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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:58
Bless Atheists, For They Have Sinned - Rebutted!
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Hi everybody, it's Stephen Molyneux from Freedom Inn Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So this is a review of an article by Emma Tatel called, Bless Atheists For They Have Sinned.
And this was written for Maclean's Magazine.
And she starts this way.
She starts, The door-to-door religious proselytizer is, like his secular cousin, the cutco knife peddler, a harmless irritant of modern North American life.
Already, I think we have a challenge.
To say that somebody who comes to your door selling religion is a harmless irritant of modern North American life is to have, I think, effectively zero empathy for the children born into such families who are told truly terrifying stories of hellfire and damnation and masturbation being a sin and God help you if you get a cut because we're not going to allow deep cut because we're not going to allow you blood transfusions and the like.
So if somebody rings your doorbell, you say, no thanks.
Well, that is fine, but that's not really what religion is all about.
Religion is something that indoctrinates helpless, independent children in some truly crazy and deranged beliefs.
And there is no secular cousin to that.
Like the catco knife peddler, he says, here's a knife.
You want it, yes or no?
Is it efficient?
Is it effective?
Is it whatever, right?
Cost efficient.
But he's not saying, if you don't buy my knives, you're going to go to hell.
And he's not saying these knives will cure you of an imaginary disease that I'm going to call sin, on the caveat that you pay me, say, 10% of your income for the rest of your life, in which case I will wave my magic wand and cure you of this imaginary illness called sin.
So, it's just a knife.
There's no metaphysics, epistemology, or anything like that around it.
So she goes on to write, say, if you don't care for his wares, you say no thanks, shut the door, and sometimes roll your eyes.
But you rarely, if ever, engage.
Well, you do engage if you care about, say, the quality of their children, their children's lives, and so on.
Portland University philosophy professor and proud atheist Peter Boghossian not only advocates engaging religious fundamentalists in debate, he has written the manual on how to do so.
His new book, Emanuel for Creating Atheists, could be called the Bible of Deconversion.
Except you couldn't call it the Bible of Deconversion, because the Bible is not a philosophical document.
It makes philosophical claims.
But it does not use philosophy to establish those claims.
It's like if I say I make a scientific claim and I read the tea leaves from my cup of tea in order to prove my claim, then I have not made for good science.
And the Bible does not use a philosophical methodology, but it is a very philosophical document, which is why it is open to philosophical examination.
So fundamentally, people who are religious They say that their religion is like the shadow cast by the giant statue of God on the horizon.
And they simply stand in that shadow.
The shadow is objective and real because God is objective and real.
And therefore they're making truth claims about the universe.
They're making truth claims about reality.
God exists, therefore I believe.
That is the way that it works.
And so all religions are making truth claims about reality, and therefore they are subject to science, to reality testing, to empirical testing, to rationality tests, and so on.
If I say I like jazz, I'm not making an empirical claim about reality, that my preference for jazz exists like a tree does, it's just my subjective preference.
But people don't like religion.
They accept the existence of God.
They believe that God exists.
And the moment you say exists, then philosophers and scientists are deeply concerned with what it is that you're saying, because you've just used the word existence.
If you say, I don't like rap music, this is not an objective truth that is empirically verifiable.
It's just what my preference is, what my subjective experience is.
So, you can't call something which contains rational and empirical arguments anything to do with the Bible.
Right?
That's like saying that a manual on demolition is a great guide for building things.
It's not.
Boghossian, she writes, has a mission to rid the world of religion through what he calls street epistemology, the act of literally talking someone out of his or her faith.
Yes.
And if I was a child and I had faith that two and two made five, then my teacher would talk me out of that error.
Right?
Faith is, as Peter terms it, faith is believing that you know things that you don't know.
And that, of course, is arrogant error.
I'm not going to make the case for or against, you can read the book, but when you talk someone out of his or her faith, you are talking someone out of believing in things that don't exist, which is, I think, quite a good thing, right?
I mean, if a man is about to walk into a canyon, he's a blind man, he's about to walk into a canyon, and you say, stop and turn around, you are talking someone out of continuing to walk as if there's ground there when there isn't.
And that, I think, is actually quite a helpful and useful thing.
And remember, it is the religious people who make the truth claim about reality.
My God exists.
Jesus came back from the dead.
Right?
Muhammad rode up to the kingdom of heaven on a winged horse after marrying a nine-year-old.
