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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:20
Anger And Evolution
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Good afternoon, brothers and sisters!
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 5.30 on the 21st... 25th?
23rd of September.
Three days left to be not 40.
So I hope you're doing well.
We're going to have a random grab bag chat this afternoon about Some feedback that I have gotten, both in terms of emails on the board and in a group that I chat with in an email forum from time to time.
And the general topic I'd like to start off with is a couple of podcasts ago, I had a, I guess for want of a better phrase, a yelly podcast.
And that podcast was the one where I was talking about the humiliation of children.
And, of course, I felt quite passionate about that particular topic.
And I was quite incensed, I guess you could say.
And I had somebody write to me, a gentleman write to me, and he said, That he found this podcast that I did a few days ago on Humiliation422, I think it might be?
He said that he found it offensive.
Which, of course, I found offensive.
No, I'm kidding.
And I found this rather curious.
Now, I've had this comment a number of times from people who have listened to podcasts, and they're, of course, happy with the ones where I'm, you know, smiling away and are full of glee, and they don't have any problem with and they don't have any problem with those, and I think they don't mind the ones where I'm talking with people in the chat shows on Sundays, they don't mind the ones where I'm reading articles, they don't mind those.
But they do not very much seem to like the ones Where I get angry.
And anger, of course, fully understand it's an uncomfortable emotion.
It makes people jumpy and nervous, right?
Because, to me, it's no accident that if and when you get to the podcast on humiliation, that it may be unsettling to you to hear me being angry to that degree.
So, of course, this gentleman Which is not uncommon, and I fully sort of sympathize and understand this, and he may be completely right.
I don't believe that he is, but let's take a gander and let's see.
He said, to me, sort of three things that were important.
And the reason that it's important, I think, well, the reason that I think it's important to talk about this is that I am certainly suggesting to you that reason and emotion should be united in your soul.
And, you know, there's a lot in the world to get angry about.
I mean, I don't think that I am any kind of So, if you take this advice, or if you find this advice to be useful, then you are going to be angry, because there's a lot of corruption and bad things in the world, and
I think that I would like to invite you to become angry about these bad things in the world.
And not abusive, not, you know, I wasn't yelling at anyone.
I was upset about, angry about people who corrupt and abuse and humiliate and demean and destroy sort of innocent children.
And so I wanted to Alright, just letting some traffic go past here.
Always concentrating on the driving.
But I wanted to sort of go over these three points.
The first point he said was that I was so angry that I must have a problem with anger.
I must be chronically or dyspeptically or cholerically angry and I should really look into that and introspect.
what it was that was making me so angry.
With the idea, of course, that anger always arises from a personal rage based on thwarted whatevers, and that it is always destructive.
Now, the second thing he told me was that he was offended by my level, or degree, of anger.
That he was offended by my level or degree of anger.
Now, that's quite interesting, of course, and not to say that, you know, maybe he was right that I was offensive.
I'm not sure that I believe that, but What I try to do in those situations, and this is something that may be of use to you, is to sort of think about the two poles that are being talked about.
Because I get this, you know, that my language is violent and I'm over-aggressive and I'm angry and I'm, I don't know, bitter or...
That I'm destructive or that I'm working out my own history in these podcasts and it's abusive.
I get this from time to time.
It's not an uncommon comment on what it is that I'm doing.
And so, the way that I sort of try and work it out in my own mind, which is not to say that these comments may not be valid.
I mean, it always is the case that I could be missing something.
But I'm talking about a universal phenomenon of destroying the souls of children.
And a universal phenomenon, a near-universal phenomenon, there are us, we happy band, a near-universal phenomenon, I just say universal, save myself some syllables and it won't make the podcast any shorter, but it might allow me to cram some more filler in.
We have the universal, corrupt, and I would say patently evil, methodology by which children's souls are destroyed, their pleasure in life are destroyed, and the seeds of future abusive children are sown, and it's the root of war, and governments, and poverty, and murder, and rape, and all of these sorts of things, right?
So you have, if I'm right, if I'm right, we have perhaps the greatest source of the greatest evil In the world.
That's sort of on the one side.
If I'm right, it could be, it could not be, but let's just say.
Let's just say at least that that's the proposition that is going forward, that what I'm talking about is the greatest source of the greatest evil, the abuse of children and so on, you understand.
So that's on the one side of the equation.
