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Nov. 14, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:02
God, Christ and Children
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Yo, everybody. How you doing?
It's Steph. Good afternoon.
Welcome to the 14th of November 2022.
I hope you are doing well.
I hope that you have avoided the worst fallout of the FTX wild ride to nowhere.
Boy, you know, when... A guy with curly hair asks you from the Bahamas to invest in something.
You're either not going to the Fyre Festival or you're eating your shorts and crypto.
And, of course, this can be blamed on crypto.
But it's not, of course, a crypto phenomenon.
It's a banking phenomenon.
But, you know, it's all sort of perfectly predictable and kind of dull.
So, yeah, always be suspicious of exchanges and always look at The moral philosophy of the people who are running it.
And if they claim to be these pathological altruists who are only gathering money in order to fight for animal rights and against global warming, then that's a form of hypnotic maneuver to try and get you to hand over your money with animals.
Just certain proof that they're just so deep and moral and excellent and all of that.
So, yeah, I guess people trusted the government about the last couple of years of health and now people trusted the government to enforce rules around SEC and holdings and loans and so on.
But that's how central banking works in general.
But I guess all kudos to the Binance guy for popping the bubble before it got even worse.
So, I just finished...
The first chapter of my new book, which is going to be called The Present.
I guess from the title, maybe I should make it a gift.
It's a prequel to my last novel, The Future, and it sort of says how things end up the way that the novel, The Future, described in the past.
And... It's, you know, it's really neat.
It's really neat to be writing a love story.
And it was something I noticed.
I mentioned this in my call with my daughter.
It was something I noticed when I was sort of describing the story to my daughter and going through sort of what happened.
She said, you know, it's, frankly, it's a little girly.
I'm like, oh, tell me more.
Because the two main characters are two sisters.
And she's like, a lot of talking, a lot of feelings.
It needs some action, you know.
The guy should go hunting.
And I'm like, you know what? That is an excellent idea.
I could draw on my own memories of past hunting trips.
And she's right.
She's right. And it improved the book, although I will not say that it gave me a massive sense of...
Overt masculinity to have my 13-year-old daughter tell me how to butch up the book a little.
But I just finished the first chapter.
It's 23 pages. And it's really, really cool.
I think I'm very, very happy with it.
It's a love story set on the backdrop of the men's rights movement.
So I'm very keen to sort of get arguments and ideas out there.
And the characters are some of the most vivid I've ever written.
At least they've come to life to me in that alchemical way that you hope happens with creativity.
So I don't obviously know how long it'll take to write.
My novel, The Future, took about three months.
It's actually the first novel I've plotted start to end.
I'm always wandering in like, you know, let's just be spontaneous as we go along, which works, I think, in many ways quite well, but...
I'm really interested in knowing the end of the story from the beginning.
It means that you don't have to...
Like, once you know the end of the story, you have to go back in and drop all the clues or the hints about what's going on.
And now that I know the end of the story, I can put all of the stuff in as I go, rather than going back and having to mine it later.
So, any questions, comments, issues, whatever's on your mind, I am more than happy to hear.
I just want to wait for people to catch up.
I am doing Leibniz next.
Leibniz was a philosopher, of course, and one of the most prolific guys.
50,000 articles or pieces of text or significant letters.
The goal of collating all of his writings, currently at 27 volumes, will be finished about 150 years after it started.
It started early last century.
It's going to be finished middle of this century.
So it'll be about 150 years to collate all of this stuff.
Naturally, I've read it all in the original.
German. But no, he's the guy, if you've ever read a pretty funny book, a bitterly funny book, called Candide by Voltaire.
Candide has a character called Pangloss, who is an eternal optimist, and Pangloss is Leibniz.
The argument is that the world that we live in, you see, is just, it's the best of all possible worlds.
Couldn't be a better world.
The great question or the problem of where does evil come from?
Religious people have a tough time with that.
And they can make appeals to free will and so on.
But that doesn't explain natural disasters and illnesses that strike children and so on.
So the answer that Leibniz gave, and I'll of course go into this more detail, this History of Philosopher's series, he's going to be number 20, I think.
The answer that Leibniz gave was he said, look, God is all-knowing and all-good and all-powerful and therefore since God created the world, it would be a bad thing to create an evil world and therefore the world that we exist in is the best of all possible worlds.
