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July 28, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:54
How I Measure Atheists!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's definitely Molly New from Free Domain.
So I was thinking actually this morning, sort of back on my life, and one of the sort of largest themes of what's been going on in my existence, conscious or sort of unconscious at the time, it's this idea that my whole sort of life has been a constant moral experiment.
It is sort of an empirical program or like process to see what people and society say and then see if they do that, especially, of course, around morals, right?
Especially around morals.
So when I was growing up, of course, society and everyone said, oh, we care about the children.
Children are everything.
And the most important thing, our greatest resource, and all of that.
So then, I guess I listened to what society said.
And I was curious in my core as to whether that's what society actually did, like to actually live that way.
And no, society doesn't live that way.
Society herds children around.
Society, you know, hits and beats the majority of children, yells at them, screams at them, locks them in these terrible schools, uses them as financial instruments to have as collateral so that they can borrow and spend on themselves through the power of the state.
And so no, not the case, right?
I went through a lot of violence as a kid that was sort of very audible.
I lived in sort of very cheap paper, thin-walled apartments or flats, of course, as we called them in England at the time.
And nobody cared.
Nobody phoned the cops.
Nobody came to my aid.
Nobody, an anonymous report.
It was no risk to them or anything like that.
And this went on for years and years and years.
And people don't care about their neighbors or children, you know, suffering some pretty extreme violence, like right in their vicinity.
Just turned up the TV.
Maybe they put on some headphones, but they didn't care.
I had on my father's side of the family, they were very Christian, and I spent a lot of time with them, both near Wales and in Ireland.
And they knew, of course, the nature of my mother's violence.
They knew who my mother was.
They never once asked me how I was doing or if there's anything I could do.
In fact, I was left alone with her for a couple of years in my early teens, just me and her.
This is when she was really going crazy, ended up being institutionalized.
Nobody phoned to ask how I was doing.
So, you know, this idea that like family is everything, you do for family.
We care about our kids.
I assume, just based upon the demographics, that most of the people, and this did facilitate my exit from Christianity.
It's an interesting way to put it.
But anyway, the people who were around me were Christians.
And they didn't lift a finger to do anything to counter an obvious evil.
I mean, it wasn't like we were at a farm in the middle of nowhere, right?
Like right in the middle of the city, right in the middle of a whole bunch of apartment buildings, like right in apartment buildings.
And my whole childhood, I sailed through with this violence and so on.
No one did anything.
Nobody asked about anything.
Nobody got any authorities involved.
Now, of course, you may say, well, the authorities wouldn't have helped in any particular way, but that's not what people's general perception was, right?
People's general perception was that the authorities would be helpful in these kinds of situations and so on.
And I think the only time the cops showed up at my place was when my mother called them once because I yelled back, and they just gave me a lecture on trying to understand my mother better.
So that's the, I mean, that's the reality.
Oh, it's my lived experience.
But it's a lived experience in three different continents.
Three different continents.
Thousands of people had direct or indirect knowledge of what happened to me.
Nobody, and this, even in the years since, like I went public with what I suffered as a child and nobody's called me up from my past and said, oh boy, you know, I really felt bad, but I didn't do it because of X, Y, and Z, or I thought about it.
Nothing.
Nothing.
People don't care.
And that's the state of the world as it is after 2,000 years of Christianity.
Right?
You can't wish it away.
You can't unsee it.
You can't tell me I'm wrong.
That is a pretty important experiment to live through, to go through.
And you can't look at, like if you've been, particularly if you've been mistreated as a child, you can't look at the world and think that it's good.
Not because there were people who mistreated you as a child, but because nobody does anything about it.
Nobody asks nobody questions.
Nobody brings in resources.
You know, I would go to school, you know, hungry, tired because my mother would keep me up all night.
And I would just get lectured about, well, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A-plus.
Why are you lazy?
Why don't you do your work?
Nobody asked.
How are things at home?
What's going on?
Maybe that's changed now.
This is obviously quite a while ago.
But that's the reality of the world.
Now, that's the reality of 5,000 years of moral philosophy, of Christianity.
That is the result.
That children can be tortured and beaten and screamed at, top of the lung screaming, in an environment with dozens of people around in families.
I went to a variety of different schools.
I lived in a variety of different neighborhoods.
I went to government school.
I went to private school.
I lived in, well, I spent summers in Ireland.
I lived in England, of course, until I was 11.
I spent a lot of time in Africa because my father was there.
