April 21, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:22:55
Why I Fear GOD! X Space Livestream
Stefan Molyneux recounts his Anglican upbringing, where witnessing fires and fearing eternal hellfire compelled him to view soul-saving as his sole purpose. He critiques Christian hypocrisy for prioritizing hobbies over evangelism, debating whether believers should dedicate 80% of resources to missions rather than material comforts. The discussion contrasts this with atheist philosopher Barcode's sacrifices, challenging Christians to abandon passivity, confront institutional corruption, and actively defend their moral order against societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Free Domain00:02:44
All right, all right.
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain at Fredomain.com slash donate.
If you would like to help out the show, I would very gratefully, deeply, and humbly appreciate your support as we doth and do spread our philosophy around the world.
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I hope you will come on by and check it out.
Now, I'm certainly happy to take questions, comments, issues, challenges, problems, whatever is on your mind.
I certainly have a couple of thoughts that I would like to share.
Conversing part of the conversation.
So, if you have things that you wish to talk about, I'm all ears.
Otherwise, I remain mostly mouth.
So, all right.
I guess we'll wait a little bit.
I'll talk about what's on my mind or what's been on my mind really for over 55 years.
Yes, yes, yes.
55 years.
It's a long time to have been alive.
Hopefully, a lot longer to go.
Hopefully, a lot longer to go.
You know what?
I'm just going to turn.
I have a feeling that I don't like the timeout.
I always feel like if there's a timeout on the phone, things are going to go badly somehow.
All right.
So, I guess let's dive straight in.
As you may or may not know, there's no reason why you'd have to know, but as you may or may not know, I was raised in religion, I was raised in Christianity, I was raised in the Anglican Church.
With some influence from, I guess, I mean, we were still Anglican in Ireland.
I was born in Athlone, a small village, I guess, by definition, small, right in the center of Ireland.
And I used to go and visit my aunts and occasionally my father when I was a child.
They would take me to church.
I went to church in boarding school sometimes twice a week, sang lustily in the church, and believed, Fervently, ardently.
Childhood Suffering and Faith00:06:26
And I say this with absolutely zero self praise.
It sounds like self praise.
I don't mean it that way.
I say this with zero self praise that I have in the very constitution of my atoms, in my nature, a no halfway switch.
I'm on, I'm off, I'm binary.
I'm binary.
People have often wondered, you know, based on the accent and boarding school, but yes.
If I'm going to do something, there was a phrase that we used to use in the business world that was quite powerful for me go big or go home.
If you're going to go and do something, do it all the way.
Don't do it halfway.
Don't do it in bits and pieces.
Don't do it in hesitation.
If I'm going to go up and ask a girl out, I will go up and ask the girl out.
I won't.
Because, you know, I mean, hell, she knows what the hell's going on anyway.
Who's kidding who, right?
Oh, we like to think we're so mysterious.
Men in particular, I just want to be her friend.
Nope.
We all know what's going on.
So, Jeff will get to you.
I am an all or nothing kind of guy.
And when I have tried things in the world, I have always tried things in the world with the intention of being the very best.
The very best.
When I first met my wife, and she said, Hey, what are your ambitions?
And I said, Well, I want to write so well, it's Shakespeare, Dickens, Molyneux.
And that was my goal.
That was my plan.
When I went to theatre school, if I couldn't be better than Marlon Brando, I just didn't want to do it, really.
When I learned instruments, unless I could get really good at them, I just didn't really want to bother.
And of course, there was no way to make a living at philosophy for many decades of course of my life.
So, being a philosopher, I thought maybe I could get into academic philosophy, but The anti white male DEI stuff was just kind of really cranking up in the 90s when I was in graduate school, and it was pretty clear that there wasn't going to be any room for a blonde, blue eyed, tidy whitey like me.
So I was kind of screwed that way.
Now, let's talk about God, is the title of the show tonight my fear of God.
Now, as a devout Christian, as a child, Honey, you a Christian child, I said.
Ma'am, I am tonight.
As a devotee of Jesus, as a staunch and devout Christian, as a child.
And again, I claim no credit for this.
It's just my nature.
It's a blessing and a curse.
It doesn't really matter.
It is what it is.
I am who I am.
I am what I am in the nature that I have.
Popeye style.
So, when I was a kid, the world kind of shimmered before me.
You have that thing where you're dreaming and then you feel yourself waking up and the dream ripples and parts before you.
I have the sort of same experience when I, a couple of times, I've been scuba diving.
I've been, of course, skin diving.
And even if you just have goggles, you swim down.
And then as you're swimming up, you get closer to the surface, you break the surface.
And the water runs off your goggles or runs off your mask, and you see the world for what it is.
You're no longer underwater.
And then you take off your mask and you see the world, and now you can't see underwater anymore.
That feeling you have when you're waking up and the world just breaks before your vision.
The dream world breaks before your vision like breaking glass and you can see out, like stained glass.
You break it, it falls apart, and you see through the world.
So when I was a child, Nestled in the bosom of my devotion to the divine, I looked at the world and I felt that the world was breaking apart based on my faith.
I felt that the world was breaking apart based on my faith.
And the other world, the world of God, the world of heaven, the world of angel dust and soaring over the Snarling mouths of bottom feeding demons, that world of faith and belief in the divine and miracles and of eternity.
And I yearned for that world.
I really did.
As a kid, I prayed.
I wished I wanted.
And I felt that my flesh was rotten, like a small, tiny, burning star in the gaping, Ribbed chest of a decaying zombie, that my soul and the eternal essence of who I was was trapped in the stinky, sweaty, arm pity, groin itchy, ass busting, mere mortal frame.
And I felt very strongly those commandments that this is but a fleeting, fading, foul world.
It's foul.
And the world to come, the world beyond, the world we surface from and rise above after death is perfect, angelic, feather light, deeply beautiful, arc enabled, with eyes that absorb light so bright it would blind us in this world, but only fills us with more light in the world to come.
And I yearned for that world.
I yearned for that world like if you fell off a boat with goggles on.
On the ocean.
You fell into the ocean and you looked down and there were sharks.
Hungry.
Shark snaggle toothed.
Zooming at you.
The Horror of Hellfire00:11:11
And you would pant and you would grasp and you would grab to get out.
To get back on the boat.
And you would fall on the boat panting, your heart hammering.
Tears of relief falling from your face.
And I felt that I had fallen into the flesh.
Like a bleeding man or a bleeding boy falls into the ocean and draws the predators.
And my God, did I want to get back on that boat to get out of this life?
My life was suffering, as you know, as a child.
So this is not necessarily theology, this is just my experience.
I'm just telling you my experience and what changed for me.
And I thought of a fireman.
When I was a child, I remember two brutal incidents.
That happened outside the home.
One was I was playing with some friends and somebody said, Car crash, car crash.
And we all went running up to the main road.
And there was a car on fire and they were pulling a woman out of the fire and pulling her also out of her skin.
She was so damaged.
Another time I saw a fire burning down a building.
There was nobody inside that I knew of, but I just remember.
Thinking as I looked through the window at the flickering flames, and you could feel it's one of these fires, you could feel the heat from across the street.
It was so hot.
And I remember thinking that they pulled this broken, bleeding, tortured, and most likely dead woman out of this burning car.
And that if I were to suddenly find myself inside that white hot, burning building, that I would pray for death.
And then I thought, well, what if I prayed for death and it didn't come?
And I spent eternity having my face melt in that white hot burning building.
Or what if I spent eternity being pulled out of a car and being pulled out of my flesh?
And it never ended.
And it just was on a 10 second loop being pulled out of the car, being pulled out of your flesh, being trapped in a burning building, holding your hands up, and seeing your very skeleton erupt in fire as the heat took you down, breathing in the heat like the exhale of the very sun, but not dying.
And I thought of hell.
And to the credit of my priests, I was not instructed in hell in the way that James Joyce writes about in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this sort of sadistic.
I saw a few pictures of hell, you know, the demons with the pitchforks of the fire and screaming.
And I thought, and I, no, I didn't think.
Sorry, let me be more accurate.
I felt, I felt.
That if I was a fireman, would I pull the woman out of the car before she began to burn?
If I was a fireman and I saw a child trapped, screaming, his hair smoking, at the window of a white hot burning building, would I not elbow and shoulder the wall aside, though showers of sparks fell down the back of my neck, would I not go in to save that child?
If I had certain foreknowledge that a bunch of children wandering into a cave would never come back out, Because if they wandered into the cave, they would get lost down there in the shale and the cold and the wet and the dark and the depth.
And they would shiver and cry and die.
Would I not physically hold them back?
If I had a certain vision that if a man got into a car and would then plow into a huddled, screaming, and scattering mass of school children, would I not take his keys and throw them in the sewer to keep him from his mad, murderous mission?
And I thought of the heat, and I thought of the fire, and I thought of hell.
And I saw my life, and I saw my life going forward that if I accepted Christianity, God, religion, Salvation, eloquence, heaven, and hell.
That, with the gifts of language that I knew quite early, I was writing short stories at the age of five or six, pretty good ones too, I would say.
And I've always had a fairly unique ability to thread my way through a tangle of language and emerge with a set of syllables that clarify and illuminate.
It's this extemporaneous speaking here.
I have no speech, written or prepared.
And I thought, my word, my God.
My God, if I can spew out language the way that a fire hose spews out cooling water, and the whole world is on fire, that would be my entire life.
My entire life would be convincing people to dodge, avoid, duck, and dream away from the fires of hell.
That would be, I'd be the catcher in the rye, but my entire life would be convincing people.
To avoid the bottomless and eternal pits of the fires of hell.
That everywhere I went, everywhere I went, there would be children in burning buildings, there would be women trapped in burning cars, thumping and screaming at the stuck glass, and only I would have the battering ram, the elbows, the shoulders.
The mad strength to pull the car apart, to pull the building's walls down, and to release people from the fires.
And I thought a fireman, even if he's off duty, even if he's tired, even if he's got a pulled shoulder, would absolutely, absolutely go into that building and pull the children out, would absolutely swerve his car into the ditch if he had to, jump out and run and pull the woman from the burning car.
Why?
Because otherwise the child dies.
The woman in the car dies.
And then I thought, oh my God, but it's infinitely worse than that.
Infinitely worse because the fireman goes and rescues the child from the building, the woman from the car, because otherwise they might die.
In fact, they will die.
The woman in the burning car will die an agonizing, horrendous death.
The child trapped in the white hot burning building will die.
And the really creepy thought for me, horrendous, as creepy as anything I've ever experienced in my life, and I've been to New Zealand.
I thought the fireman goes and gets the child from the white hot burning building.
The fireman smashes the glass and pulls the woman to safety, even if he half pulls her out of her skin, because otherwise they might die.
And how could he go home and ignore the screaming, the begging, the crying, the pleading?
It would haunt him forever.
That's just two things that I saw.
But what if, and this was the creepy thing for me, I don't know if you've ever had anything like this.
I'm sure you have.
I think most of us have thought of these things at one time or another.
I'm maybe just slightly better at giving them voice.
And I thought, were I a fireman and I saw the child in the building, the woman in the car, my heart would pound and I would do anything to save them because without my help they would surely die.
But the creepy thing was, I thought, but what if, if I didn't save them?
Oh, they would burn, but they would never die.
Oof.
Oof, ah!
And what if, as I walked through life, everywhere I looked were people trapped in burning buildings, trapped in burning cars, that if I did not help them,
they would never stop burning and they would never die, that the burning, the flames, the fire, the consummation of their blackened and bubbling flesh would not be a mere ninety seconds or 120 seconds or even five minutes, 300 seconds, it would not be seconds or minutes of ultimate agony until they died.
No, no, no, no.
It would be not minutes, not hours, not days, not weeks, not months, not years, not millennia, not decades, not eons, but forever and ever and ever and ever.
That everywhere I looked, I would see people walking into burning buildings from which they would never walk out.
They would forever burn, and they would never die.
And I thought, if this is true, if this is true, then there's nothing else that I could possibly do with my life.
Because what could be more important than eternally saving people from eternal fire?
Nothing.
Nothing could be more important because Jesus commands me to love my fellow man, women, children, aged.
Jesus tells me to love everyone.
And if I had a child, Who was trapped in a burning building, I would save my child at the cost of my own life, because otherwise my child might die.
