Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Is Christianity Losing? Twitter/X Space

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 30, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:47:06

Is Christianity Losing? Twitter/X Space

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Yes, good evening, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well, Stefan Molyneux.
	It is the 29th of October, almost the end of the month.
	If you'd like to help out, I would be thrilled.
	I took a massive pay cut, income cut, of course, being deplatformed.
	If you could help me out, I would appreciate that.
	Help out the showfreedomain.com slash donate.
	We'd really, really appreciate it.
	And let us get to the callers tonight, because, you know, that's just much less work for me.
	Just bouncing off people's thoughts is easier.
	I mean, I have a bunch of stuff here, if need be, but nonetheless, we can do that.
	All right, let's go to Jeff.
	And if you wanted to unmute, I'd be thrilled and happy to hear what you have to say.
	Yes, good evening, Steph, and thank you for having us on and giving us a chance to ask questions.
	It's always fascinating and enjoyable to hear your perspective.
	I appreciate that.
	Go for it.
	Yes.
	In your book, The Future, which everyone should read, it's very fascinating.
	I'd like to hear you develop more the chapter where you had the future society, which was a good one, in conflict or potential conflict with a hostile power.
	And basically, they shut them down by telling them, if you persist in your aggression against us, we will release a biological weapon against you, which only targets you and your close relatives.
	Basically, we will destroy your own line if you attempt to start a war against us.
	I never heard anyone write that before or suggest that before, but it sounded very interesting.
	And I'd love to hear you expound on that idea since it's talking about the future.
	What is it that you would like to hear more details about?
	Oh, yes.
	In particular, I'd like to know if to your knowledge, that has been something that has been researched or if that was more like just speculation of what might happen in the future.
	And also just the morality of it, because I tend to think it's a good idea, particularly considering what the alternatives would be.
	But I would like to hear, A, is that based on some research you did or more of like speculation for the future?
	And secondly, the morality of it, because I know some people will be like, oh, that's terrible, you know, killing, you know, little kids and all that.
	So I would like to hear your perspective on both that, if that clarified it.
	Sure.
	Sure.
	Okay.
	So it's a great question.
	And I was talking about targeted biological weapons and biological weapons development back when I was talking to Joe Rogan in like 2014, like 10, 10 plus years ago, long before COVID.
	And so my understanding is that targeted biological weapons are certainly possible, that you could take somebody's gene sequence and you could try to develop some sort of weapon that would target themselves.
	I put in the novel the main character says, we're going to release this, if you continue with your aggression against our society, we're going to release this weapon against you.
	Now, we're not sure how many people it's going to target.
	It could target just you.
	It could target basically your family as a whole.
	And that's the threat.
	Now, I don't know, even as a writer, I don't know if that is a real threat or not a real threat.
	It is a very effective threat.
	So, of course, if you get in trouble with organized crime, they will go against your family if they can't get you.
	Or, of course, the governments in totalitarian regimes will often punish your families for the wrongs that you do.
	And now, of course, I'm not saying that's moral, but with regards to fighting back against a hostile government power that is threatening your society, say, well, you know, but we can't have indiscriminate.
	It's like, but no, the whole point is that it's indiscriminate.
	So if they come over and they rain down bombs, that's going to be indiscriminate.
	Kids are going to be killed.
	If they have an EMP attack and target the grid, then people are going to be killed, some of whom will be children because they can't get their medicine will go bad.
	They can't get any treatment at the hospital because maybe the hospital's out of backup power or something like that.
	So the traffic lights don't work, so they'll die in the ambulance because the ambulance has to go that much more slowly.
	So if there's any kind of war, war by its very nature, particularly modern war, is indiscriminate.
	And so I look not at the individual actions.
	What I do is I look at the relationship.
	So with this one, there's a foreign power that is, it's over at fishing disputes and so on, and they are threatening war against a free society.
	And so the leaders of those are threatened with targeted bioweapons that at least are threatened to be potentially indiscriminate.
	And you say, oh, gosh, but that could target kids.
	And it's like, but the foreign power is targeting children because let's say they set off a dirty bomb.
	Let's say they poison the water supply.
	I mean, any number of things that they could do is going to end up harming children.
	So somebody who says, your children are fair game, can they really say, my children are not, though?
	That's totally immoral, right?
	So in any war, you're going to get kids hurt.
	And so somebody who's starting a war is already saying kids are legitimate targets because that's the way that war goes, particularly these days.
	It has always been the case, but particularly more so these days.
	And even in the past, you say, well, let's say we look at sort of the Battle of Agincourt or things like the Battle of Hastings.
	These are sort of semi-professional soldiers all fighting.
	It's like, well, yes, but, you know, one of them gets killed and then there's no one to provide for his six children.
	And so they suffer enormously.
	So war causes children to suffer enormously.
	Anybody who threatens war is threatening children.
	And so saying, well, it would be completely immoral to threaten children is like, but they've already crossed that bridge.
	They've already threatened your children.
	So they have no right to say it's immoral to threaten children.
	And so I think that's the general moral reasoning.
	And of course, the purpose is to not have the war occur.
	And if the targeted bioweapon that's talked about in the novel, let's say it spills over and some kids die, that's a shame.
	In which case, their father should not have threatened war against a peaceful nation.
	And so, yeah, you can't have higher moral standards than your enemies.
	It just doesn't work.
	It doesn't work.
	If you are in a street fight, right, and you say, okay, no hitting below the belt, no hitting the face, right?
	And that's the rule.
	And then some guy punches you in the face and then tries to hit you in the groin, what do you do?
	Well, you are no longer bound by the rules because the other party has violated the rules.
	So what I really wanted to point out in that scene is that Morality is understood in the future.
	This is my novel.
	Morality is understood as a relationship.
	And if somebody threatens your kids, yeah, their kids are fair target.
	It's a shame.
	It's not what anybody wants who's moral, but if that's the way things are going to go.
	You know, one of the things that I've never really liked is that the good guys play by all these rules that the bad guys don't play by.
	And we can see this happening even in contemporary politics, right?
	So the bad guys don't play by these rules, and then they expect the good guys to play by the rules, right?
	The bad guys lie and slander and then say to the good guys, well, you shouldn't lie.
	And oh, well, I've got this, right?
	So this is the challenge with morality derived from God.
	Morality derived from God is an absolute to some degree, right?
	So thou shalt not murder is thou shalt not initiate killing.
	Doesn't mean you can't kill in self-defense.
	Thou shalt not steal would not bar you from stealing back.
	But it's not very clearly put forward.
	And of course, one of the problems is that Christianity says that you have absolute moral obligations regardless of how the other person is treating you.
	So if they treat you well, then you love them.
	And if they bully and abuse you, then you're supposed to love them.
	And you obviously pray for the salvation of those you love and you pray for the salvation of those who persecute you and you hate.
	So there are absolute moral obligations that exist regardless of the relationship between the two people.
	That is not morality to me.
	And I know that that sounds ridiculous, but I think I've made a pretty good case in UPB that morality is a relationship and you don't owe higher moral standards than the other person.
	If someone cheats you, you can cheat them back.
	If someone steals from you, you can steal them back.
	If someone smacks you, you can smack them back and you should because that's the best way to prevent escalation and it's the best way to keep a society peaceful.
	You know, the old saying, an armed society is a polite society.
	So if you say, and I understand this, it comes from sort of the religious tradition of the West, not just Christianity, but the religious traditions of the West.
	If you say, okay, I'm going to take this isolated example from the book and I put it in there as a deliberate provocation and a point of contention.
	So you say, okay, I'm going to take this example where David, the leader of the free society, is negotiating with the hostile foreign power.
	And he says, you know, we've got this, we've got this biological weapon.
	It's tuned to your genetics.
	Should just be you, might not just be you, might spill over a bit to your family, and so on.
	And you say, and you just isolate that and you say, okay, so that is a weapon that might target the innocent, the children, and therefore it's immoral.
	And that is a particular way of looking at morality that is frankly civilizational suicide.
	I've always said you treat people the best you can.
	The first time you meet them, after that, you treat them as they treat you.
	So if you have a host, in the novel, right, there's a hostile foreign power that is threatening war against a peaceful society.
	And that war is going to target children.
	So they've already said children are legitimate targets of war.
	So then why on earth would the free society say, well, we can't, you know, children is absolutely.
	No, they've already said children are legitimate targets of war.
	It's like, okay, so if children are legitimate targets of war, then I don't have to spare your children.
	What are they going to say?
	Well, it's wrong to target children.
	It's like, you're just threatened war against our entire society, which is going to cause children to suffer and die and be wounded.
	So that scene is in there to point out The only way to survive as a society is to treat people the best you can first time you meet them.
	And after that, treat them as they treat you.
	So if somebody lies about me, I feel zero obligation to tell the truth about them.
	Zero obligation.
	Oh, but lying, thou shalt not bear false witness.
	That's right.
	Thou shalt not bear false witness.
	So if somebody breaks that commandment, I'm no longer obligated to tell the truth about them.
	Now, I generally don't go around lying about people anyway, but I don't feel any obligation to tell the truth about people who lie about me.
	I don't.
	And so the idea of morality as a relationship rather than these isolated absolutes is kind of challenging for people.
	And I'm not saying you, and I'll get you, I'd love to hear your thoughts about what I'm saying.
	But it's kind of challenging for people because if morality is a relationship, then you can't hide behind taking the high ground all the time.
	Because taking the high ground bothers me enormously.
	And I know that's an emotional statement, but it is also counterproductive.
	It doesn't fundamentally work in the sort of prisoner's dilemma.
	So for those of you who don't know, and I'll just touch on this briefly, there's sort of these prisoners' dilemma.
	So you're all a bunch of prisoners and you want to trade stuff, you know, like you've got a bit of toothpaste, they've got a bit of soap, you want to trade, blah, blah, blah.
	And there's these holes between these prison cells.
	And you can, but only one arm can fit through, right?
	So if they say, hey, man, give me a bit of toothpaste and I'll give you a bit of soap, right?
