0:00 - Atheism and Its Context
1:19 - The Turpin Case and Religious Communities
7:32 - Claims of Omniscience and Child Abuse
16:58 - The Role of Religion in Morality
19:31 - The Problem of Evil and Child Abuse
25:19 - The Fallibility of Human Nature
27:47 - Consequences of Ignoring Morality
30:06 - Atheism and the Erosion of Morality
35:00 - My Philosophical Stance on Atheism
This lecture by Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain explores the complexities surrounding the notion of atheism, particularly in its relationship with religious beliefs, societal morals, and the persistent issue of child abuse. Molyneux initiates the discussion by addressing frequent inquiries about his stance on atheism, especially in light of significant public figures like Richard Dawkins linking the decline of Christianity to the rise of anti-rational ideologies. He contemplates the ramifications of atheism versus belief systems and how they relate to the moral fabric of society.
Molyneux shares personal anecdotes about his upbringing in a predominantly religious environment, marked by experiences of severe child abuse. He recounts that despite living among individuals who claimed to possess divine knowledge and a commitment to virtue, no one intervened or acknowledged his suffering. This leads him to question the efficacy of religious morals when they fail to translate into action, specifically in protecting the most vulnerable members of society. The dissonance between professed beliefs and actual conduct becomes a focal point of his critique.
He emphasizes the pivotal role of religion in shaping moral standards and community values while simultaneously exposing its limitations in addressing child abuse. The contrast is drawn between the supposed omniscience claimed by religious individuals and the stark reality of inaction amidst evident suffering. Molyneux argues that if religious doctrine fails to instigate moral action despite the promise of divine oversight, it calls into question the validity of these beliefs.
Throughout his arguments, Molyneux touches on topics such as the nature of morality, the obligations that come with possessing knowledge, and the consequences of ignorance or indifference exhibited by those in religious communities. He asserts that the higher the moral claim, the greater the responsibility for those who hold such beliefs, particularly when inaction can have devastating effects. His exploration poses challenging questions about accountability, the purpose of prayer, and the societal implications of abdicating moral responsibility.
The discussion ultimately expands into a critique of atheism, suggesting that it offers little resolution to moral dilemmas such as child abuse. Molyneux posits that the abdication of moral frameworks often leads to societal chaos and deterioration, as is evidenced by increasing hedonism and a detachment from personal responsibility. He describes how the absence of a moral compass can compel individuals to act solely in self-interest, which not only perpetuates harm but also fosters an environment where unethical behavior is normalized.
In closing, Molyneux asserts that his philosophical stance cannot be easily categorized as simply atheistic. Rather, he positions himself as a philosopher who is dedicated to the pursuit of truth through reason and evidence. His reflections challenge listeners to consider deeper implications of their beliefs and the essential role of moral responsibility in fostering a just society. He invites feedback and engagement from the audience, emphasizing the importance of dialogue in unpacking these complicated issues.
[0:00] All right, good morning, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain. Hope you're doing well. James Earl Jones' voice is deployed. So, a question that floats across the purview of my consciousness from time to time is people saying to me, what is your relationship to atheism? And the question of atheism is big in the world at the moment. Even people like Richard Dawkins and so on are saying that it seems like that Christianity was the immune system against sort of the woke stuff in the Western world. And with the fall of Christianity comes the rise of anti-rational stuff, like the woke-isms and so on. And so I'm asked, and this is from people who've listened to me for a long time, have, I guess, dabbled or moved into circles of atheism, and then have found that, for various reasons, usually to do with consequentialism and emotions, which is not unimportant. I'm not trying to dismiss that. They return to the realm of Christianity or of religion as a whole. And then they ask me, are you still an atheist?
[1:10] Now, this is another one of these words that has been kind of poisoned by society as a whole. So I will sort of lay out where I'm at.