And I lived In Canada and nothing, nothing.
That's the reality.
You can't wish it away.
I mean, I can't wish it away.
Maybe you can.
I don't want to wish it away.
Now, then, of course, you know, in school, you are told that the truth matters, right?
The truth matters.
But then, of course, if you bring up inconvenient truths, sorry, Mr. Gore, if you bring up inconvenient truths, the teachers just get mad at you, right?
So it doesn't matter, right?
In university, of course, if, well, I mean, I did an English degree and I would talk about, you know, the free market and voluntary solutions to social problems and point out that government solutions are based upon coercion, right?
The law is an opinion with a gun in most cases.
So people said, well, we want the truth and we like peaceful solutions.
We don't like violence and so on.
And then you'd point out that people who want a lot of government action are kind of addicted to coercion and they get mad, right?
And then, of course, I remember when I first learned that I was born into, I don't know what the numbers were back then, but now it's well over a million dollars in debt because elder generations had overspent and demanded things from the government the government couldn't afford.
And the only way you could get elected would be to steal from the unborn.
Man, that's some silver-fingered pickpocketing to steal from people who aren't even a glimmer in their daddy's eye yet.
But when I learned about that, of course, I was like, wait, what?
All of these freaking boomers who have spent their entire life lecturing me on responsibility and hard work and owning up to my actions and doing the right thing, they've actually stolen a million dollars from me before I could even get a job?
Holy, unholy.
I mean, that's just reality.
That's just the reality.
I went to theater school and when they found out about my politics, they turned on me pretty viciously.
I mean, in Canada, of course, 90% of artists survive on pillaged government money.
So free market would not do them very, very much good, at least in the short run.
And then, of course, I went to, took a history degree, a graduate degree.
And, you know, everyone's like, well, you know, the truth is important and we're here to find the truth.
And of course, I'd bring the truth and they'd get mad.
They'd get mad.
So it's all a lie.
It's all nonsense.
I'll skip over the business stuff.
I was in the business world for many years.
And I'll just fast forward here.
So I don't want to make this huge, long, long thing here.
But for the atheists, right, I mean, I was in the atheist in and around the atheist community for many, many years.
Millions and millions of atheists have listened to my show over the last 20 years.
And atheists say, right, what do atheists say?
Well, we're all about the truth, you see.
We're all about the truth.
The atheists say it is not true that God exists.
It's false that God, the proposition that God exists is false because we're all about the truth.
And the truth is so important that you should give up the moral commandments of your ancestors.
You should give up the comfort of everlasting life.
You should give up the comfort of being reunited with loved ones.
You should give up the comfort that your suffering will be rewarded in an eternity of bliss.
You should give up everything.
You should give up immortality because God is not real.
So you must sacrifice the entire moral and metaphysical worldview of your ancestors.
2,000 years of moral development must be cast aside because it's not true.
And this brings a lot of suffering to the religious.
But the atheists say, but it's not true.
And your suffering is not important.
It's not that important.
You should just focus on what is true.
It doesn't matter if it makes you suffer.
The truth is worth it.
You should live in reality.
You should not believe, what do they call it?
Skydaddy fairy tales, all this kind of stuff, right?
So it's not true.
The immense suffering that you go through when I tell you these things aren't true and you can't argue against it or you believe what I say.
That suffering, suffering for the cause of truth is super, super, super important.
So I'm going to ask you all these tough questions and if you suffer, then, well, it's not my fault that people told you things that weren't true.
All this kind of tough guy stuff.
And that's fine.
That's fine.
So then, of course, when I ask tough questions of atheists, they should welcome it because they've kind of lived asking tough questions of others.
So when I ask tough questions of atheists, they should say, well, you know, I guess I've spent my career asking tough questions of others.
So it's fine to be asked tough questions, but they don't.
They just kind of get mad and verbal abuse, bag on Christians, rage quit, you know, all of this kind of stuff, right?
It's not really the worst of it.
So my experience, you know, I'm Steph the White, super white, because I came back from my half decade in the wilderness and I came back with a certain knowledge.
This knowledge cannot be undone.
You can't argue me out of it.
You can't tell me that I'm wrong because I know.
And the knowledge that I came back with was actually quite simple.
I was deplatformed because people lied about me.
This is when people say, well, lying is inefficient.
Lying doesn't work.
It's like, bro, the vast majority of my life's work was erased on falsehoods, right?
So, sorry, love.
