Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - How I Lost GOD!
Aired: 2025-08-19
Duration: 25:03


=== How I Became an Atheist (02:35) ===

[00:00:00]  All right.
[00:00:01]  Hope you're doing well.
[00:00:02]  Question from an ex-listener.
[00:00:08]  And I really do appreciate these questions.
[00:00:11]  I ask for them.
[00:00:12]  And thank you so much for bringing them to my attention.
[00:00:18]  And so here's a question.
[00:00:21]  And it is, are you an atheist based on refutation of the teleological or cosmological argument or both?
[00:00:30]  And how would you express your refutations?
[00:00:34]  That is a very, very good question.
[00:00:38]  So I have an entire book about this.
[00:00:43]  So I'm going to just get personal.
[00:00:47]  I'm going to get personal.
[00:00:49]  And I'm going to talk about how I became an atheist from being, I would say, extraordinarily devout in my younger years.
[00:01:00]  One of my first memories is of playing with my cousin at my aunt's house in the attic.
[00:01:08]  And there was a song by Cliff Richard playing on the radio called Power to All Our Friends, to the Music That Never Ends.
[00:01:17]  And I remember, I've talked about this on the show before.
[00:01:21]  I remember there being a very cold eye that disapproved of the song because it was secular.
[00:01:30]  And the funny thing is, is that Cliff Richard is, I believe, quite a Christian, does a lovely duet with Van Morrison.
[00:01:37]  Whenever God shines a light or something like that, it's really, really pretty.
[00:01:41]  So that's neither here nor there.
[00:01:43]  So I will tell you what happened to my faith.
[00:01:48]  I will tell you what happened to my religion.
[00:01:52]  I will tell you what happened between me and God.
[00:01:56]  And I hope that you will forgive the indulgence in personal history.
[00:02:03]  Because the arguments I've put forward out there, whether they're theological or cosmological, whether it's by design or the nature of the universe, I've already talked about that quite a bit.
[00:02:13]  And I've mentioned some of this stuff in passing.
[00:02:15]  But I think it's important to understand if you're interested.
[00:02:21]  And it's not just my journey.
[00:02:22]  I think this is the journey of a lot of people in the West.
[00:02:24]  I think it's important to understand how people end up giving up on faith, giving up on religion, giving up on God.

=== Five Pennies in a Sock (03:20) ===

[00:02:35]  I don't know if it's some, I always think of it as some sort of vague Anglo-Saxon thing, just this relentless empiricism.
[00:02:42]  What's factual, what works, what's real, and the evidence of the senses and all kinds of good juicy stuff.
[00:02:49]  For me, it's always been important to be practical.
[00:02:53]  And I know that's not an argument.
[00:02:55]  I also know it's annoying to say, well, what I believe is practical.
[00:02:58]  What you believe is I don't mean that.
[00:03:00]  And I'll sort of explain it as I go along.
[00:03:02]  And I'm just grappling my way through these particular thoughts and ideas.
[00:03:06]  And again, I really do appreciate the question.
[00:03:08]  All right.
[00:03:08]  So let's get started.
[00:03:09]  So I was very religious when I was young, truly believed in it all.
[00:03:14]  I remember being in boarding school.
[00:03:17]  I still had some remnants of faith by boarding school.
[00:03:21]  I went to boarding school when I was six.
[00:03:23]  So the memory I had was probably when I was three or so.
[00:03:26]  I remember very clearly being 10 months of age or 11 months of age before I could walk.
[00:03:32]  And by the, about three years of age, I know I still had very deep belief in God and faith in God.
[00:03:40]  And I think by the age of six, it was still there, but mostly gone.
[00:03:48]  And before that, I think at the age of four or five, I think I was cynical about it.
[00:03:54]  And I know, what a prodigious four-year-old cynic.
[00:03:57]  So, you know, again, I know it's annoying, and just bear with me as best you can.
[00:04:01]  If it's any consolation, if it annoys you, this precociousness, it annoys me first.
[00:04:05]  So, just to be aware of that.
[00:04:07]  Because I very clearly remember my aunt, I would stay with my aunt quite a bit.
