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Feb. 16, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:36
Matthew 18:6 PROTECT CHILDREN! Bible Verses
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Alright, it's time for Bible verses.
It's a very powerful one, Matthew 18, 6. But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged around his neck and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Now, that's interesting.
It's a powerful, powerful phrase.
Now, there are a number of different translations of this, of course, but scandalize is a very powerful phrase, a word, because it implies sexual abuse.
And, you know, child rape is one of the, you know, terrible, horrible, unspoken commonplaces in the world as a whole.
In general, the more ancient the community, the more likely it is that there will be childhood sexual abuse, and it will be fairly rampant.
With, to some degree, the exception of Christianity, because Christianity puts the protection of children first and foremost, according to Jesus.
Now, another way that this is talked about...
In Matthew 18.6 is, any who would cause the children to sin, or any who would cause the children to not believe in me, any who would cause the children to lose belief in me, any who would cause the children to sin, anyone who shall scandalize.
So this is a wide variety of things.
It is child abuse which leads to despair regarding morality.
It is child abuse.
That leads to the destruction of hope.
It is child abuse that breaks the bonds within society because the deal, of course, with children in society, at least the deal that used to be there or certainly should be there, the deal with children in society is society says to the children, we will protect you and in return you shall obey us.
Societies get monstrously corrupt when they no longer earn the obedience of children because they fail to protect those children.
I mentioned this occasionally over the years, but I remember being in grade 8 and the teacher was talking about the pensions that would be available to us when we got old and...
A good portion of the kids, certainly the boys, and certainly the boys who were good at math, just laughed.
There was like a laughter that ran through the room.
And this was a really interesting, concentrated moment, which was, you can't possibly imagine that we would believe that the government is just guarding our pensions and taking our money and doing all the right things and there's no corruption.
I mean, that's just crazy.
And, of course, saying you will get pensions in your old age at the same time as saying there's a massive national debt and unfunded liabilities is a lie.
And the laughter was both contemptuous and incredulous.
The contempt is, how could anyone talk about this as if it were a done deal?
You know, like, your retirement pension is in a lockbox.
And the government will just keep it for you and make sure it's available and make sure that inflation hasn't eaten away its value.
I mean, in America, illegal immigrants are getting more money per month than people who've paid into the system for 40 years who are retiring, in some cases.
I mean, it's mad, right?
So, or, it's not just contempt, like, how could you believe this, but incredulity, like, how could you say this with a straight face?
And I remember, I even remember the sunbeam slanting in the window that afternoon, that there was this ripple of laughter.
And, of course, there was the coughing rebellion, right?
The kids would just cough, all cough at the same time, and that was our rebellion.
That we knew we were being lied to, we knew we were being propagandized, we knew that we were being taught boring, useless, busy work to alienate us from intellectual or conceptual.
Habits going forward.
They teach you geometry so you end up hating morality.
Abstract, conceptual logic, which is the essence of morality.
Geometry is inflicted upon you, and certain kinds of math are inflicted upon you to inoculate you against morality.
So, the deal where society protects children, and then children grow up with respect for society, has been broken because there are legions of child abusers who target children and all of their enablers who refuse to act against them even to the point of making an anonymous phone call to report child abuse or talk to them in parking lots or any kind of safe thing that they could do.
There are the child abusers and then there are the child abuse enablers.
And then there are those who inflict verbal abuse against The survivors of child abuse who speak out against child abuse as adults, right?
That would be society as a whole plus me, and I'm just sort of one example of countless numbers of examples.
So, the way to destabilize a society is to encourage people to not protect children from the abusers.
And, of course, the best way to enable child abuse, particularly childhood sexual abuse, is to remove the fathers from the home.
There are serial pedophiles who've been interviewed about this, and they say very clearly that the kid they're looking for is the kid without a strong father presence.
If the kid doesn't have a strong father presence, then the pedophile will target the child.
And women, as a whole, on average, in general, Appear to be uniquely underqualified to protect their children from sexual abuse for reasons that we can perhaps talk about another time, but it is kind of a fact.
That as the father leaves, and particularly as non-biologically related males come into the household, the infliction of childhood abuse goes up dozens of times.
Not dozens of percent, dozens of times.
33 times more likely to be abused in some situations, circumstances.
