Why People Leave Their Religion & How We Will (Try To) Guard Against It
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 45 minutes
Words per Minute
186.80139
Summary
In this episode, we talk about science inconsistency, the decline of Western cultural traditions, and the rise of the urban monoculture. We also talk about fertility and fertility rates, and what it means to be a christian in the modern era.
Transcript
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let's talk about science inconsistency because this is a bigger problem for christianity than
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christians like to pretend so christians will be like look at all of the great things that we
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the western tradition have accomplished and what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of
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the most important scientists in the past hundred years if they were born within the judeo-christian
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tree left the judeo-christian tree either during their period of most productive work or at least
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before they die so you don't really get to like clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason
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your most productive scientists are leaving the tradition this is a big problem it's actually
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interesting how symbiotic like if this takes off how symbiotic it is with traditional cultural
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traditions and that it literally sees it as a religious order to help protect their members
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from deconverting and it only wants to prevent the people who they would otherwise have bleeding off
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from it but they would really rather not fall to the urban monoculture we can act as a good backstop
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which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban monoculture so it's acting as part of
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this cultural economy that prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization
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before it can reach the stars and ensuring that the western cultural tradition does join the stars to
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some extent so i'm gonna be like why don't you care about the eastern cultural tradition because it's
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not us like i have no connection to that it would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt
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to simulate that or simp that you know we can we can work to help them where we can but we're not part
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of that tradition would you like to know more simone and malcolm are back hello simone this is gonna be a
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fun particularly spicy episode today i always get worried because our religion episodes they typically
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perform really poorly at first and then they do better after a while i think it's lower click
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through higher watch time but they're my favorite episodes to do because it's a topic that i just have
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been thinking so much about recently and i think you know in the question of pronatalism
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becomes such an existential question for our species because in writing the pragmatist guide to
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crafting religion i mean from the pronatalist perspective it seems to be the only thing like
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religious cultures that are able to motivate high fertility in wealthy groups like the only thing
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like i have not found anything else that reliably seems to do it but then in addition to that in
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writing the pragmatist guide to crafting religion it just became really obvious to us that uh there's a
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correlation between the rise of mental issues in our society and dangerous viral memes like the virus
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which is what we call the the urban monoculture sometimes and the decline of religious traditions
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i mean religious traditions may have been like a janky antivirus that had a bunch of bloatware on it
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but it was the only antivirus we had yeah and when people ripped it out they didn't realize how
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susceptible they were making the population to extremely virulent and and quite selfish and
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dangerous memetic sets and we're now beginning to see the fallout of all of that this all comes to a
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problem for us right so a lot of people are like well then just go back to one of the old religions
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and we've done an episode on this but but it's something i want to pontificate on more while also
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talking about how we construct a system for our kids which is designed to have a low low bleed rate like
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withstand this storm this what you know this this it's like a bunch of the century storm that's
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only getting worse every year that all of the religious traditions have to intergenerationally
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weather against before we get to the other side of this so so how do i build that but in thinking
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about that i think a lot of people from more traditional religions will be able to think about
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some of the tools and techniques that we're using and where they could implement them within their
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existing systems to lower the bleed rate with their own kids now and in part to answer you know why
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not one of the old traditions which is a question that constantly comes up yes i think it goes worse
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talking about so recently i was interviewing my dad about his life we've done hours and hours of this
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now so i'll see if i posted on here and i was asking about you know when he left the religious
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tradition right like when my family left the faith because if he's half me right what it means that if i
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tried to raise my kids in one of these the traditional religious contexts they might leave
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as well for whatever reason he left christianity right and he was as antagonistic enough towards
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christianity that he refused to get married in a church for example i recently oh wow and when he
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was normally even like totally indifferent people deigned to get married in a church if a spouse cares
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about it and he bragged about never once going into the central church where all of the like a lot of
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formal stuff is done at stanford he went really out of his way to avoid ever setting foot in there
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so that's intense that that is uh yeah the level of useful antagonism he had toward these institutions
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so he when he was younger was in sunday school and he ended up the it was apparently a fairly big thing
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where he was punished pretty severely like it was considered like a pretty big deal that he had done
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this and what he had done was gotten very interested in the logistics of the noah story
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and trying to figure out how that was possible because you know someone was talking to you about this
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you're like yeah all the measurements are there like if you really want to like get nerdy and go deep
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on the logistics of this to try to figure it out that's the type of thing that of course anyone who's seen
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me talking you know i talk about humans as intergenerational entities it's exactly the type of thing that would
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have happened had my dad stayed in the faith and raised me in the faith right and this that he would
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be punished for asking these technical questions was a really hard thing for for him to take like he
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couldn't stand following a tradition that would punish him for asking questions like this and and that's
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what had him turn away from it and this was really interesting to me for a couple reasons right
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like if i think about it as us from a cultural group you know if we have a group of 20 kids and one of
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them is just incessantly demanding answers to this like very niggly like technical question
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that will be our golden child yeah and it's standing up to authority to do this to me that one person is
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worth the other 19 kids in the bedroom combined if i had a religion and i was trying to like convert
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people into it i would spend extra attention to that person and this is when we talk about like
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genetic selection effects and stuff like that within religious traditions this is how you can get a
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genetic selection effect but we'll talk about this later in like personalities and stuff like that
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but the the next thing is is is it's like well then there's lots of iterations of christianity
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that don't take a realism stance to the noah's ark story right the problem here is the iterations of
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christianity that typically loosen interpretations around what is in the bible you know they start
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saying oh this is all just metaphor or whatever they also loosen interpretations around morality and
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moral rules and moral restrictions yeah and what i want is an iteration of christianity that it contains
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a lot of the the rules and framings that are useful for living a good life but is also compatible
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with an extreme level of skepticism an extreme level of of picking apart these stories and also of
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of of you know sort of unrestrained scientific research and questioning and and i feel like this
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is necessary if we're getting to the stars like like absolutely necessary from the the the biological
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perspective and that it appears that we really need religion or some religious structure to stay
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psychologically healthy and from the carrying on our ancestral traditions you know into space into
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the interstellar empire that humankind ends up or we aim for humankind to end up creating um
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and and and so that's really what we're attempting to do here and it may turn out like a person may come to us
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and they may be like the reason why when you start loosening the slack in this one area it ends up
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loosening all the slack that's just a truism of religion you can't you can't and i'm like maybe
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maybe except the problem is is that when i take a real history like obviously i'm very trained in
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religious history i know a lot of religious traditions i know like i'm i'm very interested in
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the religious history of america this is something that is deeply interesting to me no one's really
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tried this before genuinely the closest is probably mormonism typically when people try to adapt a
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religious tradition to allow for looser interpretations or metaphorical interpretations of
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the older stories they always go in the loosen everything approach the idea of really tightening in one
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area but loosening in the other is something that i just haven't seen and so you could say our family
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is treating itself with an experiment and that's why we're using judaism as a backup and you can see
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the video on why we're using judaism as a backup to this experiment but i actually have a lot of
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confidence the experiment will work and now finally you know to go into this a person might say well
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what do you mean like everything about the religion you created it's it's completely like this is
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just what's logically necessary for the best interest of our species and and for the best health of
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your kid and it's like yes yes actually and i i do believe it right but i think if it was well
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constructed i would believe it you know that's the way rituals work you do rituals we're pre-programmed
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to believe these religions so i put this out and i believe it but well but i mean i think it's also
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believable because it's it was also based on our best understanding of reality from what we've learned
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about science physics psychology etc so yeah and now a lot of people are like come on you guys
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that's the silliest thing ever are you actually saying that a secular tradition about a metaphysical
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entity that people believe was in the best interest of kids could really do well in a world like our
