June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:14
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| It would be UPB. | |
| And kind of reach a conclusion, right? | |
| I think that we do that all the time. | |
| So Elijah, the prophet Elijah, defined God in the Old Testament as the voice of conscience within. | |
| Okay, so the voice of conscience within. | |
| I'll just touch on this relatively briefly. | |
| I've talked about conscience before. | |
| Conscience is the universality of our preferences and desires. | |
| So when my daughter was about 18 months, I was feeding her soup, and then she grabbed the soup spoon, dipped it in, and fed me the soup because she's like, oh, I enjoy eating. | |
| My father is a human being. | |
| I bet he enjoys eating too, right? | |
| So we do this all the time with kids. | |
| Like some kid grabs another kid's candy, and then you say, how would you like it if he grabbed your candy? | |
| Or you grab the candy away from the kid, the kid complains, and you say, you see, you don't like it when you don't like it when I grab your candy. | |
| That other kid doesn't like it when you grab his candy, right? | |
| Conscience is, I have preferences, I'm a human being, other human beings have preferences which I should take into account, just as I want other people to take my preferences into account. | |
| So, conscience is the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and it is the universalization of our preferences and our category called human beings, which is why we have higher moral obligations to human beings than we do to animals and so on, right? | |
| The conscience is the universalization of self-empathy and empathy for others, which, again, there's pluses and minuses. | |
| It's somewhat subjective, and there are some people who, either through whatever brain development or usually through child abuse, don't develop a conscience, right? | |
| So that's a big problem in society is the couple of percentage points of people who don't have. | |
| So, the voice of conscience is something that develops fairly automatically among human beings. | |
| I was talking about this the other day, that when I was a kid, we would play games, and if some kid cheated, we would ostracize that kid until the kid stopped cheating, right? | |
| Because we don't like cheating, and, you know, all we cheat against that kid, that kid would complain and say, well, it's not so no good, not so much fun for you when we cheat, right? | |
| Or another thing that would happen is, if somebody was Dishing out insults, and then got insulted back and cried? | |
| Then we would say, oh, you can dish it out, but you can't take it. | |
| You can be aggressive with other people, and then you can't take it back. | |
| Like, there was this woman who was debating with Andrew Wilson on the, I think it was the Whatever podcast, and she was pretty aggressive, but then when he was aggressive back, she claimed health issues, she started to cry, she had to leave, right? | |
| So, dish it out, but they're cry bullies, right? | |
| Dish it out, but can't take it. | |
| So, if you're going to say, God is the voice of conscience within, then you're going to say, That an autonomous process of human development based upon interactions, the identification of your own preferences, the identification of other people as human beings who also share preferences that are going to have some similarity, then you're saying that an autonomous, or to some degree instructed, but even the instruction seems kind of automatic, a natural development of the human brain is God. | |
| But that doesn't make any sense, because why would only that one be God, right? | |
| Human beings have a natural capacity to learn language, right? | |
| This is why if you don't learn language by the time you're sort of 8 or 9 or 10, you struggle with it forever. | |
| And the process where kids are learning language, they're like 10, 20 words a day, nobody even knows how they do it. | |
| It's incredible, right? | |
| So, why would you say, well, one autonomous development of the human mind called the conscience is God. | |
| But all the other ones are not. | |
| The development of language, the development of the ability to walk, the development of the ability to sing, the development of the ability to roll over. | |
| These are all autonomous developments within the human mind. | |
| Only one of them is God. | |
| Now, we already have the word conscience, so why would you need the word God in that? | |
| So, saying that how the human brain develops is God doesn't make any sense because it wouldn't be specific to any particular development. | |
| That's a definition. | |
| So you're just, you're saying by that definition of God, So people who are so traumatized and brutalized and tortured that they don't develop a conscience don't have any access to God. | |
| But of course, we need... | |
| So that wouldn't make much sense. | |
| And Jordan Peterson would know the amount of child abuse and trauma that it takes to produce a sociopath or a psychopath or a narcissist is a huge and brutal amount of child abuse that requires. | |
| So people who are abused as children have no access to God. | |
| They don't have a conscience. | |
| They have no access to God. | |
| Morality has no hold over them. | |
| But that would be to say that God cannot Reach those people who were abused as children, because it's consistent that if you experience horrible abuse, as particularly as an infant, your chances of becoming a sociopath with no conscience is very high. | |
| So, if particular traumas for children can prevent the development of the conscience, then God abandons those who have the most need of morality and kindness, right? | |
| That doesn't make any particular sense. | |
| And you can't just say that God is all-knowing, all-powerful. | |
| But no, God is just the voice of conscience. | |
| Well, that makes sense. | |
| And this is another reason why people hate UPB if they have a bad conscience because UPB codifies the conscience. | |
| It kind of goes back to where I'm saying initially- Elijah defined God. | |
| Okay, so as Elijah defines God. | |
| find that way in Jonah too. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'm sure you know many people who defined it that way. | |
| So, is he saying that people who are atheists have no conscience, whereas people who are religious are the only people with a conscience? | |
| Well, if an atheist, well, I guess Jordan Peterson would say that if you have a conscience, then you're religious, you just don't know it. | |
| And it's impressive. | |
| You're a very knowledgeable person. |
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