[1:19] These are not necessarily syllogistical arguments, arguments but more of a a sharing of my thinking if that makes sense that's what i'm sort of aiming to achieve so i talked about this in my turpin presentation t-u-r-p-i-n which at the moment is for donors presentation about the turpins now the turpins who tortured and went to jail for life for torturing their 13 children the turpins were very religious and came from a very religious community And in that very religious community, there was massive amounts of sick child abuse, right? Child rape, molestation, beatings, torture, you name it, right? And that is not to be sneezed at. You can't just sort of wave that away. way. Now, of course, you can find abuse and so on within the atheist community for sure, but the atheists don't claim to have an omniscient or moral God they can pray to for answers about their life. It's a little bit of a different situation. So, if a doctor says, I have access to.
[2:35] Omniscience about diagnosing an illness, right? I am a God. I have a God who I pray to, who's all-knowing, who gives me answers about diseases, right? What's going on with diseases, who's sick and why and how to cure and all of that, right? Now, if a doctor says that, then he's a little bit more responsible for curing illnesses than a doctor who says, I have to sort of reason and puzzle things out myself, sort of house MD style, and I don't have access to omniscience in the diagnosing of medical complaints, medical issues.
[3:19] So, you know, the bar is pretty high, right? Because if you, as a Christian, or as a religious person, who says religious person as a whole, If you, as a religious person as a whole, say to me, or to anyone, or to yourself for that matter, I have access to omniscience through prayer, then it makes it pretty high stakes for you to make mistakes. So if we say that the doctor who has access to the god of doctors, Dr. Spock or something, Right, so if there's a doctor who says, I have access to omniscience when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of ailments, then if you get something wrong, that's pretty important, right?
[4:09] And so, in my life, in my experience, we live, I mean, I grew up, things were much more religious when I was younger than they are now. And I grew up in a society where I went to church in boarding school several times a week. I was in the church choir. I fervently believed and accepted the premises and tenets of religion, as did, of course, the people around me who had access to divine knowledge of good and evil in their environment and how to fight it. Because there was a sickness in society, as there remains even now, and perhaps in some ways it's worse, a sickness in society called child abuse. And the question is, is how did religion solve the problem of child abuse when I was a kid? And how has religion solved the problem of child abuse now that I'm older? You know, it's a pretty essential and important question, right? Because remember, and I talked about this in my presentation.
[5:17] That my aunts in particular, and my mother was not very religious to put it mildly, but my aunts were, and uncles, And like a lot of these things, it was, to a significant degree, driven by female sentimentality and devotion and dedication and so on. It was the aunts who got everyone up. I think the men would prefer to sleep in after their labors, but it was the aunts who got everyone up. And you had to go to church, and they believed, and so on, right?
[5:45] And so it's kind of hard to miss that, that as a child victim of fairly severe abuse, use. I had religious people surrounding me all over.
[6:00] And they all, of course, claimed through prayer to have access to omniscience, to the identification and cure of evil. In other words, I was somebody with a giant tumor surrounded by doctors who claimed to have a perfect knowledge of illness and how to cure it. And yet of the hundreds and in this case thousands of people over the course of my life who've been aware of the abuse that I suffered as a child, certainly hundreds when I was younger, possibly more, but let's be conservative in our estimates. So when I am being preyed upon violently and abusively, I have an illness, I have in a sense a virus that is attacking me, mind, body and soul. And I'm surrounded by hundreds of doctors, all dedicated to the identification and salvation.
[7:03] Identification of evil and salvation and promotion of virtue. I had a giant attack that went on for, I mean, really decades, but as a child, you know, 15 years straight. With, you know, the exception, of course, of boarding school when I was away. But then I was beaten with a cane there. So, that's sort of the reality of my history.
[7:28] So, this is the claim that is put forward.
