Nobody believes in "Freedom of Religion". Nobody.

simple is not easy to say something is simple does not mean that it's easily done to recognize that when you pray you're talking to nobody but yourself that's simple for a whole lot of people it's not easy for a whole lot of people there's a sentimental attachment to the idea that the universe was created by a kind noble infinitely intelligent spirit that cares about you and to let go of that delusion it may be simple but it's not easy conversely for those of us who have taken that step for those of us who have figured it out and who have the detachment and self-confidence to really live with the ramifications to really take it on board okay everything my parents told me was i everything my grandparents told me was like quite possibly if you went to a religious school everything my school teachers told me was a lie and to look back at the last 1 000 years of history and recognize the depth and scale of the deception and perception that's been going on recognize wow decade after decade century after century these lies have gone on and on and here i am standing at the end of this process having undeceived myself but having having enlightened myself and oh my own father can't i assume you sat down and talked to your father he can't because he won't or he won't because he can't and and now are you gonna start feeling that you're smarter than your own father are you gonna start feeling that you're smarter than your own school teachers your own university professors maybe all of the authority figures you looked up to in your whole entire life it's very easy for atheists to become in this way beguiled by a sense of their own specialness their own extraordinariness their own intellectual superiority over the people who matter to them most within their own family within their own school within their own social milieu and yes again when you look back over the centuries everyone else seems to think that sir isaac newton was a very brilliant man i don't think so i think i'm smarter than sir isaac newton have you seen what he has to say about religion have you seen what he has to say about the bible if you take some time to read sir isaac newton's religious views you might start feeling like a genius yourself and that you're looking down at sir isaac newton as a little teeny tiny intellectual ant compared to your enormity so this is an ego trip here that atheists can get pulled into you ever heard of blaze pascal brilliant mathematician if you read what he has to say about religion about god about faith you might start feeling that you are quite a bit more brilliant than blaise pascal and it goes all the way back for centuries all the great men celebrated in history kings queens emperors um scientists as i've mentioned i mean perhaps it's most extraordinary perhaps it's least extraordinary that includes scientists explorers all of these people right but the truth is atheism remains simple even if for 99 of people it's not easy it's not easy to accept it's not easy and in fact the fact figuring out this one thing and really accepting it that when you pray nobody's listening to you and let's let's just give one further illustration what i mean by atheism in this context because we're really talking not just about atheism but anti-religionism if you like because atheism can mean different things different contexts but here we really mean atheism specifically as one aspect of developing a hardened disciplined attitude of opposing religion of all kinds not for example a form of atheism that embraces worshiping the ghosts of your deceased ancestors because there are there are some religions within which you could be an atheist and nevertheless an utterly religious person um all your life in the same way that people told you it was good to pray you were probably told it was good to believe you know the doctor may have given you medicine and told you how important it was to believe in the therapy to believe in treatment and now if you're really an atheist if you're really a nihilist say what do you mean why do i have to believe in it if it works i don't have to believe in it if toothpaste works you as a doctor can handle someone say i don't give a [ __ ] if you believe in this or not it doesn't matter if you believe this nothing could matter to me less whether or not you believe in this because i know the effects of toothpaste and that's all there is to it but very often that's not the kind of scientific milia we grow up in we grew up being told you have to believe in yourself you have to believe in your teachers you have to believe in studying for the test you have put to believe in trying your hardest you have to believe in the medicine believe in the therapy believe in your father believe in your little brother believe in the army believe in winning war we saw a sign today talking about praying for the the soldiers in the current war that's being fought in 2022. oh prayer you think that'll help you know believe believe believe so it's one thing to take that step back and realize when you pray you're talking to no one about yourself well when you believe what is it that you're doing exactly that's simple okay it's not easy the problem is though as much as we may be inclined to start thinking of ourselves as intellectual extraordinary people individually as atheists or collectively like however many thousand or however many million we add up to the truth is atheists are not extraordinarily intelligent people they're not it would be very interesting to try to detail try to study quantitatively measure and qualitatively evaluate who are the atheists in any given society who stands up to be counted as an atheist in iran in saudi arabia in israel in ireland in italy in new york city and so on you know and you probably could do some research and start to come to some conclusions about the type of person who in one context or another doesn't just passively become an atheist but as i say i'm really talking about becoming anti-religion anti-religious rather than religious with atheism being one component of those anti-clerical anti-establishment and it's what kind of person does that i'll tell you something the 20th century was not a really long time ago a whole lot of people who were atheists supported and made excuses for joseph stalin how [ __ ] stupid do you have to be in the 20th century to make excuses for and support joseph's talent this set back the atheist movement by centuries all right think of the intellectual potential the atheist movement the way in which those people's individual lives were ruined by communism and the way in which any possible atheist movement as a whole was really discredited by communism right mao zedong could repeat the same story right now even within japan let's study this particular history can study the history of communism within japan so we're not talking about a christian context but a huge percentage of the people who stood up and said they represented a more rational anti-religious atheist future they supported joseph stalin they supported houston they supported communism in some cases they literally walked over the border to go join the soviet union to go move to the atheist paradise as they thought of it because of the association between uh communism and and atheism okay so this thing it's simple but it's not easy and it has this deceptive dangerous quality of making us feel special making us feel empowered of making us feel extraordinarily intelligent and well well-informed and we're not all right let's look on youtube jacqueline glenn the amazing atheist all right look at the guys who publish these books look at sam harris okay these are unbelievably stupid people and i do get messages from you guys every so often probably someone's going to say it during this live stream i get my people saying hey why don't you do a live stream with you know sam harris why don't you do a podcast with sam harris why don't you do an interview with the amazing atheist like no okay not jacqueline clinton nobody suggests that but i do i do get messages oh wow there's good moon in mentions armored skeptic wow wow that guy's an idiot okay yeah they're incredibly stupid people here on youtube uh and they've made atheism almost their their primary identity right their calling card you know what everyone said their identity as an activist their their cause you know um [Music] [Laughter] sorry i was digressing from saying you may ask