The Death of Atheism
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Summary
The McSpencer Group re-unites to discuss the death of New Atheism, and Richard Dawkins' new book, "Growing Up From God or It's Time to Grow Up from God." Plus, a look back at the early days of "New Atheism" and the rise of Christianity.
Transcript
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It's Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
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We are still polling quite poorly in Wisconsin.
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It seemed like only yesterday that all those online atheists were dominating YouTube,
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Chief Atheist Richard Dawkins just released a new book, Outgrowing God.
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If anything, it expresses the intellectual exhaustion and growing irrelevancy of the movement he launched some 15 years ago.
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Ed, Keith, and I look back at so-called new atheism,
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revealing how those liberal edgelords never ask any serious questions
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and how the battle between science and religion is not what it's cracked up to be.
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The team has reassembled. I'm very happy about that.
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full of wandering, womanizing, and wine drinking, I presume, or at least I hope.
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Keith, how many FGDs did you contract during your summer?
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Well, I'm not sure, but my head feels a lot clearer.
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You know, I've had no Anglo takes contaminating my thinking for the last couple of months.
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Feeling clear-headed can also be a symptom of pubic lice.
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I went to a pumpkin fair yesterday with the kiddos,
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You know, swinging around, riding around on hayrides for hours.
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I haven't spent the summer contracting sexually transmitted diseases from Southern European tarts.
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For example, yesterday I went with my family to a spa hotel in Vokkowa,
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That was very pleasant and went on a long forest walk.
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Do you get in one of those Scandinavian saunas?
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So I haven't been having the kind of prime that Keith has been having.
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is that race mix and air to Southern Europeans wide?
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It depends whether we're dealing with Portuguese people here.
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There's quite a lot of black ab mixture in the native Portuguese population.
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Actually, I don't know if you're familiar with Varg Post and, you know, Varg Vikernes.
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He was arguing with an Anglo and he was disparaging the Anglo on the basis that he thinks Queen Victoria was a gypsy.
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He, he's kind of, I kind of like Varg, but I like him from a distance.
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Like, I kind of like that there's this madman out there kind of, you know, ranting and raving.
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But you kind of want to keep your distance from madman.
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All I would say about that is that Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia.
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And there was no record of hemophilia in the royal family before her.
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So either, her father was about 50 when she was born, early 50s.
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So either it was a denoma mutation on her father's sperm.
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Or her mother copped it off with a gypsy hemophilia.
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So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's one or the other.
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So I, I asked you guys to do this just because Richard Dawkins has a new book out.
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And so I thought this would be at least somewhat timely.
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I'm not sure the size of the splash that this latest volume is making.
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It's called, uh, outgrowing God or growing up from God or it's chill.
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I've, I've actually, um, listened to about three hours of it now, just kind of as I was
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And it, yeah, it's kind of, I, I, it's, it's like the God delusion for dummies.
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It's, it's kind of, he's not saying anything that he hasn't said before and it is kind
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Um, so yes, he's trying to get the teenage set or something.
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Um, but, uh, this book has not made a huge splash, you know, sell a lot of copies, I'm
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But, um, he did make a big splash, uh, when he published the God delusion in 2006.
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And there was this phenomenon that lasted about 10 years.
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And it was to a very large degree, a YouTube phenomenon, which is also interesting at the
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And it was the, the atheism, new atheism as they called it.
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And most all of what they were saying was not new at all.
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Uh, but it, it was something that was actually quite powerful and, um, influential.
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Um, I think it might've, you could, it's, I don't think it's too much to say that it changed
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minds on a mass scale and at least contributed to the decline of religious belief, particularly
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Christian belief, um, in America and, and the Western world.
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Um, but I, I think it's something that is, is now kind of old now.
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It's now feeling a bit outmoded and I think it's something that we can kind of look back
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And, uh, I guess it's interesting that we have this panel assembled because I think each
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of us in our own way is kind of a eccentric about religion.
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Um, I don't think, I've, I don't think any of us really want to adopt an atheist label.
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Although I, I don't think we also have the same perspective as a average church goer as
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Um, but anyway, I'm just kind of setting the table here.
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Uh, but, um, Keith, you're younger than I am when, when new atheism came around, I was
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already kind of like on a few meta levels up, but you were a teenager or even younger.
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I can't remember when I met your mom, but, um, you were, um, fairly young when new atheism
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Um, was, was this influential as a kind of young, precocious know-it-all, uh, or was it
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Not, not really at the time, but I remember when, I don't think I got like regular, uh,
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And then it was actually like when, when I started using YouTube or whatever, that was
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actually one of the first things I gravitated towards was, uh, the new atheism stuff.
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Cause I don't know, there's a certain kind of person, I think on the internet that's just
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kind of attack, attracted to, uh, drama and conflict and arguments.
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But, uh, it is kind of funny to look at the, the progress that some of those, uh, internet
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It kind of, I think it, in a funny way, it kind of mirrors a lot of the people that sort
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of came into the alt-right and that like, you know, you look at the, you look at the
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channels of some of them, um, like what's that guy, TJ something, the amazing atheist or
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whatever, but it's like, he's kind of almost alt-right or something.
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I mean, I, I, I'm not trying to, uh, you know, uh, slander him or anything, but he, he's
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definitely kind of edgy in a, in a real way, not just like making fun of Christians, which
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is not particularly, um, uh, edgy at this point.
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Like, I remember when I would watch these, because atheism is unstoppable, got banned a
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couple of months ago, but he had, you know, he started talking to like Jared Taylor.
