All Episodes
Previous Next
July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:33
Religious Hypocrisy 101
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, Jordan. Hi, Stefan.
How are you? I'm very well.
How are you doing? Good.
Thanks for taking my call this morning.
I'm really happy to hear about your health.
That makes two of us.
Yeah, I bet.
I was actually the one that emailed you about...
You actually kind of talked about it already in your last podcast about...
The kid leaving religion, having a girlfriend still that might want to raise her kids in the church.
Yes, okay. So it's you who's more than dating but not quite engaged to the woman who's still hilt deep in the Mormon faith?
Exactly. Yep, that's me.
Right. So, yeah, I wanted to thank you for talking about it the other day.
I was listening to it and I was like, oh, He's talking about my issue.
But, you know, it's kind of a bigger issue, though.
There's more to it.
Just that one thing is just one little aspect of leaving the Mormon faith, you know?
And so maybe I thought we could talk about that today.
Absolutely. I'm very happy to.
So just for the background for those who have not...
I mean, if there's one person out there who happened to be in a coma when I did my last show, I'm sure that everyone's heard it.
But just in case you haven't, this fine fellow wrote to me and said that he was a Mormon and he's left the...
I hate to say left the faith.
That sounds like you are now faithless.
You now believe in nothing. But he's left the religion, for want of a better word.
But his girlfriend slash live in...
You guys live together? No, not yet.
Okay. So, but she's interested in getting married, he's interested in getting married, but she wants to raise the children in the Mormon belief system.
And you, I think not so much of my advice was that you can believe whatever you want, but you don't have the right to inflict superstitions on your children because they don't have a choice in the matter.
You know, it's prisoner indoctrination to inflict irrationalities on your children.
On your children because they can't leave.
They didn't choose to be there. They didn't choose you as parents and so on.
So that's not something that is, I think, a positive and productive thing to do.
I don't even think it's a moral thing to do, but that's sort of where we have.
Do you want to talk more about it, which I think is great.
I mean, certainly my two minutes on it can't possibly do justice to a very complex issue, so I'm certainly happy to talk further about it.
Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
Well, let me give you my backstory then.
When I was very young, about, you know, five, I mean, My parents would take me to church back in the day.
And I remember that I did not appreciate it.
I didn't want to go to church.
I didn't understand what they were saying.
Plus, the clothes would itch and the shoes would come untied.
It was just a big hassle.
I didn't like it. And I had an experience one day where I felt...
The one thing I did like about church was being able to sing.
I kind of liked singing as a kid.
And... As I was singing at church one time, I kind of felt emotional about it.
I started thinking about the words, I got emotional, and I felt as if at the time that this was the revelation, the answer of God to me that everybody was talking about.
And from that moment forward, that's probably like seven or eight or something like that, from that moment forward until I was about 22 or three, I was totally devoted to 100% to the church.
And looking back on it now, and even during it, I kind of felt like something was wrong.
And looking back on it now, I can kind of see how my growth, my intellectual development, in every way, emotional, social, was kind of stunted by me being so into it, so dedicated, and so Believing that it was true and everything.
I mean, I don't know.
We can get into that. Like, when you have that, you kind of adopt a different set of morals.
But they're not your morals.
They're just commandments.
And so that's just one example of how you just stunt your own growth by, or I felt like I stunted my growth.
By just adopting all these things without even thinking about it.
Just saying, oh, well, it's what the church teaches, so it's got to be true, so I'm down.
So, I mean, looking back on that now, I can see how it's kind of hurt me as a person, and I don't want to do that to my kids, and I don't really see that my girlfriend sees that yet.
She just sees the good stuff, like a social structure and And having friends and, I don't know, all those other kind of good things that a church embodies.
But I don't want to put my kids through what I've been through.
So, that's kind of some of the background.
Yeah, just a couple of thoughts that popped into my head.
First of all, music is...
Music has a really dark side, and I think you sort of experienced that as well, which is that music is very effective in terms of propaganda.
It's hypnotic. It gives you emotions without intellectual content, which is always very dangerous.
And, of course, when it's communal, when everyone's singing together, there's a feeling of unity that comes simply out of everyone singing together, which is entirely artificial.
Like, I mean, if you go to a sports game and everybody starts singing some song, there's a false feeling of unity.
The same thing happens, of course, with national anthems and so on.
There's a very false feeling of unity that comes with everyone singing together, and it bypasses sort of rational intellectual skepticism.
Music is very dangerous, particularly for children, because it can provide them, again, emotional content without intellectual content, which is dangerous.
It gives a false feeling of unity, which is why there's always singing in propaganda.
Think of the music that goes into totalitarian regimes.
Think of all of the hymns to the state called national anthems or the hymns to deities called Religious music, it is all very effective in getting people to feel this sense of emotional connection and unity without actual emotional connection.
Intimacy is great, and intimacy requires that you really know what the other person thinks and feels.
But if you want everyone to feel like they have intimacy, just get them all to do something together, and music is about the most effective in creating that.
So the fact that it happened during music is not accidental.
A lot of the religions have this sort of chanting that is designed to put you into a semi-hypnotic state.
Think of the Gregorian chants that happened in the Middle Ages.
I used to sing some of those when I was in theater school.
We used to use them as warm-up exercises.
And they are incredibly hypnotic when you think about it.
They put you into a state of receptivity, which is very dangerous I think again.
So a lot of the stuff that happens in almost all of the major religions to do with chanting and to do with songs is...
