Atheistkult
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode, we take a look at Atheist Cult and Skeptics, and discuss the difference between them and the skeptic community, and how they are different than the rest of the scientific community. We also talk about some of the conspiracy theories they promote, and whether or not they are correct or not.
Transcript
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You realize that the Bible looks more like something written by Bronze Age savages than
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You realize that the question, is there a God, makes roughly as much sense as asking
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Nameless to say, this is my video on Atheist Cult.
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Now as a precursor to this, yesterday I did a video on nihilism, about rationality, about
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what it means to actually be somebody pursuing the truth who asks tough questions and won't
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See I want to start off with that, because that's what we need to establish.
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The Atheist Cult is not a rational movement, that they have a very narrow range of things
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that they criticize and they do with to great length, but they're not actually interested
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They have their own belief structure and they are going to push that agenda to the ends of
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Compare them, for instance, to a community like LessWrong.
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LessWrong.com, linked below, is a site devoted to understanding human biases and trying to overcome
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That 90-95% of the members there are Atheist, but they don't really discuss it that often,
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because, quite frankly, it's a boring question.
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Atheist Cult, on the other hand, can't shut up about it.
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Now if we're going to attack Atheist Cult, let's not attack the YouTubers, let's not attack
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Let's try attacking one of their strongest arms.
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I'm thinking particularly of the skeptic community.
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Granted, there are a few theistic skeptics, but the overlap with atheism and skepticism
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Now you'd think, with a group of people called skeptics that like to go on and on about the
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scientific method and falsifiability, that they'd be some of the most rational people
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Maybe they wouldn't agree with some of the things that we say around here, but we could
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sit down and have a conversation with them, and either sway them to our point, or be swayed
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They attack the crystal healing, the inoculation paranoia, all this pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo that
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people are being tricked into pain for, they attack all of that, and that is a good thing.
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But overall what you see isn't so much a devotion to the scientific method, to rationality, to
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And the status amongst skeptics tends to be making fun of those silly southerners that believe
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in the healing power of prayer, and believe all this nonsense, and have all these conspiracy
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And so they just attack these people without thinking about it.
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They identify themselves as being part of the university intelligentsia, and so they attack
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And the problem with that is that a certain number of these conspiracy theories are going
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So yeah, certainly there's no lizard people inhabiting government, I don't think so anyway.
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But if you follow the Paleo diet, and if you study how the modern American diet was developed,
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you discover that yes, there are financial interests, and it's actually very dangerous
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Sometimes you do need to go against the common wisdom.
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Whereas these guys, the skeptics, completely follow the common wisdom because they want to
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Even the best skeptics make stupid criticisms at times.
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The example I'm going to use is Penn and Teller, who actually go against a lot of the stuff
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And I think if you gave them another 20 years, they'd come around to be properly right wing.
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But every so often on their show, which is quite enjoyable usually, they say something
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And the one example that really stands out to me is their criticism of cryogenics.
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Now for those of you unfamiliar with it, cryogenics is the idea that at the end of our lives,
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if we freeze our brains, then 20 years, 50 years, 100 years in the future, if we freeze
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them fast enough and we contain all the data that's still there.
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They'll be able to go in, recover the data, and reinstall it into a new biological sim or
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they'll install it into a computer or what have you.
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Now for the skeptic, this promise of eternal life sounds like religion.
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And so they knee-jerk to the reaction that this cryogenics must be complete pseudoscience
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And their attacks on cryogenics are utterly weak.
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If you go to the Alcor site, it's very quick, very easy explanation.
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They actually don't do a lot of detail, but first of all, no, there's no ice crystals forming
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Two, you have until about six hours after death or so, probably, to freeze the brain before
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the data is too damaged to be recoverable, too decayed.
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They have done this to rat brains where they've frozen the rat brain and then de-thought it
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and demonstrated that, yes, there is still usable data inside the brain.
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And then there's just the fact that we're constantly pushing back what the definition
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It used to be that when a heart stopped, it was considered death.
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There's surgeries performed where they cool the body down to five degrees, stop the heart,
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and perform brain surgery for half an hour, and then revive the person.
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The theoretical basis for cryogenics is completely legitimate, and all these criticisms are addressed
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Now, whether or not we'll ever awake is another question, and they certainly don't promise
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that, but the frozen brain still contains the data.
