Feb. 27, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:03:50
The Truth About Christian Ethics! X Space
The Truth About Christian Ethics! features Steven Pinker—or a similarly provocative guest—debunking divine morality by citing the placebo effect’s 59% relief in IBS trials and 56% improvement in schizophrenia patients on fake treatments. They dismantle God’s "perfect authority" argument, exposing it as untestable, then compare Noah’s flood to modern interventions like chemical castration, questioning why an omniscient creator wouldn’t design humanity to avoid mass evil. Concluding, they warn that faith-based ethics collapse without proof, leaving society vulnerable to science-driven totalitarianism unless empathy—currently failing at 8% audience retention—becomes the new moral foundation. [Automatically generated summary]
We, a reminder, I will be on tomorrow morning, the Scott Adams School to 10 a.m.
I'm going to have a chat with the lovely hosts there.
And I hope you would drop by tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Scott Adams School on X and I think lots of other places.
I hope you will check that out.
And another reminder, I will be in Atlantic City.
Put your do your makeup pretty and meet me on April 11th in Atlantic City.
I'll be doing a debate, maybe more than one.
I'll be doing a meet and greet, a dinder, and all other kinds of cool stuff.
So I hope you will join me there as well.
I'm really, you know, I miss meeting people a lot.
You know, it was really nice sort of back in the day, Mike Sundovich used to put on these Night for Freedom events, and we would go out and have great conversations with people.
I remember after the speeches and so on, it was about 500 people sort of lining up.
I'd say line up to chat, but to sort of express their thanks for philosophy.
We had lots of great hugs and chats.
And it was really a great and refreshing and wonderful thing.
So I kind of missed that.
It'd be nice to meet people in the flesh, as Hannibal Lecter and Pink Floyd have mentioned.
So yeah, that will be April the 11th in Atlantic City.
And you can go to wordwardebate.com for more on that.
I don't think tickets are out.
At least they weren't when I checked.
But the tickets are going to be out soon.
And I hope that you will check that out.
I'm happy to get questions, issues, challenges, problems, comments, whatever is on your delicious foldy brains.
I would love to hear from you.
Of course, I have things to talk about, man.
Tings to talk about.
Things that I've been kind of fascinated about.
And I've touched on them on the show from here and there.
So I'm just going to wait for a sec in case anybody has a yearning burning.
Placebo Power00:10:51
If your mind is peeing fish hooks and you need the solvent balm of hopefully reasonably rational philosophy, happy to hear.
I'll tell you something I'm quite fascinated about.
The placebo effect.
You know, the placebo effect is when you are given a fake cure and you are healed.
I mean, to obviously use it in the most colloquial way possible.
You are given a little sugar pill or you're given a pill with inert elements or and sometimes even they do fake surgeries.
We'll sort of talk about that.
But you think you are healed and lo and behold, you are healed.
Healed.
And of course, you know, this is, it's a pretty wild thing, and it's a sort of staple of more fundamentalist churches.
You know, she can stand Lord above.
And so I did a bit of research and I put together some amazing placebo trials.
So, you know, belief, the expectation or belief in a cure can profoundly influence healing in your body, in your mind.
So this is going to blow your mind a little.
Now, of course, I'm not into magical thinking.
Of course, the placebo effect cannot regrow an arm and so on.
And it should not be used to cure, I don't know, cancers and stuff like that.
You can't just wish or will those things away.
The immune system in particular is heavily regulated by the mind.
So there have been some studies, I think they were out of Japan, where they give people an inert leaf, rub it on their arm, and say it's a poisonous leaf.
And a lot of them develop rashes, even though it's not a rash-inducing leaf.
And vice versa, right?
They take a sort of poisonous leaf, they rub it on people's arms like a poison ivy, and they say it's inert, and much fewer people develop symptoms.
If you've ever been in a situation where you are anticipating pain, then the pain generally feels worse.
I remember as a kid, I had stitches in my knee.
And it's funny because I can remember most of the injuries I had as a kid, but I can't remember how I got that one.
But I had stitches in my knee.
I still have on my left knee, I still have the imprint of my two front teeth from when I was a kid and jumped off a garage roof and my legs buckled and I ended up biting my knee by accident or my knee hitting my front teeth.
Anyway, so I was at the doctor's and I was expecting there to be quite a bit of pain with removing the stitches, and he just stomped on my foot and then pulled the stitches out.
It was fine because I wasn't expecting the foot stomp.
This is back when you could do those kinds of things, I guess.
But we will do a couple of these.
I see somebody wants to chat, which is great.
We'll do a couple of these and then we'll do the chat.
So this is pretty well documented studies.
So this is from 2002.
Sham knee surgery.
180 veterans with knee arthritis got a real cleanup, a joint washout, or skin cuts only, right?
So they're supposed to clean up the gunk, wash out the joints, or they just put little cuts on the skin.
No tools inside.
Patients and assessors were both blind, right?
So the patients obviously didn't know whether it was real or not.
The people who assessed their progress didn't know whether it was real or not.
Of course, the surgeons would, and so on, right?
So this was tracked for two years.
And all improved pain and movement about 20% equally.
So that was pretty wild, right?
So they just get a little cut by your knees and they say, oh, we've fixed up your joints, and people get substantially better.
Let's look at one from 2008, IBS.
What is it?
My daughter's an artist on the tablet, IBS Paint.
Anyway, irritable bowel syndrome.
So this is 262 IBS sufferers.
Waitlist, fake needles.
So one of them was, some were put on a waitlist, some were given fake needles, and some were given fake needles and warm chats and physical touch, like 20-minute visits.
Because I don't know if you, I mean, maybe it's just a Canadian thing, but it always feels like the doctors are just in a hurry.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Right?
They just want to keep the conveyor belt going.
I don't, I mean, I sympathize with them because that's just the reality of this kind of medicine.
But so what's wild is that the relief rates of people on the wait list were zero, zero percent improvement.
The people who got fake needles, 28% relief.
And the people who got fake needles, warm chats, and physical touch, 59%.
So human connection, just talking to people, getting some sympathy, some physical touch, almost 60% relief.
And this has been repeated in depression and other kinds of pain studies.
So simply having a conversation, like I'm telling you, the healing flows forward from these kinds of shows, like actually just talking to people can really help improve people's health.
So kids, this is from 2010, kids fake ADHD pills.
11 kids, obviously not a big sample size, obviously be clear about that, 7 to 12 years old.
11 kids on meds added blue pills labeled fake placebo for two weeks.
Blind doctor scores, big jumps, eight out of 11, much better.
Pioneered honest placebos.
37 trial meta-analyses show solid gains across conditions.
Honest placebos, fake placebo, right?
So isn't that wild?
Parkinson's brain boost.
This is from 2010.
So 35 patients got saline shots, obviously inert, labeled 25 to 100% real drug.
According to scans, matching dopamine surges up to 200%.
Better movement proves expectations, sparks brain chemicals.
This has been replicated as well in imaging work, which is wild stuff.
1959, oh boy, that's so long ago.
It's even before me.
34 angina cases.
So there was real artery ligation or chest open touch only.
Six months later, both approaches slashed attacks from 30 a week to four.
And people were able to double their exercise and there was no difference between these two.
So whether you actually did real artery ligation or just opened the chest and didn't do anything, the improvements were huge.
The fake, quote, operation had a 72% efficacy.
Fake style differences, this is from 2015.
48 healthy folks got pain shocks after a nasal spray, pill, or poke fakes.
All hurt less.
Blood tests, inflammation varied by method.
So whether you think you're going to get pain, whether you think you have painkillers and so on, has a big effect on your subjective experience of pain.
Back pain truth pills.
This is from 2016.
97 chronic back cases labeled placebo versus expectation, which is pills versus the usual care for three weeks.
The fakes one big.
Disability slash pain drops twice as much.
Supports ethical open use in meta reviews.
So the fake pills caused better outcomes in back pain.
I mean, I've never really suffered from chronic pain, but you know, if you do have something that's hurting for a while, you think about it.
I mean, the number of, I've had a sort of fairly small number of workout injuries over the years, and you kind of wake up and you check it and oh, is it better?
One gene variant gave placebo group lower heart risks.
Isn't that wild?
18% drop.
One gene variant gave the placebo group lower heart risks for some, not others.
So genes may dictate personal belief benefits.
Schizophrenia ward recovery.
This is the 1960s.
300 plus acute schizophrenia patients in the US veteran hospitals.
Antipsychotics or placebos over months.
About 56% of the acute schizophrenics on the placebo improved substantially.
22 out of 39 in one group, rivaling short-term drugs, highlights natural recovery/slash expectation in psych settings.
Now, schizophrenia, of course, is considered biochemical, it's physical.
You can see it in brain scans.
I've known that there's been some, I think it's Danish studies that have shown that you can treat schizophrenia with some talk therapy and sort of supportive, kind community involvement and so on.
But the idea that well over half of these acute schizophrenia patients, these are probably people seeing visions and so on, improve substantially while taking placebos is wild.
And at least the last one we can last one we can talk about is depression.
This is from 2021.
137 people with major depression or schizophrenia related.
All placebo two-week trial, half got pre-rating talk on placebo effects.
Talk group showed smaller mood gains on self-reports.
Simple awareness dulled the fake response for both illnesses.
So if people are told it's a placebo, it blunts their response.
If they're not told it's a placebo, hey, what's up, buddy?
Focus On Others00:14:23
How you doing?
I'm doing well.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Imagine that.
Turning down the background music.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Imagine that you made cash in your sleep.
You woke up to thousands and more dollars every day.
And you had spontaneous random adventures all over the planet.
And the last one you had was laying out some hot young variety on top of a rock with the mountains behind her, and you're banging her out.
And that's just kind of your life.
And you do whatever the fuck you want.
Nobody tells you what to do.
That's the answer to happiness, to male happiness.
And that's the lifestyle I live.
I appreciate that.
How I know we talked before.
How old are you?
I'm 37.
37.
Okay.
Do you have any kids?
Yeah, I have multiple kids.
Okay, and how do you support them?
I take care of them.
Okay, and how do you make your money?
I have a cybersecurity company that kind of runs itself now.
And I also do a variety of other things, including real estate investing and whatnot, and just numerous things that give me money that I've built over the years, kind of like you have in your entrepreneurial efforts that you talked about in the past.
So what virtues do you think you are bringing to the world?
What good do you think you're doing in the world, if that's even important to you?
It's not important to me.
Okay, so you live for pleasure.
I live for myself.
It may not necessarily be pleasurable.
Yeah, that's not a very intelligent statement.
But what are your purpose of your life, would you say?
To experience it to the best of my degree, with me in complete control of my decisions and what I want to do.
So that means being somewhat solitary, right?
Yeah, I would say the life of a nomadic entrepreneur is definitely solitary.