me why don't you collaborate with these people why don't they collaborate with you i think that is the reason why i think sam harris as accomplished as he is as uh wealthy as he is so on and so forth i think he would be intimidated to talk to me about buddhism to talk to me about hinduism but quite possibly to talk to you about anything about democracy in america about any conceivable topic i don't think sam harris is my fault we own a couple of his books here i did a book review if you dig back on my channel i did a review of one of his books years ago we have another one of his books that we got for free you know i don't have to hold it up but you know i just say it's not a completely uninformed opinion on my part and i have made videos uh criticizing this position in detail so let's stay on sam harris just to illustrate this point a step further so that the first example i gave you and this is with all due humility and i'll do self-criticism okay i know what it's like to want to believe these things i know what it's like to want to believe that there's a god i know what it's like to want to believe in a religion without believing in a god i've been through both right i was involved with terabyte of buddhism really orthodox philosophical profound therapeutic like the deep end of buddhism not the shallow hippie end of buddhism right so i know i know what both of those are like i know what it's like to want to believe in a religion with a god i know what it's like to want to believe in a religion without a god okay my parents were communist fanatics communist extremists not moderate or ironical communists you know um so i i know what it was like to kind of be forced to believe in communism by your parents and to try to try to get along with the family religion you could talk about it exactly what age i started rebelling against that or was seeing how crazy and nonsensical my parents police were cause for me uh it was kind of perpetually falling apart um [Music] anyway and i was always very good at seeing my parents weaknesses that way seeing what it was put it this way seeing what it was they wanted to believe but couldn't believe themselves seeing the brittleness of their own belief in communism and and criticizing them for it and seeing how they react so just over the dinner table i already had this well-informed perspective that this ideology my parents were committed to was wasn't entirely functional even even for them um okay if we think we're so brilliant if we think we have some tremendous intellectual advantage over members of religion as atheists um [Music] if you were to do a survey in the united states of america right now in 2022 who has a higher rate of psychedelic drug use i'm going to narrow that question down who believes in lsd atheists or religious people who has a higher rate of not just using lsd but believing in lsd who has a higher rate of using ayahuasca and believing in ayahuasca right and we can go through a long list of from my perspective crazy hippie spiritual beliefs i was just spiritual crazy pseudo-scientific beliefs and you were going to find the atheists are just as desperate to believe in them as as members of mainstream religions or that they're more desperate to believe in them that for some reason christians muslims and jews aren't reaching out for lsd they aren't reaching out for ayahuasca in the same way that atheists are and admittedly these are minority persuasions we're talking about it's not it's not the case that lsd has an enormous cult following in the united states america but it's it's significant the people who really believe in uh how we want to put the psychedelic uh drug use psychedelic drug therapy uh so on and so forth now you know we go through a number of other things you might think faith healing is only associated with the religious to a remarkable extent it's associated with atheists you can go through all these you know beliefs that people cling to and you know one i'm i'm open-minded about um who has more belief in antidepressants in psychiatric drugs we just had mentioned here mounin mentioned armored skeptic so years ago i made a video criticizing him on exactly this issue he identifies as a skeptic what he says about antidepressants prozac ssri drugs these these types of drugs there's no skepticism in it he's dogmatic in the truest that's what he is a believer he believes in these thought-terminating cliches trust your doctor [Laughter] ask your doctor to vote trust your doctor your quote unquote your mind has a chemical imbalance you know what i mean all this all this crap and you see how thin their commitment to skepticism is and you see how you know the fact that they had some quality in them that let them you know let go of their attachment to prayer let them let go of their belief in a in a creator god that the world is some divine plan they had something to let them do that right and yet they're still clinging to all of these other beliefs including quite likely prozac if not lsd they want to believe in drugs they want to believe in science their idea of science really is a kind of religion it's at best pseudoscience they have religious attitudes that show up in other parts of their lives now what i'm about to say to you some of you will find this hard to visualize and some of you know right away what i'm talking about have you known anyone who was an atheist who was an anti-religious anti-clerical atheist and was an atheist and rejected organized religion thoroughly and you hated black people have you known someone who was an atheist and for no religious reason whatsoever they hated homosexuals now i'm going to just narrow in to put a human face on it let's say you knew someone and you considered them a highly intelligent person with modern atheist values but they were specifically racist when it came to miscegenation meaning people getting married and having children who are from different races have you known a black american woman who intensely hated black women who married white men oh now it has a human face now before we were talking about racism as an abstract concept now we're talking about a per a particular person with a particular kind of experience in life and they will often say to you in a self-effacing way well look this is just my experience when i was going through college all of the girls who like they're gonna have whatever justification for but that can be a really intensely felt racism and it may be based on jealousy it may be based on supernatural beliefs have you so here's here's an example i've seen up up close in person have you ever met a white woman living in asia who intensely hates white men who choose to be with asian women rather than for example being with her these are examples of of racism now i could go on and on have you met chinese people who are racist against mongolians have you met cambodian people who are racist against vietnamese people so my point is you know it's very easy to presume that atheists and the people who in an extraordinary way with with real daring stand up to their own parents and say no this is wrong and in a sense they turn around and look back at the last thousand years and they're willing to accept this this whole period of millennia but at least one thousand years this is all error this is all wrong it might be very beginning to think these people are extraordinarily intelligent there's something really excellent about these people now i would make the claim that the most intelligent people in every society will question will challenge will overturn the lies that society is predicated upon all right so the foundational myths the mythology the lies that created and perpetuated and sustained the society they're born into the most intelligent people will question those things will challenge them will overturn all right i don't know how someone can be born and raised in the united states of america and not question what they were taught in school about the american revolution but this is typical all these people who think they're they're brilliant they will point their finger and say look at those russians all they hear is propaganda from vladimir putin they never question it isn't this pathetic look at these russians who only hear one side of the story oh i'm sorry have you read anything written by british united empire loyalists have you read one pamphlet one lecture have you read the perspective of just one person who argued that the american independence