In other words, given that God is all-powerful and all-good and it would be evil to create a sort of flaming zoo of horror for the animals you're creating, then he created this reality and this reality is the very best possible reality.
Say, ah, well, what about this, that, or the other?
These bad things that happen. No, no, no, no.
If those things could have been alleviated, just logically, God is all-powerful and all-good.
And therefore, if those things could have been logically alleviated, then God would have done that.
And so this is the very best of all possible worlds.
And it's a wild argument.
Now, of course, as Bertrand Russell pointed out about Leibniz, he was a very good thinker, but a very bad man, because privately he didn't seem to believe much of anything.
Well, of course, with that volume of productivity or production...
You're going to find contradictions.
That's fine. I mean, that's fine.
That's going to happen over the course of a long lifetime of writing and thinking and arguing.
There's going to be things that you change your mind about.
There's going to be new ideas that supersede or even contradict old ideas, and you can't keep your entire lexicon in your head.
So I don't mind that too much.
That's going to happen. But privately, while he was advocating the best of all possible worlds privately in his letters or privately in his diaries or privately in his notes, He was like, no, this is all nonsense.
It's all ridiculous. So he definitely was a two-faced guy.
Now, of course, when you get that two-faced guy, the old argument is, well, just because he's a hypocrite doesn't mean that he's wrong.
Yeah, and, you know, this is a fine argument.
If you were immortal, that would be a great argument.
But mortality requires credibility.
Because we're going to die, we can't spend forever investigating everyone's claims.
So if there's a guy who claims he has a surefire way to get thin and ripped, and he's fat and bloated without an ounce of muscle other than his sophistic jaw muscles, if a guy who's fat and bloated tells you he's got a surefire way to get thin and ripped, Does that mean that his way or methodology of getting thin and ripped is just automatically, totally and completely wrong no matter what?
No. But we have a short time between the here and the hereafter.
And because we have a short time from the here to the hereafter, we have to use the efficiency principle.
Because we don't have forever to waste in exploring everybody's arguments against all the empirical evidence of their being.
If I told you I had a sure...
It was really, really important to stay young, youthful, fresh-faced with a full head of hair, and I have a surefire way to do it, and then you saw me, blue-eyed giant thumb of haggardness, you'd be like, okay, well, I don't really...
I don't believe you.
But logically, logically...
Look, the efficiency principle is based upon mortality.
Again, if we had eternity and infinity, we could explore everybody's arguments and we wouldn't care about appearance.
But because we need credibility before we invest time, In someone's plan or program, then if you are a bold, two-faced, hypocritical liar as a moral philosopher, I don't care what you have to say.
I don't care. I don't care.
I don't care what you have to say. It's like the people who are dependent upon the state for their income.
It's like, don't talk to me about politics.
It's not politics, just survival.
You have adapted yourself and your family and your lineage to extract resources through the power of the state from other people.
It's fine. I mean, it's not morally fine, but it's sort of an observation of reality.
So don't talk to me about politics.
It's not like you can't judge these things.
If you're dependent upon state redistribution for your income or your power, and this is true for the rich as well as the poor, but if you're dependent upon state income for your survival or your wealth or your status or your power, Don't talk to me about politics.
This is ridiculously objective, you know.
When you look at articles that are put out by scientific journals or psychology journals, sociology journals, it's always supposed to be a conflict of interest.
Conflict of interest. We confirm or we affirm that we have no conflict of interest, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And yet... Go around the world and apply reasonable standards of conflict of interest.
Who gets to talk about anything?
Who gets to talk about anything?
Government that pays media.
Government that supports media.
Those media should never talk about the government.
Never. Because they can't be objective.
It depended upon government income, government protection, government control.
Professors in university.
Can they speak objectively about state power?
No. Not even a tiny, tiny little bit.
Because they've been given an enforced monopoly on teaching in a university.
Through the PhD program, they've got a union.
They've got exclusive access, monopoly power, the capacity to grant the magic wand of diplomas, which have legal status.
So, how can they possibly talk?
And this is true for free market advocates in academia.
I mean, that's just too ridiculous for words, right?
But who can talk about The state or state power or politics without a conflict of interest.
Well, I mean almost nobody really.