But what would be a far greater incentive would be the need to save my own child, not because my child would die, but because my child would forever burn and never die.
And as I looked at the base of these flames and the shadows of the figure inside, Figures inside.
And I looked up and I looked up and I looked up, and the column of fire ran beyond the sky to the left of the right, as deep as infinity, as present as a firework going off, held before the face.
Forlorn Abandonment in Flames00:04:24
And I thought, if I have a gift of language and I accept this reality of purgatory, heaven, Hell, eternity, punishment,
sin, and guilt, then my life will be an endless, endless strain to pull people out of burning buildings where, if they take one more step, they are stuck inside, burning and melting and screaming for ever and ever, Amen.
That would be the reality.
Because that is what the beliefs.
Demand.
This life is a flickering, insubstantial nothingness in the face of eternity and torment and hell.
And even if we say, well, you see, it's not hellfire and brimstone.
No, no, no, no.
Come on.
Don't be silly.
It's not that.
It is simply separation from God that is hell.
You're not actively tortured.
You are just separated from all that is good.
I heard that argument too as a little kid.
And I thought, okay.
I was a terrible.
I actually just thought about this today when I was thinking about this.
It was a terrible day in my childhood.
My brother went to boarding school a year before I did.
I was too young.
I went when I was six.
He went when he was seven.
I was five.
I was too young to go.
And my mother and I went to visit my brother that day in boarding school.
It was a long train ride.
I was once in Florida.
I went on the Harry Potter ride at Universal, I think it was.
Crazy flashbacks to the train to boarding school.
And my mother and I spent the day with my brother, and then we had a train ticket on the last train going back to London.
We didn't have a car.
I never had a car as a kid.
Didn't actually own a car until my late 20s.
So we spent the day with my brother, and then we took my brother back to the boarding school.
But there was nobody there, and the doors were all locked.
And again, I was five years old.
And my mother said, I'm sorry, we have to go.
And there was nobody there.
Now, this boarding school was pretty big, it had big grounds and lands around it.
And I remember the sun was setting.
It was starting to rain, and my mother left my poor brother on the giant front steps of this boarding school in the darkening rain.
And I very clearly remember my heart breaking, looking at the standard analogy of raindrops are like tears as the rain cascaded down on the rear view window of the cab as it took us back to the train station.
My brother, in entirely understandable.
Sobs and tears, standing forlorn, wet, alone, and very, very young on the giant steps of the seemingly completely abandoned boarding school.
I don't know what happened.
I don't know that we ever talked about it again.
And I thought of that when I was told, but it's just distance from God.
And I thought, okay, so my brother in this day, when he was a child, was not burning, he was not tormented or torturing, his eyes weren't.
Popping, his face wasn't melting, he wasn't trapped in a burning car like a woman or a white hot burning building like a little boy.
He was just left behind.
He was just abandoned.
And he sobbed and was utterly forlorn.
You know, when you look at someone and you just see utter loss in their eyes.
So let's say it's not a burning building.
Let's say it's just abandoning someone on an empty estate.
On the giant steps of a giant empty building in the rain and driving off.
Well, I wish that had never happened to my brother.
I wish my mother had been slightly more organized.
The Logic of Saving Souls00:08:44
This is all, of course, long before cell phones.
You couldn't call anyone who knew.
But she shouldn't have done that, of course.
But it's not like we could afford a hotel or to stay.
And maybe something had happened.
Maybe the school was closed that weekend.
I don't know.
I never knew.
I never knew what happened.
We're not overly chatty about things like that in my family.
Man, it's been many decades since I could reasonably ask him.
So maybe it's not hellfire and brimstone.
Maybe it's just being left behind on the wet steps of an abandoned building to fend for yourself in the rain and the dark at the age of seven.
Maybe that's all hell is.
But of course, if I could go back in time and help my brother, I would.
And so I viewed, if I believed and accepted all of this, I viewed that that would be my entire life.
It would be consumed with saving people.
Like Oskar Schindler.
This watch could have saved someone else.
In the time it takes to pee, I could have saved someone else.
In the time it takes to eat, I could have saved someone else.
There are burning buildings everywhere!
And people strolling into disaster everywhere, all the time, and for eternity.
There are people getting into cars who are going to run down.
Innocent little school children by accident or intent or drunkenness doesn't really matter.
And the 10 seconds of impact and pain and bone shattering will be replayed for eternity.
They won't even die.
Their suffering will never end because their lives and their torment and their sin and their separation from God will never end.
Now, I mean, just think of this.
I mean, really, really think of this because this is what it is.
I have not changed my opinion.
In 54 years, since I was five years old, I'll be 60.
All too soon.
But this is what it is.
When you buy a latte, in the time it takes to buy a latte, you could have saved a soul.
How could you do anything else with your life?
If you truly believe, if you truly believe, and I am so constituted, I do not go halfway.
If I accept a thing, I accept it 150%.
If I accept reason, I'm not like, yeah, kind of reason.
No, reason.
If I accept the evidence of the senses, it's not, yeah, well, you know, but there are other higher senses.
No.
No.
Evidence of the senses.
Uncertainty is for slaves.
Uncertainty is the pretend virtue that saves cowards from the view of their own cowardice.
No.
And if God is real, and hell is real, and punishment is eternal, you and I can do nothing with our lives but save souls.
In the time it takes to sleep, you could be saving people from burning buildings which will never kill them, and in which they would burn forever.
There would be nothing else that would matter.
A doctor goes home, an emergency room doctor goes home, because other doctors are going to step in.
He needs his rest.
And the worst that can happen, really, to people who come in is that they suffer and die.
And when they die or after they die, their suffering is at an end.
But what if you were the only doctor who could heal, or one of the very few doctors in the world who could heal, and if you took a break from the emergency room, People would come in with grievous injuries and then would die forever and never leave the hospital.
Everyone you saved would leave the hospital.
Everyone who died in your hospital would squirm and burn and bleed and choke forever and ever and would never leave the hospital.
Could you go home?
I mean, I'm sure you'd take a few tortured cat naps here and there, but your entire life would be dedicated to that.
And I think I had a pretty strong sense.
Of the eloquence and passion and connection that I was capable of.
And I thought, I thought, if what I have, if what I have is a God given gift, then this is all my life can be pulling people from burning cars and burning buildings, pulling them out of the way of speeding cars, preventing people from being pushed onto oncoming subway platforms.
Wrestling people back from airplanes that will spend eternity slamming into mountains and shaking hot shards of metal through their body, organs, and bowels forever and ever.
Amen.
That every person I do not convince to be good will die in the ER forever and ever.
Amen.
That was going to be my life if I believed.
And I, you know, I'm telling you, I think I've got some credibility at this point in the.
Smoking fucking crater of my career, I think I have some credibility in saying, oh yes, oh yes, like a whore, I am more than willing to go all the way, all the way.
I think, I think that is believable now.
And I would have done it, man.
I would have done it.
I wanted to do it.
I was terrified to do it, but I would have done it in the same way that a fireman doesn't want to run into a burning building, but will do so for reasons of honor, a desire for a good conscience, in other words, an inability to live with himself if he didn't.
If it was true, I would have done it all.
But that was what was demanded.
That is what the belief demands.
Jesus Himself.
Dragon, his cross, crown of thorns, spit on, whipped, beaten, lied about, slurred, and then nailed for days in the cross of agony.
Himself not believing he would be saved.
Why hast thou, my God, forsaken me?
He did it.
And he's the backstory, he's the origin.
You can't hear the capitals.
In the HE of which I speak, but they're there.
If you're transcribing this, they're there.
And I was willing to be an exhausted firefighter rescuer from eternal torment for my entire life.
I was willing to do it.
I was willing to do it.
I won't say I wanted to do it.
In fact, I can very much tell you I did not want to do it.
But even if you're an uncertain swimmer, if the loved one is drowning, you get in the water.
And you do your best.
And I was a Mark Phelps language based champion swimmer, pounding through the syllables, arranging them in ways that save men's souls and women's souls, in a way that is unconsciously artful and thereby all the more powerful.
I would have done it.
I won't say that I wanted to do it, but I was willing to accept the necessity of doing it.
Except for one thing.
It was a big thing.
And it has not changed in 54 years.
And I would argue it's even worse now than it was more than half a century ago when I was knee high to a grasshopper and fingering the eternal smoky suit of the eternal salvation firefighter and saying, I'm going to spend my whole life breaking my back wrestling people from burning buildings so they do not end up consumed by flames forever.
Necessity of Following Jesus00:02:44
Because that is the logic and necessity of the Christian life.
That is the logic and necessity of following Jesus.
You must spend your entire life saving souls, expending every ounce of energy, every fiber of your being, shouting yourself, Alex Jones, horse, if you have to.
And you will probably have to, burning up your entire life.
Revolting pillar of satanic flesh, burning it all up to totter into the last grave with the maximum souls saved.
And what did Jesus say?
I mean, I read the Bible.
All who would follow me, sell everything you own, give your money to the poor, and preach, and preach.
And I was taught by firefighters, by priests, whose holy gushing words should quench the fire of sin and save people from eternal damnation.
Forever and ever, amen.
I was raised by priests.
They were my fathers.
And I couldn't help but notice the distinct disparity between what the faith demanded and what they were doing.
It wasn't any big papal style of corruption that first stimulated Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.
It was that they were, I guess, reasonable or decent enough fellows, and they gave their speeches, and it was a Christian school, it was in a Christian nation, devotees of the strictures and requirements and demands of Jesus.
And I couldn't help but notice that although I was raised by firefighters, and everyone was burning, People didn't really do much to put out any fires at all.
I mean, they got mad at people from time to time and, and so on.
I remember my music teacher was flirting with, no, my English teacher was flirting with the music teacher, one of the few females we had teaching.
I think I had two.
And, you know, he had a nice jacket and a cool haircut.
And those, I guess they were those glasses that, with the Polaroid, they turned dark in the sun and so on.
And he was flirting away and chatting away and they were laughing and she put her hand on his arm and tossed her hair back and she had a cross on her cleavage.
Flirting with the Music Teacher00:13:37
And listen, I, I'm like, but there's a giant fucking fire that's burning down the whole world forever.
What are you doing?
And I couldn't understand it.
I mean, imagine if a fireman's child was burning in a building and he wasn't going in because he wanted to flirt with the music teacher.
Ah, it's fine.
It's fine.
And it's infinitely worse because if the fireman's child is trapped in a white hot burning building and the fireman is too busy flirting with the music teacher to save his son, it's one thing if the son dies.
But in this scenario, the son never dies and is burnt forever or left on the steps in the rain of an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere while his mother drives away with his white faced younger brother staring out the back of a rain drenched taxi.
And the masters played cricket.
They played cricket.
But the world is burning, for God's sakes, people.
The world is burning and souls are sliding off like dead fish over a waterfall.
They're sliding off to fall and burn and die.
And be tortured and tormented by the presence of fire or the absence of God for ever and ever.
Amen.
And you're playing cricket.
You're playing cricket.
And when it was sunny, the nurse and the nurse's aide would sometimes go up to the roof and try and get some breeze.
Ooh, get a little colour.
Get a little colour.
But they were Christians.
They had the crosses.
They had the Bibles.
They went to church.
The world is burning.
And you're getting a tan.
People are sliding into sin and hell.
And you're just trying to get a slightly more attractive color.
Ooh, I can't go out there.
I don't have my stockings.
Oh, you can't show the bare legs that God gave you, but you need to cover them up with stockings.
Again, a firefighter's son is burning in a building.
And he says, I can't save my kids.
I have the wrong socks on.
I've got to go change.
I can't save my kids.
Look, look, look.
It's a beautiful break in the clouds.
I'm getting some real sunlight here.
Come on.
I'm pale.
I need some color in my cheeks.
And one of the masters had a train set.
He had a train set.
He went out and bought trains, modeled the papier-mâché over the chicken wire, painted the little faces, put the little lights in the trains, put the little lights in the tiny little stations, and all the while the world is burning and people are dying to be tortured and tormented forever.
And again I thought: hang on, hang on.
In a shed right outside, and somebody came pounding on the door.
Hey, your sun's burning!
Get out!
Get out here now!
And he's like, Whoa, whoa, hang on, I'm just working on this.
