"Atheists, what are we fighting for?" vs. Matt Dillahunty.

good intentions are quite irrelevant to the question of whether you are correct or incorrect right or wrong good slogans are quite irrelevant to the question of whether politically morally philosophically or pragmatically what you're doing is correct or incorrect right or wrong it might seem that atheism is such a simple cause that nobody can screw it up [Laughter] that it's such a simple message that it's such a simple principle to preach to live by it's such a simple basis for having an organization collecting donations such a simple cause defined as a charity that nobody could possibly screw it up i'm here to tell you for the last 20 years we've been screwing it up i'm here to tell you right now matt delante probably the single most influential voice in atheist activism he is screwing it up he is getting wrong and there will be long-term negative consequences as a result of the errors in reasoning that he's now popularizing now i used to be a buddhist how can anyone screw up buddhism how can buddhism go it's this way of thinking people want to imagine as long as you've got a lot of warm-hearted human beings together with good intentions and good slogans it can't go too terribly wrong as long as we're all saying something about compassion and trying to make the world a better place and brotherly love modern buddhists are very big on this concept of whether how can it go wrong you know as long as you're telling people that they're going to solve their emotional problems and their neuroses you know are gonna they're gonna be on a journey of self-discovery and self-improvement how can it go wrong now we could repeat this for practically any religion in the world ancient or modern big or small like whether it's perceived as a cult or as an ancient continuous tradition and you know the biggest domino of all to fall here really is communism have you ever heard someone explain their reasons for being a communist and say to you well they're opposed to the greed of capitalism well they just want to see workers getting organized and getting fairer pay getting a better better shot at life better opportunities have you ever met blacks black americans who've become communist and you just say something very simple and down to earth like they feel that neither the democrat nor nor republican party like none of the mainstream political parties will ever work for them because they're black they felt alienated and excluded so what would be wrong with this other political party um [Music] [Laughter] the question of whether communism is good or evil correct or incorrect right or wrong it's totally utterly unrelated to sort of the goodness of these slogans or the goodness of the intentions of the people who buy into those slogans right now i can say the same about buddhism right the goodness or badness of buddhism or of any particular form or particular organization within buddhism as a religion right you can never come to a conclusion on the basis of the goodness of the intentions people state or the goodness of their their particular slogans why are you guys collecting these donations oh it's to teach people transcendental meditation you know what what could be wrong with that what could go so horribly terribly wrong some of you in the audience have no idea what i'm talking about when i think of it here and some of you know some of you don't need me to explain okay it can go wrong when the communists for their part say that they're collecting donations in the name of human equality as opposed to inequality what could be so bad about that now the flip side is whether we're talking about atheism buddhism communism or some other example when these movements are right about something when they're correct it's often equally arbitrary and seemingly random the catholic church was opposed to cousin marriage they were opposed to inbreeding specifically here we're referring to cousins marrying other cousins they were right there's no reason it's not it's not because of the the it's not because catholic prayer works better than protestant prayer it's not because when catholics pray they talk to god and when protestants pray they just get a dial tone like they're calling god and not getting it that's not why all right but randomly arbitrarily the catholics were really right about that and if you don't know anything about the consequences of inbreeding and cousin marriage all right it's actually an incredibly important thing that catholics have forbidden and discouraged people from sexually reproducing with their own cousins and protestants it's a shorter history but it's a much worse history with much worse outcomes islam cousin marriage in islam now this gets even scarier talking about inbreeding on a massive scale and huge negative consequences as a result now am i saying to you that catholicism is a better religion than islam or it's a better religion than than protestantism or that it's a better religion than atheism huge numbers of atheists seem to see nothing wrong with marrying your cousin for completely secular scientific reasons i'm telling you there's something wrong with it but you can be an atheist and be wrong about this imagine a parallel universe in which the communists had the best advice about how to run a farmer where communist agriculture was just this amazingly effective incredible way to reorganize farm labor a better way to grow pears and oranges imagine if the soviet union under communism had been flourishing and producing so much more through agriculture that farms were just so much more productive in the soviet union than in capitalist western europe or the united states of america or what have you now if you know anything the history of communism both the history of the modern world the advice communists had about farming was disastrous it was so terrible whether you evaluate it as a religion frankly or as a science or historical happenstance what communists had to say about farming was a disaster in russia was a disaster throughout the eastern bloc of soviet aligned states it was a disaster in vietnam it was a disaster in cambodia totally different climate right it's not like oh well you know uh the soviet approach to agriculture didn't work so well in siberia but it turned out great in vietnam nope it was it was a disaster everywhere from saccoland island to to cambodia you know but when vietnam was implemented for a significant length of time you know um china you heard of it you ever heard of china this is an experiment on an enormous unfathomable scale with reorganizing farming agriculture right now what the communists had to say about economics very broadly what they had to say about factory production what they had to say about specific types of factory production i remember learning about the history of how teapots and teacups were made under communism in china in contrast how they were made before and after you know before and after the period which people actually believed in communism china still is a communist country to some extent but they don't run farms that way anymore and they don't make tea pot that way anymore either um the goodness of the intentions people have when they embrace when they believe in these slogans right that tells us nothing about what's right or wrong about a religious movement about a political movement or even just about say a policy you know and um the trap i see atheism moving into and matt dillahunty is not the only one but i think it's very efficient to criticize matt dohan because i think he really does reflect frankly the accumulated uh experience of the last 20 years of the atheist movement he's not new i mean i think his current opinions um his current advice his current guidance as a leader in the uh the atheist movement it really reflects 20 years of experience failed paradigms like you've seen different fads uh rise and fall and you know it it reflects his personal understanding of what went wrong in the next 20 years and what he hopes will go right in the next one here so i take it seriously and i criticize it seriously because i think it's i think i think he was wrong before and i think he's still wrong now um i think it's very easy for people who are within the atheist mindset to only see the goodness of the intentions and the goodness of the slogans and not to really ask these questions of true and false right and wrong so at the end of these decades of experience in the movement matt dillahunty's conclusion is that what we are fighting for is equality what an appealing slogan and it's wrong he argues that what we are fighting against is religious privilege religious privilege not religion not faith not belief not pseudoscience but religious privilege so that through the abolition of that privilege we can all be equal to me it's so 2020 what can i tell you i mean being honest it sounds a little bit more 2015 than 2022 to me but it's very much of the current era of the current epoch of trying to you know express and conceptualize every political struggle as a struggle against privilege and in favor of equality so i've seen this come and go uh with the vegan movement where like instead of just saying you're trying to close down slaughterhouses you're trying to stop meat production stop this form of farming instead we're trying to articulate this really jesuitical line of reasons like well you know what we're against is speciesism because that's the inequality of humans and animals and what we want is equality and what we're trying to get rid of is human privilege it's totally incoherent it's totally wrong there was an attempt to refashion reimagine what veganism was as a movement i think it's done a lot more a lot more harm than good um okay so what's what's the problem with matt dillahunty's approach to to atheists the objective all right okay so i've got to express this in two parts it's following the pattern of his own argument what it is we're fighting for and what it is we're fighting against um there is a sense in which it's mere happenstance that the religions are wrong about all these things um sort of like the happenstance if you like that the communists were totally wrong about economics totally wrong about agriculture it would be much harder to argue against communism if they had flourishing farms they were tremendously successful in reform agriculture if they were able to actually show they had a better way to run a farm that people just couldn't do in france for example or west germany that oh the farms of east germany were so much better than the farms of west germany or the farms of north korea were so much better the farms of south korea that would be a much different argument to make and say well look even though you guys have better farming or a better economy or better factories than we do still this thing called democracy and what it entails in terms of capitalism this is so important to us this idea of freedom of speech and multiple parties contesting who controls the government and having newspapers that endlessly snipe and criticize and cross-examine each other that that's so important that we're just gonna have to pass we're just gonna have to survive without this better system of farming but as we can just discuss it here as a matter of happenstance of course it isn't happenstance but as if it were a matter of happenstance no communism was an economic disaster and communism was a you know agricultural disaster