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And the route they went, it was like, they started off like arguing with theists and
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And then the next thing, it was like a little bit of race realism.
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And then, oh God, you know, all of a sudden they're like, well, it is true in the sense
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of, I mean, uh, of a lot of them are genuinely open-minded.
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I think atheism unstoppable is, is a lot like that.
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I mean, I've, I've watched a number of his videos.
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He does seem to be ultimately a kind of classical liberal, but he is willing to go there on a,
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I remember, um, Jackie Glenn, I believe was her name.
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And she was kind of like the, uh, cute young, I'm not like the other girls, uh, amazing
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And, uh, I, I remember seeing some of her videos, you know, I don't know, 10 years ago or something.
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And she's like talking to transsexuals and full on, you know, SJW hating her parents and
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So there are many different paths that they can take.
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Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, look, I, I, I would say this.
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I mean, one of the reasons why I don't have a tremendous amount of respect for new atheism
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is that it's coming at a century or two centuries after a major crisis of faith that was occurring,
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uh, to a degree due to enlightenment thinkers who were kind of operating on a, on an elite
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Um, it was, it's coming after Darwin, it's coming after Nietzsche, it's coming after the
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world, the first world war, which, you know, itself just brought about a, a kind of, you
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know, end of tradition and everything you take for granted.
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And it just, it's all, it, you know, even if I might agree with many things that they
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say, uh, there, there's a level at which they're just kind of tedious last men, um, uh, kind
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of arguing for things that have already been kind of won in a way.
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So it's a way of signaling how rational and logical they are and then how intelligent they
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They have that to gain, but there's essentially, apart from pissing off a few nutcases, a few
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extremist fundamentalists, there really is nothing to lose.
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So whereas, whereas when people were doing something like that, um, a couple of hundred
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years ago, someone like Darwin, he, he seriously didn't want to come up.
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He, he, he, he came up with the idea of evolution and then he held back on it for about 20 years
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because he knew what offense it would cause and how, how, how socially problematic it would
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be and how much it would upset his wife, who was a highly committed Christian and then
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And, and, and things, and things, and things like this.
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And he held, and when he was under the impression, some people say wrongly, that somebody else
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was about to go there with the same idea, then he, then he went ahead and published.
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I mean, if you go back a couple of years before that, there was no worse insult that
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could be thrown at people than, than being an atheist.
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To be an atheist, if you were found guilty of atheism, they'd burn you.
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And so, and it was, although there, it seems that there were atheists around, nobody kind
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of knew their names or whatever, because this would be done kind of secretly and in secret
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societies and you'd all be very careful and whatever.
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And so there really is, there's no, they're not brave.
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It's like, it's like if you, if you live in Eastern Europe, parts of Eastern Europe now,
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I don't think what you're doing is good for the society, but I have a certain amount of
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respect for the activists that are pro LGBT in like Russia or whatever, because they're
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You've got nothing to lose doing this in the, in, in Britain or, or, or somewhere like that.
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And so it's kind of like, I have very little, it's a, it's a sort of a feeble thing to do.
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Let me add real quick, although I think you might be going there.
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Um, just to give a slight bit of credit to Richard Dawkins, um, in 2006, this, it was
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You understand this, this was the height of the white house or so he said, and this was
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And we're going to, they were, they were openly in some cases, maybe a minority view, but we're
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talking about, we're going to install a theocracy and God is on George W. Bush's side and we're
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going to invade the entire planet and install Christian democracy.
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In the context of 2006, we just had the Iraq war, or it was ongoing, the Iraq war, um,
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and it suggested that this was, you know, he and Blair prayed together or whatever.
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Blair was this extremely committed Roman Catholic.
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Uh, Bush was this, uh, born again Christian who'd been an alcoholic or whatever it was
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So it is true that religiousness was much more powerful then, and therefore there was
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There was a sort of religious establishment to some extent, or the woke establishment wasn't
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And so, and so, so, so, so now I think the reason why this atheistic tracks are so much
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less interesting is because religion is now marginalized.
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Uh, it's, it's the woke people who are all kind of atheists or whatever, anyway, who are
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And so you're not really, you know, it's rather feeble to, to, to waste your energy
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on it when there are kind of bigger fish to fry.
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Also, more importantly, we are now, the society, the irreligious society is bearing fruit and
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we are seeing the results of a generation who have been raised not with a group selected
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religiousness, uh, which pushes them in a group selected pro-social direction where you
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sacrifice the interest of the self for the interest of the group and whatever, but an
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individualistic ideology, which is all about the feelings of the individual and everyone
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not feeling upset and feeling they're all equal and feeling the same.
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And we're seeing this bear fruit in this emotionally incontinent snowflake generation,
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um, who are utterly black, who are utterly bigoted in their thinking and can't take criticism
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and can't deal with people that think differently from them.
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Uh, and so, uh, therefore it's no longer in any way brave to challenge religion and to
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It's, it's, it's brave to challenge atheism and to challenge those people.
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Um, and so, and, and, and, and it becomes intellectually dangerous to toy with the idea that not only
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could, whether God exists, I don't know, but, but that there could be positive things about
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religion because that's what undermines really a kind of state communism, um, which is now,
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so, yeah, so I think it's just, it's just the last gasp of a, a man who's, who's spent his
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career obsessed with slagging off, uh, religion and I don't know, maybe he needs the money.
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I think the, I think the interesting question about new atheism is what, you know, what was
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new in the new atheism because, oh, you know, obviously, as you said, like other people,
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better people have made these arguments before them.