[00:04:13]  This is my father's sister.
[00:04:15]  Well, one of them, he had three sisters.
[00:04:17]  And my aunt would take us to church.
[00:04:21]  And I remember she would give me, she gave me five pence to put in the collection box.
[00:04:29]  And instead, I put it in my sock because often after we were at church, we might go.
[00:04:38]  I'm not sure what my plan was, but we would go, and I think I could get a candy bar for a penny or two.
[00:04:43]  And I figured at some point I could get a couple of candy bars, chucky bars, instead of putting money in the collection plate.
[00:04:52]  So, just empirically, again, by maybe four or five years of age, because this was before boarding school.
[00:04:58]  So, by four or five years of age, I was not devoted to God, the church, or religion, but was instead apparently devoted to chocolate and the slow-rolling destruction of my teeth.
[00:05:13]  So, it's always been interesting to me how I went from that level of devotion to cynicism to hiding five pennies in my sock.
[00:05:27]  And here's the funny thing: and I very clearly remember my aunt saying, Do you have your, do you have your five pence?
[00:05:36]  And I'm, yeah, show it to me.
[00:05:38]  And I was like, Oh, it must have fallen.
[00:05:40]  Oh, my gosh, I wonder if it fell in my sock.
[00:05:42]  I mean, just honestly, the most ridiculous stuff.
[00:05:44]  And she kind of, I'm sure, let me get away with it or whatever it was, right?
[00:05:47]  Oh, it ended up in my sock.
[00:05:48]  I think I put it in my sock for safekeeping or something like that.
[00:05:52]  But I didn't get my two to five candy bars.

=== Lost Faith Circumstances (03:07) ===

[00:05:56]  So, what had happened in the interim?
[00:06:01]  Of course, it's pretty hard to recreate your thoughts at such an early age.
[00:06:07]  And I don't have, obviously, I didn't have syllogisms.
[00:06:10]  It was all feelings, experiences, instincts, sort of you name it.
[00:06:14]  And so, it's hard for me to recreate this in any accurate manner.
[00:06:22]  So, I have to kind of look at the circumstances and try and figure out what was going on that my faith just kind of drained away.
[00:06:29]  I think it's John Irving who was talking about the faith of a priest as a sort of a stink insect that was climbing sticking sect that was climbing up a bathroom wall with a shower raining down, and eventually it just gave up and let slip.
[00:06:41]  Certainly, by the time I was in boarding school, I had some affinity for religion and I enjoyed some of the religious stories, but I was not religious.
[00:06:51]  I prayed because I was supposed to, but I did not pray anymore to God.
[00:06:58]  Now, I had not encountered any atheists or any atheism.
[00:07:02]  I had not read, of course, at that age, any works disputing the logical consistency of the existence of God.
[00:07:12]  I hadn't read or seen there weren't exactly a lot of comics based on radical skepticism of theology and so on.
[00:07:22]  So, I lost my faith with no intervention that I can recall.
[00:07:29]  Now, my mother is not religious.
[00:07:31]  My father at that time was an agnostic to my knowledge.
[00:07:37]  He later, later on in life, much later on in life, he became devout, devoutly religious.
[00:07:43]  But my mother was not religious.
[00:07:45]  My aunts were.
[00:07:48]  I don't know that my father ever talked to me about religion at that age.
[00:07:54]  But my father was profoundly irresponsible.
[00:07:56]  I mean, as I said before, he played a tennis game while letting me crawl around the tennis shed to the point where I ended up drinking Weed Killer, almost dying.
[00:08:07]  And so I don't recall any irreligious, anti-religious, or even non-religious consumption of anything.
[00:08:17]  In the media, I don't remember anything.
[00:08:22]  So I lost my faith due to circumstances.
[00:08:28]  Or, I mean, to be more accurate, due to my interpretation of circumstances, which, of course, as everyone knows, is not always the same thing, to put it mildly, right?
[00:08:39]  So I lost my faith due to circumstances or my interpretation of circumstances.
[00:08:46]  So what were those circumstances?
[00:08:47]  I mean, I think it's a big and important question because I clearly am far from alone in losing my faith as a child.