I'm working on painting the little ticket master's face here.
Hang on.
Oh, I'll check on him tomorrow.
Right.
And on X for the last day or two, I've been posting some fairly basic but interesting questions about religion.
Everybody knows how eloquent I am.
Everybody knows I've had a billion views and downloads.
And if I were to convert or reconvert, go back home, so to speak, it would be a great boon to Christianity.
And I assume that they're praying and they're saying, well, Steph is posting these questions because I like to test.
I'm an empiricist, right?
So I like to test these things.
It's important.
You don't just want to have assumptions.
You have to test them scientifically, rationally, empirically.
I've been posting these questions.
And I've been fascinated to see the responses because I assume that people are praying for their responses.
They are asking what the right thing is to do in the face of these challenging questions.
And they're not, you know, you could say that there are answers, but the answers are not definitive.
And I've been posting the questions because I want to probe and see does anybody actually believe what they say they believe?
Now, of course, Christianity says, love your enemies.
Which means if I irritate people, especially if I irritate people, they should show me love.
Right?
And I've had thousands and thousands of replies, almost all uniformly hostile.
And again, a man's children are trapped in a white hot burning building, and his neighbor, say down the block, block and a half, maybe he doesn't know what's happening, his children are trapped in a white hot burning building.
And people say, call Steph, man.
Call Steph.
He's a firefighter.
He's an expert.
He's got the biggest hose.
Bigger hose than OnlyFans.
Call Steph, and he says, No, Steph pisses me off, man.
Do you know he drove past me the other day?
I waved at him, didn't even seem to notice me.
Fuck it, my kids can burn.
Do you see?
Why would you let petty temper or irritation or annoyance overrule you if you genuinely believed in God?
I have a big audience, I've had some significant friendliness towards Christianity.
I've written an entire book sympathetic to Christianity.
It's called The Present.
You should get it at freedomain.comslash books.
It's free.
And all I get is pissy, petty, vengeful, irritable, snark, and bullshit.
The logic of Christianity demands that you spend this brief, insignificant flash of rotten fleshed existence saving people from burning buildings wherein they will not die but would instead melt in agony for eternity.
If the buildings are real and the burning is real and the eternity is real, you could not do anything else.
The parable of the Good Samaritan commands that you help people.
And it is a parable, partly, of course, for the salvation of the flesh, but most importantly, for the salvation of the soul.
The world is on fire, people will burn for eternity, and everybody plays with their train sets, indulges in their petty snark, plays cricket, flirts with the music teacher, does all other sorts of inconsequential bullshit, rather than being the self proclaimed firefighters.
Who don't even have to rush into burning buildings, right?
You don't save people by rushing into burning buildings.
How do you save people?
Well, we know.
You save people by talking them out of burning buildings.
You don't even have to go in.
You don't have to go in at all.
All you have to do is talk them out and say, hey, hey, I know you're terrified, man.
Listen, I know you're terrified.
Take a deep breath.
No, okay, not too deep.
Sorry, there's all that smoke and sparks and fire.
The door.
Is three paces to your left.
You can't see it in the smoke.
Take three paces to your left, turn the handle, step out.
I'm right here.
You don't have to go into the burning building because you can't.
Free will means we can't go into other people's minds.
But we can tell them the way out of sin, right?
We can tell them that.
We can tell them the way out of sin.
So, my first test of a belief system is not whether it's true, but whether the people who claim to believe it do, in fact, Believe it.
Sure.
I mean, because we have a limited amount of time in this life.
And if a fat guy is trying to sell me a diet book, I'm just not going to spend any time evaluating his diet because he's following his diet.
And if his diet is making him fat, I'm not going to test anything, right?
In the same way that if somebody says to me, I want you to spend your whole life roaming around the world trying to find a square circle, well, I'm not going to do that.
You say, oh, well, technically the diet could be good even if the diet.
Guy is fat.
It's like, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's possible.
It's possible.
But then the person is insane.
Because if somebody's trying to sell a diet book, and neither he, nor the editor, nor the publisher, nor the marketer, nor whoever, the people who take the pictures for the cover, if nobody's pointing out that you shouldn't try and sell a diet book if you're morbidly obese, then everybody's insane.
And I don't tend to evaluate the claims of crazy people.
I mean, there are schizophrenics who say the most wild stuff and scribble all kinds of nonsense on blackboards and nobody sits there and tries to figure it out.
They're not John Nash, for God's sake.
And I felt extremely bewildered.
And I will get to call us, and I appreciate your patience.
I felt extremely bewildered, disoriented, dizzy, dizzy, dizzy.
In fact, how is it possible that everyone says the world is on fire for all time?
All we are is firemen and spends almost no time talking people out of burning buildings.
Don't even have to go in.
Don't have to get burnt yourself.
Don't have to.
But how is it possible that this could be the case?
How is it possible?
Everyone says the world is on fire, we are all firemen, we don't have to put ourselves in danger, and they spend almost no time saving people from the burning buildings they say is the most essential task in the known universe.
Hmm.
Hmm.
And that's why I was afraid to be a Christian, because the demands upon my life would have been so overwhelming that it would have ruined.
My life, and I was willing to ruin my life.
I really was.
I was willing to ruin my life.
But nobody believed what they said.
Nobody believed what they preached.
It was all conformity and nonsense and sentimentality and, of course, a way to bully children.
And, of course, if they had prayed, as they claimed to, if they had prayed to God, God would have said to them, Hey, you know that short.
Kid, blonde kid, towhead kid, bit of a freckled face.
He's the youngest kid in school.
You can't miss him.
I've given him pretty spectacular gifts of language.
I mean, this guy will be able to talk the feathers off a goose.
This guy will be able to sell ice to the Inuit and heat lamps in the Sahara.
So you need to inspire him.
Maybe you need to nurture him, mentor him, develop him.
He's going to have just about the biggest intellectual audience in a scant couple of decades, which is nothing in the face of eternity.
He's going to have the ear of the world.
He's going to have a billion views and downloads, millions of books.
You should keep an eye on him.
You should help him out, inspire him, help him understand.
Nope.
And so, what is the answer to this riddle?
How can everyone tell me that the world is a never ending conveyor belt of children in white hot buildings and women burning to death in cars for eternity?
But everyone has model trains and hobbies and plays cricket and flirts with the music teacher and learns French and learns how to do the Charleston and learns instruments and goes and watch football.
What football?
Soccer for North Americans.
Football, footy in England.
I never saw my aunts, who were very religious, try to convert anyone or talk to me about religion.
I mean, they were praying, saying, Oh, you've got a rare gift, like Stefan Molyneux, like his ancestor, William Molyneux, has got a rare gift of analytical intelligence and verbal adroitness.
His ability to translate the most obtuse abstractions into everyday speech with a flourish of analogy and metaphor that drives the point home in people's minds, like the spike.
On the most secure railway line in history.
What is the answer?
Well, the answer is that they don't believe it.
It's mostly nonsense.
And there is no hell other than a bad conscience which dies with you.
So that's the answer.
And that's why I stopped believing, took a deep breath, and said, Well, thank you, in difference of my elders, for showing me what absolute foolishness and nonsense it all is, so that I can live a life of reason, rational calculation, empirical virtues, and effective language to promote real good rather than imaginary fires and catastrophes and disasters.
The associated incomprehensible indifference to the fate that is preached into the minds of children.
Absolute Foolishness Revealed00:10:46
Thank you for your patience.
I appreciate that.
Jeff, if you are still around, if you would like to unmute, I'd be happy to listen.
Yes, yes.
Thank you very much.
That was very interesting, very interesting.
I had all different thoughts and hearing that.
First, let me just thank you for sharing that.
And also, I hope you're, I know recently you had some difficult, a couple of difficult to personal days.
Hope the family's doing well.
I have a little girl and a wife myself.
So, hope they're doing well and are healthy and safe.
I appreciate that.
There was no disaster in my family, but they feared a massive disaster in the environment.
So, I don't want to tell any tales out of school, but I certainly do appreciate the sympathy.
Everyone here is doing well.
And thank you for your kindness.
Yes, absolutely.
I suppose I've been writing seriously, as you recall, not in anger, but just to try to keep up with everything, listening to this, you know, an hour, over an hour, very thoughtful, thoughtful things you've said.
My first thought was perhaps what this comes down to is taking on a responsibility across, if you will, which is not yours to bear, to taking on the responsibility for saving.
All the souls in the world are spending every waking hour that you don't spend doing the necessary thing like eating, sleeping, and earning a living in this work.
The responsibility for saving all souls in the world is not, and no one put that responsibility on you or me or anyone else.
Hang on.
Sorry.
Sorry to interrupt you.
I'm sorry to interrupt you just as you're starting, but I never said saving all the souls in the world.
I just said it's a conveyor belt.
Everyone you meet, everyone you could have impact on, you would have a responsibility to save, but not all the souls in the world.
So sorry.
It's just a minor correction, but go ahead.
Okay, well, that works fine then.
So let's take that then.
You have the people you can have an impact on.
Can we assume, for the sake of this conversation, that speaking to, you know, preaching to random strangers is probably a less effective means of winning souls?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Some people do it.
Some people do it.
Yeah.
Let's phrase it another way, then.
Are you more likely to persuade, or through your either word or deed or example, your own child of something or some random stranger you meet on the subway?
I don't quite understand the analogy.
I mean, if I was an emergency room, hang on, Just explain you're very intelligent.
The closer your relationship with someone, the more you invest into their life, the more likely they are.
To listen to you, generally speaking.
Do we agree on that?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Are you saying that teenagers are very keen to listen to and obey their parents?
In fact, doctors are forbidden from treating their own family members in most circumstances.
So if you're an emergency room doctor, you're probably better at treating strangers than you would be at treating your own child because there's a conflict of interest and you can't be objective and so on.
But you don't think that in the area of metaphysics, religion, the great questions of who are we, where are we going after we die, etc., you don't think that your daughter would be more likely to listen to you than to some stranger.
She's reading their thoughts online.
Well, you're missing, and I'm sorry because I know it's a complicated topic, so I say this with great kindness and appreciation for what you're talking about, but I wouldn't have a daughter.
Because having a daughter would interfere with my ability to save souls.
Because if you had someone like me, like say you were God and you had someone with my verbal skills, would you say, well, in order to save the maximum number of souls, you should have a child or children or get married or anything like that?
No, because that would all interfere with saving the maximum number of souls, given the amazing technology that's available.
I wouldn't have a daughter.
Why do you suppose that this, that, and I know that what you've said has occurred to many young men in the church through the years, in their young years.
Why do you suppose that they eventually came to accept the fact that they could not spend every waking hour doing something, nor were they commanded to do it, and that they had to trust that the limited amount of time they could do any good work was Compensated for by the fact that ultimately God, they plant the seed, but God was in charge of bringing the harvest.
I'm not sure what that analogy means.
God is not in charge of bringing the harvest.
Because God, if God was in charge of bringing the harvest, then God would speak to people individually and you wouldn't need preachers or philosophers or theologians or anyone because God would just go speak to people individually.
But your words are not me.
They're the tools God uses, but whether or not on any given day someone listens to you and says, Oh, I'm going to believe, is not because of your eloquence.
It's because a dead heart is made alive.
You know, you talk about reading the Bible over and over.
You see, it said that He gives, He makes a dead heart alive.
He gives the power of belief to those who He wills.
It's not because you have harangued someone into heaven through an emotional experience.
Well, I feel it's disrespectful to say that I'm.
Talking about haranguing people.
I don't harangue people.
That's a negative and aggressive term.
I've been an hour talking about burning buildings and using very serious language.
So forgive me if I misspoke or I did not mean to, but you have been using very strong, very vivid imagery.
And you have talked about throwing guys' keys in the sewer in order to save him from doing something terrible to himself or to others.
You know, it would be justified to do, you know, to use every verbal tool which you're commanded to save someone from burning in eternity.
We've seen that happen before.
It was called Charles Grandison Finney and the Second Great Awakening.
You'd have these tent revivals where people would be stirred to enormous emotional, you know, energy and be, and come forward.
Oh, come forward, brother, you know, confess, cast off your sins.
And people would do that.
And then within about a year's time, less than a year, most of them had slid back to their old ways and, uh, And it wasn't, it didn't take very well.