These are truth claims that are made.
And whenever you make a truth claim, scientists, philosophers, and thinkers have the perfect right to review those truth claims for efficacy and veracity.
So, he's a sound familiar, she says.
Boghossian has taken one of organized religion's most invasive and possibly problematic practices, proselytization, and turned it on its head.
This sentence is perplexing, I guess you could say.
Most invasive and possibly problematic practices, which is bringing the good news of Jesus or whoever to people.
Proselytization is obviously just trying to convert people to your religion, telling them about your religion.
Most invasive and possibly problematic practices.
I mean, just off the top of my head, I would say that female genital mutilation, for the case of religion, which occurs throughout the Arabic world, Male genital mutilation, which is focused on Judaism but also occurs in many other religions, circumcision, that's pretty invasive and significantly problematic.
The call for murder for lots of people in the Bible, if the Bible was written by an atheist, the atheist would likely go to jail for hate crimes.
Because this is the book that she's comparing Peter's elegant work of reason to.
I'll put the links to this below.
So, in the Bible, anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the Lord your God must be put to death.
Such evil must be purged from Israel.
So, kill people who don't listen to priests.
Now, I've read that book pretty carefully.
I actually supplied a blurb for it, and I'm pretty sure I don't remember Peter anywhere saying that anybody who doesn't listen to the atheist arguments should be murdered.
But this, of course, is the work of the Bible.
Kill witches.
You should not let a sorceress live.
Kill homosexuals.
If a man lies with a male, as with a woman, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed.
They have forfeited their lives.
I don't believe that in Peter's book there's anything about killing people who are homosexuals.
This is a significant bummer for psychic affairs.
A man or woman who acts as a medium or fortune teller shall be put to death by stoning.
They have no one but themselves to blame for their death.
A philosopher might say that both the Bible and the stoners, not the fun kind, would having that.
Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death.
All who curse their father or mother must be put to death.
They are guilty of a capital offense.
So death for cursing parents.
This is the highest moral ideal and I don't believe that he's written any children's books saying that any parent who tries to enforce religion on you should be strangled in their sleep.
Death for adultery.
If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.
Death for fornication.
A priest's daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also shall be burned to death.
Now, often they don't prescribe how you're supposed to be put to death.
It's got stoning and burning.
Death to followers of other religions.
Whoever sacrifices to any god except the Lord alone shall be doomed.
kill non-believers, they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers with all their heart and soul, and everyone who would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.
Kill false prophets.
Kill the entire town if only one person in the town worships another god.
Kill women who are not virgins on their wedding night.
Kill followers of other religions.
Death for blasphemy.
Infidels and gays should die.
Kill anyone who approaches the tabernacle.
Kill people for working on the Sabbath.
Kill children who are rude.
You kill the curious, if you're God.
Murder children.
Kill the sons of sinners.
It says, make ready to slaughter his sons for the guilt of their fathers, lest they rise and possess the earth and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants.
God will kill children.
You should kill men, women, and children.
God kills all the firstborn of Egypt.
Kill old men and young women.
God will kill the children of sinners, rape, baby killing, and so on.
And this is just murder.
I mean, rape, slavery, you name it.
It's in the Bible.
So, I think that these commandments, which have been tragically and aptly enacted throughout religion's history, might be considered organized religions perhaps slightly more invasive and possibly problematic practices.
So this is from Peter's book.
5% of the U.S. population does not believe in God, he writes.
We have a standing army of more than half a million potential street epistemologists ready to let loose to separate people from their faith.
To deliver millions of micro-inoculations of reason to the populace on a daily basis.
So yes, if he were to say we have a standing army of more than half a million anti-racists ready to talk people out of being racist, I think that that would be considered a noble practice.
And religion is a very dangerous kind of bigotry.
The Bible is like a kaleidoscope.
It is like an insect's eye, in that whatever you like, you can find approval for, and divine sanction of.
So if you're a vengeful guy, then you go to an eye for an eye.
If you're a gentle guy, then you go to turn the other cheek.
You can, of course, find Literally thousands of these contradictions in the Bible, because it has evolved to be all things to all people.
You get to cherry-pick and choose what it is that you want divine sanction for, which tends to be kind of what you like already, but amped up to infinity through divine sanction and approval.
This was pretty evident after the Reformation, when the monopoly of Catholicism was cracked throughout Christendom.