[7:32] And it's a really, really, really important claim. I don't just dismiss stuff or say, oh, they're deluded or it's superstition. I don't do that. I take the claims seriously and test them according to the evidence. I value, of course, reason, empiricism, the scientific method. So, I was being attacked by a very obvious virus for 15 years. I had hundreds and hundreds of doctors who claimed access to omniscience in the identification of evil and the salvation of virtue with a God and Jesus who commanded them to protect the young. And in that time, hundreds of people over 15 years, not one person identified that I was being abused. Despite obvious signs, not one person identified that I was being abused and not one person talked to my mother or did anything about it. Because if they had talked to my mother, My mother would absolutely have told me about that in no uncertain terms and demanded to know how that person knew or what they suspected and why. So those are the facts.
[8:53] If you have a guide, let's say you're on some safari, right? And you have a guide who says, I have a great knowledge of predators. I have a great knowledge of predators, and I am an expert at identifying predators and keeping you safe, right? And that's really what you're hiring the guide for, right? Sorry for the raking sound. So you're hiring the guide because the guide has intimate knowledge of predators and an unrivaled ability to keep you safe. And then in the morning in the bush or the jungle somewhere, you are out doing something in the camp, like you're in the campsite, and you are being attacked by a lion or a tiger or a bear. right? It's roaring, it's screaming, it's, you know, ripping at your flesh and chewing at you and doing all kinds of unholy things to your physiognomy, right? Well, you would of course expect that the expert you paid to keep you safe in the jungle would leap forward with his amazing abilities, his weaponry and his skill and his knowledge, that he would leap forward and he would save you from the predator.
[10:17] Especially if he said, you know, I have cameras set up all through the camp. I'm immediately alert and awakened. I never sleep or whatever it is, right? So he would, and so he, but what he does is he just goes about his business while you are being torn apart by the predator. He's just making his coffee. I don't know, he's checking Twitter on his sat phone or something like that, right? And so this guy who says, my sole purpose is to identify predators and keep you safe, walks around while you're being torn up by a predator and does not change his behavior, does not change his demeanor.
[11:00] Does not change his habits or his pace or his heart rate doesn't change. He just, dum-de-dum, off he is. He's getting his coffee. He's taking a pee. He is choosing his outfit for the day while you're screaming and being torn apart by a predator, right? Well, you would not say that this was a very good protector. In fact, you would say he's a total freaking fraud, right? And you would say that this is not even somebody who swore to protect you, sees that you're getting attacked, but instead hides and cowers. So we would say, well, he saw the attack, but unfortunately he was just coward about it. So he talked tough about his courage, but ended up showing his true colors as a coward. And therefore he was fraudulent in his taking money to protect you, right? He was fraudulent. So you would have an issue, right? So growing up as I did, around religious people who swore to protect children, claimed to have access to divine knowledge.
[12:13] And to want to protect the helpless and fight evildoers, they did nothing. They did not even, at the time or even years after, when I became a fairly prominent person and talked openly about the abuse, nobody from my past ever contacted me and said, oh gosh, I'm so sorry about how it was for you, I'm so sorry about what you suffered. Nothing, none of the religious people. So it was not a lack of knowledge, although they should, of course, by their own theory, have had no lack of knowledge of me being preyed upon because they had access to divine knowledge, right? So I was in this bizarre, truly bizarre situation, of course, of people praying in church with me, like older people, and not just relatives, of course, but the priests and other noble. I mean, I saw policemen there, I saw everyone in church praying for guidance, help me do good, help me identify evil, help me to follow the path of righteousness and virtue, which would of course involve protecting children from rampant child abuse, which was right in their environment. Now, the signs were there, right?
[13:32] It's the same thing that's true with the teachers. I grew up with, you know, a whole coterie of very religious teachers, both in public and in private school, and in schools in three different continents. I grew up with very religious teachers who prayed daily about doing good. We did the Lord's Prayer every morning, deliver us from evil, help me identify the good, help me fight for the good, help me oppose evil. We did this prayer every morning. And the priests, the teachers, the family, the parents, the adults, everybody did this prayer. I don't mean to labor the point here, but it's really important to understand this because I'm not alone in this, obviously. I'm tragically not alone in this, right?
