July 12, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:59
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| Time | Text |
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| All right. | |
| I think we can do one more. | |
| And thank you, everyone, for your patience. | |
| I'm so sorry we're not getting to everyone. | |
| Oh my gosh, a lot of people want to talk. | |
| I'm so sorry. | |
| We've gone, what, two hours? | |
| Let's go a little bit longer because, of course, people have been patient. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| And conservative, oh, conservative non-believer. | |
| That's a very descriptive name. | |
| If you can unmute, I'm happy to hear your questions or comments. | |
| And thank you, everyone, for your interest today. | |
| It's really a great pleasure to chat with all of you. | |
| Going once, going twice. | |
| You with me, brother? | |
| Yes, sir. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'll try and make this quick. | |
| My son, he's 25, recently married within the last year, has a baby on the way. | |
| I raised him in a secular household because I am a non-believer. | |
| But now that he's facing, you know, husbandry and parenthood, after looking at a lot of statistics, he sees a correlation between a father's attendance to church and religiosity tends to lead towards a more successful marriage and raising of children. | |
| Now, I haven't looked at these statistics myself, but I'm going to take him at his word because he's a smart kid. | |
| And I guess my question is, you know, is it okay to resist your principles if the outcome is better for your goals? | |
| He wants to be a successful husband and father, and he wants to go about it the best way possible. | |
| And although he doesn't believe, he wonders if maybe he should go through the motions to help the success of his goals. | |
| It's a great question. | |
| So I think it's fair to say that people who visit the dentist have better dental health. | |
| However, just going and hanging around in the waiting room doesn't give you those benefits. | |
| So the question is, is it genuine faith or belief in God that provides these benefits or going through the motions? | |
| Now, I would argue that it is, in fact, genuine faith and belief in God that gives you these benefits, not just going through the motions. | |
| The other thing, of course, is that if your son decides to fake faith in order to gain particular benefits, then what kind of message is he communicating to his son about integrity, that you should just lie about what you believe in for the sake of some particular benefit, right? | |
| That does not seem the right message to pass down the generations. | |
| I agree, but the proof is in the pudding to me. | |
| And, you know, I've resisted advising him on which way to go because I do believe there is power in truth. | |
| And as long as you have a good reason for what you believe, it's okay to believe it. | |
| But I understand his dilemma, and I'm just trying to advise him. | |
| Okay, so also I would say to him as a father, I would say, so if it is acceptable to lie to others for a particular benefit, then he better never punish his son for lying. | |
| That's all, because then it would be completely hypocritical. | |
| So if the kid lies, like let's say the kid doesn't want to go to school and the kid fakes a stomachache, right? | |
| And let's say that the father finds out about this in some manner, then he shouldn't ever get mad because the father has already taught that if you can get a particular benefit, you can lie your ass off. | |
| So I just don't think it's particularly practical. | |
| I think the benefit that religion, the people who really believe in it is it gives them a consistent set of morals and values and a community. | |
| Now, you don't have to, I mean, I wrote a whole book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics about how we can derive ethics, logical universal ethics bans on rape, theft, assault, and murder from first principles philosophically. | |
| It's the first time this has ever been done in the history of philosophy, and I understand that your son wouldn't necessarily know about it. | |
| It's still relatively obscure for obvious reasons. | |
| But you can get community and you can get morals and integrity without having to fake prey. | |
| And I think that the fake prey is disrespectful to the community as a whole, to his church community. | |
| And I don't think he'll get the benefits. | |
| I think it will mostly be just costs and losses because at some point his son is going to find these things out. | |
| And that's going to be a moral earthquake for his children. | |
| So let me try and summarize what I've heard from you. | |
| It's not the attendance that brings the benefit. | |
| It's the actual faith. | |
| So faking the faith could actually be detrimental to your goal? | |
| Well, it means that you're saying to your children that you should lie and fake things if they benefit you or even if they benefit others, which means that he cannot enforce the virtue called honesty or he can't encourage the virtue called honesty on the part of his children, which means he's going to raise children who will lie at will and lie at whim if they perceive a benefit. | |
| And that's going to be pretty costly for the kids in the long run because they probably won't be very trustworthy. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| I appreciate your time, Stefan. | |
| Big fan, I won't fanboy you much to hear. | |
| He also listens, so maybe he'll listen into this call. | |
| What do you mean, maybe? | |
| Send it to him. | |
| Yeah, keep your eyes peeled. | |
| And of course, FGRPodcast.com is where you can go. | |
| You know, you can go sign up to the feed and the podcast will be automatically downloaded. | |
| And yeah, and if he wants to call, obviously I'd be happy to chat with him. | |
| These are very, very important issues, and I really do appreciate you bringing them up. | |
| And look, we all have to do this to some degree. | |
| We all have to. | |
| The world is a dangerous place for the truth tellers. | |
| So always to some degree, we do have to deal with this. |
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