So, when you attack children, you open the door to despair, and you open the door to infinite cavalcades of self-management.
So, self-management is sort of an under-discussed issue with regards to corruption.
And there's an argument that says that Satan doesn't want you to worship Satan, Satan just wants you to worship yourself.
Self-management will often keep you from morality by turning your gaze inwards and have you just attempt to prop yourself up and to keep yourself going.
And because you can't sort of just get in the car and drive somewhere because the car keeps breaking down and the car keeps stopping and coughing and so on, then you end up spending a lot of time tinkering with and trying to maintain the car Rather than just driving places.
So when children get fractured and broken through assault and verbal abuse, sexual abuse and neglect, when children get shattered and broken, then they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to repair themselves and prop themselves up.
And this gives them precious little time, effort and energy to oppose the increasing predations of the powers that be, you know, inflicting upon and taking away their liberties.
Right?
And so, if you can get people destabilized, then they spend a huge amount of time, effort and energy in their lives attempting to have some kind of stability, attempting to have some kind of peace, attempting to have some kind of evenness of temper.
So, of course, if people are constantly battling depression and anxiety and rage and addictions and so on, Then they're too internally focused to do much to resist the powers that be in the world.
And that, of course, is very convenient for the powers that be in the world.
They very much like it when people are focused on themselves and their own inner states rather than robustly going out there and doing good in the world.
And, of course, when children are abused, they often end up with these big destabilizing buttons.
That can be hammered in order to torture them into kind of compliance with social corruption, right?
So if a kid is raised with verbal abuse, then the kid can be verbally abused by those in power, and he will often or she will often just comply with what the people in power want.
So these big compliance buttons get installed and all of that.
And of course, if the society doesn't protect the children, the children don't grow up to protect.
Society, which means that it's easier to displace or replace or take over.
So, it is a very powerful statement, and to say, those who cause the children to sin.
And that's interesting, because if sin is caused by an external factor, is it really sin?
You see, one of the things that child abuse does in the world...
Is it creates a very strong and powerful impression of the omnipotence of evil.
That evil is everywhere.
Evil is triumphant.
Good people are, you know, like little mice at the feet of dinosaurs.
That virtue is something that you've got to hide away.
And bad people, you know, completely run the show and have control over everything.
And merely have to wave their hand or snap their fingers in order to get their way.
And we've seen this, not just, of course, in a political context, but most of us, I would hazard to say all of us, have gone through the process where there is a supposedly virtuous group of people and a bully, a dysfunctional sociopath or...
Whatever it is, they come sort of riding in and casting about aspersions with all of the confidence that they're going to win, and they get their way, and everyone just kind of parts before them and avoids them maybe, but nobody stands up and say, nope, this is wrong, you've got to stop.
That is common.
If you've ever been in any large group, you have absolutely, I guarantee you've absolutely seen this phenomenon.
Lord knows I have.
That you have a bunch of, you know, nice, reasonable, decent people, and some, you know, crazy, aggressive, virulent bully comes in, and everyone's just like, whoa, okay, right?
And the bully then runs the show, gets his way or her way, and everyone parts before them.
And so the crazy, aggressive, abusive people who are willing to escalate and don't have a conscience, those people run the show.
And child abuse that is not resisted in society is a marker to say bad people, evil people run the world, and good people, the best they can do is hide and appease and try and, you know, eke out some meager crumbs of potential virtue from this corrupt and evil-controlled social world.
So, This flexor exercise of the power of corruption and violence over children is to say to the children, there is no social contract, good people are hypocrites, evil people run the world, you have no chance, you have no hope.
It is a, I mean, other than the perversions to do with various kinds of abuses, it is a humiliation ritual to And if someone does stand up for the rights and protections of
children, we will humiliate, attack, slander and de-platform them and Everyone will kind of go along with it.
Everyone will just kind of go along with it because, you know, the bad people are scary and powerful and relentless.
And everyone knows that if you stand up, it's sort of the high noon thing, right?
That if you try and stand up against the evildoers, that all of the good people who talk tough about morality and integrity and virtue will scatter and betray you.
I mean, betraying themselves and so on, right?
