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June 1, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:07:26
3703 The Politics of Atheism | Steven Crowder and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Wallin from Freedom Main Radio.
Here with a good friend, Stephen Crowder.
You know him as the Swiss army knife of entertainment.
He is a comedian, political commentator, and the host of Louder with Crowder.
Just like it sounds, louderwithcrowder.com.
You can follow him on YouTube at youtube.com forward slash Stephen.
Not like mine.
Not with 16 different spellings.
It's S-T-E-V-E-N. His parents made his life easier.
Stephen Crowder.
Twitter.com forward slash S-Crowder.
And the mug...
Club sign-up is available at crtv.com forward slash mug club.
Steve, how are you doing today?
That's a bunch of plugs.
Now, have I been getting it wrong?
Is your name pronounced Stephen or is it Stefan?
Well, it's Stefan.
And I find that in general, the number of insults thrown at me on the internet are directly proportional to people's inability to either spell or pronounce my name.
Pronunciation has been pretty good, but the number of misspellings is truly astonishing.
And I guess it just speaks to people's French literacy, which I would not assume is hugely high.
There's a famous fighter known as Stefan Bonner.
So actually, I wanted to make sure I got that correct, because it does depend.
He's a P-H-A-N, so it's P-H-E-N is more common.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate the generous plus.
And by the way, we got so much positive feedback from you on the show, so thanks for taking the time.
People are really happy about it.
Thanks, thanks.
It was great fun, and I enjoyed the conversation enormously.
Now, we're going to have a little bit of a chat today about our good friends, the atheists.
We're going to approach them with, dare I say, a Christian sense of love and positivity.
And I, myself, of course, come from an atheist background, still self-identify as an atheist, but I try not to be judged by the company that I keep intellectually.
And one of the things, one of the arguments that I've made, I want to get your thoughts on this, one of the arguments that I've made is that atheism seems to be pretty strongly associated with...
I'm going to put out a couple of stats just so people know we aren't completely wind-blowing here, at least yet.
Soon, perhaps, but not quite yet.
So according to the Pew Forum in the United States, quote, about two-thirds of atheists, 69%, identify as Democrats or lean in that direction.
And a majority, 56%, call themselves political liberals.
And there are only one in ten atheists who say that they are conservatives.
A Harris Interactive poll found that most American atheists Are liberal.
Now, when I put this information out, there are two responses.
Let me get your thoughts on these.
Number one, I'm the tall Chinese guy.
People will say below, they say, I am an atheist, but I am a conservative, I'm a libertarian, I'm a whatever, right?
All true, right?
These are tendencies, right?
However, the other response is people say, well, atheism is not a positive intellectual belief.
It is merely a rejection of the supernatural and of gods and so on.
And therefore, you cannot associate it with any political ideology, which I would completely agree with, except for the basic fact that it is specifically associated with left-wing political ideologies.
If it's a purely neutral belief, you know, I like plaid, well, then it wouldn't be associated with...
Yeah, then, well, I guess us and Gavin McGinnis, but it wouldn't be then associated with any particular ideological belief.
But it has not missed me in the many decades I've been talking about politics with people that Christians skew towards conservatism a lot of times, and atheists skew towards liberalism, socialism, leftism, big intrusive nanny state, big brother government stuff – Has it been your experience in dealing with the world, or is that more of my individual plus statistical experience?
Well, first off, I don't think it was anecdotal at all.
I'm grateful that you brought the statistics to the forefront.
Because one thing, if people actually listen to our show, I would be categorized as a Protestant, non-denominational Christian.
We've had professors in the show who've talked about how Protestantism specifically, not Catholicism, has sort of formed Western society.
But we always try to be very respectful of our Catholic audience or whoever they may be, particularly with atheists.
Because I do think that now, because of programs like yours, there's been a bit of a switch.
And my producer...
You know, not gay Jared, who was homeschooled, and I've talked about this, where there are a lot of young Christians, I guess sort of younger millennial, Generation Z, where they conflate Christianity and compassion with socialism and leftism.
And so with younger generations, I think you're seeing a lot more liberal Christians who are sort of pansified, for lack of a better word.
And then I think you're seeing more common ground between people like myself and younger atheists.
I had a conversation with a Christian friend I said I don't share much in common with a lot of Christians as far as getting out of theology, getting into just philosophy outside of religion and approach to geopolitics.
This is a Christian, to give you an idea, I won't name him, but he said, I would never carry a gun because I can never shoot another human being.
I said, if he's raping your wife?
Because I could shoot a man if he's raping your wife.
It's not even my wife.
And it was just kind of a lot of Christians like to do this right away.
That sets up the conversation as though, well, I would never shoot somebody even in self-defense.
So I'm talking down to you.
And it's really easy to be altruistic when you're using somebody else's money.
So a long time – for a long time on YouTube, I would say 2009 to about a year and a half ago, yeah, the atheists were really aggressive liberals to the point where liberalism and atheism kind of seemed like one and the same.
That was sort of early Bill Maher days and then you see a lot of atheists who have gotten mad with him now for the same reasons on the other side of the coin.
Yeah, I have found that.
And I don't know how much of it is cultural.
Again, because I think you're seeing atheists in Generation Z being a little more libertarian.
I was talking with Sargon about this.
If it's an absence of belief, then that lends itself to militarism.
You have to be proactively atheist.
If it's an absence of belief, then that creates a void, which will be filled by something else, as we see with Europe now with Islam.
If it's an absence of belief, if it's apathy, as you see with With European atheism, I don't think that it's necessarily as aggressive.
It's not really even on their radar.
They're just very unchurched.
You have these beautiful, like in Montreal, beautiful cathedral churches that are completely empty.
And I think you have to address either issue.
Are you proactively atheist where effectively it sort of becomes like a religion that you're proselytizing?
Or is it agnostic, apathetic, you're an atheist in absence of belief?
In which case, well, you have to acknowledge that human nature hasn't changed and something's going to fill that void immediately.
And we see, unfortunately, that can be Islam.
So I don't know if that answered your question.
I think it depends generationally, but it depends on kind of which stance the atheist in question takes.
Yeah, and I think one of the things that, I mean, I was raised a Protestant to like yourself and like the prodigal son conversation I've had before, where it's like, I'm going to go completely against all of this.
And then, of course, you know, as a good Protestant, I wake up and what do I want to do?
Get to work!
Keep working!
What are you doing reading this?
Get back to work!
What are you doing thinking about working when you could actually be working?
And this is a very important aspect.
And for those who weren't raised Protestant who don't have this, you know, you work until your eyes bleed and then you put some visine drops in and you keep plugging away and get some more work done.
The work ethic in Protestantism is very powerful.
I haven't noticed it quite so much in the pajama boy leftist atheist community, which could be the saving...
Well, isn't it funny?
See, you're making an assumption, and I would too, that pajama boy is an atheist, but the reason is because leftism and atheism have sort of combined to create – it's like John Carpenter's The Thing, and you don't really know who is who anymore.
Who's the killer up here in Alaska?
I think it's Alaska.
Someone's going to correct me.
It's the Yukon Territories.
You get the reference.
But yeah, it's funny.
We don't know that he's an atheist, but you see it, and people often make that assumption because of what it's become.
Well, no.
I think he's an atheist because he's chicken-chested and has the biceps of a ramen noodle.
You are far more brutal on atheists.
No, no, no.
This is not just my opinion.
This is not just my opinion.
Here we go.
Here we go.
An academic study from researchers at Brunel University London assessed 171 men.
Question, Steve, just if you had to go out on a limb.
Would you say that the guys who are physically strong and buff tended to be more into...
Feral competition for resources in the free market, or do you think that the chicken-chested guys, you know, blown over by a bus passing by with a strong wind, were they more into socialist income redistribution, if you had to go on a limb without knowing the answer to this survey?