Not nobody, nobody.
But almost nobody.
And this conflict of interest is foundational to just about everything that goes on in the world.
It's really hard to have a rational opinion unless you're free.
Of bribery and punishments.
Really hard. I mean, everybody in the media knows that if they talk about certain topics, they will lose their careers.
I mean, it's increasingly becoming the case that many doctors are now warned, there was a law passed in California recently, that if they don't toe the line, they could lose their license.
You can't be honest if you're in fear of that.
You can't be honest if your survival depends upon Certain procedures in society.
I mean, this part of the efficiency principle, for me at least, is just to say, okay, I don't care what you're saying.
Let me just find out a little bit about you.
Let me just find out a little bit about you.
If you've got these 20-something goofballs running giant crypto exchanges that come out of nowhere and rise to the top of the industry incredibly quickly and incredibly well-connected and donate a lot of money, I don't know.
I mean, it's just, oh, it's just sad.
It's really, oh God, you know, the lessons get harder until the knowledge is gained.
The lessons get harder until the knowledge is gained.
And hopefully, hopefully we won't have to learn too many, too horrible a set of lessons.
Before we learn.
Before we learn. So yeah, I'm going to do Liebnitz.
He's a fascinating guy, a very interesting guy.
And the problem of evil, and again, I'll just vamp a little bit here.
I'll take another couple of minutes in case anybody wants to chat.
Totally fine if you don't, but...
Let me tell you, this is sort of a brief preview.
You can get the entire series at freedomain.locals.com.
You can sign up, promo code ALLCAPSUPB2022, and that will give you unfettered access to all of the premium content, my book, premium podcasts, the History of Philosopher's series, you name it, for a whole month.
And if you don't like it, you can cancel, won't get charged a penny.
But yeah, you should check it out, freedomain.locals.com.
It's also a really great and fun community, really nice people, really great thought-provoking articles and ideas and all that that are I tossed in there, and I really, really appreciate that.
And you can see me struggling my way through VR, which I just posted yesterday, and they get first dibs on my flashes of stand-up.
So, the problem of evil.
Problem of evil. Why is there evil?
Where does it come from? Now, of course, when there was a generalized perception in society that God created everything and God ran everything, God was in control of everything, Then the question of evil centered around the will and power of God,
which makes perfect sense, because God is the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover, the only thing which is not contingent upon something else.
So looking for the cause for evil, the cause of evil, to God made perfect sense.
If you're trying to understand a structure, understanding what its purpose is is fairly important in getting there.
Understanding who created it and why.
You look at evil and people are drawn to the divine, to the infinite, to the eternal, to the abstract, to the concept, to things outside of reality.
Now you and I, we know, we know, we know, we know the cause of evil.
The cause of evil. It's child abuse.
You understand that the people who wished to do evil unto the children very, very much want you to look beyond the clouds for the source of evil.
To look to the infinite, to the eternal, to the Old Testament, to prayer, to the will of the ineffable, to the comprehension of the incomprehensible, to send you in the infinite platonic rat's maze of imaginary causes.
Look over there, look over there, look over there.
Like the magician who distracts you with one hand while We're good to go.
Abuse, children, people who wish to.
Beat, and abuse, verbally abuse.
And harm, and rape, children.
Oh yeah, for sure, they say, absolutely you should look for the cause of evil, out there beyond the sky.
Out there beyond reason, beyond evidence, certainly not in the house upstairs.
Look at us. Don't listen to the footsteps at night.
Don't listen to the screams echoing down the hall.
Don't do any of that.
Go dive. Go learn ancient Aramaic.
And dive deep, deep, deep into the tangled texts of prehistory.
Oh, that's for sure where you're going to find evil.
I mean, the evils are occurring inside your own house.
Inside your own house.
It's like a detective with 20 years' experience witnessing a murder in his own house and saying, Well, you know what we need here?
You know what we really need now?
We need a Ouija board.
We need a Ouija board to ask the ghosts what happened.
Well, I suppose he would be what they would call...
An accomplice. He would be an accomplice to that crime.
So you've got the one-two punch.
The people who were abused as children very much want to avoid the pain of that abuse and want to Vault, boomerang and trampoline up to the world beyond the senses, the imaginary realm of otherness, the nominal realm, the realm of forms, nirvana, utopia, heaven.