	So you push through the toothpaste, then you see if they give you the soap, right?
	And if they do, right, treat people.
	So you do it.
	Hey, this deal is going to work.
	First time you treat them the best you possibly can, right?
	So they say, I'll give you the soap.
	You say, okay, I'll give you the toothpaste.
	And they say, give me the toothpaste first.
	Sure, absolutely.
	Here's the toothpaste.
	Now, if they give you the soap back, fantastic.
	Then you just keep doing that until they stop doing it.
	You treat people the best you can.
	First time you meet them after that, you treat them as they treat you.
	And if you hand over your toothpaste and they don't hand you back the soap, then you don't deal with them anymore.
	Now, there's certain wrinkles to this over time that, you know, maybe if the person really apologizes, okay, but those are sort of exceptional exigent circumstances, right?
	So you treat people the best you can.
	After that, treat them as they treat you.
	So in the novel, David, the leader, treats people in the foreign country the best he can.
	After that, he treats them as they treat him.
	So if they're saying we're going to launch a war and that is going to be targeting children by definition, then he's like, okay, so we can target children.
	So I'm going to have a bioweapon.
	I can't guarantee it's only going to hit you.
	It might also hit your family.
	Now, that's kind of, and that also hits a genetic thing, right?
	Which is that your genes want to survive.
	So maybe getting some extra fish out of the ocean isn't really worth it if your entire lineage is done because you're threatening a war.
	So yeah, that's the general purpose of that scene as a whole, but it's tough.
	It's tough because people want to, and I say hide behind, they want to hide behind this, take the high ground.
	How many times somebody is a real piece of crap towards you, they really just do nasty things towards you, and people say, well, you got to take the high road, you know, be better than them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And it's like, no, no, that doesn't work.
	I think it's wrong morally.
	And it doesn't work.
	It only causes more provocation and it only rewards bad behavior.
	And people, though, vengeance is a difficult and dangerous business.
	I talked about this recently, so I won't get into it here about passive vengeance.
	I'm a big fan of passive vengeance, which is that if somebody's wronged me, I don't wake up every day and say, oh, how can I get him?
	But I have this part of my brain that's always like, oh, this person's name pops up.
	Oh, I remember that guy was a real douchebag.
	And I will either amplify or promote anything negative they've done or fail to defend them if they're being attacked, right?
	That's that's passive vengeance.
	I don't pursue it, but if the opportunity comes along, I will act on it and move on.
	And so vengeance is a difficult business for people.
	And people would rather take the high road and think that they're right.
	But in general, the high road is just cowardly.
	So they can do whatever they want, but I've got to take the high road.
	It is just a way of avoiding a necessary fight and feeling superior as a whole.
	So that's what that scene is in the book for.
	And I'd certainly love to hear your thoughts about it.
	Well, yes, that was a very good explanation.
	I just had one or two thoughts, follow-ups.
	To begin with, you make an excellent point that when a war starts, particularly modern war, children are targeted.
	it's inevitable and uh and so therefore well sorry i i i'm i said that kind of wrong It's not that children are targeted, but children will certainly be hurt and suffer.
	But sorry, go ahead.
	They will come targets, even if it's not intentional, just because of the nature of modern artillery, modern bombing, cruise missiles, et cetera.
	Civilians will become casualties for sure.
	Or that old military expression, when they didn't want to confront the reality, they'd say collateral damage.
	Collateral damage.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	As opposed to saying, yeah, there's going to be a lot of dead kids.
	But if you think, and you make an excellent point about even in the days of the more limited warfare, like at Asian Corps or in the Christian era of the Middle Ages, you know, a man dies in battle, his family is going to suffer almost certainly.
	They didn't have life insurance back then.
	So you're going to, so, and you think about, say, Star Wars when Anakin massacres that entire village that kidnapped his mother.
	That very, that scene in there.
	So you, I imagine you've seen that scene and that film, so you're familiar in general.
	So some bait, some, some Mongol Hun-like people kidnap his mother.
	He, he finds her, but it's too late.
	She's dead.
	And he kills the whole village in retaliation.
	You see that, and it's supposed to be part of his transformation to the dark side.
	But when I saw that for the first time, I said, now, wait a second, just like you point out, Steph, children will suffer.
	I says, wait a minute.
	So on the one hand, he could only kill the men who could fight back and then leave the women and children to fend for themselves.
	Well, what's going to happen is they're going to be the next band that comes along going to turn them all into sex slaves and slaves or sexually whatever or kill them.
	So on the one hand, it's awful for him to just kill, you know, kill all these people in vengeance, but it's perfectly okay for him to basically leave them to their fate and let the wilderness and the desert kill them.
	So it's like, yeah, that's to me, that's like you say, that's avoiding a hard decision.
	It's like, if you're going to allow them to die, but just slowly and not by your hand, yeah, that's, that's kind of a cowardly way to go about it.
	And maybe it's not the perfect analogy, but it did strike, it did strike me as you mentioned that.
	But also, I'd like you to follow up, if you would, the issue of like vengeance and treating people as they treat you, et cetera.
	This doesn't seem to have been a problem throughout most of the history of the Christian West until the last relatively few generations.
	Christians in general seem to be able to have balanced justice with mercy, individual kindness with the need for the civil magistrate, as Romans says, to wield the sword vigorously.
	Why do you think that broke down?
	Why do you think Christians today or for the last few generations, unlike the past, have had such a hard time separating out personal kindness, personal, you know, forgiving a personal slight with the idea that the civil magistrate must vigorously prosecute evil?
	So, I mean, Christians have generally had an issue with this.
	And you can go to FDR podcasts and look up the truth about the Crusades for more on this: that the Christians lost a lot over the issue with the Crusades, lost a lot of territory, lost a lot of land.
	And Christians, frankly, are getting their asses kicked and have been for quite some time in terms of losing countries.
	I posted something on X, which was all of the countries that used to be Christian that are no longer Christian.
	And it is a lot of countries.
	It is a lot of countries.
	And so you can look that up and do a search on my channel.
	So not to interrupt, but the Spanish, not to interrupt, but take the Spaniards.
	Spain was conquered by the Moors.
	And then within about a century, half of Spain had been reconquered.
	And within another 50 years, about two-thirds of Spain had been reconquered.
	The full Reconquista took about 600 years.
	But after being pushed back to a tiny little kingdom in northern Spain, the Christians basically got the upper hand within about a century, century and a half.
	And thereafter, they could have pushed them out at that point, but they took Muslim tribute instead of pushing them out.
	The Moorish Granada and such, the Emirate of Granada and Valencia and such basically paid the Christian kings not to dispossess them.
	And it took a while for them back to be pushed out.
	I just say all that to say, in the old, in the Crusader days or in the days of Reconquista, Christians didn't have any trouble pushing back.
	Okay.
	I mean, I would argue that they did have a little bit of trouble in that it took so long.
	And of course, this is also true for a southern Italy, right?
	Southern Italy, where they philosophically, they didn't have a problem fighting the enemies of Christ.
	Right.
	Well, I would argue that they did, though, because they lost so much of their original Christian lands that, you know, when they were, you know, halfway through Europe, there's sort of a pushback.
	It's not enough.
	It's not enough to maintain it.
	We can see, of course, this happening now.
	So, and again, southern Italy was taken over by the Moors as well, which is why the southern Italians tend to be darker and so on.
	So, yeah, it is a big challenge and it is a big issue.
	So, there's a couple of reasons that come to mind, and this is obviously tentative and so on.
	But Christianity has had a thesis that all human beings' souls are created by God, and therefore everyone has the equal ability to be like everyone else, and everyone has the equal ability to be a Christian.
	In other words, Christianity, for at least a thousand years, has moved through the world with the idea that although you come from the other side of the world, if you become a Christian, you're just like me.
	And this was the white man's burden that you bring Christianity and the Western sort of political traditions of limited government, free speech, free markets, and so on, that you bring those to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world becomes like Europe.
	This was the sort of civilizing, oh, you know, because in the sort of mindset, it was like, well, gee, there are these savages out there in the world.
	This is the mindset, right?
	There are these savages out there in the world, and they're savages because they have not learned about Jesus and they have not become Christians.
	But if we go out into the world and we teach them about Christianity and we teach them about Jeffersonian-style republics and so on, and we teach them about free markets, they'll be just like us.
	Now, to make this a conversation, that has been a central thesis of Christianity for a thousand years.
	And literally untold amounts of blood, life, and treasure have been poured into the world as a result of this thesis that we're all basically the same, and the only difference is knowledge and Christianity.
	And so Christians have been around the world spreading knowledge and Christianity in the hopes of turning all the world into Western Europe.
	And how has that gone?
	Not too well, to be sure.
	And to your excellent point about the advance of Islam, one thesis, there's one thesis that says basically Islam kept moving forward against Christianity until it came up against the Germanic peoples.
	Basically, the warlike nature, there's a lot of books been written about how Christianity took over in Germany and Christianized Germany, but also some of the unique German characteristics remained with the German Christians.
	Well, so when Islam came up against the people who'd been Christians for the least amount of time, they got pushback, right?
	Well, that's an excellent point.
	And it would be an even stronger point if we weren't able to point to other examples of nations that had also been very Christian for very long.
	I mean, the Crusades themselves stand as a testament to the fact that Christians will fight back, will push back as a whole religion if necessary, although not always.
	And it's certainly not as central to their way of thinking as Muslims are.
	But the fact that the Pope preached a crusade to protect Christian pilgrims going to the Holy Land, and then you have Christian kings from all over Europe responding to it to varying degrees is definitely a pretty good sign.
	Or you take Skanderbeg, the defender of Christianity in the Balkans, the scourge of the Ottomans in the Albanian mountains.
	You take Vlad the Impaler.
	You take the various kings, Saint Ferdinand of the King of Spain, who pushed the Moors back to the Granada, Ferdinand Isabella, who finally took Granada as well.
	Yeah, it goes both ways.
	But in general, I agree with your thesis that the Christian urge to say that everyone can become like us with enough effort, you know, to associate Christianity with the unique cultural aspects of Europe is certainly a long-standing Christian, you know, an issue.