It is funny.
It's been so long now.
I got so much good stuff out of those five years that I'm not complaining about it.
I'm simply pointing out the absolute epistemological branded in to my spinal cord reality of the last five years.
So the atheists say the truth is important.
Tell me the truth is important.
Your discomfort is not that important, which means that they obviously atheists would be willing to endure discomfort in order to speak the truth.
It must endure discomfort to speak the truth.
Now, great question millions of atheists listen to my show over the last 20 years atheists say the truth is essential regardless of personal discomfort how did atheists respond to my unjustly platforming based upon falsehoods my whole life is a moral experiment to see if people have integrity to what they say you
You must tell the truth.
The truth is much more important than any personal discomfort.
Well, atheists knew, of course, that what was talked about with regards to me were falsehoods.
And I was unjustly deplatformed.
How did they respond?
Come on.
We know this.
We know.
How did they respond?
They vanished.
They ran away.
They did not stand with me.
They did not stand by me.
They did not invite me on their shows.
I mean, I've actually done shows with atheists, strong atheists, knew that I was unjustly deplatformed.
The truth is important regardless of your personal emotional difficulties with it.
Okay, so lies were told about me, somebody that they, you know, had some respect for and millions had interacted.
Did I get email messages?
Even if you just want to create an anonymous account, say it's totally wrong, I'm so sorry, blah, blah, blah.
Did I get any messages?
Did I get any invites to shows?
Did I get any articles written about how unjust and wrong it all was?
Because remember, the truth is important.
It doesn't matter if it upsets you personally.
It doesn't matter if it's difficult emotionally.
The truth is essential.
So, of course, when I go to atheists and I say, hey, what are your reasons for telling the truth?
Did you tell the truth about what was said about me that was false?
I mean, you understand the basic principle is they deplatformed some pretty horrible people, which I don't agree with.
I'm a free speech absolutist.
They deplatform pretty horrible people so that when they deplatform people who aren't horrible, they get mixed into the same vat of vitriol, right?
So, yeah, how did our good friends the atheists do when a prominent atheist was deplatformed for lies?
Did they say, well, you know, we've made a lot of Christians, we've made, you know, hundreds of millions of Christians uncomfortable over the decades with our very tough questions, but we've told them you must stand for the truth no matter what.
Oh, a prominent atheist is being lied about?
I wish I could do this Homer Simpson disappear into the hedges behind me.
But, yeah, I mean, that's just the reality.
So then when atheists come and say, well, you know, I guess I was just raised better than you.
I guess I just value the truth more than you do.
I guess I just have better morals than you do.
Come on, come on.
Stop larping as a moral hero.
I mean, just stop it.
I don't mean this with any contempt.
I don't mean this with any hatred.
But you have to have a clear-eyed view of who you are and who you aren't, right?
If you're fat but you think you have abs, you're not going to lose weight.
If you're cowardly but think you're brave, you can't get braver.
You can't get the virtue courage if you think you're already courageous.
So when the atheists say to me, well, I know, I know, I tell the truth, and I have morals, and I have virtues, and it's good for society, and it's good socially, it's like, okay, then why didn't you tell the truth about the lies told about me?
Millions of you knew about it, or hundreds of thousands.
I mean, I had a combined, you know, close to two million set of followers.
At that time, I was deplatformed.
I had three-quarters of a billion views and downloads, so I don't think it's that unfair to say that millions of atheists knew about me, and my deplatforming was kind of talked about.
And they all just despawned.
They went to the back rooms.
And they didn't even send me anonymous messages of support, which is fine.
It's fine.
And it's data.
And it's a whole lot of data.
Now, Christians were actually quite kind.
Christians were actually, you know, hey, we know what it is to be persecuted, man, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, I mean, I have empirical evidence that, empirical, direct personal evidence that Christians behaved infinitely better than atheists when it came to upholding the truth or providing sympathy for somebody who was being unjustly persecuted.
You can't undo that knowledge in me.
And it wasn't, it wasn't two to one.
It really wasn't two to one, five to one, ten to one.
It was a lot to, I mean, I'm thinking zero.
I'm thinking zero.
So, as far as personal integrity, upholding the truth despite emotional discomfort, I mean, morals are not for what you want to do.
Morals are for what you don't want to do, right?
Diet is for things you shouldn't eat or things you don't want to eat, but you should.
Exercise regimes are for when you don't want to exercise, right?
Discipline is required for the things you don't want to do.