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world today and it's like santa like santa is mopping up the old traditions in terms of its
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intergenerational fidelity and growth in mindshare these days like we have seen that this works but
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i also think that it's something that we are really dedicated to and actually believe and sometimes when
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people talk to me they're like wait you really believe this stuff don't you i can never tell
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and there was this one book that you had me read while you were writing the pragmatist guide to
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crafting religion about faith and about religion that was written by an anthropologist who went into many
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different obscure cultures and like tribal systems and asked them lots of questions about their faith
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watched them practice their faiths and maybe this is because it was very close to what you would call
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a super soft religion or like you know that kind where you just sort of go back to like you know
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reciting a spell so that your usb cord goes in the right way the first time right like just the really
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weird sort of default intuitive religion but one thing that was really interesting that she observed
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was that people would both could both and do both have faith and not have faith so she would be
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like what in in you know the same day this man at the same day she would ask do you believe in ghosts
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and they'd be like obviously not and then like you know in the evening something like oh i just saw a
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ghost you know you know i'm praying to this ghost for this and she's like what like and so it was very
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context based and the the faith would come in the in certain settings or when it was useful or when it
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was needed i also saw this a little bit in japan like just sort of like spending extended time with
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families that hosted me and whatnot where like i don't think buddhism and shinto necessarily are like
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seamlessly combinable as religions right like logically for all the rules etc but like many many many
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japanese hold both shinto and buddhism you go to shinto when your baby's born and you go to like
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the buddhist thing when someone dies like there's just like you choose this for this and this for
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this and you sort of pick and choose which is kind of indexy right where you're like let's just combine
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our favorite things from both of these religions and i think in the moment they fully believe each i had
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a friend when i was a kid named nicholas who was raised as well at one point my mom explained to me in front
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of him that he was raised half jewish and half christian and he's like no i'm all jewish and i'm
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all christian and he was like very serious about this and i do i do kind of think that that's somewhat
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possible because i think that only a certain strain of humanity or certain like iq level or like genetic
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tendency level is going to really struggle with that logical logical consistency nonsense like the rest are
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able to be very contextual about how and when they believe and i believe that there's a significant
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amount of both anecdotal and more systematically research documentation supporting that i think
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this study that simone mentioned here is actually really important to understanding how we relate
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to religion and how our religion is constructed we both 100 believe our religion is true but also
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100 believe that it's something that we artificially constructed because it was psychologically
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useful to us and our family and a lot of people will look at this and they'll be like that
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that can't be true you can't have a religion where both the secular theory of the religion exists
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overlapping the theistic interpretation of the religion and it's like well yes you can and
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historically it was actually pretty common for people to have these overlapping frameworks about
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belief because so we'll get to that in a second but let's go into it so what i wanted to ask you to
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start simone sort of let's take an inventory why are the various reasons that you think people
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leave religious traditions intergenerationally these days okay so there's what you pointed out
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where there's just like logical inconsistencies they can't deal with another one where i watched a
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friend lose hold on before you go further i want to pull at this logical inconsistency thing because
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they fall into two categories okay i think noah's ark is a really good example of doing this
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so there's two ways because as we go through each of these like let's talk about them a little bit
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right so logical inconsistencies i think is a real one the problem is is that when people try to fix
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the logical inconsistencies there's three routes they go down and they're all pretty bad route number
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one is just to deny that there's any inconsistency and and say that like somehow we don't understand it
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or there was a miracle involved in this that wasn't particularly noted in the bible like maybe noah's
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ark really did have all the full animal sizes in the world on it and just like somehow it worked
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because magic except that's not really talked about like they don't talk about the magic like
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like so it just doesn't seem plausible to me that that you're getting magic there but like
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it's not mentioned in the story that they were using all this magic to do this yeah there's also a
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bunch of other weird things about noah's ark like apparently god wasn't pissed at any
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seaborne mammals or fish or bacteria we'll get to that in a second so the next problem i don't want
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to get into all the problems with the noah's ark story yeah one is is they try to create like a
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science-y explanation right like maybe it was all baby animals or maybe it was as i've heard more
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recently maybe it was a total world flood but like he took the dna from all the animals and went to
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space or maybe i'm just picturing like all the really cute like cutest noah's ark ever everything
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yeah but these feel to me like like if you're an outsider and you're like doubting a religion or
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you're trying to be convinced of a religion they feel like sophistry and very weak sophistry it feels
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like you're really trying it's like okay but if that was the story then the bible would have said
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baby animals it doesn't say baby animals like you're adding things that make it plausible because we
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know stuff now that they didn't know then the final answer which i really hate is to say that
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this is all metaphors which i also also just by the way the baby animals thing wouldn't do given the
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duration of the flood because they would have most of them would have grown to like close to full size
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by the time it was over so so so the the the answer that we would come up with with our tradition
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for our kids to this is that this was a full revelation from the period of people of that time period
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like what they were capable of understanding and if you look at when the noah's ark story was delivered
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you know you are looking at like bronze age civilization you look at these people level of
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education and understanding of the world and there was probably something that was trying to be or that
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needed to be conveyed by this story and it was a direct real revelation insofar as we were able to
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understand it yeah like you can kind of picture almost like imagine someone came from the future
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but then had to explain this in like layman's terms to people of that time and eventually like i can
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imagine the person first tells the truth and then like tries to like dumb it down and then finally
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they're like okay okay okay imagine god's really mad and so he he tells this one guy to build a boat
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and put all the animals on the boat and then like he floods the earth to get rid of everything else
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like but you can just imagine like someone getting increasingly well no that's what i basically think god did
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like he talked to us like we were idiotic children yeah and that was the way he handled it but then
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okay go to the next why did what's the next reason people leave yeah so there's there's a couple people
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that i know or that you and i know who to a certain extent left their religion because they really
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didn't like the way that certain groups and specifically certain groups that they were members of
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like women were treated by it and like sort of what the the teachings were about women
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specifically in this case in the two cases i'm thinking of it was like well women you know sort
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of kind of don't belong in leadership positions and they belong you're thinking of mormons right the
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people who you're thinking of right i'm thinking of mormons and other conservative christians okay
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yeah no it is it is a big problem within our society right now and it's a big problem in that i think
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that aiming for true equality also causes issues i think another issue here is sexual restrictions
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that evolved so i'm going to group these into two into the same category sexual restrictions and
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traditions that evolved was in religions because they helped them compete in an intergenerational
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context historically but now are counterproductive and really just lead to bleed so the other thing
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here i would say is like gay rights and gay marriage within traditions if you look at god i don't
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find the guy's channel when i'm doing this the guy who does videos on us occasionally and we're
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going to have on our channel soon paul vanderclade yeah paul vanderclade he's done a number of
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videos on fights within the church and he's from the reform christian church which is a calvinist
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church actually pretty similar to the the iterations of christianity that we came from and the church
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right now is continually having rifts and splits over gay marriage and you see this across christian
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traditions today it's actually a really really easy tactic that progressives can use to pull people
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out of religious traditions because it feels arbitrary and when you talk to religious people you're like
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why is this bad and they're like because it's sin because it's not the way humans were meant to work
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and it's like well it just feels really capricious and evil that god would then make some humans
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arbitrarily more attracted to the same gender like why would he do that and and i know people who are
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gay and they seem perfectly happy and if you actually look at studies that have been done on gay
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people adopting kids those kids actually do better than the kids in straight families now the reason for
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that is almost certainly because those families have been much much more vetted than straight families
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but it's it's still just like a truism of the studies that have been the the good studies that
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have been done so far um so the the there's sort of a few problems that are overlapping here so the
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question first is is why did religions take these perspectives if you take our world view of this
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right they took these perspectives because the iterations of them that took these perspectives in a