[00:08:57]  And I think a lot of it indirectly had to do with World War II, but we'll sort of get to that over time.

=== Coldness and Distance (14:36) ===

[00:09:03]  And again, I appreciate your indulgence.
[00:09:05]  I hope this is of interest to people.
[00:09:06]  For me, it's always very interesting to work through particular patterns of thought or to figure out, you know, why I would give up on something as essential to my identity as my Christian faith, to give up on it or, in a sense, to see it evaporate within me because this was not a reasoned process.
[00:09:24]  I didn't sit and think, well, this doesn't make much sense and that doesn't make much sense and all of that, but it just kind of evaporated.
[00:09:31]  Like, you know, if you have a driveway and it rains and it's summer, then you get these pools of water and then the pools of water dry up pretty quickly.
[00:09:41]  And then next thing you know, you look and they're gone.
[00:09:43]  And that was sort of my, that was sort of my experience.
[00:09:46]  And I think that cold sort of saw on eye of God that I experienced when I was younger, and this could just be like a British thing, like growing up in England.
[00:09:54]  England is a cold place, man, emotionally.
[00:09:58]  And the sort of stiff upper lip, the frigid reserve, the class consciousness is a cold, cold place.
[00:10:07]  Not a lot of hugs, not a lot of comfort.
[00:10:10]  And I think a lack of comfort, a lack of kindness, a lack of gentleness, a lack of warmth, really, I think in the British culture, chilled the distance between me and God to like interstellar lengths.
[00:10:28]  Because if a culture worships God, which my culture, the British culture, if a culture worships God and the culture is cold as hell, then God must be cold.
[00:10:43]  I won't say cold as hell.
[00:10:44]  It seems a little blasphemous, but God must be cold.
[00:10:47]  My father, cold.
[00:10:49]  My mother, crazy.
[00:10:51]  My brother, cold.
[00:10:53]  My aunts, cold.
[00:10:54]  My cousins, cold.
[00:10:57]  I mean, 23 years ago, I married this wonderful Greek woman who's very warm.
[00:11:03]  And I mean, it really did thaw my heart, let me tell you.
[00:11:06]  Cold, cold, cold.
[00:11:08]  Very little spontaneous joy, very little happiness in the presence of children.
[00:11:14]  Very tense, a lot of frustration, a lot of eye-rolling, a lot of icy politeness.
[00:11:20]  A cold, just such a massive distance between people.
[00:11:26]  And that coldness is also the case in Canada.
[00:11:30]  It's also the case in the U.S. from what I've seen.
[00:11:33]  Certainly was the case in South Africa.
[00:11:35]  So maybe it's a wasp thing, I don't know, but just cold, cold people, cold, distant people.
[00:11:42]  No warmth, no hugs, no deep inquiries into how you're doing.
[00:11:48]  No, how's your heart?
[00:11:49]  No, you know, no real empathy, no deep consideration, no sensitive listening.
[00:11:57]  Just cold, broken, anti-tribal, shattered connections, enormous distance.
[00:12:06]  Now, of course, two world wars, the Great Depression, and you name it, certainly contributed to all of that.
[00:12:12]  Or maybe, maybe I should say it was not so much that it was a cold culture, but it was a culture that was dissociated through shock, PTSD, and the massive hemorrhaging blood loss of millions of its inhabitants.
[00:12:26]  And I find modern culture very cold.
[00:12:28]  I mean, you see it on social media all the time.
[00:12:30]  There's almost no warmth.
[00:12:32]  I mean, we think about it, right?
[00:12:33]  There's almost no warmth.
[00:12:35]  I mean, I will say to people, you know, like, I'm really sorry that happened to you, and you have my deepest sympathies, big hug from the Great Beyond, and all of that.
[00:12:43]  And I mean, I feel that, and I really do care.
[00:12:46]  You know, people have sad stories, but it's cold as a whole.
[00:12:52]  I'm not sure why, but Western culture, again, some exceptions, of course, Italians are quite warm.
[00:13:00]  Our Greeks, of course.
[00:13:02]  But for a lot of the Western culture, it's just cold.
[00:13:07]  Distant, icy, removed.
