2022… THE LAST Christmas… THE END of Christianity!

have you ever unwrapped a present maybe the person who gave you the president is in the room with you maybe not and as soon as you get the wrapping paper off you see right away oh wow this is some kind of really impressive artistic box it could be carved at a wood could be made out of metal whatever it is and then your mind starts racing you're looking at this beautiful box it was underneath the wrapping paper and you wonder what could be inside you know it may be a handmade box that may be produced in a factory but there's this highly decorative box and you know you know most packages you get a hint at you know what's what's going to be inside once you take the lid off and then you take the lid off the box and there's nothing inside because the present is the box now if the person who gave it to you is sitting right there with you you know on christmas or hanukkah or whatever you celebrate you know they might say oh yeah yeah it's a decorative box so i gave it to you you can can keep your socks in it keep anything you want you know oh oh right the present is the box you're not necessarily disappointed you're not mad at the person or something it's just this moment of being slightly out of step with expectations like oh oh okay right all right so the the gift is the box the it's not that the box contains the gift people want to take this attitude toward their own cultural heritage especially christmas people in the united states of america in western europe especially they want to kid themselves into thinking that they can keep the packaging they can keep the container that christmas you know it's just this beautiful decorative empty box and you can fill it up with anything you like that you know christmas can be a secular holiday that christmas can be an atheist holiday it can represent anything you want it to represent if you're american specifically people try to do this with thanksgiving like oh it's such a nice box slavery genocide the puritans wiping out the indigenous people the the indians in this particular uh part of the east eastern seaboard the united states oh we'll keep the box you know and um we'll fill it up with all kinds of good things we'll give it all kinds of nice ideas we'll say it's a holiday celebrating you know some uh ideology more suited to our times more suited to our tastes so on and so forth [Laughter] this is a box that cuts part of your dick off okay how what percentage of christian males in the united states of america are circumcised and yes when i talk to christians face to face when i talk to jewish people face to face i go right to the most disturbing example the example that is the most irrevocable the most impossible to change or compensate for or wiggle your way out of with jesuitical reasoning you know uh a decision that's made by your parents on your behalf while you're still an infant and you can't speak for yourself and no one represents your rights or your long-term interests something that is as unspeakable as tattooing the word jew on a baby's face right but instead you're depriving them of 60 of the nerve endings in their penis for the rest of their life right and christians do this as if they're tattooing the word christian on a baby's face all right now i i'm someone who both is jewish and looks jewish there's a real sense in which i walk around with jew tattooed on my face and i am the target of anti-semitism not just on the internet in real life i i i don't just identify as jewish everyone else identifies me as jewish and i gotta deal with that all right gotta tell you i remember the first time ever i confronted my father about his decision to have me circumcised because both of my parents are they they consider themselves atheists whether or not that's really true is kind of another story there are people who call themselves atheists who aren't in the same way their people call themselves christians who aren't i mean life's full of these kinds of uh these paradoxes and you know the way my father reacted it was completely sincere and unguarded you'd think you were asking him why he chose the color blue when he bought his first car as a teenager you know what i mean like it wasn't so much something he was making excuses for justifying it was just this distant memory he didn't really care about and where he was just kind of speculating like oh why did i choose a blue car i mean i don't know maybe i was thinking this maybe i was thinking that you know when someone they're not like making up an answer to try to please you or try to mislead you they're making up an answer because they just don't give a [ __ ] and they never gave a [ __ ] it never mattered to them it doesn't matter to them now and she's like yeah i mean you know on the one hand maybe it was this they were thinking oh well guess what i get to deal with the consequences for ever but of course circumcision isn't the only example all right christianity judaism islam communism fascism do you think that all of these ideologies should be allowed to open and operate their own schools for children do you think they should all be allowed to open and operate their own summer camps now in case you think small cult groups don't do this they do i mean the mormons are a large cult group scientology medium-sized cult group i mean examples of that if you listen to hip-hop music if you listen to rap music you may be aware of the the so-called uh five percenter religion all right there are a lot of rap lyrics from wu-tang clan uh puff daddy a lot a lot of new york rappers or greater new york area rappers have a lot of five percent illusions a lot of five percent mythology or philosophy whatever to say in their in their rap song if you look up the history of that movement the real turning point was when they started to get funding to open and operate their own school now i forget how many years this school operated i don't think it lasted for all that long but they were taking in children and uh always remember that the emphasis in on their in their school i mean to some extent it was about kind of black self-empowerment there were some other other themes going on there but um they emphasized mathematics and self-defense i was thought no you know to what extent that was them using code words for what they were really teaching uh i don't know but i remember thinking yeah i can kind of imagine you grew up in the african-american ghetto and you think you know what if there are two things kids are not learning enough of in schools and regular government schools mathematics and self-defense if you guys know anything about even the hip-hop hip-hop slang that comes out of that out of that religious movement they do use the word mathematics in a way that you and i do not it is it is a bit of a code word but in any case i think they use self-defense in a way that we don't use it also but uh oh okay so you know if we're if we're moving past the level of just acknowledging irrevocable permanent bodily harm done by these religions changing people's lives forever a few moments after they're born marking them physically and impairing them physically for the rest of the last men and women you can google it right now how many million women are circumcised and will have female genital mutilation whatever you want to call it how many million men are circumcised how many of them don't know why their parents didn't know why right they're just trapped in this cultural pattern that goes on and on forever okay do you think it's harmless to put a child into catholic school if so you're not an atheist all right you're not all right there are atheists who will say that and you know there's a sense in which i kind of don't believe them but if you talk to them at some length and they're really sincere they really think it does no harm to a child to be sat down and taught how to pray taught how to confess to a priest taught not just how to do the rituals but you're taught what they mean what they symbolize what your place in the universe is you're taught whatever the hell you're taught these days about the theory of evolution that's changed for the catholic church it's not the same for the catholics is it this is the protestants anymore you taught whatever you're taught about human sexuality and marriage and all these other things all right well i don't think that's harmless i think people are damaged for life and even if it's harder to see than the damage done by circumcision all right if you look closely enough you can see it even amongst the people who consciously and intentionally reject catholicism and start to identify as atheists or as anti-clerical people who were church they are [ __ ] up for life i don't have time to read this book i may never have time to read this book this is a somewhat famous person called uh tom baker i after i ordered this book i just googled around to see what people say about the saturday this is now the 2022 coming up in the last few days 2021. and this is someone who was tremendously famous in the decade of the 1980s i remember someone online uh so just googled around to see what what people were saying about him i think i did within the last year or something but because again he's not forgotten but he's become barely remembered barely known cultural icon i remember somebody saying you know that for him growing up as a child in the 1980s that tom baker really symbolized what it meant to be a man he was a symbol of adult masculinity that was sort of intellectual and responsible he was a hero but he wasn't a physically dominant hero in the way arnold schwarzenegger was you know in the way an action movie hero was it's not he didn't use a gun he didn't take his shirt off he didn't punch people out with his tremendous muscles he wasn't a kung fu hero uh for a lot of kids growing up at the time i think so this was just a comment i read from one person up i thought wow that must be true for a lot of kids who grew up in that era and his show he was the star of doctor who and he was the star of that show at a turning point where it went from being a somewhat obscure cult uh subculture to being really a big mainstream hit show certainly in the united states of america uh if you want to talk about within england or within western europe i'm sure the timeline is a little bit different but what i remember is when his version of the show came out his several seasons that's when mainstream networks went back and looked again at the earlier seasons of the show and said okay how can we make money out of this um i think if if you grew up within england you'd have a more complex memory of from one year to the next how the show became more or less famous the tide rose and phil it was it was a big turning point now look i'm not i'm now a 43 year old man i'm not here saying that this show had a lot of intellectual content by by my standards i'm saying if you were an eight-year-old kid a ten-year-old kid a 12 year old kid watching this show it had a lot of intellectual substance compared to teenage mutant ninja turtles compared to arnold schwarzenegger movies cop drama movies you know tj hooker compared to macgyver there's the cultural reference melissa's not really old enough to remember macgyver it's not really her generation nor am i yeah anyway i'm not i'm not quite old enough for from macgyver even my older sister i think would would be more of a macgyver person i mean a generationally so yeah compared to the other stuff on tv who he was and what he seemed to represent in the character he played and as he said at the time he still says now he was given no direction on how to play the character like how does he portray this fictional character how does he play the part of doctor who what he was told with the director was just be tom baker just be yourself so he felt that there was a lot of himself in the in the character all right why did i buy this book i don't give a [ __ ] about doctor who tom baker is a fascinating example of someone who was completely broken by the christian religion and he stayed broken his whole life long there was no putting the pieces back together not even after he rejected the religion not even after he became an atheist or not even after he rebelled against the religion put it that way not even after he became a multi-millionaire movie star whatever i want to say became a tremendously successful cultural icon due to his uh due to his position on a mainstream tv show when he was a young man he was a true believer and i he went to a monastery i forget to what extent he was in seminary to become a monk or to what extent to become a priest and again i haven't read the book i haven't had time who knows what i'll have time if ever you know but this is the life story of a man who was broken by religion by being inculcated with religious education at an early age and he stayed broken and this book tries and i have read enough of it though it tries to be really honest about the effects on his sexuality right what you're getting when i say you never get over it it doesn't mean you stay living in celibacy your whole life right a lot of people rebel against it and they go the other way they overcompensate but they still don't really understand sexuality they're just acting out their rage and a comprehension of what was inculcated in a different way tries to be honest about his sexuality you know as a as a child as a teenager as a as an adult how he struggled with this through the lens of religion against the laws of religion right and it tries to be honest about nationalism too national identity all if you if you watch the news it seems so easy for us to look at palestinians to look at iranians iraqis whatever look at the isis rebellion look down and say ah these these poor benighted petty people who somehow mix together religion and politics for them their faith is you know [Music] inextricably bound up with nationalism how about irish people about scottish people how about english people how about southern baptists in the united states of america you think religion isn't inextricably bound up with nationalism for us to whoever the [ __ ] you are in the world you you think you know we talk about the japanese we talk about south koreans we don't really talk about italians the french really like take a step back look at detachment with christianity and you're going to see that we really do have the same fundamental problems as islam the most important reason to engage in the critique of islam is not because it is so different from christianity but because they are so nearly the same they're so closely comparable um if you can get to the point of admitting to yourself that it's not just circumcision that the problem is little kids like tom baker being put into religious schools uh what next what now like already just with those just with those realizations just with admitting that to yourself the political path we have in front of us is very clear now i'll digress for half a second i'll um see your comments coming guys if you have a second hit the thumbs up button it'd be nice to have more people join and comment while i'm doing this but obviously i have enough i can do this as a straight monologue and melissa can join at any time too i'm not going to lean on the comments to provide me with with content here you know but