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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:28
Why I Was Right About Atheism
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So I put out a video just a couple of days ago pointing out that atheists tend to, you know, lean a little to the left.
Seem to be a little bit on the left of the political spectrum and got a wide variety of responses back.
with a chilling uniformity of thought, I guess you could somewhat say, and the arguments seemed to fall along sort of the following categories.
So I say there's a tendency for atheists to be on the left and it seems like everyone in their dark decided to type into the keyboard, well I'm an atheist and I'm not on the left!
It's like, yes, yes, that is what is called a tendency.
It doesn't mean a hundred percent, you know.
Objectivism was founded by a woman who was an atheist and a libertarian, or objectivist, as she would... I get it.
I fully understand.
This does not mean 100% of atheists are out-and-out Marxists.
I'm just saying there's a tendency.
So that's emotionally reactive garbage, fundamentally.
I mean, you have to be better than that.
If you want to be an atheist, you have to put forward some relatively decent critical thinking.
And if I say, well, you know, a lot of Chinese people are shorter than a lot of Danes, I know a tall Chinese guy!
Thank you.
Please go to the corner where some edible glue and soft scissors await.
And the facts are fairly compelling.
The Freedom From Religious Foundation ran a survey from June through December of 2015 and they surveyed, they have 23 1,500 members, nearly 8,000 respondents, and they participated.
96% of them are registered to vote, which is more than 20% higher than the population at large.
72% of these people reported having a college degree or higher.
So, how did they define themselves?
Well, 70% declined to affiliate themselves with one of the major political parties, that's two.
In the US, more than 20% identified themselves as independent voters.
36% described themselves as progressive or liberal.
And, uh... Sorry. 1%!
said that they were Republicans.
There were lots of socialists and Marxists, there were progressives and liberals, Democrats, a few libertarians, and 1% of this group's survey were Republicans.
That's 8,000 people.
It's not a perfect survey, but that's still a pretty compelling number, 1%.
So let's compare this, right?
So I said, well, people Who are atheists tend to skew left and people who are religious tend to skew right.
So 1% of this group of atheists said they were Republicans.
In 2011, 70% of white evangelical Protestants identified as Republicans or leaning towards the Republican Party.
And 28% expressed support for the Democrat, Democratic Party.
Okay.
So, so here we have in one group of atheists, 1%, 1% say that they're Republicans here.
70% of white evangelical protestant voters identified as Republicans.
So this is just two groups, one religious and one atheist.
The religious group is 70 times more likely to be on the right, or at least be sympathetic towards Republican ideals, generally smaller government and so on, and that's 70 times.
Now, you can say to me, well, correlation doesn't equal causation.
Of course it doesn't!
Of course it doesn't!
That's why I put forward a hypothesis that atheists tend to replace the God with the state.
When they leave religion, they tend to Promote the state into the place formerly occupied by religion.
And I put forward a hypothesis, and say this is absolutely and certainly true beyond all shadow of a doubt.
That would be a ridiculous thing to say.
I put forward a hypothesis.
See, atheists tend to really be into science.
Love their science, right?
So that's what happens.
You have a hypothesis, you can go out and test it.
And I said, well, go to your atheist friends and say, taxation is force.
The government is an agency of force.
It's violent in its very essence.
It is defiant.
As a group of individuals with the moral right and obligation to legally be able to initiate the use of force in a given geographical area.
So the state is an agency of coercion.
Taxation is force.
Taxation is clearly defined as a kind of theft and see how they respond.
And before I got bored, I ran through a whole bunch of comments, probably a couple of hundred and, um, Not one person had performed this experiment and gotten back to me.
See, that's the funny thing.
If atheists are really into science, they should really enjoy testing a hypothesis, and rather than just slinging grade 2 insults at me, could go out and say, no, no, no, I talked to all my atheist friends.
We had a rousing discussion.
They understand.
That the nature of the state is violence, they understand that taxation is a category of theft, and so on.
Because these aren't hard arguments to make.
Or, you know, here's the great rebuttals that they had about it, and let's get the conversation going.
Not one atheist went out and performed the experiment which I had suggested as a way of testing my hypothesis.
Huh.
I wonder what that could mean about this community's dedication to something like scientific empiricism.
Other people said, well, I'm not into the big government and neither are my friends.
I don't know any atheists.