You're not going to be taking anybody with you or living with any kind of wife or anything if you're going to be traveling the planet, you know, indefinitely.
Okay.
And do you experience loneliness at all?
No, not really.
Because at some point, I came to realize that all love I need is within inside myself.
I never wake up when I do wake up without somebody next to me.
I don't have the feeling of loneliness.
I'm so content with myself that I don't feel the desire to be with somebody.
It's just an added bonus to the entertainment of life.
Got it.
Okay.
So is it fair to say then that you've not had relationships in your life where somebody has added enough of a positive that you want to keep them around?
I would say that you're 100% correct because I've come to the conclusion that there is nobody that I've ever met that could give me more than I could give myself.
Correct.
You're right.
Okay.
So, I mean, obviously, you're aware that other people do get married and live together and enjoy each other's company.
Do you think that there's something wrong with the way that they're approaching life, or do you think that that's just that other people experience that kind of love and connection, but it's just not for you?
I think that when I see somebody happy with their wife, I question whether or not they're really happy.
And when I usually dig into those people's lives, they're usually very unhappy, but I'm sure that there are many who are.
And if they are, that's great for them.
I have no right to dictate how other people live their lives.
If that works for you, then by all means, do it.
And I know that you have a wife and you said you're very happy.
And you know, that's great for you, man.
But I know that's not going to make me happy.
Well, that's by definition, though.
If you had someone in your life who was providing you benefits that outweighed the costs, and of course, there are costs to having people in your life.
You're obviously right about that.
The costs are that you have to make mutual decisions.
You can't just, you know, if you decide to have a wife with kids, then you can't just sort of take off and run through Taiwanese waterfalls on a moment's notice or things like that.
So there are definitely costs and so on.
But if you have someone in your life where the benefits outweighed the costs, then you would gravitate towards that, right?
Yes, absolutely.
I'm all about a cost-benefits analysis from all perspectives.
Correct?
Okay.
So have you ever dated a woman or had friends where the long-term benefits outweigh the costs?
Yes, when I was broke and poor, living in college and sharing the bills and rent with some chick that I had a relationship with.
Okay.
And how long did that relationship last?
About seven years.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So would you say that you guys were in love?
I would say that I was madly in love with this woman, of course.
Yes.
And tell me about, if you wouldn't mind, tell me about the benefits that this woman brought to your life.
Philosophical conversation, sexual satisfaction, financial reciprocation in sharing expenses and costs and emotional support, everything that you could want in a solid relationship.
Okay, that's wonderful.
And what age were you when you had this relationship?
What was the span?
From age 22 to about 29-ish.
Okay.
And what happened to that relationship?
I seen myself at a crossroads graduating with my engineering degree and a life of total freedom and doing whatever I want.
And the other decision would be to staple it up and continue investing my time into her.
And I took myself.
I chose myself.
Well, it's not, that's a false dichotomy, right?
It's not a matter of choosing yourself.
It's a matter of choosing what's going to make you happiest in the long run, right?
Sure, absolutely.
What did you think was going to make you unhappy with her in the long run?
Stagnation of growth and her not being able to keep up with me and the level to which I wanted to achieve autonomy and freedom.
She wasn't going to be able to handle that or what it took to achieve that.
Sorry, I'm a little confused if you could set me through it.
I'm just trying to understand your life as a whole.
So you said that you had these deep philosophical conversations, you know, you gathered wisdom together, you had emotional support and so on.
So wouldn't that be continual growth?
I mean, when you said, well, there was no more, I couldn't grow, I mean, everything that you had talked about as being part of the relationship would seem to me to indicate growth.
I guess I should highlight what part of growth in my life is important to me.
And I measure success in terms of growth according to how autonomous I am.
My ability to walk away from others and be reliant upon myself without the negative consequences of cutting somebody off.
Well, but you were in the relationship for seven years.
And I assume over the course of those seven years, the relationship was more positive than negative.
Otherwise, you probably wouldn't be in it.
So what changed in your late 20s?
Becoming incredibly more capable than I was when I first met her.
And more options appeared before me.
And I became indefinitely more capable than she was or ever could possibly be.
And she admitted that to me as well.
Well, but that's what's supposed to happen.
You're supposed to be economically much more capable than the woman in your life.
You know why, right?
No, I don't know why, but that made her, what's the word for it?
She admitted that made her very jealous and envious of me at some times and asked herself why that couldn't be her.
And that was a problem as well.
So, sorry, you started making more money, I think that's what you mean.
You started making a lot of money, and she got jealous and envious of that.
Correct.
That was her attitude towards it eventually because she seen me grow at such a height at such an incredible rate in all kinds of multiple areas that she was completely daunted as to how to react to it.
And we had conversations like that.
And that was her reaction to it.
Okay, so you started making good money.
She got upset and stressed about that, right?
Yes, correct.
Okay.
Now, why do you think nature has in general endowed men in particular with the ability to make a lot of money to care and provide for the women in their lives and the offspring and the family?
Yeah, I mean, that's why we tend to have this kind of focus on productivity.
This is why we tend to be kind of hyper-rational.
This is why we have a good alignment to being productive in the real world, right?
It is because we are able, like as a man, you need to be able to produce like 10 times what you yourself need to live on in order to fund a wife and kids, right?
Yes.
Okay.
So then you were in your late 20s.
Your girlfriend was a similar age, it sounds like, if you met in college.
And so you hit your stride in terms of productivity.
And the purpose of you hitting your stride is to provide for a wife and children, right?
Now, of course, I'm not saying you have to, but that's why it has evolved, right?
Yes.
Okay, and so you're only alive because your ancestors and the males in particular produced significantly excess resources, right?
Produced enough resources to maintain a wife and children, right?
Correct.
Yes, absolutely.
So if you're only alive because your forefathers took their excess productivity and plowed it into a wife and kids, so to speak, does it not seem a little selfish to take all of that ability and just use it for yourself?
Yes, it's absolutely incredibly 100% selfish.
Okay.
Yes.
As long as you're aware of that.
Okay.
So then the only people you can have in your life are people who don't criticize anything to do with selfishness.
In other words, other people who are selfish won't have a problem with you, right?
But people who value some degree of self-sacrifice or some degree of a commitment to a higher cause, like virtue, they won't want to be in your life, right?
If I satisfy their self-interest in pursuing that virtue, then they will be.
I think that people are not altruistic.
Every action contains a degree of self-interest, whether it be sacrificial or not.
Well, no, but if your self-interest includes the well-being of your wife and children, that's different than if your self-interest is only for your own pleasure, right?
That's not the same thing, right?
Sure, I would agree, yeah, because other people benefit in your selfishness to pursue your self-interest in that action.
Yeah, right.
I want to make my friends happy.
I want to make the world happy.
I want to make my wife and my child happy because to me, a life where it's all just about me would be well, kind of pointless.
And it would be like inheriting $10 million and just rather than investing it and growing it, just blowing it all on my own silly pleasures.
But what that means, of course, is that if people are critical of true selfishness, which is only living for yourself, then those people would criticize you and they wouldn't be in your life, right?
I don't really care who or who isn't in my life.
See, I'm not asking you what you care about.
I'm asking you the logical consequences of your life.
Sure.
So what I mean by that is that you can only have selfish people in your life because, as you say, you're selfish, right?
I believe that everybody is selfish.
No, no, I'm not doing this.
Look, look, you're a smart guy.
I'm not doing this loop with you again.
We just did this loop.
Everyone is selfish.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But there are some people whose selfishness includes the happiness of others, and you're not one of them.
So let's not do this silly loop, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so what it means is that people whose happiness includes other people's long-term happiness won't want to be in your life because you only focus on your own happiness, right?
If someone else's happiness matters to me, then I'll focus on that too.
But you don't have any principles, it's just hedonism, it's just what you feel like.
And that would change in a moment, right?
I would call it reinforcing and expanding my autonomy.
That's my highest principle by any means necessary.
Sure.
So if anybody's preferences or anybody's well-being interferes with your selfish autonomy, then you would get rid of that person, right?
Costs and Benefits of Hedonism00:15:40
Correct.
Absolutely.
100%.
Right.
So, what that means is that nobody who is not selfish can be in your life, at least for very long until they, I'm sure you're pretty clear and upfront about your hedonism.
So, that means that nobody with any moral principles can really be in your life because you don't have moral principles, you just have hedonism.
And I'm not, I'm not at a critical level, I'm just saying that in terms if it's a round peg in a square hole, right?
There's a lot of people in my life who have incredibly virtuous principles, even up to the degree that you do, that you're preaching to me right now, actually.
Okay, I'm sorry, what am I doing that's preaching?
Um, maybe you're trying to tell me that I ought to adopt a way at it.
I've said I'm not in the process of criticism, I'm just pointing out the patterns.
Oh, okay, sure.
So, you seem kind of dumpy and defensive about being criticized.
This is sort of my whole point.
No, no, no, not at all.
It's just that there are incredibly virtuous people in my life.
In fact, one of my biggest mentors who I'm still in contact with today is a constitutional law professor who's always having conversations with me about morality, justice, and the law.
And he's one of my best and closest friends.
And does he have any criticisms of your life of pure isolation and hedonism?
I don't feel like I'm isolated.
You said that.
Okay, okay.
Autonomy.
You're right.
Okay, that's fair.
So let's go with autonomy rather than isolated.
Although, in the long run, it kind of has the same effect.
But we can go.
So, does your friend, the highly moral professor, does he have any criticisms about your selfishness, hedonism, and dedication to autonomy?
No.
And neither does anybody else who's as equally as virtuous as him.
His reaction is just, hey, live your life, live it up, because eventually, hell yeah.
That's all their reactions.
His reaction is live it up because eventually you'll be 80 years old like me.
Hell yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Okay, so he's a hedonist too.
So this is what this is my whole point.
You're exactly proving my point that he's a hedonist too.
He has no issues with your life of autonomy and selfishness.
So he's saying what you're doing is the right and good thing.
You should never make any sacrifices for anything larger than yourself.
You should never restrain or train your will to pleasure for the sake of doing good in the world.
So he's just another hedonist.
This is exactly proving my point that you can't have people in your life who have actual moral principles.
You can only have people in your life who praise this somewhat animal-like pursuit of pleasure.
No, okay, sure.
Well, I don't know.
Okay.
If you want to define it that way, that's okay with me.
Okay, so now you're just getting passive, aggressive, and relativistic, right?
I'm really repeating back to you what you said to me.
A life of pleasure.
Autonomy and selfishness.
I think that's awesome.
If that's how you want to put it.
I mean, I'm not sure.
No, no, this is how you put it.
Stop being a liar.
This is how you put it.
Okay, cool.
Great.
And so be it.
I love my life and my existence.
It's awesome.
Fantastic.
So all I'm pointing out, and this is not obviously for you, I don't imagine you have any particular, I wouldn't have any hope of trying to change your mind about these things because you're really dug in and you've now given up a life of love in your 20s for a life of hedonism in your 30s.