[14:14] So, clearly, there was a break in the causality, right? So, if a doctor says, I have access to perfect knowledge and all, I have access to omniscience about the identification of and treatment of disease, I have that, I inhabit that paradigm, that I have perfect knowledge about disease and its cure. I don't even need to take a test, I just need to pray, right? The disease being evil and the cure being intervention, right?
[14:49] So, if I have a giant tumor, and I'm surrounded by hundreds of people who claim to have access to perfect divine knowledge regarding illness and its cure, and I remain undiagnosed and uncured, then clearly something is not working, right? Something is significantly breaking down, right? There is a disconnect. So either they have access to divine knowledge, but, and the divine knowledge is telling them, hey, you know, Stef and his brother are being woefully mistreated here, man. You know, Stef and his brother are being woefully mistreated, and here's all the other kids in the environment who are being woefully mistreated, and thank goodness you prayed for this. In fact, you didn't even need to pray. I will stand before you, as I did in ages past, and tell you all of the good that you can do in your environment by helping and saving the victims for child abuse, right? So, either they were told this and did not act upon it and have never acted upon it, which is a challenge, right? Because if you have access to divine knowledge and the divine knowledge is given to you, yet you do not act on it, then that's a problem, right? So, if you're a doctor, right, and you say, my sole purpose in this veil of tears is to identify those.
[16:18] Are sick, with my access to divine knowledge, my sole purpose here is to identify the sick and to cure them, well, you have a problem. If there are tons of sick people around and you don't notice anything and you don't do anything. So what does that mean? It means something, right? Can't mean nothing. It can't mean nothing. Otherwise, nothing means anything. So if you say, hey, I'm a doctor, I have access to divine knowledge, my sole purpose here is to identify illness and cure it, and you don't identify any illness around you, and even when somebody says to you, I'm ill, you don't notice, you don't say anything, you don't do anything.
[16:58] Then we have a big problem, right? Which is, what is the purpose of having access to divine knowledge if you don't act upon it? Now, we can understand that people with bad incentives or people with misincentives might do the wrong thing, right? So, if doctors, for instance, are subsidized or get financial considerations and fancy trips and all these kinds of cool things, if they get all of that as the result of prescribing particular medicines, we can understand that they're not particularly objective. Objective in the prescription of those medicines, right? They don't have objectivity. They have a conflict of interest, right? And, you know, people are supposed to talk about this with research papers. And even if you read, you know, financial news, if a financial writer holds a stock that he's recommending you buy, he's supposed to disclose that, you know, all kinds of things like that right well then you could understand why this corruption might occur however, in the christian paradigm in the religious paradigm as a whole in general some exceptions but in general in the christian paradigm.
[18:13] You do good for, you know, according to many believers, not all, many believers, you go to hell for eternity. So you are incentivized with the eternal reward of heaven and you are punished with the eternal torment of hell if you don't do the right thing.
[18:34] And identify and fight the illness called evil. So with access to divine knowledge and with the eternal incentives of heaven and hell, not one person in my childhood, youth, or adulthood who knew about my abuse as a child, not one person has ever said anything or done anything, ever. I met these same aunts many years later when they came to Canada for a family wedding and nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. They didn't say, how was it? Gee, that must have been tough, single mother. You know, she seemed kind of high-strung. How was it? Nope, nothing. So, either they have access to divine knowledge, but even with the greatest incentives of eternal punishment or eternal reward, they do not act to protect children from child abuse, or they don't have access to this knowledge, and it's just an excuse and a cope.
[19:32] Either way, or of course, there is no efficacy to prayer and so on, right? People just pray for their own comfort and they have no intention of actually doing good in the world. Belief or moral system or a philosophy that claims omniscience and claims to inflict the highest positive and negative consequences conceivable, such a belief system that does not lead you to action is not even believed by the people who claim to adhere to it.
