All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 27, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:07
Forgive Them Father! Bible Verses
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Sven Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
And we are going to do a Bible verse, maybe two, maybe two.
This is Exodus 34, verses six to seven.
The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, Now, this of course sounds like a punishment of the innocent and utterly unjust and unfair.
However, it is an interesting question.
If you get someone in the bloodline who decides and chooses to do great evil, how long does it take for the bloodline to recover?
It's a big question, right?
My mother and my father did some pretty bad things.
I have managed to staunch the blood flow in a single generation.
But holy heaven above, that was a lot of work and expense, right?
In order to pay to become healthier, I dropped like, I don't know, I mean, modern day income, 40 or 60 grand on a therapy and, you know, countless books, tens of thousands of hours of sort of mental health practices, rationality and philosophy.
So, you know, it's like a Ming vase, you know, it's easy to break and very hard to repair.
So, if you get someone who does evil in a bloodline, How long does it take to fix?
Now, of course, the question of why people do evil, that's another matter.
But let's just say that there is a choice involved.
There has to be a choice, otherwise it's not evil.
And if it's no choice, then it's just like somebody swearing who has Tourette's syndrome.
It's just an involuntary tick.
So we have to assume that there's choice involved.
So the guilty, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin.
Wickedness, rebellion, and sin.
So, to stop doing wrong, you have to first admit that you're doing wrong, and then you have to apologize, you have to tame your angry will.
You know, the angry will that says, I'm right no matter what, I'm justified no matter what, and so on, right?
If you can tame the angry will and subjugate yourself to reason and virtue, then you do good in the world.
Everybody who is intelligent and eloquent...
Everybody who's intelligent and eloquent faces that fork in the road.
And one of those forks leads to lying and manipulating and gaslighting and bullying and verbally abusing and praising and it leads to using your skills to gain resources rather than to promote virtue.
If you are...
I mean, I remember...
Back in the day, I had a girlfriend who came to live with me in Montreal, and she needed some money.
So what she did was, she started selling Encyclopedia Britannicus.
And she was not having any luck getting any appointments.
So what I did was, I got the list of people to call, people who'd shown interest, and I got her like four appointments in about half an hour.
Because I realized that I had a way of talking to people, of convincing people, of manifesting my will in language, and that the will was strong.
Charisma, accent, eloquence, intelligence, whatever you want to call it.
And so I had the ability, and of course I was in sales and marketing in the business world for many years, so I have a bit of a silver tongue when it comes to communicating with people.
And, I mean, I've honed it, but I didn't earn it.
Like, you know, if you're good at singing, it's worth taking singing lessons so you can preserve your voice, so you don't end up like Freddie or Robert Plant.
But singing lessons will not turn you into Freddie or Robert Plant.
So, I have worked on communication and convincing and so on, and I've done that because...
I have a good ability to begin with and I've taken on the biggest mountain of all which is to promote virtue to a wicked world.
A wicked world that is so wicked it doesn't even have the categories of wicked anymore.
Like the only category of wicked that exists in the world anymore is those who promote the truth.
Those who promote the truth are the only quote wicked or quote evildoers left in the world.
So, those who promote evil and confusion and anti-rationality, anti-empiricism, are considered noble and tolerant and virtuous and positive, and those who push back with basic facts are considered corrupt and immoral and evil.
Truth is the only sin in an empire of manipulations.
So, forgiving wickedness, well, wickedness has to first And you would be absolutely shocked at how good a conscience you can have, even if you've done great and grave wrongs in the world.
You would be shocked at the good conscience you can end up with, even if you've done great and grave evils in the world.
And that I accept and I understand.
So the guilty, guilty of what?
Well, not of wickedness, because wickedness can be forgiven.
The guilty are punished for rebellion.
Well, rebellion can be solved by submitting yourself to virtue.
Right, so all of the silver-tongued people in the world can either become witch doctors and convince people to give them resources by telling them fantastical tales of gods and punishments, or they can work in science or moral philosophy or the free market and bring the truth and reason and virtue to people. or they can work in science or moral philosophy or The same tongue can be used to spread lies and slander and start wars.
The same tongue can be used to calm the waters and end the wars.
You can lie people into wars or you can tell them the truth and have them leave the wars, end the wars.
So, the guilty are those Who refuse to define their sins as wickedness.
Now, how do we know that they're guilty?
Well, an example, of course, that I've mentioned from my own life goes something like this.
My mother was physically very violent when I was a child.
And then, when I fought back, she was horrified that I would use any kind of physical force to defend myself.
