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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:07
Why I Was Wrong About Atheism
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So this is a challenging topic to put it mildly Issues that I have with atheists and with atheism now I was raised as a good Christian boy I was in the church choir went religiously you could say and for various reasons I've talked about in my show It's changed but I have found myself growing increasingly impatient with atheists.
Hey, it could just be because I'm cranky and all but I think there's also some good reasons for it which I'll share with you and then you can tell me what you think in the comments below and I look forward to your feedback.
So one thing I can't help but notice is that if you are an atheist Overwhelmingly, you are for big government.
You are a leftist.
You are on the liberal side.
Almost 70% of atheists in the U.S.
identify as Democrats or lean in that direction.
A majority call themselves political liberals and 1 in 10 atheists say that they are conservatives.
Conservatism has its pluses and its minuses.
One of the pluses is that it's for smaller government.
Almost three-quarters of atheists say that coercive government redistribution of money to the poor in the form of welfare does much more good than harm.
And that is a challenging statement.
In 2012, Barack Obama captured three-quarters of the votes among the religiously unaffiliated, and only 23% voted for John McCain.
So, here's the thing.
If I live next door to a Christian, that Christian can go to church and can worship and can do whatever they like and they're not compelling me to do anything.
They have their beliefs, I have my beliefs.
We shake hands, we exchange cups of sugar in cake emergencies, but they do not force me to do anything.
On the other hand, the lefties, by constantly running to Big Daddy government to enforce their moral conscience on everyone else, regardless of consequences, regardless of ethics, regardless of voluntarism, regardless of the need to choose that is essential to virtue, the socialists, by running to Big Daddy government, Well, they force me to do lots and lots of things.
They take my money.
They bury me in regulations.
They involve my cash.
In foreign wars, they do lots of god-awful things.
And if I try to follow my own conscience and do what I think is best with my resources, well, they support Cats in Blue showing up with guns to drag me off to jail because I'm not paying my taxes.
So...
Lefties support things like property tax, and property tax means you never really own anything in your house.
You certainly don't own your house or your condo or whatever, because if you don't pay off the government, they can just come and take it from you.
So all you're doing is renting from the government.
You never own anything.
Christians have a thou shalt not steal, which gives them some ammunition against increasing state power.
I can't help but notice that the Christians will try to convert me by the word and not the sword of the state, whereas the liberals, the lefties, the democrats, well, they want to use the sword of the state to make me follow their moral agenda.
Let's just say, sword a tad more intrusive than word.
And that is something that I can't help but notice.
Atheism in and of itself, okay, well, that's, you know, good cases to be made and it's an intellectual argument that I've made before.
But here's the problem.
Atheists say that they reject Irrational authority.
They reject unjust and immoral authority.
Very well.
How about, and just try this, you know, if you know an atheist or know somebody who's agnostic or whatever, bring to them the basic argument that the government is the initiation of force, that taxation is coercion, and see how they respond.
Do they respond with, wow, never really thought of it that way before.
Tell me more.
Or do they respond as religious fundamentalists respond when you challenge their faith?
I will tell you, it is almost invariably the latter.
And I've had many, many conversations with atheists about this particular issue, that the government is an agency of force and that what you ask the government to do, you are begging for the initiation of force to be deployed in a geographical area against the specifically unwilling to coerce them to act against their own conscience.
And that basic reality is that it sort of helped me to understand that for the most part atheism is an outgrowth of faith In the modern god called The State.
That is their new deity, The State.
Got a problem?
Run to The State!
Need something solved?
Run to The State!
Want something done?
Run to The State!
Feel bad about something?
Pass a law!
Take more money!
Borrow more money!
Print more money!
Make more wars!
That's how we solve everything!
Run to The State!
Get the guns out and everything is solved!
And atheists in general, when they perceive a social problem, they just run to the government.
And then, atheists have the nerve to say to Christians!
Well, you know, you just have this magical thing called God, which is supposed to solve all of these problems, like where the universe came from and how we evolved and so on.
How ridiculous of you.
I mean, that's not an answer to anything.
Well, at least it's a peaceful answer to something.
At least it's a non-blanket, geographically enveloping, coercive answer to something.
Do I particularly care that a Christian says that God created the universe?
It's not a big list on my priorities come tax time.
But when atheists want the state to magically use guns to solve every problem in the known universe, that is a much more dangerous addiction to irrational authority than anything the Christian can come up with.
The Christian can threaten people with hell, but if you don't believe in the religion, you don't go to hell.
If you do, I don't think you go to hell anyway.
But the leftists, the socialists, Democrats, the liberals.
Well, they threaten you with jail if you don't obey the very visceral and immediate Old Testament commandments of Big Daddy government, their Zeus of blood-drenched state power.
Well, that's a little bit more immediate to me.