It's a way of bypassing your critical and rational faculties and getting you to feel connected and united with people without the actual trouble of getting to know them as individuals.
So I've always sort of looked at it like music is like a fast-flowing current and all the salmon end up swimming kind of in the same direction, but just because there's a current, not because they've all made some sort of decision.
And so music is something that is very tricky when it comes to children.
And If you get children to repeatedly sing songs that have an emotional content, both in terms of the kind of music, like what kind of music, happy, sad, or whatever, the devotional music where children are repeatedly singing the tenets of the religion, then that's very much propagandizing them.
It's like getting people to just repeat a particular intellectual position over and over again with songs, stirring music, and so on.
It gives them a feeling of truth without the work of actually trying to achieve truth.
So I think that music is a beautiful and wonderful part of life.
But like all of the things that have power in human nature, it has generally been hijacked by the worst elements in society, pointed at children, and the trigger is repeatedly pulled.
So I'm sorry. I'm sorry about that, but I can certainly understand that during a time of musical ecstasy that you felt a bond with the religion because that's really the point.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's exactly, exactly.
Well, it worked on me, you know.
They devolved very well, you know.
Whatever didn't work in terms of propaganda was – whatever religion said, oh, I know – Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, and I have some other issues that have come up.
I mean, like, first of all, with the girlfriend thing, I don't exactly know...
So I've been through this process of leaving the church and thinking more rationally and all this for a few years now, and I've come to where I am, and I can't expect her to...
I'm not trying to change her.
Like, if she wanted to go to church for the rest of her life, that'd be fine.
But... I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I just wanted to pause on that point.
Yeah. Why don't you want to change her?
I would love to have an influence or a little persuasion and opening her mind up to things.
But I started dating her and I developed this relationship while she was LDS and she's wonderful.
I'm in love with her.
I just... I can accept her for who she is.
I hope that makes sense.
And... But...
Because we all come to relationships with our past, right?
Other things that we just accept in the other person because we love all the good characteristics about them.
And... I don't know.
But I don't want that to be...
Well, sorry. Again, I just want to ask a question or two.
Do you believe that – I'm trying to phrase it in a way that's not leading because, I mean, I really want an open-ended.
I don't have an answer to this on the tip of my tongue.
Do you believe that religious faith is positive, neutral, or destructive to a person's true identity or rational integrity or what have you?
That's a good question.
Let me tell you what.
I went on an LDS mission church, right?
An LDS mission.
And I saw and I continue to see.
An LDS mission is where you're a young adult, like 20 years old, and you go out for two years preaching the gospel door to door.
Yeah. That's basically what it is.
You go with other people.
The only reason that God put sidewalks in suburbia, right?
Exactly. So I saw a lot of people that find the church or find a church because they're at a low in their life or they don't have anything.
They need a kind of moral code to live by.
They're willing to change.
And they just don't have a moral code.
An identity for themselves.
So they're missing these things and religion will provide that.
And I continue to see that constantly.
So it's good in a way that it's a crutch for people because I asked my own mom when I was making these decisions about what I felt about the church.
I said, Mom, why do you go to church and why have you gone to church your whole life?
And she didn't say...
Like I would have a few years ago, that it's true.
Like, it's true. What else matters?
I want to go to heaven, not to hell, and all that, right?
Exactly. She didn't say all that, which is what I would have said a while ago.
But she said, it's a good way to live your life.
You know, it has good teachings.
She said, I have a great husband, a good family.
We have a good community.
That's why she's in the church.
And... So it has positive aspects to it like that, but if you want to, I don't know, I kind of feel like saying it's a crutch to not taking control of the way you live your life for your own self.
Like, when you're in the church, like I have been, and you just follow the commandments, the guidelines, just because, you know, just because you don't want to go to hell or You don't want other people in the community to look down on you or whatever reason it is.
It's not because you think...
I mean, you might also think, hey, that's a good idea, but it's not because you've sat down, at least this wasn't for me, and decided this is, may I say, universally preferable behavior.
So you haven't decided that for yourself.
You haven't thought about it logically, figured it out.
You just accept it.
It's kind of a crutch, but it has good aspects to it in that respect.
Kind of a life by life.
I don't like it to extend past one generation, right?
But if somebody feels like they need religion in their life, then it can be good.
It can get people out of drugs.
It can do those kinds of things.
Provide them with a...
Like if they're a vine, something to grow onto, you know?
But I want to be a treat.
I just want to have a trunk and grow myself.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
Let me also add something that I've been thinking about lately.
So, you know, for those who don't know about, I think about two months ago, whenever I was diagnosed with cancer, and I'm going through chemotherapy, and unfortunately, it's not having a hugely negative impact.
I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad to a A four-year-old, and I was told by the doctor it was unlikely I would be able to provide care for her, but fortunately, I'm able to still provide great care for my daughter.
If I wasn't, and I was part of a church, there would be, from what I've seen, there would be people who would really step up to help out.
And you get that kind of social support network.
A friend of mine's father had brain cancer.
And he was an atheist, but as the, you know, not too subtle a metaphor, but I don't know the degree of which it's biological, but as the brain cancer continued to destroy his higher cognitive faculties, he became more and more religious, and he and his wife ended up joining a church, and the church was incredibly supportive during the, the churchgoers were incredibly supportive during the final stages of what was an incredibly difficult illness to go through to manage and so on.