Yeah, I get it.
I get it.
And, you know, a lot of people in the KKK know a lot of other people in the KKK.
A lot of people who are not in the KKK don't know a lot of people in the KKK.
I'm not trying to associate atheism with the KKK.
I'm just sort of pointing out that, yes, we tend to pick friends who have similar values to ourselves.
I understand that.
Which is why if you want to test the opinion of atheists, asking your friends the atheists if you're a libertarian what they think of the government, well most likely they're going to be libertarian too.
This is not a representative sample of atheism.
Now, other people said atheism has nothing to do with politics.
Nothing whatsoever to do with politics.
Well, I guess, at a purely epistemological level, there could be argument, could be made for that, right?
In that it is simply the rejection of the existence of a deity.
What does that have to do with politics?
Well, the fact is that atheists have very different numbers from theists when it comes to their political beliefs.
You know, 20% more than the general population registered to vote, 70 times, again, that's more of the extreme, but it's still wide in other areas, 70 times More Republicans among certain Christian groups than among atheists.
Seventy times!
So if it has nothing to do with politics, then why are the numbers so skewed?
That's something you really, really have to understand.
Let's say that the number of freckles you have has nothing to do with politics, or your height has nothing, then there'd be no correlation.
But as soon as there is a correlation, That's something to be aware of.
And it's very naive, my friends, to say that atheism has nothing to do with politics.
And it shows a shocking ignorance of Western history, or any kind of common sense, really.
Religion was a supernatural structure by which social norms, morals, and ethics were transmitted intergenerationally.
And it attempted to create judge, jury, and executioner within the mind, within the conscience of each individual, so that people would be good, however that was defined in the religion, they would be good without that goodness having to be enforced by a very expensive external agency like the police, law courts, and prisons, and so on.
So it was an attempt to internalize moral rules through an appeal to getting into heaven, and going to hell, and virtue, and all that.
And so it is a form Of compliance with social norms, it is a form of social organization designed to maximize compliance with virtue, with social norms.
Now, what is the state?
Well, the state is a hierarchical structure designed to reward people with continued freedom or threaten them with punishments, not hell, but prison, if they do not conform to social norms.
And it does not as much attempt to internalize Because it doesn't as much appeal to one's, you know, you're going to be punished in the afterlife forever and so on.
It doesn't quite as much attempt to internalize as religion does, you know, always watching and so on.
But the reality is that both the state and religion are methodologies by which society attempts to gain compliance to social norms from its members.
And the religion has its church, has its Sunday school, and so on.
And the state has government schools, which are full, of course, of government indoctrination about the positive and necessary virtues of government.
And this, of course, continues all the way through, particularly in the humanities, through higher education.
So this idea that atheism has nothing to do with politics is completely naive.
Throughout most of Western history, people were good, in part, because they believed in God.
They conformed to social norms because they believed in God.
Now, atheism says there is no God, and there is a baby with the bathwater scenario going on there, in that you throw out, when you throw out God, you throw out the entire moral underpinnings of How to get people to conform to social norms in Western society.
You do!
And it has been the task of atheists, since they wanted to do that, to replace God with another form of rational ethics.
And I think that that's been relatively unsuccessful, except for my approach, which you can find at freedomainradio.com slash free.
The book is universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
But the idea that when you can just get rid of God, in a God-fearing and God-obeying society, and it has no effect on social organization or compliance to social norms or anything like that, is shockingly naive.
And I just, I can't imagine, because since I view atheists as very intelligent, I simply can't imagine that that's something that anyone really believes.
Now, I did talk about how people on the left don't have a lot of kids.
Atheists tend towards low birth rates, and that's bad, because if you're on the left, you need a constant supply of new taxpayers to fund your government programs that you love so much, particularly retirement benefits.
And if you don't have kids, you're just parasiting on other people having kids.
And of course, a lot of people wrote back and said, well, there's overpopulations, too many people anyway.
It's like, well, here's the thing.
Intelligence is highly hereditary.
You know, 50, 60, 70 or 80% hereditary.
And I can guarantee you this.
Dumb people, unintelligent people are not worried about overpopulation.
So if you're going to put out concerns about overpopulation and it takes a certain amount of intelligence to even care or think that abstractly or think in that global down the road generations hence sense of stripping the earth's resources or whatever you want to call it.