[00:13:10]  Guarded, really guarded.
[00:13:12]  Not like I had a conflict with a listener.
[00:13:14]  And I recorded it.
[00:13:15]  I'll probably put it out at some point, but just cold.
[00:13:18]  Just cold.
[00:13:19]  And that coldness, I don't know if it's a kind of superiority, not for the listener, but just what I experienced as a child.
[00:13:25]  I don't know if it's a kind of superiority.
[00:13:26]  I don't know.
[00:13:27]  But it's a sort of, there is a sort of smoke superiority and guardedness to that kind of coldness.
[00:13:32]  And so I experienced my culture as cold.
[00:13:36]  My aunt's as cold.
[00:13:37]  My father is cold.
[00:13:38]  My mother is distant.
[00:13:39]  My brother is cold, distant.
[00:13:41]  In boarding school, you got caned, cold, distant.
[00:13:45]  The woman who was in charge of us, the matron, like a real Nurse Ratchet style, you know, Louise Fletcher from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, like just cold, cold.
[00:13:55]  White, angry, white-hot anger, and cold, if that makes sense.
[00:14:01]  I know hot and cold.
[00:14:03]  The priests, cold.
[00:14:06]  No warmth, no empathy, no curiosity.
[00:14:09]  And as a sensitive boy who had had more than his fair share of heartaches, some warmth, some hugs.
[00:14:18]  I wrote about this with the character Catherine in my novel Almost.
[00:14:22]  Just warmth.
[00:14:25]  Can we get some warmth anywhere of any kind?
[00:14:28]  You know, you'd get injured.
[00:14:30]  You'd fall down, you'd taste blood, and have a loose tooth, bloody nose.
[00:14:35]  Ah, been to the wars, have we?
[00:14:37]  Been to the wars, have we?
[00:14:38]  It's cold shit, man.
[00:14:40]  God, just ice people.
[00:14:43]  Inhuman robots.
[00:14:45]  Cold.
[00:14:46]  Stiff upper lip is like a noose around your heart.
[00:14:50]  Not any particular passion, just this icy, shallow, empty rage.
[00:14:57]  I mean, I remember when I read when I was in my single digits, probably eight or nine, a book called The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris, I think it was, about how crazy people go in cities.
[00:15:09]  I don't think it's cities, but so all of that coldness, you know, if you were homesick at boarding school, nobody cared.
[00:15:18]  And that's, I think, why we went through all of these various hobby horse hysterias, the conquerors and the paper airplanes and things like that.
[00:15:27]  Just dissociated colds.
[00:15:31]  We were not social animals.
[00:15:33]  We were cold, competitive, distant, ice people, caustic to each other, as distant from each other as we were from our own hearts and our own experiences.
[00:15:46]  So given that everybody who worshipped God was distant, God could not worship closeness.
[00:15:56]  And that was not really a syllogism, but just very much my lived experience, right?
[00:16:02]  Everybody was distant from each other, cold, censorious, judgmental, aggressive, hitty.
[00:16:10]  The only passion I saw, then the white range, the white rage of tight-lipped disapproval, was my mother's florid raped into Adam's passion, which was craziness.
[00:16:20]  How could I get close to God when everyone who worshipped God was cold?
[00:16:27]  So clearly, if everybody who worshipped God and prayed to God for guidance was cold, then God must be cold, cold, cold.
[00:16:38]  A witch's breast at absolute zero.
[00:16:41]  Because if people were praying to God and said, you know, how should we live?
[00:16:45]  How should we be?
[00:16:46]  And everyone was cold and everyone prayed to God and everyone took instruction from God, then God must be cold.
[00:16:51]  Because if God was telling people, be warm-hearted, be open-hearted, ask people how they're doing, connect, right?
[00:16:57]  That's the E.M. Forster thing, like only connect, connect.
[00:17:01]  So if everybody took their instruction from God, but God was, then God was cold.
[00:17:08]  Everybody who was cold took their instruction from God, therefore God must be cold, which is why the eye that hovered over me a great distance when I was three or so in the attic with my cousin was judgmental, cold, negative, hostile to any kind of earthly pleasures, and demanding of endless self-erasure, devotion, and self-sacrifice.
