where you want to go.
	That doesn't save you from a little bit of rudeness, which I do sometimes too.
	So it's not the end of the world.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So go ahead and read me something.
	Okay, this is from discoverynews.com.
	So, Discovery Channel.
	Conventional thinking has long held that pelvic bones and whales and dolphins are evolutionary throwbacks to ancestors that once walked on land, are vestigial, and will disappear in millions of years from now.
	But researchers from the University of Southern California and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles have upended that assumption.
	Scientists argue in a paper that just published in the Journal of Evolution that cetacean, whale, and dolphin pelvic bones certainly do have a purpose in that they're specifically targeted by selection for mating.
	I can send you the link to that if you want.
	That's perfectly fine.
	I appreciate that correction.
	Thank you.
	I don't think I've used that example before, and it was certainly around when I was a kid studying biology, but I appreciate the correction.
	Let's move on.
	Okay.
	Well, My whole point is that there is no actual example of this process happening.
	You yourself, I've got you on quote saying that reproducibility is a fundamental science.
	If it's not reproducible, then you can't really make any decisions or draw any conclusions about it.
	Well, hang on a sec.
	Can human beings create suns?
	S-U-N-S? Can we create a sun in a lab?
	Well, we can observe the sun.
	We can't observe evolution.
	Okay, so observation is key, and you can observe evolution without necessarily being able to have to create it in a lab.
	Okay, well, can you observe evolution anywhere?
	No, of course not.
	I don't believe there's much evolution occurring on the dark side of the moon or on Mars or anything like inside volcanoes.
	Does it happen anywhere?
	I mean, my point is if you can't see it, if you can't reproduce it, how is it scientific?
	I'm sorry, I don't understand.
	If you can't observe what you're talking about and you can't even test it, you can't reproduce it, how is it science?
	Are you saying that there's no fossil or genetic examples of evolutionary adaptation?
	Well, evolution is the claim that life changes from one species to another, even though the word species has no definition.
	Are you saying the word species has no definition whatsoever?
	There is no definition for species.
	Really?
	Really.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	It means nothing at all.
	Try to find out what distinguishes one species from another.
	Why is a dog...
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	The two very different things.
	Species.
	A class of individuals having some common characteristics or qualities.
	Distinct, sort, or kind.
	Biology.
	A major subdivision of genus or subgenus regarded as the basic category of biological classification composed of related individuals that resemble one another are able to breed amongst themselves but not able to breed with members of another species.
	Three, logic.
	One of the classes of things, well, we got the biological one, but there are several of them.
	Well, even in that definition, you said species are animals that can't breed with each other, but dogs and wolves breed with each other.
	Hang on, hang on.
	So, but Curtis, the fact that there are fuzzy edges to biological definitions doesn't mean that the definitions are completely worth it.
	That's a fallacy, right?
	Just because there are some questions that are difficult to answer and nature presents near infinite complexity, which doesn't always fit perfectly into the conceptual formulations of human beings.
	Doesn't mean that, therefore, those characteristics are completely meaningless.
	So, for example, the fact that there's, if I give you pure black and I say, what color is that?
	You say, oh, that's black, right?
	And if I give you pure white, say, what color is that?
	Oh, that's white, right?
	And then at some point it'll be, you know, that black is kind of light black or maybe it's a little gray.
	Like at some point, somewhere in the middle, you won't know what color that is, but that doesn't mean that there's no meaning to the words black and white.
	So the fact that there are fuzzy boundaries to stuff, particularly in biology, which is a human imposition upon the near infinite complexity of the natural world, the fact that there are...
	So inconsistencies, fuzzy boundaries that occur among a small number of species doesn't mean that the term has no meaning.
	That's why I asked you three times, it has no meaning?
	And it's like, no, it's just that it's not always possible to apply it perfectly, which is, I think, natural.
	Well, that's really, whether or not you agree with me on the species, there's really no point to the actual, what I'm trying to say.
	The simple fact is, again, that the claim that a single cellular organism can become multicellular, or that eventually a dog will reproduce a non-dog, has never been demonstrated.
	I mean, I feel like we're just going back and forth on this.
	I don't want to waste all the time on that.
	Again, I'll go back to transitionalfossils.com.
	No, it has.
	Tons of fossil evidence Of species in between other species, of transitional species, of evidence that species go from one kind to another.
	There is tons of proof of this.
	Well, no.
	Fossils can't prove that one species changed into another.
	The only thing a fossil is is a rock in the shape of a dead organism.
	And it doesn't contain any DNA. It doesn't contain anything other than just what it looks like.
	You can't say that you found a dead animal on the ground so that proves it evolved into something else.
	That's a non sequitur.
	I'm sorry, saying that something is non sequitur, I don't quite understand.
	The fact that you have animals that are in between other kinds of animals and that also fit in the evolutionary timeframe is certainly evidence for it, right?
	Well, there is no thing to say that they are evolutionarily related.
	For example, if dogs died off today and researchers are trying to research them a hundred years from now, they could take the bones of a chihuahua, the bones of a terrier, the bones of a shepherd and the bones of a Great Dane and say, hey, look at how a chihuahua evolved into a Great Dane.
	Except chihuahuas and Great Danes are species that live at the exact same time and are completely compatible with each other.
	Finding an animal in the ground that kind of looks like another one and saying that it's smaller doesn't prove that one evolved into another.
	It's not true at all.
	And what you're saying about the fossil record, the geologic column that Charles Lyell came up with back in the 1800s has never been found.
	You can't find a place in the world where you can go straight from the top to the bottom and all the layers are the way that's supposedly laid out according to the geologic column.
	It doesn't happen.
	And, for example, well, again, you brought up your transitional fossil site.
	Isn't that where you read to me about the whales from?
	I mean...
	No, no.
	The whales thing, I just picked it out of my memory from when I was a kid where it was something that was talked about.
	But, no, it's different.
	Well, that's a perfect example, right?
	It's a fraud.
	It's a fraud among many.
	How many other true...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	Hang on, hang on.
	How is it a fraud?
	Isn't that what they thought and then other people found better information?
	Isn't that kind of how science works?
	I think it was an error before, not something that was lied about.
	Well, possibly.
	I mean, you know that the evolutionary field is littered with the corpses of hoaxes and frauds.
	So I can't assume that this isn't necessarily an intentional fraud because there is tons of intentional frauds throughout the evolutionary landscape.
	And I can't think of another scientific theory that's true that has so many hoaxes and frauds associated with it.
	I don't know.
	I mean, but still compared to religion, I would say it's got nothing but shiny beacon of integrity and honesty.
	But anyway.
	Well, let me move on for a point here.
	I've read both your books, UPB and Against the Gods, in preparation for this conversation, as well as reading and watching a whole bunch of your videos.
	And I want to try to move the conversation on to the more specific topic of life from non-life.
	But hang on, I don't, I mean, that's fine.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm trying to figure out, because I'm like, what standards of proof you would accept for intraspecies evolution, right?
	Which would occur over, I don't know, hundreds of thousands or millions of years or whatever, right?
	Right.
	I mean, human beings have been in wildly different environments for 75,000 or 100,000 years and can still interbreed and have most of the same characteristics and so on.
	So I'm trying to figure out and we can't put the lab.
	The lab is an impossible standard.
	Right.
	That's that's you.
	You can't have that as a standard for being able to prove something that takes huge amounts of time.
	So what standard would you accept?
	That is reasonable.
	If it's an impossible standard, then you've just set up something where you're never going to be convinced.
	And I want to know that because if the standard you have for proof is impossible, then there's no chance of having a reasonable conversation.
	So given the paucity of the fossil record as a whole, they're hard to find and they're scattered all over the place.
	As I've said before, if all of the human beings in North America died and then 100 million years from now they found the fossil record, we'd find one shin bone out of hundreds of millions of people.
	So it's very scarce and very scattered and very hard to find.