Something when you get emotionally overwrought.
You're as likely as not to continue in that after the initial euphoria has passed.
So it's not just a matter of you persuading someone.
It's a matter of their heart being changed by force strong in you.
Again, if you're taking the whole Bible, you read the whole Bible, assuming that it's true.
I mean, Paul, here's another example.
Paul, the greatest preacher of all time, wrote huge portions of the Bible, as you know.
He did not accept alms and gifts.
To pay for his expenses during a lot of the time he was traveling, he worked as a tent maker.
And this is a man who spoke to Jesus regularly.
If anyone should have spent all his time preaching, it would be him.
And he spent many hours of the day earning his living.
He chose to do that and was not told not to do that by the Lord or anyone else.
So it was okay for Paul not to spend every waking hour preaching when he had a direct line to, you know, to.
His Savior, why do you feel?
I mean, I understand it's a child feeling that way, but why do you still hold to that belief today?
Because I noticed you didn't talk about it.
Well, as I grew older, I studied it more and thought about it and refined my thoughts.
If Paul didn't have to spend every waking hour preaching, why should anyone else?
That's not an argument.
Yeah, I mean, Paul could have been as much at fault.
I mean, it's like saying, well, There's a fire chief who was walking past a building and he chose not to save someone.
So why should you save someone?
Paul wrote a third, what is it, third to half of the New Testament?
Well, no, no, hang on.
Technically, Paul did not write anything.
Paul was dictated to by God.
Well, there's a bit of a debate about that.
I won't bore you with the differences there.
There's one school of thought that.
That, well, like Muhammad claimed to have basically transcribed everything given to him by Allah word for word, but that is not the traditional understanding of how a good bit of the Bible was written.
It was written under divine inspiration, but it wasn't in some cases.
In some cases, it is directly word for word, but in other cases, it's writing under divine inspiration, but not God talking in your ear with every single word.
But, you know, that's.
But be that as it may, I think, in fairness, you would say that.
Well, let me ask you do you think that it was wrong for Paul to spend some of his time working to do his?
Well, no, excuse me, I'll scratch all that.
All of us cannot be preaching constantly in any given moment.
I mean, even you, you have to stop, you have to eat, you have to do some basic chores, you have to sleep.
Obviously, you have to sustain yourself.
Whether it's through the household income, whoever the primary breadwinner is.
But if one person is providing the living and the other person is preaching, then not everyone can do it at the same time.
You're basically splitting chores.
One person is doing all the work, the other person is doing all the preaching.
Sustaining Yourself While Preaching00:15:27
But realistically, there's only about 20, 30 hours a week after all the other time is taken out that you can spend doing this.
So that's about two to four hours a day, depending on the day, sometimes five or six.
So, would you say that if someone is spending 20 hours a day, 20 hours a week, sharing the word, doing something, that that is the equivalent of doing it full time?
Well, our life is very brief in the face of eternity.
So it's sort of similar to a double shift for a doctor.
Let's say a doctor working in New York City on 9-11.
Now, when the bodies are coming in and some will live and some will die and you do your tripartite triage and so on.
If a doctor were, let's say he had to do 12, 14, 16 hours, which doctors did, of course, during that time, would you say, That he should put maximum effort into healing people coming in from the Twin Towers, the rubble of the Twin Towers and Building Seven and so on.
Should he put maximum effort in, or should he say, No, I really want to go and work on my tennis serve.
I want to go and pick up some additional boxcars from my model train set.
I want to flirt with a nurse.
If somebody had to work a double shift, a doctor, and people were going to die, If he didn't focus, what would you think of somebody who took time away from saving lives for the sake of inconsequential hobbies?
That's a very interesting point.
As you know, of course, doctors, they don't let doctors work for more than a certain amount of time without taking some time off, some R and R, some sleeping.
They want the shift.
Okay, bro, bro.
So I'm sorry to interrupt, but look, the analogies I gave and the history that I gave was all pretty clear.
So, you were listening.
What examples did I give?
Did I say, well, somebody went to the dentist rather than save souls because they had a toothache?
No.
Did I say somebody slept rather than saving souls?
No.
What were the examples that I gave?
People spending time doing trivial pursuits or such as that.
Yeah.
Playing a sport that was not any kind of profession or anything like that.
Flirting, playing around with model trains, unimportant things.
So, when you say, well, you got to sleep, it's a straw man.
It's not what I was talking about.
So, if we take the amount of time, well, another great example is many people devote, give through their giving of tithing and offering and some volunteering their time, the equivalent of around 10% of their productive hours.
You know, the hours when they're not doing the needs just to stay alive, their productive hours, they give about 10% of their time.
So, if you're contributing the equivalent of five to 10 hours a week through giving to someone else who can do it full time, and you're also taking responsibility for mentoring and spreading the word to the people in your circle, your family, your own children, people around you, that seems to me to be a pretty good dedication.
Now, we have a problem that most people don't do that as they should.
But we also have plenty of people who do do that as they should.
There are plenty of philosophers, as you know, or self proclaimed philosophers who lived terrible lives, who were just personally reprehensible and just obviously didn't believe what they taught.
Like you say, you wouldn't buy a dye book from Batman.
That does not necessarily discredit philosophy.
And there are others who practice what they preach as you do.
So, again, I'm not quite sure where the command is.
Where is said that we must spend all of our available time without any recreation?
Because even, I'll give you an example, in the Old Testament, which is part of the Bible, of course, it's not superseded by the New, except where it's directly superseded.
God told his people to take time for recreation.
There's a feast, one of the festivals, that is basically just a time to take time to rest, to recreate, to celebrate the blessings God had given us.
So, I don't think that God would like to see some more meat on the bones of why we must spend every hour that we're not doing the basic needs.
Now, again, you've given an excellent point.
I don't disagree with you.
Spending, you know, wasting time, trivial things.
Yes, of course.
But again, how does that disprove the fact that they were not fully aware, you know, cognizant of?
Of their responsibility.
How does that disagree?
No, They're fully cognizant because they told me.
Okay, let me ask you this.
You're a Christian, right?
Okay.
Is there a more important mission than saving souls?
And the unspoken statement there is to the individual believer.
Is there a more important mission?
I mean, I'm not talking to ghosts.
I'm not talking to animated clocks.
I'm asking you as a Christian.
I'm not trying to trap you.
I mean, honestly, if you can help me out of this maze, I'd be thrilled.
Is there a more important mission than saving souls?
No.
So that should be your highest priority.
And again, that doesn't mean you can't sleep.
It doesn't mean you can't go to the washroom.
It doesn't mean whatever, right?
Maybe you have a feast, but the most important mission for all Christians is saving souls.
In the same way, a firefighter walking past burning buildings should go in.
And as I pointed out, he doesn't even have to go in, he just has to talk people out of the burning buildings.
The most important mission for Christians is saving souls.
And you've been around Christianity a while, I'm sure.
What percentage of Christians make that?
Because that's what Jesus did, right?
Jesus didn't have a wife.
He didn't play sports.
He didn't have really hobbies.
He, you know, obviously preached as much as humanly possible.
That's the ideal, right?
What would Jesus do?
Be like Jesus.
Well, actually, I don't know.
How many, how many, sorry, hang on.
No, no, just ask a question.
He was 30 years old.
He turned 13.
He spent 17 years after that before he started preaching.
I'm aware of that, but hang on.
I understand that.
I'm fairly conversant with the life of Jesus.
I understand that.
But he did that because he had not developed Christianity, had not realized his own divinity.
But once he did.
Now, everyone after Jesus has the example of Jesus, which Jesus didn't have, right?
So it's a different matter after Jesus.
You're saying that he was 30 before he realized his own divinity?
When he was 13 in the temple, his parents couldn't find him.
He was sitting there with the scribes and others.
You know the story.
And they said, Where have you been, son?
And basically they say that.
And he says, Why have you been worrying about me and looking for me?
Didn't you know I have to be about my father's business?
So, I mean, he's aware of his divinity at least as early as age 13.
Well, I mean, I'm not a theologian, but of course, being about my father's business could mean any number of things.
It doesn't necessarily mean that he was claiming that he was the son of God.
It's ambiguous.
And he had to be ambiguous because if he claimed to be the son of God, he would have been driven out of the community at that age.
So, But my point is that certainly after the example of Jesus.
In the context of the rest of his life, it's pretty clear that's where it's going.
It's not like, oh, I'm buying something for Joseph.
Well, let me ask you this.
How many Christians do you know?
What percentage of Christians that you know put the salvation of souls as their highest goal, which is the essence of Christianity?
Just about all that I know of personally to be very serious believers.
Well, that's by definition, right?
But what percentage of the.
No, because you're saying, well, the people who take it seriously.
Okay, but my whole point, that's my whole point.
What percentage of the Christians that you know as a whole put the salvation of souls as their highest goal?
As their central principle and guiding light.
In other words, everything around their life is shaped around the saving of souls.
You say, well, the serious ones, let's ask the question.
Well, I don't think it's an unfair distinction anymore than someone who has listened to one Molyneux broadcast is very different than someone who has read multiple books of yours, listened to hundreds or thousands of hours.
A passing interest or a very shallow interest in philosophy is very different.
From someone who's practicing it regularly and trying to apply it.
So, among those who are actually trying to apply the teaching, who are actually taking it seriously, I would say the number is well in excess of 50% and probably between 80 and 90%, based on my own.
Okay, so of the people who were raised Christian and who professed to be Christians, what percentage put the savings of souls as their central, all overriding principle?
Of all the people you know who are Christians or who claim to be Christians, what percentage of them?
with the salvation of souls as their central guiding principle.
Basically, like if you're drawing a line, picture a square and a chart and draw a line across and basically a V. In their early years, when they're younger, like your heart was very tender for this stuff.
The younger years, very much so.
They get into those teen years, drops down considerably in many cases.
As they get older, it grows stronger and stronger.
So, depending on what stage of life, it's going to be different.
But among people who have reached maturity, frontal, you know, brains fully developed, 25, and after that, among those people, I would say it's between 75%, I would estimate between 75% and 90%.
The older they get, the more they care about it.
Okay.
And how do you know?
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just asking for the empiricism.
How do you know that they put the salvations of souls as their central and core principle?
Based on their efforts to share that with the people who care, who matter most to them, and who they have the greatest impact on their own children, their own spouse, their best friends, their people in their life who they care the most about.
Because just as we not only do we have most influence among those people who we care most about and who we have shown the most solicitation for, you know, been most solicitous of their welfare, we tend to have more influence of those people.
They care the most about those people and try to make sure that they are, again, the most important thing you provide for your child's food and lodging, and take care of their physical needs.
And if you really believe this stuff, you would care also for their spiritual needs.
So their dedication to that and to helping people close by them as much as they're able is a pretty good indication, in my opinion.
Okay, so they do it where it's easiest, and they are firefighters who basically only save their own families from the burning building and not others.
Well, first off, I would say that there is nothing wrong with having your order of Morris, as they would say, the order of Morris being ever concentric rings going outward.
I don't think that it's unfair to say that in the case of that burning building analogy, if you had a bunch of children in that building and your daughter was one of them, the first one you were going to grab was going to be her to get her out of that building.
And that's what almost any other parent would do.
In fact, if they didn't, you know, all things being equal, I would wonder about their fitness to be a parent, to be honest.
So, number one, you've got the order of Morris.
Number two, they are not exclusively, I didn't say exclusively, focused on that.
These same people often are giving considerable amounts for missions, for tithing, to support people who can work full time in the ministry of trying to reach souls, supporting people who are doing it either online or in person overseas or right in the United States.
Or in your country, I live in the United States.
So I didn't say exclusively, and those people tend to be very giving.
If you look at the state of Mississippi, the poorest state per capita in the United States, they give more money to charity per capita than the other state in the union.
Some of the richest state in the unions do not.
So I think that's a factor we need to take into consideration the support of missions, the support of other ministry work to enable others to do what you don't have the time to do yourself.
but you're doing it through your giving.
Okay, so they give 10% of their wealth to the church or to mission work, is that right?
Yes, the command is to give 10% of your increase.
And if you could give more than that, those are additional gifts and offerings.
But yes, the command to give 10% of the increase.
Okay, so do the people that you know have things that they have bought that they don't need that would be better spent on the salvation of souls?
