In this episode, I talk about why I don't believe in God, natural law, and why I'm not a Christian. It's a bit of a longwinded rant, but it's a good one.
00:02:35.020I think in Rising to Power that the Puritans kind of degraded all religions down to this,
00:02:42.600you know, this pissing contest of who's the right religion. Instead of having a humbleness
00:02:49.920and an openness to other ways of looking at the world, there's a self-righteousness, a materialistic
00:02:59.860proving that, you know, I belong to the winning team. God loves me more than he loves you.
00:03:06.760It's quite absurd. Oh, and just for the record, I would not call myself a Christian after the
00:03:17.560Fourth Lateran Council. An atheist? Well, the creator did such a great job hiding his own
00:03:25.300work that it'd be downright rude to believe in him, so of course I'm an atheist. All that
00:03:31.280said, let's get to the actual topic of this video, natural law. Now, natural law is a sort
00:03:39.520of word you'll hear thrown around, I guess you could call them the low church. You'll hear
00:03:46.060these ridiculous Republican protesters screaming about their religion, screaming about natural
00:03:53.340law, and of course they know what natural law is. They have it completely figured out, and
00:03:59.520it's whatever supports their contemporary political cause. Natural law is a bit more
00:04:08.820than that. And see, what all this boils down to, the reason that I find theology so interesting,
00:04:18.240and in about six months I'll probably turn around and get really heavy into mathematics and quantum
00:04:24.140theory again or something like that. See, there's two different levels of abstraction you can take
00:04:32.940the universe at. There's the material abstraction, and this is most of science. Whether it's high-level
00:04:45.020science like climatology or extremely low-level like quantum mechanics where we're dealing purely with
00:04:52.060mathematical probabilities and formula, it's this measurable engineering problem. And your typical
00:05:04.220atheist response is going to be that ethics is an engineering problem. Now, certainly over at Less
00:05:12.860LessWrong, they've done a lot of work to try and reduce morality and society down to a mathematical formulation, an engineering problem.
00:05:25.020And they've done a lot of very good work in that direction. If you're not reading LessWrong, start reading LessWrong.
00:05:34.860Go click on the, there's a wiki on the side, look up the sequences, and you'll disappear into there for like a good three weeks.
00:05:44.860Absolutely amazing, the stuff they've done.
00:05:47.020And there are certain low-level engineering aspects. You know, we can do a sociological study of what's the effect of prior partner count on marriages,
00:05:58.860what's the effect of diversity on a neighborhood. We can do those sorts of studies, and we can learn valuable information.
00:06:08.860Certainly, studying science does not directly affect morality, but it's very good to be living in a world with industrial agriculture,
00:06:22.860and indoor plumbing, and traffic, traffic that's controlled by mathematical formulas. Thank God.
00:06:33.340So it doesn't directly affect morality, but it is all very good stuff to be studying.
00:06:39.580Now, what these, the people that are trying to reduce everything to an engineering issue,
00:06:45.340what they're missing is the upper-level abstract, that there are certain patterns that repeat themselves
00:06:57.900again and again at the high level. And this thing, this pattern that we notice,
00:07:06.700this is what's meant by natural law. The law that is naturally ordained by the universe that you can't fight against.
00:07:25.420Now, in a prior video, I said that, for instance, natural law means that if you spend all your time
00:07:34.700time chasing after a new line of coke or chasing after meaningless empty sex with randoms, if you live a
00:07:46.620completely hedonistic lifestyle, a completely selfish, psychopathic lifestyle, that it will catch up with you in the end.
00:07:57.180If you're poor, it's going to catch up with you pretty quickly, but even the rich, it catches up to them.
00:08:04.220It leaves them in wreckage and misery. And I know that the, I already hear the immediate
00:08:12.380atheist response to suggest that there's some sort of karmic force in the universe.
00:08:19.260What about all those, those people that suffer needlessly? You know, what about all those,
00:08:23.980those rich SOBs that die happily? And can you show me one of the latter?
00:08:32.620Oh, there's certainly a lot of needless suffering in this universe.
00:08:37.740And when you describe it as a karmic force, as an active agent, then it certainly implied that an
00:08:50.140active agent wouldn't create this sort of suffering, now would it? So that's, that's not
00:08:56.220what natural law is. It's not a cosmic agent. Or at least it certainly doesn't behave like one,
00:09:05.020I suppose it could be. A great example of natural law is Austrian economics. Seriously.
00:09:17.980Austrian economics is true whether or not you want it to be.
00:09:25.020Right now in the situation we are in, in the world, where we've, we've switched from,
00:09:32.940we've switched from gold-backed currencies to, to funny money. It's inevitable that we're going to
00:09:41.740collapse. In fact, I just saw a link, I'm going to, I'll put it down below, about how there was
00:09:48.780basically zero inflation in the United States until they, the Federal Reserve, and in particular going
00:09:57.260off the gold standard to help accelerate it way more. But you see this, this very flat,
00:10:02.780flat line, and then just this rocketing, rocketing, uh, you know, like the, the cost of average goods.
00:10:12.220It's very stark, you know, like, please argue with me Keynesians, argue that graph, please.
00:10:20.060As Aaron Clary put it, it's, it's hard to predict when the collapse is going to come, because
00:10:25.980the Keynesian funny money, they, they always, you know, they always come up with another little quirk,
00:10:32.380another different type of bailout, another different way of seemingly to manipulate things,
00:10:38.540so they get away with it. They keep seeming to get away with it until in the end
00:15:47.580I certainly don't understand all of it. Otherwise, my armies would have taken over the world already.
00:15:52.620And anybody that likes to scream and yell about how they hate this group or that group because they don't follow it and condemning everybody,
00:16:04.940acting with none of the humbleness that you ought to act with, they certainly don't understand it either.
00:16:10.460But it's not a ridiculous concept. It's one of these things that's been appropriated by the low church.
00:16:20.620That the high church, which is an atheist cult, which is modern liberalism, has rejected it
00:16:28.700and assigned it onto the low church, the enemies that will make them look good.
00:16:36.700Now we get to the second part of this video. Rebellion.
00:16:43.420Because violation of natural law is almost always some sort of rebellion against natural authority.
00:17:01.100It's a rejection of the way the world works. A reputation of it.
00:17:13.420On the low levels, it's simply a reputation. A repudiation of legitimate authority.
00:17:29.420There's a comic I saw a while back. A captioned photo of a kid riding lawnmower with a grandmother in the background
00:17:39.260that looks like she's screaming at him.
00:17:41.020And the kid kind of just happens to have a surly expression on his face at the time.
00:17:46.140And the caption goes, get back here, young man.
00:17:50.620And he says, fuck you, you're not my real dad. Gonna go listen to some Linkin Park.
00:17:57.180And like this is, it's so funny because this is so normal nowadays that our entire culture celebrates rebellion.
00:18:07.660Rebellion. Rebellion has become a commodity that's packaged and marketed and sold at discount outlets.
00:18:14.620And we can all buy our brand of disconformity.
00:18:19.020And it's gotten so bad that even like the hipsters now dress like somebody from the 1950s who was dressing to conform to look like you wore a suit, a fedora, you look like a real man.
00:18:34.620No, they're wearing the suit and the fedora to protest against something.