whatever you want to say you know in this same wise imagine how much harder it would be to argue against a religion that wasn't homophobic how much harder it would be to argue against a religion that didn't deprive you of your sexual liberty that didn't try to force you to be a virgin until marriage for example how are you to argue against a religion that didn't even particularly believe in monogamy between a husband and wife that though all kinds of different arrangements are possible one man with multiple women or one woman with multiple men or who knows you know open relationships those relationships a religion that was cool though that a religion that really didn't see anything wrong with transgender people that really didn't see anything wrong with you know gay marriage imagine if the religion you had to criticize was taravata buddhism as practiced in thailand the unbelievable intellectual laziness of people like matt dillahunty is demonstrating the fact that they never got off their asses to deal with buddhism they never got off their asses to deal with hinduism they never got off their asses to deal with any religion that wasn't conveniently so bigoted that you know what could just be ridiculed from the pulpit by them right what if by happenstance there were a religion that really made your life better instead of worse that didn't convince you that you were born with original sin didn't convince you had to live in a state of perpetual guilt and anxiety or whatever that actually as with the people of town the brute sensuality of thai culture that left you completely free to live a life of selfish shallow insipid sensory self-indulgence i mean is there any country on earth where the culture is more you know unrepentantly fixated on the pleasures of the senses then than modern thailand and by the way there's a really interesting uh contrast to make between terabyte of buddhism thailand and tiravata buddhists in sri lanka because on paper it's the same religion and yet in practice they're so different and by the way guys if you don't know in terms of the level of acceptance of homosexuals and transgender people in in thailand they do participate in elections they do stand for office there are transgender people and openly gay and openly people in in politics and they do join the army they serve in the army and for me one of the most tangible signs of the real acceptance of of out homosexuals over homosexuals as opposed to closeted or covert intersections and of uh transgender people is just their level of acceptance in the high schools and universities okay and thailand's the only country i've i've ever been in where you saw transgender people who really were friends with and were integrated with the the heterosexual students it's not that they had their own little clique that you can see almost everywhere i mean almost you know obviously not in muslim majority countries but like it's one thing to go to university and you say oh okay and there were the transgender students kind of standing in a corner amongst themselves okay and there are the gay students they have their own club but we're no like really you see gay and transgender people who are just living amongst and with the straight people really as equals where it's really not a big deal it's just it's just not seen as that important there's this very deep level of acceptance of homosexuality and you know what and buddhism as a religion is still bad and evil and wrong and why because it's based on faith it's based on blind faith and there's a really important point to make here and really important to internalize that is no matter how good a religion might be like if you made a list of its precepts and principles right if you had a religion that didn't practice circumcision that neither practiced circumcision on males nor females right terabyte of buddhism it's a big difference what's the difference between thailand and malaysia same climate guys same beaches a lot of things are the same life in thailand versus life same fruit same vegetables i the cuisine is pretty similar to actually thailand the religion is a big difference in life and whether or not as a man you had part of your penis cut off losing 60 of the nerve endings in your penis so big differences with big implications right no matter how correct as opposed to incorrect the list of principles set down by a religion might be right actually they're bad and evil and wrong because your relationship to them is of believer to a graven idol and with the passage of time these fixed truths will turn into terrible tyrannical things no matter how good they are now i've been reading a lot of political history both primary and secondary sources from the era of the american revolution before that a couple years ago really really you do need to do this research first but a couple years ago i did research about the english civil war you really need to understand the english civil war first understand the american revolution if i had been alive at that time i probably would have cared intensely and passionately about the difference between catholicism and protestantism all right the reality in the western world at that time was that the protestant faith especially as it had adapted in england due to bizarre historical circumstances historical circumstances that have nothing to do with the the details to be found in the appendix to the bible or something i mean it's not like you're going to go through the footnotes and i know the bible and figure out how this came about circumstances external to scripture and you know external to the faith in many ways circumstances including the english civil war the rise and fall of the dictatorship of oliver cromwell it's a long story okay this thing happened whereby british protestants became really proud of partial separation of church and state not perfect not absolute separation of sheridan state this very strange compromise that ensued after the english civil war that made puritanism possible that made quakerism possible that made quakers refusing to pay taxes to support the war possible like back in the dark ages right all those people would have been tortured as heretics like think about what quakerism is as a religion to us today like okay it's just another flavor of christianity oh no no oh no no back in the 1540s or something go back just a few centuries all right this is stuff that people would fight and die for and people would be in tortured and interrogated and killed for right okay and you know what it made the life of an atheist free thinker possible there was a little bit more wiggle room uh frankly let's let's give us an example someone like uh someone like benjamin franklin benjamin franklin was certainly not a religious man i think he will look in vain for him openly espousing atheism but a lot of these guys they kept their cards close to their chests but to say they were free thinkers was an understatement right a lot of these founding fathers they vaguely identified as deists or they had some kind of very creative for me reinterpretation of the bible and the history of christianity and that was a mainstream phenomenon again especially in the aftermath of the of the civil war now my point is this at that time however arbitrarily english protestantism was right about a checklist of things they offered a set of social and political advantages to be part of the anglican sphere the british empire sphere that you did not have in france you did not have in quebec in north america like right right next door right that you didn't have in the french dominion right she didn't have under spanish dominion spain's still dominating large parts of the economy in north america of course south and central america so right next door and you have trade contact with those people you're in a situation where it seems like so much of europe is still in the dark ages and the british isles and the british colonies have taken this huge step forward toward modernity with just a little bit of separation of church and state and just a little bit of democracy like england at that time can we say it was five percent democracy like it was there was just some that there was a little bit of democracy just a little bit but that was itself so precious it was so important it was so much more than as i say the rest of europe or the other colonies under other european countries dominions let alone what you saw in that time of the ottoman empire in the muslim world generally speaking with the ottoman empire specifically the ottoman empire was important because it was incredibly powerful in that period incredible military power but also was just adjacent europe didn't have that much contact with indonesia you know they did they did have some by the way but you know the ottoman empire was very much what europe was it was the mirror europe was looking into all the time right next door and they were facing off against it and and struggling against okay so there were a whole lot of people right around the time of the american revolution who were willing to fight and die for what were vaguely considered you know the privileges of being an englishman of being part of this sphere of yeah these are all really overused terms you know liberty and freedom and you know freedom of conscience and it's so easy for us now to look back and see all the hypocrisies involved well you people still own slaves and you people were engaged in genocide you know and of course i mean this is still to this day this is part of matt delante's current complaint about privilege each one of the colonies um you know now comprising the united states or would have each one of the british colonies um they all had some kind of confessional requirement to be in government and sometimes it was like well you have to be a member of a non-dissenting english church so i was like well you can be a part of any english church as long as it's not catholic and so i was like well you can be protestant or catholic but you can't be a quaker or something like each one was trying to one way or another limit how much freedom of religion you had if you were going to be a part of of government and they came up with various imperfect compromises some of which are still on the books which you know they may be unconstitutional in america but there's still a shadow cast in the united states of america from this early period this history of um some religious freedom some separation of church and state and some democracy and of course it's very easy for me to say today it's it's not enough it's too little but that difference was worth fighting for and worth dying for i've just been indicating to you right the buddhist religion is bad and evil and wrong okay what if malaysia wants to conquer thailand what if saudi arabia wants to conquer thailand what if malaysia and saudi arabia and afghanistan and iran all combine their forces and want to conquer thailand and turn it into another muslim country right the freedoms the liberties and the things that buddhism happened to write about okay they're still worth they're still worth fighting for but you see the problem [Laughter] we're still stuck at the level of talking about the lesser of two evils and most of the time that's what political discourse is about that's what that's about the history of armies and wars and politics and so on has a great deal to do with choosing between two evils to decide which side you're gonna be on including