And the Anabaptists, the Zyngalians, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, and so on, they all began slaughtering each other because they had their perceptions of what the Bible said after it was translated by Martin Luther into the vernacular in the 16th century.
They read it, and they each, based on their own preferences, decided what was the most important and essential thing, and it didn't fit.
Right?
You have holy wars of mass slaughtering around religion, there are people who have different views of string theory, but they are not stringing each other up by the neck.
This is, of course, because there is an objective methodology for resolving disputes in In science there is no objective methodology for resolving disputes in religion and therefore it tends to escalate those who take it the most seriously.
So she writes also, a manual for creating atheists is in a way an atheist attempt at Old Testament style eye for an eye revenge.
I like it.
You've got to watch these words with people.
So when she says, could be called, it is in a way What you're basically about to hear after you hear these phrases is very silly non-arguments that reveal significant emotional prejudice because she doesn't have to prove.
If you say, in a way, you know, this blue is in a way green, what does that even mean?
If you say, this blue is green, I mean, it's in a way green, well, it's a way of deflating the necessity for proof.
An Old Testament style eye for an eye revenge.
Now, Old Testament style eye for an eye revenge would be for for Peter to write some of the same kill religious people that the religious texts have about killing atheists and unbelievers.
I mean, obviously I'm an atheist myself.
I take it quite personally when the Bible says that the followers should kill me.
Now, I accept, of course, that Christians and Jews and Muslims Right.
The three that come off the Old Testament.
I mean, they don't want to kill me.
Most of them.
Absolutely.
Nonetheless, that's what the book says.
And this is who they worship.
And so, to me, it's kind of like being a black guy and reading the KKK manual.
You know, it says, kind of, put me to death.
I think KKK manual is a little bit more gentle.
I think it just says, get them back to Africa, whatever.
But it is pretty serious.
And then people can say in religion, well, that is wrong.
That is immoral.
Gays and sorcerers and unbelievers and children who curse their parents or, you know, the children of sinners, they should not be murdered.
Well, okay, great.
Then you have joined us on the secular side of challenging moral questions, because you're no longer accepting the Bible as a moral absolute, because it's full of so much palpable evil that you can't accept it as a moral absolute without it being illegal, because then you are accepting death threats against a significant portion of your fellow man as your highest moral ideal, and that's not actually... I mean, you just become a criminal, right?
And so It is a challenge.
Once you get rid of the moral absolutes of the Bible by actually reading the Bible, just read it cover to cover.
It's the best cure.
And once you have accepted that the Bible is not a moral absolute, then you're going to join us in the challenging task of defining a secular ethics that are consistent and universal and in accordance with what we teach kids in kindergarten and all that kind of fun stuff.
I've taken a shot at this.
You can get my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
So, it's not an atheist attempt at Old Testament-style eye-for-an-eye revenge, because he's talking about talking to people.
He's not talking about killing them for disagreeing, which is... that is the Old Testament stuff.
So, I can only assume that she's not read anything to do with the Old Testament.
Yeah, that's really all I can assume.
I can't imagine anybody would countenance that.
She goes on to write, what better way to chip away at the already dwindling numbers of most major religions than by recruiting from within?
Well, see, atheism is not recruiting anyone or anything.
There's no Church of Atheism, you don't have to pay anyone to be an atheist.
You know, there are about 10,000 gods that are worshipped around the world.
And everyone who doesn't worship everyone else's god, are they recruited away from those gods?
No.
They just don't believe in them, right?
As Dawkins has pointed out, you don't believe in 9,999 of those gods.
Atheists just go one god further.
So, you're not recruiting or converting.
If I say that the world is shaped like a banana and someone proves and shows to me that it's in fact a sphere, am I recruited away from banana planet?
Am I converted or deconverted from banana planet?
No.
My error is corrected.
Thank you to everyone who helps me correct my errors.
Lord knows, as Hamlet says, we are into endless error herald.
Oh no, that's not Hamlet.
That's someone else.
Anyway.
Let's see here.
Boghossian's Deconversion Methods.
Draw on everything from the rhetorical tactics of ancient Greek philosophy to the works of modern atheist all-stars Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he refers to as atheism's horseman.
Through street epistemology, he hopes that the non-believing world transform a broken world into a new society built on reason, evidence, and thought-out positions.
Well, that seems That seems good.
See, the whole time I was in school, I was taught in science and geography, mathematics of every kind, functions and relations, calculus, algebra, that I really should have reason, evidence, and thought-out positions.