And so, because everyone knows that good people will, in general, betray a virtuous person who lands a few blows against evildoers and thus arouses their ire and blowback, that good people will scatter, that you cannot band together, even though banding together would be powerful, but good people will scatter.
When one good person who's achieved some success against evil is then targeted in blowback by the evil, the good people will scatter and betray and then continue to talk about how good they are while stepping over the smoking corpse of the person they could have protected and whose protection would have caused a turning point in the battle between good and evil.
And I sympathize as this is not some big condemnation, but that is...
The mechanic.
Or the mechanics.
So it says in Matthew 18.6, But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged around his neck and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Now that's interesting.
It'd be better for him.
Now the him, I assume, is because the little ones that believe in me could be male or female, but the child abuser here, this could be child molester, but he that shall scandalize one of these little ones, That, believe in me, it would be better for him that a millstone should be hanged around his neck and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Be better for him.
Of course, that is the idea that death is better than dishonor.
That death is better than dishonor.
That to horribly abuse a child, to enact that against children, is a fate worse than death.
That's one aspect.
But there's another aspect I think that's really important as well, which is...
Would a child abuser be happy to live in a world where children as a whole were horribly abused?
It's an interesting question, right?
For a society to function at all, there must be a significant number of children who are not horribly abused.
Because as child abuse goes up, social cohesion and functionality goes down.
And if child abuse goes up enough, then all social cohesion is destroyed, and in fact, a hatred of the old becomes common.
The sort of typical example would be, look at older parents, let's just say an older mother.
So we look at the mother, she's in her 70s.
Now, when she was younger, she put her children in daycare because...
She wanted to chase the almighty dollar and wear cool suits and high heels and lipstick and wrangle PowerPoints or nonsense clients who don't really care about anything in a largely made-up job for social equity.
Now, when she gets older, because her children did not have good childhoods, they probably don't want to become parents themselves.
If they do want to become parents, it's because they've recognized that their mother Was bad or wrong to put them in daycare, to ignore them, to neglect them, to give them very little time, care, love and attention.
And so they have a problem with the mother.
It is a generally universal psychological reality that people who cannot undo their wrongs will never admit them.
So the older woman now, all of the benefits of her vainglorious pursuit of money, prestige, status, And career over the happiness and security and love of her children.
All of the benefits are in the pocket.
The money is spent.
The career is gone.
And she, of course, now unconsciously realized that she made entirely the wrong decision.
And she chased the approval of strangers for whom there was only the dry calculation of mutual utility rather than love her children, which is a bond that will last forever.
So she's old.
And either her children don't have kids, in which case she's got no grandkids, and her children are kind of unhappy and depressed and often weirdos, as people without kids often tend to be, and distant from her and don't have a bond with her and don't care about her.
So then she's sailing into the last 15 years or 20 years of her life with no particular care and comfort.
All of the prestige and benefits of the career are long gone.
And what lies ahead?
Well, Her kids don't want her around and they either have no kids or they've criticized her and she won't admit fault because she can't undo the damage and therefore they're distant from her or maybe even have separated from her.
And so, what does she face?
Well, she faces growing old with not enough money.
She faces growing old with no particular family bonds and most likely...
If her children do contribute to her, it will be to put her in an old age home.
In other words, they then reproduce their childhood, right?
As children, they were put into a daycare with a bunch of strangers they had no connection with and had to try and find some sort of bond.
And then, of course, when their mother gets old, they put her into an old age home with a bunch of strangers where she has to try and find some kind of connection or bond with people she never chose to be with in an institutional setting.
So, Obviously, it's a pretty clear mirror.
Now, does the child, in this case, let's say child neglecter, it's a form of abuse, does the child neglecter want it to live in a world where the last 15 years of their life are lonely, sad, tragic, isolated?
You know, there's a special kind of prison for the old people who've done wrong, because, I mean, they don't sleep very much, they've got their aches and pains.
And they have, I mean, this is where Satan collects his soul, right?
Because they have all the time in the world, right?
They're sleeping five, six hours a night.
They have all the time in the world to contemplate their wrongs and to be bitter and sad and angry at all the bad things they did, right?
The conscience comes to collect upon retirement, which is one of the reasons why people who retire, who've done wrong, don't tend to live very long because they can't stand being in the company of their own conscience for 18 hours a day.
They're bad conscience.