Now, what's on the other side of the equation is one guy yelling harmlessly.
Obviously nobody gets hurt by me losing my temper in any way, shape, or form.
It's no, I'm not yelling at anyone.
I'm in a car.
I'm not even disturbing my neighbors.
I'm not frightening any children in the vicinity.
I guess I'm only hurting my voice, which, you know, seems to, as you can tell from the last 12 million podcasts, seems to have a certain amount of capacity.
To recover.
So, on the one hand, we have the greatest source of the greatest evil responsible for murder, genocide, all of the things that you could imagine.
And, on the other side, we have a guy yelling in a car about this greatest source of the greatest evil.
And not yelling at anyone, and not hurting anybody, and so on.
And of course, as somebody who says that the unity of reason and passion is the essence of morality, accept it or don't accept it, that certainly is my philosophy.
And so, what I'm doing, it would seem to me, is perfectly consistent with what I believe.
And what I believe is not just sort of made up, but I think there's some Some decent proof for it, in general, in that bad people don't seem to have any particular problem getting passionate about things and about getting emotional about things.
I think it's more false self-manipulative emotion and so on.
So you have these two things.
You've got the greatest source of the greatest evil, the abuse of children, and you have a guy doing no harm but raising his voice in a car.
Now, what Does this gentleman, and it's not just this gentleman, and I'm not trying to pick on him, it's just, you know, it's a general comment that I get fairly regularly.
What is it that this gentleman is offended by?
Is he offended by the mass torture of billions of children around the world?
Is that what he finds offensive and unacceptable?
Or, in his sort of scale of things to get upset about, Is he more upset by a guy ranting in a car who's doing no harm to anybody?
Not misrepresenting the theory, acting out exactly doing what I do what I believe to be and argue for, is virtuous.
So I'm acting consistently, I'm acting in accordance with my values.
To me, the greatest source of the greatest evil is something to get passionate about, and that passion, in that instance, sometimes for me it takes the form of humor, a passion in that instance took the form of great anger.
So this is an important thing to understand about your temper and about how people are going to jump on your temper.
And this is the way that you try and resolve this in your own mind.
Of course it's always worth listening to people who have criticisms and it's always worth trying to understand where they're coming from because they might have perfectly valid criticisms.
I may be ranting and crazy and unhinged and destructive in my anger and so on.
I think that would show up in my life in general, like my career or my marriage or whatever.
So, you know, I don't think that's the case.
And of course, Christina thinks that I'm the most gentle soul in the universe, and I think that that's true.
But to me, the mental and physical attack upon helpless and defenseless children Is something that is worthy of some complaint?
Some anger?
Because of course if you can't get angry about a murderous assault on the minds and souls of billions of children, Then, you can't get angry at anything, right?
I mean, if you can't even get angry at the universal destruction of the souls of children, which results in all the great evils that flourish in the world, then there's no such thing as anger at all.
There's no such thing as getting angry.
I mean, what could be worse than that?
What could be worse than the universal assault upon children?
Do you get angry at pedophilia?
Well, pedophilia results from the humiliation and the desire to humiliate, and it's part of the cycle of violence.
Do you get angry at beating children?
Well, that's part of the destruction of their souls and part of everything I was talking about in terms of humiliation.
Do you get angry at verbal abuse?
Well, that's all part of the same... Like, if you're not even going to get angry at something like pedophilia, then it's hard for me to understand how anger is ever a viable emotion.
And maybe you believe that it's not.
Maybe you believe that all anger is destructive.
So, one of two possibilities exists.
One is that I'm totally wrong in my theory about humiliation and the mistreatment of children being the source of the world's evils, and so on.
It's perfectly possible that I'm totally wrong about all of that.
But if I'm not wrong, it's certainly right to get angry.
It doesn't mean that you have to get angry, but if you feel angry, then you should express it.
And if I'm wrong, but I believe that I'm right, then it's still perfectly consistent for me to get angry.
Like, you can't say, I'm never going to get angry, because I might be wrong.
Right?
That's like saying, I still can't love my wife, despite four years of wedded bliss.
I still can't love her, because she might turn on me.
Well, yeah.
Okay, sure.
Might turn on you.
I can't love life because I might get sick.
I can't ever advocate anything because there's the possibility of error.
Well, that's nonsense.
Of course there's always the possibility of error.