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historic pre-birth control context had more kids than the iterations that didn't so you know when
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they said uh don't be gay when they said don't have sex with animals when they said don't have sex with
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your wife when she's menstruating when they said don't engage in pornography when they said you know
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never masturbate outside of sex all of these things are really just meant to increase the rate
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of reproductive sex individuals are having even if that wasn't like why the individual who came up with
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them came up with them there have been iterations of these traditional religious systems that didn't
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have these stipulations to them but they were out competed by the ones that did have these
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stipulations because the ones that did have these stipulations had higher fertility rates and the
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fertility rates matter so much in terms of which religions ended up in which iterations of which
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religions ended up dominating and which ones didn't end up dominating the problem is in a modern context
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a lot of these stipulations are extremely counterproductive as we continually point out
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there's been great studies done on levels of religiosity and porn consumption the more the porn
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is is like banned in a region from a social context when it's not like actually illegal the more people in
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that region will consume porn it like has the exact opposite effect you would want um with gay
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individuals you're not really increasing birth rates that much anymore by by banning this and yet you're
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leading to like really high church division by banning this um and when we get to a world of
00:22:01.100
artificial wombs and stuff like that it becomes almost irrelevant from a fertility rate perspective
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and then you've got the problem of women and women's rights and everything like that and why women i mean
00:22:11.380
women and men have a level of sexual dimorphism to them right and it is true that it seems that the
00:22:19.240
cultural groups that put men in charge like if you go historically like way back it seems much more
00:22:24.540
common in these early societies when you're talking about like the true diversity of humanity to have
00:22:28.760
some matriarchal societies and some patriarchal societies the patriarchal societies outcompeted
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the matriarchal societies i mean that's just what we see that's why most of the historic surviving
00:22:39.980
societies in the world are patriarchal societies so having a patriarchal mindset does seem to confer
00:22:45.960
some advantages however i also think it has disadvantages in terms of the productivity of
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a society and by looping one perspective on reality i mean as humans we get this cool thing
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like people are often like wouldn't it be cool if we got to have like neander saws here who could see
00:23:01.460
the world from a totally different but like kind of aligned perspective and i'm like but we kind of
00:23:05.760
get that with genders and and not fully utilizing the intellectual capacity of one gender especially in a
00:23:10.980
world where manual labor isn't that useful anymore and and household labor isn't that useful anymore
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you're you're leaving a lot on the table when you do that and so i don't know if it makes the same
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sense to to build this sort of restriction what are your thoughts i have and maybe an even more tempered
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view i you know a lot of the religious traditions around what when men and women should do i think are
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refined like many of them are built on relative advantages that each gender has right so like
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that's great but as we know from our research in sexuality and all sorts of other areas with both
00:23:48.800
men and women there are always outliers like there there are some there are some women who are very
00:23:54.100
much more masculine than men and much better suited for men's roles than women's roles there is a subset
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of men that is way more suited for women's roles than men's roles so i think like just not being so
00:24:04.540
strict about like which role you want to take on you know like women can never serve in the priesthood
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or like men can never take care of kids is here's the interesting thing i think if you go to a
00:24:16.120
traditionalist religious framework and you start to loosen roles around women in church it ends up
00:24:21.980
loosening a lot of the moral restrictions because when people are following the rules of the traditional
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religious system and they don't know why it has those rules some of those rules are for like this
00:24:34.240
evolved context and other of those rules are like actually useful rules in terms of of out
00:24:40.100
competing other groups or not sinning or stuff like that i think it's really hard to loosen one of these
00:24:45.880
rules without loosening rules across the board if you don't have some sort of higher order logic for
00:24:51.320
why some rules are loosened and not others hmm um yeah i mean like i don't know when it comes to
00:24:59.520
leadership positions and having perspectives valued i mean i think patriarchal societies
00:25:04.440
seem to be fitter for a good reason but i think that the best system is a patriarchal society that
00:25:12.280
is is built in the way that a true patriarchal society is which is entirely meritocracy
00:25:18.360
you know just the the fittest the smartest the strongest wins and if one of those is a woman
00:25:23.160
fine right like and and i think this is how things have often been throughout history
00:25:27.600
there have been many people in very patriarchal societies who have been strong enough ruthless
00:25:33.340
enough etc to make it work queen elizabeth catherine the great margaret thatcher etc right like they
00:25:38.600
made it work but the rules weren't changed for them so i just want to make it clear that i'm like
00:25:42.420
not fighting for some switch over to the ginocracy with like you know bureaucratic rules and everyone has
00:25:48.860
to listen to everyone else and things like that i think it's just there are some rules that are too hard
00:25:54.040
and fast or like you know your role as a woman is to grow up and marry a man and homeschool your kids
00:26:00.200
which is great for many many many many women but like you're gonna lose some incredible talent if
00:26:06.180
you make that you're going to lose the best women yeah the highest competence highest creativity
00:26:12.520
highest ambition women which are the ones that we would want the most which is also really interesting
00:26:17.540
so so everybody who knows sort of where we're going with a lot of this stuff we are actually
00:26:22.580
specifically trying to build a religious system that is not conflicting with the pre-existing religious
00:26:29.120
systems and that it laps up these types of women who would be kicked out of these systems for
00:26:35.040
being too ambitious or the people who ask too many questions but prevents them from falling all the way
00:26:41.680
to the urban monoculture or the virus so sort of a like we have an audience that we are building this
00:26:47.440
was a was a target for because we think that you know the troublemakers within these religious
00:26:52.320
traditions so the way that we try to tackle this system on both ends from within the religious system
00:26:58.340
we're building is one have an internal hierarchy where the the social order of the hierarchy is a
00:27:06.360
meritocracy but not a bureaucratic meritocracy because bureaucratic meritocracies overvalue the female's
00:27:12.880
perspective whereas if you have a true meritocracy which is measuring somebody's ability
00:27:17.400
to succeed within a real world context which can often be measured by things like efficiency gains
00:27:22.340
which are well measured by how much money someone has earned over their life and how much money of
00:27:26.540
that has gone back into the system these these systems are going to be very good at filtering out
00:27:32.160
a genuine meritocracy which will lead to a system likely where within this type of measuring capacity
00:27:38.760
you're going to get more men but it doesn't prevent the the best of the best women from participating in it
00:27:45.400
and it has a clear reason for how it's sorting people it's sorting them on their ability to succeed
00:27:51.100
within real world scenarios i.e within the the the big game that we're all playing within any sort of
00:27:57.680
capitalistic system um or or adjacent to capitalistic system of resource acquisition the second category is
00:28:05.600
when you're talking about things like like gay trans everything like that if we just focus on the point
00:28:11.400
it's about fertility rate and all other rules flow from that it removes the need to cause full schisms
00:28:19.540
over things like gay acceptance and trans acceptance which would allow for better weathering against one
00:28:26.020
of the core tools that the progressive movement has against religious traditions now a person might
00:28:31.940
rightly point out that this way of motivating higher fertility rates and religious fidelity is going to
00:28:38.140
work significantly less well for less intelligent people or people with less self-control within
00:28:44.580
those communities you can't say okay think about the end goal then act towards that end goal you need
00:28:50.440
to give them simplistic rules like uh you know get them to have more kids by telling them not to
00:28:56.600
masturbate so when they want to relieve themselves they're doing it and not to have sex with your wife
00:29:01.020
when she may not be fertile like she's menstruating or something like that and that is true but you've got to
00:29:06.340
keep in mind the theological end goal of our religion which is focused around intergenerational
00:29:12.720
improvement with the the end state being eventually becoming whatever this entity god is in the distant
00:29:20.360
future what this means for us is that it would be almost sinful to focus on those individuals and thus
00:29:30.160
care for us and thus cares a lot less about really either recruiting or ensuring that those within
00:29:37.900
the faith who have less self-control or less innate intelligence are breeding like we actually almost
00:29:44.340
would want to discourage them from breeding as heavily as the other members of the community
00:29:48.140
so we really don't mind that effect of this whereas other religions are generally more focused on quantity
00:29:56.160
over quality when they're looking at the the way that their religion relates to intergenerational
00:30:02.920
fertility rates so what would you say a next reason you've seen people leave
00:30:06.840
i i think it's maybe this is too much like the other categories but lifestyle like they're just
00:30:13.800
not into that kind of lifestyle like stylistically i've never seen somebody leave for this i hear a lot
00:30:20.240
of people from traditions that think that people leave for this reason but i haven't seen it myself
00:30:24.680
i have not seen somebody leave a tradition because of the rules except for in so far as how those
00:30:30.200
rules look immoral i.e. preventing this otherwise qualified person from being in this position
00:30:36.200
or prevent this otherwise loving couple from wanting to marry rules like actually very interesting
00:30:42.280
like bans on pornography bans on premarital sex stuff like that what i see those rules doing is people
00:30:47.800
just break them and then stay in the tradition no it's true they do not push people out of the
00:30:52.440
tradition they they people break them they may have premarital sex without the amount of contraception
00:30:58.120
they might otherwise use or something like that or they might have more premarital sex as we pointed
00:31:02.920
out you know sex education delays the incidence of first sexual and activity so uh you know counterproductive
00:31:10.200
but it doesn't actually push people out of religions genuinely and i watch tons and tons and tons of ex-religious
00:31:17.160
content i can't even think of a single incident of this not one i have ever seen i have seen people
00:31:24.840
talk about how happy they were about not having to follow these rules after leaving a tradition after
00:31:31.400
some area of logical inconsistency pushed them out of the tradition like they're like oh this
00:31:36.440
logically just doesn't make sense to me or there was this contradiction here and here or higher
00:31:42.600
reps within my movement we're doing this really unethical thing that's another thing that pushes
00:31:46.200
people out often which we can get to um yeah yeah yeah yeah and that happens a lot in like smaller
00:31:50.440
religions where like a cult leader starts buying too many bentley's and poisoning people yeah yeah
00:31:55.080
that's that's where that happens but the the in fact i almost get the impression when i hear people
00:32:00.680
talking about like all of the cool stuff they can do now that they couldn't do in their religion
00:32:04.920
i get sort of a cringe crying thing like it you know that meme where it almost feels like they're not
00:32:11.160
really happy with all the new things they're doing but there's a level of cognitive dissonance
00:32:15.480
with not actually feeling that much better once they've left the tradition and so they try to
00:32:20.200
justify it as being a good decision through talking about all of these new things they can do now
00:32:26.840
but i've never heard of it as an inciting factor although although i and i will point out here i have
00:32:32.840
heard as an inciting factor the individual you know where you will get like i wanted to do something
00:32:39.080
and this was the inciting factor was specifically things where they can't logically understand why
00:32:45.080
it's being banned so this is not something like it's something like the gay thing right or the you
00:32:51.880
know or the women in church thing like they're competent why can't they have these positions
00:32:57.800
so then this comes to the the next point that i wanted to really go over which is a lot of the
00:33:02.600
individual logical problems that people end up stumbling upon was in religious traditions
00:33:08.200
that end up causing people to deconvert so first i call it the good god problem right the good god
00:33:16.920
problem we've talked about it before there's a lot of argumentation around it which is how can you have
00:33:21.960
an all-powerful god who is good all good as well and yet have the world that we live in today
00:33:28.360
i think that there's an easy solution to this and it's the one that we adapt which is to just say well
00:33:33.080
he's not a good god not in the way that we mean good he might have some higher order understanding
00:33:37.480
of good that we don't fully understand but it is patently clear to me like you can't say that oh
00:33:43.160