And if atheism was not associated with an addiction to the state and its power, I would have much more sympathy for it because it would be a little less in my face, in my wallet, and a shiv pressed up to my side.
Because it's sort of weird.
Human nature, at least as it's now constituted and raised and indoctrinated, perhaps, it's kind of like this balloon, right?
You push in one side and the other side bulges out.
Push in on the irrationality of religion, out comes the irrational addiction to state power.
We all seem to desperately need an irrational authority to order us about.
And if you take away God, into the power vacuum rushes the state, which is the blackest and darkest God in history.
People say, ah, well, you know, the church did some bad things and, you know, they'll talk about the Inquisition and so on.
A couple of thousand deaths.
The state, my friends, the secular, gun-addled, drunk-with-power state, in the 20th century alone, outside of war, slaughtered a quarter of a billion people.
A quarter of a billion people killed by the state.
Oh, but you see, a few hundred years ago, they burned some witches, so ha, ha, ha!
Come on, let's pile the bodies.
You can't even see one.
The other one you can probably see from Mars.
The pile of dead left by the state.
So that bothers me, to put it mildly.
And if I had to choose between more religious people and less government versus fewer religious people and more government, well, let's just say, take me to church.
Now, the other thing that bothers me is not just the fact that when you take away God from most people, they run to the far more brutal and irrational authority of the state.
It's not just that.
It is the fact that atheism tends to two things.
Towards state power and towards sterility.
And this is a very, very important point.
America's most fertile faith.
So this is completed fertility.
This is the average number of children ever born to adults ages 40 to 59.
Mormons, 3.4.
Hey!
That's why there were so many Ottomans.
Black Protestants, 2.5 kids per family.
Evangelical Protestants, 2.3.
Catholics, 2.3.
Jews, 2.0.
Mainline Protestants, 1.9.
See any atheists?
They're just coming around the corner.
Atheists, 1.6.
Way!
You need like 2.1 for even just maintaining a steady population.
Below that, it's demographic wintertime.
It's the inverted pyramid where the vampiric old are feasting on the diminishing taxes of the young and society collapses.
So if you like society, if you like the civilization, Especially if you're on the left.
It might behoove you to have a little unprotected sex and raise some kids.
So Atheist 1.6.
Agnostics.
I don't really believe in a vagina.
1.3.
Children.
So... So that's not good.
Look, have kids.
Don't have kids.
Fine.
I mean, it's not like you've got to.
I think most people who are alive are happy to be alive, which is why they're still breathing.
So the fact that your parents decided to have kids, not a bad thing for you.
How about you pay it forward a little?
No!
Too busy railing against the 10 commandments showing up in a government building somewhere.
So, but here's the thing.
If you are sterile, if you don't have children, and you're on the left, or let's say you only have one kid, and you're on the left, you are a complete and total vampiric douchebag.
And here's the reason why.
If you're on the left, then it requires a constant flow of new taxes in order to pay for the policies that you want.
You want welfare, you want health care for the poor, you want pensions for the old, you want all of these wonderful things.
All of that requires new taxpayers.
So if you're on the left and you want all of this money for the government, but you're not making any new future taxpayers, you are a horrible, vampiric, god-awful human being.
Like some vampiric, whisker-based walrus, constantly, oh, do you have any young people around?
Hey, oh, I need to, daddy needs some blood.
I need some blood for my moral posturing.
Where are the young?
Ah, fresh blood.
So tasty, I am invigorated.
That's hideous!
Hideous!
Let's say a lot of atheists are into Obamacare.
Well, Obamacare, of course, is corralling the young healthy people to pay for older people who didn't get insurance when they were young.
That's basically all it's about.
And Obamacare can only work if young healthy people are around to pay vastly in excess for what they should based upon their age and health.
They have to pay vastly more to subsidize everyone else.
That's why you have to, because, you know, health care, because the state power was getting so ridiculously expensive that young people were saying, forget it, I'm not buying it.
I'm just subsidizing everyone else and I'm pretty healthy.
I'll get health care later.
And so the government had to force young people to buy health care to pay for all of the people who were ill and didn't have insurance in the past.
Okay.
So if you're into Obamacare and you're not having children, you are The aforementioned hideous, ancient, wrinkly, vampiric leech feeding upon other people's decision to have children.
Because you want all of this redistribution of wealth, but you don't want to have any kids so that they can grow up, be taxpayers, and their wealth can be redistributed.
That is a hideous, vicious, vile contradiction, and I don't think that atheists have really talked about this much.
Hey, if you're on the left, you better have lots of kids.
Lots and lots of kids.
Don't leave it all up to Phyllis Schlafly, because she's not even on the left.
Hideous.
So there's a kind of nihilism about atheism in which the atheists, I don't know if they say, well, this is my only life, I don't have any particular values to pass to my kids.
They just don't have that many kids.