	Right.
	So here are some Christians, countries that used to be Christian that are no longer majority Christian.
	Are you ready?
	Oh, yes.
	The United Kingdom, France, Australia, Uruguay, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, and Estonia.
	If we look at historical countries, Turkey used to be Christian, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Sudan, Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.
	And that's not an exhaustive list, but that's a lot of places, man, that used to be majority Christian are no longer majority Christian.
	Oh, yes.
	You're absolutely correct.
	The second half is the areas which Islam largely took in its first in its first wave of conquest.
	Shortly before Islam, as you know, exploded out of Arabia, the Romans and the assassinated Persian Empire had engaged in a multi-century, and before that, the Parthians, a multi-century Cold War, the longest Cold War in the history of the world.
	And it finally came to a great head right before Islam exploded out of Arabia.
	So the two great powers of the region, the Persians and the Roman Empire, were basically in a really weakened condition.
	And right at that moment, Islam pushes out of Arabia.
	And there was this great battle fought in Palestine that had it gone the other way, it's as important as the Battle of Tours, because had it gone the other way, Islam would have been contained within Arabia almost certainly, and that would have limited its influence.
	Whereas, and I can't recall the battle's name off the top of my head, but whereas because of Islam's success at that battle, the Eastern Roman Empire had no field army left in that whole area.
	And so they were able to just push into Egypt, push into all these other places and keep on going.
	And basically, the Byzantine Empire at that point was limited by the mountains of Anatolia.
	They could hold the mountains.
	But I'm sorry, because I don't want to go.
	I'm not a circumstance history guy.
	It's just willpower.
	It's just willpower for me.
	And we sort of can get into whoever wins the war is whoever wants it more, particularly when there is all of the advantages that the Western Roman Christians had in terms of technology and the sort of Roman history and all of that.
	So, okay, so that's an issue.
	So I think Christianity has faced three major challenges and has weakened itself considerably.
	Number one is, as I mentioned, the idea that you can just go to all over the world and you can bring knowledge and Christianity to people and they'll be just like the West.
	Not true, right?
	Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.
	Okay.
	That's number one.
	Number two, it was not Christianity that produced the free market.
	And the free market has produced by far the greatest good for humanity as a whole.
	And it was also not Christianity that was foundationally responsible for modern science.
	So if you put science together with the free market, and those are things that Christianity, I mean, was not uninvolved in, right?
	And it's not uninvolved in, but it did not directly come out of those things.
	And certainly science, modern science, did arise with some significant opposition from Christianity.
	So the fact that Christianity had as its hope and goal, the spending of untold amounts of blood and treasure from the West in order to turn the rest of the world into the West, and that has utterly failed, I think would be a, it's a big challenge.
	And I don't see how that's really been addressed.
	I don't see how that's been addressed.
	The fact that the free market of modern science, the sort of one-two punch that produced the greatest advancements in human security, happiness, health, well-being, and so on, and that did not come out of the church, but came out to some degree in opposition to the church, means that the church has had a failure of mission and has not figured out why.
	Why did the European burden of, quote, civilizing the world, why did that fail so catastrophically?
	Well, I mean, there's answers that come out of evolutionary biology.
	There's answers that come out of IQ.
	There's a whole bunch of things, but that doesn't go in accordance with that God created every human soul foundationally equal, right?
	It does tend towards collectivism and egalitarianism.
	And this is why there's a lot of socialism that comes out of Christianity.
	And so the sort of raw naked struggle of the world is not accepted.
	The higher road and to some degree, the semi-Viking yearning for peace in the afterlife does have Christians withdraw from necessary struggles in the world that is.
	In other words, if Christians have to choose between ideas that help their society survive, but are negative towards religion, they will generally choose ideas that are positive towards their religion, even if that hampers long-term social survival.
	And again, we can see that with Christianity country after country after country after country, even foundational homes of Christianity.
	I mean, it's been over a thousand years, more than a thousand years then, that England has been Christian.
	Now it's minority Christian.
	France, of course, the same way, even longer.
	So the church, for all of its great goods, and Christianity is the closest thing to philosophical ethics that I've ever found.
	But the church, by focusing on the afterlife, and this is again one of the arguments about Rome as well, by focusing on the afterlife and having a standard, like the Romans said, what is good for Rome is good, right?
	What is good for Rome is the good.
	What enhances our power, what enhances our strength, what enhances our security, what enhances our victories, that is the good.
	Now, the pagan gods of Rome did not have this whole setup where you love your enemies and you get your reward after death in the afterlife.
	Now, the Vikings did, the northern Scandinavian or European countries did to some degree, but so you got your seat in Valhalla, but you got your seat in Valhalla by splitting skulls in the here and now.
	So in order to get to your paradise, you didn't sort of fold your hands and love your enemies as they cut you down.
	You tried to cut them down, right?
	As the old patent quote, you know, the point of war is not to die for your country, to leave the other poor bastard die for his country.
	For his country.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So I think that there is an otherworldliness to Christianity.
	There is a reward after death.
	There is a take the high road.
	This is what sort of Nietzsche understood about the sort of some of the slave morality stuff.
	And there is not the muscular Christianity was a sort of short-term phenomenon in the mid to late 19th century.
	And there is not that hearty, robust human struggle, focus on a human struggle and having the same morals as your enemies and not deluding yourself about the effects of your mission.
	Because it's not a theory, right?
	So for sort of the European burden to go civilize the world, as they talked about it at the time, wasn't a theory.
	It wasn't like, okay, well, let's try it here and see if it works.
	Let's try it here and see if it works.
	It was not a theory.
	It was not a theory.
	It was an absolute fact based upon the principles of Christianity that this was absolutely going to happen and it didn't happen.
	And science has its empiricism and its feedback mechanisms.
	The free market has its empiricism and its feedback methods.
	You know, does this product sell?
	Does it make more money than it costs to produce and that kind of stuff, right?
	And where was the feedback method?
	It's dogma and dogma dooms progress.
	And so when Christianity said, well, we're just going to go turn them into ourselves, they should have started small and see if it worked.
	And if it didn't work, they should try and figure out why.
	But because it's foundational dogma, it couldn't be questioned and so on, if that makes sense.
	Yes.
	Are you including things like the school of Salamanca in you're talking about how the free market doesn't originate in Christianity?
	Are you familiar with that?
	No, I'm not.
	Basically, in a nutshell, in the 1500s, late 140, early 1500s, scholastics and writers in Salamanca, Spain began to argue, among other things, that a just price, in air courts, a just price, is a market price, that no one should be, whether it's king or pope, should be setting prices.
	They were one of the first to argue for a free market in terms of pricing, and they used Christian principles to argue for that, as opposed to those who said you can't have market prices.
	You can't let the market determine the stuff.
	You can't have interest.
	You can't have anything.
	Also, the Protestant Reformation also introduced the idea that interest in certain circumstances was permissible, which of course the Catholic Church opposed, as you know.
	Right.
	And of course, those who are able to borrow money at interest can fund wars and more soldiers.
	So they tend to win wars and so on.
	So and somebody has pointed out, Draco's pointed out, and I appreciate that Christianity was in opposition to science.
	It's worth reinvestigating.
	So, and I did shows with Tom Woods many years ago about this.
	I was just about to mention him.
	Yeah, Tom Woods says, you know, that the fact that a lot of scientists were funded by the church and a lot of scientists, this is true, the guy who mapped the whole human genome is a staunch Christian who believes he's doing the work of God.
	And so I'm not saying that all Christians are opposed to all science.
	I'm not saying that every pope, every bishop, every cardinal was opposed to all science.
	There were certainly pro-science aspects within the church, but the belief system itself, the belief system itself has real problems with, I mean, because it says that man was created by God.
	And this is why Christians have, a lot of Christians have issues with evolution.
	And, you know, human biodiversity is a challenge to the unity of the soul created under God.
	And so there are real challenges in the relationship between Christianity and science.
	They are absolutely opposing methodologies.
	And, you know, I know there's lots of people who can hold more than one way of getting to the truth in their mind and all of that, but they are foundationally opposing methodologies.
	One is skepticism, blank slate, has to be a fully rational hypothesis, a fully internal, a fully internally consistent hypothesis.
	And only then do you go to testing.
	You have to release your source data.
	Everyone else has the right to be skeptical.
	They have to be able to reproduce your experiments.
	It has to follow the principle of Occam's razor or prosimity, which is the simplest explanation is probably the best and so on.
	That is a foundational methodology of skepticism, rationality, and empiricism that is absolutely opposed to all religious principles.
	Absolutely.
	There's no way you can get around that.
	It is absolutely opposed to all religious principles because all religious principles are faith and worship and the subjugation of reason to otherworldly expectations.
	Reason is not the highest arbiter of truth and empiricism is not how you prove anything.
	And the foundation of religion, particularly Christianity, but other religions as well, the foundation of all religion is absolute anti-science because how do you know that someone is religious?
	How do you know that someone is the son?
	Sorry, how do you know someone is the son of God?
	How do you know somebody is divine?
	They perform miracles.
	Miracles are specifically anti-scientific.
	They're called miracles because they violate the laws of physics.
	So there is a tension.
	And you, particularly in the realm of ethics, right?
	I mean, as I've said before, and I'll keep this brief here, foundational problem with religion, which we're seeing playing out in the West and really have been seeing playing out for the last, I mean, 150 years, you could say 400 years, but it's really since Darwin, 150, 160 years, is that if your religions come from, if your morals come from God, your morals come from religion, then you can escape morality by dropping faith.
	You can wish your way out of morality.
	And that's really what we've seen in the modern world.
	UPB, you can't escape.
	And I'm telling you, man, people have tried, philosophy professors, skeptics, scientists, people very hostile to what it is that I do.
	They've all tried.
	They've all failed.
	So you can't overturn UPB except by abandoning any rational consistency whatsoever, which people can't do because you can't substitute faith for that in UPB.
	So the goal of UPB was to create a moral system that you can't wish your way out of by no longer believing in a God.