But this is more for other people to point out that if you live a life of hedonism, then it becomes self-sealing.
In other words, you walk into the cage, you lock it up, and you throw away the key, and you can't reach it anymore.
Because when you live a life of hedonism, you can't have moral people in your life.
And because you can't have moral people in your life, nobody can be reliably predicted to provide long-term benefits to you because that's what virtue is about.
And so, hang on, let me finish my point, then I'll let you talk.
So, that's sort of my point.
It becomes self-sealing.
You say, well, I just live for my own pleasures.
Now, of course, people live for their own pleasure.
I take great pleasure in virtue, in love, in sacrifice to some degree, in making the world a better place.
I sort of go with the Aristotelian mean in this way, in that I'm not going to completely self-immolate for the cause of truth.
But if you live a life of hedonism, then criticism becomes unpleasant.
So you can't have anybody who criticizes you because criticism is a negative experience, and a hedonist only wants positive experiences.
It means you can't get any correction in your life.
You can't have moral people in your life, which means you can't have love in your life.
And because you can't have love in your life, and you can't have moral people in your life, and you can't have people with integrity and virtue in your life, people become less and less valuable to you.
And this is what I mean when I say you walk into this isolated cage, you lock it up, and you throw away the key, and then you are isolated whether you like it or not.
Because the only way that we can get consistently positive effects from people in our life is if they are virtuous.
And if we are virtuous, love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
And so because you have said, I'm only going to live for pleasure, moral people don't want to spend any time with you.
And that means that you find people less and less valuable, except for, you know, sex and, you know, maybe drinking, maybe drugs or well-shared experiences that are transient, like going to see a nice view or something like that.
And so you end up isolated in the long run because you can't have love in your life.
That's the price you pay for hedonism.
Sorry, go ahead.
What I don't understand why you assume that I desire love.
I don't have those desires like you do, nor does it negatively affect me in any way to not having people love me.
And there's plenty of experiences I pursue that inquire a great deal of suffering upon me.
I also don't take drugs or even drink.
I live a very disciplined lifestyle.
I don't understand this picture that you have in your head of a person like me is completely inaccurate from who I am in many ways, more than one.
And I think that you're coming to multiple conclusions on what you're perceiving as negative based on how you would feel living my life.
Sorry, when did I say that you wanted love?
Well, correct me if I'm wrong.
Are you not insinuating that not having the desire for love is in itself negative or brings negative suffering upon me or is wrong in some kind of way?
So, sorry, are we going to start having a conversation with each other in the realm of imaginary straw men, like insinuations and what you think might be behind the word?
So you're reacting to a straw man of me rather than what it is that I'm saying, which means you can't have a conversation.
Like, I can make up anything.
Like I can say, oh, you're secretly miserable, right?
And then you'd say, well, no, I'm not.
I'd say, no, no, no, you are.
You're secretly miserable.
And then we can't have a conversation, right?
And if you say this, I know you're saying that I should want love in my life.
I've never said that.
You said, well, I don't, you think that I miss having love in my life.
I'm pretty sure you don't.
I get that.
That's part of the cage, in my view.
So we can either have a conversation based upon what we're saying, or you can make up these insinuations and try and talk about those, which is not rational.
I'm talking about the top therapy.
Sorry, go ahead.
Sure.
I don't think there's any information that I can get from you to improve my life in any way that I haven't figured out myself.
And it's very clear that if you lived my life, you would be very miserable.
You've made that clear, and that's okay.
Sorry, how have I made it clear?
Via the life that you've chosen to live and the choices you've made, you've made it clear that your way of life is superior for youth, which is with your wife.
And I don't know if you have kids or not.
I never looked that deep into it.
Well, I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
I'm trying to say that the way you chose to live is the best for you.
And the way I chose to live is the best for me.
And it's working great.
And I'm happy.
Sure, I understand that.
Tell me about, I mean, I started off this conversation talking about the costs of having other people in your life where you put their needs first, right?
Remember, I said you can't just take off and go run through waterfalls in Thailand.
And, you know, if you have kids, I do have a kid.
You know, you have to take care of the kid and get up at night and they get sick, right?
So I've talked about the negatives of this kind of life.
Tell me about the negatives of your life.
The negatives of my life?
Yeah.
You have to become your own safety net and you have to build your own systems in ways that other people don't have.
They're not relying upon society and its infrastructure in a way that you completely control.
And you have to do a lot of figuring stuff out on your own, which I wouldn't necessarily.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
I'm not sure.
So do you mean that you have to save the money you're not spending on a wife and family to prepare for emergencies?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Well, what I'm saying is that this part of what I'm telling you, a lot of people would consider negative, but I don't.
It's just part of the group.
No, no, I'm asking you, what is your negative?
What is negative about your lifestyle to you?
Because all lifestyles come with costs and benefits, right?
So like, you know, if you eat well and you exercise, then you have to spend a lot of time in the gym or wherever you're going.
You can't eat food that is quite as tasty or pleasant or, you know, so every lifestyle comes with costs and benefits.
So you've talked about the benefits of your lifestyle, which is fine.
Okay, I accept that.
What are the costs to your lifestyle for you?
Like, what are the negatives?
I can't, I honestly can't think of anything right now in my life right now that I could think of as negative.
Okay, so no stress and nobody controlled me.
So, okay, I understand.
Look, you keep going back to this is this is sales, right?
I've been in sales for many years.
I understand this, right?
So if you're selling a more expensive car, then you say, well, here are the features, and the cost is right there.
It costs $40,000 more or $20,000 more or whatever, right?
So you talk about the benefits.
This is how you started off.
You're making love to some hot woman and blah, So these are all the benefits, which is fine.
We can talk about those.
But every lifestyle choice has its costs and it has its benefits.
And are you saying that you experience absolutely zero costs?
Now, if that's the case, then your life would be better than mine.
I mean, to be frank, right?
Your life would be, because my life has costs and it has benefits.
I consider those costs and benefits worthwhile.
I am in a monogamous relationship with my wife and have been for almost a quarter century, and I'm very happy with that and so on, right?
And I did live a hedonistic life in my 20s.
It's kind of funny that we flipped, right?
So you and your 20s were monogamous, and I was more hedonistic.
And then, you know, 30 plus, I became monogamous and you became hedonistic.
So I do understand your life to some degree.
See, I've lived your life, but you haven't lived my life.
So I have more wisdom and knowledge in this conversation.
You know, like it or not, I have tasted the benefits and costs of hedonism, and I have tasted the benefits and costs of monogamy and family life and a commitment to moral virtues.
And you haven't experienced my life.
I've experienced your life.
And plus, I'm just older, so I've seen a longer, I mean, you're a young man relative to me.
So I have some knowledge, some wisdom, some experience.
It doesn't make me right.
I'm just saying that I have a more well-rounded view of this.
So I've lived a hedonistic lifestyle and I've lived a virtuous lifestyle.
So I understand the costs and benefits of both.
So I'm asking you, because if your lifestyle is all benefits and no cost, then that's what we should all do, right?
Because it's all benefits and no cost.
Now, you are a smart enough man.
You said you've been trained in engineering.
So you know that everything in life has trade-offs, right?
If you want the job done faster, it's either going to be more expensive or lower quality, right?
If you want the job to be cheaper, then it's either going to take longer or be lower quality.
Like everything has costs and benefits.
So what I'm asking is, what are the costs in your life?
Now, if you're saying there aren't any, then what you're saying is that a life of pure hedonism is the best possible life because it's all benefits and no costs.
Is that right?
Oh, it looks like hedonistically he has dropped out of the conversation.
Listen, I mean, I know that guy's been in before, and I know he's constantly blathering on about his wonderful life of sex and travel and whatever, making money.
But you can see this sort of lack of self-knowledge, right?
I mean, every lifestyle has its costs and benefits.
And virtue has its costs, of course, as we know, and it has its benefits.
And somebody who's really vain can't self-criticize or can't say the costs of their issues.
Maybe he just dropped.
I think he's back.
Hello.
So one of the costs that our friend out there in the world is having is a lack of quality.
Hey, how are you doing?
Can you hear me?
One of the costs that you're facing is a lack of quality internet.
But yeah, that was sort of my question: is what are the costs or negatives of your lifestyle?
I don't think there is any, but I believe that's your quality.
Sorry, you're going to need to.
Costs of Hedonism00:07:44
Come on, you're a smart guy.
You need to keep your mouth by the microphone.
I said that I don't believe that there is any, but I believe that there is for those of you who are listening because you can't get over your own loneliness and your desire for love.
Sorry, so the fact that people have a commitment to morals and to higher values and others is a weakness for you.
Like if we were strong enough to overcome our desire to do good and to love others and be loved, then we would be superior like you.
Is that right?
Correct.
You are never alone and you are never unloved when you are one with yourself.
Correct.
You are never alone when you are at one with yourself.
What kind of bullshit fortune cookie does that mean?
Okay, if a man is on a desert island, okay, we can start with the basics.
If a man is on a desert island alone, is he alone?
Not if he doesn't feel like it.
No, I'm asking for a fact.
Is he alone?
Physically, yeah.
Okay, fantastic.
I'm not sure what other than physically the world is, but okay, so he is alone.
If a man is on a desert island, is he in the process currently of being loved in his environment?
There's been many times where I've been alone in a desert and I felt real love for the universe and just being one with nature at the moment.
Yeah.
I don't know how you can't understand that, bro.
Okay, so have I been insulting you?
No, not at all.
I don't feel like it's not.
Okay, so why are you trying to getting bitchy and pissy with me?
I don't know why you can't understand that, bro.
I mean, that's bitchy, right?
Doubly bitchy.
Oh, I didn't say it like that.
I know your point is, you don't want people pursuing the life that I have.
That's your point in this conversation.
Okay, so again, you're just making things up.
And this is the result of being under-socialized, which results from isolation.
So this guy, whatever your name is, you don't have to tell me, of course, but this guy, he can't answer a simple question.
And he constantly jumps into inferring motives rather than having.
This is.
This is the result of being undersocialized, which is the result of the isolation that I was talking about.
So if somebody says i'm never alone as long as i'm at one with myself, that's just made up cope.
You are alone if you are not in the process of being loved right now.
Of course, the guy in the desert island maybe, there are people who are distant, who love him and miss him, and so on, but if a man is on a desert island, he can't be loved in his presence.
He can't be loved in his presence.
So you do not have the experience of being loved if you are not virtuous.
That I know.
Now someone might say no no, but sex with anonymous strangers and travel and spending money is better than being loved.
And okay, that's I.
I can accept that so.
So the price of my hedonism is being somewhat alone and not either being loved Or loving others.
And that's fine.
I can say.
But if somebody's going to say, no, no, no, I experience being loved every time I look in the mirror, every time I'm alone with myself, maybe that means refers to masturbation.