I think that's That's kind of the point.
I mean, she seems surprised that a philosopher would be interested in reason, evidence, and thought positions.
I mean, she seems like, if I'm a nutritionist and I put out a book on how to eat healthy, she's shocked that the book suggests putting down junk food and eating good food.
At worst, Boghossian's approach might appear tongue-in-cheek and harmless, or, if you're an atheist, noble and necessary.
Well, you see, he's making an argument.
Throughout the book, a variety of arguments.
Those arguments are valid or invalid.
Now, I agree it does take quite a bit of time to learn how to think, to learn how to analyze arguments, to learn how to rebut false positions, to learn all of the endless logical and philosophical errors and equivocations and fallacies and so on.
There's lots of them.
And it takes quite a while to actually go through a text and find out what the arguments are and whether they're valid or not.
And so, if you don't want to do that, I think that's fine.
It can be kind of technical.
Logic trees and all that.
It can be a little dull.
I love it.
But, you know, that's why I'm doing this and not writing for McLean's.
But it's not tongue-in-cheek and harmless or noble or necessary.
The arguments are either valid or they're invalid.
They're true or they're false.
I mean, if I put forward a mathematical theorem I've discovered another proof, or I've discovered a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem or something, then people can say, is it tongue-in-cheek?
Is it harmless?
Is it noble?
Or is it necessary?
These are all adjectives that have absolutely nothing to do with mathematics.
And these adjectives have absolutely nothing to do with philosophy.
They do have a lot to do with immature emotional manipulation.
Or sophistry, as our good friend Socrates would term it, and would fight as we continue to fight 2,500 years later.
But this is very, very silly.
But it points, his approach, points to an unnerving new trend in the world of the non-believing, one that doesn't merely personally reject religion with a no-thanks-I'll-pass attitude, but globally opposes it with the addendum, and not for you either if I have anything to say about it.
Yes, that's very true.
So, for instance, let's replace this with other words and see if we can understand what she's saying.
But it points to an unnerving new trend in the world of opposing racism.
One that doesn't merely personally reject racism with a no-thanks-I'll-pass attitude, but globally opposes it, and with the addendum, and no racism for you either if I have anything to say about it.
Is that offensive to you?
Does that seem offensive to you?
But it points to an unnerving new trend in the world of opposing rape.
One that doesn't merely personally reject rape with a no-thanks-I'll-pass attitude, but globally opposes rape with the addendum, and not for you either if I have anything to say about it.
But it points to an unnerving new trend in the world.
Now, I'm not equating religion with murder, but what I am saying is that there are thousands of moral positions that we inflict on everyone.
issue, but globally opposes it with the addendum and not for you either, if I have anything to say about it.
Now, I'm not equating religion with murder, but what I am saying is that there are thousands of moral positions that we inflict on everyone.
I mean, if you simply look at all the laws and regulations in the world, of which there are millions and millions, these are all universally applied, enforced, The income tax, the regulations of any kind, Obamacare, these are all, you don't get a choice, you have to do it.
And if this is bad, then we have a whole lot of dismantling to do of our existing legal system.
But something like racism, which is an irrational prejudice, right?
You don't get to say, well, it's not for me, but you go ahead, right?
Well, no.
The truth claims that people make about reality are either valid or they're invalid.
They're true or they're false.
They're supported by evidence and validated by reason or not.
And so, no, you don't get to have your own reality.
You don't get to have your own beliefs if those beliefs are claimed to be universal.
Again, I like ice cream.
Not a universal claim.
Ice cream is made with milk.
That is a universal claim.
Right?
I don't like sunrises.
Subjective claim.
The world is a sphere.
Objective claim.
And so people who are religious are making objective claims on a very consistent basis.
God exists.
There is heaven.
There is hell.
There is sin.
The way to redemption is X or Y or Z. These, these, these, these and these are sins.
These, these, these, these and these are virtues.
These are universal claims.
They are not subjective.
And therefore they're open to objective analysis.
Boghossian's militant atheism not only attacks religion's zealous and radical manifestations, but targets its benign and secular ones, too.
Well, you see, again, benign, secular, zealous, radical... I mean, what does this conceivably mean?
There are people who believe that two and two make five.
And Bargossian's militant mathematical purity not only attacks people who believe that two and two make five, their zealous in radical manifestations, but their benign and secular ones too.