movement was wrong ever 99.9 percent of americans have never done this even people with phds they've never thought hmm it's possible that when thomas paine was writing a propaganda pamphlet in the middle of a civil war he might have been a little bit dishonest or misleading in what is overtly a work of propaganda let me just ask does it take a genius who is going to question this who is going to again regardless of what the lies are the lies that created the society you're in that promulgated promoted sustain you know the social norms what kind of person in france questions the myth of napoleon i don't i don't think i have to go into details there which i think you're aware napoleon is presented as this great hero you start asking questions you start looking under rocks have any of them read the perspective of just one person who was anti-napoleon from whichever perspective have you have you thought about it that way and there isn't just one perspective there isn't just sorry i should stay with the american revolution for one second there isn't just one perspective from which the american revolution should be cross-examined and criticized so i just mentioned the british basically the pro the royalist position the people who were loyal to the king of england that's one perspective okay what about black people did they have a perspective what about mexican people in the spanish empire did they have a perspective what about first nations and indigenous people do they have a perspective what about roman catholics in quebec they like we can we can keep going here right what about people so here's an interesting one i have a couple books on this what about people who really wanted democracy that's another interesting fight what are the people who didn't support the american constitution because it wasn't democratic enough or they argued it wasn't democratic at all that's an interesting perspective i've done that reading i'm sorry but 99.9 percent of americans they've never even imagined that that perspective exists oh what there were people there were people who said the american revolution and the constitution that's really not democratic there were people who actually kept fighting after the revolution ended because from their perspective they said the revolution isn't over yet we haven't won yet we don't have democracy did you know that this is one example and and of course religion is an important part of that history but i've intentionally used what's what's thought of as a non-religious example so yeah i do think the most intelligent people in any society the distant intellectuals they have to question the lies that society is predicated upon and religion is just one kind of lie it may not be the only lie it may not be the most important lie we are living if you are born and raised in beijing china there are a whole lot of lies for you to question that created and sustained the regime in communist china and religion is relatively low on the list religion's part of it too but it's a religion isn't as important in that critique in china as it would be if you were born in syria if you were born in even iraq this democracy you know have in iraq right imagine imagine someone who was born in iraq just 10 years ago and what they're growing up with being told about the difference between sunni and shiite and how much that matters to everyone in their family how much it matters in the newspaper every like contemporary politics and you're growing up right now in iraq imagine what it takes to really recognize this is all [ __ ] and it's been [ __ ] for a thousand years and it's still [ __ ] now okay so in coming to the title of this video in the thesis video it's a fairly concise question i want to examine here all right you could have a very shallow and catty approach to this catchphrase this thought terminating uh cliche that quote you're free to believe whatever you want to believe i i'm not going to talk about it in a shallow and catty way i want to talk about what's really profound and i want to deal with the genealogy of the concept by which i really mean its origin in one generation and how it changed from generation to generation over time what does it mean to believe in freedom of religion what does it mean to believe in freedom of conscience right what does it mean to believe in freedom of belief does it really mean oh you can believe whatever you whatever you want to believe and obviously already in the title of this video i'm suggesting you if you just stop and reflect on it for one moment you can recognize nobody believes that in our society in our world in this dimension in this family nobody believes that you can and should believe whatever you want to believe it's never sincere so why do we all say it how has that become one of the foundational myths in our study why is it become one of the underpinning you know big lives that our our society is is built upon okay now the origin of the concept right freedom of conscience freedom of religion freedom of belief was very simply and very cynically an attack on the catholic church in europe the way we arrived at our current set of pluralistic political and religious assumptions was by people assailing and criticizing the catholic church and saying people should have freedom of belief freedom of conscience and what that really meant in that period this begins when martin luther is alive all right so you guys may not know this at one point martin luther is in the same city as the the emperor of europe as he called himself it's an interesting thing at some at some periods of time there's someone calling himself emperor and sometimes there isn't this is not a king but an emperor and that emperor had the ability to kill um at that moment martin luther the whole history of the world would be different if he'd done it should he kill martin luther should he exercise some kind of clemency or detachment so obviously you guys know the decision was made not to kill martin luther and uh the emperor i'm sorry his name is escape of mine right now he published his own philosophical statement in defense of orthodoxy in defense of the catholic church and from what i know it was basically ignored martin luther's publications of that time they were wildly popular that he ended up kind of defining the debate that ensued over the reform of the catholic church so as you know these things happen simultaneously some people broke away and founded protestantism but other people took the same impulse and just tried to reinvigorate the the catholic church rid it of its uh forms of corruption or what have you you know so you know the original meaning of this kind of idiom freedom of belief freedom of conscience right the first step of it was simply to try to tolerate protestantism within catholic europe the second step uh oh here i get to use a catchphrase for 2015. ain't no fun when the rabbits got the gun [Laughter] the second step was to try to protect catholics against prosecution from protestants right so both happened although not quite simultaneously soon enough it wasn't just the fact that catholics were or persecuting i should say oppressing whatever you want to say protestants actually you had scenarios where instead it was the protestants of persecuting and oppressing catholics quite soon i think switzerland is the first place this happened you had one protestant sect mercilessly persecuting oppressing another protestant sect just over doctrinal differences of that kind okay so this is this is step two right quote unquote tolerance now anyone yes thank you charles v i didn't want to get the number wrong yeah yeah thanks guys so the the so-called emperor of europe at that time and you guys can look at a map of what he was and wasn't emperor of he did not obviously revolve that was chose the fifth right charles v i think is much underrated today in his historical significance but it's tough for another video anyway um step two it's very clear what we mean then and obviously you know within england of course as you know there were you know periods of time when really catholics were this persecuted and oppressed all right okay and then step three and this has changed our understanding of freedom of belief freedom of conscience so this day right was the quakers because now you got to tolerate people who don't want to fight in your army now you gotta tolerate people who don't want to pay taxes at least in time of war they don't want to support the