Okay.
So what you're doing is you're saying to smart people, well, don't have kids.
And what you're saying to dumb people is, okay, have a lot of kids.
Because once you start talking about overpopulation, the people who are going to end up overpopulating are the less intelligent in society.
And if that's the society you want, well, um, good luck to you.
I don't really think I want that at all.
Other people said, okay, fine.
Maybe atheists are a little bit on the left, but Christians use the state too.
Well, Okay.
Well, being on the left means that you don't want a separation of state and economics, right?
You want the separation of church and state, but you don't want the separation of state and economics.
In other words, you want the government to redistribute income, regulate tax control, shuffle everything around, force people to do this, that, and the other on pain of prison.
And if they resist prison on pain of death, right?
All commandments of the state are death threats because the state will escalate aggression against you until you comply or die, right?
That's comply or die.
That's basically written on the bottom in blood of every single law book, statute, regulation, you name it.
So the leftist statists don't want the separation of state and economics, and the religious people have accepted the separation of church and state to a large degree for a couple of hundred years, you could really say.
And people say, oh, well, you see, but they're pushing creationism in government schools.
Okay, but government schools is a leftist brainwave to indoctrinate children, largely.
So, you know, the fact that Christians are trying to squeeze their belief system into a belief system that they are forced to pay for and forced usually to send their kids to, either directly or indirectly.
And so the fact that Christians are trying to get their word in edgewise in a left-wing government clusterfrak of a program called state schools...
Okay.
But even if we accept that the Christians are using it just as much as the atheists, using the state just as much as the atheists, who cares?
Because atheists say that Christians are irrational.
So I don't think you want to say, our rational group can't be criticized because we're doing everything that the irrational group is doing too.
Then you're not that rational!
I don't know.
You can't judge my excellent basketball playing because I play about as well as the blind guy.
Then aren't you?
Anyway, I think you get it.
Now, other people said it's a pretty sophisticated argument.
It's a good one, I think.
Interesting one, anyway.
Atheists do more education.
They go through more education.
And there's lots of leftist programming in higher education.
A lot of social justice warriors, a lot of leftist stuff.
Okay, okay, so what they're saying is then that atheism does not protect you against being indoctrinated in irrational belief systems as an adult.
As an adult!
See, atheists are pretty scornful towards religious people.
Religious people are indoctrinated, for the most part, when they're very, very young.
In religious principles, right?
They're baptized, they go to Sunday school, they're taught from very early on.
I think we can forgive a child of, say, four or five or six for swallowing wholesale the ideals that are given to them by their parents, their extended community, aunts, uncles, mentors, priests, you name it, right?
So I think we can say, okay, well you're a kid so you gotta eat what's put in front of you and say you like it.
Atheists saying, well, you know, the problem is we're really susceptible to leftist programming when we're in our early twenties.
It's like, okay, then why are you upset with Christians who are believing what they believing at the age of three and four and five and six?
I mean, if atheists are susceptible to social justice warrior leftist style liberal programming in their early twenties, how can they be scornful of people who learned religion at their mother's knee?
And it's true, about 4 in 10 atheists, 43% have a college degree compared with only 27% of the general public.
Now, other people say the difference is God doesn't exist, government does exist.
That is not true.
People say, ah, government does exist.
No, it doesn't.
Government is a concept.
The government, the state, is an idea within the mind, just like God.
You say, ah, but there are buildings.
It's like, yes, and for religion there are buildings and they're called churches.
Ah, but there are people in costumes and they're called police.
And it's like, yes, and there are people in costumes in the church and they're called priests, right?
So there is stuff and there are beliefs.
The state is in the category of belief, not stuff, right?
It is idea, not manifestation, not actuality, not material object.
And so the state is a belief in the authority of certain people, the exclusion of certain people from the generally accepted moral rules.
Don't rape, don't kill, don't steal, don't murder.
The state is, well, we're going to allow an exception for that.
They can tax us.
They can go to war.
They can sell off the unborn.
They can enter us into contracts we've never signed.
They can go into debt on our behalf.
They can use us as collateral without our permission.
This is all The state is.
The state is a belief system.
The state does not exist any more than God exists.
Belief in the state exists.
And belief in God exists.
But not the concepts themselves.
They do not exist outside of the belief in them.