when you're dealing with people face to face and this may be your own parents it may be your grandparents and maybe friends you've known since school it may be people who identify as atheists or even people who identify as atheist activists who are horrified by your honesty when it comes to actually destroying the christian church we actually talk about destroying religion destroying these institutions permanently you know actually talking about abolition of circumcision actually talking about abolition of religious childhood education you know that's when it's really useful to point out the parallels between christianity and islam christianity and whatever the worst cult is that they're afraid of that's actually you know alive and operating like oh oh so you think it's no problem to take a little kid and put them into a catholic school you think that's no problem at all well how do you think about muslim kids in madrasas how does that look what if it's your kid what if we take your kid and we put them into the same school in palestine you know in israel's occupied territories you want to say how about we put them into a school operated by hamas how about we put them into a school operated by isis you know these things really exist how about they go into the regular school system even right now in turkey you'd be shocked at how cr this is a big issue in turkey is um the current prime minister of uh turkey has been encouraging more and more people to be in the religious school system the revival of religious as opposed to secular journey but they have both you know i show you taking more money how what do you think about the you know the school system in saudi arabia you know you think there aren't neo-nazis who want to run their own school really like in the old days i could just say try google or try looking around youtube now this stuff is all so censored you're gonna have to go to some other websites you're gonna have to go to you know the dark web or something you're gonna go to sensor we go websites that are outside of the censorship system because it's now harder and harder to see you know you think there aren't people who want to raise their kids in a neo-nazi school i think most of them right now are doing homeschooling but if that doesn't already exist it will do you think there aren't communists like within the united states of america not even talking about china or russia who want to give their kids a hardcore communist upbringing and you know one of the great advantages of the era of the internet is that you get to really see and hear the reality of these things if i just tell you to imagine in the abstract what a christian summer camp is like you know yeah maybe it seems laughable it seems like a joke when you are watching the youtube videos that are made by the christian summer camps themselves this is not an expose it's not like a critic of christianity suggesting that we should abolish these summer camps you're looking at promotional videos made by christians themselves made by the owners of the summer camps themselves to invite new students just look at that and it's so damning and it's so horrifying and for me at least i can say it is disturbing and upsetting to see the reality of what they're doing with these kids and you know i'm i'm only looking at the christian summer camps that are in english you know i'm looking at the english language i'm sure it gets worse you can look at the equivalent for islam you can look at the equivalent for scientology you can look at the equivalent for mormonism all right and now ask yourself what happens next in the united states of america and by the way we don't have to exclusively talk about uh we can talk about japan we talk about taiwan we talk about the whole world oh i could tell some stories about religious schools in taiwan um uh the united states of america has been on a very strange path in the philosophy of education and the politics of education and questioning what should be the government's role in education in the constitution the united states itself not one word no during the period of time when they were negotiating and writing the constitution the federal constitution united states america not a single thought given to it uh within the same generation though just a couple generations later by contrast look at the constitution for the state of maine so that's m-a-i-n-e if you're not american if you look at the constitutional state of maine then you search for words like education and school i forget the exact wording whoa what a difference you can tell that in those few decades since you know the revolution ended the federal government form almost immediately and over the course of just a few decades within one lifetime the issue the question of what will be the government's role what will be the government's responsibility in education it grew and grew until we get into what's called the progressive era and interestingly during the progressive era that was actually a period where the right wing and the left wing of the time they found common cause because the conservatives even though you might think they would be opposed to government's role in education government-controlled uh education that you might think the right-winger concerns the time would be defending the uh power of the church to uh provide and control education conservatives on the contrary and religious conservatives who had they still have a lot of money now they had a lot of money and control and influence then they were convinced that government funding of education and government control of education would result in the moral upliftment of the working class and they were aware that the working class and just poor people people were completely penniless they didn't have access to the elite education offered by christian schools most of them had access to no education at all so that okay for the moral uplift of the poor the left and the right so to speak were united in supporting the first steps taken towards standardization and government provision of education so this this has emerged in the united states in this sort of unplanned way very much outside of the constitutional framework nobody in america knows what the role of government is supposed to be in education there is a debate which i saw myself here on youtube between nixon and jfk between richard nixon and john kennedy and uh the way they talk about government's role in education it's completely surreal it's just mind-blowing that at that time this was still a totally open question like you think we were still this was still during the signing of the american constitution so i'm in this totally open-minded hypothetical way what role do you think government should have if any to what extent should education just remain the domain of donors and you know at that time it's completely dominated by the christian church now within the last few decades the [Laughter] the library shelf for philosophy of education is bare guys there's just so few books worth reading from the last century in terms of philosophy of education but the political debate about education in the united states of america has been dominated by the libertarians and if you don't know what i mean by libertarian they are basically the polite version of anarcho-capitalists that's what i work specifically right-wing enterprise so there are some left-wing capitalists completely laughable political ideology okay there was the libertarian agenda in education and then there were basically various disorganized attempts to fight against or struggle against the libertarian i'll say a few words with that in a second now i do think we probably have some germans in in the audience right now my youtube channel is a lot more successful in germany than it is in canada and i think that reflects that germany has a higher level of education in case you haven't noticed i don't livestream at german but it is fair to say that in germany the memory of world war ii the memory of the holocaust the awareness that they were in the process of a tightly controlled government transition from fascism to capitalist democracy right i i think that really you know produced a very different culture of education very different set of uh fundamental presuppositions about what the role of government in public education is and i mean everyone there knew like you had a generation where every single student in your class either their father had been a nancy or their grandfather or both like everyone had at least one grandparent who was a nazi so how are you going to raise that next generation to not become neo-nazis to not repeat you know the ideologies i'm not saying 100 of germans leaned that way politically just saying this was a massive challenge right oh and in case because you had heard there was this thing called communism right the other thing the other reason for the german government to have a kind of choke hold on public education to control it very tightly was okay we want to steer you away from fascism we want to steer you away from the right wing but we don't want to steer you too far to the left if you keep going then you start sympathizing with east germany you start sympathizing with joseph stalin you start sympathizing with the eastern bloc and you know to say it was a cold war uh is really another statement if you had been in germany at that time it was it was a very intense ongoing struggle so those are political circumstances within the last 100 years that i do think fostered a very different uh philosophy education culture of education in germany guess what guys it's not enough if you in case you think germany is the great homeland of like secular scientific modern attitudes in case you think germany is the graveyard of the catholic religion or is the graveyard of the protestant religion look again it's not all those institutions are thriving germans are still incredibly [ __ ] up by christianity like you know i think a great comparison within europe be to look at education in germany look at education in ireland right they're both [ __ ] up i mean they're both [ __ ] up by religion but ireland did not go through any of those challenges and they weren't worried about fascism and reverting to nazis whatever they weren't as worried about communism communism wasn't an immediate threat in ireland that way and you know don't get me wrong the government did have a very heavy hand uh in basically forming a new national ideology in ireland the role of the gaelic language there were different things you could see pushing and pulling at uh national education uh government-funded education ireland but it's nothing compared to the struggle uh germany was in the midst of in the in the long 20th century shall we say all right but my point is here just to say as muscular and decisive as government intervention in education is in the german context in the german example it is still not remotely adequate to snuffing out the influence of the church i'm saying the church just to generalize catholicism protestantism christianity of varys kinds in germany lutheranism right all of these religions that were in so many ways utterly discredited by the 20th century and by the nazi experience in specific guess what guys they've been revived so i've mentioned this before one of my employers in the past a guy who was my boss uh in the past he had been a small child during the nazi periods he was a very old man when i knew him and uh but you know the period of reconstruction after the end of world war ii he had more mature memories of that you know but during the war itself he'd been a small child uh but the immediate aftermath he remembered very well or with more complexity put it that way his childhood memories of the nasty period were simplistic shall we say but he did have some anyway uh i remember he said to me it was it was a big deal to him for like he said this he said you know um there are a lot of things you can't learn from archaeology you know the reality of what's going on politically or culturally he said if a thousand years from now if archaeologists dig up the remains of what happened in germany in the 20th century they will see after the nazi period we were building churches everywhere they were building new churches they were rebuilding old churches that had been destroyed by the bombing and they were renovating and restoring old churches that had just become dilapidated through the process of time were now valued as as cultural heritage he said you know anyone looking at those kinds of archaeological remains they would think this was a period of intense you know intense christian faith of christian revival and he said i lived through that period and let me tell you there never was a more nihilistic never was a more atheistic period in the history of germany everyone was completely disillusioned with the church if anything we all hated and resented christianity and they all knew they all knew the sense in which not just the church as an abstract uh institution or abstract concept not just the sense of which the church had been attached to the nazi party they knew how their particular priest their particular pastor their particular preacher they knew the individual people inside their church in their city or their town they knew what they did during the horror and of course in many cases uh not only was their resentment but their their role in nazism their role in anti-semitism the ruling the fad ideologies and crazy pseudoscience of the day and the reform of christianity itself by the way carried out by the nazi party so that's much forgotten though uh so-called positive christianity adolf hitler's reforms to the christian religion during his life um a lot of people died no matter which side they were fighting on and the war was like yeah you piece of [ __ ] you were an able-bodied man and you were here in this pulpit preaching you were here in this lutheran church preaching instead of being out there on the front lines where my brother died or my father died at my like where a whole bunch of us died you had it you were real comfortable here in the church saying this [ __ ] that now nobody believes in you know you were a conformist to the worst worst kind okay but here's the problem so you just say this is just a totally human reflection and feeling from my former boss who lives through that that period okay the problem is in allowing the infrastructure of the church to be rebuilt instead of burning it down instead of tearing it down forever instead of decisively deciding yeah you know what the history of lutheranism ends with the nazi period and now it's over you could you know you have much ground to abolish the lutheran church as the nazi party and really they were the same thing guys during the third fight they were one in the same organization they really were i mean especially lutheranism within germany you know look at the history of what happened you know you could you could have at that time draw a line in the sand and say you know i know obviously i'm not proposing that would have completely extinguished religion but okay if christianity is going to exist it is going to be some kind of completely new completely disestablished form of christianity that doesn't have churches and doesn't control schools doesn't control universities where