That's why we have logic and empiricism.
But if my theory is incorrect, but I believe that my theory is correct, then anger would be The genuine and authentic, though not necessarily required, it would be the genuine and authentic response to this looking sort of this evil directly in the face, or as directly as I was able to while podcasting.
So there would still be no reason to feel that my anger was misplaced.
If I do believe that this is the greatest source of the greatest evil, then getting angry at it is perfectly valid.
On two levels.
One, of course, this happened to me.
And the second, of course, is that the effects of it continue to accrue to me in the form of governments and religious crazies and terrorists and so on.
The world is heading in the wrong direction, and I think it's okay to beat back this corruption with some anger.
So, no matter what, if I do believe, as I openly stated, that I am staring into the maw of the greatest source of the greatest evil, then anger is a perfectly valid and healthy response.
Now, if I'm incorrect about the abuse of children being responsible for the greatest source of the greatest evil, then somebody could propose an alternate theory.
Somebody could tell me where they feel that my logic is incorrect.
Somebody could do this, that, or the other.
And I would be perfectly content and happy to accept that.
I feel that it's true, which doesn't make it true, but it means that there is a concordance between my passions and my reason, which is usually, for me at least, a pretty good indication that I'm on the right track.
Again, it proves nothing, but for me it supports quite a bit.
Like, in the same way, if you're an experienced philosopher, you can take emotional cues, right?
Like, if you are experienced mathematician and you grasp something new or you grasp the solution to a problem, you're going to probably be right.
Because your emotions now, you've solved enough problems that your emotions are going to be kind of keyed into that and they're not going to lead you totally astray.
Like if you're a computer programmer and you feel that you, "Aha! I've got a solution!" Yeah, I'm Maybe occasionally that won't be a solution, but most times it will be.
Not so much when you're starting out, but after you've trained for a while.
I've had a lot of training and experience in philosophy.
That, still, he could argue against, or anybody could argue against this proposition, but they can't claim that, based on the premise that I'm talking about, that my anger is wrong or irrational or inappropriate or anything like that.
So, the idea that somebody is going to be offended by me being angry about the greatest source of the greatest evil, the abuse of all children, I mean, imagine, if your child is attacked by a pedophile, are you allowed to get angry at the person who attacked you?
Sorry, who attacked your child?
Well, of course you are!
I think it would be inhuman and fairly irrational to ask that that not occur.
And if a father is allowed to get angry at a man who attacks and rapes his child, then if you're looking at the proximate ethical or philosophical cause of such great evils, Then I think it's okay to get angry.
I mean, to me it would be... I mean, you're looking at something even bigger than an individual attack upon your own child, which is an assault, an endless, eternal, historical and perpetual assault on the minds and souls of all children throughout the world, so... Anyway.
Now...
The third thing that this gentleman said, which I found quite instructive, was he said, I used to be that angry, and I realized how destructive it was, and so I don't do that anymore, and I don't treat anyone that way anymore.
And although I have been tempted at times to get into the lane which you're allowed to get into, if you have a second passenger, like a passenger in your car, this is the kind of childishness that we're required to follow in the fabulous state of society, that we're allowed to use this lane, but only if we're carpooling.
If I had somebody in the passenger side who I was yelling at directly, then, of course, this would be abusive.
I think.
I mean, if I was yelling at someone in those terms while having them trapped in my car going 120 kilometers an hour, sorry, officer, 100 kilometers an hour, then, yeah, I could understand them.
But there was nobody else in the car.
So when he said it's wrong to treat people like that, well, of course, that's perfectly true, I think.
I mean, again, maybe you're allowed to yell at somebody who's raped your kid, but yeah, I would say that yelling at somebody like that would be pretty abusive.
Having been yelled at like that in my life before, for, imagine, transgressions or irrational disobediences, then I can certainly attest to that fact that it is something that is abusive, for sure.
So what's interesting, of course, is that this would lead me to suspect that what is occurring is this.
And this is a good way to understand how projection may... I can't psychologize this guy from a distance.
This is just a possibility.
But how projection may come up in your life when you start to become more assertive and deal with violations of your personhood with anger.
And the way that it may come up for you is that people will be offended by your anger, and it may be occurring in the way that it may be occurring for this guy.
So, we'll call him Bob, though his name is in fact Rachel.
When I'm yelling What happens is it triggers Bob's memory of being yelled at, right?