And so this idea that the government exists and therefore it's much more tangible, well, that's just nonsense.
And atheists, of course, would never say that God exists because people worship God and there are buildings they worship God in.
And there are funny costumes involved.
Sensible people don't say that the government exists because there are buildings and people go and believe in those buildings and the moral content of the people in those buildings and their funny costumes.
You get it, right?
But here's the thing.
You know, Christians do have, I mean, there's a bunch, but they do have one really good moral triumph.
And I think atheists could have theirs too.
The really good moral triumph that Christians have was the ending of slavery.
Around the world in the 19th century.
That was a Christian driven, Christian funded program to end slavery.
And with some exceptions, of course, in the third world, it's successful for the most part.
And this is like after Muslims had killed like a hundred million blacks from Africa in their slave trade.
Insane, horrifying, horrible.
So the Christians do have that.
And I think the atheists can have theirs too.
It's hard to think of an atheist accomplishment.
In terms of a moral revolution that matches something like ending the 150,000 year practice of slavery all around the world in, you know, 50, 60 years.
And I've got a presentation called The Truth About Slavery, which you can look in the low bar if you like.
But there is something really, really important when it comes to what atheists could achieve.
But before we get to that, there's one other thing I wanted to mention.
I was raised as a Christian, as a Protestant.
And I left Christianity and nobody followed me.
I mean, you know, people said, sorry to hear that.
Welcome back.
So I left Christianity and it was fine.
I could leave Christianity.
Nobody dragged me back.
Nobody beat me with a stick.
Nobody whipped me.
Nobody killed me.
The apostasy called Christianity is, okay, welcome back anytime.
See you again soon.
Now, one of the things that's pretty grisly about Islam is the penalty for leaving Islam, for apostasy, is death.
It's pretty bad.
And, you know, it's not like it's never enacted.
There's punishments for atheists.
They get whipped a thousand times.
It's brutal, brutal stuff.
So, the penalty for disobeying Islam is corporal punishment, physical punishment, imprisonment, or death.
I can leave Christianity with none of those negative consequences.
I cannot choose to disobey the state without the state pursuing me.
I could leave Christianity.
Nobody follows me.
If I say, you know, I don't, uh, I don't want my government taxes.
I don't want my taxes going to government schools.
I'd rather invest in what I'm doing here and educate the world that way because they'll get a better education, more in line with rational values.
They'll learn philosophy.
They won't get programmed.
There won't be propaganda.
And there won't be this massive value avoidance that occurs in government schools because Anytime you teach any moral content in government schools, some particular group of parents gets upset and phones up and there's a big mess.
And so they just, this is why school is so boring.
You can't have any important discussions about anything because it's all one big cheese headed monogamous glom of nothingness.
So I don't have the choice to opt out of government in the way that I can opt out of religion.
And this is why The people who tend towards more and bigger government, more and bigger government control of things.
Well, that's basically leaving Christianity for the moral equivalent of Islam, because Islam will physically punish you or kill you if you disobey it.
And the government will do the same.
So the idea that, well, you know, atheists have just left this horrible superstition behind and now they're moving more towards bigger and more coercive centralized government.
Let's just say there are some arguments against the rationality of that position.
Now, the biggest story in the moment is the fate of the largely secular European continent, Western Europe.
And here's where atheists could just do fantastic stuff, because atheists claim That they accept evolution and that they accept science.
Now, human ethnicities evolved over 150 or 200,000 years or so in wildly disparate regions, right?
All the way from Siberia, which produced the East Asians to the Europeans, which produced the Caucasoids to those who stayed in Africa, who remained blacks.
And you could sort of subdivide, but those are sort of the major, right?
East Asian, Caucasian, and black.
And this has produced vastly different outcomes.
Physical characteristics, even internal characteristics, brain size.
East Asians have the biggest brains, Caucasians in the middle, and blacks smaller on the side, even when adjusted for body size, which tends the other way.
IQ tests are different.
East Asians score higher, whites score in the middle, Hispanics lower, and then blacks at the bottom.
Now, why is this important?
Well, because it's factual and it is supported by evolution, which atheists claim.
To be big fans of, right?
And accept evolution.
And the idea that somebody would, like 150,000 years or 100,000 years that might separate somebody growing up, or an entire group of human beings growing up in Africa versus, say, France or Siberia, of course that's going to have evolutionary impacts.