Obviously, everyone has things that they don't need to survive.
Right.
So then they have other priorities.
Because if you, let's say, go out and buy a new car, when you could in fact buy an old car, then you are taking tens of thousands of dollars that could be used for the salvation of souls and instead using it to buy a cool new car, right?
Or if you have a house that's bigger than you absolutely need.
This is sort of the questions that I'm.
Them asking.
Let me, well, then let me ask you this.
Would you, you don't have to choose, but in your mind, if you had to save only one person in a life or death situation, had to choose between your wife or your daughter, you probably know who you would choose.
Sacrificing Wealth for Christ00:14:35
But the fact that you would have to make that heartrending choice, does that necessarily mean that the other life is not also of great importance to you?
No, of course it doesn't.
So it does not necessarily follow that because the top priority in a Christian's life is to save souls, particularly those who are closest to them that they can have the most impact on, just because that is their top priority does not necessarily mean that they must dedicate all their resources to it.
If that were the case, God would have told us to do so.
But the general command has been to give 10% of your excess.
And remembering, an agricultural society.
If the crop fails that year, you haven't got any extra.
There's nothing left.
You're just trying to avoid starving.
So God does not need everything we have financially to save souls.
He gives us the opportunity to show our gratitude for what He's given us by giving our tithe and by giving gifts as we're moved to do so.
But He doesn't need our money to save the world.
He's done a remarkable, I mean, just Consider how people pay nothing.
No money is spent.
I mean, people donate to your work, but this message goes out.
You've had billions, as you say, a million, a hundred million, maybe a hundred million, two hundred million people.
We don't know how many have listened to your work.
And it didn't cost them anything to listen to it.
Didn't cost, you know, after the first bills are paid, just everything else is a bonus.
It costs you money to put it up.
But after that, after everyone listening, they'll listen for free.
So you're getting this message out basically for free at that point.
It didn't require people constantly, continuously giving money for your message to continue to spread.
So, again, I would just say humbly submit that the order of priority does not mean that priority number two is totally meaningless, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, I don't quite understand the saving my own child.
Of course, I would save my own child from a burning building.
Of course.
But that doesn't mean that I'm going to spend the rest of my life saving my child from a burning building.
The point is that after you've saved your child from a burning building, shouldn't you go and rescue other souls?
Of course, right?
So you can't just spend your whole life pulling your child from a burning building, so you should go to others.
Now, of course, as you know, Jesus is fairly strong on sell your possessions.
Give to the poor and follow Jesus, right?
Luke 12 33, sell your possessions and give to the needy.
And if you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.
So, therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
This comes right after the famous passage in Luke 14, 26, to hate your family.
The point is total allegiance to Jesus.
Your possessions, family, and even life itself must not rival him.
Yes, anything that you would put of a higher priority, anything that you would not be prepared to give up if necessary.
Is above, you know, for the sake of Christ, that is your God that you want, that you're not prepared to give up.
And in the first century, in the Jerusalem church, as you know, right in the book of Acts, but then a few, right after Christ's ascension into heaven, rather, you see the church selling their possessions, selling land, well, not possession, selling fixed assets like houses and land, particularly land, and pooling those resources together.
This is often used as an argument for Christian socialism or Christian communism.
But actually, when you consider what Christ has told them before he left, it makes perfect sense, and also why you do not see this in other churches.
Other first century churches did not practice this kind of communal living in the sense of selling off all their fixed assets.
The reason why is that Christ had been very clear in multiple occasions warning them that this place, Jerusalem, is not long for this world.
Within a generation, this place is going to get, you know, going to get, Romans are going to, we didn't say the Romans, but things are going to get really bad here, really, really bad, to the point where nursing mothers are going to wish for the hills to fall on them and their children.
And of course, that's exactly what happened.
And we see that when the Romans came in in AD 70, the Christians had pretty much all left by that point.
When the Romans were moving toward Jerusalem from after the campaign in Galilee, The Christians had cleared out Jerusalem, they cleared out Judea, they were off in the desert or wherever.
They'd gone, you know, because they knew there's no future here.
In this particular spot, in this particular city, there's no future here.
And they didn't know when it was coming, but they knew it would be coming within their lifetime.
So, yeah, let's, we haven't got any long term future here.
And again, you don't see that in other communities.
You didn't see that in Philippi and Athens and the Corinthian church and the church in, what's the big city in Asia over in Syria now?
It's a huge city.
Forgive me, I've forgotten it.
This first city where Christians were called Christians.
It'll come to me, I'm sure so.
But anyway, so I think you have to factor that into the situation as well.
The unique situation of age or where someone's going to destroy it.
And two, he's talking about you have to be willing to give up something, give up anything if it's going to be a block, if it's going to be higher in priority.
If you're not willing to give up your wealth, you're not willing to sacrifice a family relationship for the sake of Christ.
You're not worthy of him.
But it doesn't necessarily mean to hate your parents.
In general, it's just what's more important to you.
Okay, so Christians with a new car are choosing a new car over saving souls.
Again, why does it follow that you must spend all of your resources?
No, I'm not talking about all of you.
No, did I say spend?
What did I say about the car?
You got to listen, right?
What did I say about the car analogy earlier?
You said spend a new car instead of getting a used one.
So, is that spending all of your resources or are you miscommunicating what I'm saying?
The implication of what you're saying is to spend anything more than the minimum necessary to life, to practical daily living, to spend extra, to spend in excess unnecessarily is a wrong use of those resources if you believe the most important thing is to save souls and that money could be spent saving souls, correct?
Right.
But then you said, so all of your resources, and I didn't say that, you would keep some resources for the used car.
So basically, we come down to the question of when you have those resources which you don't need for basic tactical daily living, you have that extra, that surplus.
What do you spend that surplus on?
What's the best use of that surplus?
If you look at, and you're right about, Priorities.
And if you would consider the fact, Seven, that out of, let's say, realistically, for most people who struggle with the daily needs of life, the world economy is pretty tough right now.
Throughout most of history, life's been pretty tough.
There's much extra.
So if you take out that 10% tie, take that 10% tie, this sort of part of your extra income that you don't need just to survive.
And then on top of that, realistically, there's probably only about Five, 10% of your income left over, of what you have.
So, for most people who are giving what they're commanded to, they're giving half, maybe more throughout history, certainly, and even today.
What percentage of most people's income is surplus income?
Realistically, probably about 10%, maybe less.
And if they've managed to give 10% tithe and then they've got a little extra, Let's say 5% after giving 10%.
They've already given out of 15% of their extra money.
They have $85 tax, living, et cetera.
You got 15 bucks left.
They gave 10 to the Lord's work.
They got five left over.
So they've already given two thirds of the money they don't need just to keep things going to the Lord's work.
I'd say that's pretty daggum and dedicated.
I mean, it seems like you just don't want to address the issue that I gave.
And you're just talking about the things that you want to talk about, which is fine.
Yeah, it seems like you don't particularly want to address the questions that I'm raising because you're not dealing with the specific issues that I'm raising, but talking rather in generalities.
Like I was talking about.
No, you know, you asked me, what about the wasteful amount of, you know, the extra money that could be spent, the work?
And I'm just giving you an actual example.
As you know, you could ask Chad GPD or Grok, most people's disposable income is a very small percentage.
No, you're begging the question, bro.
You're begging the question.
You say, well, they've got to spend their money on a new car, and therefore that's a certain amount of money.
It's like they don't have to spend their money on a new car.
They could get a used car and then their actual requirements for spending would go down.
And you're saying people don't have a lot of disposable income.
Well, you have more.
Listen, I've been rich, I've been poor.
You have a lot more disposable income if you buy a used car than if you buy a new car.
Can you agree with that?
Yes.
And I did not say you have to buy a used car.
I'll cite you 5% extra income.
Let's just say the people buying things they shouldn't or can't afford.
Now, instead of 10% extra income, they got 15% extra income.
That instead, they have $5, $15 out of every $100 they make is relatively discretionary spending.
And the other $85 go for taxes and all the things they have to do to keep body and soul together.
They got $15 left over.
If they give $7, $8, $10 of that $15 to the work of the church and volunteering extra time is equivalent to a dollar or two extra.
So if they're spending $10, $12 out of $15, Extra dollars to the work of saving souls.
They got 15, they're spending 10 or 12.
That's 67 to 80% of the discretionary time, resources.
I think we would both agree that anyone who spends 80% of their discretionary time or resources, approximately 80%, in any kind of effort is pretty dedicated to that effort, whether it's a hobby, a philosophy, whatever.
It's pretty strong dedication.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what to say because you're just taking people's spending as a fixed thing.
People could live on far less than they do.
I mean, we know that because historically in the past they did, right?
But yes, and their discretionary spending was not extraordinarily higher either because they didn't produce as much.
They weren't as efficient.
They didn't have modern, you know, they didn't have modern tools.
Farmers lived on less.
It's true, but they also had way less discretionary spending.
In fact, they have less back then than they do today.
So, um, I don't, I'm not sure if that's necessarily the best comparison.
People can, people have lived on much less today than they do today.
They do in very poor countries.
Absolutely.
But it's not as though they have a ton of discretionary income as well.
Okay, so people could live on far less than they live on today.
So when you say they don't have much money left over after what they spend, they're spending too much relative to the mission of saving souls.
Well, in the Philippines or India, where income is much less, they do live on the cost of living is much lower, of course, but they also don't have tons of extra income.
Canada and Britain, in Germany and France and the United States and many other first world countries, the cost of living is much more expensive.
It's less expensive in rural areas, more expensive in the cities, of course.
But I think that we can beleaguer ourselves to death and like, you know, what's the minimum amount, whatever.
But in general, again, we can't, you know, we have to try to make this a little, you know, universally applicable as best we can.
And throughout history, most people have not had.
A great deal of disposable time or money after keeping body and soul together.
I think we can definitely agree on that.
And so, that time left over, what percentage of that time and resources are they spending to the vital work if they believe in Christ that's saving souls?
And for most people, that is a majority, effectively a majority of that time.
If you're giving of your 10% and you only have 10 or 15, 20% disposable income, you're spending more than half, maybe two thirds, maybe three fourths or more on that work.
Would you?
Okay, sorry.
We're just going round and round in circles because you're not listening.
Yeah, yeah.
We're absolutely going round and round in circles.
Yeah, you're not listening because I don't think you can even phrase what it is that I'm trying to say because you just keep saying the same thing over and over again.
So it's kind of boring.
Do you know what you said?
Well, if you understood what I was saying, you would address it.
I did.
You're saying it is wrong to spend.
You're saying that if saving souls is most important, why are you wasting money on a new car instead of just a used car and taking that extra money you could have spent?
And giving it to the Lord's word.
And I agree with you, and I would contend to you.
Funding Destruction vs Salvation00:15:01
Oh, fantastic.
So you agree with me?
I agree with you that that.
Okay, well, then why are we going on to India and other places if you agree with me?
I mean, I don't know why didn't you just say I agree with you?
Because that would actually be honest, right?
Because I do.
Well, I do not believe that it is wrong.
And again, I would challenge you to find this in the, you know, find scripture where a person.
Who spends half, two thirds or more of their disposable time and income in support of the socialist organization?
I'm not doing this again.
No, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I'm not doing this again.
If you're not understanding, I've got to think of my audience's sanity as well.
You're like a broken record.
You just keep repeating the same thing over and over again 85%, 85%, 85%, two thirds, 10%, 15%, 85%.
Step, you're not engaging.
You think that I'm not understanding what you're saying?
This is kind of rude.
Well, why don't you?
So let me just ask you simply do you think that a person who dedicates 80% of their time to a final mission of saving souls is wrong in taking the extra 20% for recreation?
I'm not sure what your question is.
Sorry.
All right.
Well, I mean, it's pretty clear.
If you, if a person.
Okay.
Don't, don't, don't start, don't just start getting insulting, right?
I mean, okay.
Go ahead.
I mean, it's not, it's not clear to me.
And I'm a pretty smart guy.
So don't automatically assume that the fault is with me.
All right.
If, if you, if, do you think that a person who spends 80% of the time they, of the time that they have helping others, you know, in the service of saving souls, Do you think that it is unreasonable for them to take 20% of their time for RR, rest, relaxation?
Sure.