Yet they want lots of fresh blood for the vampiric state, the old, the sick, the poor, the elderly to feed on.
If you want to harvest, you gotta plant.
And if you want the state to redistribute a lot of income and you're not having kids, you're just feeding on everyone else's desire to have children.
You get to have your life.
You get to save your $150,000 or $200,000 or whatever it is to raise each kid.
You get to save all that money.
You don't have the sleepless nights.
You don't have to go to children's concerts.
You don't have to pay for dentistry for kids.
You don't have to do any.
You get to save all that money.
And other people's kids get to grow up and pay for your old, wrinkly, liver-spotted ass in a hospital in 30 years.
Other people are having kids so you can feed on them.
You're not having kids, but you want lots of taxpayers for your moral posturing and status dedictions.
Bullcrap.
Now Christians, on the other hand, love children, particularly Mormons, and they have lots of them, and this gives people a different relationship to the future.
If you don't have kids, Then you don't have to maintain the values and virtues that keep society safe and civilized.
Really.
I mean, you can do it on an abstract level, but it's pretty damn visceral.
Like I, when I think about my daughter and her future, the desire to protect the world and the big daddy grizzly way goes through the roof for me.
I have redoubled my efforts to make the world a better place since I became a father, because What I treasure and what I value is going to vastly outlive me and continue ad infinitum to the future in the great chain of history that goes back four billion years to the first Orgy-based bang-a-thong in the primordial soup.
So I'm part of the great chain of being, gotta pay things forward.
And people who don't have kids, Angela Merkel, well, they just don't have that same desire to protect the values of society.
And you know, it's not everyone, but there is a general trend that way, which is why Christians tend to be much more focused on long-term ethics and self-sacrifice.
Oh, I know the objective.
It's all just exploded.
And I understand that.
And we'll talk about that another time.
But the thing that troubles me about atheism is the degree to which I suspect it is not due to intellectual integrity, but rather, don't tell me what to do.
I don't like to surrender myself to anything bigger than myself.
I don't like to be part of a bigger chain of being.
I don't like to have responsibilities.
I don't like to get up early on Sunday.
I don't—commandments?
Maybe I'll take some suggestion boxes, but I don't do commandments.
What am I, some sort of puppet of the Ecclesiastes?
I really think that it is a rejection.
of subjugation to higher standards, to higher ethics, to something bigger, larger and more continuous than yourself that drives a lot of atheists.
It is a don't tell me what to do rather than atheism is one of the relatively inconsequential outcrops of a steadfast dedication to reason and evidence.
Because if atheists were so committed to reason and evidence, then when you bring these arguments to them, particularly about the coercive nature of the state, then they should very quickly and very easily recognize that their addiction to the state is a far more dangerous form of religion than mere religion.
Which, since the separation of church and state to a large degree, In Western history has become a relatively innocuous and in many ways positive force.
It creates community, it takes soup to the sick, it does a lot of charity work, it does some wonderful things in society and people get together every week or more than once a week in the Christian world and talk about values and ideas and virtue and goodness and the high hard road of threading a good and virtuous way through a difficult and dangerous world.
Atheists don't do that.
Atheist communities generally dissolve into leftist social justice warrior infighting and collapse.
Doesn't really happen so much in Christianity.
So, atheists are not atheists because they subject themselves to reason and evidence, otherwise they'd also be voluntarists in about ten minutes.
Atheists constantly mock Christians for rejecting reason and evidence, but when Statheism, or the religion of the state for atheists, when statheism is challenged, atheists react in almost exactly the same way as fundamentalists do when a religious belief is challenged.
I have some issues with this whole atheist worldview.
It seems to me less, as I said, an outcrop of a dedication to reason and evidence and more as an excuse to not do difficult things, as an excuse to avoid the mutual reciprocal relationships that come from having a wedded community of value.
And it leads atheists in general to be I think the Greek word is, um, that's ancient Greek, bitchy.
And that's, you know, this is just, you know, a decade or a little less than a decade of reading YouTube comments, but, um...
The Christians are basically like, you know, we have Christ and cookies coming over.
You know, like, hey, you're a lot closer to religion than you think you are.
Or I get lots of messages like, I'm a Christian, but you're more Christian than most Christians I know.
I've never loved an atheist or liked an atheist as much as you.
And they're very nice.
Very nice.
Whereas the leftists, who again tend towards atheism, as atheism tends towards leftism, the atheists and the leftists are, you know, just vicious bags of hysterical verbal venom.
Just horrible, horrible comments.
And I'm telling you, you know, I guess love is my gravity well.
And it's hard to avoid that the Christians do a lot more good in many ways in the world than the atheists do.
They make a lot more sacrifices, they have a lot more children, and they tend to recognize and oppose the dangers of ever-escalating state power.
So, hard to say.
Hard to say.
The cross is to my right.
The state is to my left.
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