the suffering in the world happens because of decisions that humans make because a lot of
00:33:46.840
suffering the world is very obviously happening outside of the decisions that humans and it's
00:33:50.600
pointless and it's pointless yeah you you like you could say oh butterfly effect and stuff like that and
00:33:57.400
it's like yeah well you didn't need to set up the system this way it's just all of the little like
00:34:03.080
niggly things you do to try to get out of this problem are one just not necessary you can just say
00:34:09.160
well then it's not an all-good god and two if i'm actually basing this tradition on like the western
00:34:16.200
canon history the judeo-christian tree i i think even just from the text it's pretty hard to argue
00:34:23.080
that like the god of the old testament is a good entity from the way that we as humans mean good
00:34:30.040
when we talk about good in the vernacular yeah so problem number one that's how we try to get around
00:34:35.560
that in terms of something that pulls people out of religions problem number two which is one we
00:34:39.960
mentioned a lot but it is a much bigger problem than people believe is that you cannot have a
00:34:45.880
universalizing religion that contains the possibility of miracles and have it start locally
00:34:52.840
so let me explain what i mean by this right christianity has a big problem with this
00:34:59.480
christianity most iterations of christianity are supposed to apply to every human in the world
00:35:03.880
it is a revelation that is of total utility to every human in the world because it was complete when it was
00:35:08.600
made but the problem is is that it took so long to reach most of the world and a person might be like
00:35:15.320
yeah but like what else was supposed to happen and this is why i say you can't have miracles in these
00:35:19.400
traditions jesus is able to do things like raise people from the dead and yet he's not able to
00:35:24.360
like warp to a few different locations on the world just to slow to speed up the speed that it's
00:35:29.960
it's spreading i mean at least do you know one revelation in east asia one revelation in like
00:35:35.400
the british isles and one revolution yeah like why why not on tour why not even an attempt to go on tour
00:35:42.920
right like this is all made slightly worse by the fact that jesus died fairly young and this was a
00:35:50.520
death that he had preconceptions of he knew this was going to happen he knew he was going to die and
00:35:55.880
had at least some control over where and how it happened because he made himself the sacrifice which means
00:36:04.120
that he could have delayed that for another 25 years or so so that he could get on like a boat and go to
00:36:11.080
china and go to some other far parts of where boats could take you back then maybe south africa and and
00:36:17.720
then created seeds of christianity in those two places before coming back and getting martyred but
00:36:24.440
he didn't why why was this a completely localized revelation when it didn't need to be and jesus had
00:36:32.520
the power to perform miracles which could have prevented this from happening given what happens to people's
00:36:38.840
souls who don't have jesus christ within most christian theologies or do not know jesus christ
00:36:45.160
within most christian theologies and the the answer that that that i have i've never heard a compelling
00:36:52.280
answer to this mormons have the best answer which is to say he did go on tour we just didn't hear about
00:36:56.440
it and i'm like well at least they're trying but there's a number of other logical problems that come
00:37:00.840
from the mormon tradition which which make it not a a great answer which specifically comes from the
00:37:07.560
canonization of of future prophets they're like oh yeah we can have future prophets but then they
00:37:11.720
canonize some of the future prophets while they're still alive which leads to that you're not getting
00:37:15.720
a lot of time to vet what they're saying to make sure it's not going to have huge contradictions in it
00:37:20.040
like you know the the the prophet who said if evolution is true mormonism is false that's the
00:37:26.040
problem what undo undo undo yeah so but but keep it on within the mormon tradition is not that much of
00:37:34.360
a problem because future prophets can override past prophets which you don't have in a lot of
00:37:38.840
traditions but to me there's some other problems with doing that that we'll get to um
00:37:45.560
the the jews fix this problem by the way and we were like oh yeah we like the jewish system for
00:37:49.480
this and the calvinist system problem by saying it's not a universalist tradition it's not meant
00:37:54.360
for everyone therefore it's very easy to say oh that's why he didn't perform a miracle to deliver
00:37:58.760
it to more people faster and the way that we solve this more broadly is we're like actually everyone
00:38:03.080
always had access to the true revelation that was meant for their people in so far as they follow
00:38:07.640
their traditions in sort of a conservative iteration see our video on the tesseract god for how we get
00:38:12.360
around this problem we also fix the multiple face problem with this and the multiple face problem
00:38:18.200
is a much bigger problem than a lot of practicing christians seem to realize it is if you are
00:38:24.120
trying to convert somebody who is an outsider to christianity this is the problem of like a lot of
00:38:30.040
their arguments against atheism are arguments against atheism more broadly but that are not
00:38:35.720
very compelling for just go to their tradition versus other traditions and we have a few systems
00:38:42.680
that we've used to attempt to get around this one is the tesseract god concept to be like oh these
00:38:46.600
multiple christian traditions are actually full iterations and full revelations but then we also
00:38:51.720
use our profit system to get around this so our profit system is to say well the you determining
00:38:58.200
which messages are from god to you is a democratized thing with a few stipulations around this so we say
00:39:05.560
any individual can decide by by prayerfully examining evidence and and by evidence you know we're looking at
00:39:13.000
things that can't easily be faked like the person one predicted future events or like verifiable
00:39:18.360
miracles happened around them you can use these individuals are meant to communicate some
00:39:23.640
information to you they might be only to communicate information to you this also fix the textual
00:39:28.600
inconsistency problem so for example people who are familiar with like texture textual differences in
00:39:33.960
biblical traditions the number of the beast was in different traditions of some old text it looks like
00:39:39.800
may have actually been 616 or believed to be 616 throughout a large portion of the christian world
00:39:46.440
what we would say is well actually both iterations are completely true and the 616 was meant to be read
00:39:53.480
by somebody within the region or maybe a number of somebodies within the region that that was read right
00:40:00.840
um so that is that is how we get around that problem is by democratizing it now this leads to
00:40:07.880
another problem if you allow for the possibility of future prophets then you have the problem of
00:40:13.960
a person being able to say i'm a prophet follow me right listen to everything i do and it can become
00:40:19.400
very culty so the way you get around this is you make a rule basically all prophets have to be dead
00:40:26.520
that's just a rule you cannot say that someone is a prophet and you should not look for prophetic
00:40:31.400
wisdom from an individual who's not dead that is just not the way god communicates god will only
00:40:36.280
communicate through dead prophets now this also helps to prevent prophet profiteering whereby you
00:40:41.320
have someone start to exploit followers in ways that are really bad and selfish yeah so then the
00:40:49.800
next problem you have is science inconsistency and and the big problem here is the teleological and
00:40:56.360
ontological arguments which people think are good religious arguments but they're actually really
00:41:01.080
bad religious arguments and they kind of argue against religion in a way and they're both
00:41:05.320
solved and removed questioning here from people who so first let's talk about science inconsistency
00:41:10.280
because this is a bigger problem for christianity than christians like to pretend so christians will
00:41:13.960
be like look at all of the great things that we the western tradition have accomplished in the past you know
00:41:21.400
200 years right and what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of the most important scientists in
00:41:29.400
the past 200 years or i'd say at least 100 years if they were born within the judeo-christian tree left
00:41:35.800
the judeo-christian tree either during their period of most productive work or at least before they died
00:41:41.240
so you don't really get to like clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason your most productive
00:41:46.920
scientists are leaving the tradition this is a big problem and and it's a problem with science and
00:41:52.600
inconsistencies of the noah's ark variety that we were talking about we get around these with the the
00:41:58.360
you know one the individual revelation problem but two the so when i talked about the mass problems
00:42:04.280
i'll get to the ontological and teleological arguments in just a second but the the future
00:42:09.720
god problem where we're like okay in a million years in a hundred thousand years if we're still alive
00:42:13.880
would you say our descendants are more like a god than a man consistent was our existing science
00:42:18.840
consistent with our existing understanding of the world to say they would be more like a man
00:42:23.400
than the way we would conceive a god is just not consistent with that so to argue against this
00:42:29.000
perspective really the only argument you can make is time travel is impossible or or influencing the
00:42:35.160
timeline is impossible which is a pretty bold claim to make when like i would just be like well how
00:42:43.480
do you know that like you have no more claim to knowing that than i have to knowing that it is possible
00:42:48.360
and so it makes arguing against this religion from a scientific perspective
00:42:53.560
pretty difficult unless we get some like hard scientific understanding in the future
00:42:58.440
that definitely 100 there is no way that you could manipulate the timeline but that would rely
00:43:05.320
on a full and complete understanding of physics which i don't know how close we are to being at yet
00:43:10.600
and a full and complete understanding of physics which rules that out which i don't think it looks
00:43:14.840
like if the direction physics is going like when you look at a lot of quantum stuff and stuff like
00:43:18.840
that it actually looks like future entities likely can if we're sort of extrapolating into the future of
00:43:25.400
physical understanding of the universe can probably influence events in the past now let's get to the
00:43:30.200
ontological and teleological arguments so the ontological argument is the argument against
00:43:35.000
acs where they're like okay well what created the universe then which in the atheist mind is of
00:43:39.000
course well then what created god then right and then god people like well we don't have to answer that
00:43:42.360
question because god's special and you're exempt from having to answer that question and then the
00:43:46.040
atheist is like well that's very uncompelling to me if you're making me answer that question but you
00:43:50.280
say you don't have to answer that question because i could just say well the universe has existed in
00:43:53.960
an endless cycle of existence and non-existence and who's to say the universe is the type of thing
00:43:57.240
that needs to start you know you could have like a big bang and a big crunch a big bang and a big
00:44:00.360
crunch right we solve both of these problems by saying that the universe did potentially have
00:44:04.840
a beginning you can see our what's behind the fabric of reality video on this we talk about this a few
00:44:09.000
times i don't want to go over the full argument here but basically it's mass exists outside of
00:44:14.520
the universe things that are described by mass exist as graphical equations of those things so
00:44:19.320
you don't need to actually be playing them and so anything that can be described by an equation exists
00:44:24.600
as an emergent property of that equation if that didn't make a lot of sense in the way i just explained
00:44:28.200
it just watch our video our full video on what's behind the fabric of reality on on this particular
00:44:32.920
topic i figure it's probably worse taking a few minutes just to give a fuller explanation of how
00:44:37.400
this model for reality works because it is the model for reality that i have seen that takes the
00:44:42.360
fewest presuppositions and the few presuppositions it does take seem intuitively true to me the first
00:44:50.600
is that two things and two things is always four things whatever reality you're in yes you can get
00:44:57.800
things like non-euclidean geometry but mass broadly holds constant across all realities and is therefore
00:45:05.320
a thing that exists outside of realities two that if you have an equation like a graphical equation
00:45:13.480
the line that that equation is representing exists outside of that equation as an emergent property of
00:45:20.360
that equation even before i graph that line on something like a piece of paper that equation is in a way
00:45:27.880
that line finally that our reality can be described by a single or set of mathematical equations e.g. the laws of
00:45:38.040
physics and the way things interact was in our reality can be defined by a single mathematical equation if
00:45:45.240
i only hold those three things to be true that means that our universe must exist like even if a material universe
00:45:53.960
exists in the way that we think our universe exists with you know atoms and everything like that
00:45:58.920
alongside that universe a separate graphical representation of the mathematical equation that
00:46:04.280
described how those things interacted must also exist and therefore via occam's razor we don't need to
00:46:11.000
assume that the physical reality that we believe exists exists and so this this model argues that
00:46:18.520
because our universe can be described by a single equation and all equations exist outside of time
00:46:24.040
and all universes this universe would exist no matter what is a graphical representation of that
00:46:28.760
equation and all universes that can be described by a single equation exist this is also why our
00:46:36.360
understanding of time is kind of funny because we see time as just one variable in this equation and not a
00:46:43.560
particularly important or immutable variable within this equation all moments of time exist simultaneously
00:46:51.720
as simply variable points within this graphical representation i'd also note here that this way of
00:46:58.120
framing reality means that we no longer need to answer the question why does the universe exist the
00:47:04.200
universe must exist if math exists instead we need to answer the question what brought math into existence or
00:47:11.160
why does math exist asking why math always exists as an inherently true thing feels a lot closer to
00:47:18.600
the type of thing that you don't really need to prove in the same way that arguing well god exists as an
00:47:24.360
always inherently true thing does or at least seems like an easier presupposition to me than an all-knowing
00:47:31.880
sentient entity that is infinitely complex versus the simplicity of math but it solves a few problems
00:47:38.440
it solves the ontological problem and it solves the the teleological problem it also solves the what
00:47:44.520
happens if we're in a simulation problem in that it makes a universe that is being run within a simulation