it is stripped of its worldly power and it doesn't collect taxes and it doesn't collect tides and it doesn't get benefits from the government and taxpayers money are not used to build its architecture to build its monuments or restore its grounds like you know we're tearing it down and it's going to stay okay well guess what it's not what germany did no matter how nihilistic they were at the time you know for let's say 10 years or something after the end of that spirit they allowed the infrastructure of the church to be rebuilt and in so doing they locked themselves into another century of the [ __ ] dark ages it's not getting better it's getting worse vladimir putin in russia oh suddenly everything i just said about germany it seems a lot easier to [ __ ] admit to ourselves when it's russia doesn't it what what happened in russia under communism yeah the christian church was suppressed you can say it really wasn't eliminated you can talk to people who lived through that period of russia people were discouraged from going to church but under russian communism the church didn't cease to exist one of many paradoxes i mean also by the way in case you didn't know when the russian communist party was founded one of the most fundamental promises was that everyone would get the same salary like to eliminate wage inequality like everyone would get you'd have a minimum wage and a maximum wage wage the minimum wage would be fifty dollars the maximum energy fifty dollars everyone's got the same yeah they never even attempted it's one of those promises campaign promises this bird you know i don't know total economic inequality and they say strangely the early promises about abolition of religion they really just never followed through on them but nevertheless under russian communism you certainly had a powerful deterrent to the christian faith what happened after the berlin wall fell what happened after that fateful day in 1991 as i recall december of 1991 when for the last time the red flag was lowered over the russian house of parliament over all the russian government buildings in moscow simultaneously and instead they put up the old imperial tri-color they restored the pre-communist flag but for the last time the hammer and sickle came down never to fly again what happened you didn't destroy the church when you had the chance you allowed it to be rebuilt you even funded it and fostered it and pretended it was just cultural heritage you pretended that it was just an empty box this beautifully carved empty box who wants to get rid of it it has this wonderful quality of decorative art oh it's only an empty box you can put anything inside you can put the most modern humanitarian sentiments inside the most refined 21st century relativistic ideology can go inside oh don't dolter out the box just because it used to have something bad inside it doesn't mean it always has to you can reuse the box you can reuse the packaging what do you [ __ ] think is gonna happen in the next hundred years in russia given what happened in the last hundred years you think the russian orthodox church is getting less powerful it's not it's terrifying how much money and power the russian orthodox church has now it's terrifying how much land they own okay and they have schools and they have universities and they employ people they're like a separate organized crime institution within russia that is unbelievably powerful and i can say it's not going to change i'm i'm telling you i think it's going to get worse it's they're going to get more and more powerful it's going to get worse before it gets better and you can speculate about to what extent the politicians of vladimir putin's generation to what extent they did this just out of laziness like they just didn't have a strong filthy to what extent they did it out of a sense of nationalism like rather than religion feeling that a part of russian-ness was caught up in the eastern orthodox church again in that box in that architecture in that music in those decorative elements and you know to what extent people really sincerely had a crisis of faith i remember it being debated this is right around 1989 1991 i remember it being debated whether or not the russian government should now censor television more because there were these charismatic christian leaders spiritualists new age hippie leaders who were getting on tv and you know it looked like a pyramid scam but you know they were they were making a lot of money you were asking for donations asking for investments they were mixing religion and fundraising and so on and at that time it seemed like enormous numbers of russians were so eager for it you know after being starved of organized religion under communism there were huge numbers of them who stepped up and embraced it but by the way there were plenty of people especially when you read uh specific biographies or autobiographies of people you will be amazed how many people just continued practicing their their particular form of religion throughout the whole communist period well you know for for decades and uh they weren't persecuted more or less than anyone else i mean life was miserable in russia for everyone life was miserable for communist party cadres don't get me wrong so that's easy to admit to ourselves right it's easy to look at russia vladimir putin's russia our hated enemy in 2021 right oh they [ __ ] up oh they had this opportunity to break with the church forever to embrace modern secular scientific anti-religious anti-clerical values to to stamp out religious education for the next generation of kids you know to have the kind of decisive shift that germany had in some ways after the nazi period and it said look your father may have been a nancy your grandfather may have been a nancy but not you oh it's going to be different for you it's going to be different for your generation that was wrong this is right we're moving on you know to have that kind of really clear turning point in history and guess what guys it involves coercion in germany it's illegal to be a nazi the law is not enforced terribly strictly you can google right now and see there were there are whole towns full of nazis in germany there are people getting away with it but everyone gets the signal this is something that is actually forbidden this is something in the past and we are coercively going to communicate to everyone that it must remain uh in the past it's easy for us to look at vladimir putin's russia say oh boy what what a lost opportunity you know and now now here instead anyone have any optimism about the next hundred years in russia does anyone think the power of the church is going to diminish or disappear let's let's just calibrate it 20 years from now i hope everyone here is still going to be alive 20 years from now 20 years from now who is going to be more religious the russians or the italians the ukrainians or the spanish right i'm just being with you i think eastern europe 20 years from now is going to be more [ __ ] up by religion than italy italy is somewhat [ __ ] up but don't get me wrong don't like i don't know on a scale of one to ten it's difficult to assign numbers these would be difficult to calibrate it try to come up with a scale of harm done by christianity in any one of these kind of oh yeah oh yeah russians questions are [ __ ] up by christian and it's it's not getting better guys it's not [Laughter] and on the other hand isn't it hard to sympathize with china isn't it hard to sympathize with the horrible government of evil xi jinping when they put the foot down and say islam is over no more madrasas no more religious education literally no more telling people not to eat pork i know that may seem like a joke to you guys i mean i'm i'm vegan i don't eat pork also don't eat cows but yeah i you know i do believe the stories about the communist party going and force people to eat pork and it very directly mirrors their decades-long history of forcing buddhists to meet generally people who were committed buddhists including the former emperor at the time of the revolution of somewhat sadistically forcing them to be non-vegetarian as part of breaking down their faith breaking down their their sense of religious identity so this consistent recurring motif in the coming spread it would not surprise me at all it's possible it's propaganda it's possible but it would not surprise me at all if they are sitting down with muslims and saying no you're going to learn that there's nothing magical about this meat it doesn't even taste that different from other kinds of meat you're going to sit down and eat pork like everyone else in china you're going to start living in the modern world and stop having superstitious beliefs monstrous oh terrible unforgivable oh oh all of a sudden i care so much about human rights do you give a [ __ ] about human rights in north korea do you give a [ __ ] about human rights in communist china something give a [ __ ] that nobody in china can vote you give a [ __ ] about human rights in myanmar in cuba i mean in saudi arabia oh no no no no no no no no in this in this very specific context of religious freedom in one province of china i care about human rights how about buddhists in tibet no interest no you know no no no oh you you care about human rights i don't i don't think human beings should live for the next century in a museum devoted to the worst [ __ ] errors of their past i don't think the 22nd century should be a [ __ ] museum to what we believed in the 14th century where we lock ourselves into a goddamn gilded cage a gleaming display case with our accumulated cultural heritage oh look at this vaz it's so [ __ ] pretty look at my ming vods look look at this this fine tapestry look at this handy work look at all the things we did devoted to these vulgar idiotic cult beliefs look at all the paintings we have of angels look at look at all the paintings we have a baby jesus we're so [ __ ] proud fill up your [ __ ] house with it fill up your life with it inculcate your children with this ideology for no goddamn reason other than the fact that your great-grandparents did repeat it forever and ever even down to an including what involves cutting off part of your penis what involves losing 60 of the nerve endings in your penis and i've read the bible there is no justification there's no great symbolic meaning to it you can read the bible cover to cover asking yourself why and there is no answer to the question why it's the mark of the covenant of abraham cutting off part of your dick that's how barbaric these beliefs are there's nothing beautiful about it doesn't even compare well to the poetry of william shakespeare and i'm a critic of shakespeare i think more than half of his writing is garbage more than half of his plays are garbage i don't particularly like his sonnets okay i'm not really an uncritical fan of shakespeare but okay if you've got complete works of william shakespeare and you've got the christian bible which one do you want to take to a desert island and which one which one do you want recited at your funeral blah blah blah there's some value in some of shakespeare's work want to cut off your dick for it huh you want to get a [ __ ] circumcision to symbolize your commitment to the brilliance and genius of [ __ ] william shakespeare all right the future of atheism cannot be tolerance for religion because in case you haven't heard one religion doesn't have tolerance for us two each religion has nothing but intolerance for all of the other [ __ ] religions do you think it's harmless to send your kid to a sunni summer camp you think it's harmless to send your kid to be raised in a shiite muslim fundamentalist school i'll tell you one thing i want you have two kids raise one of them suny and one of them shiites so they [ __ ] hate each other how does that sound right the only reason why we can see this so clearly is the the otherness of islam okay it's that it's remote enough it's alien enough for us that we can perceive in islam the same [ __ ] problems that are there with judaism and christianity they're just more familiar gonna take a moment to read thomas the audience melissa if you'd like to join in [Laughter] for reasons i was looking up videos lately of christmas music uh for critical reasons i'm writing something about christmas so i saw a family that i'd posted music videos of themselves with their children their six-year-old daughter was singing these christmas songs um and just to me it hit you know it's exactly what you've been saying like i really don't think this is good for children and uh i do see the real harm and in my family having seen how different people different personality types different characteristics and cousins and distant cousins how they've responded once they grow up once they get out of the christian uh household they respond you know um one of my relatives or one of my distant relatives has become a homeless drug addict basically and i know it's because he was messed up because of christianity going to not a religious summer camp but basically a boot camp to you know become what more well-behaved um you know it's just i have seen plenty of these examples of children growing up and being screwed up by their religion that they were uh inculcated with yeah messed up for a long time and look i think you know yeah right the dark ages are not over yet they the dark ages will end when we end them when we force them to end it's not going to end voluntarily go on yeah children today are celebrating christmas you know celebrating and singing songs to commemorate the birth of jesus this is this is something that we we have to be we have to be really strong in this and that we don't accept it we don't want it anymore anyway you know not every movement needs leadership you know i think there are forms of social change that can come about without leaders and without followers i think there are you know um [Music] the nature of the challenge we've got in facing down five thousand years ten thousand years of religious tradition you know i think it does need leadership i think it does require leadership whether that leadership is overt or covert you know i think you can have an organization that's secretive frankly that's a conspiracy frankly but it's not it's not going to happen without leadership and you know there is this quotation from karl marx i'm an anti-marxist and an anti-communist by the way that's your first time saying i'm not a marxist you know to to paraphrase and truncate it slightly religion is the opiate of the masses it's the soul of a soulless world um i don't believe that i disagree with karl marx i think egotism is the opiate of the masses i think what people really like is feeling special and feeling superior to others especially in ways that are completely unearned and unmerited believing in their intrinsic superiority rather than just being superior because you practiced shooting a basketball for 100 hours and now you can shoot a basketball well you know people who have the humbling process of earning their superiority are rarely on the synchronous i think the opiate of the masses is egotism and i think religion can provide that and i think atheism can provide it also it's thus very distressing for me to see the extent to which atheism and the leaders of the atheist movement are