military this kind of thing you have people who are conscientious objectors and they're an organized religious group so the fear about catholics very understandably was when you had a war between protestant and catholic the catholics are going to fight in the catholic side and the protestants going to fight in the present side that was generally the case i mean it wasn't this wasn't some kind of baseless fear was that there were many many contexts in which you know religion mattered more than nationality and in the complex alliances within europe um you know when england and spain and france and the different bits and pieces of germany and italy were all at war with each other well a lot of times you know this kind of fear that the catholics would be on the catholic side prove to be true so you know the basic question is could you have a form of nationalism national identity that was more powerful than the division between catholic and cross and would incorporate them both into one army and into one taxpaying public oh but then you know the quakers more than anyone else prove the point that just even sorry again everyone in this audience will say the doctrinal differences between these groups are not worth fighting and dying over they're not even worth reading a wikipedia article over how many of you have ever read even one wikipedia article about what the difference is between quakers and protestants how many they didn't wear buttons they they were identifiable by not having buttons i kid you not the quakers they were very proud they had a distinctive style of dress that came out of their ideology how different were the quakers from the puritans how different are protestants from catholics or episcopalians from lutheran get into these everyone in my audience today will say well this isn't worth fighting for and so okay my point is those trivial differences just a few centuries ago they didn't just matter they totally consumed the body politic they totally overwhelmed the parliaments of england and the 13 colonies for example and in any given period like within france catholic versus protestant i mean again france is a defined country germany is much harder to generalize about because it's a whole bunch of different uh duchies and countries and so on again switzerland has its own story here with zvingly and so on okay this this this was not a footnote in history of europe this was a totally overwhelming all-consuming problem and the hope was the prayer was you might say that we could overcome this through freedom of conscience freedom of religion freedom of belief and anyone here right now can say you know yeah but all you're talking about is is the difference between two two religions so similar that from the perspective of a japanese tourist they would be identical like in the year 1750 if you have someone come from japan to europe they'd say well all these people are killing each other and i don't get it like you know okay i've been to a catholic wedding and i've been to a protestant wedding i've been to a catholic funeral i've been to a prostitute yeah what do you got you know how how is this you know how is this worth fighting and dying over i'm using japan as an example but you may or may not know this in the same period religions within japan were unbelievably heterogeneous like i mean you can talk i mean japanese animism how much consistency how much consistency is there from one river valley to the next river valley in japan for what they call religion you can call it shintoism you can use one noun to describe it but i mean this incredible diversity in this you want to talk about buddhism you know buddhism is a very loose concept for what's going on in japan at that time and you could say to some extent now but anyway you know like these these sorry melissa and i've talked to this a lot with the history of china was like look people talk about taoism like it's one thing like you know the amount of diversity and heterogeneousness incorporated within a category like taoism like confucianism like legalism even so-called legalism um so on and so forth these are you know there's no comparison to how orthodox and strictly defined catholicism is and then frankly how each one of the flavors of protestantism define itself so narrowly and hated and despised all the others so that was that was the original concept here right now i always find it's sufficient for me to just say this to you guys verbally i can gesture with my hands and not to provide you with an actual three-dimensional chart or computer generated imager or graphic so it's up to you you can look at the screen now or you can close your eyes and imagine along with me as i i described to you the following diagram once you imagine a very large circle representing facts so our first circle is facts the universe of facts of things that are merely true whether or not you perceive them to be true whether you care about them or you're indifferent to them or whatever and within this there is a much smaller circle which i'm going to call interpretations and the second circle is entirely within the first circle right so there's a subset of facts that are your interpretations of facts right and already you can imagine your interpretations of facts are not quite the same as mine your interpretations of facts are not quite the same as your own brothers your own sisters your own parents your own grandfather now within this second circle there is a smaller circle completely encompassed by the first and second circles all right and that circle is opinions so there are facts there are your interpretations of facts and then there are your opinions which are on the basis of your interpretation of facts and so and now the final circle in this diagram which is the smallest of all there's a little teeny tiny circle nestled within your opinions and that is the circle of beliefs okay there are things you believe what do you believe you believe in opinions opinions that exist on the basis of your interpretation of facts facts that exist i'm sorry and then the interpretations in turn on the basis of actually existing facts that you you may or may not may disregard may ignore at your liberty right if someone were to say to you today as many people do oh you can believe whatever you want to believe it's the exact opposite of the truth isn't it are you allowed to believe that your daughter will live a happier life if you have an arranged marriage for her are you allowed to believe that the best possible life your daughter can have is to be taken out of school as soon as possible to never complete high school and never go to university never have a career and to be married to a man selected by her parents her grandparents her aunts or uncle right are you free to believe that do you think other people should be free to believe that and this is a really difficult one to talk about because if you if you're willing to say no i think we should coerce people into not doing that with their daughters the methods of coercion become quite difficult to pin down now this is the year 2022 have you ever heard ever in say a newspaper article a radio report have you ever heard police this week presented evidence from the text messages and emails of the parents and grandparents proving that this girl was forced into an arranged marriage that they'd selected her husband that wasn't her would it be harder to prove that someone was the victim of an arranged marriage put it that way would that be harder to prove than proving that someone's a drug dealer through text messages emails these kinds of of communications right now as as you may know most countries now have laws against child brides they have laws against arranging a marriage below a certain age but you might be shocked at just how low the age is just how young someone has to be for it to be treated as a as a crime in this way okay do you think it's acceptable for the family to take a relative education have an arranged marriage which by the way culturally it may be bought and paid for it may be a lot closer to prostitution than you want to think it is maybe uh pay for do you think that's acceptable when a girl is 14 16 18 i don't think it's acceptable when a woman is 22 24 26 i don't think it's acceptable under under any headache right but what we're getting at here is something quite subtle quite difficult to enforce and that nobody in the last 200 years has wanted to want to deal with again i've never heard