00:16:12.380
Well, I, I think what was new was one, how bad the arguments were. Uh, I do actually think that
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was part of why it was a popular phenomenon is it was like, you know, it was kind of like the
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McDonald's of like a secular philosophy and that it just sort of stripped any of the, you know,
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any of the, any of the good arguments that's in atheism as a tradition.
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It stripped, do you know what I would say, Keith, is that it stripped the tragedy from it all
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Yeah, well, that's where I was going with the second aspect. One aspect is how bad the arguments
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are, but the second aspect was the evangelical tone that came with it. And that, you know,
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previous atheist philosophers, I mean, you know, like Nietzsche was grappling with this
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as a serious problem. And I think he recognized the, you know, the tragedy of the death of
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God and the huge problems. I think he foresaw a lot of the problems that were.
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Earthquakes and volcanoes, whatever he was writing about. Yeah.
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Yeah. And the whole, you know, and the whole project of modernity and that's like, that's
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just completely lacking in the new atheists. I mean, you know, there's a few of them are
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actually, Dennett is a philosopher, A.C. Graylin is a philosopher. I mean, Dawkins doesn't
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put forward any philosophical arguments, really. It's basically sort of moralistic tomes against
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the Old Testament God. Yeah. But no actual engagement with, you know, classical theism
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in terms of, you know, the basis for it as a philosophy. But the remarkable thing is how
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much they just kind of presuppose this, like, secular Christian morality. I mean, like, Dennett
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at times will make arguments that, well, morality is just, you know, evolutionary adaptation,
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Darwinianism and things. But then at other times, he'll just, you know, he'll just treat
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it as obvious that these sort of, you know, this very complex Christian moral worldview is
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just, it was just always obvious to people. And, you know, as well, the way they'll just
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kind of skirt over some of the horrors of the 20th century, which are, you know.
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Right. And it wasn't. I mean, I think, you know, in The God Delusion, Dawkins does make
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some gestures towards, I mean, he actually, he doesn't quite dismiss, but he is skeptical of
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group evolution in a way that Ed is not. But he does kind of say that, you know, morality
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is going to evolve and it's going to precede religion in the sense that you have to get
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along and cooperate with your group. You obviously have a lot at stake with your own children and
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That is true. There were some studies which I've found on this recently. It is true that,
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well, no, I've just found, this is a review I did of The God Delusion in 2007. I just dug
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it out. But no, one of the things that was found is that moral, is that highly complex
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societies precede moral gods. So the order in which it goes is high level of societal
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complexity, then moral gods seem to develop as a way of holding that society together.
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And as for his skepticism of evil, of group selection, I think that's just a result of,
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I think that's his own personal problem. So in the 70s, when he basically talks about
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group selection, the National Front, which were the main British far right party at the
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time, picked up on this and said, oh yeah, Richard Dawkins, this professor has said this
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and so therefore we white people. And then he was horrified that he should be associated with
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the National Front. And so he came out and condemned group selection. I mean, I've recently
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written a video on this for The Jolly Heretic and I looked at it. There is no logical argument
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against group selection at all. It is quite clear. The first argument they use is that,
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oh, we were in these small bands in the player scene or whatever. And consequently, we couldn't
00:20:02.080
have developed group selection because we were in these sparse bands. But it's been shown that
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there were appalling wars, appalling genocide in the player scene, A. B, that though there
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were these sparse little bands of clans that were separate, they would come together in
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perceived times of crisis when outsiders were trying to destroy them. They would come together
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like, you know, 10 times their numbers. And so there would be group selection. There's clear
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evidence of massacres of huge numbers of people. There's historical evidence, archaeological
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evidence of the wiping out of entire tribes by other tribes. So that is group selection.
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It's a logical extension of kin selection. And computer modelling has demonstrated that
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group selection seems to explain this. He has just a prejudice against group selection.
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And it's as for what he says about religion as well. He says that, oh, well, religion,
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it's this kind of misfiring of various adaptive things. Well, that's clearly bollocks, because
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for something to be adaptive, for it to be accepted to be adaptive in evolution, and he
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would know that as an evolutionist, it has to be partly heritable, or religiousness is
00:21:08.660
at least 0.4 heritable. Aspects of religiousness, 0.7, fundamentalism is 0.7 heritable. It has
00:21:14.720
to be associated with fertility, which it is heavily. It has to be associated with mental health
00:21:19.980
and physical health, which it is at the genetic level. There have to be certain parts of the
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brain that are associated with it. You stimulate them with magnets, you become more religious
00:21:29.200
or whatever, which is the case. It has to be associated with pro-social traits, because
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we're a group-oriented species, which it is. So on every single marker of it, religiousness
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is something that's been selected for in itself. And so therefore, he can't just dismiss it
00:21:45.840
as some misfiring of adaptive things, like following the leader and over-detecting agency.