so completely disabled by egotism they're disabled by this same opiate masses you know now in case you know my family religion was judaism to a large extent my father had been a convert to christianity and he had more than a decade of being a crazy extremist christian he wasn't just a little bit christian during his christian period you know uh but my mother was jewish and thus i am considered genetically jewish blah blah blah i mean i grew up in a very haunted household you know in this way but one of the aspects of judaism is of course this notion of being the chosen people you know being special just just for being born into this uh tradition and i got to tell you i think that that's not a distinctive aspect of judaism i think that's exactly what judaism has in common with every other religion you can meet zen buddhists who feel special because they're born into zen buddhism you meet zem buddhists who feel special because they converted to zen buddhism and you can meet christians who feel special because they're christian uh so on down the line you know it's true it exhibits itself somewhat differently the sense of specialness when you're talking about a minority religion as opposed to a dominant majority religion but still americans can feel special just because they're american you know just because they're part of this nationality this ethos this constitution this history you know this democracy whatever it is you know nationalism is a masculine but it still involves this sense of being being chosen it sickens me to see the same fundamentally religious attitude exhibited by the leaders of the atheist movement uh the leaders certainly within my lifetime all of them that have that have come and gone you know um [Music] you want a job yeah i just want to say i really it resonated with you what you said about christians uh people who are religious they're antagonistic to atheists it's not like they're accepting it that's right they don't have the same kind of you know we're supposed to tolerate religious people but religious people don't tolerate atheists yeah so the the most fundamental premise of christianity is i'm right you're wrong so when you die you go to hell now different christians cope with this in different ways some say that you should have this kind of loving and snide attitude towards atheists and non-believers kind of invite them in and some are more harsh and condemning and so on but yeah uh tolerance is a lie now i would just say if you guys want i can talk about this for an hour solid the notion of tolerance that is very much written into the american constitution the notion of tolerance that exists in the united states of america at the end of the puritan period we might say it's a few decades after puritanism has kind of lost its luster but very much influenced by the brief but bright burning candle of quakerism in the united states and quakerism is basically one of several puritan ideologies and movements puritanism isn't one thing it isn't one church there's a wave of enthusiasm that came and went the notion of tolerance at that time it didn't apply to black people it didn't apply to american indians it didn't apply to anyone but quote-unquote us it didn't even apply to catholics all right the notion of tolerance in the united states america at that time is a unique product of the english civil war and you've got to understand what was going on in christianity in england before the english civil war because it really did cause it in part it's not the only cause it's one of the most important causes what happened during the civil war era during the dictatorship so to speak the foster civil war the brief period of some democracy followed by dictatorship you know what you want to say and then you know say a century afterward the long shadow of what happened they you know came to this notion that the best way for christianity to move forward the best way for it to advance was to have this very limited freedom of religion this tolerance of basically having different puritanical protestant churches competing with one another lively discourse and this was a period of history when alcoholism was basically 100 the amount of alcohol people's drinking is unbelievable and these groups they believed in shall we say hearing voices uh they believed in uh feeling the spirit of the lord come into you and you hit your feet on the ground and you stammer and speak in a supernatural voice they they believed in superstition in its most crass form and it didn't last you know like even i'm sorry it's talking about centuries i'm not saying it was a wasn't just one summer once it wasn't just a few you know i mean obviously it changed the fate of the world get me wrong don't get me wrong but no it wasn't sustainable now many of these religions aren't i'll just mention uh there was slash is a religion called subud one of the few youtube channels of montreal is still uploading uh videos you know why are some forms of religion more durable than others subud also was based on this notion that you put yourself into this uh state of possession by a spirit so to speak you put yourself into this very strange uh where they would uh so it's not a trance i'm the reason i'm not saying trans i'm aware technically what a trance is in any case subwood it's not that different from what the quakers used to do where you put yourself in this state of mind and they'd either get on stage or stand in the middle of a circle of people and they'd start dancing and twitching around in a strange way and speaking or singing in a strange way this uh spontaneous i mean all these words in english are so loaded if i say it's possession well what are you possessed by you know some form of christianity you're possessed by the quote unquote holy spirit but regardless of the kind of philosophical justification well you know i think you can imagine that's the sort of thing that can motivate people and recruit people it's a kind of religious experience an altered state of mind that can have a big impact on people for 10 years how do you raise your own children in it how do you establish and manage institutions that last for a century with it take a look at quakerism today almost all of the distinctive aspects of the quaker faith and its founding years have disappeared they're aware of them but they've you know same with mormonism mormonism as it exists today is totally different from mormonism in the life of the prophet mormonism today you know on the outside it looks so much like any other form of mainstream christianity you do a little bit of digging and you find out all the crazy things they believe in at least on paper but many mormons will tell you their own religion is only 10 different from christianity that's a lie but it may be a lie they they tell themselves so in terms of in these religions once they institutionalize once the centuries start to pass uh that's one of the aspects but anyway um we have a cultural and political memory of tolerance tolerance as defined during the english civil war switzerland doesn't look at the history of christianity in switzerland right so switzerland the great homeland of protestantism that's where zvingli had his debates with martin luther okay guess what as soon as the debates were opened were over apparently as soon as the debates were over zwingli and his followers they start persecuting everyone who disagrees with them on any doctrinal point the swiss tradition even though protestant it's not catholic it's protestant they're out there persecuting heretics and today of course what was considered heretical it's like minor disagreements about exactly what happens in the doctrine of trans substantiation when you eat a magical weight for a dream like really minor things about different kinds of baptism or something no this is life and death to them these are you know the nature of the persecution is incredibly balancing [Laughter] sega genesis or super nintendo make up your mind gotta be on one side or the other [Laughter] uh so i just say like swiss prosthetism was not part of that that tradition in england at all now i think some other parts of europe actually were influenced by it more or less i think the netherlands the netherlands has always been very tightly bound to what's going on culturally politically in england you know you can you can make a case in someone anyway they're across the water from them and so on um another story to be told there but yeah so we have we are burdened with a false ideology of tolerance a notion of tolerance that only ever existed to serve a certain type of narrow instrumental purpose within doctrinaire or protestant christianity you know this is one interesting comment here from turnbull so turn of all i wonder how my whole life would be different if i'd settled in scandinavia whether sweden norway whatever but i'm aware in most of the studies about atheism most of the studies say that the country that has gone the furthest toward atheism is either sweden nor way denmark that the scandinavian countries you know there's some statistical evidence for this but i think it's mostly just the anecdotal experience of being there and meeting people and talking to people that it seems like it seems like everyone's an atheist but in any case a significant percentage of people are are atheists and then scandinavia atheism has become the dominant discourse so i turn vol writes in and says quote in scandinavia it's the opposite religious people accept atheists well we give them a harder time um okay but here's the problem i still want to put to you uh turn of all you know the power that a parent has over their own child now we have traditions in canada of tattooing your face and there are talks now about reviving those traditions because most of them were eliminated by christianity they were forced to cease to exist by christian missionaries and i saw one youtube video from one woman who's inuit you know genetically her ancestry is inuit what people commonly call eskimo still um and you know she made the decision to tattoo her face in the tradition of her great-grandmother or something for how many generations have been in her family since they had this there are still some photographs of what those tattoos look like well you know i think it is one thing for an adult to make the decision to tattoo their own face and we probably do need laws about exactly when you're an adult when do you get to make decisions at you is it 18 is it 16 is it 14 is it 21 it's a big decision to tattoo your own face it really is um but i think probably everyone in this audience immediately just because that is an act of rebellion against christianity to say you're going to recapture the appearance of your great grandparents before christian missionaries arrived there's a sense in which we sympathize that on the other hand it also represents a kind of superstition and a kind of religion that none of us would sympathize with we don't want to return to uh worshipping the evil spirit that's at the bottom of the ocean that catches finger men and drags them down to the bottom of the sea sorry inuit mythology is it's very evocative in this way but you know the the water there is unbelievably cold and deadly so a big part of their cultural experience is anyone who falls over the side of the boat is almost immediately dead uh whether they sink or swim you know what if even if they if you get them out of the water they've been so uh so totally chilled that they they don't recover and so on so this idea that falling in the water is death influences a great deal of their their religious imagery and i read so i used to research this stuff i was in a university program i read an account of a christian missionary who at least in his area introduced writing for the first time to the anyway so i know you know it's a huge area so i'm not saying this is definitely this is the first white man to teach them how to read and write anywhere in there bernice in his in his area none of them none of them had the concept of reading and writing before and he came and explained them at that time inuit culture was very vibrant it hadn't been exterminated by uh european influence yet and uh so he's talking them through how the phonetics work and then the first thing he writes on the board it's in any way it's their equivalent of you know kichi manito and in korean ojibwe you know um you know so they have a word of language for the the great spirit for this kind of this this monotheistic god who to some extent is bigger than all the other gods who actually includes them you know they have this kind of idea that there's a kind of mega god even though they have stories about smaller gods also you know and then he wrote i forget it was on a chalkboard which wrote on some surface this is the arctic they probably didn't have a chalkboard it was probably i don't know what the hell he was writing on he was writing on something that gallery um he wrote in the phonetics he had just explained to them how the phoneticism was he wrote the great spirit loves you and all of them were stunned in silence and they sounded it out and they looked each other and it's not that they didn't have that concept they had the concept of god they were terrified god for them god or gods that was the thing at the bottom of the ocean that pulls you down to [Laughter] to be trapped forever at the bottom of the sea i mean you know it's there's a lot of fear a lot of fear and trembling in an inuit uh uh you know mythology and here was this guy telling you you know the the one true god you know loves you this message of love and so on and this is a stunning you know turning point in there in their religion um yeah it's easy to sympathize with someone who wants to tattoo their own face what if this same woman has a child and now wants to tattoo the child's face when they're still a baby when they're eight years old like maybe they can talk but they're not really at a level to understand the consequences of this decision you know even in scandinavia i'm just i'm just going to i don't plan to ever spend time in scandinavia i can imagine in a different life i would have ended up there um partly because i hear really good things about the university system like that alone is a reason for me to move to another country by the way just just being with you i've also done research and i've read a lot of bad things i've heard both i have i did do enough research to realize you have a lot of really deep problems with university education i do i do know that um but nevertheless compared to canada i can imagine that i would have i could have ended up you know somewhere in scandinavia but in scandinavia you know if you think you've won you know i i really disagree um because of the power parents still have over children the the power they have to tattoo their own faces tattoo the face the statue the faith of their ancestors onto those children obviously religious upbringing religious education and and so on and um yeah i look i will i could do i could do a documentary movie about it we'd go to scandinavia we could really interview people and do research and ask calls like scandinavia have we won yet i don't know come up with a catchy title but questioning you know is this victory is this the end point for atheism and i i can tell you right now i think