Appalled and horrified.
So, that's the hypocrisy, right?
And, I mean, this happens on the right, happens a little bit more on the left.
Right?
They only care about the kids, they only care about the children when it advances their political agenda.
Migrant detention facilities become kids in cages, and crying kids in cages is the worst thing known to man, even though there are hundreds of thousands of children who have vanished along the border, never to be seen again.
At least...
In the eyes of society, Lord knows where they went, but it probably was about the ugliest place that you can conceive of.
So they don't care about that, right?
People who try to control me through appeals to integrity and consistency are using their skills to confront people in a bad way.
It doesn't mean I can't be corrected.
Of course I can, and that's great.
But if you do it in a sort of negative, hostile, So, he punishes the children for the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.
I don't know, on either side of my family, I do not know what the last healthy generation was.
Now, I get, of course, that there's problems with this and You've got to try and figure out what does it mean to be healthy and all that.
I get all of that.
But even just not crazed and deranged, I can't, because I don't know enough about my family history.
I have some knowledge of it.
But it certainly is going back as many generations as I've seen.
So that would be one to maybe two and a half.
And it doesn't seem to have been better because, of course, my family was torn apart in the First World War.
On my father's and my mother's side, and then in the Second World War, on both sides.
And so, maybe you'd have to go back to the sort of late 19th century for any kind of productive mental health in my family.
So, he punishes the children for the sins of the parents of the third and fourth generation.
So, what messes up children is not Evil, foundationally, but manipulation.
It's the evil that portrays itself as good.
It's the, you know, physical discipline is good parenting and you brought it on yourself and it's the right and wise thing to do and look at all of these soy jacks and soy boys who are so weak it's because nobody ever gave them strict consequences as children.
All of that stuff, that's what will infect you with corruption.
It is the evil masquerading.
As virtue, that is where the messed up stuff really happened.
So, he punishes the children for the sins of the parents of the third and fourth generation.
Now, he, of course, if you're religious, that's God.
And if you are secular, that is child abuse.
There are not many people with the capacity to do what I've done in the family tree and the family line.
It's very rare.
Who can see what is not shown.
There are people who can see what is shown.
And then there are people who will never see even if they're shown.
I happen to be in seeing what is not shown.
And of course, some of you are seeing your own things that were not shown.
But for a lot of the call-in shows, it's trying to get people to see when they're shown.
And it's really trying to communicate to the people who will see when they're shown.
That they are probably embedded in a corrupt family structure, if the family structure is corrupt.
That they're embedded in a corrupt family structure, wherein the parents will never see, even if shown, even when shown.
The conscience has become too corrupted to ever be confronted, to ever be roped onto the side.
Because there's a certain desperation when you're around corrupt people.
You just want them to start doing the right thing, because you'll love them, they'll be happy themselves, but they just won't.
In general, they just won't.
And that is the rebellion.
That they can't be caught in corruption or immorality.
They will never admit it.
They believe that what they're doing is good.
They believe that the only sin is the truth that provokes a bad conscience.
That's the only sin.
Because they're hedonists, right?
So, it's not, I would say, that God decides to punish.
The children for the sins of the parents of the third and fourth generation.
It's that if you end up with a wicked evildoer in your family, he will corrupt the bloodline often for the next couple of generations.
And putting a stop to that is very, very hard.
And this is why it's important to not spend time with corrupt people.
It's important to marry into a virtuous relationship because the infection.
It's brutal, and it lasts for generations.
So, I hope that makes sense.
That was Exodus 34, 6-7.
Let's look at Luke 23, verse 34. This is a very famous one.
This came up in a telegram chat the other day.
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
And they parted his raiment and cast lots.
I threw the dice when there pierced his side, but I've seen love conquer the great divide.
It's a great song from you too, Rattle and Hump.
When love comes to town.
Father forgive them, for they know not what they do, and they parted his raiment and cast lots.
So, a lot of people don't really understand this one, and I'm sorry for starting off with such a pompous statement, but I think it's important to at least understand where I'm coming from, whether you agree or not.
A lot of people Don't understand this one.
And they think that everyone can be excused through ignorance.
Everyone can be excused through ignorance.
Now, the question is, if you look at the Roman soldiers, were they universalists?
No.
They did not believe in universal moral truths and universal moral values, sort of UPB 1.0.
And they also were not hypocrites.
So, when a Roman soldier, and of course I'm generalizing here, but when a Roman soldier was captured in battle, he would expect to become a slave or be killed.
Right?
That would be his fate.