	Given all of that, what would you accept as a reasonable evidence for transitional species?
	If what I've provided to you is not sufficient, what would you accept that is sufficient?
	Well, I've already said, I think demonstrating what you claim to be a natural process occurring in a lab would be a really good way of doing it.
	I mean, people always make the claim that it takes millions of years or whatever for evolution to happen, but of course it depends entirely how quickly an animal reproduces.
	Bacteria reproduce much faster than human beings, so there's no reason to think bacteria should take nearly as long as a human being to evolve.
	And yet we've never seen any change within even what we would consider simple life from one form of life to another.
	The idea that it takes millions of years, if the world's 4 billion years old, every single day is 4 billion years from someday in the past.
	So even if it takes 100 million years for life to evolve, every day it happens.
	There should be something changing.
	And the fact that this is a theory that's been around for 150 years, that nobody has ever...
	Even attempted to demonstrate actually occurring, the best you can come up with is, uh, moths that are different colors or, or, uh, birds with slightly different finches with slightly different beaks.
	I mean, there's still finches, the beaks are a little bit differently, but that's saying that because of beaks different, that means that a bird will eventually turn into something else is completely different stretch.
	There's no, there's no evidence of it.
	I'm sorry, I'm having trouble understanding.
	If you're saying, is there evidence of natural selection in the here and now?
	Well, there certainly is.
	I mean, bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a pretty clear one, right?
	Well, bacteria that's still bacteria.
	The thing is, evolution says that bacteria will eventually be a non-bacteria.
	Saying that bacteria becomes a different kind of bacteria is not the same thing.
	No, okay, because you're talking about two different things.
	Number one, you're saying provide evidence of evolution, and there's evidence of evolution in bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
	And then you're saying provide evidence of intraspecies evolution, right?
	And we talk about transitional fossils, and you reject that.
	And then we talk about your skin, and you reject that.
	And so I'm curious what you would accept, given that it's going to take Tens or hundreds of millions of years and cannot be reproduced in a lab, what evidence would you accept?
	And if there's no evidence that you'd accept, that's fine.
	I mean, I can accept that.
	I just need to know that.
	So why stop giving you evidence when it's impossible to satisfy your standards?
	I told you the evidence I would accept, but you're just saying that because of the way the theory of evolution works, it's impossible to test and prove.
	Which sounds exactly like a bullshit theory.
	If I say that leprechauns, to use an example that you love so much, if I said that gravity wasn't real, but instead invisible leprechauns that can't be seen, tested, measured, or observed are really what's holding everything down, even if it's accurate, it's a completely useless theory because it can't be tested, observed, or verified.
	And so how is saying that, oh, evolution, yeah, yeah, yeah, obviously it can't test or observe it, but...
	What evidence would you accept?
	I mean, I don't understand.
	If you're admitting that it can't be tested or observed, how can you then therefore say, of science?
	No, but again, you're conflating the two things.
	And I'm sort of beginning to suspect that there's sophistry involved here.
	You're conflating the two things.
	So if you want to know some things which support the theory of evolution, number one, I guess, would be the universal genetic code, right?
	So every single cell on Earth, bacteria, white blood cells, cells in the leaves of trees and on the tongue of the chameleon can read any piece of DNA from any other life form on Earth.
	So there's some evidence there that since it's all the same building blocks, that there's a common ancestor from which all life has descended.
	Let me ask you about that.
	I'm sorry?
	Let me ask you about that.
	Actually, never mind.
	Sorry.
	Move on.
	Okay.
	So number two, the fossil record, you know, the simplest fossils are found in the oldest rocks because it's a tenet of evolution that Less complex things evolve into more complex things, right?
	You don't start with the human brain and end up with single-celled organisms.
	It kind of goes the other way around.
	And so the way that you would test the theory of evolution is to say, can we find significantly more complex species earlier in the fossil record that don't show up later and have no antidecents?
	So, you know, the fossil record's pretty consistent.
	And this is a Dawkins thing where he says, if you can find one fossil significantly out of sync, you will have taken a big hammer blow to evolution.
	And I don't really think that's...
	Now, the other one, you could say genetic commonalities.
	I mean, you know all of this stuff, right?
	I mean, that human beings, it always blows my mind, have 75% of the genes in common with mice and 80% with cows, because I guess they're bigger, 90% with cats and 96% of our genes we have in common with chimpanzees.
	And again, that doesn't mean, of course, that we evolved from mice, except, I guess, some of the...
	Europeans, but it does mean that way back there must have been some kind of common building block.
	And there is, the last thing I'll say, there is a fairly good branch that works insofar as the further along ago the genetics diverged, the greater the difference, right?
	And so there is that as well.
	In embryos...
	You know, all life forms, you've probably seen those things, I know, when my daughter was in utero, like, you know, embryos have gill slits, tails, you know, weird anatomical structures involving the spine, and...
	All of the embryos initially kind of resemble each other for mammals and so on.
	Pig embryos are used in classes because they look so much like human embryos and so on.
	And so again, there does seem to be some commonality as far as that goes.
	And again, bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
	So there are some ways in which there is things that support the theory.
	You know, obviously it doesn't prove it to you, but I think you can at least accept that that does support the theory.
	Well, for example, like you just said, single genetic ancestor.
	Because we all have some genetic commonality between us.
	Why is the idea that we have genetic commonality between us not, why does it contradict the idea of a common creator?
	What?
	Well you're saying that commonality in DNA is evidence that we are possibly linked to the past, as in we evolved from them.
	And so I'm saying, I don't disagree with you.
	There is genetic similarities between us and all living organisms.
	That being said, if there was a God who created all living organisms, why would that not be true?
	Why would you not see similarities between those organisms?
	But no, Occam's razor would say that the simplest explanation is usually the best.
	And if you already have a theory which doesn't involve a deity and explains the data, why would you want to introduce a deity?
	Well, I mean, logically, I mean, you may for reasons of faith or whatever, but you wouldn't logically say, well, I need a giant omniscient ghost to make this theory complete when you don't need it.
	Well, that's what we're talking about.
	The theory of evolution was brought out as an explanation for the variety of species on Earth.
	But what I'm telling you, what this whole conversation has been about, is that the actual fundamental principle that a single cellular organism can become a multicellular organism, or that one species will eventually evolve into another, has never been demonstrated.
	Right, because it takes millions of years.
	Again, and that's okay.
	It's like saying, Steph, you never created a fossil in your living room in one afternoon, so therefore there's no such thing as fossils.
	I mean, it's a silly standard, you understand, right?
	Well, if you think testing is a silly standard for science, then I guess, but I don't.
	Oh man, I've just given you five tests in a row that you agreed with, and now you're telling me that I'm rejecting testing.
	Dude, I'm in my last straw with you.
	If you want to make one other comment, that's fine, but this is ridiculous.
	Okay.
	Well, like I was trying to say earlier that I think that the real good place to take this conversation is the actual idea of atheistic evolution, life from non-life.
	I would like to quote from your book, Against the Gods, for a moment here.
	You said, secondly, we also know that consciousness is an effect of matter, specifically biological matter, in the form of a brain.
	Believing that consciousness can exist in the absence of matter is like believing that gravity can be present in the absence of mass, or that light can exist in the absence of a light source, or that electricity can exist in the absence of energy.
	Consciousness is an effect of matter, and thus to postulate that existence of consciousness without matter is to create an insurmountable paradox which only proves the non-existence of what is being proposed.
	So, when I read that...
	Man, I love you in my own writing.
	I really do, I gotta tell you.
	It's good stuff, but go on.
	Alright, I don't want to stroke your ego too much.
	So, when I read that, what I'm seeing is that you're saying that because every time we've ever experienced a consciousness, it's been associated with a brain.
	So, to suppose that you can have consciousness without a brain is to suppose something that is the complete contradiction of everything that you've ever observed.
	Well, no, it's not just the contradiction of everything that I've observed.