00:47:51.640
functionally uh from a moral standpoint position identical to a universe that is not in a simulation
00:47:59.000
again watch the video on what's behind the fabric of reality if you want to learn more about this
00:48:03.240
the teleological problem is like how did we happen to be in a universe that had these exact
00:48:08.280
laws of physics play out exactly as they did like you needed numbers to be so precise now a lot of
00:48:13.560
people fix this with the anthropic principle it's like well why did humans evolve on a planet with
00:48:17.720
water when we needed water well we wouldn't have evolved on any other planets we wouldn't be asking
00:48:21.080
the question if we didn't have water but then it's like yeah but it is kind of weird that the universe
00:48:25.160
happened to be created this way but if you believe this math iteration of why reality exists well
00:48:31.080
everything that could be described by an equation exists so there are parallel universes all the
00:48:37.240
the other universes where humans wouldn't exist to be asking this question also exist and people
00:48:42.600
aren't asking this question and that's why we're not in one of those universes any anything you want
00:48:47.000
to add to this simone because i've been talking ranting for a while no i mean hold on we got some
00:48:54.600
some more ones here that are actually pretty important okay another one is historicity historicity
00:49:00.280
is i think a bigger problem for strict christian interpretations than if you haven't left christian
00:49:05.320
circles you're really going to be aware of we're building out a school system right now for kids
00:49:09.560
right and i want that school system to be usable by people who have strict christian interpretations
00:49:14.280
because we want to be an ally to these groups we want to relieve them of their troublesome members
00:49:19.720
you know if if that's a problem for them but we also want to protect them from the virus because i
00:49:24.680
think that they we could be wrong about creating this tradition and if we are then they're probably the only
00:49:30.280
hope we have of our species seeing the stars and and achieving what we're meant to achieve at the
00:49:35.160
species at least what what you and i believe so uh the in this this tree we have a certain marking
00:49:43.000
for nodes like like pieces mastery levels that are associated with things that i think could get
00:49:50.840
really strict christian interpretations of reality mad at us for and if you buy it and you click the i don't
00:49:56.520
want any of these things in here it like just deletes all those nodes from the tree the problem is is it
00:50:01.560
pretty much just delete everything around jesus's life to except for the stuff that's just in the bible
00:50:08.360
to everything at the great schism like all of that stuff is just like thanos when you do this because
00:50:14.760
if you talk and you look into a lot of this stuff you know he wasn't the only jewish miracle worker
00:50:20.600
in the the the what is now israel in that time period you know there were a number of others
00:50:26.680
when you're talking about like honi the circle drawer or hania bendoza or someone bar yahi and it's
00:50:32.840
it's one of the things where it's like he just doesn't seem that particularly remarkable outside of
00:50:38.840
the impact he has had on history when you compare him with other well-known miracle workers of the time
00:50:44.840
period and but but then you say well he performed more miracles than them and it's like yeah well we have
00:50:50.040
a lot more text on him we only have the names of a few miracles that these other people produced
00:50:54.760
but and the knowledge that he was seen as similar to them in some texts right such a lesson about you
00:51:00.760
know the importance of marketing and investigating right i'm forced to point all of this out because
00:51:06.040
a lot of people mistakenly believe that jesus's miracles or people purporting to have seen jesus's
00:51:13.720
miracles is evidence of jesus's divinity when miracle workers during that time period and at
00:51:20.840
that part of history were actually fairly common and the list i gave was not even exhaustive you know
00:51:26.760
you also have individuals like apollonius of tiana who was a greek philosopher who lived in the first
00:51:32.680
century a.d and was seen performing miraculous deeds having supernatural powers and who raised people from
00:51:39.080
the dead even if you're just constraining your knowledge of this to the bible you have individuals
00:51:44.600
like simon magus who the bible talks of as a sorcerer somebody with magical powers now of course
00:51:50.920
he tries to buy jesus's magical powers which is where the term simony comes from but it shows that
00:51:55.880
even when he a sorcerer saw jesus's magical powers he was like oh it's another magician i should buy these
00:52:02.600
so that is the way that jesus's powers came off to professional somatological performers of his
00:52:09.320
own time period even was in the context of the bible i should also point out the virgin birth thing is
00:52:15.240
also not particularly unique even in the united states today 0.8 percent of women who give birth
00:52:21.560
claim to be virgins now what's interesting is i have to take things out like you know when we take out
00:52:27.800
this sort of stuff or what's going on in in history during this time period from our courses
00:52:33.720
that go to strict christian households you might be like well why would you do that if they know
00:52:37.640
from the bible that individuals like simon magus existed and it's well because some strict christian
00:52:43.960
theology finds ways to gloss around this or to not mention this and it is kind of sad to me because i
00:52:50.360
think it's actually more powerful to say that jesus is set apart and i believe he has set apart
00:52:57.480
not because of his miracles but because of his prophecy but that is you know neither here nor
00:53:03.720
there but from our perspective because an individual's efficacy as a prophet is determined
00:53:11.240
by the impact they have on history those people are next to irrelevant it solves the historicity problem
00:53:17.400
for us yeah and then the the the final problem i wanted well the irrelevant rules problem that we
00:53:23.880
we talk about a bit here but then this has a another really important thing that we really wanted to
00:53:29.960
work into this which was we wanted to structure the religious tradition in a way where individuals who
00:53:36.920
are completely atheistic could live and work within it going all the way up to individuals who are much
00:53:44.040
more like actually believing it um so it needed to have interpretations that work for both of those
00:53:52.600
and then it also needed to have interpretations that work for children and adults and and dumb people
00:53:59.000
and smart people and this is really important because if you look at pretty much all the successful
00:54:03.560
traditions they do this right like totally uh you know a child who sees god is like existing on a cloud
00:54:11.400
and like an old guy with a beard and basically they're thinking of you know an interpretation
00:54:16.840
of zeus really but but certainly not the christian god but it's it's the way that we explain these
00:54:22.200
stories to children you know some people make fun of us they're like what you guys are taking like
00:54:26.680
actual like warhammer 40k stuff and just explaining to your kids that's how your demon you know world
00:54:32.760
works works and it's like what and i'm like well okay you're a christian do you believe in like a red
00:54:38.040
devil with like hooves and horns that is not from the bible that is all extra biblical fan fiction
00:54:44.520
a lot of religions do this and the reason why like you don't throw out that interpretation of the
00:54:49.800
devil is because it's iconic and it's good and it helps get across certain lessons and we've had
00:54:53.880
different interpretations of the devil throughout time like the devil at the crossroads who is you
00:54:58.520
know maybe making deals or playing a fiddle or something like that right like these were relevant
00:55:03.960
to convey certain concepts to people of those periods around like con men and other sorts of
00:55:09.720
swindle men that were around them and not deleterious to the religious tradition so someone i want you to
00:55:16.360
talk a bit about how our tradition is sort of built for kids and stupid people like what did that look like
00:55:22.600
for us i mean a lot of it looks like and we've been discussing this internally forever holidays because
00:55:29.400
that's how so many people primarily relate to religion people always talk about like well what
00:55:35.640
kind of christian slash jew are you like do you won't do you go to church every single day week or are
00:55:41.560
you only there for like easter or christmas or like these special holidays and that's i think where we
00:55:47.880
decided to start when it came to building traditions because it's the holidays that people show up for
00:55:53.160
especially if they follow the right holiday criteria which include things like being super
00:55:58.680
photographable and and really fun and very kid-friendly often involving gifts often involving
00:56:04.280
fun decorating schemes often involving fun meals that kind of thing and so that's how we for our
00:56:09.480
upcoming holiday the future police right yeah yeah so we have the future police which is we will also
00:56:15.960
call like among adults the agents of provenance in our religion steal things from our children that
00:56:22.440
are sort of addictive skinner box like devices or toys the audience knows about this tradition
00:56:27.320
talk about what they look like like the way that we portray them to our kids so with future day the
00:56:32.920
the vision of the future police that our kids are normalizing around is more like stormtroopers or
00:56:38.920
robocop and not so much like this very amorphous could not you know we can't even fathom more like what
00:56:45.880
one would read had described where you know just like it who knows what what is embodied like it's such an
00:56:51.560
abstract concept like totally above us so obviously with our holidays things get dumbed down because
00:56:57.640
it makes it more approachable and fun so the gist is that the future police within our tradition they
00:57:03.000
look like stormtroopers to a kid right like they look like actual futuristic police like they would see
00:57:10.680
in a sci-fi or something like that whereas to an adult in our tradition they follow much more closer to
00:57:16.520
the words of winwood reed you know you i think ethereal beings of which we cannot even conceive
00:57:22.200
they're they're a being or a type of entity that is beyond our powers of conception the words we were
00:57:28.520
looking for were you blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream you pure
00:57:34.840
and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth and if we're going to look at how he describes
00:57:40.840
sort of what they look like or the way they should be conceptualized he says these bodies which
00:57:46.280
now we wear belong to the lower animals our minds have already outgrown them already we look at them
00:57:52.040
with contempt a time will come when science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture
00:57:58.280
and which even if explained to us we could not understand just as the savage cannot understand
00:58:03.240
electricity magnetism or steam disease will be extirpated the causes of decay will be removed
00:58:10.200
immortality will be invented and then the earth being small mankind will migrate into space
00:58:16.280
and will cross the airless saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun the earth
00:58:21.800
will become a holy land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe
00:58:27.000
finally men will be masters of the forces of nature they will become themselves the architects of
00:58:32.520
systems the manufacturers of world man then will be perfect he will then be the creator he will
00:58:39.400
therefore become what the vulgar worship as a god there is but a difference in degree between the
00:58:44.520
chemist who today arranges forces in his laboratory so that they produce gas and the creator who arranges
00:58:50.760
forces so they produce a world between the gardener who plants a seed and the creator who plants a nebula
00:58:57.560
we do not wish to extirpate religion from the life of man we wish to him to have a religion which will
00:59:04.120
harmonize with his intellect and which inquiry will strengthen not destroy we wish in fact to give him a
00:59:10.920
religion for now there are many who have none and that really just aligns with our mission here we
00:59:17.720
are not looking to remove people for religion we are looking to create a religion that people who
00:59:25.160
right now live without religion or who would otherwise deconvert from religions can accept and
00:59:31.000
a religion which as as it he says uh will harmonize with his intellect in which inquiry will strengthen
00:59:37.880
not destroy and this is not the way that we sell this to kids we sell this to kids as
00:59:45.480
you know stormtroopers basically right and you can even do different iterations of the future day
00:59:50.440
tradition where you have like evil future day police before the kids promise to make the world a better
00:59:54.120
place and then like nice looking ones where you change their visual schema and this also is true
00:59:58.920
with our profit system right our profit system can be taken by a child to mean that these individuals are
01:00:07.080
actual profits in the way that like other religious traditions mean it where it's like a god is talking
01:00:12.360
to someone and that person is passing on moral advice or if you take sort of the adult understanding
01:00:17.800
these are individuals who are being influenced by potentially quantum events and like butterfly effect
01:00:24.520
stuff to go down specific pathways to say the things that need to be said but it's not necessarily
01:00:31.400
a revelation from god as in an entity is actually talking in their ear now it might be but it's not
01:00:37.800
necessarily another thing that we haven't yet really mentioned or delineated is it was in our system we see
01:00:43.640
the mystical arts or mystical approaches to things to always being a pathway to evil and i should
01:00:49.240
point out here i i did not say that they are untrue or inaccurate i am just saying that opening your
01:00:56.360
mind to those sorts of possibilities innately destroys human intellect in a way that is really
01:01:05.480
really damaging a human's ability to process the world in an ordered and structured manner if you want to
01:01:11.960
word this in the way we would explain this to a child i would explain it very similar to the way
01:01:16.920
that you know in like the warhammer 40k universe you would talk about chaos opening your mind to the
01:01:23.080
warp or to chaos would potentially give you some level of magical powers or prescience or something like
01:01:30.200
that but it is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and it's how demons can come in and take over your
01:01:35.880
body so you see there we're using a metaphor to explain something that we think is just a useful
01:01:41.640
thing for a person in terms of how they're mentally developing and how they engage with the truth
01:01:47.480
to prevent them from falling off the path of of logic and righteousness or to put it another way
01:01:54.280
a witch is a witch it doesn't matter if they became a witch to to try to make the world a better place
01:02:00.680
or help people it doesn't matter if they became a witch using instructions that came from one of the
01:02:07.720
abrahamic traditions being a witch will always corrupt your mind and soul you were telling me that it
01:02:13.320
with your head the the certain amount of it after a while it just with your head that's why i'm usually
01:02:18.600