And I think, you know, if he'd been an objectivist, it's hard to imagine, or a libertarian, it's hard to imagine that same level of community support would have occurred.
And there are these...
Incredibly hard trials and tribulations that occur where people become resource black holes.
They need resources.
They need someone to come and help them and a family can do that.
That's great for people who don't, like if you're older and you don't have your parents who can do that or maybe siblings are further away.
The one thing that, well, one of the many things that religion does get right is the degree to which it is willing to invest time and energy in its members.
So lots of religious groups, you know, when I'm at the hospital, I see lots of religious groups who are volunteering to be, I think they're called candy stripers, volunteering at hospitals to help people out.
And I don't know the degree to which I would see a lot of libertarians volunteering at hospitals to help people out.
And one of the things I'm thinking of is in the fall, when this is all behind me, to start focusing on really generating more libertarian charities, because this has been quite instructive to me.
I mean, so far, I have missed...
A bullet has missed me that could have been incredibly difficult, which would be I would be unable to provide care for my daughter, and what would I do?
It's a real challenge.
So the one thing I think that libertarianism slash objectivism slash anarchism tends to be a young, single, healthy, independent man's gig.
This doesn't have anything to do with the truth or falseness of it.
I still fully accept the truth of the anarchic principles, but the older you get, the more challenging Your resource requirements become and the one thing that religion does is they bring soup to the sick and they volunteer and they help out and That, to me, has been a very important and instructive thing, to understand the prevalence of religion, to understand the challenges that people have in joining anarchic communities or voluntarist communities.
And this is why I think things like the Free State Project are interesting.
And I don't know the degree to which there's charity going on there.
I'm sure there is. But I think that is one of the things that becomes challenging for people who are focused on this...
This paradigm of volunteerism is that it's not a big enough set of communities yet where you can get the resources that you need from your community for free if you need them.
There's not enough to build that sort of reciprocity of tribal networks that are the hammock and support system for those who, through no fault of their own, tend to be in significant need.
That is already there.
That's built in when you join a church.
I just wanted to point out that the community aspect, I think, is important to religion.
When I was facing my diagnosis and what the doctors were telling me, the toll that the treatments were going to take on me, it was a challenge.
It's not like I can just go to my local atheist-anarchist gathering and say, dudes, I need some help here.
I need some significant resources to help get me through the next couple of months.
That's not possible. And in that sense, I can sort of understand the degree to which the welfare state rose with the collapse of religion in many people's lives because there just are times when you need those resources.
And how do you deal with that?
I think that's an interesting question. I don't have a big answer for it other than I think – I was trying to think of objectivist slash libertarian charities and volunteer groups and so on.
I've certainly tried to get some of the listeners of my show involved in things like Big Brother and so on, and they have, and I think they've had very positive experiences with that.
And I myself donate to charity and all that kind of stuff, particularly the stuff which helps get medicine to kids in the third world.
I think that's all very important.
But I can understand in a way that I didn't before the degree to which when you need resources, having a collective community is important.
Obviously, I think that a rational philosophical community would be far better than a superstitious one, but beggars can't be choosers when you need those resources.
Does this make any sense to you?
Oh, that's one of the challenges that I'm dealing with while leaving religion.
Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah.
It's like you've got to wander off into the desert saying, I'm sure there's an oasis out there somewhere.
And across your fingers time.
That's how I feel. Yeah, that's how I feel.
It's hard. I mean, this is all I've known, right?
And so I'm venturing out.
And the other hard thing about this is...
Your family doesn't understand, right?
And I haven't even really talked to them about it.
I've only talked to my immediate closest friends.
So... And that has already proven a challenge with my girlfriend and this situation that we've been talking about.
So just being able to communicate it with your family, I'm not going to get any empathy from them.
And I'm only, when there's no empathy, there's got to be judgment.
And so I know that I'm only going to get judgment, probably quiet, silent judgment.
Like, oh, did you hear about Jordan, this, that, and the other, you know?
Not to my face, but I'm not excited about that either.
So, I keep, I don't know, yeah, but...
I get that.
I mean, that's hard.
You know, wouldn't it be great in life if just once you could get the cheese without the trap taking a finger off?
Wouldn't that be great if you could pursue truth and wisdom and self-knowledge and rational virtues and integrity and thinking for yourself and reasoning, all of that, and get all of the beautiful and wonderful prizes of that without at the same time having some big-ass fucking bear trap take your leg off at the same time?
Wouldn't that be great if you just didn't have to choose between reason and community?
I mean, man, because we're social beings.
We're not isolated astral-traveling cats, for God's sakes.
We're social beings.
We like community.
We need community. But at the same time, we are driven to reason and truth and evidence.
And these poles, these opposites, it really does feel like you're sometimes in that old Genghis Khan punishment of having four horses tied to each limb, and they all charge off in an opposite direction.
I hope I hug myself okay, because Otherwise, I'm going to be bouncing all over the tundra in various pieces.
And it's horrible that after 2,500 years of philosophy, the choice remains as stark now as it did in the days of the pre-Socratics.
Now, it's true that we're not given hemlock anymore, and there has been some significant progress.
We ain't burned at the stake as much as we used to.
Good, good stuff.
But it does suck that integrity...
Tends to isolation.
And honesty tends to ostracism.
And that is tragic.
And that remains, I think, as heartbreaking.
I talked about this when I was in New York.
This remains as heartbreaking now as it did in the past.