	It's the contradiction of that which, like, I don't have to observe gravity working to know that gravity is the result of the proximity of mass or the result of mass.
	I don't have to go and test every piece of matter in the universe.
	It's a principle.
	It's a universal principle.
	So it's not what I have observed.
	It's that consciousness is the effect of very complex biological interactions in the brain.
	And therefore, since consciousness is an effect of the brain, then logically, I don't have to go and check or observe, it's just that there cannot be consciousness without a brain.
	Because, well, first of all, if there's consciousness and it has no impact on our senses whatsoever, then that's exactly the same as non-existence.
	I mean, if there's something which has an effect on our senses or we can detect it in some manner, then it can be said to exist.
	We detect either the thing itself or the effect of it.
	So we either detect the black hole, which we can't really do very well, or we can detect the gravity well around the black hole sucking in juice from some nearby star or whatever.
	So, no, it's not just, well, I have never observed it, and therefore, like, it's not empirical.
	This would be more definitional.
	Okay.
	Well, that kind of changes something there.
	Let's see here.
	Alright, well, that kind of wasn't exactly what I was thinking, so I'll move on from that point.
	I guess the only other real thing that I just wanted to talk to you about was something I heard you making a case about not too long ago.
	And that was the, but Jesus and his, I know this is kind of Going completely off the wall now, but Jesus said in the book of Matthew that, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
	And that was meaning God or Jesus did not want to be crucified.
	And because Jesus didn't want to be crucified, the explanation for him dying is a post-facto explanation, trying to explain why someone died after the fact.
	Do you understand what I'm saying?
	If Jesus was the Son of God and had all powers, then how could he be nailed to a cross and die?
	I mean, that's like, I don't know, killing Superman with a bag over his head.
	You know, it doesn't make any sense.
	So if he has these magical powers, then either he wanted to die, which is suicidal, which is obviously not great, or he didn't want to die And either then he chose not to use his powers, which meant that he wanted to die, or he decided, or he had no powers to use, in which case he wasn't the son of God.
	So there was, I think, a challenge with the death of Jesus to the followers.
	Okay, and you use that quote, the my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, as a reason explaining why, an example of God, or Jesus demonstrating that he did not want to be crucified.
	I mean, I would also assume that he didn't want to die.
	Well, yes.
	He didn't want it.
	That's what you claim.
	Okay.
	So my point is, is that this is an example of not being a particularly well-versed on a topic and making judgments about it.
	Jesus wasn't talking about not wanting to die.
	He was quoting Psalms 22 verse 1.
	And it was about, which also addresses the other point, about pre-facto writing.
	Psalms 22 verse 1 is from the book of Psalms, which is hundreds of years older than Christ.
	And so he's quoting from this book, and this chapter is also about his crucifixion, about his death.
	It's prophetic about his death.
	That's why he's quoting it.
	So not only did God not Not only was Jesus not saying that he wanted to die, that's completely wrong.
	He was quoting scripture.
	He was quoting scripture that proved his death was not a post facto writing, but was a pre facto writing.
	I don't, sorry, maybe I'm certainly not up in my theology to the degree that you are.
	So does this mean that he did want to die?
	Well, obviously, yeah.
	So he did want to die.
	And why did he want to die?
	Well, that was a sacrifice needed for sins of the world.
	Why was it needed?
	Why couldn't God have forgiven the world without killing his son?
	Well, that was a plan that God wanted.
	But why would God want to do that?
	I mean, if I can easily do some good thing, but instead I have to strangle my child to death in order to do that good thing, clearly we would understand that me strangling my child, while it's certainly not necessary for me to do the good thing, is an evil action, right?
	Well, would it be wrong for you to strangle your child?
	Yes.
	Right.
	So, therefore, it must be wrong for God to strangle or to kill his child.
	Well, no, because Jesus voluntarily did it.
	I mean, he wasn't doing something against his will.
	And he voluntarily did it.
	He wanted to do it.
	But why was it necessary?
	That's my question.
	Well...
	It wasn't necessary insofar as God can do anything he wants.
	Yes.
	And that's the way God chose to do it.
	Now, if you're asking me why God chose to do it, I have no idea.
	That's his plan.
	That's the way he wanted to do it.
	Does it give you no pause that God does something that is unnecessary and would be evil for any human being to do?
	Does that not give you pause as to the virtue of God?
	Or do you just simply say, I suspend judgment because God is by definition good, even if he does the opposite of what he commands other people to do, which is thou shalt not murder?
	Well, God is not a person.
	He's not someone on the same level as us.
	The example I thought about is that imagine you buy yourself some land.
	You've got some money, you buy some land, you go get some cows, you start breeding cows, and one day you go out on your land and you say, hey, I want a new belt and I want a steak dinner.
	You go out to the cow, you slaughter it, cut it up, eat it.
	Now, if I did that, if I walked onto your property, slaughtered your cow and ate it, I'd be charged with trespassing, I'd be charged with animal cruelty, I'd be charged with all kinds of crimes that you wouldn't be charged with.
	Because there's a difference between you and me.
	You own the cows and I don't.
	Well, except that the cows don't have a moral conscience and the farmer does not command them to follow virtue, right?
	Well, I don't know of anywhere in the Bible where it says God commands you to follow virtue.
	Wait, aren't they called the Ten Commandments?
	I do know enough about theology to know that they're not called suggestions.
	They're commandments, right?
	Well, the Ten Commandments are...
	Most people have a misunderstanding of what the Ten Commandments are.
	The Ten Commandments were nothing more than ten rules that the average Hebrew could learn to stay good with God.
	Because most Hebrews back then didn't obviously speak or read and write.
	Only the Levites, the priests did.
	And so if you didn't have the text and you didn't know all of the regulations, which nobody outside of the priest class actually did know all the regulations, if you follow those ten rules, you'll be okay within the Jewish community, you know, as far as everything else goes.
	But those rules were commanded, those rules were given to the priests by God, right?
	Well, they were given to the Jewish people or the Hebrew people.
	Right.
	To everybody.
	Okay, so this is what is moral according to God, which is thou shalt not murder.
	There's no where it says that this do it because it's moral.
	God doesn't ever express any sort of do this because it's moral.
	He expresses sovereignty.
	He owns everything.
	He runs everything.
	He gets to be in charge.
	So the pursuit of Christian virtue is a lie.
	Because there's no way that doing anything that God says has anything to do with virtue.
	Is that right?
	Well, Christianity doesn't say that it makes you a better person or it makes you good.
	I mean, Christianity says the exact opposite.
	Christianity says everybody's evil, inherently evil, we're all bad, and there's nothing you can do about it.
	Not the Christianity I was raised with.
	I don't know what sect you're coming from, but not the Christianity I was raised with.
	Well, I'm talking about what the Bible says.
	I mean, I know people say all kinds of things, but I'm talking about what the actual Bible says.
	So the Bible does not encourage people towards virtue?
	Not the word virtue, not the...
	You don't do what you're supposed to do because you're trying to be a good person.
	The Bible does not want people...
	Sorry, the Bible does not want or encourage or command people to be good.
	No, you can't be good.
	Your good works are filthy rags to the Lord.
	That's what it says.
	You cannot do good.
	No one is good but the Father alone.
	Christianity is not an attempt to make you good.
	What is it an attempt for, then?
	Well, it's not an attempt.
	Christianity, maybe I should have been a little bit more...
	No, I'm fascinated.
	Honestly, this is not what I was raised with, and I had a whole bunch of Bible quotes when I was growing up, but if Christianity has nothing to do with virtue or being good or striving to be good, I'm fascinated.
	Well, it's not.
	The vast majority of the Bible is nothing more than a history book.
	It's recollection of stories.
	Most of them have nothing to do with what you're supposed to or not supposed to do.
	Most of them are just historical stories.
	So when Peter says, sorry, when Peter says, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge, what does that mean?