I don't know.
But the price of selfishness is you can't be loved and you can't love others.
Now, I personally think it's look, it's not immoral. to be a hedonist as long as you're honest, right?
Like if you say to women, oh no, no, I really want to have a girlfriend in a long-term relationship, right?
Then that's immoral because you're lying to them.
If you say to some woman who you go out on a date with and you say to her, no, I just want to use you for your body.
I'm completely solitary.
I don't play well with others.
I don't want love.
I don't want commitment.
I don't want a family.
I don't want any kind of long-term relationship.
But then, of course, why would a woman sleep with you then?
I mean, she'd have to have zero self-regard to do that or just be another hedonist, you know, if you're tall, good looking, or whatever, right?
So if, look, bro, if you want to say to me that, well, the price I'm willing to pay for my hedonism is I can only be with kind of trashy women or women with very low self-esteem or negative self-esteem and I can never be loved for who I am or love others for who they are because there's no virtue in the relationships, but then that's fine.
That's an honest statement.
But if you say to me, there are no costs at all to living a purely hedonistic life, then you're wrong.
You just don't see them.
Is it I don't see them or I don't experience them like you would.
I'm not sure what your question is.
I just stated my question.
Yeah, I don't understand it.
You heard it.
I know and I'm fully aware that you don't understand.
Okay, so this is just more bitchy passive aggression.
Okay.
So yeah, you don't experience, and this is part of this is why good quality people don't want to be around you.
And this is the price you pay for hedonism.
It's you can only be around other kind of trashy people who are manipulative and passive aggressive.
There's plenty of good quality hedonism is that's a bullshit conversation.
I don't like this kind of passive aggressive bitchy stuff.
I just think it's unmanly.
I think it's weasly.
I think it's actually kind of sad and pathetic.
And I feel a kind of revulsion over this kind of stuff.
Look, if the guy's like, you know, hey, man, I know I can't be loved.
I know I can't love others, but I'm willing to substitute animal pleasures for that, you know, sex and travel and whatever it is that he's doing to make his life so great.
That's fine, but it's this manipulative, trashy crap that I just don't...
Well, I know you don't understand.
Stuff like that, right?
That's just really sad.
And anybody who tells you, look, at the beginning of me doing this philosophy show, I was very clear.
I was very clear.
I said it's going to cost you a lot to be a good person, that there's going to be big costs to virtue in your life.
I said that very openly.
I said that from the very beginning because I wanted to be upfront with the costs of virtue.
I think that you guys have seen me pay the price of virtue.
And to me, it's well worth it.
And it's a good thing.
You know, if being a virtuous person helps keep the glow, and I know it does, helps keep the glow of love in the eyes of friends and family, then I think that's a very positive and wonderful thing and well worth it.
But I mean, there are costs for sure.
And anyone who tells you, my lifestyle is all pluses and no minuses, that's not honesty.
That's just a sales job.
All right.
Thank you for your patience.
Mulde.
All right.
If you want to unmute, I'm happy to hear.
Oh, nice to meet you.
How are you doing?
Two for a number of years.
I think I've, I think I've been able to follow a lot of your conversations.
So I'm hoping my question will be a good one this evening.
Showing Compassion Morally00:03:25
So thinking about UPP, universal basic preferences, I think.
No, universally preferable behavior.
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
And I think I sort of understand that the problem that you're trying to solve with that.
So my question is more around Christian philosophy.
So if I understand Christian philosophy, is that they teach objective morals.
And if I understand objective morals according to the teaching, is that there's a set of standards for everyone.
And they teach against subjective morality.
And if my understanding of subjective morality is that there's rules for you, rules for me.
And as time goes, rules can change.
I don't know if you if I'm making sense.
I understand you so far.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So I've been thinking about it for a while.
And I'm wondering if, from a Christian perspective, if they do fail in their terms of teaching objective morality, in the sense that the morality that they teach is not, how can I say, objective?
And I thought you would be a good question to ask as far as I know, you're not a Christian, so you don't really have a horse in the race.
But if you look at like Christian object, Christian morality, they'll say that, well, you know, we're now living under the New Testament, so we've got a new set of rules.
But the guys in the Old Testament, they had their set of rules.
And for me, that just seems to be more on the subjective morality side of things.
Well, you know, you're now basically arguing that rules change as societies change or a group of people change.
Or if you were a very specific group of people living in a very specific land, you had a set of rules, but now everyone else is exempt.
So I don't know.
Yeah, so I mean, like, let's say, let's try and make the argument a bit clearer.
So if you take the argument of, you know, the keeping the Sabbath, which is the fourth commandment, Christians will teach that they are no longer under that law.
But, you know, from a Jewish perspective, they like, no, that's a law that they're still under.
And Christians will teach that they're no longer under that law from a New Testament perspective.
But then, you know, the Jews are still subject to that law.
And for me, it just seems kind of unfair.
How can you claim to be following objective morals if you're saying that there's rules for that group, but not for my group?
Right.
Okay.
Is there more that you wanted to add?
I don't want to cut you off.
Yeah.
And then obviously, so just to just to add more flesh to that argument.
So then from a Christian perspective, I'll say that let's say Sabbath is not a moral commandment, and that's why we don't have to worry about it anymore.
But if I look at the fourth commandment, the fourth commandment, I think it is a moral commandment in the sense that it's like, you know, you must show compassion on those around you and that you must rest, but not only you rest, you must let everyone rest and give them some time off.
Even the animals are given, are permitted to rest on the Sabbath.
And from a work ethic perspective, if you're making somebody work seven days a week, they're your slave.
But if you're now going to give somebody a day off to say, you now got a day off, I'm not going to make you work, that is showing compassion.
And surely showing compassion is part of morality?
Testing Invisible Friends00:15:50
It can be, for sure.
It's not the essence of it, but it can be.
Yeah.
Ervina, I mean, yeah, so I mean, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know if I'm thinking of it the wrong way or if I've missed.
I mean, I'm not a philosopher, but I mean, have I missed something that I should be thinking about when it comes to trying to understand this idea of Christian objective morality?
Or is that why you have your own universal basic preferences?
Okay, that's a great set of questions.
There's a lot in what you said.
And just because we're talking to the planet, but I want talking to you indirectly.
How blunt would you like me to be?
I have a blunt omiter that you can go from minus 10, which is super diplomatic, to plus 10, which is super blunt.
What's your preference?
Give me about an eight.
An eight.
That's fair.
That's a good number.
Okay.
So if I said I have universal morality because I have an invisible friend who can't be wrong, who's told me what it is, would that be a philosophical argument?
So if I play it back to you, if you say, if I've got a friend that's invisible that's told me what the answer is, is that a philosophical argument?
Well, no, I have an invisible friend who can never be wrong.
And my invisible friend who can never be wrong has told me the answer, therefore, this is the answer.
Is that a philosophical argument?
Well, then I would say no, because it's like, how do you know you've got the right friend?
Because I could maybe have a different friend that has, I could say that I could make the same argument and to motivate my own points.
I would say it's not a strong philosophical argument because anyone can make that argument.
Well, yeah, it's the opposite of a philosophical argument.
A philosophical argument is in accordance with reason and evidence.
And also philosophical arguments, much like scientific theorems, can be universalized.
So if I say this planet Earth has the property of gravity because it has mass, and then we can say, but everything that has mass has gravity, it's constant throughout the universe and so on, right?
So philosophical arguments are rational, universal, and accord with evidence.
Now, you cannot universalize my all-knowing, all-moral, invisible friend told me the answer.
It cannot be universalized because, as you quite rightly point out, everyone can say that.
No, no, my invisible friend tells me this, and your invisible friend tells you something else.
So it is an argument from authority, which is an invalid argument, and it is an argument from perfection.
I mean, imagine how narcissistic I would have to be, maybe a little hedonistic too, but imagine how narcissistic I would have to be to say, well, listen, man, you may want to argue with me, but remember, I'm always 100% right.
I know everything, and I cannot lie.
Therefore, everything that I say is true.
That would be a sign of mental illness, right?
Okay.
So religion does not prove universal ethics.
Religion invents an invisible friend who can't be wrong and then says, well, my invisible friend said that this is what morality is, and therefore that's what morality is.
That is not a philosophical argument.
It is in fact an anti-philosophical argument.
And in any other context, it would be considered mad.
I mean, if someone were to go to the doctor and say, listen, I'm having trouble with my family because I'm always right.
I know everything.
I cannot lie and I'm perfectly moral and they keep not obeying me.
What would the doctor say?
Yeah, I mean, the doctor's just going to basically turn you out.
Well, he's probably going to institutionalize you, right?
Now, it doesn't make any difference if you say, well, I'm always right.
I'm always perfectly moral, blah, If you say, I have an invisible friend who only speaks to me, that invisible friend is all moral, all knowing, and all good.
And therefore, when I speak on behalf of my invisible friend, I share his characteristics of being all-perfect, all-knowing, and all good.
Whether you say it's you yourself or you say you have an invisible friend who only talks to you, it's the same thing from a philosophical standpoint, right?
It's the same craziness.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, so I suppose because I mean, this is where I've gone back and forth with some guys that are religious to say, like, well, if you're saying that your God is objective, okay, how can you say that, and maybe I'm just preaching to the choir, or not preaching for choir, but just trying to maybe confirm your point.
But, you know, I'd say, well, how can you make the argument that the commandments or the ethics that you say is Christian ethics is objective if in the same argument you build your faith on the fact that there was this old law that applied to a group of people, but now we're under the new law.
And the answer that I get back is never satisfactory to say, well, it's like, well, God's all-knowing, and he's just decided that that's the way it is.
And because it comes from God, it's therefore objective.
Yeah.
So they have an invisible friend that validates everything that they say and therefore it cannot be questioned.
That is in absolute opposition to philosophy.
Yeah.
So with that, they're not figured out that there's actually, and I was quite surprised when it was a whole thing.
I thought objective morality was objective.
But then somebody said, well, you need to have a universally objective morality.
And I was like, I thought that was a very strange thing to introduce into argument.
But yeah, I suppose it makes sense.
Was it the Christians who said you need a universal morality?
Well, this is, you know, what I'm talking about is universal morality.
You know, so universal moralities do not murder.
But, you know, keeping Sabbath is an objective morality.
Subjectively true for the Jews, and it's objectively true for the Christians.
But when it comes to murder, it's a universal moral point.
And that's why, you know, both the New and the Old Testament preach murders wrong.
But the New Testament teaches that the Sabbath is no longer applicable.
Applicable, but an Old Testament Sabbath was, you know, like absolutely necessary.
And yeah, I suppose the problem that I got there is that like, what I'm struggling to articulate is like, you know, I'm struggling to now understand from a Christian perspective.