That's what he would assume would happen, that he would become a slave or be killed.
And as a slave, he would be worked half to death.
He might be sold in a slave market.
And he did not consider that...
Some sort of stone evil thing.
It was just, well, that's what happens if I lose, so I better win.
That's what happens if I lose, so I better win.
So there was not hypocrisy.
A Roman soldier would in general accept that if he broke the laws of the state, that he would be violently punished.
It's sort of like if a tax collector cheats on his taxes, He's not going to suddenly, usually, he's not going to suddenly become some sort of ANCAP because he's been caught cheating on his taxes.
He's going to say, well, I arrested people for cheating on their taxes, I guess I'm going to get arrested or punished for cheating on my taxes, so that's the way.
I mean, a boxer goes into a boxing ring, and of course the boxer knows that he is going to try and land some blows on his enemy, and his enemy...
It's going to land some blows on him.
It's not hypocritical.
I will try and punch you more than you punch me.
I will try and punch you better than you punch me.
But boxers don't go into the boxing ring, land a few blows, and then when hit back, cry in a corner and saying, oh my god, this is so terrible.
Why would you hit me?
That's wrong.
Hitting is wrong.
It's assault.
Right?
They don't do that.
They go in knowing what the game is and without hypocrisy.
If a hockey player puts the puck in his opponent's net, he says, yay, I scored.
And if his opponent puts a puck into his net, or his team's net, he says, dang, they scored on me, that's bad.
So he accepts and universalizes the rules of the game, and he's not hypocritical that way.
He sinks his puck, and when the other team sinks his puck, he doesn't complain and say, how dare you, that's immoral.
He knows the game, and he plays it.
A good chess player will understand the rules of movement for the pieces of chess, and if somebody wins by pulling a legal move in chess, he may be upset, he may be frustrated, may even be angry, but he would not call the person a hypocrite.
So, sort of the well-known phenomenon of pretending to be bad at a game to lose some money, and then...
Having a big bet where you then win a lot of money, called being a ringer or something like that, steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool.
So if you pretend to be bad at, say, pool, and you lose 20 bucks, and then you say, let's bet 200 bucks, and then you win, well, people are going to accuse you of pretending to be bad and then turning out to be good.
And generally, they will get mad at that, and you might in fact be physically attacked or...
That was in some weird bowling movie with Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson.
So, the Roman soldiers say, well, you broke the laws of the state, and therefore you get crucified.
And you know what?
If I break the laws of the state, I will be crucified.
I won't like it, obviously, but I won't say that it's weird and hypocritical and wrong and immoral.
They won't switch the rules mid-game.
If they win a battle, they take the enemy soldiers as slaves and sell them off or use them.
If they lose the battle, they fully expect to be taken as slaves by the enemy, and if you go into a boxing ring, you hit and expect to be hit, and all of that.
So, they're not manipulative that way.
So, that's sort of a Kantian imperative, right?
Like, society should be run that all who break the laws of the state should be crucified.
Okay?
The soldiers are enforcing that law that all who break important laws of the state are crucified.
The soldiers are enforcing that law, but not in a hypocritical fashion.
Because if they themselves break the laws of the state, they fully expect to be crucified.
If they lose a war, they fully expect to be taken as slave labor.
So it's not hypocritical.
So when he says, Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
It's because the Romans, the Roman soldiers, are operating in a state of pre-knowledge.
They have not heard the arguments for moral universalism.
They are tribal.
If my tribe wins, I'll take you and your soldiers as slaves.
If your tribe wins, you'll take me and my soldiers as slaves.
They are not hypocritical.
They are playing a tough game.
And they don't know about moral universalism.
They don't know.
I mean, the Roman Empire, of course, was no friend of free speech.
This is the main reason why it fell.
No friend or no fan of free speech.
So, Jesus, in saying what he said, was upsetting the social order or social peace of the Roman Empire.
So, they were following the laws.
They agreed with.
The soldiers were following laws that they agreed with and were also subjected to themselves.
So there was violence.
There was the initiation of the use of force, but there was no hypocrisy.
So, taking people, we can assume that the Roman soldiers were in their 30s or 40s, probably 40s because the younger soldiers would be sent off to fight on the edge of the empire.
The Edge of the Empire garrison town, as Sting sings about.
So those soldiers were in their 20s, hale and hearty and strong, and were probably off.
So the soldiers keeping peace in the town were probably in their 40s, maybe even in their 50s.