	Well, I would have to, this is where it gets kind of tricky when you're talking about Documents that were written in other languages.
	I would have to look into that particular verse in the context of the greater section that it's in to give you a better understanding.
	But I mean, what I'm trying to tell you, do you disagree that Christianity teaches that people are inherently wrong or evil?
	I mean, is that something that you were taught?
	Not to the degree that original sin commands the Catholic perception of the world.
	I mean, we have a tendency towards sin and Satan runs the world, but you can, through faith and dedication to God and good works and striving towards virtue, you can get closer.
	You can obviously be the same as God and there was only one perfect person and he got nailed to a cross.
	But you can certainly become a better person.
	You can reject temptation.
	You can resist evil.
	You can resist the seven deadly sins.
	You can strive to be a better person.
	And you can strive to emulate Jesus as much as possible rather than, you know, sloth and gluttony and lust and violence and all that kind of stuff.
	So it's not that there's no...
	The way I was raised, it's...
	There are differences in your choices in terms of how proximate you are to the teachings of Jesus.
	Well, within Christianity, you're taught that doing bad doesn't make you a bad person.
	You're bad.
	That's why you do bad.
	Anything that human beings can do that would be considered good isn't them doing it.
	It would be God doing it.
	I'm sorry, say that last part again?
	You're not supposed to glorify yourself.
	If anything that you do is considered good, it's not you, it's God or the Holy Spirit working through you.
	But you can choose to let God into your heart or not, right?
	You can choose whether to go to church, whether to read your Bible, whether to learn what the path of righteousness is and strive to step towards it.
	That invites God to join you in the promotion of virtue.
	But I assume you have some acceptance of free will here, that you do have some choices, don't you?
	I mean, maybe you don't believe that.
	I don't believe in free will.
	Oh, you don't believe in free will?
	No.
	I don't know how free will is compatible with a God.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	You don't believe that human beings can change their mind?
	Well, can human beings change their mind within their own context?
	Yes, but it's being, everything that happens in the world was predestined before the world even existed.
	So, you're changing your mind, but because God programmed it that way.
	So, the conclusion of this conversation is not up to either of us?
	Well, everything's predetermined.
	Okay.
	Well, God is telling me to move on to the next caller because I don't chat with robots.
	Thanks for your call, man.
	I appreciate that.
	It was very instructive.
	Mike, who's up next?
	Oh, right.
	Well, Joseph is up next, and Joseph wrote in...
	Wait, are we continuing our biblical theme?
	Joseph is calling from a donkey.
	Do I have any room at the end?
	It's okay.
	It was predetermined that Joseph was going to call in.
	Joseph is an Indian doctoral student in Germany.
	So he has a completely different look at the idea of being an immigrant in Germany.
	And he wrote a long email, but I think it'd be best if Joseph just directly told us what was on his mind and give us this fresh perspective.
	So welcome to the show, Joseph.
	Yeah, so yeah, I was just listening to your discussion about the religions and philosophy of God and everything with Rick, I think, the person's name.
	Yeah, but then actually I was just listening for a long and then actually I was just waiting.
	And now I got to tell you, now I know what contempt sounds like with an Indian accent.
	That's good to know.
	Okay.
	So what's on your mind, man?
	Yeah, so, yeah, coming to the topic, yeah, actually, I think about the email I wrote, yeah, actually I was quite, yeah, I'm now four years in Germany, like, finished my doctorate more or less.
	I think I will submit my thesis in Germany.
	A few days because I'm almost like finishing everything here.
	So I'm planned to...
	It's not about I plan to continue something in Germany.
	It's like to look something good for my career I have to do something As a postdoctoral experience because normally in scientific field to work in a to be a professor or to be in a very good scientific career you need to have like after PhD you should have a experience from a lot of research position.
	So this puts me in a situation that I have to be At least 3-4 years to be mostly in Western countries or, okay, like Eastern countries also, like Japan.
	Yeah, mostly like countries which you have like more scientific things, like more advanced technologies where you can use for learning.
	Yeah, so, okay, this is like professionally I have to be outside of India to improve my career.
	In this meantime, I also kind of, in Germany, there is a lot of discussion about foreigners, economic migrants, and also about the refugees and all these things.
	And when there was a talk about always the foreigners, I always, though sometimes all the talks are not directly intended towards people like us, Who are just mostly as students in university.
	But when these talks actually comes from people, I often take it as a kind of emotionally into me that, okay, I am also a foreigner just out of my home doing something in other country.
	That kind of feeling just it's a little bit hurt.
	I was kind of very upset that I feel also I'm a kind of economic immigrant or something like that.
	Sorry, how so?
	Sorry?
	When you say you're an economic immigrant, what do you mean?
	No, I mean, like, because whenever they talk about, okay, whenever the common people, when they talk about, like, it's not about talk, it's like when they look people, like, especially, like, for example, when I'm in part of university, and so I have my student card, so it is different.
	So in university, it is different.
	But when I travel outside, people actually look like kind of...
	Okay, it's not everybody because when you don't care, there's like everybody's...
	Yeah, in Germany at least most of the people actually, it's like they kind of...
	Yeah, I think so in Germany you cannot...
	People are like kind of after the...
	Historically they had some kind of bad...
	Politics, they always try to be good so that they just never want to show them, like, we proud Germany.
	We Germans are the highest in blah, blah, blahs and everything.
	Sorry, just very briefly, the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led communism.
	And Jewish-led communism had wiped out tens of millions of White Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing and there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff.
	So I just wanted very briefly for that stuff.
	But with regards to immigration as a whole, I mean, there's an interesting question and I'd like to get your answer to this, but there's an interesting question to ask if you're in someone else's country, which is to say, how would I sell me Being in this country to the natives.
	In other words, like if you're a really great pilot and you come over and you fly people around, you say, okay, well, I got trained in India.
	You didn't have to pay for me being trained in India.
	I can come to Germany and I can fly immediately and that makes airplane flights cheaper.
	Something like that, right?
	Like if I were to say like I was...
	Pulled over pretty much against my will pretty much to Canada when I was 11.
	And if I were to sort of look back and say, okay, well, why should the Canadians have paid for my education when I was in public school?
	And, you know, I didn't cover the whole cost of my whole university.
	It's kind of impossible to do that if you live locally.
	So why should Canadians have paid for my college degrees to the degree that they did?
	And, you know, I could say, well, you know, I... I started a business.
	I grew it.
	I had a payroll that was very productive and sold a lot of software, helped people to save money.
	I have started a philosophy show and I'm trying to encourage people to think critically.
	I'm contributing money and all that to the business.
	I have a child and I'm not burdening the government school system with my child as you could imagine.
	So if I were to sort of come to make the pitch You know, like I'm smart and I'm ambitious and I come from highly intelligent backgrounds on both sides of my family.
	On my mother's side, a bunch of writers and my uncle won a prize for the best poem in Germany and wrote a famous book on unions.
	And on my father's side, philosophers and thinkers and very educated people.
	One of my ancestors was best friends with John Locke and all that.
	You know, good stock, I guess you could say, and ambitious and all that.
	Except for one not inconsiderable hiccup and pretty healthy my whole life and all that.
	So I can sort of make the case as to why the population should value having me there or why it's a net positive for the population to have me there.
	So if you were to make that case to the Germans, I assume that you're not covering the entire cost of your education.
	Maybe you are.
	I don't know how it works in Germany.
	But if the Germans are subsidizing your existence, right?
	Like if you don't pay the full cost or maybe any of your College education.
	What's the benefit to the Germans for having you there?
	Yeah, but the thing is, normally PhDs, you cannot consider it as a complete studentship.
	For example, in Germany, PhD is often not considered a student because it actually comes under Arbeid Fairtrac, so you are completely as an employee under university.
	Okay, so why would Germans want you there rather than a German?
	Because I assume that you have displaced some native German.