Again, these are all just adjectives.
It doesn't mean anything.
When asked what harm a privately religious person could possibly do in the name of his or her savior, he denies that such a person exists and insists on characterizing all faiths in the same simplistic fashion as pretending to know something you don't.
Now, when you say someone insists, then you make it sound like they have an irrational emotional preference or addiction, that they're kind of crazy and fixated on something.
And the word simplistic is Not an argument.
The fact that I need to say this is significant.
If I am handed a copy of the proofs for the general theory of relativity and I toss it to one side and say, this is a simplistic argument, all I've confessed is that I don't know how to analyze an argument or a theorem.
In science, a hypothesis, and so I've simply confessed my own incapacity to analyze anything from a rational standpoint.
As pretending to know something you don't, right?
So, you can say that an argument is simplistic, but then you have to say, Dare I say it?
You have to say why it is simplistic.
Merely calling an argument simplistic is not an argument.
There's a reason that we go to school for years to learn how to think clearly and rationally and if we could just use the word simplistic to rebut arguments that's like calling yourself a doctor because you shout the word health at a tumor thinking it's going to get better.
Now, there are lots of arguments that Peter makes in the book about why faith is pretending to know something you don't.
And she doesn't address any of them.
She simply uses the word simplistic.
I mean, that's not even simplistic.
That's just ridiculous.
I mean, it's not even an argument.
It's not even wrong.
In other words, it's not even a bad argument.
So she writes on, darker still is his tendency to refer to faith as a virus and an affliction.
Yes, well he makes the case for that as well.
You cannot inflict religion on your children without threatening them and bribing them.
You simply can't.
And also you cannot inflict religion on your children without lying to them about the prevalence of other religious beliefs.
So if you say to your children There's no heaven and no hell, and you do not intimidate them, and you do not threaten them, and you do not threaten the withdrawal of approval or anything like that, but you simply say, here's a religious belief, there are 10,000 opposing religious beliefs in the world, and I'm not going to promise you any benefit or anything negative to believing or not believing in this religious belief, then religion would be gone.
You know, about five years, right?
Because in the first five years this indoctrination generally takes hold in the minds of children.
So, the fact that you can only trigger the continuation of religion by threatening children with hell and bribing them with heaven and also threatening them with personal Disapproval, anger, threats of abandonment, hostility, punishment, spanking, in order to get children to accept religion is why it is kind of like a virus.
It attacks the weakest among us in society, the most dependent among us in society, and it replicates by damaging the brains of those tender and helpless children when this eye-watering, brain-shredding searchlight of religious darkness is turned into their brains.
And it is.
Things which are false are an affliction.
And a philosopher that's interested in diminishing error and increasing truth claims, and establishing the validity of truth claims, is kind of doing what a philosopher is supposed to do.
The other thing too, I've made the argument before, that the more irrational A belief system is, the more aggression is required to inflict it on children.
So, if you give your child an empty iPad box at Christmas, and they open up the iPad, and you want them to thank you, you have to be pretty aggressive, pretty hostile, pretty manipulative, pretty punishing, in order to get the child to pretend that there's an iPad there when there isn't, because their sense is denied that there's an iPad.
They really want an iPad.
The fact that there isn't breaks their heart, but they then have to cheer.
And there's no evidence of any kind for the existence of God.
God is entirely logically contradictory, biologically contradictory, empirically invalidated, and so on, right?
It's consciousness without Matter.
Consciousness is an effect of matter like gravity is an effect of mass.
God can't be all-powerful and all-knowing because if God is all-powerful, he can do anything he wants in the future.
If he's all-knowing, he has to know exactly what he's going to do in the future and everything that's going to happen in the future.
You can't have both of these things.
It is the most complex consciousness which has never evolved, and we know from biology and evolution that complexity is the result of evolution.
It's like expecting an eye before a single-celled organism.
It's not going to happen.
Anyway, there's six million different reasons as to why a god is logically contradictory and empirically non-existent.
So there's no iPad.
You have to tell the children to cheer that there is an iPad.
You can only do that through aggression, which is why fundamentalist religions score much higher in terms of spanking, hitting, child abuse, and so on.
You really do have to harm children to get them to believe in the invisible and cheer the non-existent.
So, yes, it is very harmful and very dangerous to children.
Every enlightenment has a dark side, she goes on to write.