00:21:53.980
That's not the case. As Keith said, it's how bad the arguments are. He's so dismissive of
00:22:02.120
things. He's so emotional in the way he presents things. He's so completely over the top. In this
00:22:08.480
new one, for example, rather than talk about the existence of God, he kind of poisons the
00:22:12.420
well by saying, oh, well, you know, there are people that believe in fairies, and there
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are people that believe in imps, and there are people that believe in, you know, talking
00:22:23.880
Well, yeah, it just seems to be a complete... And you mentioned, you said that you think
00:22:29.800
he's the worst of them. I don't think he... I think he's the... In some ways, someone
00:22:33.680
like Daniel Donet, who you mentioned a minute ago, or Keith mentioned, openly said that scientists
00:22:43.700
Yeah, if the social consequences are too... I think he said actually specifically about
00:22:47.800
something like race and IQ. Yeah, he did. He did. He was one of these new atheists, and
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he openly said that. And at least Dawkins hasn't said that. And my counter-argument to that is
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that traditionally, scientists have these transcendental values, these values that the truth, the truth
00:23:07.180
is sacrosanct. And what that ultimately comes from is Neo-Thomism, is really a belief, what
00:23:13.620
these scientists originally believed was that their purpose was to unveil God's revelation,
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and therefore to lie. That means that you can't lie. You believe in eternal truth, and what backs
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it up as true is a sort of traditionalist idea that there's a metaphysical realm which verifies
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it as true, or God verifies it as true. And then the belief in God died, but the belief
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in truth without God, the worship of truth, hung on for a while. And I don't know if Dawkins
00:23:46.740
This is a very Nietzschean argument. I mean, and he might very well have not been the only
00:23:51.300
one to make it, but he basically made exactly the argument that you just made. He overturns
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this notion of the opposition, the great battle between science and religion, and he demonstrates
00:24:03.560
that science, in a way, overestimates truth. And that's a kind of very, you know, kind of
00:24:10.240
a little bit sarcastic way that Nietzsche would put things. But in the sense that truth itself
00:24:17.300
is divine, and you must pursue it. And so science is lit by the same lamp as religious fervor of
00:24:24.640
previous years. And then there's a kind of historical irony to this, in the sense that
00:24:30.420
this quest for truth at all costs is bringing about the end of religion, and might be very
00:24:35.840
well bringing about the end of civilization, in the sense that it makes us question too
00:24:39.640
much, that we overestimate truth. And this is, again, in Nietzsche's kind of, you know, playful
00:24:46.060
way, and in a discomforting way as well. He'll kind of look at, you know, we shouldn't just
00:24:53.080
value memory, we should also value forgetting. And we shouldn't just value truth at all costs,
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even at the cost of ourselves, we might actually need to value illusion and delusion at some
00:25:04.480
point. I mean, this is, again, a very kind of Nietzschean move in that sense. But you
00:25:12.140
want to go ahead, Ed? I have some more to go on this.
00:25:15.140
He gets, people argue that he's a bit like a fundamentalist, because he's dogmatic, Dawkins,
00:25:19.980
because he's dogmatic. He's highly, he's highly emotional in his argumentation. He seems very,
00:25:25.580
very certain and whatever. And his counter argument is, no, I'm not a fundamentalist,
00:25:29.780
says in The God's Delusion, because fundamentalists know they are right, because they have read the
00:25:33.440
truth in a holy book. Now, that's what I mean about the, just the badness of these arguments.
00:25:38.980
So what about religions that are not religions of the book, like Hinduism? I mean, it's just
00:25:46.320
evidence that he doesn't care. He's not even trying to argue a logical case if you say something
00:25:51.100
as dismissive as that, but can be just pulled apart very, very quickly. It's just a way of
00:25:58.780
rallying the troops with a load of emotional bad arguments and saying, oh, yeah, there's no
00:26:03.460
God. Aren't we clever than these stupid Christians that believe in a God on a cloud?
00:26:08.980
And it's, I mean, let's, let's go, because, you know, Dawkins himself acknowledges as he did
00:26:15.960
in The God Illusion, and as he would now, that their morality is evolved in the sense that it
00:26:24.660
actually is good to cooperate. It is good for people to trust you and not lie, etc. And that this
00:26:33.020
operates also in a kind of group level in the sense that for those things to work and good, you have to
00:26:40.860
have trust and investment with the people around you. So you might very well be as gentle as a lamb
00:26:48.480
with your children and nephews and friends and colleagues. And you might be as violent and ruthless
00:26:55.280
and amoral as a lion when you are facing off with another band that also wants that piece of territory
00:27:02.940
or might want to kill you or take your territory, etc. There is a kind of in-group, out-group component
00:27:09.720
of morality in the sense that it evolved. And you can even, you know, see this in populations like
00:27:19.120
Germans and Japanese who are completely nice and, if not goofy, when they're within their own societies
00:27:27.860
and then utterly made a total maniacs when they're going to war with other populations.
00:27:34.120
Yeah, precisely. That's what's been selected for. That is the morality that's been selected for.