	Because if morals depend on God, then you either incarcerate or drive out people who don't believe in God, or you end up with a whole bunch of amoral people in your society, which makes it very difficult to sustain your society as a whole, if that makes sense.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Would you say that, what do you think of the hypothesis that says that after the initial defeat of Christianity by the Muslims in several countries and some of the pushback, the retaking of Spain, et cetera, then you see Christianity explode in the age of colonialism and exploration and basically come to dominate the all it dominate North and South America, virtually all of Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and et cetera.
	What would you say to the idea that Christianity had an initial drop with Islamic, the losing land to Islam, a slight regain, but still a net loss?
	Then in the age of exploration, colonization, they take basically four continents plus and held it for a time.
	And then the world wars, as you've said so many times, so eloquently, wrecked it, the 30-year civil war that destroyed Western civilization.
	And now they've been in a retreat ever since.
	But it's not a, you know, the same Christianity, or perhaps you disagree, but the same Christianity that lost the Middle East to Islam also conquered the Americas from the indigenous religions, conquered Africa, conquered Australia.
	So how would you square that?
	Well, I don't know.
	I would talk about it at a personal level.
	And because I really want people to sort of get this.
	And you can tell me if this is the case in your life.
	So have you ever had it where you're doing well, sailing high, you know, conquering the planet, taking names, writing them down.
	And then there's a little voice in your head that sows doubt in your mind.
	I have to deal with this.
	It's mostly better now, just at a personal level.
	And I think this is true for the West as a whole.
	Boy, look at me microcosming my way from me to the West as a whole.
	But I have had the biggest ambitions, I think, of any human being in history.
	I'm going to solve secular ethics.
	I am going to propose the ideal society.
	I am like all of the things that I'm going to advance philosophy more over 20 years than it has over 2000.
	That has been my goal.
	I've certainly achieved some of it, and there's no question that I've achieved some of it.
	However much I have achieved is for history to decide and all of that.
	But during the process of pursuing what I've done over the last 20 years, there have been times where I wake up, look in the mirror and say, oh, there's a voice in my head that says, you're insane.
	You're deluded.
	Are you kidding me?
	Delusions of grandeur, megalomania, whatever you want to call it, right?
	And I have to deal with the problem of self-corrosive doubt.
	And whether that comes from me or it just comes from everyone who loses out if UPB becomes established doesn't really matter.
	But I'm sure that you've had over the course of your life something where you believe that you can do something great and then you hit this hiccup of doubt.
	And I actually don't really trust anyone who never hits this hiccup of doubt.
	It means that they're a little crazy because especially the bigger your goal and the bigger your ambition, the more you should have the occasional doubt to reorient yourself and make sure you're not crazy.
	I mean, I went from a broke, non-economic, welfare state, poor background to, you know, being fairly decent in business and, you know, starting a company and growing it quite well and so on.
	And there are times where it's like, who am I to, right?
	I don't have sales training.
	I don't have, I never took a computer science degree.
	I don't have any business training.
	I don't have any management trading.
	And so who am I to write software, to hire people, to manage people, to grow a business, to do sales, to negotiate contracts?
	Like, who am I to do all of that, given that I'm not trained?
	And so I think in the West, and I think if you're honest, you know, I know that's a bit of a leading question, but I think if we're all honest with ourselves, we either don't have doubt because we've not tried anything particularly great, or we don't have doubt because we're crazy, and there's nobody here who's crazy.
	They don't tend to stay on this kind of show.
	So that wanting to do great things, what do we do with the doubt?
	What do we do with the doubt about whether we can do it, whether it's crazy to try, whether it's wrong to try, whether it's deluded, and so on, right?
	Because delusions are pretty bad, right?
	They tend to make life pretty miserable.
	So I think that Christianity, what was it that fueled the spread of Christianity in the age of imperialism?
	Well, it wasn't Christianity itself.
	It was the free market.
	It was science, right?
	It was better maps.
	It was better sailing vessels.
	It was figuring out the link between vitamin C and scurvy.
	It was a better weaponry and better food production, better food storage, transportation.
	So it was, I mean, to have a big army and to have a big navy fleet, you need to have a lot of extra food.
	And where did you get the extra food from from the revolution, agricultural revolution, 17th, 18th century, which produced massive amounts more food by rationalizing and privatizing food production by turning food into the free market.
	And how did you end up with being able to have sailing ships going across the oceans?
	Well, because, I mean, partly because Blaise Pascal invented the kind of calculus math that could get an insurance company going, but you still had to have an insurance company.
	The first stock market in the Netherlands in the 17th century, I think it was.
	So it was not Christianity per se that drove the age of conquest, the age of imperialism.
	It was the free market and science and the combination thereto, then taken over by the state and fueled for Christian ends and so on.
	And so it was an artificial boost to the spread of Christianity that did not come out of a certainty with the belief themselves, but came out of an increased technological and navigational capacity to inflict will on others.
	And then, of course, the mad race to just color the map your own country's color and so on.
	And so Christianity got a significant artificial boost from non-Christian elements such as science and the free market, which caused to some degree the spread of Christianity, but the same things that caught Christianity to spread also undermined the certainty of Christianity.
	And I really feel that Christianity, certainly in my lifetime, has had a crisis of confidence.
	See, a crisis of faith, and maybe the two are two sides of the same coin, but a significant crisis of confidence in that Christianity promised a better world, but it was science, reason, and the free market that produced a better world in opposition to the foundational epistemology and metaphysics of Christianity.
	And so, and also the failure of the European burden to, quote, civilize the world, the failure of that was never really addressed.
	And I don't know if the failure of that can be addressed without discrediting Christianity in the minds of a lot of people.
	So I think it's been fighting a losing battle against a rising tide.
	And the step has to be towards rational philosophy.
	There's no turning back to mysticism.
	There's no turning back to superstition.
	There's no turning back to, you know, one Christendom certainty.
	And there is only moving forward to absolute rational certainty about virtue and reality.
	And that's really been the mission that I've been on.
	But I think, yeah, there were spreads, but I do not think that Christianity is certain enough.
	I mean, when you have the Pope washing the feet of migrants who aren't Christians, that is a crisis of confidence.
	That is a crisis of certainty.
	And of course, it has a lot to do with increased female power and so on in the church.
	And in the church services that I've been going to, and I've tried a variety of them, it's very, very female.
	It's very female.
	It's all about connectivity and the challenges of temptation, but it's not about sort of strength and moral courage.
	And it's not about fighting the good fight.
	And it's not about doing the right thing and standing up.
	There's been nothing about the dangers of Satan and the need to have a spiritual battle against the evildoers of the world.
	None of that.
	None of that at all.
	And that is a challenge.
	And that's why men are falling away from Christianity quite a bit.
	Yeah, or put another way, The religious departs of Christianity that do exactly what you're talking about have seen a great deal of loss.
	And the part, the denominations or the branches of Christianity, which are emphasizing the more masculine elements, are seeing a lot of attendance.
	The New York Times, I believe, wrote about this, how for the first time in recorded memory, with the first time since anyone's been keeping stats, more young women, more young men than women are going to church.
	That basically the falloff among the young people in Christianity stopped with young men sooner than it did with women.
	It's not like there's a sudden huge rush of men going back to church, but if in the last generation it was 30% in a certain area among men and 35% with women, it's now 15% with women and 20% with men.
	So the women have fallen away from the church more and it's definitely having an impact.
	And you look at the various Christian commentators online who draw very large audiences, the preachers who draw large congregations, they tend to be the ones that emphasize slaying the dragon.
	But the idea of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, they look at like a dragon because serpent and dragon can be used interchangeably.
	We slay the dragon.
	It's a much more masculine approach in emphasizing that.
	So I think in some ways the old-time religion is stirring again in the sense of what to emphasize.
	But you're right.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	I'm sorry to interrupt.
	But I think it's despair that's driving the men back to the church.
	I think it's end times.
	They're not going back to fight for their cultures.
	They're not going back to engage in a massive spiritual battle against evildoers.
	They're going back because they feel doomed.
	And Christianity has an eschatological end times revelation style message.
	Yes, that's a good point.
	Although that kind of like eschatology basically only really came about in the 19th century.
	So before that, you would need another explanation as to why is to draw off Christianity to people in despair.
	I also think you have to separate out the different Christian doctrines and how they would apply in a situation like this.
	Like, for example, if you're of the Calvinist variety and all the various denominations that have come from that, and originally even the Church of England was Calvinist in the Westminster Confession of Faith, Calvinists have a lot easier time reconciling these problems that you've described because they already believe that you don't go to heaven unless God has already determined that your soul is going to be saved.
	Now, of course, we don't know who's going to be saved.
	The Calvinists don't.
	So they preach to everyone they can.
	But having already accepted the idea that God has preordained some to eternal hellfire, it's not difficult at all for them to accept, oh, God has also preordained some to bigger brains than others.
	It is, that's never been a real problem for the Calvinists because they've already accepted the idea that God has foreordained some to eternal hellfire.
	So at that point, it's not that hard to accept, you know, human differences in biodiversity, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
	No, thank you very much.
	I'd love to keep talking, but others are online and I've already taken up enough of your time.
	Thank you so much.
	You're very welcome.
	Welcome anytime, Jeff.
	Thank you for a great chat.
	All right.
	Draco, if you wanted to unmute, I would be happy to hear what is on your mind.
	All right, Stefan, thank you very much.
	Well, firstly, I do want to mention I would love at some point to plan out a UPB discussion.
	I know we've chatted before, but I love going through your work there.
	I've been highlighting so much, but I think that would require kind of a sit down because I'd love to get your thoughts and enough for some, you know, some clarifying maybe challenges, which I'm sure you could answer anyway, but I think it'd be useful.
	So I hope to do that.
	I wanted to, on the Christianity and science, just wanted to posit this context with Galileo, because at least for me, growing up, when I kind of embraced the idea that Christianity tried to oppress science in some way, I mean, the first thing that most people think is, well, Galileo, the church tried to silence him.
	He was promoting a new model of the world.