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And yet the skeptics, and go ahead, look up any skeptical critique of cryogenics, they attack
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If they did a minute's worth of research, they would realize that they're talking out of their
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But they are interested in criticizing these wacky, crazy scientists who are believing in
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woo and crystal healing rather than actually reaching the truth.
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And, on a general note, my experience with skeptics is that they are remarkably ignorant people.
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Now I don't consider myself particularly well-educated.
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I will break open history tomes written a hundred years ago to see what people thought back then
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I'll work through economic textbooks, I'll study Bayes' theorem, and I'll break out a pen
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and a piece of paper to work through the mathematics myself on it.
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I have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics.
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But I actually consider myself incredibly ignorant on these topics.
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If I'm anything, I'm possibly a renaissance man.
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I know a little bit about everything, but I'd never call myself an expert.
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Skeptics, on the other hand, when I talk to them, are just absolutely oblivious to the
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These aren't the low-level skeptics I'm talking about.
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I'm particularly thinking about one who has a radio program in Edmonton that I met.
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And yet the arrogance to go out there and proclaim what is true and what is false.
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I know some of you guys on this channel here have criticized me for doing the Schrodinger's
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Schrodinger's Cat actually confuses these people.
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These harbingers of truth and lighthood and all that.
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And that's one of the strongest branches that's not obsessed with bashing Christianity in the
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They really don't impress me as great minds of our generation.
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And see, that's, I think, really the final nail in the coffin is just how unreasonable
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Now, Fringe left some comments in my last video about the fact that I might have to argue with
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some of these guys and their propensity to use personal attacks, to constantly shifting
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In fact, I'll link to the bottom, on Freedom Main Radio, there was an anti-statist who was
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talking to a bunch of Mensa members about anti-statism, and he's just describing the
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There was only like one lady out of the 20 or 30 of them that would actually have a rational
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conversation without using biases, using manipulation techniques to control the conversation that
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And atheist cult, if you disagree with them on something, they tend to be just as bad as
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So with all that said, what can we definitely say about atheist cult?
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They do tend to be on the right side of the bell curve.
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Proal atheist cult that love to chant out the most idiotic slogans they can find from the
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third of Dawkins' book that they made it through.
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But generally, atheist cult tends to have IQs above 100.
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However, as much as we talk about the importance of IQ around here, IQ is not the same thing as
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And in fact, a lot of high IQ people are very, very good at deluding themselves.
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Very high IQ, not very concerned with truth-seeking so much as they are concerned with winning the
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The second thing we notice about them is their obsession with Christianity.
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They will go to great lengths, pouring through the Bible, taking notes about any little inconsistency
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They'll produce all these videos repeating the exact same arguments.
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They'll create trite moral arguments criticizing some passage in the Bible that was written
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by a semi-literate person and didn't even go into motivations.
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And they're absolutely obsessed with the Bible.
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And yet they also have some of the most facile criticisms of it.
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Vox Dei actually wrote a book, which is a free download.
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He's a Christian, but he really points out the intellectual vapidity of Dawkins and Hitchens
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and these criticisms of atheism, or criticisms of Christianity, that is.
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The atheist really does attack Christianity as if people, as if Christians believe there's
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a guy with a beard up in the sky watching down over them.
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And maybe a few Southern Baptists believe that, but generally Christians are a little bit
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So, and it's not even that they're strawmanning.
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It's that they're just very philosophically naive.
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And the third thing we can notice about the atheist cult is, as much as they talk about being oppressed
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and being such a small minority in America, they're actually pretty mainstream.
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Incredibly critical of Christianity, without being critical of any other modern delusions.
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And these intellectuals are the vanguard of it all.
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Now, I'm going to have to justify that claim, won't I?
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I might have pissed off a few of you atheist cultists out there.
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Christianity is the bedrock of our modern civilization.
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And I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but our modern civilization, our modern
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myths, the way that we organize ourselves socially, is entirely based upon Christianity.
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I'll give you a few examples here of modern values, of mythical religious values that we
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Equality is a Christian concept, unique to the Christian religion.
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That each soul has equal value and is judged before God based upon the decisions that they
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You don't see this particular idea in other religions.
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And the Christians, they used to, the old Christians anyway, 200 years ago, they only considered
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But it's this idea that led to the French Revolution, that everybody should be an equal
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And nowadays, atheist cults embrace this value to the point where they absolutely demand that
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everybody be equal intellectually, everybody have equal opportunity emotionally.
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So if somebody has a personality disorder, it's not their fault.