Like you've got very famous apologists that will now claim that we can't follow subjective morality and this is the outcome of subjective morality.
But, you know, the way I'm looking at it is that they effectively are, even though they preach objective morality, they are in practice teaching subjective morality in the sense that you've got a set of rules for one group, but out of the same book, you've now automatically got a set of rules for a different group.
And even though they're all reading from the same book, that makes sense.
No, I understand that.
So, of course, if I believe that my invisible friend is the source of all objective truth, virtue, reason, and morality, well, not reason, but all objective truth and morality, then the way that I can make my morality pseudo-objective is to get more and more people to believe in my invisible friend, right?
Yeah.
Because if more and more people believe in my invisible friend, then they accept this and it becomes more universal.
And this, of course, had a lot to do with empire and colonialism was, well, in order for university to become universal, sorry, in order for morality to become universal, more and more people have to believe in Christianity.
But it's not an answer.
It is not a moral answer.
It is simply an argument from perfect authority.
I have a hand puppet that can never lie and is always right.
And this is what this hand puppet said to me last night.
Trust me, bro.
I mean, that's not, I mean, this is back to Socrates when he went to the Oracle at Delphi, who cannot lie, and said, who's the wisest man?
The Oracle said, well, you, right?
And Socrates said, well, that can't be right.
I don't really know anything.
So this was the paradox that he was faced with, with the oracle cannot lie, but he did not feel that he was the wisest man.
So he went on the whole crusade to try and figure out who could be wiser than him.
And he found that they weren't wiser than him, but at least he knew it.
You know the whole story.
Now, your approach of how can it be objective if it has different rules for different groups is fine.
But I think it's better or maybe slightly more efficacious, although you probably wouldn't get much traction with Christians in this, to say, so if you have an invisible friend who knows everything, that's pretty easy to test.
And this is one of the things that is kind of frustrating as a rationalist and an empiricist, is it's pretty easy to test, right?
So if I say, I have an invisible friend who knows everything, how would you test that?
Yeah, I mean, the only way you'd be able to test it is through reason, evidence, and logic.
And I mean, and that's what I'm talking about.
But what would you ask me?
Right?
If I said, I have an all-knowing invisible friend, how would you test that?
Yeah.
Or I suppose if I'm thinking, let me just think from my, if I had a person, okay, it's like, how was that revelation given to you?
So I suppose that would be the first question I'll ask.
Oh, I say I have an invisible friend who talks to me and tells me whatever is true and knows everything in the universe.
What would you ask me?
I don't know that your friend's real.
Well, if, okay, let's let's.
I mean, I suppose the question, I suppose, sorry, what I'm trying to think of is the question that Socrates was asking that person that could never tell a lie.
Well, if you're saying I'm the wisest person, how would I know I'm the wisest person?
So if you're saying you know somebody that knows everything, how do you know that that person knows everything?
Well, no, that's not what you can't ask a question and get a proof.
So let's flip it around.
So if you came to me and you said, Steph, I'm in constant contact with an invisible friend who knows everything.
I would simply ask you for a piece of knowledge that you could not have yourself.
Yeah.
Right?
Yep.
Okay.
That's good.
I would say, oh, that's interesting.
What did I dream about last night?
Now, God, knowing everything, would know exactly what I dreamed about last night, right?
And this person having access to God would ask God, hey, what did Steph dream about last night?
And God would tell them, they would tell me, and I'd be like, whoa, that's wild.
Or if I had a private story, we all have these, right?
If I had a private story that I never told the world, of course, by definition, private, right?
I had a private story that I never told anyone.
And I were to say, what was the name of the first girl I had a crush on?
And let's say I'd never told anyone that, right?
Well, God would know, right?
Yeah.
Or I would ask, give me a universal law of physics that has yet to be discovered by mankind.
Yeah.
And then you would have, because you have access to an all-knowing being, you would be able to provide me answers to those questions, right?
Yeah.
And similarly, in the Bible, you would look for, since people were in constant contact with the all-knowing God, with an all-knowing God, in the Bible, you would simply look for knowledge that couldn't possibly have existed at the time.
So these are all very, very simple questions to answer.
That if people claim to be in close contact with an all-knowing being, then you would simply ask them questions that they could not have the answers to and see if they provided those answers.
And if they could not provide those answers, then their hypothesis would be falsified.
Yeah.
I mean, if I say I know so-and-so's phone number and you say, oh, what is it?
Then either I give you, and let's say I don't know so-and-so's phone number.
You say, I want to call Bob.
Oh, I know Bob's number.
Oh, what is it?
Let's say I don't know Bob's number.
Well, I'm either going to fog and obfuscate or whatever it is, or I'm going to give you a number that's random and not Bob's number.
And therefore, I will.
So it's actually, if people claim to have access to omniscience, I mean, that's a pretty wild thing.
I have access to every fact in the universe through all time.
Well, that would be an amazing claim.
And it is a claim that is made all throughout history by millions of priests and shamans and witch doctors and so on, that they have access to omniscience.
That's wild.
Okay, so that's a wild claim.
And if any individual said, I have an invisible friend who knows everything, well, I mean, that's so easy to test.
It's so easy to test.
And the fact that it's not tested is because nobody believes it.
Nobody believes it.
Because it'd be so simple to test, if that makes sense.
So I just sort of wanted to point out it's anti-philosophical, it's anti-scientific, it's anti-rational.
That knowledge is something that you work pretty hard to try to achieve.
And for people to say, no, no, no, I have access to all truth and all virtue and all knowledge because I have an invisible friend.
And listen, I know that invisible friend could be perceived as an insulting term, and I sympathize with that.
I really do understand it.
But whether you say, God, a God who loves me or an invisible friend who likes me, is just a difference of degree, not of kind.
Why We Abort Fetuses00:09:05
So I'll give you one example of something else.
And then obviously I'll shut up and you can tell me what you think.
But if you look at the story of the flood, right, Noah's flood.
So we can assume, of course, since it's quite common in mythologies or stories about the ancient world, that there was a big flood.
There was a big, big, giant flood.
Or maybe it's some primitive memory from the end of the ice ages when the glaciers and snow all melted and so on, right?
But let's just say, so there was a giant flood which poses a big problem for religion.
So if there's a big, giant flood that kills a lot of people, what's the big problem for religion?
Sorry, that's a real question.
If we're with, no, with not, okay.
Sorry, he may have lost contact for the moment.
So the big problem, of course, is, well, if God loves us and we give 10% of our wealth to the priest to protect us, then how was there this big giant flood that killed millions of people?
Or, you know, in the neighborhood, they probably wouldn't know millions back in the day.
But that's the big problem.
Right?
So the big problem is we give money to the priest.
So the priest protects us from things, right?
From, you know, the witch doctor will dance and bring rain and so on.
Right.
And so we give all of these resources to the priest to protect us from God's wrath.
And then there's a big, giant flood.
So then the priests, what do they say?
Do they say, well, you know, I don't actually really control anything.
You know, I've just basically been taking your money for no reason.
And it sure is easier.
I mean, if you've seen what it's like out there, plowing the back 40 and wrestling with cows.
And, you know, that's hard work.
Mending fences, that's hard skill.
I mean, you see that guy doing the blacksmith, he's sweating.
It's horrible.
Soot all over him, smoking smoky lungs.
Like, I don't want to do that.
So the priest can't say, well, the flood happened.
I couldn't really control it.
The priest has to say, the flood happened because you didn't listen to me hard enough.
Right?
This is like every problem on the left results in more government and higher taxes.
That's sort of the purpose.
And so if you look at the story of the flood, Noah and the flood, then it perfectly aligns with the self-interest of the priestly class.
So the priestly class is supposed to protect humanity from negative outcomes.
And so if there's a big giant negative outcome like a flood, then the priestly class has to be able to explain it.
And they say, oh, well, you see, people were just so bad and so evil and so terrible that God decided to flood the whole world.
And it's like, well, what about the babies?
What about the children in the womb?
What about the little kids, the toddlers?
I mean, solely they're not evil, but all of them, right?
But They also, society needs a way to live with less fear, and so the priestly class says, Well, it's because people didn't listen to us enough that the flood happened, but don't worry, because after the flood, God put a rainbow in the sky and promised to never do it again.
Well, that's curious, right?
With regards to universal morality, because if it's the wrong thing to flood the world and kill fetuses and babies and toddlers, and I'm sure that there are some good people in the world too, right?
But it would be pretty bad.
So, if it's the right thing to do, then it must be right for all time because it's universal morality.
So, if it's the right thing to do to flood the world, then God might do it again.
But if God puts a rainbow out after the flood and says, I'm never doing that again, that's even more confusing because how could it go from being the right thing to do to the wrong thing to do in the space of 10 minutes, if that makes sense?
So, so, sorry, Stefan, I lost connection, but but I mean, isn't that a bit of a misrepresentation of the Noah and the Ark story?
Because the narrative for the Noah and the Ark was that there was not one good person, Noah was the only righteous person.
Well, but what about the babies?
The fetuses, what are the babies and the toddlers?
Well, if let's assume you've got a world of today that that um that celebrates abortion, is it is it really that wrong to execute a woman that is going to have bought a baby anyway?
That she was quite happy to have carry a baby up until I was talking about what were the categories that I was using.
Uh, what do you mean?
Well, I said babies, fetuses, and toddlers, yeah, so no, no, so baby, fetus, and toddlers, so they were killed in the flood, yeah.
Everyone okay, so how just to say that a fetus and a baby and a toddler are all evil and need to be killed?
Because if everyone's evil, then the woman who's doing the abortion is doing exactly what God did: God killed millions of fetuses in the flood as the mothers drowned, and therefore the woman who's doing the abortion would just be doing God's work but more inefficiently.
Okay, but I mean, no, but I mean, let's take a step back.
If you've got a society where everyone in the society from the youngest of ages to the oldest is groomed to do the most waterous things, what is the way you deal with that again?
I'm sorry, I'm still trying to understand how a fetus can be evil.
No, no, a fetus is in the womb, it's it hasn't come up.
I know, but they're saying they died in the flood, yeah.
I know it died in the flood, but but what I'm what I'm trying to say is that you know, if you if you're looking at the narrative of Noah, the Bible says that no one was righteous except Noah, right?
That means hang on, hang on, step by step, right?
Hang on, step by step.
So that means that the fetuses were evil or the babies, no, it doesn't mean no righteous, not evil.
So, what evil, okay?
But, but, but, but let's, let's, let's, let's, so if you've got a society where every adult is performing the most waterous, wicked things you can think of, right?
And, you know, from adult all the way to, I mean, what's, I mean, I've heard of kids of age of five raping other kids.
I mean, sorry, graping, but anyway, you know, if let's assuming that as soon as that is the culture that you're living with, everyone that has got the ability to make a choice.
Okay, sorry, I feel like my mind here.
Okay, fetuses, babies, no, no, stop interrupting.