	And so one, I guess, one question I would ask in my understanding with this is, if let's say I were to propose a scientific theory about something right now that we haven't discovered yet.
	And let's say in principle, I'm correct.
	Let's say I've identified the next law of physics, you know, proper understanding of gravity or quantum physics that people haven't solved yet.
	And I have the correct answer, but I cannot demonstrate it to you.
	I cannot actually demonstrate it to you.
	So my question would be.
	No, no, no, hang on, hang on.
	You can't.
	You can't.
	You can't sneak that in.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Hang on.
	Slow down.
	So, and I appreciate we need to break this down, right?
	So I feel like I'm being dragged behind a gallop, which is not your fault, right?
	I'm just saying I need to pause.
	Okay, so let's break this down.
	So you've got a theory.
	Let's say that you've got a unified field theory that ties together magnetism and strong and weak atomic forces and gravity.
	And like you've got what Einstein wasted decades in pursuit of.
	You've got some unified field theory, right?
	And you're saying it's correct.
	Is that right?
	Sure.
	Let's say it's correct, but I can't demonstrate it to anybody.
	Okay, hang on.
	So under science, if you can't demonstrate it, you can't say that it's correct.
	I would say ontologically, it's still correct, but epistemologically, we can't know that it's correct.
	No, no, but science is about tests.
	If you're talking about the behavior of matter and energy, it's subject to empirical testing, right?
	Yeah, to epistemologically come to know it.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So you can't be right if you can't test it.
	Can I be right if I can't test it?
	If you can't reject it.
	Can I be right?
	If you have a theory about matter that says matter behaves in this, that, or the other way, then either matter behaves in a different way or it behaves in the way that you predict, right?
	Now, if it behaves in a different way, then your hypothesis is false, right?
	Sure.
	Right.
	Unless the mechanism for testing isn't yet available to falsify my hypothesis one way or the other.
	So give me an example.
	Are you talking about something subatomic?
	To be concrete, I guess, because I was trying to establish a general principle, but fair enough.
	To be concrete, what I mean is with Galileo, my understanding is when you had the geocentric versus heliocentric debate, which was a long-standing debate, the main problem no one could solve at that time was the parallax problem, which, you know, it's like how the perception of things that are close to you seem to move horizontally more than things farther away from you.
	And so Galileo, his formulation, he, even though he had the correct conclusion that, you know, we revolve around the sun, he didn't have a solution to the parallax problem.
	And the scientific community at the time said, listen, like you have to solve this problem in order to overthrow the existing theory.
	So it's not that they were trying to suppress this heliocentric model outright.
	It was that he couldn't solve the current problem that scientists were struggling with.
	And that was solved later, right?
	That was solved a bit later.
	So I guess that was my nuance that I wanted to contribute.
	What was the solution?
	That goes outside of my scope.
	I forgot it was a math thing or testing that they did with the star alignments.
	Yeah, because my understanding is that the retrograde motion of Mars is one of the ways that they proved that the Earth goes around the Sun.
	Potentially, I forget the specifics, honestly.
	Yeah, so because the Earth is closer, obviously a lot closer, eight light minutes from the Sun than Mars is, there are times when the Earth goes around the Sun faster, which makes Mars appear to move backwards, like going forward, but then you accelerate, so it looks like it's moving backwards.
	And the Ptolemaic system couldn't solve that.
	But if you put the Sun at the center of the solar system, it perfectly explains the retrograde motion of Mars.
	Now, the parallax thing or whatever.
	Okay.
	So there was evidence for the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun.
	The model was not self-contradictory.
	Is that fair?
	Was the model self-control?
	Honestly, this is where it goes outside of my scope of details.
	I don't know if I know.
	Given that the Earth does go around the Sun, a model that puts the Sun at the center of the solar system is not self-contradictory.
	Yeah.
	Yes, of course.
	So it is a consistent theory that explains a lot of phenomenon, phenomena.
	It's a consistent theory to put the Sun at the center of the solar system.
	It's not self-contradictory, and it certainly does explain some things like the retrograde motion of Mars.
	And it also is understandable.
	And I don't know.
	I can look this up, and maybe you know.
	When did they figure out the size of the sun?
	Yeah, I'm not sure.
	Let me just look this up.
	So when was the size of the sun determined?
	Because that's a big, that's a big whole question, right?
	Because I know they look, the sun and the moon look about the same size, but they're not, right?
	So the size of the sun was first determined in the third century.
	Wow.
	Amazing.
	Okay, so his results, he said that the sun's radius was 6.7 times the Earth's.
	And the accurate, actually, there's 109 times larger.
	So he knew that it was larger.
	Okay, let me, when was it, when was this measurement?
	When was this, was it accurate?
	So they knew in the ancient times, or at least they had a hypothesis that the sun was bigger than the Earth.
	They got to 6.7 times rather than 100 plus.
	So I'm just trying to look at when the sun, the sun's size relative to the Earth was more accurate.
	And I'm just Grok is great.
	And Grackopedia, go look up me on Grakipedia.
	It's not bad, actually.
	It's like the first fair shake I've gotten that's not in the completely foreign press, right?
	Right.
	So let's see here.
	18th century.
	Looks like 18th century.
	I'm just, it's giving me these little answers.
	Okay, the physical size of the sun was first accurately determined in 1672 by Giovanni Domenica Cassini.
	I now have pasta stuck between my teeth.
	So solar distance of about 138 million kilometers, modern value, 149.6 million.
	About 8% error.
	Not bad at all.
	Not bad at all.
	And he was very accurate with regarding the size of the sun.
	Now, given that they knew about gravity, part of which of Galileo's experiments are dropping things off the tower of Pisa, but if you put the sun at the center of the solar system, then the planet orbiting the sun makes a lot more sense if the sun is well over 100 times larger than the earth.
	Because the idea that the sun, being 100 times larger than the earth or more, is orbiting the Earth would make no sense from a mass and gravity standpoint, right?
	Yep.
	So the theory that the sun is the center of the solar system accords with mass calculations that were available in the 17th century.
	And I assume that the accuracy went up from the third century BC.
	So they knew the distance, they knew the size.
	And once you know the size, then of course the sun has to the earth has to orbit the sun once you know the size of the sun, right?
	And again, and they got the distance, they got the size.
	And so by the 1600s, there was certain reasons to believe outside the parallax stuff, like with a virtual certainty that it was a sun-centered solar system.
	And so the theory is not self-contradictory.
	Can you test it?
	Well, I don't know how they tested it.
	It would be actually, I'm going to make a note to sort of look it up.
	I don't know how they tested it and determined it and so on.
	Parallax observations.
	Aye, okay.
	So that's interesting.
	So they could, can you test it in terms of reproducing it within a laboratory?
	Well, no, because of course Galileo and other people, there was this famous model of the solar system that was taken to the Pope, and it sort of ran and chugged along and did its thing and so on.
	And the Pope sort of famously said, well, where's God in this equation?
	And the astronomers kind of swallowed and said, well, not technically necessary for, you know, it kind of runs on its own kind of thing.
	And so saying, is there a true hypothesis that cannot be proved, that doesn't necessarily mean reproduced, of course, right?
	But can it be proved?
	So we can prove the fact that the Earth is round by putting two sticks in the ground, you know, a thousand kilometers or miles apart and measuring the distance of the sun and the shadow and all of that kind of stuff.
	There was some way that they figured out the distance and size of the sun with a remarkable degree of accuracy.
	So if you say, well, there's a hypothesis that's true, but it's not proven, that that's two part of that.
	One is can you reproduce the experiment?
	And the other is, of course, well, you can't make a sun and your solar, you can't make a sun and the solar system in your lab, but you can reproduce the observations that produce the conclusion.
	So with this sort of heliocentric thing, it is not a self-contradictory theory, number one.
	And number two, you can reproduce the calculations by which they have determined that.
	And you can take your own measurements of Mars and look at the retrograde motion.
	And you can do this parallax observations that help you get a really accurate distance and a really accurate size.
	And so that theory is true because you can reproduce the standards by which you can prove it.
	Yeah, I think, and this goes outside my scope of details on it, but I think it comes down to the specificity in measurement instruments.
	I mean, something about being able, you know, our ability to measure the distance of stars has increased exponentially over the years.
	So I think that at the time, they couldn't really observe the parallax motion because they just didn't have the instruments to do so.
	But then finally, once we had the better equipment, you could conduct that experiment and then see that what's predicted is actually what's happening.
	But I just don't, I don't think we had as precise of instruments that would have met the threshold of sufficient proof or sufficient evidence.
	Yeah, so my point is that you can't say that something is true in science without being able to reproduce any aspect of the experiment.
	You can say that it's potentially true if the theory is not internally contradictory.
	I mean, but you can't say it's valid or true in the absence of anybody able anybody else able to empirically verify how you came to the conclusion.
	Well, I think pragmatically that's true.
	because for sure but I guess don't just throw a word in there what I'm saying is that what I'm trying to say sorry go ahead no No, I mean, right.
	Irrespective of what humans believe about the world, the world is what it is, right?
	And heliocentrism was always the case.
	We were orbiting the sun even before humans were able to map their thoughts to correspond to that reality.
	So in that sense, like, you're right, you can't credibly say, yeah, I know heliocentrism is true until you can demonstrate it, but it was true.
	So if I said the proposition heliocentrism is true, that would be a true statement, even if I can't empirically prove it, just because reality was always heliocentric, whether I knew it or not.
	Well, you can be accidentally true.
	That doesn't make it true.
	So the wind could blow the sand into the equation E equals M C squared.
	That does not mean that the wind is a physicist.
	And there's sort of a famous experiment in philosophy, a sort of thought experiment, where if you whisper to a golfer, I'm just making this one up.
	This is not the real one.
	But if you whisper to a golfer, hey man, what's two and two?
	And then he says, for, because he's crying out that he's hitting the ball, right?
	Has he answered the question correctly?
	Well, right, that's equivocation on language.
	Yeah.
	What does he mean when he says four?
	He's obviously not referring to numerical four.