Well, you know what?
Here's the thing.
Yeah, we also covered this survey more so talking about socialists, how weaker men are likely to be socialists.
And I think that, listen, it's intrinsically tied with atheism.
We're actually playing a game.
Who said it's Stalin or Bernie Sanders?
Remove the lining up and shooting?
It's virtually identical to vilifying of the wealthy.
But to play devil's advocate...
I could see how atheists would say, well, that's because the Christians are dumb jocks.
So they're meatheads and we're the intellectuals.
So we've evolved beyond, you know, as Joe Rogan says, maintaining our meat vehicle.
So I would guess that's their argument against it.
But yeah, there is absolutely no doubt that weaker, more frail men are certainly more likely to be socialists.
I think a big part of that is fear.
I think it's a fearful man, a man who doesn't believe that he can provide for himself.
That's what socialism says, right?
It doesn't matter if you're a man.
It doesn't matter how innovative you are.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are.
You need us to fix it for you.
So I just think that the wimpy guy who wants the government to provide him with a handout would tend to be a socialist, but it is interesting.
Well, and if you are a chicken-chested, rubber-legged, non-entity physically, just back in the day, you know, when we were out hunting for things for a living, you know, you're just the guy trailing along whining and hoping that somebody's going to give you a slight leg of something that you can't hunt and bring down yourself, you know?
Like, I mean, there's positive economics where you go out and create and provide value, and then there's negative economics called...
Right.
And I think both of those have played the part in, you know, some people hunt the prey and other people hunt the hunters with whining.
And that seems to be sort of, I think, where the socialist stuff came along.
Hunt the hunters with whining.
Yeah, you know what?
I will say, the guys who I knew in school, I knew two guys who claimed to be gay, and they are not gay.
I know beyond any shadow of a doubt now, but they were always surrounded by the most beautiful women, often nude.
So maybe that's just another evolution of the human condition, its defense mechanism.
They realize that we can't compete.
We're the runts of the litter, so we're going to lie.
Maybe that's what they do.
Well, it's interesting too.
I don't know what your history is with exercise, but I was thinking the other day, like I really, I was a socialist when I was younger, which was in direct collision to my get to work Protestant inner sergeant major of self-improvement.
But when I was 15 or 16, I began to work out with weights and so on.
And I was just thinking the other day, okay, so I was a socialist until I was 15 or 16.
Then I began to work out.
I mean, in stuff I was reading as well, but I wonder if that had something to do with it.
It's been a constant habit of mine ever since, and I just wonder, because I know a lot of people like Mike Cernovich and yourself and myself are constantly pushing the value of exercise and good health and so on.
I wonder if it's like, well, we can't convince you with the power of our arguments and the force of our rhetoric, but what we can do is get you to bench press more than a mosquito's ass full of weights, and then you're inevitably going to be driven or pulled towards the free market because you're just physically stronger.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, it's funny that we talk about this a lot in the show, and I think you're right.
It's kind of a modern idea that a man either has to be a dumb jock or an intellectual, or a man can be strong or emotionally available.
As a matter of fact, you were never, you know, because we kind of go back a few generations, let's say the 40s or 50s, kind of post-World War II, particularly our grandfather's generation, they didn't hug a lot.
That was actually pretty cultural.
That's kind of a temporary blip in time.
If you go not much longer before then, men are kissing each other.
You know, they're expressing their love for each other.
In certain cultures, men hold hands.
Not saying I'm going to go that far, but I'm saying you weren't considered a complete man unless you had all of the above.
You know, we use this term a lot, master, you know, jack of all trades, master of none.
The original expression was jack of all trades, master of one, meaning you need to be a well-rounded man and you need to have a specialty.
And I talked about that with Joe Roganus.
It's like the best fighters now.
There was this idea that there was going to be a new breed of fighter in mixed martial arts where they would just be good enough at everything.
You actually see that's not the case.
They need to be well-rounded and still really, really good at one thing.
We're still seeing that's never really changed.
If you look at Abraham Lincoln, you look at people like Teddy Roosevelt, even though I disagree with some of what he did to the federal government.
But if you look at people who are rugged individuals and you look at their writing, these were people who were incredibly poetic.
These were people who were incredibly emotionally vested in their causes and filleted themselves open, which now we sort of reserve for the slam poetry artist at some open mic.
And then the dumb jock is over there doing bench press.
And it makes sense when you think about what we know neurologically, what happens with neurotransmission when you're training, how much – I don't know about you, but I feel like crap if I go for a long time without doing something strenuous physically.
I feel better.
I think better.
And science proves that.
So I think, unfortunately, feminism has created this whole idea of toxic masculinity, and then you have this sort of pseudo-macho pickup culture.
It's like, man, I don't want to read books.
I'm going to pick up chicks.
And neither one has in the history of man really been considered a complete man.
That's relatively recent, and I've always been fascinated with it.
Well, I think the welfare state has a lot to do with it as well, because when a woman chooses a man, she wants two things.
She wants, like, in a free market environment.
When a woman chooses a man to be, I don't just mean like a sort of fling or whatever, but if you want to settle down, have kids or whatever, you want the man to have resources and you want the man to not die.
Having resources and dying, not a good combination.
Not having resources and living forever like the poor vampire, that is also not a good combination.
So she would want intelligence and physical health.
But of course, with the welfare state, the women can turn to the state to provide for them all the resources formerly provided to them by healthy, intelligent, hardworking men.
And so the values of intelligence and hardworkingness and physical health have declined because they're just not as necessary for the security of the wife and the children.
I think you're right.
I also think that's why women aren't funny.
We were just having this conversation recently with my wife and my mother, and they were like, oh, that's not true.
And I said, okay, let me ask you a couple.
Name me kind of one thing that you do really well.
My wife is really good at yoga.
It's not really fair.
She just naturally is tall and thin, and she walked into her first yoga class, and they said, hey, would you like to be an instructor here so they can take credit for God's work or nature's work, right?
She had never done yoga before then, but I digress.
So she has done it for years.
She's really good at it.
I said, take anything that you're really good at.
I said, okay.
My wife was yoga.
I said, so you had to practice at it.
Did you see the progression?
She said, yeah.
I said, well, men have to do that with humor or we don't have sex.
Hitchens kind of talked about this, but she had never heard it that way.
I said, if you were to be given a choice to be the most beautiful woman in the room or the funniest, she said, well, most beautiful.
I said, most guys would take funniest guy in the room or certainly a portion of men where no woman would.
Same thing.
Throughout time, this was something that women considered attractive and it's because humor is generally an indicator of I think you're right.
And two, providing someone with a safety net.
Those are the two things that I think are most corrosive to the human spirit.
I've seen people who've become successful and then they've just – it's entirely warped their perception of reality in themselves.
And I've seen people who are getting PhDs in German poetry who just have no ambition in life because they're living off of some kind of a grant.
I don't even know how you get a grant in German poetry.
I could be mistaking the language, but I have a friend who's getting a PhD in either German poetry or, I don't know, maybe it's some syllabic language poetry, but how do you do that?
Well, they don't have to do anything else.
I think next year it's just by studying Arabic, but I could be wrong about that.
So, and I think it's interesting, this point about humor as well, because you're right.
I mean, if you can make a woman laugh with surprising original observations, hey, airline food is not...
Anyway, but then...
What's the deal with microwave dinner?
Why are they so soggy?
Why are they pre-washed?
I didn't ask for that.
So, if you can make a woman laugh, of course, a couple of things happen.
First of all, you give her...
the drug addict of he can make me laugh.
Secondly, you show your intelligence.
And thirdly, you do it in a way that's not going to piss her off too much, right?
Like if you start coming in with political opinions, it might be a little bit stressful, a bit tense, you know, there could be a miss.