	And, you know, I could understand how, you know, like, let's say Albert Einstein wanted to, you know, when he was alive, you know, wanted to come to some college and say, well, that means there's some local person who won't get hired.
	But I think everyone would say, okay, that's fine.
	We'd rather have, even the person who was displaced might prefer that, right?
	So given that, like, what is the plus?
	Because I'm telling you, this is what unconsciously goes on when people view foreigners to their country.
	You know, whether it's right or wrong, just or not just, this is the internal calculus that goes on.
	What is the case if you could make that case?
	Why is it beneficial for you to be in the class that you're in or to be having the job that you're in rather than some young German person?
	Yeah, this is because there are some fields of area where actually you can find a lot of people in any Local environment and actually my field is kind of very specific you cannot find people of that good knowledge in like it's a kind of competition versus availability so for example in my field the amount of people are available
	for this Position is kind of selective.
	Maybe the field is that unique that they need somebody of that special qualification.
	I have a very strong background from India because I have no purpose of Doing some studies abroad, but I was in kind of...
	I did all...
	I was in, like, during my masters, I was one of the best students in one of the best, you know, institutions in India.
	So I was kind of forced to be like, in order to improve your professional life, you have to move to some higher institution.
	That's the point that I moved to Germany.
	Okay, I'm probably not making myself clear.
	Let me try again.
	So, the Canadian population paid a certain amount in taxes for me to go through my education in Canada.
	I mean, I had jobs, I was paying some taxes, and I paid some of my tuition, but it clearly was not enough to cover the entire cost of my education.
	And so, at this point in my life, I'm 49 years old, at this point in my life, I can look back and say, the Canadian public got a very good deal with me.
	Because I have contributed far more to the Canadian economy than I have ever taken out of the Canadian economy.
	Right?
	Yes.
	So, as far as a cost-benefit goes, I'm a net plus to Canada.
	Economic, right?
	Because Germans are paying for some portion of your education.
	What economic benefit are they getting in return?
	Yeah, they are getting that because whatever the research I put during my doctoral program, most of them are contributing to my university as well as the scientific group which I'm working in.
	For example, a scientific publications or a patent which is taken during my PhD, it all comes under the institution's benefit.
	And what is the dollar value of that?
	I mean, are you going to start a company?
	What is it that you're going to do to...
	I mean, okay, let me ask you something more directly.
	How much is it costing the German taxpayer every year that you're there studying?
	Sorry, actually, can you repeat?
	Sure.
	Sure, how much is it costing the German taxpayer every year that you're there studying?
	Yeah, okay, maybe I didn't understand, but actually I'm also a taxpayer in Germany because I'm also an employee in Germany.
	Yes, but you're paid by the German taxpayer.
	You're not getting your money in the free market, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So your pay comes from the German taxpayer, so the fact that you pay some of it in taxes is not a net positive to the German taxpayer, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So do you know how much you cost the German taxpayer every year in salary, in benefits, and also in the facility that you use?
	And please understand, this is not specific to you.
	This would be to any person in your position.
	I mean, a German person would cost the same, right?
	So I'm just curious if you know how much it costs the German taxpayer to keep you in your position.
	Actually, I do not know how to answer for this question.
	If I want to tell in a quantitative way the numbers, I do not know the value of the number.
	Because I still don't feel myself as an employee because my target is for...
	actually I came to Germany not because of like to earn money or because I have no purpose on the economic purpose to be here because for me my purpose was I have a target to achieve in my scientific field and I For example,
	if a patent or for example a scientific publication whatever I have from my PhD as well as after my PhD these all Though it can be from Germany or Canada or any kind of Japan or any other countries, this is going to give me a positive look.
	Okay, sorry, sorry.
	I got to interrupt you.
	I understand that it's beneficial to you.
	I get that because you're doing it.
	So it's clearly beneficial to you.
	I'm asking you because I'm conscious of the fact that I took money from the taxpayers.
	To pursue my education.
	And I felt a responsibility, still do feel a responsibility, to provide back value for the value that I have taken.
	So my question is, what value, economic value, are you going to contribute to the German economy to make up for the taxpayers' money that you're consuming?
	And if you say none, that's fine.
	That's a perfectly valid answer.
	I'm just curious.
	Yeah, if you ask that what I'm contributing for there, because I'm getting paid from them what I'm contributing back in the, like the economic contribution of me to the country, it is like, yeah, to be from like a normal student Way of thinking actually,
	I'm like bringing a lot of collaborations from a lot of financial investment for my scientific work group from different, like for example, Swiss National Scientific Foundation and other countries which actually going to support several other PhD students in our research laboratory.
	So it is like...
	Oh sorry, sorry to interrupt.
	Where's that money coming from again?
	It could be from Swiss National.
	For example, in my case, I have every year a discussion with Swiss National Scientific Foundation, and actually I bring a lot of financial collaboration to our research laboratory.
	Okay, so is it my understanding then that some of the costs of your education are being covered by Swiss National?
	That's a bank, is it?
	Yeah, it's like a scientific community in Switzerland.
	And is that scientific community funded privately or through tax dollars?
	That's funded by, yeah, of course, Swiss people's tax money.
	Okay.
	Why would Swiss people's tax money be going to fund your research in Germany?
	I'm trying to understand that.
	Yeah okay, so when you ask this specific actually it's kind of, I am working on energy and about the future conservation of energy and to be like kind of very To be in a more green energy level, not to go very specific.
	So in this way, we actually bring a lot of collaborations with different countries, especially within the European Union, for bringing more investment for that field to develop some new ideas in the field of energy.
	But so far, it's all government money that you're consuming, right?
	Yeah, it's government as well as we have also some private companies who support because when we make a new collaboration we bring Actually new funding for the scientific community, which means there are going to be new more PhD students as well as new postdoctoral employees.
	So the research group increases and the research committee can afford a lot of new employees for that position.
	Okay, and I assume that some of these private companies are getting government grants and so on, right?
	So the challenge with immigration as a whole is, you know, and again, I'm not saying I know what the Germans are thinking, it's just my thoughts on it, what they might be thinking, is that they may be looking at you and saying, well, if you weren't here, my tax bill would go down.
	And I think the only way to overcome that is to try and find a way to contribute back into the economy that you're taking money out of.
	Mm-hmm.
	I mean, in that you kind of owe the German taxpayers, and I guess to some degree the Swiss taxpayers now too, you kind of owe them.
	You are accumulating a sort of karmic debt with regards to the German taxpayers.
	I guess my question is, what are you going to do when you graduate?
	What are your plans?
	Yeah, as far as I said, I have a plan to become a I'm in a good scientific position, for example, as a scientist in India.
	So for that, to apply for a position, I have to...
	Okay.
	Hang on.
	That's all I need to hear.
	So you're planning on taking money from the German taxpayers and then going back to India?
	It's not about money, because I'm not concerned about money of Germany.
	It's about money for the taxpayers, my friend, because they're paying the bills.
	How is that a good deal for the German public?
	How is it a good deal that you come to Germany, and again, this would be true of German people as well, I mean, but you're going, at least German people would be more likely to stay.
	So you're coming to Germany.
	You're spending years there, you're sucking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources, and then you're leaving and taking your education back to India.
	And I guess my question is, how is that a good deal?
	How would you sell that to the German taxpayers?
	Yeah, this is the main question of me also because for me, every year I'm contributing a lot of things.
	For example, in my four years, because of my contribution, our research laboratory can really increase in numbers and my professor can finance a lot of new PhD students.
	So because of my research contribution, the research Collaboration has become bigger and we have bring a lot of new workers for the research area.
	So this is...
	All right, and I'm sorry to interrupt you again.
	So your argument is that the German taxpayer who's paying your bills should be happy because your work has brought more people who will have to be funded by the German taxpayer.
	Yeah, it's not about my work has bring more people to work, as well as my work also brings, for example, when we have a patent in our department, which is, of course, it's the scientific work of few PhD students who are involved in it.