It's rude.
Yeah, sorry.
Fetuses, babies, toddlers.
Okay, a toddler is not five.
Let's just, and I don't know about the five, rape, whatever, right?
Okay, fetuses, babies, and toddlers are given the death penalty.
Yeah.
So I'm not sure what you're talking about, older people and adults and women giving abortions.
You're just, I need you to address that or tell me you're not going to address it, but don't just ignore it.
No, I'm just trying to figure out, like, I get it, that you've got fetuses, toddlers, children.
Babies, babies, toddlers.
Fetuses, babies, toddlers.
Let's say up to the age of three.
Up to the age of three.
So they don't make their own decisions.
They're under the guardianship of their parents, right?
But what do you do in a situation where from the age of four, everyone is groomed to do evil?
Okay, hang on.
So again, I feel like I'm losing my idea.
I say, here's the categories we need to deal with.
Fetuses and children up to the age of three.
And you say, but four onwards.
It's like, no, no, no, that's not the category.
The category is fetuses, babies, and toddlers.
Can we restrict our moral examination to that?
Don't talk to me about four and five and plus or anything like that.
Okay.
Millions of them were given the death penalty.
Yeah.
They could not have been evil or unrighteous or anything like that.
Okay.
Now, the only answer is that God knew that they were going to grow up and be evil, but then that takes away free will.
Okay.
Okay.
So I accept that.
I don't have an answer.
I don't know what the answer is.
No, but there is no answer.
Yeah.
God as the Engineer00:13:26
Okay.
I get that there's no answer.
So my question in response to that would be, what do you do with a society that is as early at the earliest possible chance, everyone in the society is groomed to do evil?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by when you say, what do you do?
What do you mean?
So if your entire society is based on making sure that everyone that's living does as much evil as possible, what is an appropriate way to deal with that?
And they're not interested in like, take that other young man that we had on the call earlier where he was just like, you know, me, myself, and I, and I'm just going to do what's best for me.
And everyone is as hedonist as they come.
They've got absolutely no moral boundaries on this.
I understand the question.
Okay, so maybe I'll take this approach.
Okay.
So if you are an engineer and you build 100 bridges and every single one of them falls down, whose fault is that?
The engineer that built the bridges.
Yeah, assuming that he's in control and blah, blah, blah, right?
So he says, I'm going to build these bridges.
He builds 100 of them and they all fall down.
And if he builds 1,000 of them and they all fall down, he's a bad engineer, right?
Yeah.
Now, does the bad engineer get to blame the workers who followed his instructions?
Let's say they're illiterate workers and right, they're just, he's just paying them and he's ordering them around and so on.
Does he get to blame the illiterate workers who followed his instructions?
Well, I suppose if that's the workers he's got, no, you can't blame them.
Right.
So, who designed humanity?
Well, if you're going with Christian ethics, it would be God.
Yeah, God created humanity.
Right.
So, if all human beings are evil, who should God hold responsible?
Is it okay?
If you're saying, okay, was that the design of God, or was that just a consequence of free will?
Just maybe I don't want to.
Well, God designed humanity, which means God designed the internal and external systems of punishment and reward.
So, God designed human beings to have greed, gluttony, lust, you know, or whatever it is, right?
And so, if I dangle a whole bunch of chocolate in front of a toddler and the toddler eats it, is that entirely the toddler's fault?
No.
Okay.
So, God designed, say, men to be full of lust.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, I'm sure you remember your teenage years in particular.
It's like a possession.
It's like a demonic possession, right?
The level of lust, right?
Now, that is God's design.
Yeah.
And God also designed human beings to have taste buds that lead them towards food that is not always the best, right?
We like sugar, we like fat, we like salt, and so on, right?
So, salty caramel.
And so, so the God is the engineer.
Yeah.
And if every single one, let's say that there were a hundred million people alive at the time of the flood, and a hundred million people that God had designed were all failing, were all misfiring, they were malfunctioning, they were doing the wrong things, right?
So, if I say if Elon Musk designs and builds a hundred million robots and all but ten of them malfunction and do terrible things, do we blame the robots?
No, we don't blame the robots.
God created the incentives that drive humanity, and if everyone is doing wrong when God wants them to do right, now we can say, okay, there's free will, there's free will.
Okay, we can get we can get that there's free will, okay, but free will is related to incentives, yeah, right?
So, if someone kidnaps your dog and holds him for a hundred dollar ransom and you love your dog, do you have free will?
Well, not really, in a way, because I mean, you can choose to pay the ransom or not, but you still have to take into account the ransom, right?
Yeah, it is having a huge effect on your decision as to whether you give the guy $100 or not.
Yeah, and so incentives matter with regards to free will.
And so, if God has created all of the incentives that drive the human mind, then God is putting his thumbs on the scale of free will.
And so, if people are all choosing wrong, then God has given them too much of a desire for things that are immoral.
And that's a design flaw, and you can't blame the people.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, no, so I was going to take your lust as an example, right?
So, so, so, so, lust is a human, a human condition, right?
I agree with you there.
Now, now, if you're, if, now, this is someone, someone that had to work through a pornography addiction.
My, my, my greatest growth as a person was not indulging in it, but was actually making the decision to overcome it.
And I grew as a person, right?
Um, so, so if the human condition has lust, but the ability to overcome grows you as a person and you become a better version of yourself, is that a design flaw or is it a feature?
Well, you've taken 100 million people and reduced it to you.
You're kind of similar to the first commandment, but it's solipsistic.
No, because if a hundred million people cannot overcome their most murderous and horrible lusts and desires, that's a design flaw.
Now, saying, well, you know, I like cheesecake and I have to say no to cheesecake and right, that's reasonable.
I mean, that's fine.
But God killed everyone, which meant that 100 million people minus 10 in Noah's family were all hideously evil to the point where they got the death penalty even as a baby.
Yeah.
Now, that can't be right.
No, but I mean, I don't think that's a fair representation because, I mean, if I listen to your philosophy channel, the reason why you do the whole thing is to appeal to people to put away their base desires.
No, no, but you using our human nature and how we've been designed, how we can use reason, logic, and evidence to actually say, listen, yeah, guys, this, what we did in history or this way of doing something wasn't the best way of doing it.
And then you spend, I mean, I've watched a lot of your videos where you encourage people to guys, like, let's do better.
Let's give away, let's put away our base desires and actually do better.
Let's put away hedonistic lifestyles and actually find meaning in relationships.
Please, please, for the love of all that's holy, you don't need to explain me to myself.
No, no, no, but this is that.
But I hang on.
I know that I exhort people to do better, right?
And I exhort myself to do better as we all do, right?
So we accept that.
You don't need to explain to me or the audience about exhortations to do better.
Okay.
So we accept that, right?
Yeah.
Do I get to kill people who don't listen to me?
You're not a judge.
Do I get to kill people who don't listen to me?
No, because it's not a free-for-all.
Right.
So I did not design human beings and I don't get to kill people who don't listen to me.
Now, you could say, well, maybe there should be the death penalty first degree murder, like or self-defense.
Maybe you can kill people if they're about to kill you or something like that, right?
But in general, saying that God killing 100 million people is the same as me telling people to try to be more honest and good in the world, I don't understand the connection.
I did not design humanity and I don't get to kill people who don't listen to me.
So God did design humanity.
So why does he get to kill people if he's built the wrong incentives into humanity and everyone's evil?
Because if you say, well, I've created humanity and I want them to be good, but all of them turn out to be evil, that's a design flaw.
Okay.
But I mean, and if there was people that actually like, so I mean, if you're looking at the story of Noah, I mean, like, he was celebrated as somebody that was righteous.
And, I mean, that was something that was like, even In the face of everyone else choosing to do evil, he still chose to do the right thing.
Surely that is something that's like a good thing to actually like, well, even so, sorry to interrupt.
So let's use that analogy.
A guy builds 100 million bridges and 10 stay up.
Is he a good engineer?
Well, I suppose the question, I mean, I'm not trying to run away from your question, but the question would be like, why did those 10 bridges stay up and not the other 999,000?
You don't need the answer to that to know whether he's a good engineer or not.
Well, I suppose, I mean, like, I'm not trying to run away from the question, but it's like, you know, if I think of engineering, like, if you built a bridge that it's in a low-lying area and you've got a flood that runs over the bridge, like, yeah, maybe, maybe the engineer could have built the bridges the best he could, but if it was in a low-lying area, then it doesn't matter how well he built the bridge, the bridge would have still failed.
If there's a okay.
So, again, I feel like I'm losing my mind.
100 million bridges, all but 10 fall down.
Is he a good engineer?
No, it's not a good engineer.
Okay, so that's that's my point.
Okay.
But but then, I mean, I'm just trying to figure that out.
Then, what, what is if, if okay, let me let me take another approach in it.
Yeah, okay, so uh, I say that you should never lie, thou shalt not bear false witness, right?
Right, and then I show up at your house.
This is a typical argument from Kantian ethics, right?
I show up at your house and say, I'm going to murder your wife.
Where is she?
Yeah.
Would you lie if you know where she is?
Of course.
Okay.
So, what that means is that I have set up a moral rule called don't lie, but then I have changed the incentives so much that you can't tell the truth, really.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So, if God has set up moral rules, but so designed humanity that 100 million people minus 10 all are irredeemably evil, then clearly that is a design flaw.
But, but just to push back on an example, so I mean, I remember I listened to one of your talks a few weeks back, and you were talking about a guy, he was talking about his health, and I think it was a lady.
And the question that she was posing was, like, did the drugs that I took for my element kill me or not?
So, and basically, I remember the conclusion that you made is that if you've got a gun to your head, you no longer got ethics or philosophy, you no longer got philosophy, because it's like you can't really make a decision if you've got a gun to your head on something.
So, if you've got a situation where I've got a gun to my head and you're telling me to tell a lie where my wife is or not, you know, yes, I'm going to tell a lie in that moment, but that me telling a lie in that moment to protect my wife doesn't invalidate me being honest when I go to work the next day to say, did I carry through with my deliverables?
I still have to, I've still got a requirement to tell the truth in my day-to-day work, but in that extreme situation when I've got a gun to my head, like, am I really expected to tell the truth then?
Everybody in the world of Noah was irredeemably and irrevocably evil.
Minus now.
Again, I'm not going to say minus Noah because that's sort of implied, right?
Why God's Design Fails00:15:34
So 100 million people, all irredeemably evil, which means that God, who designed their bodies, their minds, their nervous system, their hormone system, and all of that, their lust, their greed, their recoiling, their pain, their pleasure centers designed every aspect of their brain and bodies.
That God, who wanted people to be good, and we of course allow that you have to have some free will to be able to be good.
I accept that.
So God wanted people to be good, gave them moral rules and gave them their personalities and their bodies and their minds.
Are we in agreement so far?
Yep.
Okay.