This is why with the atheists, if they say, well, I just don't like lying.
I don't like lies and liars never prosper.
It's like, bro, you're talking to a guy whose life work was erased.
because of lies and very successful lies.
You're literally talking to a guy whose life work is erased through lies, saying, Well, lies don't work, man.
Lies are impractical.
Again, I'm not saying everybody needs to know my history, but I think most people do.
I think most people do.
So, yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right?
As you get older, I mean, particularly if you have a sort of moral, a real moral backbone.
I mean, obviously, I've got my flaws, I've got my faults, I've got my paccadillas, but I've never disavowed anything I know to be true.
And I have talked about things that are true, that are really important to society, that are very controversial.
You know, I think, you know, if anything, I fall a little bit on foolhardiness, which is an excess of courage.
And that's a fault.
That's a flaw.
I'm not saying this.
I don't humble brag look how.
But I fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
I definitely have that fault to a degree.
I'm working on it.
And actually, one of my characters, I wrote a book in my early 20s called Just Poor.
You can get it at freedomaine.com slash books.
And one of the characters who's old and wise says to a young person who tells truths that are very dangerous, he says, the truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
Should have listened to old nodded Bob.
But I mean, I did what I did before love came to town.
So, yeah, I mean, I have my faults and flaws.
But as far as courage goes, you know, not bad.
Again, a bit too much, a bit too cocky.
That's all right.
I mean, I didn't go bored by having low testosterone.
So I would say that when atheists, like when I asked atheists, what reasons do you have to not lie?
And they say, well, we have all these reasons to tell the truth.
We have all these reasons to not lie.
Then, of course, my question is, so when lies took me down, where were you?
If the truth is so important, millions of you knew about me, you knew that it was unjust.
Where were you?
You, Homer Simpson hedged.
You were in a hedge fund called Yellow.
So, I mean, you can't undo this amount of data.
These are facts.
Now, I don't say this with any hostility, any contempt.
I don't even say this with any disrespect.
It's just that as atheists, yeah, value the truth.
And the truth is, you don't really value the truth.
You value comfort, right?
This is why I kept responding to people on these threads saying, well, you're just hedonists.
You're just hedonists.
Because when it became, well, I couldn't say, again, send me an anonymous email saying, I'm so sorry, blah, blah, blah.
It's not a lot to ask.
Didn't matter, right?
So, yeah, you don't value the truth.
You don't value justice, really.
And that's fine.
I mean, that is in accordance with evolution, right?
Evolution says do what is best for your survival.
And it could have been risky to publicly support me back in the day.
I get it.
I understand.
I sympathize.
I'm not even mad at you, I'm just pointing it out, that then when you say we, it's hypocritical to say to Christians, you should accept the truth, even though it makes you suffer enormously, and then refuse to even send an anonymous email of support when someone is treated unjustly.
Bye.
*Sigh* Mm-mm.
You just got to look in the mirror and see who you are.
Unadorned, no vanity, no pomposity.
And look, I'm not perfect at this.
Obviously, it's a lifelong project, but it's a really important project.
You guys look in, and I'm just holding up a mirror.
These are the facts.
And you don't have these facts, right?
I have these facts because I went through it.
So this is who you are.
You failed to support someone who was being unjustly attacked because it was uncomfortable, because you didn't care, because it was inconvenient, because it was potentially upsetting.
So you did not uphold the truth because it was upsetting to you or you were afraid of it.
And then you tell Christians you should let go of 2,000 years of moral history and immortality and reuniting with loved ones and so on, comfort in the face of death and illness and suffering.
Well, you're not what you think you are.
I'm sorry to tell you, you're just not who you think you are.
You pick the easy fights, not the difficult fights.
You don't value the truth.
You value dominance.
And when you're asked tough questions and you get tough data, and I recognize this is tough data, and I sympathize with it, it's tough to go through that dark midnight of the soul when you say, gee, am I living up to that which I claim is the good?
Easy to talk about the good.
I can say the word diet, diet, diet over and over again.
Muscle, muscle, muscle, it doesn't change anything, right?
You can say, say, words are cheap, right?
Deeds are expensive.
You are measured by what you do.
Your conscience measures you, if you have one, by what you do, not what you say.
So I say to atheists, I ask atheists, did your words match your values?
Did you do one 100,000th of that which you demand of Christians when it came to telling the truth?
No.
So, sorry, atheism.
You're not enough yet.
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