my conclusion would be no um you know that you can't be complacent that this hasn't gone nearly far enough and both geographically and culturally i would put to you the the possibility what if scandinavia is in a transition now of gradually drifting over toward the same kind of normalcy um represented by russia the ukraine eastern europe i mean i know culturally and linguistically you're different people but i mean look at finland i'm sorry you know i mean your history is not easily extricated from russia specifically it's the giant next door um you could drift back toward being a more religious country uh you know again if you don't take really decisive steps now but yes i mean i think scandinavia provides a fascinating set of contrasting examples and the role of of religion and education and culture and politics there um you know i just mentioned in germany several of the most powerful political parties identify their religion in the name you know the christian democrats being the most obvious but which parties are christian which parties are specifically catholic and protestant and so on that's written right on the ticket there you know now any of us would regard that as barbaric in iraq any of us who regard that as barbaric in iran oh how can you have a you know it's actually an issue in syria too the difference from you know alawite islam is different from the other forms of islam and so on oh how can you have a political party or a political fashion that's defined by its religious affiliation well you've got that overtly still in germany in the 21st century and i remember i mean i crossed swords with this very powerful charity in scandinavia swedish church aid i think that's the name sorry if i'm gonna name slightly wrongs maybe it was even scandinavian church i forget but i know there were very very powerful church charities and they were [ __ ] things up for us in places like laos and cambodia where i had to deal with them anyone i remember people from scandinavia saying oh but you have to understand these these organizations they're barely christian and you know and i know what they're comparing it to i know those organizations get it they're not as christian as like american missionary outfits guess what guys in terms of the future of laos and cambodia um no this is this is a very potent form of christian efforts just reading through your comments oh so yeah one of the saddest issues of all here our regular contributor do you want to give me lucas says quote atheists one child per couple evangelicals three children per couple well the statistics are even more worrying than that and there's are we talking with the united states are we talking about saudi arabia are we talking about palestine you know i'm talking about israel judaism within israel um so you have to disaggregate the data and now we do this in social sciences all the time this is normal procedure for data analysis in political science or whatever you want to say of the families who have seven children in israel what percentage are atheists of the families who have six children in israel what percentage of atheists of the families that have five children four children three children two children one child zero children right so you have to break it down and make a make a bar chart that shows those splits that's where you really see the difference so yeah the the statistic using is probably an average like on average evangelicals have three well yeah but that's an average when you look at the upper end of the spectrum who are the people having three four five six seven eight nine ten children they're almost all religious maniacs um now you know some are christian some are jewish some are muslim but it is incredibly rare to find uh an atheistic modern secular person who has you know let's say more than four children but i think as you go up the chart you'll see like almost all of them have either zero one or two children and thus the the averages is down there now there are reasons um and again by the way this my father would be to say ashamed would be to totally misrepresent his character he was incapable of feeling shame but my father would not be able to cope with my saying this openly the reason why my father had so many children was that he used to be a crazy christian he used to be uh committed to a form of charismatic christianity and then i mean he always was left-wing he was a left-wing crazy christian but then he moved on into this different phases of his communist identity he then wanted to misrepresent his past as if he always had been a communist and there's some truth to that i mean you know he he wasn't conservative when he was a christian maniac um but he would not have had nearly so many children if he hadn't been for those say 10 years roughly um committed to a strange form of of christianity and by the way for some reason his form of christianity legal marriage celibacy not so much you know you know people pick and choose uh getting a whole bunch of random hoe bags pregnant that was his form of christianity and you know he could back it up read the old testament there were a lot of guys having kids with a lot of different women in the old testament like if you actually read the bible in the actually in the new testament there's enough of that too the new testament is shorter and there's less about family uh but there are there's enough material so he could justify uh getting all these women pregnant you know uh here you just quote chapter and verse you know there's enough of that in christianity and yeah um as i've said many times under many different headings the excuses are harder to quit than the thing itself yeah so look coming back to the you know the very real very palpable very important issue here introduced by do you want to give me the kiss what do you think the future of israel is just 20 years from now given this fact you know and and by the way we can like repeat this within palestine or whatever you want to call it the occupied terror whatever turn you want to use you know within the occupied territories you can do a similar chart for muslims okay how many people are having seven kids or i don't know if you gotta start at nine or ten how many people have ten kids nine eight seven six five four three two one how many people are religious who have many kids and then when you get down to the lower numbers what percentage of people are atheist versus religious in this case meaning uh muslim predominantly um and then what's the knock-on effect of that uh 10 years from now 20 years from now and so on israel already is a country dominated by religious maniacs some of them are muslim maniacs some of them are jewish maniacs there's a very influential christian maniac minority in israel even though they may not have big numbers they're organized and well-funded there are christians in israel and they're very passionate you can imagine why and you know the people who have modern secular atheist anti-clerical attitudes they're over represented in all the walks of life that are actually getting [ __ ] done right like you can live your life in israel today you can live in haifa or any of these places and it seems like everyone you meet is secular or atheist everyone you meet at the vegan restaurant you know everyone you let's say you work in the banking system or something any any kind of high level executive people it seems like all the time you're dealing with people who are either just barely nominally religious or they're actually anti-religious and non-religious yeah um but that minority is getting smaller and smaller and they're becoming voiceless and if you live in israel and you have a child and put your child into a school what is the effect of putting your child into a school where the vast majority of the other children are unassailable in their religious convictions where they're the local majority so to speak again i think any of you would be terrified to put your uh put your children into an old muslim school where your child is the one atheist in a school where everyone else is a muslim you know well you know within israel both for jew for for all three for jewish people for christian people and for uh muslim people it becomes impossible for the exceptional atheists to really raise their children as anti-religious shall we say unless you commit to you know homeschooling unless you commit to raising your kids totally cut off from the society uh that surrounds them do you want to jump in on that baby um so it's not just long-term demographic change that's the problem with religious people having more kids than secular and atheist people right there's there are also you know issues of kind of direct short-term cultural influence and frankly bullying you know i mean that is that is your experience in school if your experience in school is all the teachers are muslim all your classmates are muslim everyone's participating in these religious rituals everyone's talking about what are you doing this weekend i mean the same way for many of us we grew up with people talking about their plans for christmas you know it's just the most natural thing you grew up you grow up immersed in that well then just sustaining an atheist minority becomes a constant act of quite dangerous defiance and rebellion and so yeah this factor alone you know can we ever win there's someone in the audience who's using the name food favors um and their parents enrolled them in a catholic school for a few years not clear mayors and then later uh he or she was enrolled in madrasa in a mosque so an islamic school uh oh so both were for at least five years so catholic education for at least five years and then uh madrasa for at least five years and he or she says that he or she learned arabic and had to memorize the quran so that the memorization and recitation of the crime very simply uh this contributor in the audience says quote no good memories from the catholic or the islamic school oh so frida says it is very damaging you develop superstitious thought patterns even when you're not religious anymore so you know guys under a bunch of different headings people have told me that i should be a therapist because they're concerned about my ability to make money which is a reasonable concern how am i never gonna earn a living and you know people sometimes say that because they've seen my videos talking about drug addiction and sobriety or they see my videos about video game addiction and self-discipline or they see my videos that are in a philosophical way talking about living a meaningful life you know i've seen what i have to stand or different even the videos have been talking about fitness and exercise and stuff you know people say oh you should be a therapist you know you should get some kind of some kind of license or credential so you can be a therapist and help people one-on-one and earn a living doing it if you were a therapist how would you actually help these people you know so you guys know her if you've been watching my channel i know one ex-mormon some people here are mentioning examples of ex-mormons i know one ex-mormon and by the way i'm not going to say anything that she hasn't put on the internet herself either on youtube or on podcasts she used to do both her name used to be american unicorn which by the way was a name i gave her it's a funny story um she changed her youtube channel a different name before but she her youtube channel and instagram she changed them all to american unicorn because of a comment i made about her in passing on my channel okay she so she was raised mormon and when i first knew where she was completely devout committed woman she went from being anorexic to being an obsessive bodybuilder sorry i don't alexa stop she went from being anorexic to being an obsessive bodybuilder uh she went from being a devout mormon to being an atheist she went from sobriety to some moderate level of use of i think marijuana and alcohol and that kind of thing soft drugs at least at least she was drinking alcohol forgetting she smoking so and she also went from being vegan to being a mediator she had all these very strange transformations in her life and oh yeah i mean again i i i'm not going to give any details but she was pretty public about this she went from you know being a virgin until marriage and only having been with one man to shall we say a more liberal uh position in life and and more diverse experiences in life so i don't know how much of that is still on her instagram i think like a lot of people think she later deleted some of her comments on instagram stuff some of her posts fine it's totally her yeah um [Music] it's not fair to say looking at her life that she had one period of being damaged by religion and and then a period where she was fine and she had recovered like both periods all of these extremes she's still [ __ ] up by religion in the before and after she's just coping in different ways and you know again i'm not putting words in her mouth or something you can look at her period of being an anorexic and at that time i believe she was a virgin she was you know celibate until marriage um you can look at that as her coping with her religious upbringing with the faith inculcating her and you can look at her period of rebelling against that in different ways a period of bodybuilding and so on it's not like one is the problem and one's the solution like they're both imperfect tragic psychopathological ways of coping with the same religious upbringing and look you know i don't know her like that i i know i know her pretty well i know i know we're better than my own brothers and sisters you know i i don't know you know i'm not on any kind of speaking terms with any of my brothers and sisters he's not saying much but you know i know her to a to a limited extent i know i know about a lot of things in her life that are not on the internet and i'm not going to divulge you know um there is no before and after i mean sorry again same with with tom baker it's not like there was this period before where she was damaged and then there's after where she's not damaged anymore it's like looking at her life there's a series of struggles to cope with the way in which she's broken and she remains this broken person i'm sure she wouldn't like my saying that but on the other hand if we were having a face-to-face conversation or an eye on talking about i'm sure i could state it in an inoffensive way that she'd probably agree with and and reflect on and now you know a lot of people a lot of people like that i mean aaron janus claims to be i i can't trust i mean in terms of what she says in your youtube videos you know you tell me but aaron janice has one video up that i've shared the link to before uh where she's talking about her religion and her religious upbringing but she does she isn't honest in that video with the extent where she flip-flopped like she was involved with a kind of uh authoritarian traditional christianity for one period of her life but she was involved with a lot of other weird spiritual stuff in other periods of life and exactly what the timeline has been she's someone who flip-flopped between different uh religious extremes and again they're all coping mechanisms if there is no before and after you know it's not that before this was a problem and now you're uh