So they had grown up with this system, they accepted this system, they were subjected to the laws of this system, and they were acting in the Kantian imperative in a way to say, I will act in such a manner that the principle of my action becomes a universal law.
In other words, if you harm the peace of the state, if you provoke violence and disorder, then you are subject to capital punishment through the torture of being crucified on Calvary.
So the Romans were, in the fourth or fifth decade, the Romans fully accepted the laws that they were enforcing upon Jesus.
And the Romans had been raised to respect those laws, and those Romans, as soldiers, we assume, and younger, they had killed and died for those laws, and therefore the idea that Jesus could talk them out of pursuing and obeying those laws in the short time that he had while being crucified is not reasonable.
He couldn't do that.
So it's one thing, of course, to say I don't know anything about the teachings of Christ when he's being crucified, because he was still a fairly obscure figure.
Hundreds of years for his teachings to become widespread and commonplace.
So, in saying his moral arguments and his moral rules and his moral laws, he could not overturn the history and prejudice and acceptance of the Roman soldiers.
They don't know what they're doing.
In the same way, if you invented a touchscreen phone, And you were the first one.
Then other people, can they be forgiven for not using a touchscreen phone?
Sorry, I know this is kind of a ridiculous example, but that's important, right?
Can people be forgiven for not using a touchscreen phone?
Well, of course, because there's only one, and it's new.
In the same way, the guy who first figured out why stars burned without with his girlfriend, sitting on a park bench looking up at the skies, and she said, they're so pretty, and he said, yes.
And right now on the planet, I'm the only one who knows why they burned.
Could he condemn others for existing in a state of pre-knowledge?
Well, I don't think so.
I made this case way back in the day with regards to soldiers who received nothing but propaganda and family and social and media reinforcement about the virtues of being a soldier and the toughness and the goodness and all that sort of stuff.
So...
Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
Well, sure.
Let's say that Jesus was the first to proselytize for universal morality.
Not in-group preference, not tribal morality, but universal morality.
How could that possibly have reached the ears, hearts, minds, and conscience of soldiers in their fourth or fifth decade of life?
So, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do is saying, don't condemn people prior to knowledge.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why I say to people, if you have issues with, say, your parents or anyone, you should sit down and talk with them.
You should sit down and talk with them so that they know what your issues are and they can't claim the excuse of ignorance.
So if you say to your parents, you know, you hurt me or you damaged me or you did this or that or the other that was destructive, then they at least know they're in a state of knowledge regarding what happened and they can't claim that they didn't know and they also can't blame you for not telling them.
Taking away people's moral excuses is pretty foundational.
Of course, I've made this case countless times before that a doctor in the 18th century cannot be condemned for failing to prescribe antibiotics because they did not exist.
Now, a doctor in the 21st century who does not prescribe antibiotics where their prescription is appropriate and good for someone's health can be criticized.
In the past, there was no real treatment for hernia, so you just had to wear this.
Strap to kind of keep the intestines in.
Now there are treatments to hernias.
So any doctor who says you can't fix it, you just got to wear a strap is incorrect.
As there's the mesh one, the shoulders one, like there's ways of dealing with hernias.
So knowledge brings responsibility.
So the mistake that people make with regards to forgive them father for they know not what they do is to think that this lasts forever.
If you were just coming up with the concept of antibiotics and one of your patients came and said, I'm suing.
This other doctor, because he didn't prescribe me antibiotics, you would say, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on, like, I'm still testing them.
They're still new.
They're not proven.
You can't blame him for that.
Right?
So that makes sense, right?
So forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do, is precisely why Christianity and universal morals was proselytized, so that people would be responsible and could be judged.
I mean, I really think I've done everything that I could to promote UPB, but people as a whole don't want to promote it.
I understand that the important thing is to do the work.
I'm not responsible for what people do with the work, right?
I've certainly done speeches, interactive audience, comedy routines.
I have done PowerPoints.
I have done all kinds of presentations.
I've done debates.
I've got...
I've written an entire book which is free, and libertarians as a whole, who should be the ones focusing on this because it does prove libertarian morality, have decided not to pursue or to promote it.
Now, they're responsible for that, right?
Can't be disproven, and morals are the most important thing in the world, so people who can't disprove a moral theory and then refuse to promote it are now morally responsible because they know.
Now, the people that they refuse to promote it to, Those people are less responsible, but everybody who knows about UPB and fails to promote it is morally responsible for the corruption that they allow to be maintained through their avoidance of promoting objective universal morality.
All I can say is that I'm comfortable with my conscience.
I'm happy with my conscience.
And, I mean, they can't do it now, right?