by the way during world war ii a whole lot of people had to choose between fighting for adolf hitler or fighting for joseph stalin they're both terrible people adolf hitler is a terrible person joseph stalin also a terrible person there were people there were people who chose to fight with the russians forced that one just because it the alternative available them was was hitler and those those were the two sides they had to they had to choose between it's an awful choice and indeed there were awful consequences and as soon as hitler was defeated just look at what stalin did it's it's horrifying you know and yeah there's there's plenty of blame to go around but my point being here even the story of world war ii is not a simple question of contrasting uh good and evil okay so look the particular religions that matt de la hunty chooses to focus on ignoring all others right they happen to be wrong about a kind of a list of social justice issues that make them sort of easy to lampoon and the very easiness of tackling them in that way and of doing fundraising and of building to some extent a movement here on the internet and so on and so forth i think it has lulled people like matt dillahunty into an unbelievable state of fatuous self-importance and the ultimate expression of this is his current theory his current thesis that what we are fighting for as atheists is one equality and two the end of religious privilege the point being here that the end game that he wants the conclusion that he wants to achieve is simply one in which religious people and atheists have a kind of fair playing field an even playing field where for example if christian churches and muslim mosques if they're doing fundraising so they can open and operate a school they don't get a special tax break or a special tax incentive that a scientific foundation wouldn't get if that scientific foundation wants to collect donations and open a school that is lunacy that's utterly wrong that's not what we want at all and i think on a very deep level it reflects the libertarian lie what is the great libertarian lie which today influences the left and the right and the center it influences everyone everyone is to some extent brainwashed by libertarianism in the united states of america it's been an incredibly successful doctrine in the last say 50 years despite the fact that nobody votes for the libertarian party neoconservatism was influenced by libertarianism neoliberalism was enforced by libertarianism the whole spectrum left right and center in the last 50 years was really influenced by libertarians libertarianism is based on the notion it's based on the conceit that as long as each of us as individuals makes up our own mind as long as each of us is free to choose then out of the cacophony of those choices things will work out for the best in the end right think about this in terms of ecology libertarians would argue to you with absolutely no irony that oh yeah yeah yeah just let everyone cut down the forest for their own reasons let it all be parceled out what have you and out of that cacophony things will turn the best let everyone decide for themselves whether they're going to participate in a government program for sewage treatment or if they're just going to dump their own sewage directly into the river untreated or what have you you know oh yeah just let people make up their own minds let parents choose their own schools for their children just give them vouchers let them choose whatever school they want and if they're muslim fundamentalists let them put their kids into a crazy madrassa where they're brainwashed and raised in islam and if the parents are mormons let them put their kid into a crazy mormon school where they're brainwashed and raised in mormonism and so on for each for each religion if they're crazy communists they can have a crazy communist school and as long as everybody is doing their own thing as long as everybody is free to choose that supposedly the government doesn't care if you're brainwashing your children to never use toothpaste because you think fluoride is a brain control controversy it doesn't matter if your kids are raised believing in a flat earth or or what have you that it doesn't matter you know again if your kids have tooth decay as a result then we all have to deal with that that that the the fundamental conceit the fundamental lie is that a plurality of various forms of insanity competing with one another will produce sanity that that the most rational alternative the most efficient or most effective alternative will emerge as the winner if you just allow the marketplace of ideas if you allow free market forces if you just allow people again with this notion of equality you let people choose and there is never any interest in real world examples right why don't you look at what's happened with the freedom to choose schools just in england in the last 50 years in any given neighborhood in england what are your choices is there an atheist school is there a scientific school is it the best school no there's a catholic school and there's a protestant school and depend if you're in downtown london there may also be a muslim school and there may be a jewish school there are a few in england you have the next one gee gee look at all your choices look at all the different ways you can brainwash your children look at all the different religions that want to circumcise you that want to give you a magical mystery excuse for cutting off part of your penis you get your choice which flavor of insanity would you prefer and that's england that's england in the year 2022. have you done research have you looked at what schools are like in iran when schools are like in malaysia in thailand we might as well include real world situations or schools anywhere schools i could talk about my own upbringing talk about toronto we could talk about montreal you know it's completely ridiculous to say that the objective of atheists is simply to achieve equality and the abolition of religious privilege right what we want to abolish is religion period now let's say you have one school where children are taught every day to sit on their knees and pray to get down on their knees and pray then you have another school i've seen this it's real you have a buddhist school where they're taught to sit in a different posture and meditate at one school they recite and sing songs from the gospel from the bible and another they memorize and recite the quran right and then over this other school buddhist sutras everyone put ancient scriptural texts from from buddhism buddhism is different and again whether or not you've regarded as mere happenstance there are a whole bunch of ways in which i can say the buddhist school is better if these are my only choices i'm going to choose to put my kid in the buddha school for one thing my kid might be gay i might know it my kid might not know if you're homosexual you're going to be better off in the buddhist school than in the christian school or the muslim no doubt if you're a woman the status of women i mean even in the worst buddhist countries like even in cambodia the status of women is so much better than a muslim country it's so much better than a christian country right there's no comparison so women over 50 of the population of course if you have a daughter you should put her into the the buddhist school of course she goes i'm not pretending they're all the same and if if my only choice is to put my kid into a catholic school versus a muslim school i would choose the catholic school if my only choice to put my kid into a catholic school versus a protestant school it's close probably i'd choose the practical but in the particular case some catholic schools are better than some possible right like i'm not these things are not all the same right but there's something really fundamental here right there's something really important they have in common closing your eyes and wishing closing your eyes and dreaming while you're still awake inculcating into children teaching them rehearsing with them practicing with them right believing in things that can never be true leading them through this journey of the imagination right a marketing of false promises you know what buddhism has in common with both christianity and islam teaching children if they do good deeds they will be rewarded for them after they die you think that's harmless uh you think that's you think we're going to have a better society in the future if we just have equality and free competition in the free free marketplace today if we just get rid of religious privilege if we just take away say the privilege that christian schools have over muslim schools so that muslim schools get the same amount of funding you know well maybe maybe we should even give more money to islam so they can go out and convert first nations people american indian people the way christians used to think about how unfair that is that the indigenous people of north america that you know people like the kree and the ojibwe and the dna are native people here they never had the chance to convert to islam do you think that would be an improvement if we started giving government funds so that you know islamic temples and muslim you know muslim schools madrasas could start converting and convincing our indigenous people to leave christianity and become muslim instead probably a tiny number of them have converted in prison you know islam is very active in converting people within prison black white and and otherwise people become muslim in prison in significant numbers i know um you know is that that sound good to you like you know it's just ridiculous now my point here is not to say that that uh religious privilege doesn't exist the most palpable form of it no doubt is this issue of tax breaks there's a tax advantage given to a religious foundation as opposed to a a secular one but this isn't true for the whole planet earth right and you can look at countries where this isn't the case there isn't this tax advantage and where their problems with the religion are the same or worse like i just like okay what is this difference in taxes worth because you know you can set up a non-profit a secular nonprofit organization in the united states of america in western europe you can get very significant tax breaks you get significant tax advantages anyway you can look into the details but like if we were to actually say what the financial disadvantages of being a secular foundation as opposed to a religious foundation is it 15 is it 5 like i think if you really do the math if you really crush the numbers it's not some enormous landslide difference economically if you're doing if you are doing charitable activities so let's give an example you have a secular foundation that wants to feed and clothe homeless people um you're helping out almost people in your you're all atheists you have a religious foundation and then you actually get an actuarial scientist you get an accounting team to run the numbers and say okay if this is how much our expenses are this is how much overhead we have these are payroll costs and ask them do you think it will be advantageous for us if we incorporate as a religion instead of being a secular foundation they can crush the numbers and they can tell you what difference it'll make i'm not saying this is zero but if you think this is going to transform society in the united states of america in france