00:27:39.480
High and positive and negative ethnocentrism. And once you get a group where, once you get a group
00:27:44.600
which is sufficiently large, like a city or whatever, where you're not going to, where you're
00:27:49.140
not closely genetically related to the person, they're not a member of your family or your extended
00:27:53.760
family, and where indeed you might not even ever see them again, then you have to have some reason
00:27:58.620
to cooperate with them. And that's where moral gods then come from. Because if he believes in the
00:28:05.780
same moral god as you, then it's an insurance policy that he will cooperate, you know, he will cooperate
00:28:12.500
as well for the greater good of the society. And you're not, you know, he's not going to be a
00:28:15.900
free rider. He's not going to pay a parasite off the society. He's going to cooperate. He is going
00:28:21.000
to cooperate with you back. You can trust him. It's an insurance policy. And if they don't believe
00:28:25.780
in the same gods as you, then that shows that, well, maybe you can't trust them. And so that's where
00:28:30.440
religion becomes important. And therefore morality, it becomes, being highly moral and pro-social,
00:28:37.880
internally cooperative and externally hostile, becomes selected for concomitantly, but both
00:28:45.160
because of religiousness, because the group that is better able to be positively negatively
00:28:50.160
ethnocentric because it's the will of the gods they believe in. But also it becomes, religiousness
00:28:54.020
therefore becomes selected for concomitantly with greater morality and whatever. And what you
00:28:59.320
find, the group that is going to be more, is going to become selected for, is going to be more and more
00:29:03.960
internally ethnocentric, more and more religious at the same time, and they'll go up. And we know,
00:29:08.800
Dawkins in that book goes on about all the terrible things religious people have done, all the wars
00:29:13.280
and massacres and whatever. Yeah, to different groups, to outgroups, that's the point. With regard
00:29:19.040
to in, with regard to in groups, or simply with regard to generalized morality, when asked questions,
00:29:24.320
religious peoples, it's just a fact, religious people are higher in agreeableness, in the trait
00:29:29.160
agreeable. They're higher in generalized altruism than atheists, and they're higher in generalized
00:29:34.280
conscientiousness. They're more pro-social people on average. Let me take this in a, in a
00:29:38.900
interesting direction. So, I mean, there's a quote from, I'm forgetting, he's, he's actually a Jewish
00:29:44.260
scientist. It's, it's not Weininger. It's, he has a name like that, but there's this classic quote
00:29:49.780
that new atheists always say, which is that, you know, whether religion can make a bad person good
00:29:57.540
is up for dispute. Maybe that happens in some cases, maybe it doesn't happen in others, but
00:30:02.580
religion can make a good person bad. That is, religion can give you the power to go to war.
00:30:10.220
Religion can make you conquer because God is on your side. Religion can make you persecute
00:30:14.660
heretics, maybe within your community to maintain group cohesion. So religion can make good people
00:30:20.460
bad, but whether it can make bad people good is up for dispute. And I mean, I guess my answer
00:30:26.380
that is kind of like, yes. And the people who have God on their side are going to win. And, you know,
00:30:34.700
at some point you have to back away from this kind of moral peacocking and just recognize that those who
00:30:44.560
believe in themselves and believe that their triumph is good for the world are going to triumph.
00:30:51.060
It is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense of belief. Sorry, the sun is rising,
00:30:57.800
perhaps symbolically right now. So my, the lighting in my room keeps changing, but don't worry about
00:31:02.260
that. Um, or maybe I'm about to be struck down by lightning, uh, who knows? Uh, but so it's those
00:31:08.640
who believe that God is on their side are going to win. And I think in some ways, I mean, I gave
00:31:13.940
Richard Dawkins a smidge of credit, uh, for writing the God for publishing the God delusion in 2006 in
00:31:20.560
the sense that this was the height of the religious right and George W. Bush and the Iraq war. And I
00:31:25.600
agree with him on being at the very least skeptical of those things and certainly opposing, uh, the Iraq
00:31:32.720
war. So, you know, good on you for that. Uh, but I think it, it also kind of has a neoconservative
00:31:39.960
element to it. And remember perhaps the second most famous new atheist is Christopher Hitchens,
00:31:46.640
a, you know, contrarian left winger, uh, for right writer for the nation. And I think he was a
00:31:53.200
Trotskyite at some point or something like this. Uh, but someone who ultimately became a kind of
00:31:58.080
neoconservative who, who endorsed the Iraq war, wanted to crush Islamofascism, uh, et cetera. He,
00:32:04.240
he was the contrarian of the left, uh, of his day. And there's this almost neoconservative quality to
00:32:12.160
new atheism in the sense that yes, they want to demoralize and demean the, the religious right and
00:32:19.280
the fundies and the Vangies and all that kind of stuff. Uh, but their target seemingly is Islam at
00:32:26.420
some level. I mean, particularly with someone like Sam Harris, uh, their target is Islam. You want to
00:32:32.200
demoralize Islam at the very least, you see this growing religious fervor on the horizon as a threat
00:32:39.880
to your, you know, secular liberal society that you're wanting to, uh, defend. You seem quite
00:32:46.480
skeptical of this. Well, yeah, well, you may be right about that, but it was about the demoralizing
00:32:51.860
Islam, but that's not really what they do, is it? These books are aimed at white middle-class people
00:32:56.080
that these kinds of, we're talking about, this is not going to be read by Muslims. Muslims aren't going to
00:33:01.720
So it's a, so Dawkins is engaging in a completely anti-evolutionary process of demoralizing
00:33:08.360
his own people so that they will be conquered by Muslims.
00:33:11.220
He's demoralizing his own people so they will be conquered by Muslims. So is Christopher Hitchens,
00:33:15.840
because he's taking away their religion. And the thing that will allow them in the battle of group
00:33:20.040
selection to triumph, as they did do, as they did do at the time of the Crusades, the thing that
00:33:26.120
allowed them to triumph over Islam was that we were at an earlier stage of civilization that the Muslims
00:33:30.820
were at that stage. We were the desert tribesmen. We were, we were, uh, uh, Ibn Khaldun's desert
00:33:36.580
tribesmen with our high level of Asabiya. And that is why, and that was also the case a bit later.
00:33:41.740
And that is why we were able to successfully, one of the reasons why we were able to successfully
00:33:45.920
fight against Saladin and people like this. Um, and, and so, and he is, and people like Hitchens
00:33:51.320
and Dennett and, uh, Dawkins and these other posers, these intellectual posers,
00:33:57.600
Dennett and his impenetrable, impenetrable books about consciousness and whatever,
00:34:02.840
are, um, are, um, are, are, are, are, are just damaging their own side.