Modern atheisms may be its creeping idolatry of reason and reality, which in our current political circumstance gives way to Islamophobia and sexism.
Well, given how sexist Islam is, I'm not sure how you can get Islamophobia and sexism into the same category.
Now, she goes on to talk about Rebecca Watson, who was proposed, somebody said, come back to my hotel room at four o'clock in the morning, and she found this shocking and appalling, and, you know, this is charges of sexism rampant back and forth in the atheist community.
And I have no doubt whatsoever, at all, that there are sexist atheists.
I have no doubt whatsoever that there are racist atheists, and there are atheists who are not kind to their cats, and there are atheists who don't vacuum under their couch, and there are atheists who don't apply enough deodorant, and there are atheists who do all of these things.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with The arguments for atheism.
The personal habits or personal belief systems of atheists outside of atheism have virtually no bearing whatsoever on the arguments for atheism.
I mean, it's literally like saying, the guy who told you that two and two make four was a racist, and therefore two and two don't make four.
It's not relevant.
The arguments for atheism are valid or invalid.
Pointing at the personal bad habits of atheists has nothing to do with anything.
You cannot judge an argument by unrelated belief systems.
That's like saying Hitler wasn't evil because he was nice to dogs.
It doesn't make any sense.
I mean, I could say Marxism It's invalid because Marx had sex with his maid and then threw her out on the street when she got pregnant and therefore his arguments that exploiting the masses is bad are irrelevant because he exploited a worker who is dependent on him.
I mean, obviously it wasn't great that he did that, and it certainly means that he has no problem exploiting the workers, but it doesn't mean that his arguments are false.
However personally distasteful even his own life was in other areas, that's not an argument against his arguments.
You either find them valid or you find them invalid.
And so the idea that atheism is somehow invalidated because there are some irrational Atheists, or atheists who are irrational in other areas, is like saying that somebody who believes in God can't possibly drive a car.
They would just let Jesus take the wheel.
It doesn't make any sense.
You look at the arguments themselves, finding the worst people who claim to be part of a movement, and then saying that you're going to critique the movement, when the movement is really based upon a series of arguments, rather than critiquing the arguments, again, it's just... it's lazy.
I mean, this is not what thinkers do.
Let's see here.
Yeah, there's a difference between challenging an idea and attacking a person.
He says religion isn't an immutable characteristic of a person.
So he says religion isn't an immutable characteristic of a person.
Yeah, because, I mean, I get this, too.
People say, like, I'm bashing religion and things like that.
You know, again, arguments are valid or they're invalid.
The word bashing, all it does is tell me that you are emotionally triggered by a particular argument and don't have the skill, capacity, or intelligence to rebut it or examine it, and therefore you're going to just, you know, don't like the painting, fling mud at it, mug it, mud at it.
Look, the painting has kind of gone away.
And so religion isn't an immutable characteristic of a person.
Of course we are always trying to talk people out of error.
I mean, slavery was a massive moral error.
And talking people out of slavery was a pretty good thing.
And it wasn't like, well, slavery isn't for me, but if you want to do it, go ahead.
That's not how the opposition to fundamental moral evils within mankind goes.
You take a stand for truth, for reason, for evidence, and so on.
So, Peter says, religion isn't an immutable characteristic of a person.
He's right.
Technically, it's not.
I see.
Again, you bring in the word "technically" and I don't know what that means, other than you're just refusing to admit that you're wrong.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
Technically, that's true.
I don't know what technically adds to that.
It's true or it's not.
Right?
I mean, it's either...
It's either true or it's not.
Red and yellow make orange.
Well, technically that's true.
Technically?
What does that mean?
Religion isn't an immutable characteristic of a person.
He's right.
Technically it's not.
Unfortunately, though, the Nazis didn't care about technicalities, nor did any other non-religious power that killed on the basis of religion.
Okay, well, Nazis... The Nazis didn't care about technicalities, nor did any other non-religious power that killed on the basis of religion.
Oh, so I think she's talking about the Nazis were a state and they killed Jews because they were Jewish.
I think that's what she's saying.
Religion isn't an immutable characteristic of a person.
Technically it's not.
The Nazis didn't care about technicalities, and so the Nazis killed Jews because they considered it an immutable characteristic of a person.
What did the Nazis have to do with his argument?
That's sort of first and foremost.