But if you can make her laugh, you can easily show off your intelligence and the plus of having you around, which is people will smile and laugh at what it is that you're saying and And I think also, last but not least, when you get a little older, women, there's a certain phase in a woman's life.
It's true for men as well, but it's more important for women.
There's a certain phase in a woman's life where you don't know how old they are until they laugh.
Have you ever seen that?
Like a woman who's like, wow, you look fantastic.
And then she laughs and it's like, oh, origami, aging, cryptkeeper, oh no, folds of time and dimension.
I was going to say by what they laugh at, like their cultural references.
Like that Carol Burnett, right?
You know, oh, that Milton Berle, Freddie Roman.
No, but I guess, yeah, the laugh lines too.
Speaking of which, did you know that they're encouraging young women to get Botox now?
Did you know this?
Really young women too, right?
Yeah, it's preventative.
I have friends who live in – I left Los Angeles that hellhole a while ago, but I have friends now who are getting Botox.
It's preventative.
I mean talk about a brilliant marketing ploy.
It was something that was reserved for old people because it's too small of a niche.
We'll just tell young people if they do it, they won't need it in the future, and then we'll give them the super Botox package in the future.
Well, you know there's no Botox for eggs, right, Steve?
Yeah.
You know, you can make the dinosaur egg, you can paint it up and so on.
It doesn't mean you've got a viable non-raptor inside there, right?
I mean, you can make the outside look as fresh as you want, but those eggs, the best buy, the sell buy, the impregnate buy, the make into a human buy date doesn't budge one inch.
It doesn't matter how many sit-ups you do.
It doesn't matter what Botox you've got on.
The dust accumulates insides no matter what.
And that, I think, is something that people need to remember.
You can look younger.
It doesn't mean that you're any fresher on the inside.
Yeah, inside share.
It's like Tales of the Crypt.
Now, regarding atheism, there is a general argument, which I think is interesting, whether it's conclusive or not, we can sort of jawbone about.
But there's a general argument which goes something like this.
So, increased materialism that came out of the Industrial Revolution and everyone living in cities getting better educated, and then plus Darwin, right?
Darwin solved, at least biologically solved, the question of the problem of the origin and development of life, at least for a lot of people.
I know that's still pushback and so on.
But with Darwin, you had a creation and development of life that scrubbed the moral force from You know, the one thing I think that atheists should be, most atheists, should be roundly condemned for, and I can say this because I've tried to solve it myself, is it's sort of like this.
Let's say that there's a terrible storm and it's like crazy.
Cows flying through the air, frozen frogs raining down on everyone's head, lightning, end of the world storm.
And what you do is you, everyone's taking shelter in the church, right?
It's the strongest stone structure in the village.
Everyone's taking shelter in the church.
And you just pull the church apart.
You come in with a wrecking crane, you rip off the roof, you pull off the church.
Pull it apart, right?
And everyone's like, man, we got raining frogs coming down.
We got lightning.
We got cows flying through the air.
Where the hell are we supposed to go?
And he's like, I don't know.
I just don't think the church is a valid place for you to have shelter in.
And now everyone's exposed to the elements, like Lear style, just messed up.
And then, you know, people start freezing to death, and it's cannibalism, and it just goes from there.
I think the big problem which atheism posed, which I think we're still feeling the repercussions of more than 150 years later, is they said, okay, we can explain to you a universe without God.
But God was the moral log.
God was free will.
God was ethical responsibility.
God was the soft fabric that kept society in a productive structure.
And when the atheists, in a sense, stripped that out of society, I think, you know, okay, fine, maybe you can tear apart the church, but you better damn well have some place for the people to go.
Because the storm of the world, as we can see from these days with what's going on in the world, the storm of the world never seems to abate.
And I think by ripping the roof off the church and not having another place to go, in other words, not bending all of their will and their effort into creating some secular version of morality that could be as objective and as absolute— As religious or in particular Christian ethics, I think that it created a lot of homelessness, created a lot of death.
And I think we're still feeling the repercussions of that, you know, the relativism, the situational ethics and all that kind of stuff.
And that's my big complaint at the moment.
Well, I think you're right.
And here's the thing, you know, in atheist defense, if they're right about all of it, That's not their fault.
You know, for example, if they're right about all of it and all of it is a house of cards or the church comes tumbling down and they're right, there is no God, none of it, there's really no purpose to any of this, it's happenstance, let's assume that they're right.
And I readily acknowledge, by the way, I'm not one of those Christians who says, I know for a fact.
No, there's a certain element of faith.
And listen, I go back and forth all the time.
Of course, Christians question their faith.
I think we do a great disservice to the world by acting as though We are absolute in our faith and it never wavers.
That's what the whole Bible is about.
The Bible is about dealing with crises of faith.
Everyone has that at some point.
But if atheists are correct, I don't really think it would be fair to blame them.
Say like, well, you were right, but look, you didn't replace the lie with something.
And I can understand them saying, well, that's not my fault.
It was a lie.
And I think that kind of brings us to the question, is there some spiritual truth that certain, you know, that Christians hold to be self-evident?
If you look at the way throughout the history of mankind, the human cycle has occurred.
And like I said, there's a vacuum and it's filled by something.
There's this God-shaped hole that people continually try to fill.
And it can't be filled with, like you said, an absence of belief.
There have been people who tried to replace it.
And unfortunately, I'm not saying all atheists are communists, but when people say, like, oh, religion's the cause of all wars and death, well, hold on, Stalin, Mao, I mean, communism and atheism were distinctly tied together because communism effectively tried to be an answer, right?
There was, okay, this is nonsense, and here's a way that humans can live in harmony, in spite of the human condition, to get ahead, to try and be successful.
So I don't think it's fair if atheists are right, right?
It's not their duty to replace a lie if it's a lie, but I do think throughout history they've tried to answer that question, and sometimes it's had catastrophic results.
Well, okay, so the Christian worldview...
It's something like this, that, you know, there's God and there's the devil, and you are responsible for the life choices, the ethics that you choose, and how you act in the world.
And there's, of course, you know, for a lot of people, there's the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell.
But you are responsible.
And so your relationship to God, your relationship to virtue, your relationship to moral choice is inescapable.
And the question of where does dysfunction or where does evil come from is answered to a large degree in Christian theology by the corrupt nature of our souls or the corrupt potential of our souls, the temptations of the devil, the temptations of the physical world, and so on.
So there's an answer as to where dysfunction comes from.
And there's a solution, which is dedicate yourself to virtue and betterment and absolutism.
When that was taken away, the logical response for atheists would be, okay, well, then none of that is true.
So there are no objective rules.
And therefore, the last thing we'd want is a big government enforcing these rules in a particular geographical region, you know, whether it's the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the communists in China or in Russia or whatever.
So that would be the logical result.
But the communists came along and said, aha, we know, we know where dysfunction comes from.
We know where exploitation and evil comes from.
It comes from control over the means of production.
It's not really very catchy, but it did seem to catch on quite a bit, particularly when there was a lot of guns behind its enforcement.
Created by people who never had a hand in any kind of production whatsoever.
Ultimate social justice warriors demanding that they be given control over the means of production because they can't get a real job.
And so this answer says, well, it's...
It's class.
It's your relationship to the means of production.
There's the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, there's the workers, the exploited, and so on.
And that's the answer to human dysfunction.
What that means, of course, is they say, well, there's no such thing as an essential human personality, which, of course, with the soul and with the essence of humanity, it's fully accepted in Christianity.
You are defined by your economics, by your class.
And therefore, if we change the economics, if we change the means of production, we can then mold...
be.
And Christians will never accept that.
Christians will say, "No, you're moldable, but not completely." Right?
I mean, and whereas the idea is, of course, and now we can see this with a lot of the left now, that everything is a social construct, everything is a continuum, there's no essence, there's no biology, there's no essentialism of any kind.