any instance of this now this paradigm arranged marriage what religion were you picturing is the problem here i'm going to accuse you of being prejudiced and say you were probably picturing muslim families don't you well i'm going to name a few other religions that have a problem with arranged marriage buddhism hinduism judaism christianity mormonism it's not just islam remarkably this authoritarian patriarchal pattern of how women are treated it's recurred amongst basically all of the most popular religions in the world now it is true if you were to say okay how many buddhists today take this seriously in practice this way as opposed to how many muslims i'm not claiming these religions are all equal is this as big a problem even in judaism as it is in islam there's no no doubt there's a huge difference between the extent of this problem in judaism and christianity as opposed to islam hinduism pretty interesting example guys you might want to do some research about child marriage and hinduism arrangements hinduism so on and so forth have you ever once heard about a trial were people anywhere in the world where the parents were brought in and accused of arranged marriage and the parents said whoa come on my daughter is pretty ugly and i was just trying to help introduce her to some men that she might be the choice was hers this is what you'd have to get into if you were going to enforce a law against this right some people would be accused of engaged engaging in arranged marriage and they try to defend themselves oh no i was just inviting her to just encouraging my daughter to go on a date with this guy and give him a chance i wasn't you know the choice was hers i wasn't making the decision for her i didn't actually auction off her virginity i didn't actually sell her as a bride or something right what exactly are the definitions where does it start to stop how do you how do you even coercively change your culture that way again sir maybe you guys have heard of anywhere in the world and so someone here mentions hasidism yes so i was indicating that so within judaism this exists don't get me wrong it does i'm saying that explicitly this does exist within judaism it does exist in christianity it does exist within mormonism does exist in buddhism it is it does but yes i mean what percentage of jewish families are implicated in this cultural pattern today it's certainly less the scale and depth and extent of it sure there's a reason why people by default probably are picturing this as a muslim problem some people depending on your background you might have thought of a uh you might have thought as a hindu okay here's the question i want to ask you i open this video by really explaining to you at some length that we are not angels by virtue of being atheist we're not extraordinarily intelligent we're not even well informed you know this is something simple but not necessarily easy to do it brings us together that we have in common as atheists um how many people if they were raised as secular atheists with modern scientific values how many would reinvent the wheel how many would devise a system of oppressive patriarchy involving arranged marriage and child marriage now i am not going to say to you that zero atheists would do this i would say incredibly stupid incredibly evil people would do this in the absence of religion but in the presence of religion you can be in a society where the vast majority of people are doing where it's a mass phenomenon where it's the default culturally accepted behavior that's what's so extraordinary about religion so i can repeat this now very briefly with circumcision all right how many people if they were born with secular atheist anti-religious anti-clerical modern attitudes how many people would get the idea you know what i need some kind of of age ceremony i need some way to mark the difference between being a boy and a man just you know paying a surgeon to cut off part of my penis to remove 60 of the nerve endings in my penis can you imagine someone in the absence of religion deciding to do this deciding to mark the difference between childhood and manhood by undergoing circumcision an incredibly small number of atheists incredibly stupid or incredibly evil could do this to themselves or could do this to their own sons right but the power of religion is that it makes it the unquestioned default throughout society now i can say the same about eating meat i can say the same about animal sacrifice i can say the same about drinking alcohol it seems that there is no evil that cannot be rationalized and popularized and taken on coercive force through religion and although you know i dutifully opened this video by criticizing my own side and pointing to the fact that atheists are fallible right we now live in a world where we have to question right we have to question the extent to which we could make progress just by pulling people back from this tiny circle of beliefs from living within the sphere of belief and perceiving what's in that sphere as more real than any fact to instead pull them back to recognizing these are merely my opinions and these inter these opinions are based on a finite and imperfect set of interpretations of a finite and imperfect selection of facts that's the breakthrough we're capable of as a human species the vast majority of people can't live without beliefs but they can learn to regard those beliefs as nothing but opinions they happen to be especially passionate about they can learn to in this sense undermine or overcome belief and to not have dogmatic attitudes to not have religious attitudes about anything in their lives it's a tremendously important form of progress and even if we acknowledge atheists can become communists and it happen on a huge scale atheists can be racist atheists can be homophobic atheists can be terrible people in myriad ways nevertheless right i don't think i'm being optimistic when i say that atheists cannot reinvent the darkness of the dark ages atheists will not revert to arranged marriage child marriage circumcision so on and so forth we live in a society now that as a kind of echo or an inheritance of the internecine wars between catholic and protestant right dogmatically asserts this notion of freedom of religion freedom of belief so much so that we say when china puts muslims into a re-education camp that it's a crime against humanity okay i want to talk to you about camps for just one second here i've talked about camps on the channel before when christians in the united states of america have a gay son or a lesbian daughter what do those christians do try to force their kids to become straight straight acting heteronormative they send them to a camp they send them to a re-education camp and we don't seem to regard this as a violation of their human rights we seem to regard religion as something innate and inalienable when it suits us that prejudice against religion is treated like prejudice against a skin color is therefore taboo and fat and evil and wrong right um how do mormons ensure that their kids grow up as good little mormons how do lutherans ensure that their kids grow up as good little lutherans they send them to a camp they send them to bible camp they send them to brainwashing camp and i have made youtube videos in the past showing you what these camps look like and it's horrifying even the catholic ones when i was when i was putting together those video clips looking at all these different religious camps i was expecting the catholic camps to be less horrifying i thought well come on the catholics don't take this stuff seriously the catholic camps were arguably the most horrifying of all it was unbelievable the indoctrination the brainwashing the real real ritual inculcation of belief and superstition and irrationality and stupidity into children one generation after another in camps yes to some extent this happens in schools every day if your kid goes to a catholic school but i think there is something especially tangible like it's not just symbolic the significance of these camps it gives you a really tangible way to visualize what this process is of one generation bullying another to come into conformity with their fundamentally stupid ignorant evil and wrong preconceptions and to hold on to these beliefs and to think that those beliefs are more real than facts that they don't come from a human being's interpretations and opinions but that they've been handed down by god or