[20:02] My family, my aunts, this is on my father's side, they all knew that my mother was highly unstable because, I mean, these aunts, well, I mean, one of them literally took me in for months when my mother was hospitalized for depression shortly after I was born. So they knew about her craziness, mental illness, and so on. And then for years, my brother was airlifted to England while I had to struggle with the mental decay of my mother on my own at the age of 11 or so, or 12, and to 13, maybe 14. I had to struggle with this for years on my own, and nobody called. Nobody wrote a letter. Nobody asked me how things were going at all. Now, were they praying to God for information? Were they praying to God for the ability to identify evil and do good? Well, yes, of course they were, but nothing happened. All right, so that's sort of the issue. Now, given that religion does not solve the problem of child abuse, it cannot solve the problem of evil as a whole, because you cannot solve the problem of evil without solving the problem of child abuse. It's like trying to move a shadow without moving the statue. You. It's not how reality works.
[21:13] So it's like trying to manage symptoms of smallpox without there being a smallpox vaccine. You want to stop it at the source, and then you don't have to deal with the effects all the time. So just this is why I had some difficulties with, in particular, Christianity, which was, of course, the prevalent religion of my youth and adulthood, early adulthood for sure. So, this is why I have issues with Christianity. Now, of course, Christians will say that we're all fallible, we all make mistakes, and that the fact that every single person around you who claimed to be a Christian did nothing to help you then or now with the problem of child abuse is because human beings are fallible and Satan does his thing and so on, right? Well.
[22:01] But the fact that Satan does his thing is why you have principles. And if you say, I mean, that's like the old line from Oscar Wilde, I can resist everything except temptation, right? So if having all this knowledge and the threat of eternal hellfire or heaven, the promise of heaven or the threat of hell is not enough to get people to change, then it doesn't solve, right? It doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't solve the problem. So given that Christianity does not solve the problem of child abuse, it can't solve the problem of evil. And, you know, tossing it off to the devil doesn't really solve anything. Because that's like saying, well, I as a doctor have access to divine perfect knowledge about illness and its cure, but the devil twists and changes it and makes it bad and wrong and has me not want to fix the problem, or cure people or identify the issue, right? Okay. All right. Well, then you don't really have access to divine knowledge if you can wave away any and all failures as the result of temptation from the devil. See, God himself raises the requirements for human virtue so high that the devil has to be invented to explain why people don't achieve this virtue. I mean, in the face of eternity, a human life is but a blink. And if the promise of heaven or the threat of hell is not enough to get the people to change their minds.
[23:29] Not solving the problem is it fundamentally not solving the problem at all in fact it's making it worse in many ways so we can get into that another time but so that's the issue now atheism simply means against god and i would not categorize myself at all as against god and this having been said of course there are lots of wonderful things about christianity and so on and other religions that to be admired and religion is an attempt to create at least christianity is an attempt to create universal morality, in the absence of true rational proof, right?
[24:07] So lots of pluses and Christians are staunch and often very wonderful people. And certainly had more courage with mighty platforming. I can think of individual Christians who had more courage with mighty platforming than all the atheists put together, right? So where does this leave us? Well, the problem with religion is that the standards it raises are so high, like you have access to all the perfect knowledge and virtue. The standards it raises are so immensely high that human beings will almost inevitably fall short of this, of these standards. And then you need the devil, you need temptation, fallible human nature, original sin, you need all of these reasons as to why you fail to meet these lofty standards. It's but because you have these excuses right i remember there was some cop movie a tv show or something like that where somebody said well that's not very christian and the cop said hey jesus is perfect i'm not and these are excuses well you know sin is tough and the devil is always watching and waiting and human nature is fallible and you know all these all these they're excuses excuses.
[25:20] And I don't like that in particular. I think that is not great. Not great. Excuses are promises of repetition.
[25:28] The idea that you can beg forgiveness no matter what, no matter when, is not healthy. If you imagine that if smokers, like they can smoke for 30 or 40 years, and then when they get lung cancer or emphysema or COPD or something like that, when they get some, you know, deadly effect of smoking.
[25:48] Then they can simply really, really, really be sorry they smoked and get a fresh pink pair of lungs and everything is perfectly healthy and wonderful for them after that, right? Right. So that's not going to have people quit smoking.