kind of like almost autistic is i'm just being constantly why because lower entities will come in
01:02:24.600
and violate your free will they know all your they see right through you they will not manipulate your
01:02:30.920
free will unless you ask them in i have dude do not say that i'm going to get killed i've 100
01:02:38.040
communicated with something i'm not judging anybody i'm just saying be careful the question is whether
01:02:42.520
that something was actually in my imagination or in my mind or that something was something that takes
01:02:47.400
place in another dimension once you open that gate it's all bad they why is it all bad why why
01:02:53.160
can't you experience that interdimensional being and learn something from it and be a better
01:02:59.320
person because because every time it gets controlled it starts murdering everybody they wind
01:03:04.440
up killing everybody in every case it always starts beautiful it always starts great problem is
01:03:08.840
some of it makes sense that that's where the psychosis comes in whoa it's going to create a giant
01:03:13.480
societal crisis where most of the people are already going to get killed because an evil force wants
01:03:17.720
conflict so i'm saying no no no it's all chaos stop it this is the nature of the beast now people might
01:03:24.120
be like well do you really believe in those sorts of things and the answer is no like the logic side
01:03:28.120
of me doesn't believe in those things but i do think it's useful to build into a religious construct
01:03:33.800
awareness of the mystical stuff so even if we do have dumber people join our tradition we can explain
01:03:40.440
to them in a way that they can understand why it is not useful in society for them to engage with
01:03:45.640
mystical hoodoo in addition it provides some layer of buffering against any would-be magician who wants
01:03:51.720
to try to prove that they have some sort of magical or supernatural connection and use that to pull
01:03:57.720
people from the path of righteousness if you're wondering why we take this view on witchcraft well
01:04:01.800
when i look at the wealthiest people of the world or the most powerful people in the world i don't see
01:04:06.200
a bunch of people who are practicing this sort of mysticism or witchcraft which
01:04:10.280
leads me to believe either it doesn't have real world efficacy or there is some additional cost
01:04:17.960
tied to using it at that sort of a level which prevents people who do use it for these sorts
01:04:23.560
of grander things from achieving their desired outcomes in fact when i look at people who practice
01:04:29.400
mysticism they primarily seem to be on the lower end of the power scale which leads me to again take
01:04:35.400
away either it doesn't work or it has a huge very negative blowback effect on the individuals using
01:04:41.560
it either way it's worth warning practitioners about another thing that this system allows for
01:04:49.560
is the incorporation of more modern profits while also understanding that profits are relevant insofar as
01:04:56.600
they are useful to kids so one that we were talking about recently was the martyr marvin haymeyer and
01:05:03.640
the miracle of the killdozer miracle of the killdozer so this was an event that happened in 2004 anyone
01:05:09.560
can go and learn about it if you don't know what it is trouble began in 2001 when the zoning commission
01:05:15.960
approved the construction of a concrete factory adjacent to marvin's shop for many years he may had used
01:05:22.760
this route to get to his shop as it was really the only access road leading there construction
01:05:28.200
of the plant would block this route however he may try to appeal the zoning commission's decision
01:05:34.120
but was denied he tried to petition the city with neighbors and friends but was once again
01:05:39.560
unsuccessful the concrete plant was going to be built so marvin said all right all right you win
01:05:45.960
i'll just have to find another way to my shop he petitioned to construct a new access road
01:05:51.160
and he even bought all the heavy machinery so he could just do it all himself well guess what he was turned
01:05:57.160
down again to add insult to injury the construction of the factory cut he-mare's connection to the sewage line
01:06:06.040
and granby town council fined him for not being hooked up to the sewer with his livelihood seemingly in ruins
01:06:13.720
marvin felt he had no recourse he began planning his next move he would write notes and record
01:06:19.800
audio tapes about his predicament i was always willing to be reasonable until i had to be unreasonable
01:06:26.520
sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things but it did contain a miraculous element which was
01:06:34.120
that multiple individuals had been in his shed and saw him building a tank and none of them noticed or
01:06:41.800
thought to ask him about it and his interpretation of this was that god was occluding their vision and that's
01:06:47.640
not even the most unbelievable thing about all of this numerous people had actually visited marvin
01:06:54.120
during the year and had been in his shed and not one of them said anything about the homemade tank
01:07:03.080
sitting in the corner like what was going through their heads as they looked around that garage
01:07:09.240
hmm nice toolbox may get one of them for myself broken boiler there by the looks of it oh expensive power
01:07:17.400
drill might ask for a loan of that real old pair of boots there giant bulldozer fitted with composite
01:07:25.240
armor tree gun ports on its own surveillance system on more he may believe that god had built him for this
01:07:33.480
job and that it was god who clouded the judgment of the people who entered his shed now well then
01:07:40.200
this means that we can then take multiple interpretations of this right first also the
01:07:45.880
miracle that nobody died during the the killdozer as people would call it rampage right righteous
01:07:51.480
rampage against bureaucracy on june the 4th 2004 marvin lowered the armor onto the killdozer cabin
01:07:58.360
one last time sealing himself inside began his rampage by tearing through the wall of his muffler shop
01:08:04.920
and then the concrete plant before making his way into town for two hours he terrorized the town of
01:08:11.000
granby he destroyed the town hall the office of a local newspaper that editorialized against him
01:08:17.480
the home of a judge and many others every building he destroyed was owned by somebody that had previously
01:08:25.000
wronged him in all he smashed up 13 buildings causing about seven million dollars worth in damages
01:08:33.080
but it should be noted that nobody was armed police made continuous attempts to stop the rampage local
01:08:39.720
and state patrol including a swat team followed the killdozer everywhere it went firing shots at the cab
01:08:46.360
with no effect they then tried to take out the cameras which again failed as they had the bulletproof
01:08:51.720
shielding they climbed aboard trying to figure out a way to put a bullet inside the beast a flashbang
01:08:59.000
grenade was even dropped in the exhaust pipe but nothing they could do could stop it they even brought
01:09:06.360
out a wheel tractor scraper to fight the machine but the killdozer has just pushed it aside so it it
01:09:14.120
teaches us the evils of bureaucracy what's expected of us in a no-win situation against the evils of bureaucracy
01:09:20.360
it it happened there was it was miraculous in in those ways but it also shows the way that god can
01:09:25.640
intervene with things god can intervene with things through occluding people's vision of something
01:09:30.760
that should be obvious to them and we're going to go into this with the hasidic community i think in a
01:09:35.160
different video or we're going to go over the oh well we'll save this for the other video that's another
01:09:39.880
way that can be used another thing that we use in terms of like the kid version versus adult version
01:09:44.760
is we take as the core prophet of the religion winwood reid right and we say as efficacy of his
01:09:50.920
tradition you can look at how his predictions turned out right and it is pretty supernatural how accurate
01:09:58.440
he was much more to from my perspective supernatural and accurate and no vagueness in his predictions
01:10:05.400
like you have in a lot of other like nostradamus-y sorts of predictions or so that's useful to us
01:10:10.920
right in terms of providing some sort of like logical proof to our kids that this was actually
01:10:16.120
inspired by some sort of divine entity but it's also useful to us that we were able to vet the prophet
01:10:21.880
you know hundreds of years after his death instead of having to appoint prophets while they're still alive
01:10:29.160
and world opinions can change pretty dramatically and stuff that they were involved in either
01:10:34.200
scientifically like views they have end up being just like super wrong like winwood reid he was famously
01:10:39.640
involved with the writing of the descent of man right you know one of the most important scientific
01:10:43.800
books so you could say he was at the the nexus of this but then he he also you know if i read you
01:10:49.000
know things he said so you know he was around during the civil war so this is him talking about you know
01:10:54.760
giving black citizens equal rights and he says but it need not be feared that they will become
01:11:00.680
hostile to those with whom they reside experience has shown us that whenever aliens are treated as
01:11:06.440
citizens they become citizens whatever may be their religion or their race it is a mistake to
01:11:11.960
suppose that the civilized black american calls himself an african and pines to return to his
01:11:17.640
ancestral land if he is born in the states he calls himself an american he speaks with an american accent
01:11:23.480
and he loves and hates with an american heart and i think that you know we're able to vet for this you
01:11:28.360
know make sure the guy who we were choosing in the prophet didn't say a bunch of stuff that would get
01:11:32.600
him disqualified with the obvious hard contrast here being mormonism which accidentally built racism
01:11:38.600
into it theology and then had to override that with future prophets but obviously that's going to
01:11:44.360
push a lot of potential converts away from the religious system oh yeah you were you were just
01:11:49.880
telling me this morning this story about one word read that you didn't even know about originally
01:11:54.440
when going through all of his texts because he doesn't personally seem to write about it very much
01:11:59.080
anywhere but he spent extensive time traveling through africa and at one point he found himself
01:12:03.720
inconveniently either put into a position of servitude or like literally enslaved and he was he was posed
01:12:10.120
with a series of very difficult seemingly impossible they were supposed to be impossible feats which he then
01:12:16.920
executed with you know aplomb and grace you know thus uh securing his release you know this is the kind of
01:12:23.800
stuff that prophets do you know just crazy crazy stuff in addition to you know really calling a shot
01:12:29.480
also proving that they could do insane things and i i love that kind of color of a historic prophet i love
01:12:36.120
it yeah well i mean you see this with with catholic saints all the time just like these insane stories
01:12:41.400
about the quirky things that they did that were impossible but so cool you know it's it's so click bait
01:12:47.800
but that's what you need you know you need yeah and i talked about like the the mormon prophet
01:12:51.640
problem was there anything else that you wanted to to say to this concept about preventing sort of
01:12:56.680
intergenerational bleed and the ways we've sort of thought about this and how we constructed our
01:13:01.560
religious system yeah i wish that organized religions would think more about this from a
01:13:09.240
really practical standpoint because i think right now the conversations are how do we keep people from
01:13:14.440
leaving more just like how do we get people to lean more into the religion instead of looking within
01:13:20.200
i think you can kind of look at it from like a relationship microcosm of it's as if people are
01:13:25.720
in these relationships that may not be going so well like they might not be sustainable they're like oh
01:13:31.160
man like how can i you know how can i get my wife to just stay with me like you know what what do i need
01:13:37.240
to tell her like how do i how do i convince her that this is a really good marriage instead of like
01:13:42.040
looking at oneself and being like how can i be a better husband like am i am i doing something wrong
01:13:47.160
am i not showing enough appreciation maybe i should help out around the house more maybe i shouldn't
01:13:51.880
abuse her like all sorts of things right like and so i think that the churches need to look
01:13:56.120
not at their members but rather at their own policies and doctrine and understand deeply what
01:14:05.080
they need to internally change to keep people yeah well and so there's a few other things i wanted to
01:14:11.080
sort of note here one is is is the way like a lot of people wonder about the christian like judeo-christian
01:14:18.600
framing that we've chosen for this um like you could probably construct something like this without a
01:14:23.720
judeo-christian framing but we believe in like when we think about go to the stars we want to go to
01:14:29.400
stars with a contiguous cultural tradition you know the western cultural tradition which i think is
01:14:34.360
encapsulated within the judeo-christian tree of religions and through framing and through taking
01:14:40.760
their prophets as our prophets what we can do is prevent or lower the probability of attack from
01:14:47.400
these groups while also making it easier to talk to these groups from their own perspective a huge
01:14:54.040
problem that a lot of religious groups have when they're trying to convert people out of different
01:14:57.720
religions or trying to relate to people from different religions is they will talk to them from the
01:15:01.720
perspective of their religion they're like how can you doubt jesus when he did you know the bible
01:15:06.360
says these things about him and it's like well they don't believe the bible so that's why now if you
01:15:12.200
take the tesseract god concept that means if ever anyone from this tradition like any of our kids
01:15:17.880
are talking to a jewish person or a christian they believe that that jewish person or a christian
01:15:23.000
has a whole revelation of god so one they're not going to be as interested in converting that person
01:15:27.800
unless the only alternative if that person is going to leave their ancestral tradition and
01:15:31.480
move to the the virus right so in that case they would pick the person up like these rebels who
01:15:36.520
we're talking about but there's no one real motivation to be dangerous to devout christian
01:15:41.400
or jewish groups because they believe that these people do have full access to tradition but when
01:15:45.240
they are talking to that person who's deconverting they can argue from a jewish perspective to that
01:15:51.480
person you have to speak in someone's own terms yes while also lowering the probability of attack so
01:15:58.280
if a christian group sees you as an iteration of christianity or a muslim group sees you as an
01:16:02.200
iteration of islam they are less likely to attack you so long as you aren't a very closely related
01:16:08.840
iteration so the two highest attacked groups that you're going to get within traditions are and you
01:16:15.000
can see our judeo front problem video on this that we do a lot talk a lot about this is when religious
01:16:20.360
traditions are very closely related like shia and sunni you're going to have a lot of conflict there
01:16:24.440
or the early catholic protestant split but when religions become more distantly related but are
01:16:29.640
still part of the wider grouping of religions you typically get pretty low amounts of conflict