Because Bob has a bad temper.
And Bob has a bad temper because he was humiliated and abused in his past.
And so when he... I don't know if he watched the video.
I think he listened to the podcast.
So when he hears me yelling, it reaches deep into his nervous system and awakens a fight-or-flight response to him.
within him, which he then mistakenly identifies the harm that results, the tension, the fear, the upset, the resulting anger that he feels, the fight-or-flight mechanism that occurs within children when they're yelled at, abused.
My raised voice triggers that within him and Instead of saying, "My God, I mean, how scarred am I by these assholes who raised me that I can't listen to somebody yell about universal child abuse without feeling scared or angry or upset how scarred am I by these assholes who raised me that I can't listen to somebody yell
Right?
When somebody has beaten you around the face repeatedly when you're a child, and somebody who you love and trust, a lover, say, then reaches for your face and you flinch, I don't think that it's rational, though it is certainly understandable, I don't think that it's rational to say to that person, you scared me, it's highly offensive to do this to me with your hands.
Right?
What you can say, I think reasonably, is "My God, how badly was I beaten by these assholes who beat me so that a person who is reaching for me with love and affection frightens me?
How unjustly was I abused so that all expressions of anger, even just expressions of anger, strike me as offensive and abusive?
How scarred was I by bad and evil-tempered people to the point where I view all anger, even anger against abusers, to be offensive and destructive.
Right?
Obviously, I've done nothing to Bob.
I've never met Bob.
I've exchanged a few emails with him.
I've done nothing to Bob.
But Bob finds that me getting angry at abusive people scares and humiliates, provokes feelings of fear, humiliation and anger within him, and then he is offended by that.
He is offended by me being angry at abusers, but of course the only reason that he's unable to process healthy anger is because he was abused.
Do you see the sort of catch-22 here?
Abusers who use destructive rage to humiliate children Prevent, many times, prevent those children from feeling anger themselves, which leads them to be defenseless in the face of future and further exploitation or abuse.
And so, when you begin to be more assertive, you will end up provoking these kinds of defenses and projections in other people, and they will attempt to convince you that if you are angry, you are abusive.
And they'll do so in a passive-aggressive manner, like the intimation that you, Steph, are unhealthy and full of rage, and it's sick, and it's abusive, and I'm offended, and I'm shocked, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And what he's basically saying is, you frightened me.
And I understand that.
I totally, totally sympathize with that.
And I'm sorry that you were frightened.
But I would say that you will probably gain far more self-knowledge and perhaps even access to your own healthy anger if you look at how you were conditioned to be frightened by anger rather than to evaluate it just as something that someone is feeling.
All that's happening is I'm feeling angry.
I'm obviously no conceivable personal threat to anybody.
I'm a very careful driver.
I've been doing this for, I don't know, ten months.
You can listen to or review the video now if you want.
I have never even remotely become dangerous while I'm driving.
In fact, I would say that I'm a better driver when I'm podcasting because I don't space out.
I am very aware of my surroundings and my brain is working much harder than if I were listening to some dumbass radio show or listening to an audiobook or just staring kind of blankly into nowhere.
That, to me, would be a more dangerous state of mind than being mentally alert and working feverishly like 12 hamsters on 50 wheels to try and keep a podcast show going with consistent, semi-consistent arguments in an unknown amount of time.
Let's put it that way.
So...
I'm sorry that you were frightened, but I think rather than being offended at me, if offense is to be taken, I think that it may be more justly, it is more just to be offended at those who abuse children than somebody who's getting angry at those who abuse children.
That's just a possibility, and you might want to spend, look into your being offended, and first of all, ask yourself, I'm guessing, this is sort of my guess, that mostly in the destruction of childhood anger, healthy childhood anger, parents work this very tight tag-team approach, right? healthy childhood anger, parents work this very tight tag-team approach,
So, the father will be physically abusive, or verbally abusive, in a kind of top-down, hierarchical, hegemonic fashion, and the child will then feel anger in response, right?
I mean, sort of makes sense.
And the child will not so much express anger, well, obviously, originally, will express anger towards the father, but the father will simply threaten and bow-breed this child, one-tenth his side, into atomically vaporized submission, Amen.
Thank you.
But then the child, of course, the anger will out.
The child will then express anger about the incident towards the mother.