And what I think it does is it says, "Well, we can get rid of dysfunction." You know, the poor are poor, Why?
Because they don't have money.
So if we take money from the rich and give it to the poor, then we'll have smoothed everything out and everything will be fine.
There is this great temptation for secular, coercive, government-based power lust when you rid the world of individual responsibility of free will.
And you make everything into economics and redistribution of wealth.
It's almost, I've made this case before, it's kind of a satanic temptation to take control of the things of this world and redistribute it to eliminate dysfunction, which is materialistic alone.
Well, I have a couple of things there.
I have a question, actually, for you.
But, you know, we would go back to kind of the biblical parable, give unto us a king.
And God's like, are you sure?
Are you sure that's what you want?
Everyone else is like, we want it.
We want to be in control.
Are you sure?
I kind of just fixed some crap.
So, yeah, I think, again, it's human nature.
And even if you just kind of like, well, Jordan Peterson does believe in a God.
He was on our show, but it's an interesting world that he has.
We discuss theology, and a lot of people go, I can't really follow this.
us on our show, you know, there's sort of a starting ground where, okay, if someone's a Christian, then we know we can sort of discuss five-point Calvinism, the idea of predestination.
But Jordan Peterson has, Professor Peterson has some out there beliefs, and it was a really interesting discussion.
But he believes in a God, but he also believes in kind of the archetype.
So let's assume it's, you know, a series of fables, the Bible.
It still does have some answers for the human condition as well as some prescriptions for it.
Not all of them, and not everyone's going to think it's correct.
But it's interesting that you bring that up because, you know, I guess sort of my question is since you say, you know, you are an atheist, but you've obviously dedicated yourself to And that's a big part of, you know, this idea of moral absolutes and rejecting moral relativism and situational ethics.
Why do you think it is that you've done that and it's so uncommon for sort of, I guess, the modern atheist?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, obviously, like most people, I invent ethics because I love to lecture people.
I love to feel morally superior, and I love to instruct people on what to do.
And of course, to do that with credibility for myself, I need to have some set of rules.
And I say that, it's kind of half a joke, but it's also not.
Like, if you think you can create beautiful buildings, you need to study architecture and engineering so that your blueprints aren't going to fall down.
If you think that you have something of great beauty to bring to the world, of great truth and of great value and of great virtue...
Well, I know that morals are the biggest levers that move society.
You know, if you go to Europeans and you say, well, you see, to be compassionate, you need to take in, you know, 12 trillion people from Africa and they believe it's good, they believe it's right, they believe it's the good, moral, right thing to do.
Well, you own them.
Whoever defines morality creates almost this predeterministic channel or train track for human beings to follow.
And so knowing, as I do, how powerful ethics are in society, how they are kind of like a virus or a meme that spreads, I really, really wanted to be sure about what I was arguing for.
And, you know, the non-aggression principle, the non-initiation of forced respect for property rights, you know, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not assault, thou shalt not rape – I really wanted all of those to be solidly grounded in a rational framework because otherwise I'm saying to people, you should do this while having to conceal from them.
It's just my opinion.
You can't...
That's really like...
If I say...
Stephen, you have to like pistachio ice cream.
It's like, that would make no sense.
It's like, well, you have a particular taste and I have a different taste.
So I really wanted to be able to tell people the right way to live, or at least not the wrong way to live.
You know, thou shalt not.
It's much more liberating than thou shalt, right?
Like if I say, thou shalt not go to Detroit, which is usually a pretty good commandment to follow— Good argument.
I've seen your videos.
And I'm not trying to counterfeit off this fiat currency called ethics, which is actually founded on just mere assertion and opinion.
Well, I think you've done a good job of it.
I certainly think that you're a more consistently moral person probably than a lot of Christians out there.
And that's because I also think, listen, to Christians' everlasting shame, first off, it's not fair.
I was having a debate with SC Cup about this.
They're like, well, this nation is a vast majority of Christians.
No, a lot of people check the box because they were born that way.
It doesn't mean that they're practicing Christians or understand anything.
As a matter of fact, you can't really be born a Christian.
At some point, you have to decide.
That's the very idea of Christianity.
You have to decide for yourself.
Your parents can't make you a Christian.
Your parents can't make you a disciple.
But unfortunately, we see this nation as a majority Christian and a lot of people just sort of check that box to do whatever they want.
So they actually just check it so that they don't have to frame things.
And like you said, to be able to define morals and ethics and be able to back it up because it's like, yeah, you know what?
He who has not sinned, cast the first stone, meh!
Drinking, beating their spouse.
So I see that a lot.
And it's unfortunate.
I do think that Christians have had really, really bad representatives.
But it's interesting that you talk about this.
We're talking kind of about this void.
And here's something too.
I think you're obviously a very smart person.
So you see the importance and the value of ethics and moral foundational principles.
And I think atheists for a long time have given themselves a pass because almost everyone was raised with some religious background.
And it's like, since I rejected it, I'm the critical thinker.
But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the case.
It doesn't mean that you're an intellectual just because you're an atheist.
And I think they've gotten a pass with that.
So I think for you, you're a smart guy, because I also see a lot of people, they're still prone to filling this void with something that's very dogmatic.
And we're talking about this today, the Paris Climate Accord.
I mean, this is if you look at neo-environmentalism.
By the way, people out there think, I'm not denying climate change.
I'm not denying the fact that humans have a role in it.
But the question arises, is it catastrophic?
Is it imminent?
And then what proof do we have that the Kyoto Protocol, now the Paris Climate Accord, First off, is India going to respect their demand that they lower the emissions of cow farts?
Yeah, we're going to get right on that to follow this protocol.
If you look at what the United States is pledging versus China and these other countries who are the other big emitters.
But it comes down to, I've had so many atheists who are really, really just hardcore environmentalists, and it just becomes pagan Gaia worship.
It's the same thing where this priority, as Alex Epstein has put it, is what's your litmus test?
And for some people, not all of them, But for some people, their ultimate kind of measure is minimize impact, minimize impact.
Alex Epstein talked about that, whereas his measurement, a more important one, that's not one that he doesn't take into account, but before that is what maximizes human flourishing and alleviates human suffering.
And again, now we're getting into the hierarchy of values and kind of what determines that.
So I think it comes back to that question that often people are filling the void with something that Even if they don't perceive it to be religious in nature.
Well, and you tell me something that the majority of atheists who claim to be so scientific, you tell me something they support that doesn't end up with massive government programs and spending.
I mean, if you want to – yeah, of course.
I mean, it would be great if we could reduce the amount of CO2 that's being pumped into the atmosphere, although it is, of course, plant food and is very good for things growing around the world.
I don't think we can have a massively growing population and starve the plants of CO2 at the same time.
I don't think that's a Malthusian problem that is going to be solved by war and starvation.
But my question is, okay, if you really want to minimize humanity's impact in the first world on the planet, fantastic.
Then you need to support absolutely no government deficit spending, absolutely no government debt, absolutely no unfunded liabilities.
Because when the government spends an extra couple of trillion dollars a year, that's an extra couple of trillion dollars a year that's burning up the Earth's natural resources, which we can't afford.
But when you go to atheists and you say the best way to deal with climate change is to reduce the size and power of the state, also another way to deal with climate change might be just potentially, you know, go out on a limb here, it might be to not move millions of people from low-impact third-world countries to extraordinarily high-impact first-world countries and give them thousands of dollars it might be to not move millions of people from low-impact third-world countries to extraordinarily high-impact first-world countries and It's just a possibility.
And you can see this short circuit.
It's like, oh yeah, I do want to reduce humanity's impact, but no government deficits and no government debt and control over immigration?
And this is where you see these crossed wires.
But how do we force the economy into green energy?
Germany is selling their energy at a negative price.