Is that unreasonable?
Is that okay?
Would you say that that's a reasonable thing to do?
I'm fine with that, yeah.
All right.
So then we can have that as kind of our baseline.
So, by that measurement, a substantial number of Christians are doing what you're saying they should be doing.
Maybe it's 20%, 30, 40, 50%.
You know, just people who claim to be Christians.
Yeah, there's plenty of people who claim to be Christians, plenty of people who claim to be reasonable and believe in reason.
But as you know, most people don't.
But among those who are doing anything that remotely resembles consistently walking the teachings, it's a fairly high percentage and it can definitely be higher.
But, you know, I think we can say that it's a fairly large amount, probably a majority or close to it.
So I don't think we necessarily have to.
You know, I think we should be concerned more about getting those who aren't doing what they should to continue to do it rather than necessarily say that, well, no one, I don't see anyone living these teachings that, you know, as you saw as a child, you know, this is urgent.
Why aren't they doing more?
Well, perhaps plenty of them were doing more.
They were just doing it in a way that wasn't obvious.
You didn't see the tithe they give, you didn't see their little efforts because, you know, you aren't with everyone 24 hours a day.
You can't be expected, particularly as a child, to, Okay, you can't, you can't, you can't.
Come on, man.
You don't have to say stuff like you aren't with everyone 24 hours a day because that's insulting to my argument, as if I would have that as a requirement for any argument that I was making.
That's just annoying.
Well, we've said.
So, my basic point, my painting, my, my, no, I got to talk now, right?
So, my basic point is that I should have seen it as a child.
I should have seen it as a child.
Because I was put into the 24 7 hands of a Christian organization.
I should have seen it as a child.
Do you think that's reasonable?
Should you, you said we should focus on children.
I was their child.
I was in boarding school.
Do you think that I should have seen it as a child?
Do you think any of my friends saw it as a child?
Do you think that they should be giving to people in Somalia and not showing dedication to Christianity to the children under their own roof?
That they are housing and feeding and taking care of 24 7.
So when I didn't see it as a child, and then you say, well, you can't be with everyone 24 7, that's an insult.
That's not my requirement.
I did see it as a child.
Do you think I should have?
Yes, particularly if you were associating with enough people who claimed to be Christians.
Well, they were Christians.
I didn't claim to be Christians.
They were Christians.
So when I was staying with Christian families, And I didn't see it at all.
Maybe they were giving money to people in Somalia.
Maybe they were giving money to, I don't know, maybe.
But then your point is that it should start at home.
The Christian charity should start at home.
So why do you think it's the case, just out of curiosity, that my empirical evidence from living with a wide variety, I lived with a Christian minister in Africa for a while.
Why do you think that in many different countries, in many different households, Across many different years, I did not see it.
You didn't see people caring for basically the soul of the child, your soul in particular?
Well, any child's soul that I ever talked to.
So, in your personal lived experience, you never knew a child who felt as though their parents cared about them from the kind of like the spiritual sense.
Well, I certainly, in a wide variety of Christian households and a Christian boarding school, nobody asked me about the state of my faith or any doubts that I might have or any questions that I might have.
This never happened to any of the friends that I ever talked with about this, which we talked about it quite a bit.
And this happened in Canada, this happened in England, this happened in Scotland, this happened in Africa.
And so, I mean, I think it's a fairly broad spectrum conversation that I have had exposure to.
And my other point about the money.
Is that people, let's say in the Middle Ages, gave 10% of their tithe, and let's say they made $2 a day.
You could sort of make an argument.
It's a little bit apples and oranges, but you could make the case that people in the Middle Ages lived on $2 a day.
And now people live on $500 a day or $100 a day or $200 a day.
So they have, you know, 50 to 100 times more income.
And what's happened is they've scaled up their spending to heights that Jesus, I mean, obviously he's omniscient, so he could have imagined it, but the average person in the Middle Ages or in the ancient world could not fathom the amount of wealth that we have.
And People have simply scaled up their spending.
I'm sure you've known people over the course of your life, they come into money and they just start spending more.
And so, in general, I would say that if saving souls were the number one priority of Christians, then they would not simply scale up their spending to have bigger houses and newer cars and so on, but they would instead pour those extra resources, not into their own creature comforts, but into the salvation of souls.
So, your percentage argument to me is kind of blowing over the fact.
That, you know, like if I have, if you and I go out for dinner and the bill is $110, and you have $100 and I have $10, and I say, well, let's both put in 100% of her money, you wouldn't say, well, that's fair because they're, you know, we're both putting in 100%.
At least you wouldn't say that's mathematically fair.
And so, yeah, with the extra income, there should be far more resources going towards the salvation of the poor, not just in terms of percentages, but in absolute numbers, because everything about bare bones.
Would be taken away from the salvation of the poor.
And I'm sure you've been to Christians' homes and so on, and they've got a lot of nice stuff, and they've got a lot of Netflix subscriptions, and they've got a whole bunch of stuff that is subtracting from the salvation of souls.
Now, listen, that's fine.
I don't, I mean, spend money on whatever you want to spend it on.
I'm just saying that that is not putting the salvation of souls central to your mission.
Because what you would do is you would say, does this serve the salvation of souls?
And big screen TVs do not really serve the salvation of souls.
And Netflix subscriptions, well, quite the opposite, but serve the damnation of souls, taking money from the government, as the Christian churches in the West have taken billions and billions, I think even hundreds of billions of dollars from the government to resettle refugees or to settle foreigners, often who are quite hostile to Christianity in the West, which would be of questionable value to the continuance of Christianity.
In the West.
And I don't see.
It's terrible.
It's a horrible thing.
Right.
So, how is this occurring in a Christian society that Christian churches are being paid by the government to bring in populations quite hostile to Christianity to the point where Christianity is going to lose its foothold in countries where it's reigned for hundreds of thousands of years?
Because the churches doing that are functionally, if not literally, apostate.
They value liberalism and the post war consensus more than they and the approval of man.
More than they value the safety of their flock and the perpetuation of the gospel.
That's why.
All right.
So then the money that the Christians are giving to the church is funding the destruction of Christianity.
The tithe is funding the destruction of Christianity.
That's what I mean.
Most Christians who are serious about their faith and give their tithe, anything close to 10% of their tithe, are doing it with churches which are not participating in those activities for the most part.
Well, the churches are getting a heck of a lot of money, and it's not coming from nowhere.
Yes.
And like I said, if you look, you can go look it up.
The churches, there are a few churches that would be considered conservative or evangelical or Orthodox, not like Eastern Orthodox, but Orthodox, and they're holding to the scripture and such, that have participated in those sort of programs.
But by and large, you find it among your more liberal, more mainline denominations, the Anglican, the Episcopal.
United Methodist, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which is the older established but also the most liberal one.
You know, the kind of people who fly the Pride Parade flags, you know, the Pride flags, those type of churches, which very few serious Christians would call churches, are the ones by and large engaging in this activity.
You do not see this very much among your churches that are more serious.
And you ask about where's the money coming from?
It's coming from the government.
But also, you have to remember these older, now basically apostate churches, many of them have very generous endowments, which were given to them over the generations by people in their wills.
They left the money.
And so, most of these churches are empty of congregants for the most part on a typical Sunday, but their building is paid off.
They have a portfolio that they can keep the lights going, pay their utilities, and keep going and spend money on some things.
Because of the accumulated net worth of all that giving over 200 years.
Oh, so your argument is that people prayed to God as to whether they should give their money to an apostate church, and God said yes.
Or a church that was going to become apostate, which God would know about because God knows all.
Well, when they gave their money, these churches were not, for the most part, these churches had not fallen into this same condition.
Yes, but God would know that they were going to fall into that condition.
So God would say, don't give the money to the church because that church is going to end up funding the destruction of all that you treasure.
Yes, and that gets us into a long discussion about free will and sovereignty of God and all that.
And we're talking more about hell and about your responsibility to save souls from hell.
So, in the interest of time, we probably don't want to slide off into that long discussion.
Besides, that wasn't.
Yeah, so my argument is that if.
Well, that wasn't your main question.
If you make $10,000 a year and you give $1,000 to the church, that's fine.
If you then go to making $100,000 a year, And you only give $10,000 to the church, but you could live on, say, $20,000 a year, then having the number one mission would be to give $80,000.
And again, I'm talking about net of taxes and so on and things like that.
But people are making hundreds or thousands of times more than they did in the ancient world.
And if saving souls was the number one priority, then they would be pouring much of those additional resources, not just a small percentage.
But anyway, listen, I've got another people or two to call.
I do appreciate it.
The feedback.
What I would argue is that if people were to, as a whole, make the salvation of souls their number one priority, following Jesus' commandment to sell everything you own, give your money to the poor, and follow him, then I think that there would be a greater salvation of souls than currently going on.
And I also, while I appreciate your community, it sounds interesting, but.
There's always more that can be done.
And if your community is doing great stuff, fantastic.
It's not like any community that I've ever seen.
And maybe it's a special outlier, in which case you should know that it's a special outlier and have more sympathy for what I'm talking about.
But it's certainly not, it's not the case from what I've seen or experienced.
And I've been around the world quite a bit these days.
All right, Barcode, if you would like to mention your thoughts.
Hi, Stephen.
Your introduction was very eloquent and.
I sympathize with it.
I've been in the same position where it's like I'm looking for a sign from God.
Objective Right and Wrong00:15:14
It's like, should I dedicate myself fully to this?
You know, if you want to become a priest, you have to sacrifice the touch of a woman.
Like, there's certain.
Well, not always, but yeah, in some denominations.
Right.
Like, as a Catholic, right?
I just like the, I mean, do you agree?
Let's, let's start from basics, right?
Like, do you agree that there is an actual moral truth?
There is something that everyone should be doing.
There is like an order to the universe that all of us should be pursuing universally.
That's way too abstract and ill defined for me to be able to comment on it philosophically.
So I'm afraid you'll have to give me some definitions.
All right.
Um, do you think there's a right and wrong?
Like, and then, sorry, are you asking me that because you don't know?
No, I, I do, but.
No, sorry, you don't know what I believe.
Yeah, I don't know what you believe.
So do you?
Okay, yes.
There is objective right and wrong.
Okay.
So if there's an objective right and wrong, like you're placing this sort of unfeasible task on yourself to always pursue the right and advocate for the right at all times in every position.
Otherwise, that's it.
You got to deal with what I said and don't start off by straw manning me or this is going to be a very short conversation.
Okay.
Did I say that every waking second, right?
I never said that.
No, no, no.
Let me rephrase then.
So, listen, listen, just so we get off on the right foot, don't straw man me.
I'll turn up.
Then that's not a reasonable conversation and it's not a productive conversation.
But sorry, go ahead.
All right.
So, let me ask you questions then.
So, am I right to presume that you.
This is difficult.
Well, let me clarify it a little bit more as well.
I was talking about my special responsibilities as somebody who's really great with language and really great at communication and convincing people.
So I was not talking about the average person.
Of course, I was talking about my own particular abilities in reasoning, in conversation, in debate, and in convincing people.
I am pretty good at it, I am fantastic with analogies.
And so on.
So, I was talking about more my particular responsibilities and not, you know, the average person wouldn't have my particular skills and abilities.
So, I was talking about the particular choice that was facing me as a child, not what would necessarily be a universal commandment for everyone.
All right.
So, I just feel like you're being way too hard on yourself.
Like, I feel like you're living a moral life, you're pursuing a sort of moral order, you are advocating for what you view as true and rational.
And you're convincing people to like against a sort of definite evil.
Like you've identified an evil prospect.
No, no, no.
Hang on, hang on.
I'm not saying that I'm living an immoral life.
I think I'm living a very good life.
I think I'm living a very productive and healthy and moral life.
So I'm not sure what you mean when you say I'm being hard on myself.
Did I ever say I have failed to pursue a moral and good life?
No, but you advocated for like a fireman who sees a child burning in a building and you would have to save it.
But like there are other positions.
If you believe in hell and the final judgment and St. Peter's and the pearly gates and damnation and salvation and perdition and so on, right?
So if you believe in hell, then you must convince people to avoid sin.
Otherwise, they burn in hell for eternity.
And there can be no higher mission than that.
And I was raised by all of these firefighters who said that fighting fires and saving people is the most important thing and then seem to do just about everything but.