And the tag team way that this works, I'm pretty sure it's male-female, I guess it could be reversed, but this is sort of my understanding of it.
The tag team approach is that the father provokes anger, the child expresses anger back to the father, the father crushes and squelches the child's sense of self, and then the child, in desperation and trying to find a way to not experience the abuse directly and not realize that he's changed to these psychos for the next 15 years, enslaved and helpless and dependent and can't get away.
The child then turns to the mother and says, I'm really angry about X, Y, or Z.
And then the mother responds with shock and horror and offense that the child is angry.
And this is the tag-team approach, and it's the masculine-feminine way of crushing a healthy, responsive anger in a child in a situation of abuse, i.e., in a situation of childhood. responsive anger in a child in a situation of abuse, and The father is overtly aggressive, and the mother is passive-aggressive, and is horrified, horrified I tell you, that the child could ever conceivably be angry.
I saw, and I've immediately sort of mentioned this, I saw two films a little while back.
One I think is called Talk to Me, and it's a French film about a girl who's overweight and has self-image problems and so on.
And it's not a bad film.
It's worth renting, I would say, if you can get a hold of it.
It's subtitled, so don't watch it on your iPod.
But the way that I think is important, and the reason that it's important to watch this film, is that the child has legitimate complaints about her father.
He's selfish and not abusive overtly, but he's passive-aggressive and this sort of stuff.
And the child has legitimate complaints about her father, the daughter does.
And I think that it's perfectly fascinating to watch everybody in the film is constantly denying everybody else's Authentic experience.
This is absolutely worth watching from that standpoint.
It's absolutely continual, and I don't think it's an intention on the part of the writer, but it's well worth watching just to track that.
I mean, the acting is very good, and the characters aren't bad, and it's kind of like a Woody Allen with an accent.
And it's well worth watching, though, just to see how common it is whenever anybody expresses an honest opinion or is actually right about something.
How much other people reject, poo-poo, minimize, dismiss, and reject their opinion.
This is very common.
The other film is a Deepa Mehta film, it's the third in the series, and it's called Water.
And it's definitely worth renting.
Again, I mean, if you're in Hicksville, Illinois, you're not likely to be able to get a hold of it, but if you do see the film Water, It is a little long and it's very unusual.
It is the story, and this I'm not giving anything away, this happens in the first five minutes of the film, it's a story about a woman in India, a little girl who's about seven or eight years old, in India, and she is married, as many women in India were and are, she's married off to a guy, basically because they need, I guess the guys need
Cooks and cleaners and so on, and so she's married after this guy, and this guy dies right after they're married.
And you can't get divorced, and you can't remarry in this faith.
I can't remember if it's Hindu or whatever.
And so the daughter is packed away into a monastery where she is expected to live out the remainder of her life, basically begging for her daily bread, because she's a widow.
Right?
So she was married off at the age of eight.
Her husband died.
She's never allowed to remarry.
She can't divorce.
And there's a lot in the movie that's nonsensical.
The relationship with the young intellectual to his mother is completely make-believe.
But it's a very powerful film.
And it speaks quite a lot about social convention.
And it speaks quite a lot about another terrifying problem, particularly in Indian society, which is also discussed in the movie Bollywood Hollywood.
I believe it is.
No!
Monsoon Wedding.
Monsoon Wedding.
Which again, Monsoon Wedding, well worth watching.
But...
If you get a chance to watch either of these two films, I think it's very, very important.
But what happens in this sort of tag-team approach to manipulating and destroying and undermining a child's rage, the father provokes anger and the mother dismisses it, and is appalled and horrified and shocked and rejected, and rejects the child based on the anger, right?
So the child then realizes, says, oh, then anger is not abusive when my dad does it, but anger is abusive when I do it.
That's the message that is very much reinforced within families, and of course it is very much reinforced with the government, right?
The government can express anger or rage in this case, where they can go and throw people in jail, and they can pass whatever laws they want, and they can invade countries, and they can, you know, ban substances, and then throw people in jail.
So the government is allowed to express rage, But you, as a citizen, are never allowed to be aggressive against the government, right?
I mean, that's appalling!
That's absolutely appalling!
And this is a very common kind of situation in society wherein, as I said in the podcast on humiliation, and I won't yell again here because I think I made my point.
The reality is that the heavy provokes, in this case, the government is the father and the media is the mother, right?