Where I can say, I get my human need for community met at my individual need for actualization.
Or I can get my individual need for actualization met at the expense of my human need for community.
And it, as they used to say in the Old Testament, it doth suck.
So I really sympathize with that.
Yeah, well thank you.
Thank you for your sympathy. But it's really, I have to thank you also because what's been helping me also is good examples of people that can stand on their empty feet, you know.
And like yourself, I mean, when I was kind of thinking about libertarian or Anarchist concepts.
And I saw Doug Casey.
I was like, this guy, he doesn't care what other people think.
And you just kind of have to be that way if you're going to go this route of objectivism or, you know, rational thinking.
Well, I mean, I know that there's, and this is all just my personal opinion.
This is not philosophy.
This is just person to person, open my heart time.
I don't know the degree to which not caring about what other people think while it is a relief to imagine it and it probably is a relief to experience it.
I don't know the degree to which it is an ideal emotional state to be in.
Empathy is not a laser.
Empathy is like sunlight.
At least I think real empathy is like sunlight.
So I've not been able to find a way to only care about what my friends and wife and daughter think.
And nobody else has any impact on me.
To me it just seems like a big giant switch.
If you turn your empathy off, well okay, then you don't care what people think.
But I think that's very costly.
In terms of interdependence and love and emotional connection and all that.
I mean, I incredibly care what my friends think of me.
I incredibly care what my wife thinks of me and I incredibly, incredibly care what my daughter thinks of me.
Almost every single day, probably a few times a day, I ask her how her day's going, how she's enjoying her time with me, if there's anything I can do different or better.
It really, really matters to me what they think of me.
I have not found a way to, like a big giant table saw, cut that little part out of my heart and have only the people who I care about, that's the only people I ever care about, what they think of me and have no opinion whatsoever or no interest whatsoever in what anybody else out of this particular circle It seems to me that there's always a case where there's overlap, where people I don't care about, do I care what they think about me?
Well, yeah, probably to some degrees less, right?
But I think that the ideal of I don't want to care what people think about me, I think that I don't know any way to achieve that.
Other than... Without.
I mean, there is no switch, at least for me, to turn off empathy.
So I don't know how to achieve that, and I don't know how to achieve that in a way, even if I could, that's so precise that it only targets the people I'm indifferent to or don't like and never targets the people who are incredibly important to me.
Yes. Yes.
Okay. So that's a new epiphany for me.
Then... I don't know if Doug Casey has kids or a wife.
I don't know much about his personal life at all.
I haven't either. My first thought, and I like Doug a lot, but my first thought would be, has that indifference come at the price of other things that I would not be willing to pay?
Yes. Yeah, I see where you're coming from.
I see that now.
So that means that the solution to my problems with communicating with everybody, my family, community, my girlfriend, even friends, would be...
Can you give me some guidelines on this of how to approach this topic of the new me, I guess, without just how to communicate it effectively to maybe be understood and Or so that I can care what they think about me and put my best foot forward.
Does that make sense? Yeah.
There's no way to solve the fundamental problem, I don't think.
I mean, and I'm telling you this is my opinion.
This is no absolute answer because that I think would be impossible, at least certainly impossible for me.
I don't think there's any way to solve the problem that honestly on your part is going to cause emotional difficulties for others.
Who are still religious in your circle.
Right? So I think if you accept that as a possible fact, I think it's true.
If other people have become conformists, then you are becoming an individual.
There is...
Whether we like it or not, there is an implicit criticism of collectivism from individualism, right?
So if you say, I'm no longer going to believe things that other people inflicted upon me as a child, oh, and that reminds me of the one thing I, you know, if you listen to this again, and I would recommend that you do, I would focus when you listen on your story about for how long you were religious from,
as you say the musical experience to your early 20s you talk a lot about your choices and and and what you believed in someone rather than what was inflicted upon you and for which there was enormous social pressure to conform to so i'd really focus on the outside forces rather than your individual choices i think that's especially because you were a kid i just wanted to mention that i wanted to mention that earlier but i forgot so so i don't think there's any way to say i am going to choose to think for myself
i'm going to choose to reject the irrational superstitions that were frankly unjustly inflicted upon me as a child and i'm going to live with reason and philosophy and integrity and true virtue rather than just obedience to edicts and so on And that's better for me.
This is not, you know, I've switched from heavy metal to jazz, right?
All right. Which is a matter of taste, not a matter of better and worse.
Because there is an implicit criticism.
When you choose reason over superstition, there is an implicit criticism of superstition that is not personal to you, but is rather more objective and true for everyone.
Does that make any sense? Yeah, that makes sense.
So that aspect, until reality reverses itself, which I'm not holding my breath for, that is not something that I think we'll be able to change.
Now, do you think that there's a possibility...
I don't know the edicts of the Mormon Church, but just looking at Christianity, and again, I know it's not exactly the same, but looking at Christianity, one of the things that is the most frustrating is the self-reinforcing cherry-picking that occurs during times of moral crisis.
It seems to me, from what I've seen, that all Christians do is they use religion in general to reinforce whatever emotional impulse that they're having, right?
So when the planes fly into the World Trade Center, the Christians, who are the vast majority in America, the Christians seem to forget a couple of edicts that Jesus put forward, like turn the other goddamn cheek and love your enemies.
That was nowhere to be seen.
I didn't see any of the Christians and almost all of the people in the media and the people in politics.