	He's saying, you know, utterance of watch out, like whatever four means in that context.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So he would be, he would have the accidental right syllables, but he wouldn't, like if you say, okay, if you, if you say to someone, does two and two make four?
	Or if you say to someone, what does two and two make?
	And they reply, four, then they've got the right answer.
	But if you kind of murmur it and he's playing golf and maybe, so if it's an accidental answer, does it have truth value?
	I would say no, because we only know it's true relative to some other standard.
	So if somebody says in ancient, ancient, ancient times, like whatever, right?
	I think that the Earth goes around the sun.
	Would they be right?
	Nope.
	Because just an opinion.
	There's no verifiable facts.
	There's no reproducible experiments.
	There's no math.
	There's no understanding.
	There really is.
	There's no factual statement in that because to be accidentally right is not to be right.
	It's sort of like saying I'm a really good golfer because once I hit a hole in one when I was blindfolded, it's like, that's just an accidental hole in one.
	It's not a skill that you can reproduce because consistency and reproducibility is the mark of excellence.
	And so if somebody says, you know, in the back of 5,000 years ago in the midst of time and they say, I think the sun goes around, it's my opinion that the earth goes around the sun.
	They're not right.
	They're not even accidentally right because there's no way to test it.
	And that way, a bunch of people say a bunch of stuff, right, in the world.
	People say all kinds of crazy stuff.
	But they're not right unless they have a reproducible methodology, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, well, that's a, it's, I understand your point.
	In my mind, when I hear it, I feel like it's collapsing epistemology with into an ontology, you know, what is versus what you know to be.
	Like the map and territory distinction, right?
	Like the difference between a map and a territory.
	Sorry, explain to the audience the map and territory thing.
	Sure.
	So we know the difference between a map and a territory.
	A territory exists.
	It's reality.
	It's there.
	You know, there's the mountain, the waterfall, the tree, whatever it is.
	The territory exists.
	Humans, we engage in map making.
	We are trying to understand the territory that is out there.
	So I might draw a map and I'll say the mountain is here.
	The lake is to the right and the tree is up there.
	And then your map might be, no, no, no, Drago, the water is to the left, not to the right.
	And then we go test it.
	We go measure it.
	We compare our maps to reality.
	But the map is not the same thing as the territory.
	And now, to your point about accidental, it could be the case that somebody is just in their room.
	They're not even outside exploring the territory.
	And they just happen to draw the correct map.
	Like for some reason, they accidentally drew the mountain next to the water and in the proper location.
	They never tested it.
	And so the question is, is their map correct?
	Well, I mean, technically it does correspond to the territory.
	So it is correct, but it's not credible.
	So there's no reason that you should believe it because they were just sitting in their room.
	How would you even know it was correct until you tested it?
	So it's a differentiation between what is, which is the territory, and then the map making exercise, which is how we come to know it.
	Yeah, I would say that the map is not correct.
	Yeah, well, then that's an interesting.
	I mean, think about that.
	It's just a coincidence.
	It's the map.
	If someone picked up the map from the guy who was in the basement in his room locked up and he used that map reliably in the real world and it worked, I would say, well, that's a good map, even though he was lucky.
	He didn't produce it by any good means, but it works.
	So it couldn't have, I mean, the map is correct, at least in some sense.
	It corresponds to reality.
	Okay.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	If I play you a bunch of garbled syllables from a language you don't understand, and I say pretend to translate it and you just write down a bunch of scribbles, right?
	Yep.
	That's right.
	Okay.
	Are you translating?
	Am I translating?
	I'm not reliably converting the meaning of your garbled to like, right?
	So I'm not reliably.
	There's no reason to trust what I'm doing has any meaning.
	Okay.
	So you are not translating.
	You are scribbling, right?
	Yeah.
	From my perception, I'm just scribbling.
	I'm not even aware that I'm doing anything but scribbling.
	No, so you've got to get out of the subjectivity.
	Nobody cares about your perception or my perception.
	Are you translating if you are hearing a bunch of garbled syllables and scribbling a bunch of things on a piece of paper?
	Well, I would say no.
	I'm just trying to think what translating entails, what that concept necessarily things.
	But I'll say no.
	I'll say no.
	Okay.
	If you do it for long enough, is it possible that you will write a very short word by accident that actually corresponds to the language you don't understand?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	Have you translated that?
	Spoiler, it's impossible because if you're not translating, you kind of translated it.
	Yeah, I mean, I get the pragmatic linguistics layer of what you're saying.
	I just think that that's like a different layer of the questioning, right?
	Like don't give me layers.
	I don't know what the hell that means.
	If you didn't, if you weren't translating, then any accidental, quote, word that you, you don't even know that you've made a word, right?
	You've just scribbled and somebody says, oh, interestingly, because those syllables also drunk, you got the word, you wrote the word cat, and it happened to the syllables happened to be saying cat at that time, but you didn't translate it.
	Right.
	And so because you didn't translate it, nothing you do can be the result of translation.
	The only thing that could even potentially correspond is pure accident, unreproducible, using a methodology that nobody would ever bother.
	Like, here's the thing, because it won't ever happen in the real world.
	So let's say that you have a brother who likes making up maps for his Dungeons and Dragons campaign, right?
	And then you are going on a difficult and dangerous hike, right?
	Do you go to your brother to get a map?
	No.
	You wouldn't.
	You wouldn't never in a million years go to your brother and get the map because you're going to end up like Julian Sands, just kind of walking into nowhere, right?
	And you may not come back, right?
	So nobody's even going to take a map that's been scribbled by someone and go and compare it to the real world.
	So even in a practical sense, nobody's going to check it, right?
	And of course, as you know, the odds of a randomly drawn map corresponding to an area in the real world is so close to zero that it's like once in 10 lifetimes of the universe kind of thing.
	So it's functionally impossible.
	It will never be tested.
	And the map cannot be accurate because accuracy is looking at something and reproducing it.
	So if I want to make an accurate portrait of my wife, like I want to draw an accurate portrait of my wife, I have to look at her, right?
	Let's say I want to draw an accurate portrait of someone I've never seen.
	I have to look at the picture, right?
	Now, I could just randomly draw a person.
	Oh my gosh, it just looks just like that person, right?
	And we've all sort of had, you know, seen that, right?
	But I have not accurately reproduced that person.
	It's just a crazy coincidence.
	And nobody would ever go to an artist and say, I want a portrait of they won't phone the artist up, right?
	They just phone the artist up and they say, I want a portrait of me.
	And the artist says, okay, can you sit for the picture?
	No.
	Okay, can I get a picture of you?
	No.
	Okay, can you at least describe to me what you look like?
	No.
	Right?
	Unless you've got a voice changer on, can you at least tell me if you're male or female?
	No.
	Okay, will the artist ever paint that portrait?
	No, because he can't do it.
	He can't paint something that he hasn't seen and have it be accurate.
	Now, once in 20 lifetimes of the universe, it could be the case that he takes on that commission and paints you perfectly down to the last number of hairs in your eyebrows, right?
	But that would never come to pass because nobody would ever do it.
	Nobody would ever take a map out that somebody wrote in a fever dream and say, wow, does this correspond to actual reality?
	I'm going to blah, blah, blah.
	And if it did, they'd never go back to that person because the odds of it happening twice are zero.
	And so what you're talking about is a theoretical that is not accurate.
	It's not true.
	If I just painted a random person and someone came up and said, oh my God, that's an accurate likeness of me.
	I would say, no, it's not.
	You just happen to look like my painting.
	It's a total coincidence.
	It's not a good portrait.
	Did you see it?
	It's just a coincidence.
	Yeah, no, I mean, I understand your argument from pragmatism.
	And I do, yeah, well, I do have some follow-up, but I am speaking of pragmatics.
	I'm getting the nudge here to help out with the family.
	So I appreciate it.
	No, this is a good question.
	These are good questions.
	And it sounds more important.
	It is more important than it sounds.
	And this is why I spent some time on the issue.
	I do not believe that you can be accidentally correct because correctness requires a methodology.
	Jimmy James, speak to me, brother.
	Hey, so I never heard that thing about the parallax thing because I didn't know Galileo super well.
	So I took a look at it and it's the, what happened was people said, critics to, you know, skeptics of his Galileo's theory said, hey, man, if you're right, the star should be moving.
	Because if we're moving around the sun, we should see the stars shifting positions relative to each other.
	So because they're so far away, people had no clue that like Alpha Centauri is like 4.3 light years away and therefore you're not going to see it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So they tried to look at it and Galileo's like, okay, you know what?
	Fair point.
	Tried to find it and he couldn't observe it.
	It's like the stars themselves just did not shift.
	And so he said, well, I mean, one possible explanation for this is they're billions of miles away instead of millions.
	And that's all he could come up with.
	And that was in the early 1600s.
	Yeah, so it was like trying to see around a mountain by moving your head one inch to the left.
	Yeah.
	So I got a little more on this.
	So it wasn't actually demonstrated until 1838 by Friedrich Bessel, nearly 200 years after his death.
	And just to get a sense of what we're talking about, stellar parallax can be observed at one arc second.
	And I'm like, okay, Groc, what is that?
	So it's 13600th of a degree.
	Which just to get a sense of what that is, that is the size of a U.S. dime, which is about 18 millimeters diameter.
	What is that, like half an inch, something like that?
	At a distance of 2.5 miles away, four kilometers away.
	So imagine trying to see this with like 16th century telescopes or the naked eye.
	You can't see it, the naked eye.
	You know, you might be able to see that point of light through the atmospheric turbulence, like a single star that size, like just that little glimmer of light, but you're not going to see that star moving.
	And so let's see.
	Yeah.
	And so normal vision 2020 human eyesight can see about one arc minute, which is 60 times larger than that.
	So I just thought that was really interesting.
	I mean, it's like, oh, I never heard of that.
	And it's just this science stuff.
	I just really like it.
	So, yeah, I just wanted to share that.
	No, I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that.
	All right.
	Well, I think we have come to the end of our list of callers and I will close down the show.