materialized magically you know uh so and so forth now when i was a kid [Laughter] uh i saw my own family tear itself apart over israel the politics of israel totally terror bitter vicious hatred between people and my families because they're different positions in israel this relates to many different things in this uh video even though everyone involved was an atheist who were people who were jewish as an ethnic category but all these people in these bitterly contested discussions and people who didn't talk to each other for years and hated each other and all this stuff and over israel over israeli politics you know what jewish families do to try to ensure that their kids grow up zionist meeting pro-israel they send them to a camp and i met and i talked to kids who told me how thrilled they were to use a machine gun at that camp you take a little kid who's played video games said hey back then the number one most popular gun in video games and comic books and stuff it was just the the gun that people that was cool was called the uzi now you know this you said i mean there's a rapper recently with that nickname it's a little bit old hat now it's an israeli gun guys you may not know this it's the israeli army and sorry to learn how to use an uzi so you take a kid and in america too i mean each state's a little bit different but kids are already shooting hunting rifles at age 12 and stuff 12 14 from state to state kids are using guns with with adult supervision you take a kid and you put a gun in their hand and you show them what it's like to fire an uzi and then they literally go home and watch cartoons like superhero cartoons and they read comic books and they see that gun and they know they see it in action movies too arnold schwarzenegger movies whatever's powerful they know what it's like to hold that gun and hear and feel the bullets coming out of it okay god isn't real or that that power trip is this really influences [Laughter] little little kids all right and i'm sure i'm sure we could talk about this under other headings i know there are families that they want to they want their son to be a hunter because this father and grandfather then they go and they hold a gun and they shoot a deer you know whatever it may be um i remember one guy who was um he was jewish to me he didn't look jewish i was surprised i thought he was jewish i remember he started telling me about the the peculiar rush he felt when firing tracer bullets so these are bullets that have um phosphorus in them so that when you fire the bullet you know normally bullet travels a bit faster than the human eye can really see you get to see this you know illuminated trace this trail behind it so you can see exactly the angle you fire the the bullet at so you can imagine this is useful for improving your aim this is a this is a kid knows it's like the whole fire or a gun and to be told what are they told you were born special one of god's chosen people all right um muslims are putting their kids into camps all right christians are putting their kids into camps mormons are putting their kids in the camps hindus are putting their kids into into camps you guys might not have seen this i did have you seen the videos about some of those ukrainian camps some of those right-wing ukrainian camps all right there are a lot of people there a lot of people organizing camps all right so what is it exactly that we are today criticizing china for what is it exactly that china is doing wrong in xinjiang and how long is it going to be before we make hypocrites of ourselves by doing approximately or exactly the same thing i'm going to pause guys now 55 minutes i could do a mic drop right now melissa's been sitting off camera i want to give melissa a chance to chit-chat with me if you want to you can sit down as you want you can you can ask a question if any of you in the audience have uh have anything tremendously intelligent to say you can say it now and i'll pay i'll pay more attention more attention than usual there have been some comments here i can i can reply to uh from the last hour um now look you know different levels to this thing so melissa's i can see she's see she's rubbing the sticks together to come up with a couple with a spark it's still pressurized you could say anything you could say you could say nothing um what do people mean when they say you can believe anything you want all right what do people mean today in the 21st century all they mean is that they don't give a [ __ ] about you that they don't care like if someone is vegan and they say to you as a meat-eater hey you can believe whatever the [ __ ] you want it's really like saying you can go to hell like i just i don't care about you doesn't mean they don't care about the animals you're killing doesn't mean they don't care about the damage you're doing to the climate doesn't mean they don't care about heart attacks and all the terrible diseases that come there are a whole lot of things they care about but not you you can go [ __ ] yourself that's what it means when people say you can believe it in the in the 21st century but what's interesting is that is the final and most degenerate form of an idea that just a few generations ago meant something very different what it meant was that in the autobiography of ben franklin that he took really seriously the fact that he was in a colony where he had to get catholics and protestants to work together in fighting against spain and fighting against france and fighting against quote-unquote the indians native americans and that he had to take really seriously and manage his relations with the quakers you know which you can read about you can read it from his perspective that that was his idea of a society was with that kind of pluralism and when they said you can believe whatever you want to believe you have freedom of conscience etc all they really meant was there's just enough tolerance here that we're not going back to the way things were under charles v emperor of europe the way things were before the protestant reformation that there's this this way forward of a little bit of wiggle room and enlightenment did they have any tolerance for the religion of the indigenous american people no non-zero did they have any tolerance for the religions of the african people who still had their own religion when they came over no none zero was this very limited range of tolerance and what i'm inviting you guys to think about a little bit is how limited the range of tolerance is in our times also if we're really being honest about it um again very briefly i don't see any reason why we should tolerate circumcision male or female what is the argument in favor of tolerance of that and again i'm being honest with you guys here this one i'm about to say it's even more unpopular that's already unpopular i don't see any reason to tolerate uh gambling i just don't see the benefit of letting people lose their money gambling at a casino the vast majority of people disagree with my i realize what i'm saying here is is unpopular there are some evils that there's a point in in tolerating you know if to give an example i really take this seriously now we've been we've been through this for years together guys you've been watching my channel okay there is a reason to tolerate racism if you if you don't let people say what they really think on twitter and on youtube and on like how are we supposed to make progress when you silence and censor the racists right like that i've seen that freedom of speech come and go on the internet i was myself attacked by racists and anti-semites whenever i'm you know i'm ethnically jewish i've really enjoyed that but like i'm just saying you can't say there's no point in allowing racist people to have freedom of speech there is a point there is benefit but some kinds of tolerance right what are we talking about yo you want more of it yeah sure i was thinking of an example that you've actually already made videos about so it's something that was uh on my mind as we were talking about this because it's not in every religion i don't i at least i've never heard about it in hinduism or buddhism but uh it is in certain religions the the problem of cousins and marriage yes and interbreeding and this sorry yeah yeah um that this is a real significant problem i saw some video from a the a countryside in in in turkey in the country of turkey uh where a family of the husband and wife were cousins and some of the children