They're all Christians and not like Sunday once an hour Christians, but real God-fearing, Christ-loving Christians.
I did not see any of them say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Christ commanded us to love our enemies.
Christ commanded us to turn the other cheek.
If you ask for your cloak, give him your shirt too.
If you ask you to walk a mile with him, walk two miles with him.
Let us take the example, what would Jesus do?
Jesus would try to love his enemies and try to understand where they were coming from.
I saw none of that in the lead up to two of the most brutal invasions the world has ever seen.
You're totally right. And that is really kind of frustrating when you see that Right.
Right.
I mean, they're not hard to find.
But the whole point of Christianity is to allow the adaptations that Christ put upon the Old Testament religious commandments to be primal, to have primacy.
You're not supposed to skip over Jesus and go to the goddamn Old Testament if you're a Christian.
You know, the key is in the first five letters, folks.
It is incredibly frustrating, though – I mean, it's not that frustrating for me anymore because I understand it in a deeper way.
But it is incredibly frustrating when you see Christians continually satisfying their bloodlust with no reference to the central tenets of their religion because it makes you ask, what the hell is the point of the religious edicts if they just reinforce whatever you feel like doing what the hell is the point of the religious edicts if Repulses on steroids.
That is the essence of almost all the religion that I've ever seen in the world.
And it would be really nice for the Christians who praise somebody who went against the dominant ideology and theology of his time, who attempted to reverse some of the more brutal commandments of the eye for an eye Old Testament psycho deity, for one of them to actually emulate what Jesus was supposed to be doing and stand before the Chinese tanks of righteous vengeance and say, no, Jesus taught us to love our enemies.
What would Jesus do? Would Jesus go and bomb the shit out of the Iraqi civilian population and the Afghanistan civilian population who in no way were responsible for what happened?
No! That is not what Jesus would do.
I stand before you and say, stop!
Let us remember the commandments of that, of the man we worship.
Did you see any of that in the lead-up to the war?
You know, I hate to say this, but I saw exactly what you did.
I was in high school or whatever, and I don't remember too much about the news.
I didn't care. But I would go to church, and I remember sitting there.
Because in our church, it's not just one preacher.
All the members get up and give talks and whatever.
So I remember...
Sitting there, listening to these people get up and say, you know, they were for the war.
And not just like, it's my opinion, that's great.
No, they would say like, this is what we need to do, you know?
And I remember thinking like, really?
I had to ignore it though, because I was totally in the faith.
I had to be like, well, maybe they're right, I don't know.
And I just had to Forget it.
But I do remember it bugging me, saying, you know, it kind of feels like weird.
I mean, they're saying that these Muslims or whoever are just bloodthirsty, their religion tells us all to kill each other or whatever.
But I was like, we're kind of, seems to me that we're kind of doing the same thing.
So, the same thing that we're preaching against, right?
Yeah, just stare in the mirror and paint a turban on, and that's the reality.
But the power of religion to get you to say, oh, well, whatever.
That's sad. I look back on that, and I'm sad that I just had to...
They're like, well, I guess, whatever.
And I couldn't think to myself. And there's no backtracking that I can see.
Like, nobody has said, you know what?
In our lust for blood, we committed the unforgivable sin of baying like a bunch of rabid jackals, baying for the blood of our enemies.
We forgot the teachings of Jesus, and now look what's happened.
You know, we've killed over a million Iraqis.
I don't think anybody even knows how many Afghanis have been turned into vaporized rubble.
We forgot the teachings of Jesus, we committed a sin, and now we must make amends.
I don't think there's been any goddamn backtracking at all from the Christians.
There never is. With regards to not following the teachings of Jesus and joining into the low-rent, baying, paleolithic blood pack of vengeance seekers, there's no circling back.
There's no, oh my, I mean...
The priests drove the war more than the politicians did.
I mean, everybody focuses on the politicians.
Ooh, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, ooh, Rice, bad, bad, bad.
No, I mean, the priests drove the war.
America is by far the most religious of the Western countries.
I mean, there's not even a close second.
It's by far the most religious.
And if the priests had told people, Jesus loves his enemies, don't you dare bathe for the blood of those who have attacked you.
Don't you dare bathe Go for bloodlust.
You cannot go and slaughter the innocent children of your enemy and call it virtue.
That is directly against the teachings of Jesus.
If the Pope had said everybody who supports the war is excommunicated, anybody who lifts up a gun to shoot, even if we had the enemies in our sights, anybody who pulls the trigger is directly disobeying the central commandment of Jesus to love your enemies, there would have been no war!
Yeah. And the fact that the priests are back there driving and whipping the sheep all over the cliff in the fiery furnace of sin and bloodlust is something that atheists should be pointing out repeatedly.
They drove the war.
They herded the sheep into the war.
They blessed and approved those who shoot the innocents and bomb the children.
And not only do they do nothing relative to their own ideals and edicts to stop the war in its tracks, they're the ones who drove and made it happen to begin with.
Yeah, it's really sad.
What did the Pope do? Well, the Pope did what the Pope always does.
Gets behind and licks the boots of those with the biggest goddamn guns.
I mean, the Pope says, I excommunicate, I condemn as a sin, ex.
That is some serious shit.
Hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world will take that shit very seriously.
He had the power with a word to prevent a war.
Who else has that power?
And what does he do?
He goes home and forgives his pedophile priests and licks all the fucking gold in the basement of the Vatican.
Excuse my outrage, but I think it's justified.