We have to use it.
The only way we can force people into wind and solar that doesn't work is through deficits.
I saw that on CNN today.
We're talking about it on tonight's show.
I don't know who it was.
I wish – I don't know if you have the software.
Maybe you can tell me off air where I could go back and go, oh, I was watching CNN at 9.30 this morning and no one is going to upload that clip and I would love to do a rebuttal.
It could have been Jennifer Granholm.
See, your first problem is the sentence, I was watching CNN. That is the first issue that you have.
Well, you know, I watch CNN. Professional hazard.
You're like the taste tester for the king to see if anything is poisoned.
You'll dip into the mainstream media to see if other people consume it without their heads exploding.
Right, yeah.
It's the original Cheers, where you're actually hoping a little bit of poison goes into your glass, and I'm looking HuffPo in the eye, shady bastards.
I feel the need to because I feel as though I learn more when I watch opposing viewpoints, generally speaking.
And I also find it kind of boring to listen to people who agree with me a whole lot, unless it's, you know, dynamic conversation like this.
But someone was saying, they were saying, you know, Donald Trump is promising things that he can't do.
Coal jobs.
He can't bring back coal jobs.
Besides, there are more jobs now in wind and solar.
I'm going, Well, no.
No shit, stupid.
Hold on a second because Barack Obama said he was fine.
Sorry for the language.
But Barack Obama said he was fine putting coal out of business, putting moratoriums on coal while subsidizing wind and solar even though it's not efficient and it doesn't work.
And Ted Kennedy didn't want the windmills out in front of his Cape Cod summer home.
It's amazing how many more jobs you can create in this sector.
When you're subsidizing it through a deficit while simultaneously closing down jobs that we know exist on an honest profit margin.
And no one on the panel, no one just said, wait, what?
And that's what's remarkable, I think, about cable and why shows like yours and Joe Rogan and hopefully ours, we don't want to ever toot our own horn, are doing well because people can say, hold on a second, hold on a second.
Do you understand what you just said and can you substantiate it?
It doesn't happen.
It doesn't happen on a lot of traditional media.
But I just – I want to blow my brains out when I hear things like that because like you said, yeah, reduced deficit spending.
Oh my god, would that have an impact on climate change?
Well, Greens as well are I think hideous enemies of Western civilization as a whole because the – our need to consume energy is what keeps most of us alive.
The Greens, I mean, yeah, keep the environment clean and so on, but it is energy.
It is our prodigious energy use that keeps literally hundreds of millions of people alive.
Like human beings, we were down to like 10,000 people during the last ice age.
I mean, we were like circling.
It's like if we're done, if these walls of ice get three centimeters closer, that's it.
It's cannibalism and we're done.
And now we've got, you know, billions and billions of people in the world because we use a lot of energy.
So we're going to use energy.
And if you cut back on the use of energy...
You just, millions and millions of people are going to die.
That's just a basic fact.
People need to be aware of that.
So energy is going to be used.
The question is, is it going to be used in a more responsible and environmentally sensitive way in the first world, or is it going to be in places like China and India and Saudi Arabia where all of the money is going to go?
So the West develops all of this amazing technology for extracting oil and then creates the massive demand for oil by having an industrial civilization.
And then Middle Eastern governments, when the West was weak after the Second World War, just scooped in and stole everything from the Western companies.
And ever since, we've been pouring trillions of dollars into the Middle East.
And then we wonder why certain ideologies might be spreading just a little bit.
Yeah.
I mean, you can't solve this problem.
You drill at home and you get oil, you get coal at home, or you end up funding theocratic dictatorships all over the world who have a specific agenda that may not be all too friendly to your long-term way of life.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And something else that a lot of people don't know, I mean, picture, gosh, what was it?
There was Exxon Valdez.
The BP oil spill was a recent one.
Those happen all the time if you actually look at just spills that happen from tankers that are going overseas.
A lot of people don't understand that.
There are spills all the time, far more that occur in transporting oil, as you put it, from countries that they don't have an EPA.
They couldn't care less about how they're drilling or being environmentally friendly.
Then they have to make that travel.
I mean just think about it.
Only 100 years ago, people who made that trip, half of them died.
That's why they had 15 kids because only half of them would make it on the boat.
It's coming over and there are tons of spills all the time.
One happens here on our shores and people freak out.
They don't understand how much worse it is for the environment to be dependent, let alone ethically.
Like you said, supporting these horrible dictatorships.
And I hate to sound like a nihilist but I have kind of taken the viewpoint that there's just – I just don't think there's any way to fix it.
I just don't think that Islam – and I don't mean all Muslims are bad people.
I don't think that Islam is compatible with Western civilization right now.
I genuinely don't believe it.
We haven't seen it happen successfully.
I mean you see it kind of happen like a glimmer of light like, oh, Lebanon.
Oh, it's the Paris of the Middle East.
And they screwed up again.
Oh, look, Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
And someone just got jailed because they came forward with rape accusations.
And I just, it's kind of at the point where every now and then they, Eddie Haskell it, and they put on a good face, and we think, oh, look, he's a good kid, and they can't get their crap together.
So, I mean, it sounds very pessimistic, but listen, there's a solution.
We have more than enough energy reserves here.
We do, and so does Canada, by the way.
Canada is the worst.
I remember as a kid, I got kicked out of class because they were saying, they're ruining the tar sands.
They're going to ruin the tar sands.
And I said...
What are the tar sands going to be used for?
They're tar sands.
If not for the tar, what purpose?
Is it a bastion of wildlife?
You know, they're acting like it's fern gully.
They're tar sands!
And I got kicked out of class, and this is me just as a kid trying to ask a question that they couldn't answer.
So, again, this environmentalism now has gone from, we want to clean up, we want to be responsible, to a borderline religious worldview.
And you're called to sign...
Here's one thing, actually, that we were just talking about today earlier, and we'll be on our show tonight.
Did you follow the story?
University of Arizona, the feminist who is creating inter...
Hold on a second.
I think I have it right here, if you give me one second.
She is creating...
Oh, the new physics.
Yes, intersectional quantum physics.
That's right, because Newtonian physics are gravity.
And I mean, she screamed to her scale.
Let's be honest.
This is an angry, fat feminist who just hated the idea of the law of gravity.
I think a lot of people, and this is science should be, science should exist outside of any kind of an ideological worldview, or it should exist in the complete absence of religion.
But I think you're seeing more atheists wake up to when these same people call you and science denier simply for saying, I don't think the Paris Accord is going to fix man-made climate change.
Bill Nye says science denier and you could be jailed.
But the same group of people are pushing the idea of 52 genders, the idea that Newtonian physics are oppressive.
I think people are saying now that science at the level of higher education, at the university level is being co-opted by ideological extremists.
And that's a tough pill to swallow and a reality that I think a lot of people have to come to They may not approach science that way.
The good scientists don't.
But in academia and in the media, yeah, that's happening right now.
It is very easily co-opted by people who are, I mean, I don't know.
Can you get any more extreme than this?
And this isn't fringe.
It's being taught in the main campus.
Well, I mean, the whole problem with higher education is there's this myth, right?
And it's because people don't understand cause and effect.
If you're smart, you generally go to college.
If you're smart and you go to college, when you get out, you generally make a lot of money and you're pretty successful.
And so people think they don't think cause and effect, right?
They think, OK, well, let's just dump dumb people into college and they'll suddenly become smart and go on to be really successful.
Like, you know, take Danny DeVito, draft him in the NBA.
The guy's going to wake up, you know, six feet taller by morning because, you know, tall guys are in the NBA.
You know, it's ridiculous.
So they've opened up the floodgates to just allowing run-of-the-mill idiots into higher education.
I mean, you know, I don't know what percentage it is.
It's huge these days, the percentage of people who are going to college.