00:34:07.000
They're individualists who, who realize that they can attain status as individuals by doing this,
00:34:13.420
by not by rocking the boat in a small little kind of, kind of way, which doesn't damage them much
00:34:19.300
themselves or creates a, a few enemies, but creates much more friends that does enemies
00:34:23.540
signaling that how clever they are and how rational they are and damaging their group in the process.
00:34:28.620
They're just, there's parasites off the group. And the fact, the fact that Islam will not tolerate
00:34:33.460
this nonsense within its own societies is one of the reasons why, one of the reasons why,
00:34:38.100
of many, um, that, that it, that it is growing.
00:34:42.220
The, the only, the only interesting part of that new Dawkins book is, uh, at the bit where he's
00:34:47.460
trying to justify morality and he obviously, you know, he has no philosophical basis for
00:34:52.340
any of his ethical claims, but he, he keeps using this phrase where he talks about like
00:34:57.780
some of the progress of the, the past few hundred years, like abolishing slavery and giving women
00:35:02.880
the vote. And he says there was just something in the air, you know, he uses this like quasi
00:35:08.100
mystical language about like the progress of liberalism. And you kind of see this with all
00:35:13.080
of them. I mean, like atheism obviously is a, a sort of value neutral worldview. I mean,
00:35:18.800
it should be a, you know, you should be a moral nihilist if you're an atheist, but they're all
00:35:23.720
do all of this complete reification of like Western liberalism and progressivism, uh, that they can't
00:35:30.180
really ground in anything, but that just so it seems so obvious to all of them. It's the same in that
00:35:34.240
book, uh, Sam Harris wrote about moral foundations where, you know, he spends the whole book showing how
00:35:39.060
like science can show us like levels of suffering and how to alleviate suffering. But again, he has
00:35:43.820
no, you know, he has no philosophical basis for why, uh, progressivism and alleviate and suffering
00:35:49.500
is a good thing. So they're so, it's funny at once they're attacking Christianity, but they're all so
00:35:53.620
bound up in the Western tradition that, uh, liberalism. They're not self-critical or self-aware of
00:35:59.980
it. Yeah. They don't see at all the, like the historically contingent nature of some of the,
00:36:05.900
the moral truths they believe and how reliant they were on the Christian tradition. Like
00:36:10.680
in a weird way, they reify Christianity more than anyone.
00:36:14.840
I was, uh, I think that's a very interesting point that Keith makes there. This is a book
00:36:18.720
I got some years ago called God is Dead by Steve Bruce. And it's basically, it's the secularization
00:36:25.600
thesis. Oh, they call it a thesis. It doesn't actually predict anything or allow any predictions
00:36:30.260
to be made. But basically what it says is it basically, basically the idea is we get, we get
00:36:34.180
the, we get, well, it starts off with Weber. We get Protestantism. Protestantism makes us
00:36:38.480
kind of more hardworking and makes us more rational somehow. I'm not sure that's true that
00:36:41.900
I would say Protestantism is perhaps more religiously fervent. But anyway, from, um, from then we
00:36:46.820
get the industrial revolution. From then we get science and science then just sort of magically
00:36:52.000
spreads. People, people, people, people realize that science is, is the answer and science is
00:36:57.940
the way forward. And we become more scientific in our thinking, more and more and more scientific.
00:37:02.280
And religiousness is relegated to private life and eventually religiousness dies out.
00:37:06.780
And again, it's rather like there's something in the air. There's a, there's, there's a sort
00:37:11.200
of miasma of science that floats, floats over, over the, floats over society. And it becomes
00:37:18.640
more scientific. And when you show evidence that, well, look, yeah, it's become more scientific.
00:37:22.400
And then this happens and people become more religious. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Wars,
00:37:27.520
for example. Well, I would say, well, it's because of stress. It's reduction in stress that's
00:37:32.420
causing this. There's, it's got science itself that sets off this process. There's factors
00:37:37.260
behind it, genetic factors and environmental factors that are reducible to biology. And he
00:37:43.280
just says, oh, well, yeah, these are just humps and bumps. Well, you're always going to get
00:37:46.440
humps and bumps in a general process. That doesn't explain anything at all. It just describes it.
00:37:50.780
I think that's exactly what Keith was saying. This idea, it's just in the air. And anyway,
00:37:54.780
is it good that women have the vote? I mean, is that progress? I mean, let's think about
00:37:58.680
what that set off. But now, Ed, you know, I mean, that's their own fundamentalism because
00:38:07.180
obviously they have no, they have no ethical foundation for why it's good that women vote.
00:38:12.000
But if you, if you challenge that, you know, they'll all be perfectly happy to, to silence
00:38:15.880
your Troy Odey Academy because, you know, there's something in the air. It's just as mystical
00:38:19.860
a statement as, you know, I believe in, I believe in the, the God of the Old Testament
00:38:24.560
because I feel it in my heart, you know, there's just something in the air.
00:38:28.820
They just blithely accept postmodern liberal democratic norms. And it's just kind of like,
00:38:35.480
well, of course, science taught it, you know, it's science.
00:38:38.220
Women are less rational than men. Women are low in autistic traits than men. Women, the extreme
00:38:47.100
male is hyper, hyper, hyper systematizing and to do with system and logic and solving problems
00:38:53.580
and basically empirical truth. And the extreme female is high in empathy and therefore disinterested
00:38:59.600
in those things and more interested in everybody cooperating and everyone getting along and nobody
00:39:03.360
having hurt feelings and not much competition and everyone just getting along. So what does
00:39:07.080
it result in? If you have more women in just forget about voting in the academy, it means
00:39:11.900
less science. It means less science because suddenly something is more important than the
00:39:15.940
truth and reason and logic and the empirical fact. Something's more important than that.