It is justified, totally.
These people don't know because there's so much status propaganda.
I'm sorry, who don't know?
The first thing you've given me is forgiveness.
And I get that that's a virtue, but let's forgive what is real, not what is imagined.
So, who doesn't know?
Well, I was talking about the people in my little community when I was growing up in high school, right?
They don't know the edict, turn the other cheek?
Oh, they know that.
They don't know the edict, love your enemies?
I see it on bumper stickers, for heaven's sakes.
This is not a closely kept secret written in ancient Aramaic on the inside foreskin of the Pope.
They're not keeping this one secret, are they?
No. What they don't know is that the status propaganda has turned it all so that they think this war is just going after the bad guys and we're liberating the people and giving them democracy.
This is the kind of stuff that I get when I bring it up.
When you say backtracking, they say, oh, well, we were trying to do this and It just didn't work out.
And this is what's so frustrating.
The equation, the state takes away the economic responsibility of the war by printing money and going into debt so people don't feel the economic brunt of their bloodlust.
So the state facilitates it.
The state greases the tubes, but it's religion that lights the fuse.
That's what propels it.
And Religion has been utterly unable to solve the problem of war for 2,500 years or 6,000 years depending on how you count it.
Religion has been utterly unable to solve the problem of war.
The state, and in fact facilitates and drives it, and the state has not only been utterly unable to solve the problem of war but facilitates and drives it.
And this is why I have sworn enmity to these two institutions.
Because until we can solve the problem of war, we cannot have a just world.
We cannot have a peaceful world.
And religion, Christianity in particular, one of the moral revolutions that it had was to love your enemies.
And it seems to me that whenever that question comes up, it vanishes to satisfy the bloodlust of the moment.
And the priests who approved the war and the priests who are not all the Christians, and this is all the media, the media are all Christians.
I think Rachel Maddow may be an atheist.
I don't know. But they're all Christians.
And there is a massive conspiracy of silence to reference none of Jesus' teachings when it comes to violence.
And so what the fuck is the point of these teachings?
If you can just wish them away and never talk about them and never reference them and never mention them, no matter how disastrous the outcome of not following the Love Your Enemies edict is...
What the hell is the point?
It's a marriage of convenience between the lusts of the moment and the eternal approval of the imagined.
Yeah. So, anyway, let's get back to your question.
Well, I was just going to say...
So, the reason I came up with the love your enemies thing was...
I had this idea or this belief that you could say to people...
That they're supposed to love you if you make an error, right?
Sorry, hate the sin, love the sinner, right?
So if people believe that you're in error, do you think it's possible to, I don't want to say use their beliefs like in some manipulative way, but to appeal to their ideals and say, but Jesus would have loved me if I am a sinner and I'm having trouble with my faith and I'm struggling with it and I'm trying an alternative.
There is a commandment that they continue to love you, in fact, perhaps even more.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I hadn't really thought of that.
Now, you might want to check out Richard Dawkins online reading his hate mail to find out whether or not Christians bow to this edict or not.
And this, of course, I don't want to say that's representative of Christians as a whole.
I mean, it's not. The war is representative of Christians as a whole.
Because I've not seen any countervailing currents from any of the Christians who have any kind of pulpit or media.
But you have, I think, the confidence of going in to say, look, this is a speech I would give.
I'll make it very brief.
But it would be something like this. Mom, Dad, I am more than struggling with my faith.
I am really drawn to an alternative to the belief system that was inflicted upon me as a child.
And I say inflicted not because you're bad people, because you felt it was for the best for me, but I sure as heck didn't ask for it.
And I was really not allowed to question or oppose it.
I am trying on something different.
It works for me.
I'm really drawn to the rationality of philosophy.
I'm really drawn to the objectivity of philosophy and the way that you like how your car runs because of engineering.
I like the way my brain runs because of philosophy.
You don't fill up your tank with faith but rather with gas and I'm filling up my brain with reason rather than superstition because I actually want to get somewhere in life.
So I'm pursuing this path.
I know it's going to be upsetting to you, and I sympathize with that.
I really do. And in some ways, I wish that the curse of the lightning rod of illumination had not happened to strike my particular brainstem, but that's the way it is.
I am now a candle. But I remind you, of course, that Jesus said to...
To love the sinner if I am a sinner and to love your enemies, though I don't believe that we are necessarily enemies.
And now if they say, well, you know, that's true.
I was taught and told to love the sinner and, you know, we're going to redouble our attempts to get close to you, to love you, to understand you, to talk to you, and to not bear false witness against thy neighbor, right?
Not bearing false witness against thy neighbor is a Christian commandment for integrity, right?
Because it is to tell the truth.
To not bear false witness is to not lie.
And intimacy and lying are opposites, right?
Intimacy, true knowledge of someone, true connection, true closeness with someone is the truth.
Is the truth. And you are actually following a commandment, to be honest, with your parents about your skepticism.
you are following the commandment.
You're following two commandments.
The first commandment is to not bear false witness, and the second commandment is to honor thy mother and thy father.
I don't think there's any theologian alive who would say that you honor your mother and father by lying to them.
Honor and lying are opposites.
So you are following at least two of the commandments in talking to your parents openly about your skepticism.
Now, either they're going to – of course, they're going to have a reaction, which is going to be shock, disappointment, surprise, or anger, or whatever it is.
I mean, that's my guess.