And you hear this, you know, when you're an atheist, it's, you know, it's the mustache argument, you know, Stalin and Hitler were both atheists, and look at all the death that they caused, and so on.
Well, first of all, Stalin was raised by a vicious, vicious child-beating priest, and Hitler was certainly raised religious, and he was beaten by his religious father into a coma as a child, probably causing significant brain damage, and certainly not allowing him to develop the basic empathy neurons that good parenting bring to you to allow you to function in an empathetic way in the world.
But what's important, you know, just by the by, since this argument comes up a lot, what's important about the Nazis and the Communists was not whether the leaders were atheists or religious, but rather what countries did they take over?
Right?
Which countries did they take over?
Well, the Nazis took over in Germany, of course, the fascists took over in Italy, and the communists took over in Russia.
Now, these were, by far, the three most religious countries in Europe at the time.
I mean, jamming Russia into Europe for the moment.
Russia was, of course, orthodox and was incredibly religious.
They had not received much of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Scientific Revolution, and so on.
Germany was embroiled in 100-plus years of religious war during the time of the greatest changes and rationalizations, approach of rationality in the West.
And so Germany was by far the most religious country in Western Europe.
Russia was incredibly religious.
And Italy, of course, a seat of Catholicism.
And so you often hear like religion is somehow a sort of proof against or an inoculation against a tyranny, but it doesn't really explain why the most religious people in Europe fell prey to these kinds of tyrannies.
And I would argue, of course, that God is a classical tyrant, in fact, one of the most murderous tyrants in all of literature, as he's portrayed in the Old Testament and to some degree in the New Testament.
And, of course, the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Old Testament was when the Jews were in charge and therefore they could be as tyrannical in that sense.
The New Testament was designed to appeal to a slave population and therefore there was a lot of turn the other cheek and, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth and it's easier for A camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
It's just because they had to make people who were slaves feel that they were somehow rewarded for being in the lowest position in society, so it doesn't really have anything to do with changing ethics.
It's just the audience, right?
Tyrannical patriarchs in the Judaic tradition versus Roman slaves in the Empire.
So it is really important to understand that worshipping a tyrant such as the Old Testament deity primes you significantly for totalitarianism.
It's one way to explain why these countries that were so religious became so susceptible to tyranny.
Now of course communism is another form of religion where you replace God with the state.
It's fundamentally the same kind of thing.
Philosophy fights irrationality.
Communism is fundamentally an irrational doctrine, as is fascism, as is Nazism.
They are irrational doctrines, and therefore to say that atheism, which is one manifestation of the fight against irrationality, is somehow responsible for other Irrationalities is literally like saying that trying to get people to eat better is responsible for racism.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
So, it takes context to make that distinction.
Whatever distinction is truth-making, I think about the Nazis.
And it's context, not faith, that today's atheist agitators surely lack.
For now, I'll take the guy at the door.
You know, it's not all about Emma and her ability to close the door.
There are lots of people who don't really have the ability to close the door.
Women in Islamic theocracies don't really have the option to say, no thanks, you're just like the knife cutter, the guy selling the knife, sorry, I don't really feel like I'm going to be part of this, I really want to wear a burqa, I'd really like to drive, I don't want to get stoned to death, I don't want to live under Sharia law, no thanks.
Well, they don't have that choice.
Children born into fundamentalist religious households do not have the chance to say, oh, no thanks, Mom and Dad.
Not really for me.
It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me.
I think I'm going to go out and play, and I sure as heck don't want to wedge myself into my Sunday best early on Sunday mornings.
I don't want to go to church.
Three times a week, and I don't want to believe in hell and damn fire, damn nation, all this kind of stuff.
This is not possible.
And the reason that it's not possible is lots of thinkers have worked on the separation of church and state, and are now continuing to work on the separation between religion and philosophy.
Religion and philosophy are really in the same place, because religion is making universal truth claims about reality, and philosophy is examining those and finding them, well, let's say, wanting to a significant degree.
So I hope that helps.
I just need to find that quote, because it's driving me nuts.
I, you know, as a guy with a half an English degree, I really should know this about Alexander Pope.
Oh, how sad.
I should know that.
I knew it was some guy, some poet.
And so, yes, The Glory Jest and Terror of the World in Endless Era Herald.
An essay on man.
So this is, let me just, I'm so sorry, this is something I should know off the top of my head, but let me just make sure that I reestablish my literary geek credentials to some degree.
Let me just get you the full quote.
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