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Equality is one of the basic fundamental values of our society, and it's directly derived from
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But the idea of nationalism, that we're all in it together, and certainly all the revolutions
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200 years ago, were based around the concept of fraternity, which, again, comes directly
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Rather than being subjects that are supposed to obey the priest, which you'd find in something
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like Islam, where the imam is a moral and political authority, that if you're not an
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The idea of political freedom, that is another myth of our current civilization, stems directly
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The ones trying to get rid of slavery back in the 1800s, is that they argued that God gave
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us free will so that we could choose virtue or vice.
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They should be free to make their own choices because that's how God intended it.
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And it's Christianity which devolved into the modern system.
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Now, I'd like to address a couple of arguments against that that you might have.
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Democracy, I would say, is largely a product of Christianity.
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And the obvious counter-argument would be, what about Rome?
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Those democracies did not resemble our own in the slightest.
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They were democracy, yes, in the organization of how politics was performed day to day.
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But the society themselves, they had very strong roles dictated by their religions for what
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a man was supposed to do, for what a woman was supposed to do.
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A Roman citizen was not the same thing as a freedman, was not the same thing as a slave.
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The Greeks, for instance, were more than happy to raise young boys as homosexuals so they'd
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To call our entire system a democracy, and then to call Greece a Roman democracy, you're
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But there's only a couple of minor comparisons between the two.
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And as for how religions create societies, you would never see a Western-style democracy
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Islamic countries have the imams, are political and religious heads, and no one has absolute
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The president answers to about a half-dozen, a dozen different imams.
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Western-style democracy is not going to happen there.
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It can be forced onto it, but it's not going to happen organically.
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Confucianism itself lays out a hierarchy of society.
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It's all about structures from the god and the emperor all the way down throughout the
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India is similar, where it has distinct castes and distinct roles.
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If you've read the Bhagavad Gita, it's about how even if you don't want to go and murder
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your loved ones and family, if you're a soldier, it's your duty.
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And ultimately, God just wants you to do your duty in life, regardless of how it feels to
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These are very different concepts than Christianity, which is about us all being equal and about
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I'm certainly not judging, saying one is worse than the other or anything like that, but
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they're different, and they're not going to result in a Western-style democracy.
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Now let's get back to atheist cult again, because they believe in this leftist ideal of
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democracy, this modern society that we've developed.
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But how can they be a Christian without believing in God?
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Well, from day one, Christianity has been becoming more populist.
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It started out populist, became a state-controlled Catholicism, with the Pope at the top, and then
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It went from Catholicism, where only the priests could interpret the truth of the Bible, it was
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all kept in Latin, to Lutheranism, where they translated it to the vulgar tongues, and everybody
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And eventually Protestantism, where they threw out the Virgin Mary and all the saints, and instead
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had a direct relationship with just Jesus, rather than the more polytheistic sense of Catholicism,
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where they have many different powers within the structure.
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And as time goes on, you see less and less of a relationship between the practice of Christianity
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And so what you have with atheist cult is that they just threw out God and Jesus.
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They still believe in everything that a Christian believes in, but they threw out God and Jesus.
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And this is why they are so angry at Christianity.
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The same reason that the Protestants and the Catholics were at each other's throats back in Britain.
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See, if you're just an atheist, if you're a right-wing lunatic like us here, you don't really care about Christianity.
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You know, I have no reason to go argue my teeth out against Jainists.
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Atheist cult, and this is what you see, they don't argue against other religions.
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They primarily argue against Christianity because they are close enough to them to be a threat.
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And one final thing, let's compare atheist cults who believe in absolute equality between people,
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that believe in political correctness, that believe in all of these foundational myths of our modern era,
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to a group that's actually deeply rational and is atheist, but actually challenges these questions.
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And I'm thinking again of the Lesseron community.
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One of the big focuses of that community is whether or not we can build a super-intelligent AI that's friendly.
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This evolutionary heritage that we have that creates our ethical code,
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And what sort of ethics should a super-intelligent entity have?
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Now, atheist cult, if you try and discuss anything ethical with them,
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will just knee-jerk back to good old-fashioned Christianity
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They will get very, very angry with you if you can try.
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They're intelligent enough to be good speakers,
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but they're not particularly deep thinkers or theologians.
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They don't believe in a god, but they believe just as strongly in their
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pseudo-scientific, allegedly scientific, worldview,
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with all the foundational myths of our civilization in it.