now you're done with it so you want to jump in that video was with the documentary the indian filmmaker i know yeah so i just say she's another example of somebody oh oh yeah okay so with maggie maggie so i'll tell your story so maggie um yeah it's incredibly boring i feel sorry don't don't shout out youtube videos that are as boring as watching paint draw but you know uh so maggie is this vegan filmmaker and she made the video with uh aaron janice talking about her religious struggles i guess you know it's a question maggie from her own perspective she had a before and after that she had a religious upbringing and now she's over and done with it but that's not my perspective on maggie so again i'm not saying anything private about maggie she's someone i have spoken to privately but only here i'm going to say things that she said publicly in her own youtube videos she reacted to christianity which in her form of christianity had taught her to be a virgin until marriage only ever have sex with one man and to raise children with that man she reacted against that by becoming an anti-daedalist frankly hyper self-indulgent [ __ ] that's i'm not you know misrepresenting her too much she had this period of her life of really sleeping around of really aggressively pursuing one night's stance and she was working uh basically in a nightclub she was doing venue side management related to stand-up comedy so you know and it's a kind of you know people are getting drunk people are laughing people are enjoying themselves and she has been very honest and saying she had this period of her life of you know sleeping with uh with some comedians and so on no i think i don't think she only slept with stanford okay so i mean you can look at that are you gonna say yeah before you were sick and damaged and now you're cured you know like again sorry talking about this guy you know uh tom baker like every stage of his life is coping with the damage done to him by religion and you know you know there's cosmology involved what is the darkness to you what do you see in the shadows what do you see in your dreams what are the symbolic significance of things in life how do you think about the world how do you think about the last 5 000 years of history in the next 5 000 years of history i'll give this may be a remarkable or unusual comparison for you guys but um elon musk is popularizing the notion that this planet earth is something we can discard and move on from he believes that human beings can live on mars and in the immediate future he keeps giving these projections like within 10 years within these really short times which are and he keeps blowing his deadlines too because he's been doing this for a long time he keeps saying they're going to be these miraculous advances towards having human life on mars now one of the reasons why i'm such a harsh critic of that why i warn people against this mentality is that it changes your cosmology it changes your view of what the world is and what the life is over say a ten thousand year time span the five thousand years before the five thousand years after okay now look the reality is in terms of the laws of physics we will never never have a self-reliant human population on the moon or mars if human beings ever do live there it will be in exactly the same circumstances as they're currently in the space station in orbit meaning they rely on earth for water and food and so on it is it is not possible it's actually easier to produce food in orbit around the earth in a uh in a satellite it would basically be it would be completely impossible to farm on mars to raise food on mars just very briefly one of the reasons that is that if you're in orbit around the earth at least the sunlight you get from the sun is the same intensity as earth you don't have the atmosphere you have other disadvantages but at least you got the sunlight to work with on mars you don't don't even have the sunlight but you don't have sunlight you don't have soil you don't have any of the things taken for granted well you know some people would say isn't it just harmless for people to grow up with science fiction assumptions about the future of life on earth the future of life on mars i don't think it's harmless at all i think it has real world consequences here and now well in this way inculcating children with a certain kind of cosmology with a certain view of yes even the geography of the world and the timeline of world history past present future and for most most christians most muslims and a significant percentage of jews this timeline includes the end of the world the idea that this whole planet is going to be discarded that has consequences for ecology it has consequences for whether or not you think it's perfectly morally acceptable to kill and eat cows every day to have more than a billion people killing and eating more than a billion cows on the same planet every oh well you know we're going to run out of water we're going to run out of like you know all these terrible ecological costs well if you think the world is going to end when jesus comes back if you think the world is going to end on judgment day if you think the world only exists to be a play thing for the short term delectation of human beings then there isn't much of a moral argument to care about how many billion cows there are dying for basically human entertainment right these things have this on this cosmological level you know these things really matter it changes the way you see the world when you're awake changes the way you see the world when you're asleep uh it changes your whole life forever including when you are in that phase of your life of rebelling against it you know um so look i've said this before and again the main reason why sexuality comes up in these conversations is just because it's so easy to visualize like for example the status of homosexuals in christianity and the lies they're told and you know so-called gay conversion therapy it's very easy to see the harm being done the kind of cosmological things we're talking about here it's it's much harder so guys i've said before in other contexts i try to be sex positive i try it's kind of an uphill battle it's kind of a positive there are so many bad things about sex frankly there's so many ways in which it destroys people's lives and prevents them from leading a meaningful life there are a lot of bad things about sex but i try i try to be sex positive i think in principle we sort of ought to be despite all the disadvantages of it you know okay sex is one thing the human ego is another you know what you get with a lot of ex christians is people having sex just to prove they can people having sex as an act of rebellion against the church as an act of rebellion against their upbringing sex to prove that you're smarter than your own parents or grandparents to prove that you're smarter than your school teachers you may have had school teachers who inculcated christian morality into you sex and again i mean i don't believe religion is the opinion of the masses i believe egoism is the religion of masses sex you know attached to your your ego in this way it's very easy for those people to say that they're now ex-christian or post-christian and atheist a lot of people they still are haunted by it they still are damaged by it and of course my own father is an example i mean you know my father was my father was such a nutcase i mean i a lot of time i don't feel is worth talking about just because when you're dealing with people who have really extremely abnormal psychology it's not going to be very meaningful for anyone else in the audience to uh to talk about it you know but sure you know my point being living your life in defiance of religion this still isn't atheism this still isn't the end goal of atheism you know it's being in a position of of genuine indifference towards religion where we regard you know the religion of christianity the religion of judaism the religious land we regard these these judeo-christian religions with the same sort of indifference as you know learning about a quaint you know ancestral cult we've never heard of before from some distant ancient people you know who've already lived and died on this earth more than a thousand years ago um the same way it's merely of academic interest to talk about the religious beliefs for example of the ancient romans um the preposterous notion in ancient athens and ancient rome of you know dissecting a bird and examining its internal organs to foretell the outcome of a battle you know um [Music] you know we we can read about that and it has no power over us including we do not feel we need to rebel against it in any way that's the end point that's the end goal of atheism and i'll say now guys i'm going to take a moment to read your comments again but um you know how do we get there well one huge part of the struggle has to be cultural production it has to be the production of new songs new stories new rituals new cartoons to really challenge and replace the christian ones that's not the whole struggle it's not the whole story i mean for me it's not enough to open an atheist school we have to actually shut down the christian schools and if you aren't willing to be honest with yourself about that you're not an atheist you're not anticlerical like you know i'm sorry very brief aggression but some of you people don't know this some of you've never thought this too before okay if you feel that a vegan diet is just a personal choice that improves your own life but you're completely indifferent to whether or not your own husband or wife eats meat in front of you has meat in your fridge is buying meat with your money you know what i mean and is cooking meat on your pots and pans if you are completely different to whether or not your own children eat meat whether they're not your own work colleagues you mean whether they're not your own parents and grandparents if you just regard this as a fad diet that you're doing for your own health or doing for your own amusement then there is a very meaningful sense in which you are not vegan at all you're just eating vegan food right because the most fundamental premise of veganism is it doesn't matter if i eat meat or you eat meat as long as someone is paying money to produce beef to produce leather this same industrialized system of production carries on right so it absolutely inevitably and inexorably must be that if i am vegan i want you to be vegan also i want all humanity to be vegan or as as larger percentages we can get to now of course that is a desire that is going to be frustrated that's not the point i'm not commenting on whether or not that's an attainable desire most desires worth talking about are unattainable okay [Laughter] you know yes this really is implicitly built into the definition of veganism oh yeah it makes no sense to call yourself an atheist if you think atheism is just something you dabble in for your own amusement or your own entertainment that it just improves your own life but you're completely comfortable with taking your own child and putting your child into a madrassa to be forced to memorize and recite the quran to carry out these rituals to have inculcated them if you think your atheism dies with you your own children will revert to the religion you have reacted right this makes no sense i've and i know your own brothers or sisters have children so look at your brother look at yours like maybe you don't have children your whole family is having children and raising the next generation in the same traditions in the same religion the same superstitions the same beliefs as your great-grandparents if you don't have a problem with that if you don't want to challenge and change that you're not an atheist right and then yeah you can scale it up and you tell me what we're talking about on the the scale of minds i just say this comes back to one of the first things i said in this video the opiate of the masses is not religion it's egotism you know um [Music] what i see dominating the american atheist movement the british atheist movement and the australian atheist because they're all on youtube together these people the english-speaking atheist what i see dominating these movements is the belief the smug conviction you know of in one's own superiority that and then they look down on these other people oh well that's fine for them that's fine for people like my brother you know my brother he's not the sharpest tack in the stack you know people like that's fine that they carry on with that for those people that's fine but not for supposedly elite special people like you and i so the ego the egotism leads to this very strange form of de-politicized indifference the egotism leads to a kind of social irresponsibility even for your own brother and sister let alone on the scale of millions for your for your fellow man now i just mentioned here if you are evaluating the democracy of ancient athens the religion of athens had advantages and disadvantages there is definitely a sense in which you can look at the religion of athens or more broadly say the religiosity of athens and see the way in which it contributed to the creation of democracy the participation of democracy we can talk about that we can talk about the advantages of the religion of athens i am saying to you sincerely in the 21st century christianity has no advantages none you're going to hear no compromise for me on this there is no other side of the coin there is no silver lining in that cloud i'm saying it's all bad i'm not saying throw the baby out with the bath water i'm saying to you there is no baby there is only bathwater now ancient athens there were a lot of absolutely terrifying aspects of that religion if you look into it i would say herodotus if you want to know what religion was like in the ancient world including human sacrifice animal sacrifice just the craziness of religion and that period you know the way in which it's terrifying i'm i'm conceding the point that there were some positive aspects about the religion of the the religiosity of the athenians but wow there were negative aspects and if you were alive at that time or if you walked into a time machine now you would be an atheist in your way in athens too and you would have to be very careful that you didn't end up dead like socrates you would have to be very careful in how you moved in challenging or opposing the uh the religious views that were predominant in your time they were the religion was compulsory there was i mean there was more freedom within athenian religion than there was in the dark ages of catholic europe but um you you were compelled to respect and participate in all the the public cults which occupied uh it's only 300 days a year and there was there was a religious festival not quite every day but the number of festivals and religious observances to be attended in downtown athens is unbelievable was not a small part of your time so you know i'm just can we be honest with ourselves about what atheism means it doesn't mean that you only find fault with the contents of the box doesn't mean you're going to reach inside the box and take out take out homophobia take out judgment take out hell but that you're going to keep the box you're going to put new positive wonderful humanitarian 21st century