[00:17:31]  And that message I got from very early on, that as a man in particular, as a boy, as a male, you were just supposed to self-sacrifice.
[00:17:38]  Now, I felt stress at all the coldness around me, because it meant that I was unattached and therefore unprotected as a little boy, as a toddler.
[00:17:54]  And I was.
[00:17:54]  I mean, I remember being six or so and crossing the street with my mother.
[00:17:59]  We weren't at a light.
[00:18:01]  And I dropped my coloring book and I reached down to pick it up.
[00:18:04]  And a car swished by at high speed so close to me that it drove over my coloring book, like inches from my head and hand.
[00:18:13]  High speed.
[00:18:14]  Crazy stuff.
[00:18:16]  And so if I didn't feel cared for, if I didn't feel loved, appreciated and warmly attached, then I was in perpetual danger.
[00:18:28]  I mean, if you don't care about something, you leave it behind.
[00:18:32]  You ignore it.
[00:18:33]  Children should be seen and not heard, I was told.
[00:18:37]  And if I was stood in front of something my mother wanted to see, well, I know that you're a pain.
[00:18:43]  I just don't know that you're a window pane.
[00:18:45]  So I think that coldness was, and this just struck me now.
[00:18:52]  So the coldness was God worships distance.
[00:18:56]  God praises distance.
[00:18:58]  God worships distance.
[00:19:00]  If God praises and worships distance, then the only way to worship God is to distance yourself from God.
[00:19:05]  And I think that's what I did.
[00:19:08]  Because if God commanded warmth, but everyone was cold, then nobody believed in God.
[00:19:14]  If God commanded cold and everyone be cold and everyone was cold and distant, then I should be cold and distant, which meant, in a sense, since God commands being aloof as virtuous, then I should be aloof from God.
[00:19:26]  So in a sense, my faith was to drop my faith.
[00:19:31]  Since being distant and cold is the ideal, then I should be distant and cold from God as God was distant and cold from me and from all those around me who prayed for guidance and became cold and distant.
[00:19:43]  And of course, it goes without saying, since I've said it before, but I mentioned it briefly here, none of my relatives asked me how I was doing with a, they knew my mother was deranged.
[00:19:52]  They knew my mother had been hospitalized for madness even after I was born.
[00:19:58]  And so they knew that my mother was mad and dangerous and violent.
[00:20:02]  And yet they never once asked me how I was doing, or my brother, to my knowledge.
[00:20:09]  So that's cold.
[00:20:12]  It means that they don't care.
[00:20:14]  And if God says, don't care about children, which again, everybody was praying to God.
[00:20:19]  And if God says, don't care about children, then it is good to not care about others.
[00:20:26]  And therefore, it is good to not care about your family.
[00:20:28]  And therefore, it is good to not care about God.
[00:20:31]  How can God command you to be close to God if God commands everyone to be distant from each other?
[00:20:35]  Which is exactly what I saw and experienced vividly, daily, nightly.
[00:20:40]  So no priest, no teacher, no headmaster, no relative.
[00:20:46]  Did I mention teacher?
[00:20:47]  No, no priest, no teacher, no headmaster, no relative, no friend, no neighbor.
[00:20:54]  No one ever asked me how I was doing, despite the fact that, I mean, the abuse that I suffered as a child was not quiet.
[00:21:00]  It was loud and violent and screaming and screechy and, you know, things being thrown, kids being thrown against walls, like it was just crazy stuff, right?
[00:21:08]  And nobody ever asked.
[00:21:10]  And so I accepted that people worshipped God, and I accepted that this was the result.
[00:21:18]  And if the result of people worshiping God is coldness, hostility, abuse, indifference to the suffering of children, and only performative morality, then they cannot be worshipping a good deity.
[00:21:33]  I genuinely think that I deep down believed that everyone had switched their circuits and was not following God, but rather the devil.
[00:21:43]  And it didn't make any sense to me.
[00:21:46]  I think it is all instinctual stuff.
[00:21:47]  I wasn't reasoning this stuff out.
[00:21:49]  I'm just sort of looking back upon the course of my life from, you know, 50 plus years on.