Sorry, there just aren't that many smart people.
Go to the fashion industry and say, you have to have 40%, the most attractive 40% of people have to be on your runway and in your swimsuit calendars and so on.
And suddenly you have no fashion industry because then people look in the mirror and they see how they're actually looking in these clothes rather than how people who don't eat look in these clothes.
And so with higher education, it's just become ridiculous that the government's showering so much money into it that they're opening up the floodgates.
And when you let dumb people in, you have to keep lowering your standards and lowering your standards and lowering your standards to the point now where you barely have to have a pulse and a half in order to get through.
And then you end up with stuff like this and you have to have some place where all these people are going to go.
It can't be the sciences because the sciences still have vestiges of objectivity and it's hard to do, you know, chemistry and physics and biology.
These are tough, complicated, difficult subjects to master.
So you need all of this goop where you can flush all of the idiots you've brought in who can't hack it in the hard sciences.
So this is what's happened to the arts.
It's become so ridiculously corrupt because you just need a place to flush all these idiots and Well, that was another thing, right?
They were talking about student loan forgiveness.
I can't remember the name of the government program, but that's effectively what it is.
Like, Donald Trump We're good
to go.
Interesting you use the word allow.
That means that leftists, they don't believe in this concept of, while we're talking about sort of Christianity versus atheism, they don't believe in the concept of inalienable rights.
They believe that every single right is really a privilege bestowed upon you by government.
Donald Trump will allow private employers to not pay for what they see as a violation of their conscience.
I'm just, allow, steal.
And it's because they've been in our pockets so long and people start from that baseline.
And I think deconstructing it just to go, hold on a second, hold on a second.
Let's get back to the baseline.
What is theft?
Well, theft is taking something that isn't yours.
Okay.
By force or by coercion.
Right.
So how is allowing small businesses to not be forced to paying for something theft?
Well, I guess it's not.
But taking somebody's money that they've earned through the force of government, that's not theft.
And you can see the lights go on for some people.
But now that you're talking about this, I guess this gender, is it just being taught in gender studies, the intersectional quantum physics?
I guess I was tricked and thought they were teaching it as science to some degree.
I'm pretty sure this isn't going to show up in a physics conference.
I haven't read the details, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just assume that it's just coming from some place where, because of the stunning Kruger effect, that if you're not smart, you can't just appreciate how not smart you are.
A really intelligent person, you go through this every day.
It's like, oh, I don't know much about this.
I don't know much about that.
I'm pretty limited in what I know.
I like to have my, as you say, jack of all trades, master of one, try to focus on the stuff I'm good at.
But, you know, idiots think that everything's easy and they can just, oh, Newton, what a heck, I'm just going to overturn his stuff.
I think he might have been a deist.
Newton, what did he know?
I read Dawkins once and I listened to Sam Harris's podcast.
By the way, brilliant people, brilliant people, but just because you've read a Dawkins book, just because you've listened to Sam Harris's podcast, does not a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris make.
And everyone thinks that they are.
Where's your science now?
I mean, that stuff is far more validated than anything to do with climate change.
So they have no particular interest in science.
They like using science to attempt to corner and humiliate religious people, but they don't like science when it goes against their leftist agenda.
It's very, very much a buffet of love and hate that the left has with science.
Well, I think abortion is an interesting one because let's get rid of the idea of where life begins in conception.
But we were just talking about this...
Gosh, I think we were talking about it yesterday, but...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
BuzzFeed released a video.
So we did a video on it where it was so misleading.
If people haven't watched, I would encourage them to go watch our video because it was just one of those things where I watched how misleading they were.
For example, in trying to say that women who've had abortions do not have any increased rate of depression or guilt or mental illness, the comparison they use, and I missed it the first time, they say, as a matter of fact, studies show us that women who've had abortions versus women who tried abortions and have failed have no difference in levels of depression or mental illness.
Well, hold on a second.
They both had abortions.
And when you look at the studies of women who have had no attempted abortions and women who have, there are differences.
There are ramifications.
Whether you think they feel guilty because they've been guilted by their church or some outside contributing factor, fine.
But that's just a statistical reality.
And the BuzzFeed video, they say, you know, at six weeks, yeah, it has a beating heart.
So for me, that question becomes, okay, it's a beating heart.
It's not yours.
You're stopping that heart.
Whose heart are you stopping?
And how do we justify that?
And that's a conversation we can have.
And then they say, and it's also proven that babies or fetuses cannot feel pain until 20 weeks or 24 weeks.
That's not true, by the way.
Well, does that mean I get to stab a guy who can't feel his legs in the leg because he doesn't feel it?
I mean, the feeling pain thing is not, you know, does the dentist get to drill through the roof of my mouth, but I'm novocained up?
Well, of course not.
Well, yeah, it depends on the dentist.
And they talk about it, and they compare, too.
They say, as a matter of fact, there's a far greater likelihood of complications delivering a baby than performing a run-of-the-mill abortion.
I'm going, well, hold on a second.
Again, no shit, stupid, because the goal...
Complication called being alive.
Yes, exactly!
Exactly!
The complication, if you're trying to deliver life, would be the abortion, would be a termination of life, whereas that's the goal.
It's a lot easier to destroy than it is to build, than it is to create...
I just thought it was so misleading, and I think there's plenty of common ground that I can find with people on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but not from BuzzFeed or Vox.
Well, this is, you know, the MyBodyMyChoice stuff is a little precious because it's not your body.
It's someone else's body.
You just happen to be growing it.
If I rent a car, it's not my car.
I'm just borrowing it.
You'd have to return it at some point.
And the my body, my choice stuff, you know, there's stuff about my body that I fully recognize.
Let's take, I don't know, my penis.
Let's take my penis.
My penis is never going to detach from my body, grow up and run for office.
I mean, we've all had those dreams.
I assume you've had those dreams about my penis.
But my penis is not going to grow up, detach from my body, and run for office.
It's never going to write a symphony.
It's never going to write a haiku.
It's never going to design a building.
Because it's my body.
It's a subset of my body.
It has no independent consciousness or will of its own.
Although it may have felt that way when I was a teenager.
However...
When you are a woman with a baby in your body, that baby is going to detach from you, alien style, hopefully a little less gory, and is going to go out there, run for office, write symphonies, create haikus and design buildings and all that kind of stuff.
My body, my choice.
Okay, you've got your body, but then there's a part of your body that's going to detach and do something else.
And the other thing too, where they say, my body, my choice.
Okay.
So, a woman wants to have total control over her own body and doesn't want anyone else to intrude upon it.
But, of course, women at the same time want to have fairly strong control over men's wallets and use both the family court system and they want to use the government, they use all the welfare redistribution system, which overwhelmingly taxes men and gives money to women.
Where is a man's control over his own income?
Because a man's income has a lot to do with his sexual market value.
And so, if you take a man's income...
And give it to women, then you are undermining his sexual market value.
You're undermining his marketability in the dating arena and in the marriage arena.
So where's his wallet, his choice?
That doesn't seem to show up quite as much.
It's a good point, and it subsequently leads to probably a much greater likelihood of abortion because a woman doesn't feel as though she can be provided for, right?
That's a big—my wife works at a crisis pregnancy center, not Planned Parenthood.
Funny enough, by the way, anecdotal.
She's done this for a long time.
Not one person, not one person who's ever come in and planned on having an abortion didn't know what birth control was or contraception or couldn't afford it.
It's never happened.
And even when you watch this Vox video, they talk about how most women who have abortions are already mothers that original child must feel great, right?
The firstborn, thanks, mom.
You want to kill the next one.
I'm a prime example.
Not a single one that my wife has ever encountered has not known or not had access to birth control.
It's just not true.
And she has found with what they do, they offer resources, and they often encourage either if they need to put the baby up for adoption, they have families there that are ready, people who want to adopt children.