01:16:34.600
and when religions get very distantly related like christianity versus pagan religions you get a
01:16:39.560
really high amount of conflict again a great example of both of the dangers of playing this stratagem
01:16:45.880
too closely or too far we can see in the mormon tradition in the early days of the mormon tradition
01:16:51.800
they were much more differentiated in terms of their lifestyle and beliefs than modern day christians
01:16:57.320
and as such they were often in active and very hot conflict with nearby christians i mean at one
01:17:03.720
point they went to war with the us government that's how much conflict the mormons used to be in
01:17:09.320
with nearby christian communities but as time has gone on a unique and i'm not sure if it's a genetic
01:17:15.240
thing was in mormonism or or something that has become a norm was in mormonism but more than any
01:17:21.080
other community mormons seem to want to really really be seen as normal and fit in and be
01:17:28.600
respected for being normal and wholesome but this has led to a problem in that they have started to
01:17:35.880
cover up the ways that they are different from other christians and this has happened through two
01:17:41.880
core sort of chains within the mormon tradition the first is a huge number of their converts are
01:17:48.520
catholics due to where they are converting people which has led to a level of catholization of
01:17:53.400
mormonism which makes a lot of sense i mean you could draw a lot of parallels between the mormon
01:17:57.560
central hierarchy and the catholic central hierarchy from the perspective of a new convert but then you
01:18:02.040
have the second problem which is the mormons who are in the utah the traditional uh mormons mormons of
01:18:07.960
the original mormon cultural and ethnic group they have done very poorly recently because that's the group
01:18:14.440
that really really has this strong desire to fit in and so when they are being preached to by their
01:18:20.440
pastors or whatever you call a pastor in mormonism many of those pastors will often leave out the way
01:18:25.640
that mormonism is different from mainstream christianity because those are the things that if
01:18:30.760
their parishioners repeated in public would get them chastised you know the multiple mortal prohibitions
01:18:37.480
problem or the ideas about intelligences and in the ways that human reincarnation may exist or the
01:18:44.520
idea that humans will eventually become gods themselves or like god and we go into this in
01:18:51.800
the are we mormons videos but the point being is when mormons come to us and they go mormons don't
01:18:56.680
believe this what they mean is that their local preacher doesn't mention this stuff and it's like yeah
01:19:03.160
that's a problem because historically your prophets used to talk about this stuff all the time and me
01:19:09.080
as somebody who really likes studying those sort of weirder aspects of mormonism and finds them much
01:19:13.480
more compelling than the more modernized iteration of mormonism is really into those works like the
01:19:18.520
old orson pratt stuff but this leads to a problem in that the mormon church has lost a lot of its identity
01:19:26.360
from my perspective because of this and is becoming more and more just like any other christian tradition
01:19:32.680
which is of course a risk that you know suppose our system takes off and our kids do really well
01:19:38.280
and they stay within the system and it becomes this large religious group well if it's existing
01:19:42.440
alongside other christian groups and it doesn't have built into its dna this internal drive to rebel
01:19:50.600
and to paint oneself as as different and to be sort of an iconoclast it will face the same problem
01:19:57.640
mormonism does which is just shave off all the parts of it that are really really sharply different
01:20:04.280
from other streams of christianity and it doesn't need to like actively decide to shave it off as i've
01:20:09.240
said it can just be due to where preachers are shifting the focus of their teachings so this allows us to
01:20:15.320
lower the amount of conflict but also logically lower the amount of conflict because we're not an
01:20:20.040
active threat to their devout members like we view it as one of our religious duties to protect
01:20:25.320
people from deconverting from these conservative religions and develop systems that help protect
01:20:29.400
people in these conservative traditions because they increase the diversity of religious systems
01:20:33.400
out there like if you look at the motivations of our system but two if they believe that their system
01:20:39.400
is really the true system our system captures all of the teachings of their systems so if we end
01:20:45.000
up being one of the traditions that goes to the stars their systems could re-emerge out of our system
01:20:50.600
you know it could be god's way of of taking certain religious faiths to the stars that end up dying
01:20:56.200
out through other means also everything that we're aiming to do you know protect conservative religious
01:21:01.640
groups as well as ensuring that humanity becomes an interstellar species and ensure the continued
01:21:07.640
diversity of humanity this might be a problem to some progressive groups or some totalizing religious
01:21:12.280
traditions i.e traditions that eventually want to convert everyone but those religious traditions and
01:21:16.520
those traditions are typically enemies of all other religious traditions because they're totalizing
01:21:20.600
right you know so we we get to be nice there without also having any form of open conflict in
01:21:28.040
regards to that and also people should keep this in mind from our own perspective so they understand
01:21:33.000
that this isn't just altruistic or anything like that we send people back to the other conservative
01:21:38.360
traditions because one we believe that increases the diversity of ideas out there and our belief system is
01:21:45.240
really centered around i guess what you could call cultural darwinism or the idea that the cultural
01:21:50.040
traditions that survive are god's will and that is how god displays his will to us but for cultural
01:21:56.040
traditions to compete you need multiple cultural traditions a healthy ecosystem is a diverse one and
01:22:01.880
that is true at the cultural level as well but in addition to that part of the reason we are not
01:22:07.240
interested in the people who are active in rebelling against their ancestral traditions actively is because
01:22:14.200
we view them as inferior we specifically want the type of people who ask a ton of questions in our
01:22:20.120
video on the genetics of religious traditions and how quickly you can get these sort of sociological
01:22:25.080
tendencies concentrated in religious groups we are almost you could say specifically farming rebellion
01:22:31.560
because we see that as being the core of the the human fire of the human spirit that allows humanity to
01:22:39.560
thrive and is what allows this cycle of intergenerational improvements and what will fuel the next
01:22:45.880
generation of our practitioners to go against us and try to improve the system while still having
01:22:53.240
enough of a drive to compete and enough of a drive towards logic that they are okay with being judged
01:22:59.480
directly against us this is where our system of encouraging our children to rebel comes from which is to
01:23:06.360
say our system if you look at the index in the pragmatist guide to religion and the way it's
01:23:10.920
structured is it encourages our children to rebel but still stay within the larger framework and then
01:23:18.120
they get judged against their own parents and then other ancestors and other members of the tradition by
01:23:23.240
their own children in terms of their efficacy and rearing children i.e in terms of how those children come
01:23:28.600
out from their own perspective if this is your first time hearing about this essentially we tell our
01:23:33.560
children anything that you think that we did poorly as parents or in this tradition we constructed we
01:23:39.960
strongly encourage you to try to make it better to build better systems to adapt systems from other
01:23:47.000
cultures that you think are stronger than the systems that we used with you but do know that there is
01:23:53.480
this central book called the index which you write your perception on how these traditions ended up affecting
01:23:58.920
you in but your children are also going to be writing in and when your grandchildren are choosing how
01:24:04.440
they're going to rebel and are choosing different structures of traditions they can use this book and
01:24:10.200
judge whether or not you actually did a good job in your restructuring of things and they might go
01:24:15.960
back to ancestral ways believing that you did not build a system that was effect as effective as the
01:24:21.400
systems that came before you and so the only way a person would deconvert from this really so long as
01:24:27.080
they're not converting to one of the older traditions is if they didn't think they could do a better job
01:24:32.920
or if they didn't like this metric that we are using to judge a person's competence or the competence
01:24:38.920
of their ideas and that metric is how their children judge the competence of those ideas so all of this
01:24:44.760
is completely egotistical from our perspective us one not wanting to convert people out of conservative
01:24:51.640
traditions but also us sending people back to and protecting people from deconverting from conservative
01:24:56.120
traditions as well as our belief in you know we see ourselves as an ancestral chain we see ourselves
01:25:02.840
as intergenerational entities and that ancestral chain comes out of the judeo-christian traditions
01:25:07.320
so obviously we're also going to see some benefit to protecting those traditions which is also why we
01:25:12.120
encoded them in all of this it's not all just about protection however it is also about protection our
01:25:17.880
goal of intergenerational human improvement at both the spiritual and biological and technological level
01:25:24.680
means that we have faith that within five or six generations members of our tradition will be
01:25:31.880
fairly unassailable from pretty much any other existing tradition in the world today especially
01:25:36.760
when you look at things like the the dropping rates of the polygenic scores that are associated with
01:25:41.720
iq in the general population our real goal here is just to protect our practitioners until we can reach
01:25:51.320
the stage in which this form of protection is no longer necessary i.e protection because we are not
01:25:58.440
an active threat to these groups and they rightly see us as carrying on their traditions and as in a
01:26:05.240
way a part of their traditions the final thing i wanted to touch on is value system which are
01:26:10.680
determined through the ways that the internal hierarchy of a religious tradition works and that
01:26:16.680
this hierarchy is passed down through the way you teach kids what to value and what not to value
01:26:21.960
something that we have repeatedly set up in videos that we have done is we do not believe it is
01:26:27.640
appropriate for anyone to be a preacher unless they have a alternate source of income that they earned
01:26:34.280
on their own i.e it's not mom and dad's money and i.e they are not being paid to preach like we see both
01:26:41.800
of those things as having really negative incentive systems and i should point out here that we're not
01:26:46.600
the only religious tradition to have this prohibition this used to be part of one chain of judaism
01:26:52.600
obviously it wasn't part of judaism during the second temple period and it hasn't been adopted by the
01:26:56.840
hasidic schools of judaism but if you do look at what is written in the talmud you'll get lines
01:27:01.960
like rabbi galeman the son of rabbi yedda hanazi said excellent is the study of the torah together
01:27:08.920
was worldly occupation for the exertion in both of them causes sin to be forgotten all study of the
01:27:15.720
torah in absence of worldly occupation comes to nothing and in the end leads to sin which is what we
01:27:22.040
believe all religious study that is done in absence of labor that moves society forwards is always going
01:27:31.560
to lead to sin like physical labor or inventive labor or basically anything outside of just teaching
01:27:38.120
so would you this group or persuasion of this time period any rabbi that came to them and did not have
01:27:46.280
a job outside of being a rabbi like they did not have another way that they were supporting themselves
01:27:51.960
was teaching and preaching sin and only sin and it should be clear that they they mean this pretty
01:27:58.600
explicitly here if i go on with this quote it then says and all of the work for the community
01:28:04.680
let them for the sake of heaven for the merit of their ancestors sustains them and their righteousness
01:28:09.720
will endure forever and for you who work for the community god says i credit you with a great reward
01:28:17.000
as if you yourselves had done it on your own and then another quote here any father who does not
01:28:23.640
teach his son a trade teaches him banditry and then the other person exposes some surprise at this
01:28:30.360
statement and he goes can it enter your mind that he actually teaches him banditry and then the person
01:28:35.960
basically replies since the son has no profession with which to support himself it is likely to turn
01:28:41.560
to theft for livelihood which is what we see the selling of preaching as being the selling of preaching
01:28:48.760
is a form of theft within our tradition but you can see this is why it is useful for us going back
01:28:55.160
to the traditions of our ancestors back to the wisdom contained within this judeo-christian tree for this
01:29:02.120
extreme wisdom which is still so relevant today all religious study outside of a worldly occupation
01:29:10.840
ultimately leads to sin and this is because of the negative incentives that you're going to get
01:29:16.280
when people begin paying you to tell them what they want to hear this is why you have so many churches
01:29:23.320
bending on their key principles to keep their parishioners but what it also does is it leads to part
01:29:30.040
of the way that you judge a preacher is their real world efficacious accomplishments which means you
01:29:35.720
need this level of real world efficacious accomplishments and there is some level of
01:29:40.760
status hierarchy within the preachers of this system based upon independent research that they're doing
01:29:45.960
that allows them to add to the human body of knowledge and keep the religion being a living religion as we
01:29:51.800
call it versus the dead religion where living religions are religions that are constantly in an internal
01:29:55.800
communication updating themselves and and and producing really top-tier thinkers whereas dead
01:30:03.000
traditions and anyone can look out at historical traditions and see this are ones where they used
01:30:06.600
to produce a lot of top-tier thinkers but they haven't in a few centuries and so it ensures that we we stay
01:30:12.520
that while also preventing the negative and then you've got the profit system where you can't go around claiming
01:30:17.560
you're a prophet or something like that that it's a sure sign that you're not a prophet within this
01:30:21.160
tradition if you're doing that this can only be determined after an individual dies which prevents
01:30:26.120
that level of abuse but also allows individuals like it's very hard to like want to be a preacher
01:30:32.440
within this system to make money if that's seen as a sign of like a low status preacher right so you don't
01:30:37.960
have the same negative incentive structure there what else would you say simone so our religions value
01:30:45.560
systems which we're all a lot around obviously long-termism but also industry efficacy working
01:30:51.880