They wish to escape their bodies because their bodies were used to punish them.
So they grasp greedily at this drug of looking at abstractions and gods and devils for the source of evil.
They grab at it, as you would grab at the rope of a helicopter rescuing you from a stormy sea full of sharks.
Of course you would. So would I. It's very tempting, very tempting.
So the victims are very keen to escape the hell of their bodies into the realm of concepts, into the realm of abstractions.
As I said in my novel, The God of Atheists, 99 times out of 100, the life of the mind arises from the grave of the heart.
So the victims are very keen to get out of their bodies and fly among the stars to look for the source of evil rather than looking down at their bruised and broken flesh and their scarred and trembless histories.
Fly me to the moon and let me sail among the stars.
Don't let me look down and see my infinity of scars And that's for the victims.
Now, the perpetrators.
Well, does it even need to be said?
Of course the perpetrators are very keen On having the breadcrumbs to nowhere that everyone chases after to avoid the crimes and the sins and the abuses and the evils and the rapes and the beatings that occur under the infinite thatched roofs of personal history.
Yeah, go over there, look over there.
There's nothing here.
Rather than following the direct bloodstains in your own house.
What you need to do, you see, to find the source of evil.
Don't look across the dinner table.
Don't look across the living room to the killers in your house.
That's crazy. Let's not even talk about it.
Let's not even hold it out as a possibility.
What you got to do to find evil, don't look at me.
Don't look at everybody else on your street, everybody else in your class, everybody else in your church.
Don't look here.
Here's what you do. You get a giant balloon, the bigger the better.
You get a fire. You get lighter than air gas.
Some sort of helium or hydrogen, maybe.
And you fill that giant balloon.
With gas and fire.
I'll keep them separate, of course, but you know what I'm talking about.
And then you get in and you take some snacks and you fire up that fire and as the giant ball above you heats and the creaks of the ropes around the large bucket you stand in snap taut and you drift up from the earth.
You must climb above the house of the victims and the perpetrators.
You must bring a telescope and stare into the sun until your eyes fry.
And you must look around, check the clouds, check the rainbows if you see them.
Maybe on the backs of the birds floating above the earth are the perpetrators.
Maybe that's where you need to look.
Maybe on the tops of mountains is the source of evil.
Maybe, you know, I know, you're going up, and you can begin to see the stars at noon and the clouds are below you.
I know, it seems strange.
But maybe in the black emptiness of space, maybe on the far side of the moon, Maybe in a silent, hidden, spinning moon of Jupiter, just keep going.
Leave the scene of the crime to the criminals.
Leave the victims to the perpetrators.
You just keep looking everywhere else.
Look in your imagination.
Look in your armpit.
Look in the legs of dolls.
Look at the tops of mountains.
Look deep within the clouds.
Stare at the sky.
Scan forever. Look everywhere but where we are.
Leave us to our business.
Leave us to continue to crush the souls of children to create the brutalities of men.
That is our bloody work, and we are damn good at it.
We've really been doing it forever and ever and ever.
And to these predators that lope on all mental force through the house, gnawing and biting and chewing at the souls and hopes of children, Yep, everybody who wants to find the source of evil, you want to go somewhere else.
Come on, it'd be crazy to look here.
It's all about God, you see, and what happened 13 billion years ago in the sparking creation of the multiverse.
That's where you've got to look.
Go get a time machine.
Go back in time.
Go through ether.
Go through atoms.
Go anywhere but what's in your house.
They are thrilled and overjoyed.
Now, Leibniz was the victim, probably a perpetrator, who knows?
These things are not recorded.
Childhood is blank. See, childhood is blank for most of human history because childhood is the answer to the source of evil.
And this is why I'm pretty angry at all the philosophers who came before that sent everybody literally on a wild goose chase.
To emptiness To prehistory To nothingness To abstractions To concepts To anything But what was actually happening in their own goddamn houses?
In the bedrooms of their children, in the backyards of their brutalities, by the woodshed with the axe-handle, in the kitchen with the rolling-pin, when children's ears are grabbed and they are thrust against walls and screamed what garbage they are until they turn into rotten fruit within their innards, when the only portrait of childhood is the portrait— Of a giant reptile hoof stamping on the face of children from here to the hereafter.