Now, either their moral beliefs have some power to change their emotional reactions – I mean, if our emotional reactions were always moral, we wouldn't need morality.
I mean, it's like if what we wanted to eat was always the very best thing for us to eat, no matter what, we wouldn't need nutrition, right?
Nutrition is because we want to eat stuff that's not good for us, you know, salt, sugar, fat, all that kind of crap.
We want that stuff, and so we need nutrition to change our instincts.
We want to sit on the couch and pick Cheetos out of our belly lint.
Yes, absolutely. So we need people to say, get off the couch and go on a treadmill or something like that.
Otherwise, you look like a combination between the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Michelin Man, and Rush Limbaugh.
And that's not what we're looking for in a bikini thong, at least not me.
So we need a moral code because our instincts are frankly pretty fucking simian, which is somebody throws a coconut at us, we want to rip their heads off.
We have that aspect to it, that primitive, biological, mammalian, simian thing.
And I don't know if that's human nature.
I don't know if that's something that comes out of childhood.
And it doesn't really matter. But the fact is, we have it.
So do your emotional impulses...
Are they able to be conditioned by your rational values?
And by rational values, I don't necessarily mean philosophy.
I just mean a conformity to your rational values or a rational conformity to your accepted values.
So if your parents or your community is angry at you for your skepticism and if they then ostracize you and you remind them or they shun you or they get angry or they start calling you all these terrible things and you remind them that their religious edicts tell them to love their enemy and to love the sinner If they then say, oh man, you know what? You're right.
I was tempted into anger.
The devil was whispering in my ear that I should ban you and I should get angry at you and I should shun you and I should curse you and so on.
That's the devil whispering in my ear.
You have reminded me of Buddy Jesus on this side who is telling me to love my enemy, to turn the other cheek and to hate the sinner but love the sinner.
And if they then say, whoa, bring it up short, you're absolutely right, let me take a deep breath, let me return back to the way of Jesus and the Lord and all the other saints that come marching in, then I actually have some intense admiration for that.
I mean, though I don't believe in the ethics, I have intense admiration for people who are able to arrest the charging horses of their emotional impulses according to their stated moral ideals.
Now, either they're able to do that, and it may take a couple of tries, you know, the devil is strong in these parts, right?
But if they're able to do that, I think that they have an integrity that most of us can only cross our fingers and hope that we get in moments of crisis.
I think that's incredibly admirable, and that means that their religion has some meaning to it.
It's not just a justification for whatever they want and a way to avoid social criticism.
It actually has some meaning.
It's able to change their behavior.
What an incredible thing that is.
Now, if they just quote some other cherry-picked thing, and then, you know, I don't know, you're a moneylender and Christ is whipping you like, you know, they're whipping you like Christ did at the temple of the money changers and so on.
Well, then, they're just using their religion to justify whatever impulse they have in the moment.
And unfortunately, I think that's going to be a, I don't know what you'd call it, a respect challenge.
Yeah. Yeah, it probably would be.
But it's always important to remind people of the ideals they have that run in opposition to the emotional indulgence of the moment.
Okay, yeah, that's really extremely good advice.
Wow. Thanks for all that.
I'm going to listen to this a few times.
But that reminds me of one other problem I've been having.
Wait, wait. Now, let me just check in with Mr.
J. If we only have one other caller, I'm happy to continue with this, but I want to make sure that we get to the other callers.
Oh, absolutely. We have someone who would like to get on the phone, and we have someone else from the chat who said they want to get on.
Okay, Jordan, I hate to be concise, Lord knows, but let's give it a shot.
Let me see if I can act in accordance with my ideals of listening to all the callers rather than venting my own emotional crap.
So, go ahead, let's try and deal with this one quickly.
This last thing is just exactly what you mentioned, how the integrity of following those edicts against your emotional state.
I no longer have those commandments in my life, and it's kind of left a black hole for me to...
I want to act with integrity, I just don't quite know exactly where to start.
I'm starting at ground zero, like a child.
I've read UPB, and I kind of understand it, but I'm kind of dealing with that issue as well.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, or if you need it more expounding.
No, I would not say that you're starting like a child because a child doesn't have 20-plus years of crap to undo.
So, that's the first thing.
I mean, I get that it's like a child.
Like, okay, so the physics I believed in, you know, I thought I was in the real world.
I was in Alice in Wonderland world, and now I need to learn physics.
But you need to unlearn the Alice in Wonderland physics to learn the real physics, right?
So, children who are not born in the Alice in Wonderland, crazy upside down rabbit twitchy physics world, they don't have to unlearn all of it.
They just learn it basically, right?
And so, I get that you're like a child in terms of learning something new and I feel that way quite a bit, but children don't have as much to undo.
As far as the code goes, well, unfortunately the code of reason is combat at the moment.
I sure wish it wasn't the case.
I sure wish it wasn't the case, but it seems to be there's just so much well-armed and dangerous irrationality around the world that is doing such ungodly harm to everyone in the world that I don't believe that the irrational and dangerous and greedy and destructive and sociopathic in the world are going to give up Because of the sweet caress of the gentle spring breeze of empirical reason,
I just don't think they're going to give up that way.
And in the war for the future of the world, and I don't view it as any less important than that, there are people who will accept reason when, you know, it's the old thing, there are people who will see when they are shown There are people who will see on their own, and there are those who, even when shown, will never see.
And there is no one humanity.
It's like saying, well, we all live in a farm, so we're all the same.