turned out okay but some turned out horribly informed with severe mental disabilities yeah severely [ __ ] so this is a extreme you know example but in any case this should be banned that should be out while there should be no tolerance for this um so at what point you know do you say that this is completely intolerable and who gets to who gets to say so babe i thought about that in my earlier monologue or discussion under under a different headache this isn't disagreeing with you it's just putting in a different context when i mentioned for example a black woman who is racist against couples that intermarry so a mixed-race couple you know where that's the peculiar form of bigotry is specific not racism in general but specifically hostility to miscegenation or you know asian men asian men and white women or white men and asian women that that specific form of racism you know what's interesting about that is that if you have scientific attitudes you understand that the real problem is inbreeding the real like scientifically inbreeding is a problem scientifically marrying your cousin is a problem and you know i'm not saying that um exoticized foreigners that's necessarily the best person you can marry you know you've got to make decisions in particular cases but if you are attracted to people who are exotic estranged you there is that reassurance at least you're not marrying your own cousin at least you're not you're not gonna you know uh you you're not gonna have these these problems of inbreeding so that is one where you can't say science is neutral or science is indifferent um science is fundamentally in favor of you know and yeah it's like the truth based example where right there's just it doesn't matter if you believe in inbreeding right good or bad it's scientifically it's it's bad so well right right right quick but but to be fair you know in the year 1950 still most people believed in eugenics and they believed that science proved the opposite right and you know i mean the the the world war ii period and so on but you know even you go back to say the 1890s um which is very much the lead up ideologically to world war ii there was this whole blossoming pseudoscience of eugenics that was regarded as scientific certainty that basically you know kind of justified not just racism also a lot of classism a lot of it was kind of hating on poor people as if poor people are genetically inferior in this kind of thing and breeding between the classes aristocratic attitudes about about marriage and breeding oh and yeah aristocratic attitudes that also links to arranged marriage and these things yeah um and you know just to kind of prescribe one cure to many ailments because talk about different manifestations the religious mentality here but you know what if you could have the detachment to regard your beliefs as just the kind of opinion that you're right for all of them for all examples whether it's racism or homophobia or you know inbreeding or yeah toothpaste like what if you know and that's that's the difference well i i came to the difference between us on them well that's the difference between me and them you know as a member of the audience you have to ask yourself if you've really got this this kind of radical skepticism and come with me or not cool yeah i liked this this example or this uh demonstration that you made with the different series of circles that yeah interlock um you know i heard an intro an interview recently with a woman who had had 10 children and right her [Music] part of her reasoning was i never want anyone to tell me what how many children i can have right you know and uh you can listen to other women who have had so many children and you know they deal with a lot of prejudice from people around them they think uh you know you're a redneck you're a pumpkin that's kind of right how is it possible to provide the appropriate level of child rearing for that many children it's just it's hard to believe that any woman can can really give a good uh upbringing to 10 children uh but still um you know at a certain point you know at what point does it become irresponsible and usually it has to do with religion i mean typically yes religious uh households have more children so yeah this is this is also a factor with uh i mean us being vegan i know overpopulation is not really the problem we we know that if everybody had a vegan diet the planet could sustain a population of seven billion people right um but given that most people are not vegan most people are consuming meat overpopulation is a problem and it's going to destroy the planet yes yeah if everybody continues eating the diet that they have okay do you want about you see sure uh i'll just say you know i had i could only use so many examples in a one hour monologue but you know when i choose that kind of example when you talk about the situation of a woman who is being put into an arranged marriage and having kids and is not even completing high school and not going to university and can't have some other career sure overpopulation is a factor and these things can be talked about um but you know for me this is about the meaning of life and again you know if anyone disagrees come at me bro but i do not think a woman can have a meaningful life who has an arranged marriage at age 14. and there were people who have arranged marriage earlier than 14 there are and again if you just go back a few centuries in europe it wasn't it wasn't that common but it existed there was a there was a certain percentage of a certain percentage of marriages were you know uh this type of ranged marriage at a shockingly early age um you can read the autobiographies of people who went through it you know um even if it were theoretically possible for a woman who wears a veil and who has an arranged marriage and it drops out of school yeah theoretically she can still read thucydides she can still read her hondas theoretically she can still develop her intellect and someone but you know in every this is as ridiculous as saying that a person could be put in prison at age 14 like someone who's falsely accused of murder and put in prison at 14 which happens and they could still have a wonderful life you know well yes you you could you know theoretically your life in prison could have been better than your life outside of prison but this kind of theorizing um you know it fails to rationalize it fails to justify what we are looking at which is fundamentally snuffing out a human being's intellectual potential snuffing of the possibility that they'll have a meaningful life now the counter argument which i take seriously a lot of people would just dismiss it is well if you give women freedom if you let them wait to get married till they're 35 years old or whenever they choose to which may be 35 years old you know if you give women all of these freedoms well what percentage of them are going to become strippers what percentage of them are going to be on only fans and so on a lot you know like a lot like you know i i um i i i said in response to a comment from the audience recently someone was talking about social harmony i don't think harmony is the purpose of society i don't think having a peaceful society is is really what i want you know um you know the taliban created sustained a harmonious society that doesn't really interest me you know it is true if you give women this kind of freedom there will be many broken hearts and many bad decisions made and there and women will make particular types of decisions that would be impossible for them to make in a more repressive society where instead they're they're uh sold off as a bro they have arranged marriage and so on and so forth it certainly does you know change change the nature of those things and i think it's important to accept you know like i know it seems ridiculous but you can really say democracy entails pornography like you can't have one without the other when you have democracy you have political equality for women and freedom and opportunity some women are going to get involved with pornography whether that's only fans or magazines or or what have you some women are going to prostitute themselves even in the most idealized egalitarian future you can you can conceptualize so i'm just saying i don't dismiss that in a in a catty way but i i'm i i'm making my argument not on the basis it's a totally good point by the way overpopulation and what that entails and by the way guys the demographics