The childhood is absent.
Childhood is gone.
Childhood has vanished.
This is why in my book, in my novels, I focus very heavily on childhood.
You can't understand adulthood without understanding childhood.
And all of these philosophers, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, Throughout thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Had one job.
One goddamn job.
And the job was...
Find evil.
Find evil.
It's all you have to do.
It's your one damn job.
Find evil. And society was desperate for them to find evil.
And the future was desperate for them to find evil and expose it.
Now, looking at what's happened to me by shining a light not into the abstract nothing of the constellations, but into the bloody footprints in so many houses, mine included when I was a child, the price that you pay for actually finding evil.
Well, it's pretty high.
It's worth it.
Absolutely. What, are we going to just continue to hide evil among the stars to cover up its footprint in the house?
Are we just going to do that forever and ever and ever?
Was it never going to end?
Well, now that we and many others have spoken, It has a damn good chance to end.
There's no guarantees but it has a damn good chance to end.
And that's what we've achieved.
That's what we've achieved.
We have Pulled down like reeling in a fighting kite or dragging up a monstrous beast from the depths with a thread, it seems.
We have wrestled people from abstractions into their bodies, into the world, into life itself.
And we have dragged them from the stars back down into the atmosphere, screaming and burning like a comet through the punctured clouds, through the roof, Of the houses they lived in and dwelled, and know, and visit, and own, and say, no, no, no, no, it's not out there.
Out there is a distraction, out there is camouflage, out there is a cover-up.
Evil is in here.
These four walls, this ceiling, this doorway, this archway, this wall with the dent in it, this bed frame with the tears, This post with the lash marks.
This tooth under the oven.
This is where evil is.
This is where evil is born.
Not out there. Not in some other place, some other dimension, some other location, some other time.
Not in God's original mysterious blueprint for everything Not in the soul, not in the afterlife, not in the books, not in the texts, not in the commandments or the violations or the sin or the redemption or the prayer or the curse.
Evil is in none of those places.
Those are all just The slate-of-hand collusion between the victims and the brutalizers to throw you off the trail, to throw you off the scent.
Abstractions are like the criminal who crosses the river after escaping from prison in order to throw off the scent of the dark.
And we...
hooked...
The terrified and brutalized and abstract addictions to the source of evil elsewhere.
And we reeled them back down in and we put them in their homes and we said, check the carpet.
Check the closet. Check the stains on the bed.
They're not ghosts in the house, but memories in your history.
That's the source. Do people like it?
Some, it's life-saving.
It's life-saving. Others, many.
Well, the very possibility that the gig and the con and the distraction is up.
That we have turned our vision, our searching, searchlights, from the hereafter to the here and now.
Well, abusers do their best work in the dark, and we return with fire to light the torches and show the crimes.
Of course, they don't like it.
And I, in a strange way, almost sympathize.
Because this gig, this cover-up, this searching for evil everywhere but where it is, collusion between the victims and the victimizers, this con, this scam, this gig, this ghastly gig, has been running for tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years.
And who would have predicted after such a long run, such a long cover-up, who would have predicted that it would end in this particular slice of history?
You don't make your predictions as an abuser on the very thought or idea that the con might end now.
In a sense, that's the worst luck in the known universe.
Khan's been running for a hundred, two hundred thousand years.
Tens of thousands of years once we developed reason and abstractions and the capacity to redirect attention from the here to the hereafter in the search for evil.
And that it should end now.
I mean, it's bad luck.
It's seriously bad luck. And I have some vague sympathy.
It makes me a little bit more angry at all the prior philosophers.
It wouldn't say a goddamn thing about this and redirected everyone to cover up the evils of the now in the endless quest for the search for evil in the lands of never.
Things I didn't really know when I started.
Ha ha ha.
Thank you.
All worth it. Wouldn't take back a thing.
Played it well. And thank you.
Thank you so much.
From the future for the future.
Across the world and in the world.
We finally are on the trail.
We found the evil.
And we can give a cure.
We don't have to wait for some abstract deity to refashion his blueprints and send another son.
But we can do it in the here and now.
And Christ, you know, this is the annoying thing, enraging, frankly, to me.