	So we are bringing also financial support to the To the departments or, for example, to that scientific team's development itself.
	And these scientific teams are, of course, part of German economy as well.
	Now, Germany, I'm sure you're aware of this, but Germany is at the moment, has too much renewable energy.
	I don't know if you've heard about this.
	Yeah of course in Germany if you are doing about energy then you will get but okay so this is one part actually I think you are going more into the economy yes of course I understand your values but the question is for example research people like us it's not about for me Indian or for even a German because a German PhD student who is going to do a research in Germany is going to,
	if he needs to become a professor or for example any higher scientific position in Germany, he has to have a research position in foreign countries for his own experience.
	I don't know what that means, but I mean the fact that you are working on green energy when Germany has so much green energy that it's causing problems, right?
	I mean, it can't handle the excess electricity from renewables, so it's selling them, spilling them out over to neighboring countries.
	And that's a problem.
	So it seems to me that you're charging the taxpayers to help supply a good which they already have too much of.
	Yes, but we are doing more of the fundamental research, so it's more or less in the development because Germany is trying also to bring more innovations into the field so that actually they are...
	Of course, Germany has always the technology part.
	They have always...
	But you're leaving Germany.
	You're going to take the education that German taxpayers have been forced to pay for and you're leaving.
	So you're taking all of the intellectual capital, which the German taxpayer has paid for, and you're going back to India.
	And I'm just like, you know, you can do whatever you want, obviously, right?
	But what I'm saying is that if you want to know why, it's possible that some people might look askance at you, they'd say, okay, well, you came over here, you fed off the taxpayer to increase your capital, and then you left to go back to India, and we're stuck with a bill.
	That may be one of the reasons...
	I'm just saying it's possible as to why some people may not have the most benevolent view of your situation there.
	Okay.
	Yeah, actually, I have to make something clear that most people do not have any bad view on me or my situation because for them, it is like when...
	Okay, I'll ask you a question in another way.
	Like in the scientific community in the world, they all the time have to migrate from one country to another country to gain experience and to improve their scientific This is very common that someone who finished their master's in Germany is going to move to USA for their PhD, and they are going to...
	But why?
	Sorry to interrupt, but why?
	I mean, science is science, right?
	Why do you need to go to some...
	It's not like the physics are different in Europe, right?
	Yeah, but actually, science are science, like you said.
	But when it comes to...
	But it is not equally distributed.
	For example, the certain facilities in some institution, for example, and facilities as well as the name.
	For example, I am doing in a university in Germany, and a lot of German students who finish their master's in here, they go to PhD to USA just because having a PhD from some big universities like University of California or,
	for example, Stanford or any other, MIT, they are going to have a much more improved career in the future.
	So this is the reason that the science...
	No, I get it's beneficial.
	See, again, you're back to it's beneficial for you.
	I get that.
	It's beneficial to the people, but it's not necessary, particularly in this age of the internet and email communications and Skype and document sharing and so on, right?
	I mean, I'm just curious why you say, well, lots of people in science go from country to country, and I don't know, but why?
	And, okay, you say, well, it's beneficial to them, but, I mean, this is sort of a long way of me saying, Joseph, that if your skills had immediate practical value to Germans...
	Then you would have been offered a job That would have paid you a lot of money.
	And the reason the job would have paid you a lot of money, assuming it's in the private sector, is because your skills contribute a lot of value to the German economy.
	Now, the fact that you're in academia means that your skills are not net positive to the German economy.
	Now, of course, we all accept that there's net negatives in short terms in life.
	You know, we go to school, we get educated, and then we go out and get a job.
	But you're going to take your economic value and you're going to leave the country.
	Now, you could say, well, the Germans could trade with you in India.
	And yeah, there's certainly some truth in that.
	But the fact that you have your sort of local contacts, you've learned the language and so on, and that they're going to spend a lot of money on educating you and they're not going to get that money back.
	And now that, again, could be somewhat true of any country.
	German, but the more productive you are, like either you're not going to be productive, in which case They wasted their money educating you or you are going to be productive in which case you're going to leave Germany and all of your productivity and your tax value are going to accrue to the Indian government who didn't have to pay for your education instead of the German government, right?
	So I don't know how much money the Canadian taxpayer had to pay for my education but I unless it's a lot I can guarantee you I've paid more in taxes back into the system than I ever took out in terms of education particularly In the 90s when I was flying high in the software world.
	So it's been a huge net positive for Canada to have me here and have me educated.
	Because I contribute more in taxes than I ever took out of the system.
	Now, this is all amoral stuff.
	I wish there weren't taxation and so on.
	But the fact is that I think people look at me somewhat positively because I know I'm not on anyone's back.
	I'm not leeching off anybody else's tax payments.
	But for you, it's different, right?
	Because what's going to happen for you is...
	Either you're going to go and not be successful, in which case it was a big waste of time, energy, and resources because they could have educated some German man or woman who may have been more successful.
	Or you are.
	Maybe you go and found some big company and you hire 50 people or whatever it is, or you become a very high-flying member of your community.
	Okay, but then all that happens is that the Germans have had to pay for you to get educated, and then you go and you take your productivity and contribute back to other people who In terms of paying the government in India rather than paying the government in Germany.
	Now, for me, the honorable thing to do would be to stay in Germany and say, okay, I have accumulated, I don't know, let's just say it's $100,000 to keep you all watered and fed and housed and with all of your equipment and offices and all that kind of stuff, $100,000 a year.
	So you've accumulated a debt to the German taxpayer of $400,000.
	And to me, one of the decent things to do would be to say, okay, well, given that I've taken $400,000 out of this economy, I'm kind of somewhat obligated to put some of that money or all of it or hopefully more than all of it back.
	You don't have to.
	Of course, you're free to do whatever you want.
	But if you don't do that, If you take $400,000 from German taxpayers and then go to India and pay the Indian government rather than the German taxpayers back, or if you pay the Indian taxpayers rather than the German taxpayers, then the Germans are going to look at you and say, maybe it's deep down in their brain, but they're pretty good at math, if I remember rightly.
	They're going to look at you and say, well, that was a huge net loss for us.
	We're out $400,000.
	And not only that, but we're not having the value of somebody who's German, who we could have paid for their education, and they would have stayed and continued to pay taxes back after their education.
	And so I don't know what the tax rate is in Germany.
	I don't know.
	Let's just say it's 40%, right?
	Let's make the math easy for my art's brain, right?
	So let's say that the German gets out of college at 25.
	It's a PhD.
	It's a 30, right?
	And let's say they work till they're 65, right?
	So that's 35 years, right?
	And let's say that they're paying, you know, $40,000 a year in taxes, right?
	Okay, so let's do 35 years times...
	$40,000.
	So they're paying $1.4 million in taxes when their PhD cost the German taxpayer $400,000.
	So they're paying back almost 300% in taxes, the cost of their education.
	So that's kind of a good deal to some degree for the German taxpayers as a whole.
	However, if you take out the $400,000 and go to India, So the Germans are already out $400,000 and then they're out a further $1,400,000 because the person who could have been in your position who would be German who would stay, not a lot of German graduates heading off to India, if they speak German and not whatever you're speaking in India.
	So now we're looking at a $1.8 million loss to the German taxpayer for having you educated in Germany and then going to India.
	And it's possible that that's one of the reasons why people might have had a slightly negative view of some of the things that you might be doing.
	It's just a possibility.
	Yeah, I completely understand.
	And more or less, actually, nobody has any negative view on, because it's all about, I am analysing so much about these kind of migrants and how the people can, what is benefit for this country.
	These are the things I am Myself actually analyzing more than the people do, because as far as I think, as I mentioned, even in the email, the people are super kind and they were actually the super welcoming people and they always likes to have.
	Yeah, especially as far as I know, like at least in the department and my neighbors.