So God wanted people to be good and designed all of their physical and mental incentive structures.
And the design was so bad that everyone on the planet became irredeemably evil to the point where the death penalty for babies was imposed.
Yeah.
God could have designed humanity so that more people would be good.
Is that fair to say?
Well, I suppose the question would be: what would be if free will allows us to choose that 99.99% of people will want to be evil?
And the free will is driven by our biology, desires, and certainly influenced by, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, certainly influenced, right?
The thing is, like, what do you take?
What do you take out of the equation?
And that's the thing.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's easy.
So you take free will out of the equation.
Hang on.
So people have affairs because of lust, right?
No, because of opportunity, I would say.
Well, no, lust has to be there.
I wouldn't say.
I mean, is it really just lust or is it just opportunity?
Or is it just lust?
No, it's not just opportunity.
If you were castrated, would you ever have an affair, even if you had the opportunity?
Well, it would be physically impossible to have an affair.
Well, also have many sex hormones left, right?
So there are some people who don't experience physical sexual lust for whatever reason.
Could be something hormonal or something in their system, right?
Yeah.
So if human beings had only 10% of their current hormones that drive lust, right?
Because we all remember when it was like as a kid, right?
As a kid, you didn't have the same kind of physical lust that you get after puberty.
So we all remember what it was like, right?
Before and after lust.
Now, if God gave you only 10% of your lust, would that reduce the number of affairs or sexual misconduct sins in the world?
No.
Well, you're wrong.
Because I'm sorry.
This is a ridiculous position.
If people had 90% less lust, they would still have as many sexual sins.
Well, I mean, that's what I'm just saying.
Like, I think it's just a bit oversimplified.
It's not oversimplified.
My God, man.
Come on.
Work with me here.
I'm sorry to be annoyed, but that's right.
That's ridiculous.
Have you?
Okay, hang on.
Have you heard the word ozempic?
Yes, I've heard it.
What does Ozempic do?
It makes you more attractive, lose weight.
No, that's the effect.
How does it work?
What does it do to your sense of hunger?
It suppresses it.
Right.
It suppresses your sense of hunger, and the result is what?
You lose weight.
Right.
So if God had designed human beings with less hunger, there would be less obesity.
Right.
Fair?
Yes.
Okay.
So if we had less lust, there'd be fewer sexual crimes.
It's the same thing.
Okay.
Do you see what I'm saying?
This is why I'm getting impatient because you're just holding on to positions.
No, no, no, no.
I get what you're saying.
But I mean, like, if we're saying that, if, let's say, let's say if we, let's say, okay, let's say we only had 10% of our hormones, right?
Would that be sufficient to actually drive us to procreation?
Well, that's a different question.
Because God could implant in us a yearning for children that didn't directly come from sexual lust.
God can do anything.
But your position was that if we had 90% less sexual desire, that the number of inappropriate or sexual crimes or immoralities or sins would be the same.
And that's just not, that's just not.
I mean, I can't, I don't even know what to say about that.
When we have the example of a Zempek or a stomach stapling or whatever you want to, whatever you want to say.
Or there's chemical castration, right?
There's chemical castration for people who commit acts of sexual violence.
And it virtually eliminates their desire to commit these further crimes.
I mean, we know this.
Now, you could say, oh, yes, well, but, you know, blah, It's like, but God can do anything.
So if God has created us to do good, but everyone does such evil that they deserve the death penalty, then God has made a mistake in his design.
Okay.
So maybe let's just go on your Ozempic example, right?
So people that use Ozempe, would you say that they exhibit self-discipline?
I'm not sure what you mean.
So if you've got somebody that wants to lose weight and they've got one of three ways to lose weight, they can either decide to eat healthily, go to gym, or take Ozempic.
Would you give credit to the person that goes to the gym and decides to eat healthy?
Or would you give credit to the person that decides to take Ozempic?
I would certainly give more credit to the person who goes to the gym and exercises, but that's because our desire to eat more than we need is implanted in us.
And if we did not have that desire to eat more than we needed, then you would not need this level of discipline at all.
But I mean, I think, I mean, even with the food, I mean, like, we know how bad our food is now with, you know, how processed it is, and it's being designed to stimulate hunger.
And I mean, like, I'm somebody that enjoys my food.
I'm not trying to make it just my soul thing, but I mean, like, I know if you eat good food, you don't get hungry in the same way.
And the question comes in, like, I know with most people that are overweight, they either refuse to exercise or they refuse to look at their diet.
And those two things are like, well, we can either refuse to look at our diet or we can refuse to exercise.
But if we want to get out of jail-free card, we can take Ozempek.
It doesn't give you character at the end of the day, it just makes you thinner.
But the guy that's willing to go to gym or the guy that's willing to actually review his diet and make sacrifices on his diet, he gets character at the end of the day.
Right.
But most human beings who try to diet gain back, or like 95, 97, 98% of people who try to lose weight gain their weight back because of a variety of reasons.
But again, I mean, these are interesting analogies, but we're talking about the flood, which is the death penalty for every member of humanity, including babies, fetuses, and toddlers.
Yeah.
So that means that such evil was done that everyone deserves to die.
Yeah.
And the only question I've got there is, like, how do you deal, apart from the design flaw and stuff like that, if you got, If you, what is what is the most reasonable?
I mean, apart from saying oh, God shouldn't have created us?
No no, I doesn't say that.
No, I'm no.
Hang on.
Your question is, what do you do with a society where everyone's evil?
I don't even know.
I mean, there's nothing.
I can't do anything with a society where everyone's evil, because I would be evil too, right.
So there's no external person to do anything with a society that's evil, unless you are, of course, religious.
And if God had so designed humanity that he wanted humanity to be good, but every single one of his hundred million creations was evil, then God would say, gee, I wonder what I did wrong.
Now, of course, the other thing too is that God knows everything across all aspects of time.
And what that means is that God knew that in his creation of humanity, he would end up killing everyone through a flood because he would know what would happen in the future, because God knows everything past, present, and future.
That's what omniscient.
I'm sorry to sound annoying, but that's what omnisci means, just for the audience.
I know you get it, right?
So God would create something, would create 100 million human beings, knowing that he would have to kill them all for being evil.
Now, that's not good, is it?
No, it's not.
But I mean, it's like, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
I suppose I don't really know what to say.
Well, no, so the reason we've had this, and I appreciate the debate, but the reason we've had the lengthy conversation is because you said that I had mischaracterized or got something wrong about the flood and my analysis of it from a transactional standpoint for the priestly class.
And that's why we got, and it's a very interesting debate.
I'm glad that we had it.
But that's why we got into this, because you said that I had mischaracterized or got something unfair or wrong about the story of the flood.
And of course, if I know ahead of time, right?
So everybody who's unable to become good, because if 100 million people are all evil to the point, like not just, you know, they stole a little bit or they roughed up someone or they hit their kids or, you know, those aren't death penalty crimes, right?
I mean, we don't even do death penalties for, what do they call it, grape these days, right?
We don't even do death penalty for that, right?
So these are people who are all, you know, first degree murderers or, you know, something like just absolutely the worst of the worst, pedos and like all kinds of just horrible.
And so if everybody that God designed to be good is absolutely evil, then punishing them for the incentives that God baked into their system, right?
So let's say that people are evil because they have a greed for the unearned, right?
Okay, well, who designed them to have that greed for the unearned?
Well, God did.
And if the incentive structure has been so distorted by God's design flaws that everybody ends up being evil, even though God wants them to be good, and God knows that ahead of time.
So God designed humanity knowing that he was going to have to kill everyone for being stone evil.
And he did not adjust his parameters.
He did not adjust the hormones.
He did not adjust the desires, the hungers, the fears, the pain, the greed, the dopamine, nothing like that.
All of the complicated systems of punishments and rewards that characterize the human experience.
Knowing how he designed human beings, that he was going to have to murder everyone, babies, children, toddlers, fetuses.
He was going to have to murder everyone based upon how he was designing them.
And he still went ahead and designed them that way and then punished them for something he knew ahead of time was going to be evil.
I mean, that's nuts.
Come on.
I mean, this is why none of these stories make even the slightest shred of sense.
And I'm not sure where your religious beliefs are, but from A philosophical standpoint, I mean, and this is why I don't believe in God, because the alternative would be to believe that we are ruled by an omnipotent sadist.
Because to create humans knowing that they were all going to choose evil and you'd have to kill them all would be unbelievably sadistic.
And I can't even conceive of a universe where we're ruled over by an evil omnipotent sadist, which is why one of the many reasons why I'm an atheist is that the alternative is horrifying beyond words.
Yeah.
And yeah, I mean, at least from that perspective, I mean, like.
Sorry.
No, Sorry to be annoying.
I'm sorry to be annoying and interrupt you right away.
Do not do that to me.
I've just laid out a very rational case.
And don't say from that perspective, like it's just some subjective way of looking at things.
No, no, no, it's it's I think that there's an element of like there's stuff I don't know.
And I mean, I mean, you're you're obviously somebody that's thought about this for a long time.
And the point that I was trying to get at was that from an atheistic point of view, you're probably the best I know.
I can't bring up on my on my, I can't count many atheists that that would exemplify the moral standard that you exemplify.
And that, and that for me, it's a case of trying to figure out how do you actually solve this problem?
Because it's like, I can go to no, in terms of what is the ethical framework of how we live our life, right?
Like, and that was getting back to my original question: like, are Christians preaching an objective moral framework or not?
And I suppose my question, like, if you, if you've now laid the case down to say, well, this is why you can't believe in God, I can see your point.
The point that I'm just putting back to you, and it's not a critique, it's just like a case of like, I just don't know, but I just don't know many, many atheist societies that have actually developed a, how can I say, a world-class society.
And I can see the work that you're trying to do in terms of like using philosophy to try appeal to people to do their better nature, to appeal to their better nature.
But well, no, I mean, my entire purpose is to create moral standards that you can't just wish away.
Yeah, right.
Because if you say, or not you, but if someone says morals come from God, who we cannot prove, right?
Morals, without God, there are no morals.
And we cannot prove God.
That means that you cannot prove morality.
And even if you can prove some first cause, some prime creator, some prima facci, even if you can prove God, that doesn't mean that you've proved morality.
So my entire purpose has been, see, here's the thing, and this is based upon my experiences as a teenager, just to sort of unpack my heart a little bit here.
So it sort of humanizes my journey.
UPB didn't come out of nowhere.
UPB came out of my existential horror that I could just escape morality by not believing in God.
Wouldn't that be wild?
I mean, that's horrifying that I could just escape morality.
All morality is founded on God.
Believing in Morality00:06:36
Okay, I don't believe in God anymore.
Okay, now what?
And that's horrifying.
So Christian ethics, religious ethics as a whole, have a giant escape clause called rationality, reason and evidence.