[00:21:55]  How could it be good?
[00:21:56]  You know, when I came to Canada at the age of 11, my brother went back to England for a couple of years, and there was not one phone call, not one letter asking me how I was doing.
[00:22:05]  He went back to England to stay with my relatives.
[00:22:07]  It's cold.
[00:22:08]  It's really cold.
[00:22:10]  I assume they didn't ask my brother how he was doing.
[00:22:13]  If they did, maybe he wasn't honest.
[00:22:15]  But again, they all knew that I was left alone with the crazy woman in a foreign country that we'd just moved to.
[00:22:20]  And this was the time when my mother truly lost her mind, like wouldn't get out of bed.
[00:22:24]  She was turning 40 and the game was up.
[00:22:27]  The wall, as they say, does not forgive.
[00:22:30]  Cold, cold people.
[00:22:32]  Cold people.
[00:22:34]  How could they be worshiping a good deity?
[00:22:36]  You know, and it's fun.
[00:22:37]  It was very confusing because I remember in the sort of color paintings that were in my Bible, you know, there's Jesus hugging lambs and, you know, Mary cuddling Jesus.
[00:22:48]  And there was, you know, Jesus seemed kind of dewy-eyed and warm and friendly and yet just cold, cold people.
[00:22:55]  So I was like, okay, something's not right here.
[00:22:57]  They're worshiping the wrong way.
[00:22:58]  They're worshiping in the wrong direction.
[00:23:01]  Either God is telling them to be warm and they're cold, in which case God is not believable even to them.
[00:23:07]  They don't believe in God.
[00:23:08]  Or God is telling them to be cold, in which case it can't be God, but must be the devil.
[00:23:13]  And then people are worshiping not God, but the devil and don't even know it.
[00:23:17]  And it just, you know, it just fell away from me.
[00:23:20]  Like it just became an impossible conundrum.
[00:23:22]  Like it cannot be solved.
[00:23:24]  It cannot be solved.
[00:23:25]  Why is everyone so cold?
[00:23:27]  And again, you can see this.
[00:23:29]  Again, I know it's not an objective metric, social media and so on, but it's cold.
[00:23:34]  People express vulnerability and there's all these, you know, 10 people saying, it was a long time ago.
[00:23:38]  Suck it up.

=== Why Is Everyone So Cold? (01:23) ===

[00:23:39]  Grow up.
[00:23:39]  Doesn't matter.
[00:23:40]  Right?
[00:23:41]  Quit whining.
[00:23:42]  It's just cold.
[00:23:43]  It was cold.
[00:23:45]  And coldness is brutal on children.
[00:23:48]  When I worked in a restaurant in downtown Toronto in my early 20s, I broke up with a girl and there was a Nicaraguan guy who's like, how is your heart?
[00:23:55]  And I was like, none of my friends asked me that.
[00:23:56]  None of my family asked me that.
[00:23:58]  How is your heart?
[00:23:59]  Which just struck me.
[00:23:59]  Boom.
[00:24:00]  Struck me hard.
[00:24:02]  So I know this is not a philosophical argument, but there were philosophical conundrums that I was instinctively feeling my way past.
[00:24:09]  And I think that's how God and I parted ways.
[00:24:14]  Now, again, you can say, well, you know, but people are sinners and you shouldn't judge God by his followers.
[00:24:21]  And it's like, maybe a little.
[00:24:25]  I mean, it can't be completely unrelated.
[00:24:28]  It can't be completely unrelated.
[00:24:30]  If everyone who worships God is cold as ice, then that means something that matters to some degree, right?
[00:24:39]  And if you shouldn't judge God by his followers, then if his followers can't achieve virtue, then belief in God is not the solution to human evil.
[00:24:49]  So, anyway, I hope that helps.
[00:24:51]  I'd love to talk more about it, but I'm curious to see if anyone's interested in these ramblings to begin with.
[00:24:56]  But I hope that makes sense.
[00:24:57]  And again, I really appreciate your time and attention in these matters.
[00:25:00]  Lots of love, my friends.
[00:25:02]  Big hug from the Great Beyond.