[25:59] One of the reasons that, you know, people quit smoking, it's a good thing to do. One of the reasons that people do quit smoking is because by the time you're sick, it's probably too late. I mean, I remember reading this about a guy who was a columnist in Canada back in the day. I think it was in the Globe and Mail or maybe the Star. And he was saying, like, he smoked his whole life. He decided to quit in his 50s. and his doctor said, well, I don't know if it's going to do you much good, but, you know, it's a good thing to do anyway, because, you know, I assume a lot of the damage had been done. Now, I've heard other things that say if you quit and exercise, it's better for you and you can return to a state of health and so on, right? But would smokers quit smoking if they knew they could simply repent of smoking later in their life and be perfectly healthy?
[26:47] Well, no, they'd smoke and and then they'd just repent of it later, and so on, right? That's what they would do, for the most part, right? Same thing with drinkers, right? If your liver could be repaired if you were genuinely sorry for drinking, if your liver could be repaired by your sorrow and your regret, then how many drinkers would quit drinking, right? So one of the problems, of course, in my childhood was that if you did wrong, you could simply ask for forgiveness. So you didn't have to do right, because you could get all of your sins taken away. At the end of your life, and be as if you had never sinned. And again, I know that there's mortal sins and so on. But unfortunately, ignoring child abuse is not one of those. So, a little bit of a problem, as far as that goes.
[27:32] So, I think it does tend to lead people to ignore evils, because you don't have to quit smoking, because you can just pray away lung disease later in life. You can pray away all the effects of smoking later in life.
[27:48] And of course, the other reason why I have issues with this stuff as a whole is that you can walk away from religious morality by no longer believing in God. So you can go to Darwinism, to secular humanism, to rationalism, and so on, and you can walk away from the morals of religion simply by disbelieving in God. And then what happens, of course, is when enough people disbelieve in God and therefore of morals, you know, prior to UPB, if people are willing to accept it, the validity and truth of it, then what happens is... Cease to restrain themselves and you gain liberation from morality by disbelieving in God. But then what happens, of course, is sort of the well-known correlation between atheism and.
[28:38] Totalitarianism, atheism and big government, atheism and fascism to some degree, is that when people disbelieve in morality by disbelieving in religion, if morals come from God, you can erase morality in your mind by no longer believing in God, well, then people stop restraining themselves. They behave in a hedonistic manner, which creates chaos and negativity and problems in society. The people become hedonists, so they sleep around. And then you get children out of wedlock, you get STDs, you get heartbreak, a lack of pair bonding, increased divorce. So people become hedonists, and because they're hedonists, they demand theft for their sins, right? They demand that people have to be forced to pay for the consequences of their own bad behavior. So a woman who gets pregnant outside a wedlock demands either sort of free abortions or welfare, child support, you know, free health care and education and subsidized housing and free food, all that sort of stuff, right? Because then it's just about the amoral acquisition of resources, which generally brings sophistry and increased coercion from the state to bear on the challenges of the organizations of human society.
[29:57] Now, I understand the argument, and I'll repeat it here. This is a good argument. So people will say to me, Stef, Stef, Stef, you silly goose, let's be real here.
[30:06] So you say that people can walk away from morality by disbelieving in God and becoming atheists and claiming to be rationalists and so on, right?
[30:17] But what if people just walk away from reason and philosophy right if people if people just choose i mean you know there's most people have either never heard of or don't accept upb so, you haven't solved anything you say oh well people can just disbelieve in morality by disbelieving in god but then people can just disbelieve in your morality by refusing to accept upb and it's like Like, well, I understand that argument, right? But atheists have a veneer of rationality, right? So atheists can only reject UPB by rejecting rationality. But if they reject rationality and, quote, science, right, then there's no reason for them to remain atheists. They might as well be religious.