That was sort of the contradiction I was talking about.
But sorry, go ahead.
So, doesn't, don't you view like you're the way you've adeptly used language to talk to people and describe philosophy?
Like, isn't this you fighting fires?
Aren't you pursuing this, this greater good in the world?
Like, isn't that, isn't that the same as pulling people out of buildings with your mind?
No, because, because they burn forever.
That's the point.
It would, it would be important enough to pull someone out if you didn't pull them out and they just died.
But if they're going to burn forever, it becomes infinitely more important.
I just feel like that's so.
If you believe, if you believe in judgment and hell, then you must do as much as humanly possible to the limits of your abilities.
And not everyone has got the gift of the gab that I do, but you should do everything that you can to pull people out of burning buildings.
If by leaving them there, they burn forever.
That's sort of my point.
All right.
So you've identified burning buildings at least insofar as communism is bad and you're pulling people away from that.
Isn't that to the best of your ability?
You've rationally defined an enemy and then maybe rationally defined some allies and pursue the same moral goals using the gift of your gad.
Sure.
And so I have identified in my speech at the beginning, and I appreciate you bringing this up.
So I have identified in my speech at the beginning the problem and I have manifested for the last 40 plus years my solution.
So, I agree with you.
I am pulling people from burning buildings and I'm offering my workout for free and I'm doing as much as possible to bring people to reason and truth and virtue and integrity and so on.
So, I have, I would argue, sacrificed more for virtue than most Christians do, but they have a much higher incentive to sacrifice for virtue because the punishment is eternal damnation in the fires of hell.
So, why aren't Christians doing As much as I do.
Like the last caller was saying, well, they give 10% of their income.
It's like, bro, I took a 75% pay cut to do philosophy and I've burned up my reputation.
I've burned up significant amounts of income and so on.
And I don't have the incentive of heaven and hell.
So why aren't Christians doing at least as much as I'm doing with regards to the pursuit and promulgation of virtue?
Because they have an infinitely greater incentive than I do because evildoers or People who do wrong will suffer, I think, with a bad conscience in many ways in their life, but then they die and that's it.
But for Christians, people who sin, which is a lot of people, to put it mildly, are going to burn in hell forever.
So that's my fundamental question.
So I turned my take things seriously and pour everything I've got into what I do into the promulgation of philosophy.
And I'm just a little baffled as to why Christians aren't doing the same thing when this guy's saying, well, yeah, they can buy a new car, but as long as they give a couple of grand to the church, they're fine.
And it's like, but.
That's not what I've been doing, and my incentive is far less than Christians.
So, let me take a step back then.
Like, do you believe that maybe Christianity is advocating for the best moral position that we can as conservatives?
Like, the Supreme Court Justice just talked about like progressivism as the enemy of like American success and like our general philosophy.
Like, do you think, does that negatively impact us to say like Christians aren't doing enough and like they're Philosophy is fake just because they're not living it every moment of every day.
No, see, again, I was really hoping you could avoid the straw man.
I'm really trying.
I'm sorry.
Okay, but you just keep, what you do is you exaggerate my position to something that is by definition false.
I'm not saying it's your position.
And then you think you've won.
Hang on, let me talk.
Did I ever say every moment of every day?
No, absolutely not.
Okay, so why are you bringing that up as something?
I'm advocating for it.
It seems to me that you're.
No, no, not.
It seems to me.
Do you believe in the.
You're a Christian, right?
Sure.
Okay.
Do you believe in the commandment, thou shalt not bear false witness?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you understand that straw manning is bearing false witness?
We're talking about essential areas of morality.
And if you lie about what I've said, you are sinning.
Absolutely.
Okay.
So can you please try as a Christian not to sin?
And of course, I will try to do the same thing.
If I misrepresent anything you're saying, please let me know.
But that's why I'm asking for the, I don't want you to sin.
I don't want you to sin.
So don't, don't straw man.
Stephen, I'm, I'm trying not to.
I swear, I, I'm trying to just get to the bottom of this.
It seems like you and Christianity are aligned on a number of principles in a broad perspective.
Is that fair?
We certainly share a lot of the same morals, for sure.
And we certainly share a belief in the absolutism of morals.
I'm not a relativist or a subjectivist or a determinist.
So I think that there is certainly a lot of overlap.
Okay.
So if you believe in overlap of morals, do you believe in like the principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
That's not really, that's an article of war and of combat that is not moral philosophy.
That's a practical alliance with evildoers that is not part really of moral philosophy.
That might be practical ways to win a war, but that's not really the purview of moral philosophy.
Can I say that I sort of believe that every war is like a moral war?
On some level.
Can you see where I'm coming from with that?
Sure.
I mean, you'll need to give me a more specific example because, in the abstract, it's very hard to judge things.
I just view like there's never a situation where a war isn't like a moral, like an incongruous.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I understand that.
My apologies.
I was unclear.
What I mean is when you say the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I mean, that sounds like something out of the Godfather rather than a moral treatise.
But if you could give me a more particular example of that.
So if we believe in a true moral order and like a true morality that exists, "This.
Oh, I saw him unmute.
All right.
Yeah, we can hear you now.
Yeah, sorry about that.
It just died on my phone.
No worries.
But we're back.
I'm sorry, you'll have to remind me where we were.
I started off at another farewell speech before realizing I might be able to get back in.
So I made the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
We both agree that there's a.
Oh, that's right.
Sorry, I was just asking for a more specific example.
Right.
So, we both agree that there's a larger moral order that we're to pursue.
I'm advocating for the enemy, and my enemy is my friend.
And you're saying that Christianity is sort of imperfect enough that, like, it deserves this sort of derision that is coming from your pursuit of perfection.
I'm sorry.
When did I say Christianity deserves derision?
Only insofar as its advocates aren't doing enough.
They never dedicate themselves fully because they don't believe in it.
I never said, hang on, but hang on.
I never said anything about derision.
It comes across as negative when you say, like, why?
No, no, no, don't, no, no, no, don't say it comes across.
It comes across to me personally.
No, no, no, no.
That's not fair, right?
Because you can't say, I feel, and then straw man, and then have that be valid, right?
If I have never said derision or even implied it, then saying, well, it feels that way to me is not fair, right?
Yes.
So, I mean, you paint a story, you paint a picture of a child burning alive in a building, and the Christian's not doing anything about it.
Because he's buying a big screen TV.
No, I didn't say they're not doing anything about it.
My question is why not do as much as me?
I don't think there's a good answer to that.
I feel like you are.
Well, that's why I'm asking the question, right?
Right.
Because I don't know the answer.
I don't know the answer.
I don't know the answer.
But by the logic of the system, that's what I was talking about at the beginning.
By the logic of the system, Christians should not choose a big screen TV over the salvation of souls.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
But just about every Christian I've ever known has a big screen TV.
That's all I'm asking.
And it's not some big nagging thing.
There could be good answers that I'm not aware of.
So, like, my hope is only that, like, my view is that humans are inherently flawed.
Like, I'm very conservative.
You're born, you know, like an ape.
And, like, Christianity is just this moral system that gets imposed on you, and you do the best with it you can.
So, if you find, if you come up, if you are a fireman and you see a child burning in a building, you get him out of there because that's your role and that's your moral order.
But there are people, you know, living every day that all you can hope is they sometimes choose the best.
And all we can hope as Christians is to advocate this system of morality such that people choose the best in the moment when they're confronted with it.
You are brilliant and have an audience, and you can do all these things and advocate ideas that touch people far beyond the average person can.
I act as an accountant, I meet with clients face to face, and I'll advocate for what I think is moral in the day to day.
And I can live my life day to day as morally as I can.
But I can't do it.
I can't do as much as you, and I can't do as much as a priest, and I'm unwilling to not have a family or children to become a preacher.
Like, and I don't think that that discounts my Christianity.
It's just I want people to do what we can.
And as a Christian, I'm going to like advocate for us to do as much as we can in the day to day.
Well, as much as we can is a bit of a sliding scale, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, I'm sure you've met with clients as an accountant, right?
I'm sure you've met with clients who say, Hey, man, I'm saving as much as I can.
I need that Mercedes SUV.
I need that weekend condo in Cabo.
I need my private jet, right?
And you would say to them, What?
You could save more.
You could do more.
Yeah, you're not saving as much as you can.
Right.
And I agree that that is actually a moral position to take.
And it does help further the cause of like a universal morality where you say you could all do more.
But like Jesus was perfect, right?
He says everyone should like abandon everything and only pursue this moral order at all times.
And like that's perfection.
The expectation is that humans are fallible and we're not going to make that.
No, but Jesus would know that about people.
Jesus was all knowing.
And if Jesus is perfect, he would not ask the impossible because that would be cruel, right?
Well, we can ask for optimal and expect less.
And Jesus knew that too.
Love People Without Hedonism00:06:45
Okay, so when I say do more, how am I wrong?
You are right.
If you're asking for the optimal.
It's okay that it sounds like we agree.
But yes, yes, and yes, and yes, we can ask for the optimal and we should expect humans to deliver less on baseline.
So you have no problem with me saying do more.
I don't, insofar as that's true.
I do, insofar as it can be viewed as like a derogatory take.
On people not doing enough.
What?
I just, I don't want people to feel.
What do you mean?
It could be viewed as a derogatory take on people not doing enough.
By definition, if I'm saying doing more, I'm saying you could do more.
Yeah, people can do more, but, you know, to say that they're ignoring a child burning in a building in the moment, that's a stretch.
That's like asking for perfection.
No, no, that's that.
Listen, if you meet someone and you don't talk to them about Jesus and virtue, Are they going to hell?
I feel like sometimes when I talk to people about it, I push them further away.
Like, hang on, hang on.
No, no, you're not asking me my question.
If you meet someone and you don't talk to that person about Jesus and virtue, are they more likely to go to hell?
No, not necessarily.
No.
So, hang on, sorry, sorry.
And I don't know what denomination you are.
Do you believe in hell?
Sort of.
And I'm not trying to catch you out.
I'm not trying to trick you.
I'm honestly, I'm genuinely curious, right?
So, if I see someone who's a parent who's shaking their child or screaming at their child in a parking lot, I would go up and talk to that person and say, I don't think this is what you want to be doing as a parent.
Here's some thoughts.
I would recommend therapy.
I've got a free book called Peaceful Parenting.
I would go and talk to people about it, and I will talk to people about it on buses and trains, wherever I am, wherever.
I generally would try to talk to people about philosophy.
And I'm not perfect, obviously.
It's not like every waking moment, blah, right?
I get all of that.
But I don't have that as a standard that people are going to hell and burning in eternity if I don't talk to them about philosophy.
So the stakes are lower, but my actions are higher.
And do you believe that people's lives are better if they're Christians?
I believe that society's better if everyone's Christians.
Why do you not answer questions?
Because what is society but people?
Do you believe that people's lives are better?
If they believe in Jesus and follow his commandments?
Yeah, yes, fine.
Yep.
Okay, good.
And do you think that their lives, I guess, are worse, not neutral, but worse if they don't?
Yes, yep.
And do you believe that people are judged by their faith after they die?
Maybe.
I don't know on that one.
I'm not sure.
All right.
Do you believe that you should love the people in your society?
I believe love is, ah, man, I don't, these are broad strokes, bro.
I don't know.
No, they're not.
This basic Christianity love thy neighbor as thyself.
Yes.
Okay.
There are two commandments.
Number one, love God with all your heart.
Number two, love your neighbor as yourself.
Okay, yeah.
And I'm sorry to be annoying.
I really am.
And there's no reason why you would have all of the easy answers to these.
They're tough questions.
So I'm not, again, I'm not trying to play any gotcha games.
But certainly, love your neighbor is foundational.
Right.
But should you love your neighbor if he's actively acting against your God?
Well, what are you supposed to do with your enemies?
Are you supposed to love them?
In some way?
In some way?
Yeah, love those who persecute you.
Again, but this is in pursuance of your God.
No, love those who persecute you in pursuit of your God.
Means those who were attacking you for being Christian.
Right.
But all of that is in pursuit of the God.
I don't know.
I'm just talking about the commandments.
I don't know what in pursuit of the God means.
I'm just telling you what the commandments are that I understand.
So the first commandment is love your God, right?