00:39:21.660
And that's getting on with people and everyone getting along and no one being upset and whatever.
00:39:25.760
And so you get the rise of these midwits who are, who are, who are, you know, reasonably intelligent,
00:39:31.320
but more important than that is that they're good social skills and they're good at getting
00:39:35.160
along with everybody and they conform. And that's why women are highly conformist.
00:39:38.900
They're much more conformist than men. That's documented. They're much, much more
00:39:43.580
conformist. They're higher in conscientiousness.
00:39:49.040
They're higher. Traditionally, the women would be more, women are more religious than men
00:39:53.140
because they're higher when the, because they, they are more moral, more pro-social, more
00:39:58.300
altruistic. They're selected to be more religious because if you're under a society where you have
00:40:02.420
to invest in the female to get sex, then the fact that she's religious is a, is a insurance policy
00:40:07.540
that you won't be cuckolded. And so religion is sexually selected for women in a way that
00:40:11.740
it isn't in men. So they're more religious, um, um, uh, more conformist. And when the religion
00:40:16.580
is a process is a, uh, uh, an adaptive religion, then they are the enforcers of that. And they
00:40:22.080
are, they are the church ladies and they are more conservative. And initially giving the
00:40:25.800
women the vote meant that you had more conservative government because women were more religious.
00:40:29.760
Religion was conservative. Um, and women voted conservative with the collapse of that
00:40:34.300
religion and its place with liberalism. Women are more conformist, uh, more pro-social, more
00:40:40.020
group oriented, more, more not wanting to hurt feelings, therefore more liberal. Um, and that's
00:40:45.540
what we see now with the new church ladies of these woke harridans with their purple hair and,
00:40:50.200
and bingo wings. Right. So is it good to, and as Keith says, the fact that you can't question it,
00:40:57.200
but yeah, is it, is it necessarily good that they have the vote? Are these, these things,
00:41:00.820
these moral progresses, are they necessarily good always? Shouldn't a scientist like Richard
00:41:06.960
Dawkins and a philosopher, as he proposes to be, think about these questions, you know,
00:41:11.920
cut carefully and without, without rancor and without prejudgment. So the work, I amazed Keith
00:41:19.460
got far enough in the book to find this stuff because I try, I tried to read the book. I tried
00:41:25.080
to, but it was so bad. It was like teen fiction, as you say, it was, it was just so bad that I
00:41:32.500
couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't get far. Yeah. Like, I don't think you can stress the point
00:41:37.180
enough how bad their arguments are. I mean, they basically have three arguments that they
00:41:42.040
repeat ad nauseum. One is that evolution is true. Uh, and they kind of build up a straw man
00:41:47.420
of like fine tuning arguments. Whereas, you know, normally fine tuning arguments have, have
00:41:52.060
nothing to do with evolution anyway. I mean, most theists know philosophy departments accept
00:41:56.840
evolution. The other one is that, uh, atheists can be moral, which again, uh, no one really
00:42:03.160
contests. No theist really contests that. It's not really a challenge to anything. Uh, and then
00:42:07.420
the third one is that, well, look how evil the God of the old Testament is. And that's, I mean,
00:42:11.360
that's basically, that's their main argument is that they, uh, they hold up God as like just
00:42:16.300
another contingent being like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. And then they make like a logical
00:42:21.700
positivist argument against that. But I mean, the problem is the whole tradition of theism
00:42:26.200
doesn't argue for, uh, you know, a contingent finite being that argues for out of logical
00:42:31.800
necessity, uh, some being that's the, you know, the necessary ground of contingent being and
00:42:36.480
comes to that true, you know, yeah, true, you know, logical modal inference, but then they'll
00:42:42.060
never deal with that. And even Richard Dawkins famously avoided a debate with William Lane Craig
00:42:46.980
for years, who is a, you know, a serious and respected theistic philosopher that engages
00:42:52.220
in, uh, Christian apologetics. He avoided that for years. Uh, Craig, like Craig fairly easily
00:42:57.840
dispatched, uh, Hitchens and Harris. I think that's when it was kind of came to an end is
00:43:02.060
when actual philosophers like Craig and David Bentley Hart started, uh, writing books. Um, but
00:43:08.760
yeah, Dawkins avoided a debate with Craig famously and wrote an article saying he'd never debate
00:43:13.840
him because, uh, Craig made apologies for, uh, some, some crime that God committed in the
00:43:19.860
Old Testament. So Dawkins started accusing him of being an apologist for genocide, which
00:43:24.700
was like, Oh, I remember seeing that. Yeah. Yeah. Like a very transparent way of, of getting
00:43:29.820
out with someone who was actually competent in the field. But yeah, I mean, you know, again,
00:43:34.700
it's where point note, like for all their popularity, it was, I think a large part of their popularity
00:43:38.800
was because it was, it was such, you know, slop of slop for the pros. It was not some serious.
00:43:44.240
I won't dwell on this, but yeah, I mean, I, I tweeted something out about this the other
00:43:49.920
day. I don't know if you saw it, but I, you know, Craig is, is putting forth a kind of
00:43:54.440
Platonism and I, I actually think that's what needs to be interrogated in the sense of like
00:44:02.520
the, the, as opposed to the low hanging fruit of the religious right or crazed Muslim fanatics.