There are people who want to adopt children who cannot get children right now.
And they're actually very easy often to convince.
A woman is going in, she's obviously emotionally very fragile, and more often than not, they're able to convince them that, yeah, you know what, you don't want to abort this baby.
And I know some people will hear that and they'll think that's reprehensible.
On the flip side, imagine that.
Planned Parenthood, their only moneymaker, really, as far as statistically.
People try and say, oh, it's only 3%.
No, it's not.
Every service provided in an abortion is considered an auxiliary service.
So if you go in, you have an ultrasound, you have a doctor visit, you have eight services for the abortion, but they only count abortion as one service.
That's an accounting trick that a lot of people don't know they do with Planned Parenthood.
Since their biggest moneymaker is performing abortions, they can just as easily convince that emotionally fragile woman to have an abortion.
That's why that question I think is so important because it also – it determines we as a society, what kind of a culture we are.
That's why I part ways with a lot of libertarians even though I'm more libertarian in my approach to policy.
Is everyone draws a line in the sand and it's a moral one at some point.
We can say that it's undeniable.
There's no way around it.
You can say, okay, I think everyone should be able to not only smoke pot but do coke and heroin.
And honestly, a big part of me thinks, yeah, if a state wants to legalize heroin, fine.
I get it.
I understand it.
My body, my choice.
In that case, it would actually be more appropriate from a libertarian argument.
But at some point, you're going to say something is unacceptable and And you're going to make a moral argument.
Everyone does.
And so that's why I've never identified as a big L libertarian because a lot of them like to act as though they're beyond it.
And I think a lot of atheists sometimes like to act as though they're beyond it.
I don't think any human being can really escape that.
I just don't think we can because everyone has to make a moral choice somewhere along that path.
It's a challenging question for sure, and I am not a big fan of the drug war, but I don't see how you can legalize all this stuff while you still have a welfare state.
The fact that you have to get up and go to work is one of the things that's going to limit the destructive downside of your addictions.
But if you can basically take time off from life forever...
And get money through the welfare state.
And now drugs are cheaper and purer than they ever were before, but you don't actually have to have a job to get them.
I see that being an enormous amount of enabling of incredibly destructive abusive tendencies.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
I remember talking with John Stossel about that back when I worked on the cable news.
And they always use Portugal as an example, libertarians.
I said, well, at the end of the drug war, look at how much money they've saved.
And I said, why don't you ever talk about the massive, very expensive public rehabilitation programs?
And the increased entries into these public rehabilitation programs.
Again, they tweaked the numbers.
They said, well, actually, addiction has decreased.
After people go into your publicly funded rehabilitation program.
So, again, this kind of gets to the, if we end the drug war, we'll save all that money.
First off, it assumes that drug dealers are exclusively tied to the notion of making money off of drugs.
That they're not criminals who will find some other way to make money, whether it's human trafficking or, I mean, selling scalped tickets.
These are not people who've chosen to be a productive member of society.
So there's that point.
And then you often just end up displacing the revenue.
Right?
a functioning society.
Yeah, I agree with you.
That's the problem with ending the drug war right now because, I mean, you can have a bunch of people on heroin and public rehabilitation programs while people like you and I work to fund it.
It's a problem.
The drug war doesn't work.
But I hate when libertarians act as though they have the absolute solution.
I do understand where they say, well, constitutionally, we just don't have the right to tell people what they can and That's something that I will accept at face value.
But it doesn't change the fact that it would be massively expensive to do with the current welfare state, even if you end the drug war.
And so this aspect, and we'll jump back to the atheists for a second, because the atheists...
Bullying, I think, is something that's really important for people to understand.
And I've heard Dawkins and other people rebut all of this stuff, you know, when people say, well, you know, there are indications that Stalin, Stalin, of course, was an obvious atheist as a communist, and then there was Hitler, who, you know, it's mixed and matched, and then there's Mao and other people...
But it is pretty common when atheists take over that they persecute Christians, and not insignificantly.
The French Revolution, right?
The reign of terror.
We're going to have an atheist state.
The official ideology is called the cult of reason.
Boy, there's an oxymoron that you'd never want to hear again in your life.
And they murdered hundreds of priests, thousands of Christians with the guillotine.
The Soviet Union persecution of Christians was enormous.
Just five years after the October Revolution, you got 28 bishops, 1,200 priests murdered, many on the orders of Trotsky.
When Stalin came to power in 1927, over the next couple of years, 50,000 clergy were murdered, tortured, crucified, literally crucified.
I mean, premedieval.
And according to the Orthodox Church sources, as many as 50 million Orthodox believers may have died in the 20th century, mainly from persecution by communists.
Now, 50 million?
That is a hell of a lot of souls to liberate from this plane of existence.
We're not even talking that much about China.
China, of course, persecuted Christians all over the place.
It's happened pretty continually, and we're talking tens of millions of murdered religious people, murdered Christians, And I'm trying to think of where, at least with Christians, there are other religions, but Christians generally don't come to power and start killing atheists.
But when the atheists do get into power, there does seem to be quite a lot of this.
It happens in a softer way with this, well, you have to bake cakes for people you, you know, maybe you don't approve of the homosexual lifestyle, but you still have to bake cakes for them, otherwise we're going to destroy your business and ruin your reputation and so on.
And we can see this with, I think, a lot of the social justice warriors seem to me a little bit more on the left.
And there is something about Christianity that is more tolerant of free speech, that is more supportive of individual responsibility.
And if you want to smoke drugs, just don't make me pay for it.
I want the negative consequences of your bad decisions to accrue to you, because that's a way of allowing the free market of ideas and resources to reinforce good behavior and to, quote, punish bad behavior without an interventionist state.
And so because Christians believe that virtue will bring you happiness and vice will bring you misery, they will let people's choices play out, and they will provide charity, I think, where it's reasonable and necessary and where a person's disasters are not self-inflicted continually.
There is a live and let live because the long arc of society and the world and the human soul bends towards just to see the hero in the afterlife.
They don't need such an intrusive state to micromanage everyone because there is, I think, a naturally positive response the universe has to virtue and a negative response it has to vice.
And you don't need six million bureaucrats sitting on top of everyone ordering them around for virtue to be flourished and rewarded within society.
I think it's a good point.
It's funny you mentioned that, and then what's sticking in my head is you said live and let live, and I was just thinking, man, you know, for Paul McCartney writing a Bond song, live and let die was just utter crap.
So it just sticks with me.
I have the whole Bond song.
I'm like, this is one of the worst, and it's Paul McCartney.
No, I think that's very right, and I think it's also important to note that...
Well, obviously people right away, I can hear what they're going to say.
What?
Christians don't come to power.
It's important for them to understand what you said.
Christians don't typically come to power and kill atheists.
You know, if you look at the Crusades, a retaliatory action, by the way, I know you've talked about that and I've talked about that.
And it's kind of crazy that there aren't more people talking about it.
It's just accepted.
The Crusades, they just went out and killed Muslims for no reason.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
No one is saying that that's not the case?
There's like two guys on the internet?
Really?
That, and they'll bring up the Inquisition, where you look, they were killing other people who believed in a deity.
They weren't killing atheists, and it was also political in nature.
And I think, in that same breath, it's important to point out, you listed a bunch.
You listed Stalin, you listed France and Mao.
Some of those were more political in nature, but there were some of those, particularly if you look at Stalin and Mao, where they targeted people solely because of their faith.
Because some people will try and make the argument, well, economically they want to do this because Christians happen to be the wealthy peasants, as Stalin put it.
By the way, Just remove the killing of wealthy peasants.
Basically, anyone at a successful farm, anyone who ran a local business, Stalin had them lined up and shot.
Change lined up and shot with take all their crap.
Bernie Sanders is policy.