If those who severely abuse children, right, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and so on, well, they are raising a lot of violent and angry people with strong criminal tendencies.
So, do they want to live in a world, when they get older, that is full of angry, bitter criminals with no respect for the old?
Well, no.
The child abuser does not want to live In a world full of the victims of child abuse.
I mean, at a really basic material level, the child abuser requires and relies and needs younger people to be very economically productive because they have to fund their own families and they also have to fund his or her old age pension, right?
Because there's no money in the old age pensions, they're just taxing the young, right?
Now, if the severe child abuser And,
of course, they may have addictions which destroy their economic value and savings.
And bad habits.
No, they can't pair bonds, so they get divorced, which further destroys economic value and activity.
So, do old people who need a stable and economically productive society in order to live as they get old, do they want to live in a world where a lot of children get horribly abused?
Well, they actually cannot survive in a world where a lot of children get.
And, of course, in old-age homes, there is a lot of elder abuse.
And this is the sort of full circle, right?
Would they rather, the child abuser, when he or she gets old, let's say she, does the child abuser want to live in a world where they're, you know, happy, loving children, take them in and take care of them in their sunset years, or do they want to be in some Shoddy, run-down old age home with, you know, bitter and sometimes violent and unhappy elder care aides who don't care about them and will abuse them sometimes.
Well, when the child abusers get old, then they don't want to live in a world full of the victims of child abuse because then their last 10, 15, 20 years of life or more are miserable and scared and poor and they are the victims of neglect and abuse, just as they inflicted neglect and abuse on their own children.
Now, of course, the old people should be, I mean, if they cared at all about the future, the old people should be writing endless blogs and screeds and articles and posts about how they did wrong and they don't want to live in the world they made.
Right?
I mean, like, you know, you see drug addicts, Who will often write books saying, I did wrong and I don't want to live in the world that I've made.
My addictions and my poverty and my broken relationships and my unhappy children and my divorce.
I don't want to live in the world that I made.
And that is a warning to not do what I did.
Don't do what I did.
That's the greatest value that can come out of immoral people is for them to write the confessionals that say, I don't do what I did.
Now, I may have missed this, of course.
It's not like I've been scouring the web for it.
But I have not seen...
I can't think of one.
I'm sure there have been some.
I have not seen a lot of articles from...
Oh, I know.
I can think of one.
Yeah, I can think...
I thought of one.
It's the woman who wrote about how she was writing some stupid diversity newsletter way back in the day, which nobody cares about.
Everyone's forgotten.
But because she was writing this stupid diversity newsletter, she...
I think it was diversity.
It could be some other corporate garbage.
But...
Nobody remembers her newsletter, but because she was writing her newsletter, she missed the opening of her daughter's play.
Her daughter still remembers that mommy wasn't there to support her when she did her first play.
Nobody remembers the newsletter, but her daughter still remembers.
And there was some sadness in that.
That really is the only article that I can remember.
And I've read a lot of newspapers.
I mean, I was younger in particular.
When I was in Montreal, I used to get the newspaper daily.
I would often read it cover to cover.
I remember I would stack it up behind my couch and then every couple of months I'd have to take a massive trip to recycling with all these old newspapers.
So, I have not seen a lot of boomers saying, I do not want to live in the world that I have made.
I have made terrible mistakes.
I have done the wrong thing.
I have failed to defend my culture and my children.
I lived a life of vanity and worship of the self and hedonism and response to external...
attachment, I had children and dumped them with strangers.
I do not want to live in the world that I've made.
Whoops, bad.
Mea culpa.
I'm sorry.
Let's try to make restitution.
Instead, I hear a lot of stories of the boomers, you know, laughing and cackling and saying, we're going to spend all the money.
Good luck.
You know, we're selling the house and selling the business for equity.
We're going to spend it and good luck, right?
So the selfishness is only escalating.
So, When people get old, if they've been corrupt, as a lot of people have, they are in a state of extraordinary fragility.
Fragile, from Christmas Story.
So they're in a state of extraordinary fragility because their conscience is lying in wait for an external moral to pass by.
You know, it is the case.
This is something, was it Johnny Cash said or someone said Willie Nelson?
I don't read reviews because, you know, one statement can be like a stone in your shoe for three months.
I can sort of haunt you, right?