sentiments into the box love your brother and all this [ __ ] or equality of man okay you can't just take this beautiful box and take out slavery and take out gender inequality and take out homophobia you know take out the fear of you know eternal punishment in hell okay atheism means you're willing to throw out the whole box it means you're willing to burn the church down and have nothing left boo hoo we're gonna lose all those paintings of baby jesus boo [ __ ] who what a goddamn tragedy it will be to have lost the decorative arts of the christian tradition i don't like disneyland i don't like the disney corporation i don't like disney movies i don't i'm a critic i think with disneyland you can take some things out of the box put new things in and keep the box i do i think disneyland can change i think disneyland does not have to be burnt down i think you can take pocahontas out of disneyland and disneyland can endure i mean as you guys may know disneyland is now more and more about star wars they have star star wars has been added to the box well maybe we can make some room for star wars by taking out pocahontas and just burn that like maybe pocahontas has to be [ __ ] banished has to be uh emulated [Laughter] you know the disney movie version of pocahontas and all the marketing and toys connect to it yeah the time has come for pocahontas to disappear from walt disney theme parks and from their list of movies you can see that yeah i do i do think that specific film but i am willing to concede the point you know it's it's not all bad there are advantages and disadvantages and because it is a fundamentally secular organization it's fundamentally anti-clerical and atheist even disneyland can change all right we can have a better future with disneyland we don't have to burn disneyland town but can we be honest with ourselves all right the future is not christianity the future is not judaism the future is not islam not even a little bit what are we willing to do to get there i've never had one atheist youtube channel reach out to me cooperate with me in any way my memory not even on twitter you know what i mean like not even not even someone sharing the link to one of my videos and saying hey this is great you guys should check out never not one skype call not one interview not one in invitation to come to an event they're still having events they look like really dorky [ __ ] events they don't look like an event i want to attend at all um you know why is that this is the reason why all right even if they don't really think it through none of them are comfortable with this part of my message which is so [ __ ] self-evident it's so obvious none of them like okay look amongst vegans it's real easy to get people to agree that yeah the ultimate goal of veganism would be to have a 100 vegan world to have a world in which 100 of people are committed to not eating meat not eating cheese etc right that's not real controversial the only pushback you're going to get is well what about people who are literally marooned on a desert island what about a few tiny populations of indigenous people on remote islands in papua new guinea yeah yeah you get some people like well people who who narrow down to say they want the planet earth to be 98 vegan and there are still two percent of people living in such remote areas or such uh you know primitive conditions that they should be allowed to eat amazingly in 2022 it's it's not just controversial but i am demonized i am a pariah in the atheist movement i am hated and denounced by other atheists even here on youtube i am regarded as crazy and an extremist because i'm talking about a 100 atheist planet earth if that's not what you want what what do you want you know like what what what is your model of the future is it catholic schools inculcating this religion into children forever and ever like and a lot of these people so let's just say you yourself are a heartbroken catholic like like tom was okay you want your own children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the future you want them to go through the same traumatizing experience you had you you endure catholic school and you rebel against it like you're the tiny minority who rebel against it and become atheist and realize it's all horseshit and you realize the extent to which you're emotionally damaged sexually damaged intellectually warped by this experience you reflect on you think yeah you know what this is the meaning of life let's just let's just have it go on forever you know let's just have this repeat for all eternity let's even have as in the case of uh russia the former soviet union let's have the power of the church expand and increase and be more entrenched for for centuries to come that's that's your idea of the future um you know i've heard atheists say that their role i wonder if they got this from christopher hitchens like there's probably one specific person who said this first but i've heard it from many different people that their role is merely to engage in the mockery of religion you know that by by you know what progress is veganism going to make if our you know the engine of social change is satire if you have vegans devoted to stand-up comedy yes you know and again i think the most dangerous aspect of that the the mockery-based movement is that it all comes back to egoism it all comes back to this notion of i'm intellectually superior to others supposedly that you know oh here i am in this benighted intellectually superior minority i was i was the one kid in my catholic school who rebelled against the system and therefore i'm gonna look down my nose with these people and and make fun of them you know well you know what political movements start making progress not when they're mocking other people but when they're actually helping them it's just ridiculous you know hey you know what's a big problem in america obesity do you want to have a movement to improve public health through mockery through shame through satire let's have more stand-up comedians telling fat jokes and insulting people for being over is that what you want to do is that the future of you want to reduce the obesity rate you want to reduce the rate of diabetes through shame and humiliation and joking like no um so these these are the dominant cross currents of our time nobody should be surprised that i am hated by buddhists nobody should be surprised that i'm hated by muslims or christians or jews jews tend to have very mixed feelings about me i've had emails over the years from jews trying to convert me to judaism you know wanting to pull me into the religion i have they didn't succeed um anyway you know of course it makes sense that i'm hated by those groups and then i'm a hated outside but i'm hated by atheists that's the state we're at in the year 2022. catching up with your comments right now guys so i just say you know um some more comments here about psychological consequences of having religious upbringing if you regret and resent that the quality of education you had was bad i do many of you many of you may think in your lives well you know my life would have turned out so much differently if i'd had a better education in math if i had a better education in chemistry if you had better education in french if you'd learned that language instead of it being this kind of alienating failure of an experience it was your professional articulation whatever it may be you know but you may also reflect on some of those things in your life and think sometimes you may think you know what if i'd had a better education in france or ever was really my life would have turned out the same way you know really i still would have had these thoughts and feelings i still would have gone in this direction you might reflect that even though you maybe resent or regret that you know that actually who you are your values your way of thinking what direction you you want to be the same religion it's the ultimate counter example when you're talking about the psychological effects the emotional effects the intellectual effects there's a whole world of spooks there are all these abstractions that haunt you and if you didn't have a religious upbringing you wouldn't even know what those words mean you wouldn't care about them and you know your life would not be like that like you when you look back at your life when you look at the religious vocabulary the way of thinking about ethics the way of understanding yourself and who you are and your feelings and your your way of thinking about fate your way of thinking about choices you make and decisions as opposed to decisions made by god and things being in god's hands you know it's really impossible to deal with how different your whole life would be if you just didn't even know those concepts if you didn't have that cosmology or you know obviously you would have heard about it eventually if you were learning about that stuff the first time at age 15 as something from a foreign culture you know if your view of christianity were as distant and exotic as your view of tibetan buddhism let's say like you're aware there is this crazy religion tibetan buddhism you're aware that they did human sacrifice and black magic and all this weird stuff and tantric sex rituals you're aware of that you can kind of learn about it it's of some intellectual interest you know if your relationship to christian doctrine muslim doctrine so if it were in that way too there's no way to exaggerate what a different person you would you would be today and you know just your internal monologue how it is you think about and understand your own life how you reflect on your own feelings how you feel about things in the split second where you first react to them those things are all shaped by christianity they're all shaped by these religions to an extent it's very very hard to get stressed with and it's very very hard to ever get over you know what it is that's thinkable and what it is that's unthinkable for you for the whole rest of your life what it is you feel guilty about and what it is you enjoy um you know you can look back at your life and say gee if i had received a better education in music my whole life would be different and you can reflect on say you know what if i'd learned to play the guitar and i had a good music teacher you know really my life would be the same you can you can do but there are two sides to that you know you may feel ambivalence about that you may reflect on different ways different times religion it's all in one category there's no kidding yourself your whole life would be completely different if you'd been adopted and raised by muslim parents if you'd been adopted and raised by catholic parents and it's different today because you were raised by the particular parents you had with with a particular religion you had and there is a sense in which religion religious people will never know what it's like just to grow up without that superstition without that fear without that worldview without that cosmology it's like being circumcised you don't know what you've lost as a man you could never know what sex was like if you had the other 60 of your nerve endings it's unknowable to you it's unfathomable it's impossible to imagine well you don't know what your life would be like if you had grown up just without being inculcated with these religious values this ethical system this worldview this cosmology just trying to catch up their comments guys okay so great comment again from our regular contributor do you want to give me lucas um he he or she says i forget do we know the gender of kiss i don't know okay uh let's assume i grew up without religious baggage i would still be surrounded by it right now right so i had a kind of internet friend we're not close and i know i've spoken to him for many many years but i remember talking to this guy before i went to montreal montreal quebec canada and then i talked to him again after i've been in montreal and he'd lived there for many years he lived in quebec for a big part of his life and i said to him i just can't shake my sense of horror being surrounded by the christian church at all times the way i am in montreal i am not comfortable walking down the street there or spending any time in that city where the horizon is dominated by one catholic edifice after another and by the way there are protestant buildings competing with them because there are some protestants that want you to come over to their side or whatever or they're just you know whatever there are also protestant churches they're competing with whatever the history of the particular church may be and i remember scientology had a big edifice there too so there were some new religious groups but the way in which your life is done but and what he said back to me is honestly he said he reflected he was very surprised to receive the message and he said i never noticed he said he grew up there he doesn't even see it it's invisible to him you know to him it's normal it's like the the boiling frog it's different i mean if you really grow up unreligious or anti-religious right what is tolerable to you and what is intolerable is different this comes back to the absurdity of our notion of tolerance of course but i'm i'm telling you montreal is not tolerable to me montreal is not secular enough for me montreal is not atheist enough for me how do you think i do in indonesia how do you think i do in malaysia like how do you think i would cope with living in more religious countries or contacts so yeah it's hard and certainly it's a good comparison with veganism the same way non-vegans are blind to the fact that there are advertisements for slaughtered animals around them all the time often with kind of lurid disturbing imagery and slogans right people who are raised in these religions they're often blind to you know just to blind to the evil of religion that is right in front of their face all the time and they're blind to it because it's in front of their face all the time okay so sat 12 i don't know anything about this guy you said this isn't someone i've talked to in the past or that i like i i'm not complaining but there's some people in the audience here where i really know them pretty well somebody artist called sat12 says quote a vegan world or a one with no religion is a pipe dream at this time i don't know how old you are what are you going to do with the next 20 years of your life we're not talking about pipe dreams we're talking about practical strategies are you going to resign yourself to putting your own son or your own daughter into a christian school are you going to resign yourself to sending your own son or your own daughter to a christian summer camp i knew one atheist family that did that when i was in school again i found it incredibly disturbing for me i was a small child but i really reflected on what it meant to be atheist and reject the church when my my friend jake was sent off to this i think it was a mennonite camp it was [ __ ] men and i was like jesus christ his parents were atheists or nominally atheists they identified as atheists and sent their kid to this [ __ ] religious summer camp you know you know so sat 12 my point here is not that you're wrong my point is that you're asking the wrong question the question is what are we going to do next what