The enraging thing to me It's that Christ said, whoever harms a child, it is better that a millstone be put around his neck and he is flung into the ocean.
Jesus was absolutely clear about the source of evil, that the cure for sin was the protection of children.
The devil invades the body through the bruises of the children.
And the ringing ears of the screamed-at children.
He slides in through the tinnitus.
He slides in through the broken bones.
He slides in through the opened mouth.
He slides in through the violated and brutalized orifices.
You break children, and that's how the devil gets in.
Jesus was very clear about that.
Whatever you do to the least among you, so do you also do unto me.
Protect the children, protect the children, protect the children.
He was very clear.
And even for Christians, when the Son of God himself brings down a message from on high and says...
I have to crack the family to protect the children.
He comes and says, I have come to set family member against family member, father against son.
I have to crack the family in order to protect the children.
And he very clearly and very explicitly and repeatedly says, the protection of children is the protection of God.
The protection of children is the highest virtue.
If you wouldn't do it to an adult, don't you dare do it to a child.
He extended morality, not just in a universal sense across the world, but down through the tunnel of time to the origin story of everyone, to our childhoods.
Very clear. And then the Christian theologians and the Christian philosophers all said, well, gosh, we just don't know the source of evil.
We've got to try and figure this out.
Where does evil come from?
And then they conflate moral evil with accidents of biology.
They say, well, we can't figure out the source of evil.
We've got to look into the mind of God and the origin story of the universe and the blueprints of everything and fuss and fidget and imagine.
And Jesus, if he had eight tentacles, would give eight face palms up in heaven.
What are you talking about?
You crazy, evil people.
What are you talking about?
I came down.
Got attacked, slandered, driven out of my society, lost in the desert.
Abused, imprisoned, chained, crown of thorns, crucifixion, cavalry, the whole business.
In order to tell you one thing.
Protect the children.
The devil makes you attack the children so he can slide from your fists into their heart and take over their soul.
Love is the opposite of evil and hatred of children is its endless fertilizer.
fertilizer of evil jesus himself could not have been more clear Protect the children. And that's new.
The Old Testament is not exactly founded on the protection of children.
Right? You have the story of Job.
you have the story of the father who is ordered to kill his son.
The New Testament is the protection of children.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Whoever harms a child, it is better that a millstone be tied around his neck and he is thrown into the ocean.
the death penalty for the harming of children.
Spare the rod, spoil the childhood.
The rod is moral instruction, deep investment, connection, respect.
Either you instruct the children Or the devil will through your indifference and brutality.
Love. The children, protect the children is the first commandment of the New Testament and really it's the only one.
There are neighbors in space and there are neighbors in time.
Your children come after you as your neighbor sits next to you.
But even when The Son of God Himself arises in the lands of men and performs miracles and survives even death itself and gives the clear commandment to protect the children when the Son of God Himself Descends from the heavens and leaves zero doubt as to his divinity for those who recognized and witnessed his miracles when the Son of God himself orders the protection of children.
People say, well, that means beat them.
That means beat them. Of course, man, they're on a spoiler, child.
Get a rod and hit your child. You see how ingrained this criminality is.
It's amazing. It's absolutely astonishing.
The Son of God Himself, the founder of the entire religion, says protect the children at all costs.
Whatever you do to the least among you, the children, so do you also do unto me.
Would you beat Jesus?
No. Beat your kids.
That's good, right? Even a divine commandment from the Almighty and the most holy and virtuous and pure and perfect man-God in all of creation, in all of history.
Even when that absolutely perfect man-God brings a commandment from the divine to protect your children, people reverse it.
They're all the essence of believing God is the harming of children.
Even God himself cannot penetrate this tendency.
Even Jesus himself, his most fundamental argument, his most original and powerful argument, the universality of morality, not just across the world, but through time itself, down into the next generation, down into the future, down into your own past.
Even the commandments of God and Jesus themselves were reversed by those greedy to replicate abuse.
Ah, well, fools rush in where angels feared to tread, right?
And this History of Philosopher's Series, freedom.locals.com, just to remind you, is the history of people Leading those interested in the hunt for evil everywhere but where it is.
They are colluders, they are co-conspirators, and they are responsible for more death than any ideologue could ever dream of, and more evil than even the devil himself could wish for.
Thank you for your time today.
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