So, like, this is, there are no other gods.
Like, all of these other commandments follow suit.
So, like, yes, you should love people.
Yes, you should.
Accept persecution and you should love the persecutor, but only in pursuit of this moral order.
The bottom line is the morals matter.
Sure, I agree.
Right?
So, Christianity is like this adaptation in modernity where we're just supposed to always turn the other cheek and accept all these other faiths that are not aligned with our God and love them equally to other Christians.
That's not what the faith is about.
The faith is about pursuing a moral order.
And I, in particular, think Catholicism, Christianity, Has the best moral order for humanity that's going to make the most people happy over time and make people live the best lives over time.
Even if they fail, even if they fall short often, which they will because they're fallible human beings, the reality is more good is going to be achieved by pursuing this moral order and advocating it for it at all times.
Is that fair?
So, more good.
Do you mean that people will have happier lives as a result of Catholicism?
Happiness is twofold, right?
So, happiness as like a hedonistic, like momentary pleasure, probably not from Christianity.
No, like it actually advocates against a lot of our baser instincts, such as like, you know, open sex and like, you know, promiscuity and.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right?
So, so that's going to make you less happy.
But in the same way that you're less happy by eating healthy and working out, in the long term, your life will be better served by pursuing these moral ideals.
I mean, not necessarily.
Sorry to be annoying, but technically, you could deny yourself food, maintain a healthy weight, exercise even though you don't want to, and get hit by a bus.
I mean, so we play the odds, but it's not for certain.
Now, you deviate from Catholicism in not believing in hell, right?
I don't know.
I don't believe in a fire and brimstone, but the metaphor for hell is sort of overly broad here.
All right.
Catholics believe in hell as a core doctrine of the faith affirmed in scripture, tradition, and the official teaching of the church.
Consequences of Moral Failure00:08:27
And I won't.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states clearly the teaching of the church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity.
Immediately after death, the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell eternal fire.
The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.
So, I mean, so then maybe call me a schismatic if you must, but like I'm going to advocate for Catholicism as the proper moral order generally.
Like, I view like this notion of hell is probably serving the lowest IQ tenants of Catholicism to try to get them to behave in a way that benefits their lives and benefits everyone around them.
Hang on.
Are you saying it's a noble lie?
Perhaps.
I don't know.
But thou shalt not bear false witness.
You're not allowed to have a noble lie.
Sorry to be annoying.
I really am.
I'm really sorry to be annoying.
I know this is aggravating and annoying, and I'm a total gadfly, but these are just the things that I wrestle with.
And I understand.
And I wrestle with them as well.
So, what?
I don't know.
How do you make the dumbest people behave well and live better lives?
What do you say to them?
Well, what I would do is I would not withhold negative consequences.
Right now, we have a situation where unfortunately, the least intelligent among us are shielded from the negative effects of their bad decisions to the point where, you know, we give them a hundred thousand, we give single mothers a hundred thousand dollars a year if they have children out of wedlock.
We give people who fail to save for their retirement a million dollars after they retire.
We give people who fail to save for being unemployed tax money.
If they are unemployed, we give people who fail to take care of their health hundreds of billions of dollars in free health care.
So, right now, we have a system where the least intelligent among us tend to have negative consequences shielded from them.
And because the less intelligent you are, the more you need negative consequences in order to make better decisions, we are subsidizing and encouraging the worst decisions from the least intelligent, which is a very bad consequence.
And I can sympathize with that perspective, but if you refuse to feed these people who have failed, they will revolt and your society will be destroyed just by warrant of so many people being failures.
What do you mean?
They won't revolt?
I mean, how many people are you going to starve because they made stupid ideas and they pursued bad ideas?
Well, no, hang on.
So I'm for the non aggression principle, which means you do not initiate.
The use of force or fraud, thou shalt not steal, and so on.
So, forced income redistribution is a violation of the non aggression principle.
And rioting is also a violation of the non aggression principle.
And it's very easy to stop a riot.
You just arrest rioters.
If you arrest rioters, they won't riot.
This has been proven over and over again.
There aren't a lot of riots in North Korea.
I'm not saying we become like North Korea, but it's pretty easy to stop a riot.
You just arrest rioters until everyone goes home.
So, it's not a matter of virtue, it's a matter of willpower.
I'm so sorry.
Go ahead.
What about when the French did their stupid revolution or the Chinese did their stupid revolution?
They didn't have a moral order to prevent them from killing en masse everyone who was ahead of them for making good decisions.
They just decided that their bad decisions didn't warrant them living with them because they had no moral code to prevent them from just killing everyone ahead of them.
Isn't that a real threat without religion?
Well, I've got a whole 12 hour series on the causes of the French Revolution.
And so, in general, these sorts of violent revolutions or these sort of aggressions in society arise out of the brutal abuse of children.
And abuse of children produces sociopathy, lack of empathy, hair trigger aggression, and tendencies towards extreme violence.
And so, the revolutions in society that we often face arise from prior violations of the non aggression principle, in particular, the abuse of children.
Of children.
That's number one.
Number two, that these revolutions were allowed to happen.
In other words, if the Tsar had simply arrested all the communists, there wouldn't have been a communist revolution.
If when the revolution started, he'd taken the entire combined weight of the military and used it to crush the revolution, the revolution wouldn't have happened.
So it's not like, well, they're just these riots and they inevitably take over.
It's, you know, if you live in a civilized society and someone moves into your home while you're on vacation and you just let them live there, that's your choice.
And if you don't use, if you have to even use force to get them out of your property, then that's on you, right?
So if the leaders of these societies don't decisively act against people who are fomenting violent and sadistic and totalitarian revolutions, that's not inevitability of history.
That's a failure of will.
Of the leaders.
Even beyond the leaders, you have to have like a police force willing to arrest people.
And if you reach this, like, you know, 51% of people are unhappy with everything and don't view this like moral order as a real thing, like, are you kidding me?
No.
Were you around for COVID?
Most people would just do what the hell you tell them to.
People just injected voodoo mystery juice into their veins with no access to the testing data and with the companies screeching and demanding and enforcing absolute.
Avoidance of liability for any resulting damage.
And off they went and did it.
I mean, people will just, most people, and hopefully this will change in the future with better parenting and so on, but people, 51% of people, I mean, people mostly just do.
I'm sure you know the Milgram experiments where people can be tricked into becoming murderous at a three quarters rate and into almost everybody will torment or torture if they're told to by some guy in the lab coat.
So people don't have any moral center.
And by the way, the Milgram experiment.
Occurred in a society with 95% Christianity.
So I'm not sure that Christianity has solved the problem of virtue and integrity because Christian societies will torture and kill on a whim against the orders of God because a guy in a white lab coat kindly asks them to continue.
So, this is one of the reasons I went into philosophy, not theology.
Right.
And I agree.
So, I mean, even if you look, compare a Christian society in Africa to the United States or like, you know, a white population, you'll see like these disparities in outcome that are like more.
All you can hope is like for a slight betterment.
So, like these Christian societies in Africa murder less, things like that.
That's what I'm aiming for when I'm saying this is a probably better moral order than an absence of one.
Well, let's look at the First and Second World War, largely conducted by.
Almost exclusively Christian nations.
I mean, all right.
So, like the Second World War, you had the Bolsheviks who were godless, sort of encroaching on Europe, who was also largely liberal, non-irreligious, maybe used religion as a slight advantage to gain popular support.
But a lot of this authoritarianism stems from this absence of religion.
Even you're advocating right now, you need to have the state arrest a bunch of people who are misbehaving.
Oh, sorry.
Just so you know, I'm an anarcho capitalist.
So I don't believe in the moral legitimacy of any political order.
I'm just talking about the practical way that you put down riots or rebellions in the current system.
But just so you know, I'm not a fan of political power as a whole.
All political power violates the non aggression principle.
The Illegitimacy of Political Power00:02:17
So sorry.
I mean, you wouldn't know that.
So I'm not holding you to account.
I just wanted to be clear for the record.
Right.
So when you're talking about, like, why didn't we fix this during COVID?
Like, yeah, 20% of people were thinking people like you and I were like, I don't need to take a vaccine if I've had the disease.
Well, I'm sorry to be annoying and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but not all the people who refused the vaccine did it on moral, practical, or philosophical principles.
Some of them just hate to be told what to do and had violent reactions to anyone who would tell them to do anything.
So I'm not, you know, it's not like 20% of people are rational.
Some subsection of that, for sure.
And I'm sorry to be perhaps a bit pedantic, but it was, I don't see it's divided into, you know, 20% of people think for themselves.
It's like, no, a lot of them were just jumpy, paranoid conspiracy theories, you know, and some of those conspiracy theories are true and some of them are not.
Agree.
You know, the 5G nanobots that were supposed to assemble themselves, they didn't take it for those reasons, which wasn't exactly rational.
Right.
And I agree.
And I've been in spaces where people are talking about like Trump wasn't shot at and Charlie Kirk was a hoax.
And absolutely, there's just this contingent that just absolutely instantly rebels against anything that's happening as fake.
Yeah.
I'm so sorry.
And if there's anything else that you wanted to mention, I just have had a fellow waiting to.
No, go ahead.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I really appreciate it.
And thank you so much for your very thoughtful comments.
And I do appreciate you dropping in.
And let's finish off our chat.
And I really do appreciate everyone dropping by tonight.
We've got Wise Justice.
Boy, that feels like an almost prejudicial name.
You better get things right and be very wise and very just.
Did he go?
Did he come?
Did he go?
Did he come?
Let's see.
He left.
Let's see if he's coming back.
Speaker, you're on if you wanted to unmute yourself.
Hello, hello.
Wise justice.
I cannot hear either the wisdom or the justice.
All right.
Well, it looks like he's unable to unmute or does not have anything.
So, listen, I really do appreciate everyone's comments tonight.
Great pushback from people.
And I really do appreciate that.
It's always good to hone my arguments and work to improve them.
Call Upon Christians to Act00:03:09
And yeah, my basic argument would be I mean, in the modern world, Christians have financially won the lottery.
And if someone says, look, I only make.
$20,000 a year, so I can only give $2,000.
And then they win $10 million and they say, I can only give the same proportion of that money.
No, you can give more because you have $10 million or $20 million rather than before you had $50,000 a year.
So the percentage argument to me is less important than if you have excess resources, then you should pour them into.
The pursuit of your moral goals.
The fact that Christians as a whole are not staunchly rebelling against the churches taking tens of billions, hundreds of billions across the West to bring in not only non Christians, but sometimes anti Christians into the West.
The fact that there is not a big revolt about this among Christians is kind of incomprehensible to me as a whole.
The fact that we have clergy around the West who have all the time in the world to rail against Donald Trump and have not said one thing about the hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates, millions of little Christian and Sikh girls, mostly Christian girls, being raped by some of the people that have been brought in by the church.
That is unholy.
Appalling that the church sees fit to opine upon minor conflicts between the left and the right in America, but will not rail out against the mass assault of the most egregious kinds on little Christian girls.
And of course, the Sikh girls matter as well, but the Christians, we would say, maybe a slightly bit more consideration towards the Christian girls.
This is appalling.
And I call upon Christians, I really do.
Like, Brothers in spirit, in very many ways, I call upon Christians get off your asses, do better.
The hour is getting late.
Don't fall in love with revelations and let the world slide off a precipice of evil.
Do not be the masochist that Nietzsche thought you were.
Do not say, ah, well, we're best off when we're persecuted because you are creating that persecution for your children.
You grew up with much less persecution.
You do not have the right to create a world.
Where there is more persecution for your children, do not be psyoped into accepting any of this.
And you need to do better.
And honestly, you shouldn't need an atheist to tell you that.
Your church is getting away from the good in very many ways.
Renewing Faith Against Corruption00:01:16
And you need to not be passive.
You need to get back to the original texts of the faith and know that all human institutions can be corrupted by the devil and are generally in the process of being so corrupted, and that you need a renewal of faith and a challenge to the institutions.
A renewal of the faith and a challenge to the institutions.
Or everything that your forefathers suffered for, bled, and died by the millions.
Will be laid to waste.
And if there is a God, you will go to hell.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
Fight and fight and fight.
Peacefully, reasonably, rationally.
But that's the requirement.
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Have yourself a beautiful night.
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