	And I really do appreciate everyone dropping by tonight.
	A great pleasure to chat.
	I will do a show to talk about why it's important about sort of accidental errors.
	It is really, really important.
	You cannot have truth without a reproducible methodology.
	You cannot have truth without discipline.
	You cannot have truth with anything to do with anything unless it's reproduced.
	So this is really important, right?
	So somebody says, well, I believe in psychic phenomenon.
	And it's like, that's not true.
	It's not true.
	Say, ah, well, I had this dream that came true.
	It's like, unless it's reproducible, it's not true.
	Unless walking on water is reproducible.
	It's not true.
	Unless infinite loaves and fishes is reproducible, it's not true.
	It's self-contradictory theory to say that human beings are heavier than water, but can walk on water is a self-contradictory theory.
	It's not true.
	It's not true.
	Oh, yes, no, but it happened to this.
	No, it's not.
	Well, you know, I had that weird feeling that something was going wrong and then I got a call that your aunt died.
	It's like, if you can't reproduce it, it's not true.
	It's a coinciding.
	It's a coincidence.
	It's a coincidence.
	It's not true.
	And peeling people away from this mythology, peeling people away from the superstition and saying, don't be self-indulgent just because you believe something is true.
	Like, hey, I believe that murder is wrong, right, theft, assault, murder, wrong.
	I believe that.
	I feel that.
	I get that.
	But I can't prove it until UPB.
	And the proving it is the key.
	The proving it is the key.
	So when people say anecdotal stuff, right?
	Well, I know someone who blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, it's not, if it's not a reproducible methodology, it's not true.
	It's not even a claimed truth.
	It's a prejudice.
	It's a feeling.
	It's a wish.
	It's a coincidence.
	It's a, you know, we love to, you know, give the goofbumps of, ooh, you know, we love to create these causes and effects and these dominoes and so on, where, ooh, you know, you call, and it's always a lot of it's women, right?
	You call the woman, ooh, ooh, I was just thinking of you.
	It's like, yeah, okay, well, that's okay.
	So don't think of me as best you can, and then think of me and see if I call, right?
	Oh, we got somebody who does want to jump in.
	Alex Kay, sounding like they are out of a Kafka novel.
	Alex, did you have something you wanted to mention as we close things down?
	Well, I guess I wanted to ask about UPB, but no, that's closing it down.
	It might be too much.
	That's fine.
	If it's a good energetic topic, that's great.
	I just had a whackload of paperwork to do.
	So I'm sort of clawing my way like Robert De Niro, Brazil style, out of this blizzard of paperwork.
	But yeah, go for it.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So I guess the question is: like, I've read the book, you know, and I accept it.
	I've had trouble kind of explaining it to people.
	I guess it's, I've tried, I've tried framing it as, I guess I'll, the way that, okay, I'll try explaining what I've been thinking, and then you can kind of tell me where I'm wrong and or where I'm right.
	So it's, it's, uh, it's ethics.
	Basically, it's a, it's a framework of ethics that, uh, where something needs to be universal, right?
	As well as preferable, which means it's able to be preferred, as well as behavior, which means it's an action.
	It's not necessarily thoughts or things like that.
	So listen, so the way that I would approach it is something like this.
	So you play the UPB skeptic, all right?
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Do you think that stealing is wrong?
	Well, I think that stealing is wrong, but there's tons of cultures or there's, you know, maybe I don't.
	No, no, I'm just asking you.
	I'm just asking your opinion.
	I'm not asking you to prove it.
	Oh, you know.
	Do you think that stealing is wrong?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Do you think that rape is wrong?
	Yes.
	Do you think that assault and murder are wrong?
	Yes.
	Now, there's an interesting thing in the world that right and wrong have two meanings, right?
	I mean, more than two, but in general, the two ones that are important here.
	So right means both correct, as in you got the right answer, that two and two make four, and it also means right as in morally good.
	And wrong means incorrect, and it also means could be morally wrong or evil.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So it would be nice if moral rules could be proven logically right.
	Then it would be a little bit easier to believe that they were morally right, if we can prove them logically right.
	Is that fair to say?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So a moral rule tends to be a claim on somebody else's behavior that's not just opinion, right?
	So if I like the band Queen and you like the band The Rolling Stones, we can't enforce that on each other at violence, right?
	We can't use, can't pull out our guns and force each other to conform, right?
	Right.
	I like the color blue, you like the color red.
	So there's personal, personal preferences and so on, right?
	However, do you think that if a woman is about to be raped, she can use force to prevent the rape?
	Yep.
	Okay.
	And I agree.
	So rape is something that we cannot inflict on someone else.
	They have the right to defend against it.
	Now, I know we haven't proven anything, but that's sort of the general, the general theory.
	And it would be nice if our instincts are proven, right?
	So I don't know the mathematics of hitting a baseball, but I'm pretty good at hitting a baseball, right?
	So, but the math can't contradict what I'm doing, right?
	The math has to follow what it is that I'm doing.
	Like the math can't say that if I throw a baseball really hard south, it's going to go north, right?
	Really hard, right?
	So, right.
	So let's look at something like stealing, right?
	So can stealing be universally preferable behavior?
	Let's just, I mean, forget everything else.
	Let's just look at that one fundamental question.
	Can stealing be universally preferable behavior?
	All right.
	So if stealing is universally preferable behavior, the argument would be everyone must steal and be stolen from at all times, right?
	Because it's universal, right?
	Right.
	Like there's never a time when rape is okay, right?
	Right.
	It's universal, right?
	Not on a Wednesday, not in Tunisia, not on the moon, not on a space station.
	Rape is always wrong.
	It's a universal thing, right?
	Right.
	As opposed to not liking the band queen, which is morally wrong, but not universal.
	Just kidding, right?
	Okay.
	So if we say stealing is universally preferable behavior, it means everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at all times, under all circumstances, everywhere for all time.
	Is that fair?
	Yeah.
	And I do know where you're going with this and everything, and I agree, but the skeptic, the skepticism.
	No, be the skeptic.
	Be the skeptic.
	Push right.
	So the skeptic, I guess, would say something along the lines of like, okay, you know, they're trying to make the argument that it's subjective or that, or that it comes from God.
	But usually it's the subjectivists that are, that are the problem.
	Okay, so, so, and I would say to the subjectivist, I get, I get all of that, but let me try and make this case, right?
	And then you can be skeptical.
	But, but you have to let me make the case, right?
	I think a big part of where they get tripped up is when, you know, you'll say morality and they might say something like, morality is subjective.
	And no, no, have I said that?
	What about?
	I haven't said that.
	That's why I'm sort of stepping in from this person.
	Sorry, I'm saying the skeptic would say that.
	Okay, but I haven't made that case.
	I've asked them, do you think that rape is immoral or wrong?
	And they say yes.
	Because listen, if somebody says, I think rape is moral, don't bother having a rational discussion with them about ethics because they're a sociopath, right?
	And not even a clever one.
	Okay.
	So, because I haven't said morality is universal yet, right?
	So people will try to be referring to it as universally preferable behavior.
	No, but I already established that because we already said that rape is never right.
	It is universal.
	Right.
	Right.
	Not in Tunisia.
	Do you remember not on the space station?
	Not on Tuesdays, right?
	No, yeah, of course.
	But the term universally preferable behavior, I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around.
	Forget, like, let me finish the case here.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Right.
	So, so I would, and, and if you're playing the skeptic who says, well, I don't like this term, it's like, you have to let me finish the case.
	You can't judge guilty or innocent until the closing statements, right?
	Like, if you were in a court of law and somebody had an opening statement, you wouldn't want them to be, you wouldn't want to be found guilty or innocent.
	You'd want some proof, some data, some reasoning, some expert witnesses, some evidence.
	You'd want that, right?
	Yeah.
	So we got to have the full case here before you judge innocent or guilty, right?
	Yeah.
	So if we say stealing is universally preferable behavior, it means everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at all times, everywhere, forever and ever, amen, right?
	Because that's what universal means, right?
	Yeah.
	Now, again, you can disagree that morals are universal, but we already said that rape is immoral, so let's just hold that for the moment, right?
	Now, is it possible for everyone to want to steal and be stolen from, because stealing is universally preferable behavior?
	Is it possible for everyone in the world to want to steal and be stolen from?
	No.
	Why not?
	Because then you'd have to want to be stolen from, and then it's not stealing anymore.
	Okay.
	So it is logically impossible for theft to be universally preferable behavior.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So let's turn to rape, unpleasant topic as it is.
	Is it possible to want to be raped?
	No.
	Right.
	It is not possible because if you want the sexual activity to take place, it's not rape, right?
	In other words, if a woman says, make a love to me, I don't know why there's a vague accent there, but it is, right?
	Make a love to me, you handsome bull, right?
	Then it's not rape, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	So is it possible for everyone to want to rape and be raped at the same time?
	No.
	Okay.
	And we can, you can go through assault and we can go through murder and so on, right?
	So it is impossible for rape, theft, assault, and murder to be universally preferable behaviors.
	Just from a logical standpoint, right?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Now, let's look at the alternative.
	And I'm not saying what people actually do.
	I'm just talking about the theoretical framework.
	Is it possible for everyone to respect property rights at the same time to not steal from each other?
	Yeah, it's logically possible.
	There's no inherent self-contradiction in respecting property rights, right?
	So if we say stealing is universally preferable behavior, that's impossible, right?
	If we say respecting property rights is universally preferable behavior, there's no logical self-contradiction, right?
	Right.
	So then I would pause, and this is what I was talking about with John, whatever his name was, the philosophy pref, who's like, so what?
	I'm like, that's actually a very big deal.
	We've taken the four major components of immorality, rape, theft, assault, and murder, and we've proven that they can never be universally preferable behavior.
	And we've proven that the converse, which is respect for persons and property, can be universally preferable behavior.
	So as far as, and then they're going to say, but morality isn't universal, right?
	I guess, yeah.
	Okay.
	So then I would say, so some things are definitely, this is why I set up the ban thing, right?
	So some things are definitely not universal, right?