france a very interesting example i'm not speaking from ignorance on that i've lived in france i have a daughter growing up in france there are reasons why i know about how secularism works in france how how it is in canada you know what the advantages are incorporated whether you think of that as a five percent financial advantage or a 15 advantage how do you think the world will change if you achieve this so-called equality you're talking what difference is that going to make in the united states america let alone iran let alone malaysia let alone thailand any any japan any society in the world this is the other thing that's very peculiar about his argument he says that the problem is religious privilege as opposed to religion and he does say incoherently i've heard him say it in other contexts for example and talking about christmas and so on his attitude is that you should just let people believe whatever they want to believe and that all we are fighting for we as atheists is merely that we also can believe what everyone believes that we also equally like we also can be ignorant and live in darkness you know it's just it's this is all based on this kind of false equivalence all right i'm sorry we're not equal right if you believe toothpaste is part of a mind control conspiracy from the government you think fluoride and toothpaste you're wrong if you believe the earth is flat and i believe the earth is imperfectly spherical i can't just say it's a sphere it's not quite there there's a ball shape of some kind of okay guess what we're not all equal your beliefs are wrong and stupid and mine are correct i can't even say they're smart they're just correct all right within a country like iran within a country like jordan any muslim majority country you want a name okay the most intelligent people the people with the most initiative you know the people with the most brilliance the people who in practice really are free thinkers people really start thinking for themselves okay they are the atheists we're not equal it takes a person of extraordinary intelligence character just self-confidence to live in a muslim majority society and stand up to your own parents and say no i'm not going to be a part of this anymore to be in a society where 99 of people are circumcised and say look circumcision is utterly bad and evil and wrong i wouldn't do it to myself i wouldn't do it to my own child and i can't believe you did this to me this is barbaric what's wrong with you we're not all equal guys like it's just ridiculous to pretend that this is like different flavors of ice cream and we just there's just no reason for me to go around trying to force everyone else to even know ice cream if you like chocolate chip that's fine you do you if you like mint you do you if you like uh grape whatever hey man each of us enjoys eating a different flavor of ice cream we're all equal and we can just let the free market you know present us with however many options and we can all compete no you know the position atheists are in is that some people are right and some people are wrong and this is why i want to introduce communism right up front okay in the 20th century a huge percentage of the people who could have been building an atheist movement who could have been fighting for an atheist world they were seduced by communism like in terms of like the energy and attention and initiative like the work that could have gone into creating an atheist world challenging demolishing religion right a lot of that was co-opted by was taken was funneled into communism a lot of people who were atheists became communists because they were atheists a lot of people who were atheists made excuses for communism and rationalized what was wrong with communism because they felt this kinship like oh here's this political regime that at least on some level mouths the principles okay being an atheist doesn't mean you're right over there being a you can be an atheist and you can be horribly terribly wrong and i don't really see any interest amongst any of the leaders of of atheism now in the 21st century just look back at the 20th century this is not ancient history and deal with the fact that atheists have indeed been responsible for some of the most mind-blowing massacres and instances of mass starvation some of the most horribly repressive governments who've ever existed in the history of the world right if you could be reincarnated in 17th century italy or live through the famine under mao zedong in communist china where would you like to be teleported to and reincarnated you know if you could live to like i'm just saying there are all kinds of moderately repressive religious regimes that have come and gone i don't know sardinia in 1852 much too christian for my tastes i don't want to live in christian sardinia in the 1850s how about you know how about athens under the under the ottoman empire talking about modern athens non-ancient ads when it was ruled by the by the ottoman turks not too comfortable not too great intellectual climate you know what's worse joseph stalin living in living in atheist communist russia like guess what guys it's not atheists can be wrong too and atheists have been wrong really on the single biggest question of the 20th century like communism was the single biggest threat to the status quo marxism was the single biggest threat to the status quo globally within the united states and everywhere else for some reason for some reason it's getting hot this is not planned to be a striptease guys i see your questions coming in if you guys have a second hit the thumbs up it'll help people discover the video so i appreciate if you have a second thumbs up and uh if you have something intelligent to say i can i can uh i can answer questions so look uh zippidaya says forgive me if i'm mispronouncing your names of that quote it's impossible to abolish religion life is too hard to cling to secular humanism especially for poor people close quote i lived in thailand i lived in laos i lived in cambodia how would you feel if someone there said to you that it's impossible to abolish pedophilia you would say [ __ ] and you would say either you're a coward you're an idiot or you're a pedophile yourself what the [ __ ] is wrong with you nope mathematically is there any country anywhere in the world with zero pedophilia absolutely zero maybe a small island where the total population is only 100 people you know there might be some really tiny societies where you're dealing with only a few only so many people are living there so you actually get down to zero any society i would say any society with more than 10 million people in the population to some extent to some extent pedophilia is a problem right and you have a society that that actively educates people and actively oppresses people to try to eliminate pedophilia to try to get it as close to zero as possible where do you think there's more pedophilia today thailand japan or canada and why why do you think that is within europe catholic spain catholic italy say an eastern european country like ukraine where where do you think it's more or less wrong do you think there's no social science research on this do you think there are no discs on these guys or do you think you've actually been avoiding reading about this or thinking about this have you ever seen a single politician stand up and debate this kind of stuff have you ever seen a politician talk about what are the most effective methods of eradicating pedophilia which countries in the world have the best laws in place the best role for federal authorities local authorities so the fact that it's impossible doesn't mean it's politically irrelevant everything we aspire to accomplish in politics is impossible there is no country in the world with 100 literacy but we have a government policy saying everyone has to be literate you can tell me the wording of this varies from country country many countries around the world have a policy saying it's our policy everyone should be literate and if you're illiterate we help you this way if you're in prison and you're illiterate still we're going to help you we're really going to try to make 100 of people capable of reading and writing what are you going to say that there's no point because you're going to fail i think there's a difference between living in a country where 99 of people are literate versus 95 versus 90 versus 85 [ __ ] you like one of these things what kind of cowardice is there at the basis of that okay all right you say it's impossible to abolish religion do i look like a ghost to you like what is so impossible about my life it's like when people say it's impossible to live on a vegan diet you know i am living proof that you can be vegan i'm not kidding i talked to someone just a couple weeks ago this has happened only a few times in my life and he really sincerely said to me that he thought it was impossible to be sober like i don't know if you've had the there are people who even if it's just marijuana and alcohol people who use marijuana like i.e what we consider soft drugs i've met people who really seriously said that like no it's not possible to exist as an adult without getting drunk at least a couple times a month or a couple times a year or whatever their their standard of normalcy was that that's impossible no like in a sense what i'm rejecting is the notion that i'm either superhuman or subhuman no you know and if you're gonna argue that life is too hard you think my life has been too easy keep watching the youtube videos you think i haven't had heartbreak and suffering and sorrow i as opposed it's just ludicrous okay look i understand what you're saying here i know you're writing with no bad intentions sorry [Laughter] sorry if this seems like a somewhat over-the-top response here um [Music] you know i'll bring this comment back to the other aspect of what um uh matt dillahunty argued for and what he argued against so with no explanation as to the segway between these two these two points of comparison he says we need to abolish religious privilege easy example of religious privilege these tax rights tax breaks tax incentives and then with no clear segue again and again throughout the video he talks about the impossibility of being elected in the united states of america as an atheist now to actually win an election does not pardon me it doesn't require that 51 of people vote for you like you know you guys know this in most western countries you could win an election with sometimes 25 but nobody else got 26 so you win anyway you can win various ways and very it varies from country to country what the electoral system is but let's just say for the sake of this video that to win an election you need 30 percent of people to vote for you just to use a round number and i'm just telling you it's not true in some cases in some cases you may need 51 but in some cases you may need much less than that you might be able to win with 20 of the votes but to be a contender to have a let's just say to be in the running and have a serious shot of winning let's say you want to have 30 percent of people willing to vote for you if you define the purpose and objective of the atheist movement as merely being the removal of religious privilege so that we can all be equal so that we can pretend we're all equally ignorant so we can pretend that a legend about the earth being flat is equally as valid as you know basically a scientifically