	You know, because they're all on the receiving end of the tax dollars.
	I get it.
	They're all on the receiving end.
	I'm talking about the taxpayers, not the people receiving taxes.
	Yeah, that's true.
	And I don't know that Germany needs more green power.
	Not only do they have an excess, but energy taxes are huge, right?
	31.6 billion euros, or about 42 billion dollars.
	In 2013, energy taxes went up by about 25%.
	So there's this renewable energy levy.
	I love it when they call it levy rather than a tax.
	The surcharge rose with US dollars, 18.9 billion to 27.3 billion dollars.
	And Germans are spending $3,263 per average per household per year, 35 cents per kilowatt hour.
	That's nearly 10 cents higher than the EU average and nearly triple the US average.
	As many as 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because of an inability to pay for these rising energy costs.
	And so it is, you know, it's not like the Germans need more green energy.
	So this is another way in which your work could be perceived as costing them.
	Yeah, when you come to this point, I'd like to mention that, okay, of course, it's a kind of scientific politics that's going on everywhere.
	It's not about Germany, it's about most of the countries.
	Every people, when they become a big scientific position, they want to get funding and they want to have their own network built up.
	So sometimes many scientists Really they contribute to the society or not, it doesn't make.
	They actually made up scientific collaborations and there are, of course, I would say even in the hundreds of scientific collaborations and scientific works which go on, really which contributes to the development of society and the economic This is a brochure of my selfish interests have some general
	benefit, which everybody who takes money out of the tax kitty says, oh, don't worry, there's some diffuse benefit that's going to be coming back that everybody would be happy to pay for.
	Well, of course, if they're happy to pay for it, then you should go into the free market and sell your services there.
	My basic question is, do you at all recognize That you are taking $400,000 or so out of the taxpayers' pockets in Germany and then leaving the country.
	Yeah, I recognize that.
	I feel bad about it.
	That's the thing I was...
	Okay, because I hadn't heard any acknowledgement or feeling bad about it at all.
	And I'm not saying you've got to then stay like some tax slave in Germany.
	I'm just curious whether...
	Because I was always aware.
	Yeah, you know, lots of...
	People, taxes are going up because of me going to school, so I've got to contribute back.
	And I'd never heard a hint of that from you, but go on, tell me what you think.
	Okay, yeah.
	Actually, when you ask, do you have this feeling?
	Because this is the main reason for my depression, actually, because it's not about...
	Even the, yeah, it's about the taxpayers' money, how scientifically we are using, and as well as I'm in another country, so I'm using how other countries' people money for, of course, it is also, okay, I can tell, like, I am working for them, and I am contributing scientific for them.
	This all around the fact, but more or less the direct statement is I'm using for my, so that's Which I feel very depressed.
	And I feel like I don't see a solution for this because...
	Oh, there's a solution.
	You won't like it, but there's a solution.
	And listen, the reason I'm talking about this, Joseph, is I do care about your happiness, as I care about the happiness of most of the listeners who call into the show.
	We all are very good.
	Every human being is very good at social calculus.
	I remember when I was...
	Younger.
	Oh, God.
	I have to start saying young now.
	I'm going to be 50 this year.
	I remember when I was younger, I had a roommate who was a brilliant guy.
	I'm still in touch with him.
	He told me that people who are unable to solve complex mathematical equations when they're looking at them sort of pencil and paper style, they cannot solve them.
	However, when you recast those same complex mathematical questions into...
	How to split a bill at dinner or who should pay for what after a certain amount of times out, people get it immediately.
	We have this social fairness calculation engine going on at all times.
	And I've always been cognizant of it because, I mean, even before, the reason I remember this story is, ah, that's why, you know, when I grew up, We didn't split bills.
	Like friends, we didn't split bills.
	Or we rarely split bills.
	I mean, a lot of times it'd be like, okay, I'll get this one, you get the next one.
	And, you know, it just, it all kind of worked out.
	And we were all pretty good at keeping that calculus at an even keel.
	And I think that we're all kind of deep down aware of our relationship to the resources of the tribe and of the environment and of those around us.
	And I'm always concerned when people...
	We're all tempted to want to take more than we contribute.
	We're all tempted because that's a very good evolutionary strategy.
	It's just that it might work for a short amount of time.
	You know, like there's this old story, the Amish, right?
	I'm not...
	Fred, I can't use something more culturally relevant to you because I can't think of one off the top of my head.
	But I'm sure there's something similar in India.
	And again, that's a big country.
	It's like saying in the Americas, right?
	But...
	In the Amish country, you know, you go and help someone build a barn, right?
	And everyone comes and they help build a barn.
	Now, it's to your advantage to not go and help that person build the barn so you can sit and count your toes and have a nap or whatever.
	However, and there will be times when, you know, maybe you've got a headache or you're sick or whatever and you can't go.
	However, if you consistently don't help other people when it comes time for you to fix your barn, no one's going to show up.
	So there's a short-term evolutionary advantage to not contributing back to the social resources that you have taken from.
	And...
	That can work in the short run, but I think it kind of goes counter to us as a social animal, where this calculus of what I take versus what I contribute, I think is constantly churning in the back of our brain.
	And I think if we are in situations where we end up taking a lot and not contributing back, I think that makes us not happy.
	For evolutionary reasons, that if, you know, we would want to be averse To that kind of situation because you can get away with it in this situation because there's a government, there's a big giant scientist welfare state all over the world and you can go back to India and you don't have to pay your own way and so on.
	So you can get away with it under the current circumstances but that's not what we're evolutionarily adapted for.
	Like we're evolutionarily adapted to seek out sugar because it was a concentrated source of energy and also because it leads us to Eat fruit.
	Thank you very much, Karen, for that insight.
	It leads us to eat fruit, which, you know, prevents scurvy and other problems.
	So we are evolutionarily drawn to eat sugar.
	It's just that there's such an excess of sugar in the modern world that it gives us tooth decay and diabetes and obesity and all this kind of stuff.
	And in the same way, we're kind of sought, we seek to take more than we provide.
	And in the modern welfare state, which includes a lot of higher education, in my opinion, we can do that and get away with it.
	But I think our conscience is like our bodies with regards to sugar.
	Yeah, we can eat a lot of sugar.
	It just is really bad for us.
	And yes, we can take more than we contribute and get away with it.
	But I think it's not good for us deep, deep down, if that makes any sense.
	Yes, yeah, that is true, actually.
	Because, like you said, you take something and you have to contribute back.
	And this, yeah, of course, everybody will, at one point, finally, they try to take their own more benefits.
	That's the point of, even in the case of an evolution, everything try to...
	Take its own benefits.
	But yeah, this feeling of like I'm getting the money from Germany and of course I have no plans of being working in Germany in future or because after this now I finished my PhD in one good university in Germany so now I have to move to Another good institutions in the world,
	for example, mostly I think I will be moving out of Germany to some higher institutions in Germany.
	United States mostly and this is the way, it's not me actually, mostly the scientific community in the world is working in the same way.
	Like when you do a masters in one, let's say University of Heidelberg in Germany, then they try to do their PhD in some more bigger institution which has Some institutions have very good financial support.
	They have very sophisticated instruments.
	So it's a lot of factors.
	They move to a higher institution.
	And then after that, they are going to move to the United States for 5-10 years.
	And then most of the German professors, they might have like at least five years or four years.
	Hang on.
	I don't care about the migratory patterns of parasitical scientists.
	I mean, we've already talked about this before.
	I'm more interested in your feelings.
	Now, let me ask you this.
	So in India, sorry, and I can't just keep referring, which part of India are you from?
	I'm from South.
	Okay, okay.
	So in India, there are, and I have some experience with the Indian community, in India, there are very powerful mechanisms of social encouragement and social shaming in order to get people to do things which at least the elders perceive as beneficial as a whole.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes, yeah.