And you can see that, not just on the outside, but also with various internal characteristics as I mentioned.
So, on the other hand, since atheists tend towards the left, there's radical egalitarianism.
That's the belief system.
That's what I would call the religion.
Radical egalitarianism, which is the Marxist notion or the socialist notion that human beings are mostly environmental.
They don't have any fixed nature.
There's no biological limitations.
For the most part, you know, you pour people into various containers of culture and they'll just conform to them like water does if you pour it into various containers.
So you've got this radical egalitarianism on the left and you have the scientific facts that ethnicities have different characteristics.
There's no such thing as superior or inferior, they're just different characteristics.
Everything that adapts, adapts as successfully as it can to its localized environment.
It's not better or worse, it's just different characteristics.
So here we have atheism with an irrational belief that goes against science in Equality, egalitarianism with regards to all races, all ethnicities, all of these various societies.
That's the irrational belief.
Science comes crashing up against that and knocks it down and has for, and I've got interviews with countless intelligence experts, doctorates, PhDs, professors, authors, you name it.
It's all, we can all put it in the low bar.
You can browse through it.
If you don't believe me, just listen to the experts.
They'll go through all the data with you.
So here we have atheistic belief structures on egalitarianism, which science knocks over.
Okay.
Because it's very important because Europe, which is a high IQ society, is allowing the mass migration of relatively low IQ populations from the third world.
And America is doing it with regards to Hispanics and other groups from the third world.
And this is hugely important, right?
Because if there are these genetic differences, Between the races, there's going to be a bio-incompatibility in particular cultures.
For sure.
No question.
And it's going to be disastrous.
Disastrous.
The more of these facts are denied, the worse it's going to be.
So this is a very pressing issue.
Very pressing issue.
A little bit more important.
than what happened in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
Or to what degree we can fill in the God of the Gaps with transitional species of fossils.
This is more important.
This is like the survival of Western civilization that has given rise to the capacity to be an atheist and not be killed.
So, a little bit more important than just about everything else.
You could even argue that the survival of Western civilization is just a tad more important than, say, Gay marriage.
Which, of course, gay marriage is only important because there is this big government that a lot of atheists love so much, in which case, who would care?
If people would just have their own cerebral ceremonies and engage and enter into contracts, it would be perfectly fine.
So you could argue that the survival of Western civilization is a little bit more important than gay marriage, because without the survival of Western civilization, you know, Muslims have a bit of a habit of parachute lessons without parachutes from the tops of buildings for gay people, so it could just be considered a little bit more important.
Here we have scientific facts crashing into an irrational belief structure or a belief system, which atheists have, a lot of atheists have, which is this radical egalitarianism.
So what's it going to be?
Atheists have condemned religious people for centuries for being anti-scientific, for retaining their belief structures, irrational anti-scientific belief structures in the face of overwhelming evidence.
What do you mean you reject evolution?
What do you mean you reject the fact that the Sun is the center of the solar system?
What do you mean you reject the idea that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old?
Are you crazy?
It's scientifically perfectly valid!
Okay.
Atheists, it's your turn.
It's your turn.
Here is a very, very important issue.
Much more important than anything that's been discussed before regarding religious irrationality.
Very, very important issue.
I'm not saying accept my word for it, just do the research, listen to the interviews.
Here you have scientific facts which are significant differences between races and it's crashing up against your irrational belief system called radical egalitarianism.
And how did you expect religious people to react when the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution crashed in against their belief systems called creationism?
Well, you thought that they should reject their irrational belief systems and accept and embrace, or at least explore the scientific arguments and hypotheses and evidence, the empirical evidence behind the facts being presented.
So atheists, are you going to, are you going to do it?
Are you going to look into ethnicity and IQ differences?
Ethnicity and intelligence differences?
If you're not, then you've just confirmed that atheism is just a modern religion.
With the state at the center, radical egalitarianism as all ten commandments and a complete rejection of scientific facts and evidence as the basis for maintaining the irrational belief system.
It's just another religion.
It is my hope and my encouragement that you look at facts and you Absorb and enact the values that you have so desperately wanted religious people to accept.
Absorb and act on an acceptance of facts, a rejection of dogma, a rejection of irrationality.
Oh, one other thing.
Plus you get to save Western civilization.
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