hard but also being very intellectually minded and open-minded are obviously like reinforced by values and
01:30:58.600
the texts that we choose but also like sort of we'll say low culture elements like we have a list of
01:31:04.600
approved films and they range from movies like clueless to indiana jones to starship troopers like these are not
01:31:12.120
you know i don't know like weird obscure documentaries this is very popular media but
01:31:18.120
then of course it goes back to our holidays you know our holidays are just future day for example
01:31:22.680
another holiday we have we currently call lemon week it may get a better name eventually but it involves
01:31:28.360
of course colorful fun motifs of lemons and lots of citrus treats and meals but over this week of citrus
01:31:34.680
treats and lemon decorations and all that fun each family member who's intellectually capable of doing this
01:31:41.240
has just like a topic that deeply deeply offends them like just they they hate it so much and they have
01:31:48.920
to very earnestly steel man their position and share it with the family so they have to dive into these
01:31:56.520
you know these groups subreddits or their texts or their videos or whatever it is and really really
01:32:01.720
understand it um from a good faith perspective and then explain it to the family and give a very strong
01:32:07.960
pitch to the family and the family will judge if you have not been intellectually honest if you are
01:32:12.200
just straw manning them if you're making them look bad we will judge you and shame you and then at the
01:32:17.480
end of the week everyone gets to plant a fruit tree and then enjoy the fruits of their bitter but productive
01:32:24.040
exercise so you know these are examples of ways that we dumb it down make it fun make it approachable
01:32:29.320
but i'll hopefully pass down these values all right well we can go to the next video i guess talk about this more some
01:32:35.160
other time there are other things i wanted to talk to you but this video is just getting too long
01:32:38.200
yeah and i'm talking too much i don't like it when you're not adding a lot so i don't give a
01:32:44.200
shit what people think i don't give a shit what people think of our philosophy when people like leave
01:32:48.840
all these comments on like you know religious philosophy and this and this and this i cannot be bothered you
01:32:54.600
guys i cannot be bothered just live your lives follow your religion and we'll see how you do
01:33:00.120
and those who accuse us of being consequentialists yeah we are 100 it's quite immoral to not be a
01:33:06.360
consequentialist why would you not be a consequentialist we're material everyone who says
01:33:11.240
really do you think the ends justify the means that's that's people who disagree with us
01:33:16.920
yeah the ends always of course well i mean if you're if you're leading to a good most moralizing
01:33:23.160
people so everything else is just is just moral set dressing that's what so most people live by
01:33:31.800
malcolm that's what they live by but i believe consequentialist groups will out compete non
01:33:36.840
consequentialist groups i'll tell you that um we'll see through the consequences right for anyone who's
01:33:42.680
watching this and doesn't know what consequentialism is consequentialism is the ethical theory that judges
01:33:47.560
whether something is right or wrong based on what its consequences are rather than judging actions
01:33:52.600
based on whether or not they adhere to certain rules or duties or intentions so essentially a
01:33:59.400
non-consequentialist would say well i didn't intend for me sending all of that aid money indiscriminately
01:34:06.920
to africa to end up funding terrorists and leading to a huge escalation and violence therefore it was a
01:34:12.840
good thing for me to do it while a consequentialist would say it doesn't matter you should have tried to
01:34:18.040
figure out what matters is that the money you sent made the situation worse and therefore it was a
01:34:23.720
bad thing and this is because consequentialism and the reason a lot of people don't like consequentialism
01:34:28.280
is because it requires a level of self-responsibility and accountability that a lot of people aren't
01:34:35.160
willing to take we saw this for us when our travel company really suffered during the pandemic
01:34:40.520
and a lot of investors were like oh you know it's an act of god don't worry about it and we're like no
01:34:45.240
like you you never get to shirk responsibility just because it would have been hard to predict it
01:34:51.080
of all of the things we could have predicted something like this we could have done more
01:34:54.520
to prepare for something like this we are 100 responsible when we fail regardless of what our
01:35:04.040
intentions are the moment you take a philosophy that allows somebody wiggle room out of that they will
01:35:10.120
use that to justify basically just following orders or just following traditions or well i thought it
01:35:17.160
was going to help and i think this is being one of the core problems of the progressive mind virus
01:35:22.040
it's it it takes such an anti-consequentialist mindset where it really really really wants to
01:35:26.840
push this idea of as long as what you intended was good i.e well by telling a fat person that it was
01:35:34.680
going to have long-term negative effects for them to keep eating i was trying to lessen their
01:35:39.480
emotional pain but of course that has the consequence of causing much more damage in the
01:35:44.040
long run so they have this anti-consequentialist viewpoint where they're like well my intention
01:35:47.800
was nice and that's why i didn't mention it and that's why we hate this anti-consequentialist mindset
01:35:52.280
so so so much that said and we have an upcoming video on this there is one instance where a
01:35:58.120
deontological viewpoint that is the the viewpoint that what matters is duty and tradition over the
01:36:04.600
consequences of inaction is higher utility than a consequentialist viewpoint and that is for
01:36:09.560
individuals who are taking on the role of a knight instead of a king within their cultural tradition
01:36:15.480
and and we'll talk about this within a video basically you always want the leaders and the
01:36:19.480
people who are planning the grand strategy of a group to be consequentialist but you want the rank
01:36:25.320
and file brave soldiers pushing forward the tradition to be deontologists for people who
01:36:31.160
are wondering why the lights different in parts of this filming it's because we wanted to have simone
01:36:35.800
talk more well then if we've got a little bit of extra time is there anything else you wanted to say
01:36:39.960
on the religion episode because i'd really love more thoughts about passing on value systems from you
01:36:46.440
good and evil etc like what do you think about the idea of just creating a completely like
01:36:51.800
a constructed religion yeah it's like so i guess what would happen if a family because i what i
01:37:00.920
wonder is like how many people are going to take what you wrote in the pragmatist guide to crafting
01:37:04.440
religion and just run with it right just like all right what the hell and we know some people are
01:37:10.200
doing this we just don't know what their religions are like yet and when we start formally putting
01:37:15.080
together the index which is a collection of families who want to be loosely allied who all will have
01:37:20.440
different cultures and religions but would like to share data on their performance of their cultural
01:37:24.600
religions and sort of categorize their their cultural practices and beliefs so we can all sort of learn
01:37:29.960
from each other and we'll start learning from them then because we're going to catalog all these things
01:37:34.360
however i imagine some people are going to do some really weird shit like for example maybe someone's
01:37:39.720
going to be like santa claus you know you're just saying right like oh santa claus has taken on like
01:37:43.640
a lot more than a lot of other religious concepts what if someone's like let's just make this a
01:37:47.640
friggin religion like let's go for it all the way you know not just not just christmas but like
01:37:52.760
throughout the year you know he sees you and well the elves are building stuff right now and like
01:37:58.280
you know we have to to serve you know i don't know well so this is this is really interesting and
01:38:05.000
so a lot of people don't know that this is the way our religion is structured unless they've seen
01:38:08.360
like ancillary interviews or read the pragmatist guide to crafting religion but we strongly encourage our
01:38:14.040
kids to dissent from our theological views but stay within the religious system in the same way that
01:38:20.600
like capitalism it turns the greed of society into efficacy we tried to build a system that turns the
01:38:28.680
desire to prove others wrong the rebelliousness wrong rebelliousness into fidelity to cultural traditions
01:38:39.160
and the way that we do that is by creating strict measures by which an individual's life is judged
01:38:44.680
and we do this when an individual dies we've talked about this in other things is we're like what were
01:38:48.120
they aiming for did they live a life well and what do their kids think of them because you know that's
01:38:52.760
how an individual is best judged because your kids are judging you from either the value set that you
01:38:56.760
taught them and that they kept or they abandoned the values that you taught them in which case you failed in
01:39:02.200
that regard so are your kids judging you by an evolved iteration of the value set that you created
01:39:09.160
and that is the way we we work with our kids we're like okay you think you can do better than us
01:39:15.080
you think you can do more for your kids than we did for you then try create a better system yeah but
01:39:22.600
your kids will judge you in the same way you judge us within this central document which is called the index
01:39:30.120
index and then future generations will judge which of us was best well so i think there are some
01:39:37.080
examples of already totally made up religions that kind of started getting traction right like the church
01:39:43.000
of the subgenius for example which you loved when you were a kid did sort of build up a bit of a cult
01:39:49.240
following right like it's sort of dedicated to hedonism yeah which is not great right but i'm just saying like
01:39:55.160
there have been some entirely like ironically made up religions where people have in the end
01:40:01.960
started getting caught up in it like there is precedent for this and while i think you know we
01:40:08.120
just had this long conversation about how you know logical inconsistencies will leave people just
01:40:15.000
wanting more and leaving the faith yeah well and i also think another thing that a lot of people might
01:40:19.640
hear all this and they're like where are you guys actually strict within your ruling system because
01:40:23.400
you seem to abandon a lot of you know what people complain about in terms of the arbitrary restrictions
01:40:27.400
of religion and that's true we are attacking what are the arbitrary ones the ones that people are
01:40:32.760
most complaining about whereas we are going much further with the ones like self-denial and attack on
01:40:39.720
any form of hedonism to the extent where any level of self-aggrandizement all of that are status
01:40:45.320
hurting things within our cultural group if you go out and you are adorned in lots of jewelry or
01:40:51.160
something like that that is a sign that you are a sinner and that you are not someone to be trusted
01:40:57.640
but i oddly think a lot of this is actually cribbed from our really early relationship conversations
01:41:02.840
before we ever had kids about raising kids and like some of the advice that we said on that we liked
01:41:07.640
the most especially about having teenagers was like basically have no rules just have a very very
01:41:14.360
small number of rules that actually matters enforce them like mad but they have to be rules that make
01:41:19.640
sense and that's it like yeah and this is this is also really interesting so a lot of people look at
01:41:24.520
our thing like our very low temperature we keep in the house and stuff like that in the winter and what
01:41:29.240
they misunderstand is when they look at this they say oh so you live you know in constant pain like
01:41:34.760
why don't you do an additional pain rituals right like the opus day or something like that
01:41:39.560
which we would see as indulgent signs of vanity and what a waste of time because you are wasting
01:41:45.880
time to demonstrate something pain and efficacy is something that you drive through to reach an end
01:41:52.760
goal and that you should be expected to drive through whereas signs of vanity or narrative building
01:41:58.920
or self-indulgence we understand that all humans are sinners and to attempt to not sin at all
01:42:05.240
is a pass to personal damnation but to to to aggrandize the sin to say i'm actually good
01:42:15.080
because i waste my time working out to look good like beyond what's just healthy that is also the
01:42:20.680
highest one of the highest orders of sin although within our system we do have the single highest order
01:42:25.000
of sin which is stagnation that is the sin above all other sins is personal stagnation or or cultural
01:42:32.280
stagnation or any form of stagnation which is why we talk about this concept of living in dead religions
01:42:37.320
is the dead religions are the ones that have allowed themselves to stagnate whereas humanity's
01:42:41.720
greatness is defined by our intergenerational improvement and intergenerational advancement
01:42:47.640
which which does you know potentially put us into conflicts with some religious traditions except
01:42:52.760
we see them as as useful as a different perspective and thus thus worth maintaining as much as we can
01:42:59.400
um but it's actually interesting how symbiotic like if this tradition takes off how symbiotic it is
01:43:05.720
with traditional cultural traditions and that it literally doesn't want and it sees it as a
01:43:11.560
religious order to help protect their members from deconverting and it only wants to prevent the
01:43:18.840
people who they would otherwise have bleeding off from it who are bleeding off for mental fortitude
01:43:24.920
reasons instead of corruptibility reasons so if i'm going to categorize these two things corruptibility
01:43:31.480
reasons is they're bleeding off because they just want to have a lot of sex or something like that or
01:43:35.560
they want to you know just indulge in their you know some form of personal identity and in which case
01:43:41.400
we don't want them but then integrity reasons is they see some area of logical inconsistency they just
01:43:46.840
can't get over but they would really rather not fall to completely to the urban monoculture we can act as
01:43:55.960
a good backstop which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban monoculture
01:44:01.720
um so it's not acting as an outright conversion mechanism but as part of this cultural economy that
01:44:08.840
prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization before it can reach the stars and ensuring that
01:44:16.840
the western cultural tradition does join the stars to some extent so i'm gonna be like why
01:44:21.480
don't you care about the eastern cultural tradition because that's not us like i have no connection to
01:44:24.760
that it would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt to simulate that or simp that you
01:44:31.720
know we can we can work to help them where we can but we're not part of that tradition anyway i
01:44:37.320
love you to decimum would you like to go over together i can go over by myself you said it's a lot
01:44:44.120
easier with me helping yeah but i bet it's easier for you not to help yeah but no you bought me
01:44:51.560
puddings today we're going we're going together so meet me in the kitchen yeah okay you're the best i love