are very well traced for the modern state of israel how many children do conservative jews have and the different definitions of how conservative and how many children do people with modern secular attitudes have whether they identify as atheists or as reformed jewish or one of the more one more liberal liberal and libertine sects yeah guess what it's pretty consistent the religious maniacs the women get married younger they have lower levels of education they have more children and year by year the percentage of israel that is comprised of so-called heredity uh jewish people and again you can get into what is the exact definition of orthodox already but the percentage of israelis who are religious fanatics it is increasing which is say that the people who are more free thinking and secular modern they are they're having fewer children so anyway um an extreme example though though sorry yeah just say it i mean another thing i'm sorry i'll just add another thing that woman said was if one room in my house is lit by one light bulb it doesn't matter how many people are in the room it's still the same light bulb yeah so that that is her belief like she's like it was such a reduction yeah it was just so silly you know because she had just gotten done talking about how much food the whole family you know having 10 children it's ridiculous like um so you may have this belief at some point at some point there are so many people in the room that i am in someone else's shadow that is my refutation [Laughter] do you know that you know the quiver full movement um i think you've told me about it it's just an easy one to um to google it's not that popular a religious segment but there are religious people who believe in having the greatest number of children possible and i think that's a great example of how religion just immediately destroys any possibility of a meaningful life for at least the woman and her and her daughters how meaningful life that men can have it's it's just it's just less oppressive for men but it's still pretty oppressive for the men and so on yeah yeah i know i just i just wanted to say you know reiterate that i i do really appreciate this like you know your belief that you should have as many children as you possibly can you know uh to whatever for whatever you believe the reason is you know like why why it is that you believe that's the right thing to do um yes it's an opinion based on sorry remind me anyway so opinion based on your interpretation of that yeah right well you're in turn based on facts yes thank you okay sorry okay anyway yeah we have some people who are culturally hindu in the audience as you guys know i think there are different reasons why the message the unpopular message i'm sharing on this channel is more appealing to hindus than any other demographic i have several viewers now who are spanish speakers in south america think about how hard it is to accept this for someone in brazil or colombia or what have you but it was someone who was culturally hindu comments that yes arranged marriage is is huge among hindus even among the most highly educated people you will find um and and i would say this before i put emphasis on questioning how would you enforce a law against that i'm insinuating that probably it would look something like the re-education camps in xinjiang like i don't think the enforcement really would be sitting back and intercepting text messages and emails and then arresting the parents probably would have to be something like um something like the re-education camps in in sydney um but this is the thing i want to emphasize now the people who practice arranged marriage what do they believe in it's not as simple as saying god and by the way there is no text you can pull out of the bible and this is not you can say oh well look at the ten commandments like commandment number eight is therefore a range of marriage you know they believe this is for the best you know but people can believe that that can be that can be something they believe is more real than an opinion more real than an interpretation of fact more real than a fact it becomes a a belief i mean again some of you know what i'm talking about right away some of you don't if you were around traditional racists from the american south the segregated south of the united states of america what they'd always say about relations between black people and white people so it's for the best you know it's for the best that they don't get to go to the same college as we go to it's for and they really believe that they really believe it's it's for the best you know but but how how is it going to change you know how do you change someone's belief that's so nebulous right like there i hate telling this there is a sense in which i can prove to you god doesn't exist if we pin down your definition of god you know what i mean we can kind of prove that whether or not toothpaste works like there are things we can prove right whether or not the earth is flat or the earth is round can we get this susceptible to proof and falsifiability and death knowledge and certainty right but that kind of belief the belief that arranged marriages is for the best and look we could say the same thing all again with cousin marriage and again i made videos with about people who think that marrying one person to their cousin that's like for the family as a whole is is for the best right so you know how how do you overcome that and um yeah very often for people who are in this struggle it's not even clear what it is they're arguing you should or shouldn't believe it right so here's here's a comment from martin for you um and martin's been here i remember the name from several other live streams so quote he or she says i assume this is a man but it could be martina we don't know quote lies are functional and even good if they keep society functioning and avoiding its self-destruction that's why atheism and nihilism shouldn't become mainstream or taken seriously by the majority of the population so you know martin have you been to a muslim majority country i'm going to take an example of a muslim country i have v2 i have been would you live in malaysia for just two weeks and malaysia is considered moderate in its its form of islam malaysia is not saudi arabia malaysia is not afghanistan right could you spend just two weeks in malaysia and still believe what you've just said you believe i don't think you could i think after two weeks you think it was intolerable and you would completely recant and throw away this notion that as you say quote-unquote lies are functional and even good all right now we can extend this further could you spend two weeks in afghanistan could you spend two weeks in in saudi arabia you know um and i've got to push a little bit further here his phrasing is telling he says if if they keep society functioning and avoiding its self-destruction what if you lived in malaysia for two years what if you lived in saudi arabia for two years what if you lived in afghanistan for two years at some point don't you think you might start to feel that the truth is so important the difference between truth and lies is so important that it would really be quite worthwhile for society to shut down to stop functioning that it would be a good thing for this particular society to self-destruct precisely so that it could make the transition from living a lie to some kind of more healthy engagement with the truth whether you regard that as destructive or creative is very much in the eye of the beholder what one person would see as the destruction of saudi arabia someone else would see as its salvation a revolution that tears down the religious tyranny of saudi arabia of afghanistan or even a more moderate muslim country like you know malaysia some people some people would see that as self-destruction not me the role of the nihilist and the role of the true atheist in my opinion as a dissident intellectual in society is to perpetually work toward that great rectification it's to work toward writing a new constitution not just once and for all time but in my opinion in every generation again and again attacking undermining overcoming the myths the lies that as you say keep society functioning as i say that perpetuate you know society as you as you know it right pointing the way leading the way whether creatively or destructively toward the end of the darkness of the dark ages the year is 2022. the dark ages are not over yet