They can't do it now.
They can't say, oh, oh, wait, hang on, this thing came out 18 years ago.
And I failed to promote it.
In the same way that people aren't really promoting peaceful parenting, and they're responsible for that, right?
Because they know about it, right?
So people, the spread of Christianity had a lot to do with, you know, staggering levels of bravery among those who were being fed to lions and tortured and tormented, and they continued to live and proselytize for universal morals despite the most Horrendous punishments that can be conceived of by the most sadistic human minds in existence.
But through that, they promoted universal morals.
And that's the funny thing, right?
If you look at the courage of the early Christians versus the cowardice of most modern libertarians, it's, I mean, what negative things happen to you for promoting UPB? People say, oh, Steph has a bit of a bad reputation.
That's, I mean, okay.
Okay.
Okay.
So, that's really sad.
So, is it fair to say now that people have no idea what the teachings of Jesus are over 2,000 years after his martyrdom?
And there are, you know, hundreds of millions of Christians around the world.
Most people are raised with some understanding or sympathy or at least knowledge of Christianity.
So, can...
People be innocent of moral rules when they were raised with a deep knowledge of these moral rules.
Well, the answer is, well, of course they can't, right?
Of course they can't.
And so, because they are now morally responsible, they are in a different category from the Roman soldiers.
Forgive them, not forgive everyone, right?
This is not an accident, right?
I'm not pulling things out of my armpit here.
Jesus says, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
But Jesus would have scarcely consented in a way to be sacrificed, to be tortured and killed, if he did not have hope of spreading the universal moral laws of the gospel, of enacting the salvation of mankind.
Now, in order to be saved, you must know what morals are, you must pursue virtue, and you must eschew or reject sin or evil.
So, he understood, Jesus understood, of course, that he could not convince the soldiers.
So, he said, forgive them, these guys, these guys, not everyone, not everyone.
And people have taken this to extrapolate it to Jesus said, nobody can be judged no matter what.
But he consented, in a sense, to be martyred so that the gospel could spread, and people took his martyrdom with great seriousness and were themselves often martyred.
To spread the faith.
So that people could be held accountable because they could no longer claim to be in a state of ignorance.
So I consider it extremely corrupt to say that Jesus said you can't judge anyone ever because he was very specific.
Do not judge these soldiers for they know not what they do.
They are NPCs, they are following their programming and they have yet to pray and they have yet to Have the capacity to ascend to heaven because Jesus was not martyred.
It took Jesus being martyred to open the pathway to heaven.
This had not occurred yet.
So they had no possibility, really, of salvation.
And that's an edge case, right?
Because this is what did people do, right?
This is a big debate in early Christianity.
So you have all these moral people and what happens to them when they lived moral lives but they did not...
Accept Jesus and worship Jesus, the old Socrates and Aristotle question and so on, right?
And so, if the soldiers were a necessary component to the salvation of mankind through the martyrdom of Jesus, they would not be aware of the good that they were serving by killing him.
So they know not what they do.
They don't know the universal morals.
They do not worship Jesus.
They have not seen the miracles.
They do not understand the divine power.
And they are a necessary ingredient to the martyrdom, which opens the path to heaven for all mankind.
It's the question in a sense of, let's say there's a physician who's really tired and he makes a mistake, and on the table he kills a man, he cuts his aorta or jugular or something like that, and he bleeds out, and then it turns out that this man was a prolific serial killer.
Well, the surgeon, against his will, has done good by preventing, and let's say it was an absolute, it wasn't like there was confessions or whatever body parts in the freezer.
Dahmer style, well, the surgeon has done accidental good.
Now, that doesn't mean that everything's totally fine, because he still did kill someone, but it's complicated.
So when people take Jesus saying, forgive just these soldiers, because they don't know what they're doing, and they take this forward into a time where...
And they take this forward into a time where everybody knows and understands or has easy access to the teachings of Jesus and universal morals.
That is a different time.
And it is not listening to what Jesus said, which was very specific.
Not forgive everyone.
They don't know what they're doing.
But forgive these guys.
They don't know what they're doing.
They don't understand universal morals.
They've not been exposed to the glory of the miracles.
And they also don't understand that their role is to martyr me.
So that mankind can be saved.
Because by being martyred, I'm going to help spread the word of Christianity the faster and the further, and thus bring moral responsibility to everyone as a whole.
So I hope this helps.
If you find these useful and important and helpful, of course, freedomain.com.
Really do appreciate your time.
Have a wonderful day.
▲
Export Selection