And something else interesting, reading up on World War II, and I came across kind of now the American Nazi Party.
And that to me was crazy because they're like, well, we hate Marxists and we hate socialists.
But if you read their beliefs, it's just crazy.
It's socialism, but it would work with racism.
It's just like, well, if it were just white Europeans, we could do free school, free healthcare.
I'm sitting there and these people are like, yes, you are a Marxist.
And they simultaneously say, no, we condemn any form of collectivism.
But if it were just purebred Aryan people, we could do all this free stuff.
The hypocrisy knows no bounds.
And again, I think it goes back to that question of people having to make a moral decision and wanting to fill that void.
But Stalin is just...
When people say religion is the cause of all wars and the cause of all death or famine, I mean, it almost sounds like we're describing Stalin exactly.
What did he do?
Nothing but war brought death and famine.
One of the worst famines ever.
And he's not really taught in schools.
Now, Oliver Stone is trying to praise him because, you know, he's saying, well, you know, actually he did more to keep Hitler at bay.
And that's an interesting study if you kind of look at Poland and the treaty that was signed between Germany and Russia.
I think it was four out of the five soldiers who died fighting Nazism were Russians.
I mean, they were not just significant, they were completely instrumental in the defeat of National Socialism.
Right.
And a majority, or not a majority, but certainly a plurality, I think, of, if you look at the people who were killed, a huge portion were Russian or Polish.
So, and then there's also this idea, too, with history, what's so interesting to me, it's like, okay, well, what about the fact that, you know, the Russians put some of these people in the gulags, and the Nazis came in, and then they couldn't afford to feed these Russian prisoners, who killed them?
Is it the Russians or the Germans?
There are a bunch of interesting questions that I think history...
Anyway, sorry, I'm getting off tangent.
But yeah, basically, Stalin was a dick, and he's an example that...
It was proactive atheism.
That would be an example of, you know what?
We're going to fill the void.
We're going to replace it with this, as opposed to an absence of belief.
And I do think it's important to recognize the two and the ramifications of the two.
And also, like I said, we both know there are plenty...
Well, like you, there are plenty of great atheists out there who think...
Far more critically than a lot of my quote-unquote Christian brethren.
And as long as we can have these kinds of discussions, like you said, the hard thing, I think the reason a lot of Christians out there don't have a ton of discussions with atheists is because of, you know, the bullying.
In the sense that, like, I mean, I won't even get into it, but someone, I remember, an atheist debated my friend who had a YouTube channel.
This was years ago.
When my friend did well, He was accused of all his – all his subscribers are sock accounts.
Go spam them because they're sock accounts.
And it was like there's no winning with that.
I mean there's no – I believe in reasonable discussion, conversation with anyone except there are some people who are just going to burn everything down if it doesn't go down their way.
And I think you've seen that a lot with the atheist sort of I guess viewpoint that has dominated the internet for a while.
It's not indicative of all atheists but – Yeah, it's an interesting discussion.
I don't necessarily know how you solve it.
I think the way you solve it is just...
Regardless of belief, doing what you're doing and more people doing that, at least getting people to think critically, because hopefully that'll fix some of the young Christian socialists who I know, and that'll fix some of the militant atheists who you deal with.
I think, yeah, I think it's, I will close it off with this, I think, because, you know, last words always essentially, you know.
But I will close it off with this, Stephen, which is to say that, and I've listened and you've actually demonstrated this virtue a number of times in this conversation, which is the virtue of humility.
Humility is the basis of wisdom.
Because humility is saying, I don't know stuff.
Like people say, oh, Steph, you're so arrogant.
You created a whole system of ethics.
It's like, well, sure.
But when I create a system of ethics, I'm saying I was in this field for 20 years and didn't know what the hell the difference was between right and wrong in any rational way.
Because I knew I didn't know something really, really important that I ended up putting the work into it.
And in this, you say, well, you know, these people have done good.
I don't want to toot my own horn and so on.
The humility, the one thing that...
Drives me crazy.
And this is true of atheists and other people.
When they're right about something, they then assume that makes them right about everything.
You know, the entertainers who are like, you know, I sing well, therefore you should listen to my thoughts on the war in Afghanistan.
And with atheists, okay, let's say they're totally right.
You know, the God thing is contradictory and so on.
That doesn't mean you know smack about economics, about politics, about ethics.
There's one thing, and because you're standing on the shoulders of other people who spent lots of time disproving certain religious ideas, maybe you're right about that.
But don't think that that makes you an expert in other things and the humility that is necessary, which I find coming more from the Christian world than from the atheist world.
How arrogant do you have to be to say, I'm going to endow a small group of people, all the power in the world, to use violence at will, to initiate force at will, to use the entire structure and power of the legal system, to have the ability to print money, to make as many laws as they want, to make as complicated a tax structure as I want, and out of that, miraculously, wonderfully, beautiful things are going to happen.
How arrogant do you have to be to be on the left?
On the right, we say, I don't know.
I don't know how people should live.
I have this rule in my show.
I never tell people what to do.
I mean, I might tell them don't do something bad, but I won't tell people what to do because that's the humility of not knowing things.
And with atheists, and in particular with the leftist atheists, this is incredible arrogance.
Well, I know how we should solve poverty.
We should get all the government in the world to take all the money from these people and give it to these people.
It won't corrupt anyone.
There won't be any negative consequences.
There's nothing to balance.
This is just what you do.
And the arrogance of thinking you can wield the might of the state without it corrupting everyone it touches is truly astonishing.
And if there's one virtue I would like to sort of promote at the end of this particular part of the conversation, Stephen, is to promote the virtue of humility.
It is very hard to tell other people what to do, particularly at the point of a gun, and come out the good guy.
Well, I appreciate it.
Listen, I would say the same about – it's not a tit-for-tat, you know, the same about you, but the truth is we wouldn't be able to come here and have a conversation if it weren't for some level of humility.
That's just, you know, the egos would get in the way.
No discussion would ever be had.
It was a good kind of example.
I don't know out there who does Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
But the best thing a good instructor will do is pair new white belts up with either black belts or the most experienced people.
Because when you put two white belts together, they both go in, they think they know, and they don't, and people get hurt.
There's no flow.
There's no technique.
Now, you can have zero technique and just damage somebody, right?
Torque their knee the wrong way.
And someone who knows how to break your knee can do it, but because they're a purple belt or a black belt, they can exercise restraint because they're also rolling and practicing to learn and to better themselves.
So I do think that, listen, you've done this for a while.
I've done this for a while.
I mean, I think anyone who's raised in socialist French Canada has to think about these issues.
I just think I've been forced to.
I started working at 12.
My dad explained to me taxes when I was working for PBS at 12 years old.
It stemmed from that.
He's like, well, 52% is going to be gone.
Wait, wait, wait.
So I've always had to think about these issues, and I think the more you think about it, the more you...
A lot of you will say, you know, it's a cliche, the more I learn, the less I know.
No, no, I don't mean that.
I mean, the more you think about these issues, the more you actually have a thirst for learning and growing.
That's one thing we talk about all the time with this show, where every day we come in and we are looking to learn something.
And I think if people go in with that mindset, it...
Inherently is humble to a degree.
So I appreciate you having me on.
I didn't know how it was going to go when you were on my show or here.
I really appreciate it.
Any time, we'd love to have you back too.
And look at this.
Atheist and...
And Protestant, gun-toting Christian get along.
I don't know how this happened.
Well, I appreciate that, Stephen.
It's a great pleasure.
I just wanted to remind people, louderwithcrowder.com, youtube.com forward slash Stephen with a V, Crowder, twitter.com forward slash scrowder, and the Mug Club sign-up.
That's how we met.
At least I have the mug.
serotv.com forward slash Mug Club.
A great pleasure.
Best of luck with the show.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
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