[31:02] So atheists take refuge from religious moral commandments by claiming to be materialists, empiricists, secularists, rationalists, and so on, which means that they have to accept reason so if upb is proven rationally and people who claim to be atheists reject it then they're just rejecting rationality and science and and evidence right so there are there are scientific reasons to accept upb as well as historical evidence all the empirical evidence points towards it it's internally self-consistent it accords with reason, evidence, history, science, and all of that. So it's true that you can abandon religion for the sake of reason, but then you leave the church and you come to UPB. And if you then reject UPB, you've got nothing. Like you've got no excuses anymore. You can't say, well, I reject religion because it's not rational and then reject UPB, despite UPB being supremely rational. So it shows the lie that they're not interested in reason they're interested in escaping morality, which is a fantasy which you can't escape morality because it's in the conscience right so all of some people don't have a conscience but other people do and it can inflict negative consequences on those without a conscience because of their own consciences.
[32:22] So when atheists walk away from, say, Christianity because they say, well, reason and evidence, I'm oh so rational, actually, well, then they come to UPB and they can't overturn UPB and then they reject UPB. It's like, okay, but then at least nobody believes that they're rejecting religion because of reason and evidence because reason and evidence absolutely supports UPB and they're rejecting that too. So they have no interest in reason and evidence. They just want to. And they're just naked, half-ape hedonists, right? They're using rationality as a cloak to escape morality. In other words, they're trying to run away from their conscience into science. And then they just end up in this maze of dopamine and decay.
[33:02] So it is important. It is important. And this is what has... And also, are atheists solving the problem of child abuse? No. No, they're not. In fact, by demanding more government control over education and other things, they're actually fairly central to increasing some of the truly horrific aspects of modern education that denies the child their right to think and reason and have self-esteem and have their own choice and independence and morals. Not their own morals, but to affect their own morality.
[33:33] I mean, atheism, for a lot of people, turns them from ineffective angels to highly effective predators. editor's. Because religion was unable to solve the problem of child abuse.
[33:45] Atheism is unable to solve the problem of child abuse. And so it's really just all for show. But there's self-restraint and a denial of materialism in religion, right? That particularly for Christians, right? Satan offers Jesus the whole planet and he says, nope, not so much. I mean, I'd be quoting directly, but it's something to that effect, right? So there's an anti-materialism, which means that that, as Jesus says, sell everything you own, give your money to the poor, and follow me. So it's an anti-materialism. But atheism is, I mean, literally materialism. There's nothing more important than matter. And there's no such thing as a lie, because all is nature. There's no such thing as morality, therefore there's no such thing as a lie. There are just different strategies for getting resources. And if saying something that is not true gets you resources, that's perfectly acceptable in nature. Nature. Nature is based on deception, right? The tiger pretends to be grass, the cuckoo drops its nest in another bird's nest, and the rabbit pretends to be going one way, then changes direction quickly in order to escape the fox and so on, right? So nature is based upon deception. And so once you lose your morals, you can say anything you want to get the resources that you want.
[35:00] And moral people become fools and dupes so you can lie to them in order to subjugate them. Thank you.
[35:08] With regards to atheism, I am a philosopher, and trying to put me into a category is unproductive. I mean, if you're a scientist, you're a scientist. If you're a Plankian or a superstring advocate or, you know, X, Y, and Z, if you're any and all of these things, then you're not a scientist. You're a dogmatist, right? Right? So, I do not accept the existence of things opposed to reason and evidence. It's not particular to any category of those things. I do not accept the existence of things opposed to reason, that are the opposite of reason and evidence. And I am wholly dedicated to taking, you know, whatever slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and insults I have to take in order to promote out, the virtues of peaceful parenting through which no other virtues can be sustainably achieved. So I'm not an atheist. I'm a philosopher. And I hope that this explanation has helped clear my perspectives up. I really, really, of course, look forward to your feedback enormously. You can join a great community at freedomain.locals.com. You can support what I do at freedomain.com slash donate. You can also join subscribestar.com slash freedomain. All right. Hope this makes sense to you Looking forward to your feedback Lots of love, thanks so much, bye.
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