factual description of the earth being like a ball right being a planet put it that way you know so we could all just pretend that you know creationism is equal to evolution so we can all just pretend that there's nothing wrong with children being brainwashed in madrasas that there's nothing wrong with children being circumcised male or female so we can all pretend there's just nothing wrong and guys like the difference between judaism christian and islam isn't worth talking about here or mormonism or any of these other religions i'm not not nearly focused on islam here you think it doesn't harm people to be educated from the day they're born in the catholic faith i think it does tremendous harm you know a tremendous unspeakable frankly irreversible harm all right you want to pretend that our only objective is to remove the privilege so that then we can all exist as equals and then you want to somehow suggest that when we achieve this equality atheists and religious people will be able to compete as equals in elections that is impossible to imagine even within the united states of america within florida within georgia within texas i mean i go across the map here right that's does that make a lot of sense to you in iran you know they have elections in iran they do they have multi-party elections and they have newspapers that write it but a lot of people don't realize that iran is not a dictatorship they actually have multi-party democracy they actually have elections you'd be surprised how much freedom of speech they have okay they also have a fanatically religious population the voters are religious the vast majority of them so guess who wins the elections again and again and again and guess how carefully you have to couch your words if you want to advocate for any slight reduction in the powers of the islamic faith in that country if you want to argue for a more secular future and you know when are you going to have 30 percent of the people in iran supporting an openly atheist you know contender in an election okay you ever heard of this place israel small country you know but but it's in the newspapers a lot for some reason okay how what's what do you think life's like for atheists in in israel if you're ethnically jewish but you're an atheist and what do you think it's like running in elections as someone who's openly atheist in israel what do you think it's like if you're born and raised in israel and you're willing to stand up and say circumcision should be abolished it's barbaric all right i tell you this but the jewish religion it's pro-alcohol islam is anti-alcohol there's another example of religion being arbitrarily right about something by the way you know you know what what if you're you're jewish and you say look you know alcohol causes brain damage we gotta all stop drinking alcohol judaism is a religion based on ritual meat offerings the communal sacrifice of animals and the eating of meat you're saying hey that's bad and evil and wrong maybe you're vegetarian maybe you're vegan there are big fundamental changes you want to pursue in society and you're facing off against the bigotry of the vast majority of people who are religious you know it's just look the problem with matt dillahunty's approach is that he's presenting you with good intentions and appealing slogans and i'm saying to you these good intentions and appealing slogans they will lead only to the total ruination of the atheist movement all right the the deep seated libertarianism of this model has to be rejected root and branch and be honest i think that has to be rejected by conservatives i think it has to be rejected by liberals like left right center i think that's something left over from the bad old days of ronald reagan and frankly i mean sorry but but but in england it was really uh the labor party i mean sickeningly it's you know the battle days of tony blair tony blair brought together the labour party with uh neoliberalism and neoconservatism however you want to put it these kind of deep-seated libertarian assumptions i think that's an incredibly influential but now outmoded model of how we conceptualize political reality that we have to get rid of and um we have to deal with really tough questions of right and wrong okay meditation doesn't work you know it really is inconvenient isn't it to have to vilify meditation and yoga as opposed to um homophobia amongst southern redneck preachers but from an atheist perspective and i would argue from a nihilist perspective what's most important of all is to emphasize the sense in which they are the same thing it's the same error it's the same evil which is belief all right now faith healing collecting donations from someone and promising that you're gonna cure their cancer heal what's wrong with them whether it is through prayer whether it's through a christian ceremony a muslim ceremony a buddhist ceremony a hindu ceremony it's bad and evil and wrong in all instances and why belief quite apart from the particular things being believed in like you can hold up a book right it's not because of the particular contents of the book that i'm telling you it's wrong to believe in it i'm telling you it's wrong to believe in any book and i am aware of the advantages the buddhists book pardon me the buddhist book has over the christian book we'll use it in the singular it's a huge library in buddhism it's not just one book it's one cd-rom though i want to ask but you know i'm aware of the advantages buddhist scripture has over christian scripture and i'm aware of the advantages christian scripture has over muslim scripture they're not the same what's the same is belief all right the evil of putting children into a school where they will be taught to close their eyes and pray and believe in this okay it's the same evil regardless of which one of these religions we are examining all right and it's the same solution for all of them we have to close down those religious schools what we need are coercive atheist governments that really force people in schools to face up to the reality that the world is round and not flat that face a phase of the reality of evolution the theory of evolution which is disturbing in its implications it is it's upsetting it's morally disturbing and not just when you're 11 years old or something okay like i mean it doesn't come up every day but you know yeah you know what it's kind of tragic it's kind of horrible to know that to some extent we're all prisoners of these ingrained instincts that were produced by millions of years of evolution it's kind of disappointing to find out that you aren't an angel that fell from the sky to the earth with supernatural abilities nope you're just another monkey you know like yeah i this is not this is not something you're only going to be disappointed with once or only be disturbed about once right but this is something children have to start learning about i don't know at age four or something at a very early age you learn about evolution you learn about its implications not once not twice not ten times a hundred times in your life you're really going to reflect on the theory of evolution and its implications for us you know some of the implications for evolution have to do with ecology too like looking ahead to the future okay given that this is what we what produced us this is where we come from uh in an abstract sense what do we got to do for the future of of planet earth what's what's the onus upon us what's the the obligation upon us you know so on and so forth you know this is not a simpler or shallow thing for me personally i'm fairly indifferent to the cosmological elements i don't really feel that the shape of the solar system or the size of the galaxy it just doesn't mean that much to me just being honest you know if there were a new scientific finding that the milky way is actually so if someone invents a better telescope and it turns out the milky way shaped like a triangle instead of this kind of swirl shape you know i'd kind of shrug my shoulders you know well this goes to show those those expensive telescopes man you know i just don't care a lot of people care i mean i've met and spoken to a lot of people for whom just understanding the size and shape of the universe was a big deal okay and look uh kind of combining these two all right homosexuality really matters it really matters for straight people like i don't think you just live your life as a straight person ignoring this of course it matters for for gay people too and really accepting like look human sexuality it doesn't make a lot of sense you know there are all these guys who fetishize women's high-heeled shoes like they're all these really they're all these forms human sexuality takes on and homosexuality is one of the most common you know it's this is a major element of the human experience but there are also all these other little strange you know expressions that can't be rationalized in terms of evolution well you know why would a man want to have sex with a shoe instead of a woman you know this is this is the reality of life on earth right and dealing with that dealing with you know um the irrationality and passion and desire that we all have to deal with one way or another how do you want to prepare people to deal with that and again i'm not i'm not saying it's easy i mean it's really not as easy as just embracing homosexuals as your your brothers and equals it's really a lifelong thing of accepting the extent to which human beings are alien from one another and you know sorry you know this if you have a lot of gay friends or if you're gay yourself watching this it's not the case that gay people have all this stuff in common there can be two gay men who feel completely alien from one another like well they both identify as gay but they're different reasons why they're they're really mutually alienated from one another i remember this um the debates about gay marriage in toronto toronto had a huge gay community partly because the gay people ran away from all the small towns and moved to toronto because they were less comfortable and these more homophobic smaller towns and cities so we had we had a lot of gay people and there were gay men who really seriously argued that they were opposed to gay marriage because they they thought sex was better when you just had a bunch of different partners and never committed to one person they were really passionately arguing this was a medieval christian concept of one man one woman and that it was a tremendous error to replace it with one man and one man like that that know that if you're a gay man your whole life you should just sleep around with a bunch of different partners and not buy into this now look i'm being with you i don't think that's a shallow argument but on the other side there were enough gay people saying that no that's not their sexuality that their experience of homosexuality is monogamous and is about commitment and that they want to be able to adopt and raise children and they want to have these benefits in terms of life life insurance and health insurance and there are all these reasons all right it's not some simple binary thing where you flip a switch and go from a homophobic society to a gay acceptance society these are really really hard things to deal with your whole your whole life long and you know sorry in case you haven't guessed i'm completely pro homosexuality and whatever i support gay people politically but you