	So a preference for color is not universal.
	Can we agree on that?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	So you can't shoot someone for disagreeing on your preference of color, right?
	Okay.
	Now, you can shoot someone who's about to rape you, or you can use force or violence to prevent that from happening.
	Do we agree on that?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And the reason is that it cannot be universally preferable behavior, whereas respect can be universally preferable.
	Respect for a person's property, not raping, can be universally preferable behavior.
	So is there a difference between things you cannot use violence to enforce and things you can use violence to enforce?
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And the difference, I would argue, would be morality.
	So can you shoot someone?
	Let's say you say to your friend, I want to meet you at the mall at 7 o'clock and they show up at 7.30.
	Can you shoot them?
	No.
	Right.
	You can't.
	You can't shoot them, right?
	And that's because that's being rude.
	And they're not violently inflicting.
	It would also be pretty rude to shoot them.
	Yes.
	Well, no, but they're just being, no, it would be immoral to shoot them because they're not violently inflicting anything on you.
	Right.
	So it's negative behavior, but we also can't say that being on time is universally preferable behavior because universally preferable means you have to be doing it all the time.
	And most of the thing, most times I'm not on time.
	I had to be here for seven o'clock for the show or whatever it is, right?
	But most things I'm not on time.
	It's going to be universal.
	And I would mention the coma test and so on, right?
	So if somebody were to say that morality is subjective, then what they're saying is that morality is in the same category as a preference for a color.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So then the logical consequence of that is that if there was some totalitarian police force that the supreme leader likes the color red and anybody who says differently gets executed, would that be unjust?
	I'm sorry.
	Can you?
	Okay, I'm the supreme leader of the society and I like the color red.
	And I pass a law that says anybody who expresses or acts on any preference other than red is killed, is murdered, is executed.
	Would that be wrong?
	Okay.
	That would be wrong.
	Okay.
	So if executing people for having different subjective preferences from mine would be wrong.
	But if morality is subjective, then we cannot use force against anybody who's immoral because it would be unjust.
	In other words, if a color preference is the same as a moral preference, then if it's wrong to execute people or to use force against people for a difference in color preference, then if a man wants to violently rape a woman, she cannot use force against him because it's just a subjective preference.
	Right.
	So that means we have to dismantle police, law courts, prisons, laws, punishments of any kind.
	Right.
	And if somebody says they're willing to do that, I mean, we can make logical arguments against that.
	But if somebody says that there should be absolutely no police, right?
	And that it's all just a matter of preference, I just take their wallet.
	Right.
	No, because you want to keep your wallet.
	I want to take your wallet.
	It's just a preference.
	It's just like the color red and the color blue.
	Why would you be upset about that?
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Of course, I wouldn't take their wallet for real, but that would be an example, right?
	Or did you drive here?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Can I have your car keys?
	I would like to have your car keys.
	Well, you can't have my car.
	No, no, no.
	I prefer to have your car.
	Right.
	So you and I can both like different bands.
	You and I both like different colors, right?
	Without interfering with each other.
	But if there's a woman who wants to not have sex and a man who wants to rape her, they cannot both achieve their, they can't both get their way, right?
	Right.
	Which is how we know it's not universal.
	So if I like the color red and you like the color blue, we can just shake hands and go on and there's no contradiction because it's a subjective thing.
	But if a man wants to rape a woman and the woman doesn't want to be raped, obviously by definition, they can't both get what they want.
	It's win-lose, right?
	So morality is where things are win-lose.
	If I take your wallet, you don't have your wallet.
	If I take your car, you don't have the car.
	You've lost all the time, effort and energy both into getting the car and the wallet and then replacing it later on.
	So I win and you lose.
	So win-lose is where morality comes in because it's fundamentally different from having no effect.
	The fact that I, if I go home and I put on, I don't know, let's say I'm feeling masochistic and I put on a Philip Glass album and I don't even know if it's skipping or not, right?
	So I go home and I put on a Philip Glass album and you go home and you put on a quiet riot, right?
	And we're both on headphones or whatever.
	There's no contradiction there, right?
	We can both get the music that we want and we're not interfering with or harming each other, right?
	So if you're saying morality is subjective, you're saying that win-lose situations are exactly the same as situations where there's no conflict of interest.
	And logically, that's just not true, right?
	Yeah.
	Like if you and I are both in the same room, we're both breathing the air, that's right.
	I'm not preventing you from breathing.
	You're not preventing me from breathing.
	We can both breathe the air and we're fine.
	However, if you come in the room and you strangle me and I can't breathe, that's a different matter, right?
	Like that's not the same situation.
	So you can't say morality is subjective because that's saying that win-lose situations that involve violence are exactly in the same category as situations that don't involve violence or any kind of win-lose.
	And that is simply an epistemological error.
	You cannot put these things.
	That's like saying that a lizard is a mammal.
	It's just not the same category.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think so.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	Good.
	Can I ask you one more quick question?
	Sure.
	Okay, so do you think that if you're talking to a Christian and they say, okay, yeah, murder is wrong, God commands it, stealing is wrong, God commands it, would it be fair to say that UPB validates that?
	It doesn't necessarily, right?
	Yeah, no, so I mean...
	Like, UPB takes that proposition and validates it.
	I've had, I can't even tell you how many messages over the years from Christians who say how happy they are that philosophy validates God's commandments.
	Right.
	In the same way that a lot of people feel that the exploration of the universe...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I was just saying, it doesn't validate all the commandments, like, have no gods before me, but the big moral ones and that kind of thing.
	Well, I would say, so have no gods before me is have no methodology other than universality in the determination of ethics.
	That would be sort of a translation of it.
	But yeah, it doesn't validate all the commandments, but, you know, the basic ones, right?
	The ones that get enshrined in law in almost every society.
	Right, right.
	And isn't it kind of nice that right and wrong both occur in philosophy and logical constructs and in morality?
	I think that's really nice.
	Maybe there was an instinct towards that, which is why those words kind of have that overlap.
	Yeah.
	It's James.
	Sorry, is there anything...
	Sorry, James is back.
	I'm not sure if he's back or misclicked or if he's there in parallax.
	Yeah.
	oh, sorry about that.
	Uh, ready for me?
	Yeah, great.
	I'm sorry, Alex, if there's something else.
	Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
	You know, I'm now interrupting everybody most rudely.
	Uh, sorry, if there's anything else that you wanted to ask about that, I think James is going to add to the convo.
	We can have a three-way sure James is hot, hot, buttoning HR as we speak.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Oh, sorry.
	No, I had something else I wanted to add after you guys were done chatting about UPP.
	Alex, are we okay with that?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay.
	And listen, Alex, try to figure out people who want to solve problems.
	I'm not the best at that, although for me, there's the sort of public, and you were definitely wanting to solve problems, but there are people who are just going to frustrate and basically cockblock everything that comes out of your mouth.
	And those people you cannot have productive discussions with.
	So if somebody says, oh, I think that murder is great, it's like, okay, well, then we don't even, I mean, you can still run him through UPB, but that's somebody who's a troll.
	And so people have to want to solve problems.
	They want to be interested in the solution of problems in order to have productive discussions.
	And if they're just blocking everything you say, it's just an exercise in frustration and it won't lead anywhere.
	And I don't, you know, pearls before swine, you know how that goes, right?
	Yeah.
	And I think the Christians are the ones that I'm trying to spend more time around.
	And I think that the fact that UPB does validate the morality of Christianity, at least, you know, the vast majority of it, is an interesting thing.
	I'd be interested to see if in like maybe 50, 100 years, I guess I probably won't be around that long, if it's even kind of like brought in to the dogmas of Christianity and whatnot.
	Yeah, it will be interesting.
	And of course, the big challenge, as you know, is that what I have worked with with UPB validates Christian ethics.
	And also, you can't escape it by becoming an atheist.
	Whereas if you believe that all morals come from God, you can escape morals by becoming an atheist.
	But UPB hunts them down.
	All right.
	Okay.
	James, if you wanted to mention something about it.
	Yeah, thanks.
	Great comment.
	All right.
	Oh, James is coming gone.
	James, are you coming back?
	I feel you should.
	All right.
	All right.
	Kiros.
	Did you ever know that you're my Hiros?
	Oh, James is back.
	All right.
	Sorry.
	Hiroshim.
	Hang on for a sec.
	James, you wanted to mention something?
	And then I'll jump to Hiroshima and then I'll jump out.
	All right.
	Yes.
	Sorry about that.
	Kicked me out for some reason.
	So I just wanted to put a call out to everyone listening here.
	I'm looking for Bitcoin podcasts.
	So a Bitcoin podcast you listen to, you enjoy.
	Send them over to support at freedomain.com.
	And I thank you very much for that.
	Support at freedomaine.com.
	All right.
	Hiros, are you live?
	Are you muted?
	I am.
	Are you mutable?
	All right.
	Go ahead.
	I'm alive.
	Alive and well.
	So here's something very important to point out to Christians when they start getting semantical and want to debate over minor things.
	There's something that's really easy to remember, and it's the number 33.
	It's in Ecclesiastes.
	It's Ecclesiastes 3:3, and it says, A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build up.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?
	No, I appreciate it.
	I just wanted to add that in there because Ecclesiast 3:3, Three, chapter three, verse three is very, I think it's very important whenever you because you, because then, you know, when you get down to the moral debate, they get really oftentimes, they get very emotional.
	And like when emotions come out, it's just hard to really get points across.
	Right, right.
	No, I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that.
	All right.
	Well, guys, thank you so much for a wonderful evening of philosophy.
	Freedomaine.com slash donate.
	I will see you all Friday night.
	And don't forget, if you subscribe at freedomain.com slash donate, you get access to my new novel.
	I just finished reading chapter 20.
	It's goosebump good.
	I'm telling you, it is the wildest stuff I've ever written.
	And I hope that you'll enjoy it.
	I'm certainly get some great feedback on it.
	Thanks, everyone.
	And Jared, thank you.
	Have yourself a glorious evening, my friends.
	I will talk to you soon.

▲