So, in this case, Hugo Chavez is doing some conference in North America or something, and today, February 21st, 2006, Today, Hugo Chavez talked about President Bush and called him a thug, because President Bush and the CIA and so on, he says, are plotting his overthrow, are funding rebels and so on.
This President Bush doesn't deign to respond, right?
But the media run in as a shocked and appalled maternal figure.
And what do they say?
Well, there's a couple of quotes.
John Bolton, I think his name is, this pansy-assed U.S.
ambassador to the U.N., he said, you know, well, we don't condone this This comic book view of foreign relations, right?
This comic book view of foreign relations.
This idea that, you know, the president who authorized the invasion and toppling of a foreign government in Iraq and in Afghanistan could never imagine trying to topple a foreign government.
That's a complete comic book.
You could never imagine him trying to topple Hugo Chavez.
It's unthinkable.
So, of course, this is just, you know, oh, it's silly, it's shocking, it's appalling.
And somebody else said that Hugo Chavez, for calling George Bush a thug, is himself a brute.
You're a brute!
It's like some Scarlett O'Hara fainting 19th century God-get-me-the-vapours kind of situation.
But it's very, very common, right?
The government smashes people's lives, throws them in jail, gets them raped, invades, bombs, destroys, and then... But you know what real aggression is?
It's not killing a hundred odd thousand Iraqis, it's not murdering, it's not causing the death of half a million Iraqi children.
That's not brutish behavior.
You know what is really brutish behavior?
It's calling somebody a thug who authorizes those things.
Right?
I mean, do you see the rather insane way that this works within the realm of any kind of ethics?
It's not murderous to put two billion citizens in jail, and it's not murderous to invade other countries, and it's not murderous to tax people within an inch of their living standard.
And it's not brutish to run up a staggering national debt and risk financial collapse and destroy the savings of the middle class and to mentally torture children in schools.
That's not thuggish.
What is brutish is to call someone a thug.
To use the word thug, that, that is brutish, right?
But you see, that is something that is part and parcel of sort of what it is that I'm talking about here.
That you have the people who smash you, and then the people who are horrified when you try to fight back.
And this is the male-female model, so this is sort of my guess as to what this guy's childhood was like, that his father smashed him down, and his mother was appalled, right?
So the complex interaction that's occurring when he sends me this email is that I suddenly become his father, he becomes himself, and then he also becomes his mother to try and control his own shocked and appalled nature, and so on.
Sorry, to try and control his own anger.
So, this is all very complex, and this is the kind of stuff that you deal with when you become assertive and you're right.
When you sort of become passionate and you're right, then you awaken all sorts of nonsense from people's past.
It's not nonsense that it happened to them, but it's nonsense that they'll project it onto you.
And I just sort of wanted to point that out.
So that you at least can sort of understand that this is a risk that you take when you enter the, you know, semi-public arena of talking in this kind of medium.
That when you are assertive, then people will try to, rather than face their own histories in an honest and open manner, which I'm not saying that this guy consciously did, right?
Everything that he did, he genuinely experienced, and I have great sympathy for that.
But his false self is attempting to redirect his shocked and appalled and angry and frightened side to me, right?
Rather than to his own history.
And of course the true self put the nugget in about his own past problems with anger which tells me everything I need to know about his family.
His true self put that nugget in so that I wouldn't take the false self stuff very seriously and might actually be able to do something to help the true self slough off this false self that wants to misdirect his legitimate anger.
So that's issue number one and that only took us 38 minutes.
I should know.
So the next two will be quicker and we have a little bit of time for them because there was a little bit of slowdown even on the private roads.
I'm sure we can trace that back to the public roads somehow.
But the other issue that's going on is that on this Libertarian posting that I occasionally participate in and read to some degree, although 200 emails a day, I don't really get around to all of them, there's been quite a debate going on about the validity of Evolution.
And what's going on there is that there are a number of people who are criticizing evolution as being incomplete, that you can't show interspecies evolution, and there's a whole bunch of things.
You don't have to have me explain it to you, and I scarcely would put myself forward as even a remote kind of layman expert in this area.
But This question of the validity of evolution is of course directly related to people who are religious.
It's absolutely totally and directly related to people who are religious.
And what religious people want to do is they want to attack evolution because if they can create doubts about evolution, they feel that this will somehow Well, I get to tell you my friends, that is so not true, I don't even know where to start.
true, then they feel that this might threaten the validity of the existence of God, whereas if they can throw doubts upon evolutionary theory, that that leaves room for God.