And one word can destroy smug selfishness and superiority.
One phrase, one word.
People live in constant fear that the moralist is going to open his mouth, arouse their conscience, and they will live in misery for the rest of their lives.
It is a great terror, which is why censorship...
is so important to older people, right?
Censorship, like, young people don't care, and they're, in fact, quite edgy.
But older people, the reason that they have to have censorship is that if the moralist points out that they've done wrong, then their conscience-sensing an external ally will rise up, fasten its fangs on their jugular, and give them a slow, agonizing poison for the rest of their days, and they can't have that, so censorship is important for old people with a bad conscience, which is really most old people these days in the West, for sure.
It betrayed just about everything.
So, if child abusers don't want to live in the world that they made, then I think in Matthew 18, 6, when Jesus says, but he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged around his neck or they should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Boomers are extremely...
Extremely, extremely fragile.
And with that fragility comes a kind of petty low-rent estrogen aggressiveness that is just kind of bitchy and pining in its bullying conformity and plea for the avoidance of morality.
That's a horrible life.
To live in fear that someone around you might let slip a nugget of truth?
I mean, it would be like living in fear.
That someone, anyone around you might cough and that would make you disabled, paralyzed, sick and in agony for the rest of your life.
And therefore you'd have to control everyone ferociously around you.
When people live a lie, the nugget of truth is poison in their black veins.
It doesn't kill them, but it turns them into agony.
And this is why people censor.
So, if child abusers don't want to live in a world of the victims of child abuse, I think that's what Jesus, with all obviously deep, deep, deep humility, drowned in the depth of the sea.
Now, boomers did what they did because they assumed the media would be controlled forever, because it has been controlled forever.
That's an old movie with Julie Roberts and the great Mel Gibson, and they're called Conspiracy Theory, where this guy has a conspiracy theory, and he photocopies it and puts it in people's mailboxes, and that's all he can do, right?
All he can do.
And I remember way, way back in the day, before the internet really, I wrote my manifesto in my early 20s.
You can get that at freedomandnfts.com.
But I... I wrote a manifesto, and all I could do was put an ad in the newspaper, and people could request the manifesto, I could mail it to them, and we would have written mail debates, like M-A-I-L, like snail mail, paper mail, debates about it.
Whereas, of course, now I can post the manifesto, and people can have spirited debates and get it immediately for, you know, virtually no cost.
And that's a very powerful thing.
Very powerful thing.
So, This is why the censorship has rocketed up because the censorship used to be implicit in that there were just gatekeepers who wouldn't let people through who might provoke the bad conscience of their corrupt audience.
Which is why you've never seen a mainstream movie about the tragedies of daycare and the sorrows of daycare and the effects of daycare on the course of a family where the empathy shown to the aged Mirrors or matches the empathy the aged showed towards the young when the young were vulnerable.
The aged get old and vulnerable, and the lack of compassion, concern, and care is mirrored.
You won't see that story.
You can't deal with that story.
So the boomers did all of the corrupt and selfish things that they did on the assumption that no truth-tellers would pierce the gatekeeping of the media and provoke their bad conscience.
But now, of course, you have to plan for the future.
And the idea that the boomers were selfish, narcissistic, and at the very best, or worse perhaps, controlled opposition.
The fact that the internet is allowing for the provocation of a bad conscience through the destruction of the gatekeepers means that censorship has to be increased.
And the boomers did all the wrongs that they did on the assumption that No moralist would ever pierce the gatekeeping and get through to arouse their bad conscience, and now that's happening, which is why you're seeing a lot of fragility, destabilization, and aggression on the part of the boomers,
because I sort of view the boomers these days as a whole, as, you know, like the old Battle of Agincourt knights or soldiers, where they've got the longbow and the arrows just come raining down from above, and,
you know, you've got your kind of crouching under your shield, And it's just a matter of time until one arrow hits you in some terrible place, which is why the fetish for control is so powerful.
So, I think this is what it has to do with.
There's a very important passage here in Matthew 18 as a whole.
We'll talk about more of that as we go forward, but I hope that you find this helpful and interesting.
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I would deeply, humbly, and hugely, and gratefully appreciate.
Thank you so much.
Lots of love.
I'm up here.
I'll talk to you soon.
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