And to me, it's perfectly horrifying that we have a society where people can just get out of morality completely and rationally by disbelieving in God, for which there is no proof and ample evidence against.
So the idea that the most essential thing in the world, which is virtue, the most human thing in the world, which is morality, can be immediately despawned and waved away by simply not believing in a self-contradictory entity for which there is zero physical proof is horrifying that our entire moral edifice as a society hinges on people believing in the impossible.
That is unacceptable.
And it has not sustained itself.
Because with the rise of science, religion has taken blows from which it cannot recover.
Because without a doubt, science has brought far more human happiness and survival and flourishing and peace and a pain-free existence.
I mean, just look at dentistry, for heaven's sakes.
It wasn't religion that improved dentistry.
It was science.
And so we found that reason and evidence is far more efficacious than religious faith.
And if the entire edifice, like everything around us is based on virtue, everything.
Why do you live in a house?
Why do you live in a house?
Because of property rights.
Why do you have money that you can spend?
Because of property rights.
Why do most people refrain from committing criminal actions?
Well, because of virtue, morality, some empathy, you know, and some, I mean, obviously some selfish cause and effect, don't want to go to jail, that kind of stuff.
So everything around us, the security of our family, the existence of our houses, the existence of roads and antibiotics and medicine and dentistry, all of it rests like a giant inverted pyramid on good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral, virtue and vice, salvation and sin.
All of it, this big giant inverted pyramid, everything that is worthwhile in our lives hangs entirely or it rests like this big giant inverted pyramid on what?
On faith.
Unacceptable.
Because then you can just walk away from morality by not believing in God.
Unacceptable.
And that's what we've been seeing for the last 200 plus years.
And so I needed desperately to say, well, when I walked away from God, I got to walk away from virtue.
Well, that's no good because more and more people are walking away from God.
And we can't just walk them back.
Because to walk them back, we would have to undo the effects of science, which will never be undone.
Because science, reason, evidence, empiricism, rationality have all produced infinitely more good to human life in the material sense, for sure, than religion ever has.
You could say spiritual or virtue or whatever, right?
But it's completely horrifying to me that you can just wake up one morning and say, you know, I don't really do the, I don't get the, the God thing doesn't really make much sense.
And then you are turned into a kind of cunning, giant-brained animal that can manipulate, lie, cheat.
Like, it's funny because like the first caller, right?
He was a manipulator.
And in my view, was not telling the truth about things because anybody who says my lifestyle has zero negatives is just lying.
Maybe he's not conscious of it, but it is, right?
So it's funny.
Like we had this sort of example.
So this is someone we can all understand that the first caller was in no way, shape, or form a Christian.
I think we can all accept that, right?
So this is a guy who walked away from God and therefore walked away from morality.
That's unacceptable.
We have to have a place for people to land that has good and evil in it, right and wrong, virtue and vice, salvation and sin, if they don't believe in one of the 10,000 invisible friends that people found their morality on.
It would be like saying, well, the only way you can be moral is to spend your whole life believing in Santa Claus.
Well, then people who want to be hedonists, they can just escape morality by not believing in Santa Claus.
Nope.
Unacceptable.
Unacceptable.
You know, like we say to kids, well, you've got to be good or Santa's just going to leave coal in your stocking, right?
You've got to be good or you're going to be on Santa's naughty list and you won't get any presents, right?
Well, if the only reason that people or kids wanted to be good or bad is because of Santa's naughty and nice list, well, they're going to outgrow Santa.
And we as a species are outgrowing religion and we need a place for people to be good that is objective and universal, philosophical and rational, scientific.
Because otherwise, people are just going to wander off on the plantation and we're just breeding these red, beady-eyed predators out there in the wild that are going to just tear us limb from limb.
We need virtue outside of superstition because superstition and the value of it, a faith, has been eviscerated by the power and efficacy of science, markets.
And we're going to lose it all.
We can't rewind back to everyone being religious because science has proven its power and science came in opposition to religion.
We've got to keep pressing on forward knowing, without a doubt, knowing that at least in the West, religiosity is diminishing and fast.
And if we can't find a rational proof of secular ethics or expand upon it, then we get all of the power of science with all of the amorality of hedonism, which is totalitarianism.
This is constant surveillance, AI tracking everything we do, social credit scores, right?
All the power of science then combines with all the amorality of post-Christian predatory relativism.
Constant Surveillance & Amorality00:02:00
And we're frankly fucked.
So this is why I put so much work into UPB and so much work in promoting it.
It certainly hasn't had the kind of success that I'm looking for, but that's not up to me.
That's up to the world.
I can't do it all on my own, if that makes sense.
I appreciate it.
And appreciate the conversation.
Thanks, Stefan.
You're very welcome.
And thank you so much.
You are certainly welcome to call back anytime.
And I appreciate you all coming by.
I love, love, love these spontaneous chats.
It gets my brain cooking.
Well, you know, I was going to say like the center of the sun.
But did you know, little scientific fact here, let's close in, start and end on science, that the center of the earth is hotter than the center of the sun.
But neither is as hot as the center of my buns.
But that's a whole different topic.
All right, I think we've answered everybody's questions.
We did have some callers, and I'm sorry that we did not get to you as a whole.
But don't forget freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
It would be really – and listen, it's just a little thought here.
I'll just sort of leave you with a thought, which I think is interesting.
I was just thinking this morning, because I do sometimes review in my mind, I think as we all should, the events of the last couple of years.
I mean, shouldn't you?
You get to zoom out in your life.
You've got to zoom out in your life and you've got to review what you've done, the decisions you've made, whether they've been good or bad, right or wrong, what have you.
And I do think of particularly since 2019, right?
Since that was when I went to Hong Kong to do a documentary with John Detoit on the anti-communist protesters in Hong Kong.
An amazing experience.
And I still have to apologize to my wife because I said, oh, no, I'm not going to put myself in any danger.
Oh, look, they're firing tear gas.
Let's get closer.
Teaching Empathy Effectively00:06:12
And then I got tear guests.
And of course, in hindsight, I should have had eye protectors.
I was very lucky I didn't get hit with anything like that.
But yeah, 2019, like the last, well, I guess 2016 was the time of first madness when Trump won.
And then 2020, of course, late 2019, 2020 with COVID and so on.
But I think it's important to look at these things.
And one of the things that I was thinking of this morning, this may sound like a wine, it may sound not, I don't know, but I just always want to be honest with you guys.
But I was sort of thinking about how, you know, when I was deplatformed, I lost 95, 96, 97% of my audience.
I don't know that for absolute certain, of course, but I could just look, I was regularly getting 100,000 views of videos plus on YouTube, and then it went down to a couple of thousand on BitChute and other platforms.
So yeah, 97%, 95, 97% of my audience.
And of course, there was a big drop in income and so on.
And you know what I thought of that was interesting was that when I've asked people about this or people have sort of called in, because it was a bit of a shock to me because it seemed like we had a sort of very good and tight community and so on.
Definitely some people did come over.
And so I want to sort of acknowledge that.
But it's interesting because I have, of course, talked a lot about empathy.
And while I certainly did get a few messages of support, given the millions of listeners that I had at the time, it wasn't quite 100 million and 10 from Noah's family or something like that, but it was a very tiny fraction of 8%.
And I thought that was interesting.
And I view myself critically this way, which was that I had failed as a coach or a teacher or educator, whatever you'd want to call what it is that I do, and philosophical coaching, whatever you'd want to say.
I had failed in some manner.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
We can maybe do this topic another time.
But I had failed to instill empathy in the right way in the audience.
Because people were like, oh, you know, I kind of lost track of you or, you know, you got deplatformed and I kind of forgot about you, this, that, and the other, right?
And I thought I had modeled empathy pretty well over the course of what it is that I was doing as a public philosopher.
I thought I'd modeled it because, you know, I get people calling in and try to be empathetic with their issues and call-in shows and people talking about the problems in their lives and so on, try to be really empathetic.
But I had failed to transfer this to the audience as a whole.
And I, you know, again, you can sort of mull this over and always feel free to shoot me an email, host h-o-st-t- at freedomain.com.
But the empathy was an interesting question because when I got deplatformed, that's when I kind of needed empathy from the audience.
Now, again, I can't blame God for designing people badly in this last conversation and then say, well, I kind of had a job of teaching empathy to my audience or not teaching like you guys don't have it, but, you know, hopefully expanding it to some degree.
But then when I was deplatformed, everyone just kind of forgot about me, which meant that I had failed in transferring empathy.
Because if I had succeeded in transferring empathy or more empathy to people, they would have said, How would I feel if I were in Steph's position and was just radically deplatformed?
And at the time on YouTube, like 15 years of my life just got erased, all those videos and so on.
How would I feel if I were in Steph's shoes?
What would I like?
Well, I'm sure a letter of support, maybe a donation or two, or something like that would have been pretty nice or something like that, right?
So I did not transfer to my audience again to some degree, but obviously it was very, very few.
I did not transfer to my audience enough empathy that they were able to put themselves in my shoes and figure out what would be nice, what they would like to experience or receive in a time of crisis in general, social attack.
Now, I know this sounds like an act towards the audience.
I really don't mean it that way.
I don't blame others for general effects.
And so if 19 out of 20 of my audience did not act upon any empathetic impulse to say, I'm going to send him a message of support or, you know, maybe donate something while he sort of scrambles to rebuild and so on, that's on me because I'm the empathy teacher, or at least I'm trying to be the sort of empathy teacher,
because it's kind of impossible to have strong morality without empathy.
And empathy, of course, doesn't always mean sympathy.
Empathy is when you truly understand what other people are feeling.
Sympathy is when you think it's just and fair and right.
So I just wanted to let you know that I am going to take on, as not even a side quest, but as a sort of significant project this year to try to figure out how to more successfully transfer or increase levels of empathy in my audience.
Because I thought I was doing a good job and the sort of facts show that not so much.
I was not doing that good a job.
And when I think I'm doing a good job, but I'm not doing as good a job, I need to be honest with me and with myself about all of that.
So I just wanted to let you know that if you have any ideas about how I can better teach or transfer or increase empathy in people given that 95% of my audience did not react to that particular instance of deplatforming in an empathetic manner, I would certainly love to hear your thoughts.
But I'm going to sort of work on this as a whole to try to figure out how to better teach empathy to the audience because it's very important.
Increasing Empathy Teaching Ideas00:00:37
It's a very important aspect of my own life's happiness.
And I definitely want to be able to transfer it in a better way than I have been able to do that.
So if you have any thoughts or ideas about that, I'd love to hear from you.
Love to hear from you at host host at freedomain.com.
And don't forget shop.freedomain.com to pick up your merch, freedomain.com slash books for the new books, in particular, the print books, and freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
All right.
Lots of love for everyone.
Thank you so much for a great conversation today.
Take care, my friends.
I will talk to you Wednesday night, if not before.