know of course as life goes on you can have encounters that freak you out and disturb i i've had gay men lay hands on me i've had some situations that test the limits of your time whoa let's not get handsy buddy sure if it happens you know you think you're tolerant and then you move to thailand look let's all keep our hands dirty to ourselves here guys you know there are going to be things that that freak you out and uh you know anyway you're going to deal with the extent to which people both gay and straight they live with these these terrible contradictory desires life is a tragedy human sexuality is a tragedy for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time the terrible yearnings that can never be never be satisfied gay or straight you know the vast majority of people and they they live with this contradiction i live with this contradiction again related to the fact that we are only slightly raised up above the apes okay um when do you want people to start dealing with these contradictions and what percentage of people for me would have just described even if we've only been dealing with the shallow end of the swimming pool here with these with these examples i mean we can get into philosophy with a capital letter p if you insist you know um if you're going to have a working democracy can you have can you have a working democracy where 99 people are muslim fundamentalists 99 i should say uh a real question can you have a democracy in afghanistan can you have a democracy in saudi arabia can you we've certainly tested the hypothesis in recent years i think part of the tragedy of communist china is that everyone knows the chinese could have democracy and they'd be great at it if there's any country in the world that is prepared for democracy it is communist china and they are prepared by basically two things atheism and literacy there are people they read books they read and talk about what's in the newspapers they talk about politics they're politically engaged and they're predominantly atheists and guys i know i know buddhism i know confucianism i know taoism even the people in china who participate in those religions trust me from an american perspective they would count as atheists you can meet people in china who describe themselves as a taoist to describe themselves as a buddhist and really they are an atheist who likes buddhist literature or they're an atheist who likes taoist literature i mean the confusions are the most extreme today i mean we're not talking about traveling but today if you meet someone from china who says they're a confusion they are basically a modern atheist person who appreciates confusion literature and you know you could ask them but don't you believe the earth is flat don't you reject the theory of evolution and they will look at you like you're completely insane they say what what are you talking about that's not what they mean by buddhism right so of all the countries in the world to be prepared for democracy the tragedy of communist china is that we all know they could they could have uh democracy you know they're so close right and yet you know because of the dominion of the communist party they're still they're still so far you know um it's just ridiculous it's just ridiculous to say that a free marketplace of ideas in which every form of insanity every form of religion and cult is free to lie and cheat and steal and manipulate people and engage in hoaxes and pious frauds and amass as much money as they can and then set up schools to brainwash children with that money what the hell kind of model is that for the future of the united states of america what kind of model is that for the future of france or england let alone for the future of afghanistan iran or what have you so guys that is the end of my argument it may seem like a subtle difference or a subtle distinction to differentiate a struggle against religious privilege from a struggle against religion period okay but i'm saying in making this error and taking this false first step right actually matt dillahunty is setting atheism on a disaster course and again i'm sorry i've talked about these things in such detail because i don't think the arguments about them are easy under any headache you know it just so happens that atheists are right about a long list of things that religious people are wrong about in the united states of america we're talking about christianity is long heavy and it would be harder if you think about a hypothetical world where maybe religion is right about some of those things and the atheists are wrong and we have a tremendous problem in dealing with all the forms of pseudoscience that atheists are wrong about so guys i will read your questions if you have something intelligent to say now's the time to say it if you have nothing intelligent to say by all means remain remain silent okay who is going to stand up and fight against prescription antidepressant drugs ssri medications we could also talk about so-called antipsychotic medications but for simplicity we can just say prozac who is going to stand up and say this doesn't work this is pseudoscience the negative side effects are really significant and really terrible and the benefits are either zero or so close to zero that you're just looking at a placebo effect etc who is going to stand up and make that argument do you want to be a part of a society in which the only way you can reduce the number of people ruining their life with psych meds with prozac with similar similar medications is to lead a mob of religious fundamentalists of religious fanatics whom you manipulate you lie to them you give the lectures you convince them that these drugs are the devil's work yep this is yet to be attempted as far as i know but whether it's in islam or christianity things imagine a charismatic figure like myself might go around from time to time we might go around from town to town and say back in jesus's day people were depressed just the same as they are now they didn't take no pill for it they got drunk like good honest trades you know you could say people should just drink whiskey when they're depressed and that's your you could build up an army of religious fanatics who are correct like they're correct in their critique of antidepressant drugs but they're right for the wrong reasons right that's one view of the world if your view of the world is just that it's completely hopeless all we can ever have is one group of religious fanatics against another you could have a new movement in the united states of america arguing that you are a bad christian if you take these psych meds and we all have to stand up and get go back to being drunk the way we were in the dark ages or you know we have to go back to this this earlier model of uh psychiatric care shall i say you know and who knows maybe throw in a bunch of crap about prayer or whatever it is that gets the crowd gets the crowd moving okay well that's not my perspective all right i think today in the united states of america there's a tiny tiny minority of people who could be described as free thinkers and then within that minority there's a smaller minority who can be called dissident intellectuals and then within that smaller minority there's an even smaller number of people who are free thinking distant intellectuals who are seriously trying to make the world a better place who are seriously trying to help the majority of people there are some people who are free thinkers and all they want to do is cocaine and prostitutes they have no interest in helping anyone else there are some people who are free thinkers who become distant intellectuals but whatever they're all they're interested in is their own artistic self-indulgence their own memoirs all they want to write you know they have no interest in helping themselves they have no interest in changing the world okay we're talking about a minority within a minority within minority that tiny number of people those are the only people in your society who might stand up and challenge the paradigm the paradigm of psychiatric care entertains the notion that depression is a medically real illness that you can treat with this pill and then the further notion that this pill is actually effective as a treatment who will stand up and make that argument who will do the right things for the right reasons and who will ultimately take that to congress take that to parliament take that to the halls of power and government and make it into a coercive law to eliminate this poison from our society all right this is my interest my interest is in creating a society where that tiny circle gets larger and larger where the the percentage of the population that consists of free-thinking dissident intellectuals gets larger and larger and i think there are all kinds of positive effects that will come from that i think some just saying not all three thing intellectuals are going to care about politics i think some of those people are just going to spend their time trying to invent a better can opener have you opened a can of beans lately we're still stuck in the dark ages on canvas they're going to invent a laser that can open can be you know some seriously i'm just saying some people are free thinking intellectuals but they're they're not like me they don't they maybe they want to change the world but not politically not philosophically not not ethically like maybe not even ethically there's nothing ethical there there's some kind of free thinking disintellectual want to say you know what can openers it's got to be a better way to open the canopy okay so my point is when you increase the number of these people i think it has positive knockout effects throughout society including parts society i'm just not that concerned about i'm not really that engaged in the tech sector however you want to put it you know it's not really what i'm what i'm looking out for but that's great if a new can opener comes out great i'm all i'm all for it okay if you think about these concentric circles free thinkers distant intellectuals distant intellectuals working in the public interest for the good of the majority to change the world pursuit of positive political change okay how big are those circles how big are those minorities today in iran how big are they in afghanistan how big are they in saudi arabia one of the simplest things that i ever heard said by the the prime minister of taiwan you know well this is during one of the periods when i was there prime minister of taiwan at the time he said simply about communist china he said you know they don't understand you have to value dissent as something precious that contributes positively to our society you know it's a beautiful it's really a very deep cutting statement about communist china again in this case neither country is religious you know taiwan is basically a secular democracy communist china is a secular democracy saying you know what the difference is between those guys and us they don't understand these people the dissidents as i'm calling them the distant intellectuals dissent itself is like a social service it's something precious it's something positive you have to value i'll tell you something all the religions have in common even buddhism even hinduism even animism like the various forms of animism i have known right all of them snuff out dissent all of them create an authoritarian social structure a hierarchy based on belief based on blind