No. There are the cows who are beating their heads against their tiny paddocks as they get pretty much their spleen milked out through their ever-swollen nipples, and then there are the farmers who are kicking up And watching American Idol while drinking a beer, right?
These are not the same species and they're on the opposite ends of the exploitation spectrum.
And there are the owners and deceivers of mankind and there is the general tax livestock and war livestock and cash livestock and meat livestock of humanity.
And I think that the owners of humanity invented philosophy to further control us and therefore we can't use philosophy to Intellectually dislodge them from their vulture-like purchase.
We push out the delicious elixir of sweet reason into the world and there are those who are going to be drawn to it like bees to honey and there are those who are going to fight tooth and nail to keep their power, to keep their control, to keep, frankly, their ownership of the human herd.
The wonderful thing is that we don't actually have to lift a finger to win.
That's the part that everybody got sucked into fight, fight, fight.
Vote, vote, fight, fight.
That's never going to win.
The only way to win at the game of human control is not to play.
Not to get drawn into trying to control the political mechanisms put in place by the most evil among us.
You get drawn into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson, you ain't going to win.
You're just not going to lose an ear.
Get tossed into the corner.
They designed the whole system.
It's like trying to join the church to rise to become pope to make everyone an atheist.
Well, no, the whole point of the religion is it's designed by the people who want to own human beings, who want to control human beings, who have no trouble terrifying children with tales of everlasting damnation in order to squeeze a few additional shekels out of them when they get older.
I mean, this is monstrous, massively evil.
It's just to not play.
Just don't go anywhere near the power structures and try and convince everyone to stay away from the power structures.
The moment you get sucked into that UFC cage, you're just going to come out because they've been training for about 6,000 years and reason, at least the way we discuss it here, is barely out of its diaper.
You know, you don't throw a newborn in with Muhammad Ali in his prime and think you've got any kind of even match.
They have been developing and making these Mechanisms of control, these propagandistic tools, these amoral, quote, moral systems, this patriotism and making everyone a slave to the hostilities of their communities.
This has all been perfected for thousands of years.
You can't go in and win. They got it down, man.
They got it going on.
And you just have to walk away.
And if you want to fight them, they'll invite you to come into their arena.
Come in and try and wrestle control from us.
No problem. We've got no problem with that whatsoever.
Come in and try and vote someone in who's going to be great.
Come on in and try and get your atheistic beliefs to worm their way up the ranks of the clergy.
We've got no problem. We've been fighting this fight, developing these systems and these mindsets and these control mechanisms for thousands of years.
So you all come in. Come on in.
You know, it's not like me saying, hey, I'd love to invite anybody.
Pretty good at it, right? And they'll try and get you to come in and Boy, you know, that Rand Paul or whoever it's going to be.
I mean, the systems draw you in to make you ineffective in other areas and particularly to make you ineffective in simply going your own way.
And so, I mean, with reason and with evidence, you just avoid the control systems and avoid people who try to draw you into the control systems.
And we build an alternate life.
That is going to be so attractive that it's just going to start peeling people away from these control systems, at least those who don't have the sociopathic lust to mount to the top and put their vampiric proboscis into the mouths of newborns and suck their very souls from their lungs.
I don't know if that makes any sense, but that I think is the excitement that we have as rational thinkers.
And my God, if this doesn't save the world, I don't think anything will, because this is the one thing that's not been tried, which is simply to not...
To give people lots of opportunities to turn away from desiring you thrown in a status cage or a demonic hell for disagreeing with them and following your own conscience and your own reason, which I was taught by the government not to follow other people and to think for myself and to reason.
I was taught that and unfortunately I actually listened.
Most people don't.
So, I think that, you know, it's weird to have this kind of bumper sticker.
You shouldn't even need this bumper sticker, right?
Friends don't throw friends in cages.
You know, it's so weird to even have, you know, to even say that to people, you know?
It's like saying, you know, friends don't punch other friends in the face with vampire teeth embedded between their fingers.
Why should you even need to say that?
Friends don't throw friends in status cages for following their conscience.
I guess a little bit of a bumper sticker, but friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Yeah, I'm down with that. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
And friends don't want friends thrown in rape rooms for thinking for themselves.
But unfortunately, that is still a deeply shocking message to humanity, and I think that there's great honor and nobility in speaking it and living it.
Hmm. Okay.
Speak the truth and avoid those.
Yeah, I avoid those at all costs.
The last time I voted was for Ron Paul and then I said, you know what?
It's never going to work.
So, we're done. Good.
Anyway, so, I think we have a great mission.
I will leave you with one last quote.
Speak the truth and shame the devil.
Alright, well thank you very much, Seth.
I really appreciate you and all you do and I really appreciate your empathy with me today and all that insight that you had to give.
I appreciate it. Thanks and I appreciate you asking the questions and I'm sorry that these are the stark choices but if we don't confront these stark choices, history is just going to be Just one big-ass blood-soaked revolving door of over and over and over again all the tragedies of history.
We're currently in the eye of the hurricane as Doug Casey has talked about.
Things are going to get worse.
And it's just that same damn cycle over and over again to break out.
We really need to hold fast print to principles of reason and evidence because that's the one consistent approach that has yet to be tried.
And you know what they say, if you keep doing the same thing, getting the same results, got to try something different.
So thank you so much, Jordan. I appreciate that.
Best of luck to you. Keep me posted if you can.
And let's queue up somebody else.
▲
Export Selection