Well I get to tell you my friends, that is so not true, I don't even know where to start.
I don't even know where to start.
The two theories are completely independent of each other.
The theories that posit the existence of God and the theories that posit the validity of evolution as a methodology by which life evolves and disseminates.
Completely and totally irrelevant.
It's like saying that the theory of relativity, if that's proven false, then inevitably evolution is thrown into disrepute.
And of course it's complete nonsense.
If you put a theory forward that says 2 plus 2 is 4, and I put a theory forward that 2 plus 2 is 5, the disproof of my theory, in no way shape or form, affects Your theory, in the same way that your theory doesn't affect my theory, the proof or disproof of it, unless my theory directly rests on yours.
And the existence of God has absolutely nothing to do with evolution, or not.
It's just another one of these nonsensical things that people put together to try and rescue the great sky ghost of abuse from his rat hole in the sky.
And what I sort of find interesting is that religious people will argue about evolution and say, well, there's incomplete data, and there's no actual proof, and you can't see it in motion.
And people argue for it with a kind of dogmatic fervor.
I find that one particularly funny when you think about religion.
But they will talk about this kind of stuff and basically say that, well, I, oh Christian, or oh religious person, I have a pretty high standard for proof, you see, and so I don't find that the theory, the scientific theory of evolution matches my extraordinarily high standards of proof because there are gaps in knowledge, there are gaps in process, and so on.
Although this is a theory that has a good degree of proof, empirically, and is logically consistent, I find that the gaps in the proof are such that I choose to reject this theory because I have such lofty and high standards for determining truth from falsehood.
And evolution doesn't quite match that standard.
My standard is 100% and evolution is only 80% or 90%.
And so I'm going to leave the question of evolution open to doubt.
I'm sorry.
I'm sure that my laughing will offend somebody now, just as my anger or any other possible emotion that I might show will surely offend somebody.
It's too much to me for a religious person to say.
I'm going to reject this scientific theory because it doesn't meet my high standards of truth.
Oh my god, it's hilarious.
Oh really?
You have to sort of see this from a rational perspective just to get how funny that is.
Oh, God.
I mean, it's like Mickey Rooney not wanting to go out with Heidi Klum because he thinks she's too short.
And young.
Oh my god.
I mean, for a religious person, or a person who believes in a nonsensical idea like gods and goblins and Keebler elves and devils and leprechauns that come back to life and walk on water.
For somebody who's religious to say that evolution doesn't quite meet their extraordinarily high and rigorous standards of truth.
I mean, they can't really be serious in that, right?
Oh, my God.
I'm sorry.
Oh, God.
You know, I think I really am going quite mad.
Oh, my God, that's good.
I just find that so rich.
For a religious person to criticize a scientific theory for lacking evidence!
Then I'm going to go to church and eat a wafer that I think is the flesh of a god!
Oh my god!
Oh my god.
I'm going to criticize evolution because there's little bits of proof that are missing.
This wine is the god.
It's the blood of a man who died 2,000 years ago.
He rose from the dead and then ascended to heaven.
Oh, my God.
Oh, man, I really gotta tell you, I think that religious people should sort of steer clear of criticizing scientific theories for incompleteness and inconsistency.
Oh, man, that is too funny.
And they're very earnest.
God bless them, so to speak.
They're very earnest about this.
You know, well, there's lots of things that evolution can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.
There's stuff that's missing and we don't, you know...
Because you know if you're really concerned about logical consistency and evidence and proof such that you're willing to reject a scientific theory like evolution, you absolutely want to believe in people who turn water into wine and can multiply loaves of fish and cure leprosy and come back from the dead.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Oh, man.
Oh, God.
Oh, it's like statists talking about virtue.
Oh, it's like soldiers talking about honor.
Religious people talking about, oh, God, intellectual integrity and the need for proof and rationality.
Oh, man, I gotta tell ya.
Oh, it's madness.
It really is.
Of course I pointed this out, not with quite as many laugh lines, but I did point this out, and unfortunately I did not end up getting much response yet, though I may get some in the future, but... Oh, okay, I'm going to enjoy the rest of this podcast on my own, because there's not much point in you listening to me laugh, but I really do find this quite funny.
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