faith that's what they have in common as religions again matt dillahunty i don't think you ever studied buddhism i don't think you ever studied hinduism i don't think you're terribly well informed about christianity to be honest i just don't think you have a lot of book reading a lot of book learning you know behind you uh to me you still seem like a pretty ignorant the podunk ignorant person if you don't mind my saying but if you take the time to do some research and really contrast these other examples and understand what they have in common although everything else is different you know like despite the profound and serious differences what it is the different religions have in common right now bring this back to this question what's my strategy what is my strategy for eliminating antidepressants ssri drugs in the united states america i think the only shot you've got is to foster a culture of free thinking intellectual dissidence is to really increase the number of those people and by the way i don't think they have to be rich i don't i think they can live in poverty and still change the world okay tell me something if you are a free thinking intellectual dissident where can you go to university in the united states of america can you go to a mormon university can you go to a catholic university can you go to a protestant university can you go to a left-wing communist university all right we have a society where even at the university level it's incredibly hard to be a free-thinking intellectual dissident and i would know and i am not stupid enough to think the grass is greener on the other side i've talked i've known so many people at so many universities throughout the western world i've had so many professors who were my friends all right like let's just say you're a guy who's a scholar of buddhism and you want to talk about slavery within buddhism all right the level of repression the extent to which you will be kicked out of the room the whole system is against you this is the 24th talk about your 2000 the president i'm not talking about ancient history here i mean today that you can't talk about slavery you know this kind of thing you can't talk about hell like you know really obvious topics in buddhist buddhist studies there's this there's an active world anyway i can i could talk about a whole bunch of different uh disciplines i've been a part of that you know different university departments have where i've worked in it known the professors you know so on and so forth what if you're what if you're a free thinking intellectual when you want to be in first nation studies american go through a lot of examples here but whatever even politics even political science you know um you know okay and the university level this is where there's the most tolerance of intellectual dissonance even though i'm telling you and i'm telling you passionately even though i can't take an hour to illustrate those with examples there is very very little margin for tolerance for free thinking uh distant intellectuals in our universities and so little i i do wonder if i'd gone to a kind of pious christian university maybe they would have been nicer to me maybe they would have had the attitude of oh you poor deer you're going to hell after you die let's see if we can't help you it might have just been nicer to me even though they kind of dehumanize me because let me tell you something going to a nominally secular left-wing university it was hell was terrible communist professors can be much meaner to you than christian professors i'm sure some christian professors are also mean and cruel people don't get me wrong but i just say like it's so bad in our current the level of conformism oppression and so on in our so-called secular universities that i question maybe i would have done better at a religious university it can be that bad but that's university to what extent are free thinking intellectual dissidents and again whether you think of those people going to the sciences people going to engineering not everyone's going to go into politics not everyone's going to go into philosophy not everyone's gonna go into charity work not everyone's gonna go to cambodia and try to do you know humanitarian work to help poor people in a post-war country not everyone's gonna study a bunch of languages people are gonna have different interesting what is the experience of a free-thinking dissident intellectual in high school in the united states of america all right what is it in high school in england in france in germany all right which of these countries any of them just even looking at the western markets which of them foster and encourage and develop free thinking intellectual dissidence all right america has a horrible culture this way at the high school level unbelievable pretty much every single one of these guys will tell you they were suicidal during high school and they'll tell you exactly why they'll tell you exactly what their experience was in high school and how terrible it was to be an aspiring intellectual growing up in an american high school it's awful and again it's so bad like really is it or would you have been worse at a catholic high school you know again i'm not saying this to glorify the guy but if you look at what life is like in a catholic high school versus the government nominally secular high schools on a case-by-case basis some of the religious schools you might have been better off there than in the government system because that high school was so bad okay so again you can cast the net wider you can think about iran you can think about afghanistan think about these more repressive cultures and you can think about kindergarten and primary school you can think about it from the womb forward okay there's a whole lot of progress that is impossible because we do not have enough free thinking intellectual dissidents engaged in real innovation in asking really hard questions in challenging the status quo in challenging the complacency of our society right asking the questions that make everyone uncomfortable right and it's only when you foster that it's only when you expand that that something like the convenient lie that if you're unhappy there's a pill that can make it better the convenient lies that are beneath the pharmaceutical industry marketing prozac to millions of people right who is going to challenge that right it's not going to be one person all right look at socrates they killed socrates too in case you didn't know i've made a video about it it's not like there's one socrates who can stand up and say this is all a scam that's already happened if you didn't know they've already been quite a few different scientists who did the research and wrote books and so on and so forth and who stood up and said it's all a scam that's not enough you need a dynamic you need myriad communities myriad salons of dissonant intellectuals and then the world can start to change and guess what guys as as tough a critic as i am of the american revolution i can sit here and talk to you for hours about everything that went wrong with the american revolution who made it happen it was a bunch of really eccentric distant intellectuals these were really weird guys sorry benjamin franklin was a really really weird guy this is a terrible book don't read this book but anyway thomas jefferson was a really really strange guy within their own society at that time not just judging them now these were extremely eccentric distant intellectuals who got together and started asking tough questions started coming up with an idea for a better society and guys again we can all sit here and criticize the american revolution can you name a revolution that was more successful this is probably the most successful revolution in the in the history of the world it was certainly more successful in the french revolution than the russian revolution the chinese i mean despite everything wrong with it right so yeah there are certain kinds of change that will await having enough people in that minority that can that can dynamically instigate change and um [Music] one of the reasons why matt delhuny's approach to this is wrong is that he's not acknowledging the extent to which the perpetuation of religion isn't just a service like a pizza delivery restaurant that satisfies a need that exists today or a desire that exists today i'll come back to this pizza restaurant pizza delivery company example just that you know we're in a situation where the existence of these religions the existence of these institutions and these religious schools it's snuffing out the possibility of progress in the future there are children who go into catholic schools and they have their intellectual potential beaten out of them all right they are traumatized for life there are children going to muslim addresses there are children going into hindutva schools like hindu religious schools i shouldn't have even said hundove i should have said hindu schools doesn't matter regardless hindu is a politicized term but anyway um you know there are children going into into buddhist schools all right and i i am not even making the claim that all these children are brainwashed i'm telling you that they are being taught to believe and in learning to believe they're learning to dream while they're wide awake all right they're learning to live in a world of prayers and riddles and sacred mysteries and ancient excuses for stupidity all right it is snuffing out their intellectual potential and if you guys have have difficulty visualizing this it's so much easier to visualize with women than men all right so look i i know probably just challenge your own bias here i i used the word intellectual dissident like 30 times every single time were you imagining a woman or a man did you think of both women and men or did you imagine like a man in a suit and tie when i say intellectual dissident okay women have just as much potential to be intellectual dissidents but it's even more obvious the way in which all of their intellectual potential is snuffed out by religious education now again even with supposedly moderate christian schools what are they taught they're taught to get married and have babies immediately and i've i've met and known women like that they're you know some of them are taught to drop out of school after a certain number of years so they can get married and have babies immediately and again you can look at christianity you can look at islam a woman who's taught to wear a headscarf and get married and follow her husband's commands and so on all right now you know again i'm not some wild optimist about human nature but whether you like it's not that everyone is a genius and then religion makes them into an imbecile right but i am seeing to you some percentage of these people some percentage of women who are born christian who are born jewish who are born muslim or from buddhists who are born hindu who are just born into one of the miscellaneous animist religions in japan they could have developed intellectually and instead religion suffocated their potential and tried to turn them into an obedient robotic housewife and it's just very easy to see that if you meet these people and talk to them face to face you can say whoa you are a woman who has been effectively brainwashed and oppressed by your religion you were you're a woman who had your intellectual potential snuffed out and you know what it might be harder to see that in a