are we going to do now what's going to be accomplished in the next five years 10 years 20 years all right and to have the attitude that atheism isn't worth fighting for because some kind of idealized utopian end goal is unachievable it's irrelevant categorically it's the wrong category thinking no a great example i can come back to with disneyland okay in the year 1965 pm would disneyland have made more money or less money if they had embraced christianity and become an overtly pro-christian children's entertainment company they made the hard commitment and they stuck to it that that disney corporation all their movies and all their theme parks would have no religion whatsoever so it's not anti-religious all right but you may have never thought of this before the movie bambi the movie snow white and the seven dwarves already at that stage they had made a commitment they were not going to have any christian morals okay and they have these crappy like historical recreation villages they're called like america town or america villa and [ __ ] they have these different neighborhoods never is there a church in it okay they could make a lot of money doing christian weddings christian funerals whatever they have christian services at disneyland it could make a lot of money and back in 1965 think about how religious americans were think about how many people would have shelled out money for the equivalent to bambi with an explicit christian parable an explicit christian moral of the story okay being resigned to and conforming to christian culture is the wrong decision rebelling against it challenging it producing a new culture to replace it is the right decision and it's irrelevant to say that we can never live in a world with zero percent religion okay that's the wrong answer to the wrong question okay we can never live in a world with zero tooth decay get out there and fight to convince people to brush their teeth right it's worth fighting for we can never live in a world with zero drunk driving get out there and fight to get people to commit consciously to never driving drunk really brief story uh i think i've never told this on youtube before but if i have apologies i met this woman um [Music] i met and talked with a woman for a couple of hours and she was still dealing with the death of her co-worker she had a male colleague she was all real messed up about it and she said that she personally had said to him so many times why would you risk your life riding your motorcycle drunk like when you're going home from the nightclub or the bar when you can just call a taxi cab and i forget she said the tax taxi cab will only cost you 15 whatever number she said you know like this is a life like why would you do this and the guy always said nah it's no big deal i don't know if she said that to him three times or i doubt she said it to him a hundred times but she is allegedly this is something she'd actually said to him directly again and again and one day he got on his motorbike went home from the pub and now he's dead he was killed instantly in a traffic accident that was attributable to his drunkenness to his state of inebriation or or distraction there will never be zero drunk driving accidents if you love someone if you care about someone if you respect someone intellectually fight fight to save their [ __ ] life fight to convince them that a meaningful life requires sobriety like it doesn't just require that you refuse to drink and drive requires that you end your drinking absolutely fight because otherwise if you don't they may not be here five years from now all right they may be taken off the census yeah we're dealing with life and death decisions and of the people who are still going to be alive five years from now right a lot of them are going to be locked into a meaningless life a lot of them are going to be frankly zombies on this earth it happens with religion it happens with drugs it happens with alcohol you can live a long life but one that's meaningless and where the damage does done is such that they're they're never coming back from that you know so in this sense okay if you tell me a vegan world is a pipe dream if you tell me a world with absolutely no religion is a pipe dream all right a world without drunk driving is a pipe dream okay but that is a completely fallacious reason to give up on the struggle even at the smallest scale of just two people face to face right of bringing people over to your model of a meaningful life which may involve sobriety it may involve veganism it may involve atheism we're presuming all three right to bring that one person over to your way of thinking to give them so that they live rather than die and so they have a meaningful life rather than a meaningless life that's worth fighting for just for your one work colleague just for your one brother your one sister your one son your one daughter and it's worth fighting for at the larger scale of a salon of 10 or 15 people it's worth fighting for at the level of a neighborhood of a small society of a few hundred a few thousand people and it's worth fighting for at the level of of millions you know so it's interesting you know i i'm sorry but stat 12 you've basically convinced me that you're an imbecile it's i'm i don't know how it was possible for you to have such a shallow and stupid uh response to this i took the time to to reply to that in depth but i mean this is the kind of thing as um as as members of many religions say you know them that have ears to hear let them hear i mean i can only do what i can do and there will be someone in the audience who understands and appreciates the answer i gave to that question and it's sad twelve it's not going to be you but i hope somebody can take that and get motivated you know to make a difference [Music] and look you know i do think one of the ways in which the world has changed the 21st century is so many of us don't know people face to face we know people primarily or entirely over the internet or through messages on mobile phones you may not know what it's like viscerally to care about someone and respect someone and see intellectual potential in them and in some sense to love them like appreciate them i don't mean romantic love here but like you got love for somebody but they're a drunk you know but they get drunk every weekend let's say they were two day a week drunk they're sober five days a week but they're risking their life drunk driving but they have these flaws you know and they have that intellectual potential now like you think they're smart you think they have redeeming qualities if they keep on drinking this way you know they may not have that intellectual potential for long yeah maybe because they die but more likely they just get themselves deep enough into that life as a drug addict as a kind of brain dead person as someone leaving a thoughtless stupid existence that they can't come back that they can't get out of it anymore um all right guys i was gonna crap off this video i think it'll be another video for another day reading out the whole of my uh my poems about socrates but instead i'll just describe it um i think it doesn't quite suit the mood as we come to the end of this you know i wrote a children's story book it's in verse it's poetry but it's you know it's poetry intended for kids it's not pretentious grown-up poetry i started writing stories about socrates i started promoting this idea of sock mess a socrates centered holiday to replace christmas because i in my way i'm trying to do something positive for the future of the culture for the future of planet earth for the future of my own neighborhood for the future of my own family all right i refuse to keep inculcating into the next generation these myths that i think are barbaric and stupid and wrong i refuse to inculcate into them values and beliefs that you know ultimately i think are dangerous and harmful all right i'm not going to keep reproducing the infrastructure of the christian church or judaism or islam neither in the palpable sense of the the institution as it exists in terms of buildings nor in terms of the more intangible elements of that religious tradition now if you wanted to abolish slavery you'd have to kill people we don't talk about the leaders of slave rebellions we don't talk about the abolitionists as killers all right but they were all right and you would have to be an outcast living under a false name and a false identity all right in this really strange unexamined way right we celebrate the abolition of slavery we celebrate you know the heroism of particular black people who stood up for civil rights inequality very carefully selected examples and we always want to remove the element of violence the element of risk the element of sex self-sacrifice of your of your life and what it does to you um slavery was brutal i remember reading actually a christian missionaries reflections on slavery he was a christian missionary who crusaded against slavery but at that time many christians were pro-slavery as you can imagine i remember reading this guy's reflections and he said you know as brutal as the slave masters were to their slaves if you didn't if you weren't alive at that time in that place in that culture what you can never realize is that the slave masters themselves were the most brutalized of all he was saying just like the psychological damage these guys carried around with them these were men who had committed rape against female slaves from an early age they were men who'd carried out torture against slaves of various kinds you know torture to break their will torture to force them to obey they'd been whipping and stabbing people i remember he described how they always had guns and knives on their person they could never relax you could tell who the slave owners were when they sat down in a room you know like a bar or restaurant what have you the way they sat ready to go and a lot of them would feel uncomfortable they want to have their knife out they'd have a knife out on the table or they'd be whittling something at the table they were so strung up the way in which their lives of violence you know shape their shape their minds then of course you know we think about those guys obviously these are not the worst victims of the slave system how do they treat their own children how do they treat their own wives you know the way in which slavery narrows the mind of the slave owner and the way in which you know these slave owners they slept in the same house under the same roof with people they had tortured themselves in the past people they had whipped people that had placed in chains you know aware that some of these people living in their own house or living you know in a shed just behind it that some of these people would if they could take their revenge on the same out they'd kill them in their sleep you know and uh there are examples from feudalism in europe too where it's serfdom rather than slavery that i've read i remember a vivid description of one guy he was a feudal estate owner so he had serfs not slaves who at night would lock himself in an iron cage and um his his mother was the only person who had the key to the cage and there were descriptions of how this cage was sort of elevated over a gap in the floor in his own dungeon kind of thing he was locking himself into a dungeon that was probably built for torturing and punishing his own serfs and instead he was the one locking himself in at night because he had so many enemies some people would like to kill them if they if they got the chance you know okay slavery brutalized the slaves slavery brutalized the slave owners all right the people who rose up to tear down the institution of slavery they were brutalized in their turn imagine what psychologically shattered angry violent men they were the people like not the storybook version of the underground railroad the people who had blood on their hands from the underground railroad you think they're a nice bunch of guys like compared to cocaine smugglers think about how tough these people are and the way in which they had to live a lie every day and have multiple identities and so on right think about how they slept at night you know what we're talking about here you know in saying we have a challenge in front of us we have a challenge to overcome christianity once and for all we have a challenge to stop compromising with christmas to stop pretending that we can keep the same box and put new contents inside to stop pretending that we can keep celebrating american thanksgiving you know and that it's not going to represent genocide and you would expect that of a family who had been for several generation communists in russia you say to them look i'm sorry at some point you have to stop worshiping joseph stalin i know you might think this is harmless you might think that these are traditions you've carried on you turn to a bunch of neo-nazis or a continuous family of nazis and say look at some point you have to stop reviewing adolf hitler and it exists you can google around and see it if you want to that subculture really does exist and no you can't just keep the box and change what's inside the box you have to discard you know this ideology this set of beliefs entirely uh yeah it is it is a challenge okay it's a challenge to ask yourself how am i gonna raise my own daughter without christmas carols how am i going to raise my own daughter without reading her the same story books that maybe 90 percent of her classmates have read to her it's a challenge what summer camp i'm going to send you how do i join a gym if the only gym in my town is the ymca is a christian gym you know again the jcc the jewish community center it's a jewish competitive what i'm saying yeah you know what starting your own gym it's hard okay it's a challenge writing your own story book making up your own songs you know generating something new to challenge the culture that you've inherited from your ancestors okay it's hard but there's nothing brutal about it unlike the abolition of slavery unlike the waves of violence and reprisal unlike the waves of rebellion and counter-rebellion revolution and counter-revolution unlike the internacing conflicts that have taken place even within a protestant christianity let alone protestant versus catholic christianity let alone within islam sunni versus shiite islam you know can't we take a positive attitude towards the fact that our struggle our movement is primarily creative rather than destructive that we get to fundamentally make our own lives better and make life better just for our own sons just for our own daughters maybe for a few of our brothers and sisters our co-workers our closest friends maybe we can bring some of those people into our orbit into this you know but we're doing something that only enriches our lives that only makes our life better and then it's the potential to make life better for a lot of other people in the short term and in the long term future of centuries to come it's that kind of revolution it's that kind of rebellion instead of taking on the lonesome violent path of living in a slave society and fighting for the abolition of slavery but step one is that we just have to admit to ourselves as individuals and as a movement that what we are fighting for is the abolition of the christian faith