	Like if your parents want you to marry an Indian girl, which I'm guessing they do, they have mechanisms of encouragement and shaming by which they will try to get you to do that, right?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	And this is one of the challenges with multiculturalism, which is that Indians can shame Indians into doing things that are more socially beneficial, right?
	Yeah, maybe.
	No, I mean, listen, Indians are pretty good.
	I mean, a lot of cultures are, but Indians are pretty good at this.
	In terms of, you know, bring shame upon the family and it's the right thing to do.
	There's a lot of social pressure to conform to various...
	Cultural ideals within India.
	Maybe that's not the case where your family is, but in certainly a lot of the families that I have met from India and I've had many years of experience with Indian families, there's a lot of pressure to conform to particular social ideals.
	Yes, I think most of the families, especially the younger generation of the family, has the highest pressure from the people of the older generation people.
	Right.
	So Jewish moms and dads often want their kids to marry other Jewish people.
	And Japanese people probably want their kids to marry within their culture.
	It's just easier.
	Indian people want people to marry within the religion and within the culture and so on.
	And so, within particular ethnic or social or racial groups, shaming, and shaming is just one flip side, there's also encouragement, but shaming can work.
	Yes.
	However, have you ever been shamed by a white person?
	No.
	No, I think not.
	No, of course not.
	Because if, well, particularly if white people try to shame someone of a visible minority, that's racism, that's, you know, we're inconsiderate, we're bigoted, we're, you know, culturally insensitive, whatever it is, right?
	So...
	So, Indians can, like, within the tribe, and I don't want to, again, lots of different religions, lots of different regionalities, so again, I apologize for not fine-graining this more, but Sikhs from Gujarat can shame Sikhs from Gujarat.
	Like, the families, the communities, the extended families, the tribe, they can shame, and they can produce what they perceive at least as socially beneficial behavior, because if one Sikh from Gujarat Mwambai, if one Sikh from Mwambai shames his brother, he's never called a racist, right?
	Yes.
	Never.
	And so within the tribe, shame at least In this politically correct world, within the tribe, shaming can work.
	And of course, white people can be shamed at all times for various reasons.
	We've gone into a million times on this show, which is unhealthy and is the only fundamental racism that white people generally exhibit, which is racism against themselves.
	But that's another topic for another time.
	So Germans can shame Germans, which is what you see going on with the migrant crisis.
	Indians can shame Indians.
	Jews can shame Jews.
	Mm-hmm.
	Japanese can shame Japanese and that's a strong shame-based culture in Japan like in Japan if you don't pay your debt A guy in a big yellow suit will follow you around.
	And then everyone knows that you haven't paid a debt.
	And the shame is so horrifying that people have killed themselves rather than be followed around.
	It's like death by Big Bird.
	People have killed themselves.
	I shouldn't laugh about it.
	Rather than be followed around because it's so shaming for them.
	So in groups, ethnicities, races, tribes, and groups, they can shame each other.
	But it's very hard to shame outside your group.
	I mean, Jewish people probably don't care if Japanese people disapprove of what they're doing.
	Yes.
	Japanese people don't care particularly what white people think they're doing.
	Japanese, what did they just let in?
	27 Muslims and two of them turned out to be rapists.
	So I think they've figured out those odds.
	Quite good with math, I believe.
	So...
	So if you're in India, socially productive behavior can be encouraged through a combination of praise and shaming, and nobody feels it's culturally insensitive to do so because you're all part of the same culture within that particular community, right?
	In Chinatown, you can shame other people in Chinatown who are Chinese because you're all Chinese.
	However, if I go down to Harlem and I start shaming people for whatever unproductive things they're doing, I'm probably not going to have a great day.
	And this is just the basic tribalism and it's part of the racial hysteria of the modern world.
	But this is one of the reasons why multiculturalism doesn't work.
	Which is that, in a state of society, in a state-free society, a voluntary society, anarchic society, fantastic, let's mix and match and get some great curry, but in a state of society, The welfare state worked tolerably well when there's mono-ethnicity because mono-ethnicities can all shame each other and can all say, okay, I think you spent enough time on welfare.
	Okay, I think you've got to stop sleeping around.
	Oh my God, you got divorced.
	I'm never going to talk to you and so on.
	Monocultures can have a somewhat functional welfare state for a little bit longer because at least they can enforce rules By shaming.
	However, when you get multicultural institutions, shaming doesn't work because there's a lack of cultural background.
	It takes a long time to install the shame buttons into people's heads.
	Like what your mom might do to shame you, I might laugh at.
	And what my mom might do to shame me, you might laugh at.
	It takes a long time to install these shame buttons in people's heads.
	And so in a monoculture, at least you can shame people into not spending all their time on Pogi or not You know wasting the taxpayers money or not spending their time endlessly traipsing around pretending to contribute to the world through the magic of science So there is some shaming capacity in a monoculture and if you look at monocultures Where there is a welfare state it's it it's not too bad Not too bad, you know, it lasts a little bit longer, but when you get multiculturalism There are language barriers.
	There are cultural barriers.
	There's hysteria about racism and so on and this is why I guarantee you in your life, my friend, you will be shamed by Indian people.
	I very strongly doubt you will ever be shamed by non-Indian people.
	And I can guarantee you, you will never be shamed by a white person because white people are too afraid of stepping on that click-lose-your-leg landmine of being called racist.
	And this is one of the reasons why multiculturalism does not work in a welfare state society because the barriers to overconsumption of social goods, which would be prevented by shaming people, Completely fall apart.
	Yes, you are absolutely right.
	Within monoculture, the concept of shaming is very strong without knowing even that exists.
	Yeah, it's very powerful.
	And most people guide their lives according to social shaming and social benefits because we're a tribal species and we all rely on each other to survive.
	But when you get different ethnicities, different languages, different religions, different cultures all mushing in together, The social shaming breaks down and it becomes a war of all against all and a free fall and everyone's just trying to grab as much cheddar before the dairy farm collapses and that really accelerates social spending.
	And as you can see in countries when multiculturalism goes up, social spending, welfare spending, healthcare spending, everything just goes through the roof.
	And this is what destroys societies.
	And, you know, I don't know what the solution is other than everybody should become a philosopher, but given that that's not about to happen, we have to go with the realities of human tribalism.
	Yes.
	But the solution is you can just quit and get a job.
	Like a job where you're contributing rather than taking from the common pool.
	That's a solution.
	I mean, I said you wouldn't like it, but that's a solution.
	Yeah, actually for the guilty or the depression factor that I'm getting paid by the German people's money for my PhD, so how can I pay back their thing?
	To work as an employee in Germany, that would be the only solution.
	I was just looking at all the people around because Like I said, most of the scientific community, they move here and there for their higher academic positions and they're finally going to be in...
	At one point, they're going to be in their destination, whatever they want.
	But the way they cross through, if you look, they might be working three years in, let's say, in Japan or...
	No, I understand.
	Got some value out of the conversation.
	And listen, this is not commandments.
	I don't want you to become some sort of chattel slave to the German taxpayers.
	It's just that I think this calculus is always occurring within our own minds, and we just really need to be aware of it.
	So if you're aware of it, you can make better decisions.
	But that which is unconscious tends to get us, you know, it's like the following wave that is talked about in the Harry Bosch series.
	It's the wave that you can't see that can swamp your boat.
	So, I really appreciate the conversation.
	Please let us know what you decide and how it goes and hope that this kind of calculus can help you battle some of the depression that may be tough to battle if you don't know it.
	So, thanks, Emil, for calling in.
	Thanks, of course, to everyone so much for the glorious, I dare say God-given but not, opportunity to have these amazing conversations with the planet, not just between us, which is a great thrill, but also to be able to help illuminate the dark corners of people's minds through the The light of this conversation.
	Without you, I'm at this stage in these conversations just looking like a weird guy yelling at a camera.
	So I really, really appreciate having the opportunity to talk about these issues with you.
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	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful night.

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