man like let's just say a man who went to all mormon school he was born went to mormon primary school high school mormon university and let's say he became an insurance salesman so he wears a nice suit he goes and does this work as an insurance settlement he's not he's not oppressed in the kind of obvious way that a woman in afghanistan is oppressed you know wearing this blanket you know it's not oppressed in the same office as a woman a traditional muslim woman wearing a head scarf or an orthodox jewish woman wearing this elaborate costume so and so on you know i know it may not be obvious but if you get to know that guy you know what you may realize is this guy also had his intellectual potential snuffed out of him he was sold this pack of lies from the day he was born and he was funneled and shaped into this role to be again the same way we could say the woman was made into this kind of baby making robot she was made into this white picket fence housewife robot right okay it may not be as obvious but there were a lot of guys wearing suits and ties and their lives have been destroyed by religion too right their intellectual potential has been uh has been snuffed out all right i'll take a moment now to read your read your comments melissa is also in the audience if she wants to comment she could join it i admit this is one of these unanswerable steamroller videos i'm not expecting to get any emails disagreeing with me um welcome if you support me on patreon you're welcome to send me uh you know welcome to send me a message uh but you know i understand that this it's very hard to answer and probably a lot of what i'm saying are things that uh you have to kind of live with for a while and reflect on for a while but you know i am asking this question you know not out of an egalitarian libertarian delusion such as matt dillahunty preaches you know we have to be willing to acknowledge that religion is bad and evil and wrong and that we are trying to eradicate it that we are not just trying to eradicate particular misconceptions within christianity we're not trying to reform christianity you know we're not trying to create a world where everyone is muslim but where we've managed to convince them not to implement sharia law like a reformed islam that that you know rejects sharia law but maintains this is not the objective of of atheism the objective is not to have a pluralistic society in which some people are muslim some people are christian and some people are buddhists and we all get to be wrong together some people are right and some people are wrong and that's part of why it's so so important to recognize that communism was wrong like it's relevant to this discussion because you can have an atheist dictatorship you can't have an atheist political movement and an atheist government authority that's also bad and evil and wrong you know and that atheists in a very real sense believe it okay but you know the he the solution to the puzzle ultimately has to be fostering the culture of intellectual dissent of i don't even foster the culture in a in a palpable sense increasing the numbers of intellectual dissidents and when you've got that you're going to get people who are dynamic and brilliant and hard working who are not satisfied with mediocrity that's going to transform all kinds of things in our society some of those people are going to say hey look you know what the way we teach math is terrible we've got to improve math education again that's not my mission in life but someone is really in intellectual distances look you're wasting children's time they all find it boring and at the end of the process they're not really competent doing math let's really improve math education i've heard many many times that japan has a much better quality of both math and science education we could we could probably improve math education the united states and if we just imitated what japan was already doing you can look at those kinds of you know best case scenarios i've also heard that about the education system in hong kong hong kong i didn't look into it as much i did look into it a bit in japan you know i'm giving this as an example where is that impulse going to come from just that this is again not thought of as as religious whatever it's gonna come from someone who who's you know uh a reasonably brilliant intellectual dissident who's not satisfied with the compromises of the last 20 years is not satisfied with the compromise of the last 200 years who's willing to stand up and say let's try to overcome our collective mediocrity people let's let's try to do better all right and in the doldrums of our of our lazy self-indulgent culture nobody's willing to stand up and do that in challenging prozac nobody's willing to do that stand up and do that in challenging marijuana now the increasing popularity of everyone inhaling this sedative to solve their problems becoming a sedative addict you know so on and so forth no one's willing to stand behind this so is it any surprise that nobody is going to stand up to take on the church you know whichever church it is you think of nobody is going to stand up and say you know the future of paris would be better if we burned all the cathedrals down like guys the future of paris france cannot be memorializing and worshiping church architecture forever and ever this can't 500 years from now we can't still be doing this [ __ ] something has to change we have to really have a profound where where's that impulse going to come from all right i'm not claiming it's ever going to come from the majority you know to really be dissatisfied with the mediocrity times a little bit and i've said this in other contexts but you said very briefly you know to be dissatisfied with christmas is one thing so i don't want to go on telling the same story again and again whether it's a story about jesus or a story about santa claus or a story about rudolph the red-nosed reindeer all of it it's at minimum you have to say it's mediocre at maximum it's actually evil right i want to overcome this and have something really brilliant and meaningful in my life but those dissident intellectuals they will also be dissatisfied with mickey mouse they will also be dissatisfied with batman and spider-man they'll try to innovate and do something better on those in those fields also so the dynamism of of how much your your society can change and um how much those uncover to what extent those uncomfortable questions can be asked and people can start coming up with with new and better answers for them right that comes from comes from someone somewhere all right and as long as you have matt dillahunty's attitude sorry sorry i promised you i'd come back to the pizza delivery restaurant matt dillahunty's attitude is equivalent to saying hey nobody needs to define what is good pizza and what is bad pizza uh this pizza company they do sicilian style pizza this pizza company does chicago style pizza this pizza company does vegan pizza and these other guys they just make the cheapest pizza possible and through the cacophony of the free market this great libertarian fantasy just through let freedom of choice just leave it up to individuals to choose to order any pizza they desire to satisfy their their needs and indulge their feelings tonight and it'll take care of itself in the end the voice of the people will decide what is the best pizza you know and there will be a harmonious balance of competing alternatives okay that is just utterly untrue of religion all right religion is not like pizza delivery there are people called sunni muslims and their position is that they're right you're wrong and when you die you go to hell and there's nobody they hate more than rival creeds within islam and they're constantly at war with constantly save struggle and strife with just the difference between sunni and shiite okay let alone the difference between islam and judaism etc etc okay pluralism it's fundamentally irrelevant to problems of religion and again okay look the fact that you order a cheese pizza today doesn't prevent you from becoming a vegan tomorrow all right there's some reckless optimism for you like the fact that you order chicago pizza today doesn't mean that you can't change your mind tomorrow and try sicilian pizza and realize that you've been wrong for all these years you try sicilian pizza once you realize chicago pizza is terrible compared to this other kind of pizza you've had and it doesn't prevent you from realizing you know you should give up on cheese entirely and start eating a vegan diet okay inculcating religion especially into children but also middle-aged adults like fully grown adults who just have a period of weakness in their life like there are people who are sad and broken-hearted and they convert to islam as fully grown adults middle-aged people and they convert into when they join extremist cult groups also because they're sad and broken as fully grown adults but whether it's children or fully grown adults who undergo religious conversion okay they can't just try another brand of pizza next week this is most obviously true with islam where the punishment for changing your religion once you have converted into islam is death islam is a religion by definition believes in the death penalty for rejecting islam and converting to another religion it's not like ordering a pizza all right and whether you're talking about muslim madrasas muslim schools in israel in palestine you know for the for the muslim anyway sorry just the geography and what terms to use are confusing talking about muslim addresses in the middle east let's say you know or you're talking about muslim addresses within london england within the united states within australia okay it's just not the case that you can embrace this or glorify it as freedom of choice and if as if this fits into this this free market paradigm of embracing pluralism and and as if the final objective of atheism is just to say hey i'm happy being atheist if you're happy celebrating christmas or you're happy circumcising your children then good for you you do you like you you get to eat your preferred flavor of ice cream you get to have your preferred brand pizza and i get to have mine then we all get to live in this society together and it's funny because mattel honey himself in this one video he draws attention to the ultimate absurdity of this which is the question of political power okay so you want to kid yourself this way and pretend that the difference between islam and atheism is just like ordering a pizza okay what happens when election time comes around because it as to say it doesn't even have to be 51 percent of the population to dominate electoral outcomes you could have a voting bloc of just 30 that that decides every electoral outcome because those 30 30 vote in one block and they decide all the elections where you live forever more okay guess what it's like living in a place where just 51 percent of people are muslim and voters are blocked guess who's elected and guess who isn't and guess what starts to happen in terms of your changing political conditions including most obviously education for for children so it's like how optimistic are you about the future of turkey turkey is the ultimate example of completely phony completely hollow pluralistic secularism because that is government policy in turkey turkey is nominally a secular country but in practice in reality it's uh dominated by islam