00:44:08.800
Uh, I, I think we actually need to examine that. Uh, and that's more interesting. I mean,
00:44:14.060
I do think Craig is, is, I don't want to dwell on this, but I, I do think he's, he's kind of
00:44:18.380
fundamentally wrong or backwards, but he's, he's wrong in a much deeper sense. He's wrong in the,
00:44:24.280
in the way that the whole Platonist tradition is wrong. Yeah. I mean, like it's funny. And I mean,
00:44:32.400
everyone has this idea that, you know, uh, like the new atheists, everything is secularizing and
00:44:38.000
we're moving past the list, but theism actually a huge resurgence in philosophy, uh, since like
00:44:43.720
the mid 20th century, people like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, uh, that have, you know,
00:44:50.120
taken some of the work that was done on logic in the 20th century and have kind of revived
00:44:54.440
like theistic personalism. So, but I mean, yeah, that is an interesting brand.
00:44:59.040
Anthony Flew, who was very famous and, and he, he spent his career arguing for atheism. And in the
00:45:05.940
end, he came to this. Yeah. I remember reading his book and he was actually convinced by a fine
00:45:11.400
tune and argument of sorts based on, you know, the variables of, of, uh, you know, contingent
00:45:17.600
variables of the universe and that they were so fine tuned for life. But again, you know, Dawkins
00:45:21.960
will like build up the straw man of like, if evolution is true, then you have to accept like a
00:45:28.080
materialist atheistic worldview when there's like, there's hardly a philosopher that believes that.
00:45:32.280
So a lot of the stuff was preying on his audience's ignorance.
00:45:36.700
I know. I mean, I, again, I don't want to dwell on this too much, but just from speaking nearly
00:45:41.180
from my perspective, I think we actually need to go back to the ancient world to look at the roots
00:45:46.620
of this and particularly look at the just major shift that occurred post Plato and to understand
00:45:54.120
ourselves because this is, I mean, Nietzsche's flippant one liner is Christianity is Plato for
00:45:59.320
the people or Plato for the masses. Um, but what he, I mean, that was a insult, but he, if you
00:46:05.500
understand it deeper, uh, it is that whole line of thinking of logic and, uh, beauty and truth
00:46:16.460
The famous quote by, the famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead is that all of Western philosophy
00:46:23.620
I agree. Yeah. And I mean, let's go back to the pre-Socratics and let's just go back to the
00:46:28.680
fundamental idea that the, this should, I agree, Ed, but I'm not, but you know, look,
00:46:35.660
this question that societies as they knew, even then, as they documented societies rise and fall. Um,
00:46:42.460
they, they, they, they go through these, these seasons and it's when they lose their religiousness,
00:46:47.680
they lose their fear of the gods. They become decadent. They rationalize everything, including
00:46:51.880
having children, the intelligence, stop having children and the society collapses and the,
00:46:56.380
and the cycle, uh, carries on and there's not, and there's very little that can be done about it.
00:47:00.700
But at the most one can say that we shouldn't encourage these people like Socrates to, to,
00:47:07.340
Yeah. I mean, you were speaking my language. I mean, Socrates was, you know, he was killed for
00:47:14.500
a reason. And it's like, we, we like to put up, Socrates was kind of the Dawkins of his day. He
00:47:20.680
was a gadfly hanging around Athens, pissing off everyone, making them question everything.
00:47:27.800
Yeah. And, and, and corrupting the youth. And I have to say the term corrupting the youth
00:47:37.580
And he, which Plato did, I go, I want to go on record as saying this. Socrates is an absolute
00:47:45.940
Dunn's like gone full. I, look, I, I basically agree. I mean, the, the only thing I would say,
00:47:52.720
we, the problem is we don't know enough about many pre-Platonics or pre-Socratic philosophers
00:47:59.760
like Heraclitus. And so, and, and, and, and they, them, Heraclitus himself was kind of,
00:48:06.740
kind of Nietzschean, kind of like poetic, kind of being playful, playing with words. But that the,
00:48:13.240
the, the one, you know, you know, passage of Heraclitus that almost everyone knows is that
00:48:19.740
you never step into the same river twice. The river has changed, but then so have you.
00:48:25.500
And I think what you can glimpse from these passages like that, which again, are very poetic,
00:48:31.420
you could hang it up on your wall. But it's that tension of opposites within man, it's himself,
00:48:37.880
and to understand something as both flowing and as static. It is still a river, even though it is
00:48:44.140
changing and moving. And you are still you, even though there are actually tensions and conflicts.
00:48:50.580
And so it's, and, you know, even the, the word logos, which again, is now, I mean.
00:48:54.820
It sounds more like Plato than Heraclitus, right?
00:49:04.100
Oh, you know, you're, cause, you know, you're finding like a, a kind of a transcendent identity
00:49:09.300
within the, within which you're situating the change, no?
00:49:12.140
But the transcendent identity does not exist outside of this world. The transcendent identity
00:49:17.300
is within the river itself. I mean, it really is fundamentally different. I mean, logos itself
00:49:22.160
is, I mean, well, you can have your own reading of Plato. That's better. I mean, I'll, I'll give
00:49:29.140
you that. But I mean, I, I, that is the fundamental move with Plato, but like logos itself. I mean,
00:49:35.760
it means word obviously. And there's this, you know, now, I mean, a couple of years ago,
00:49:39.800
we had this like logos is rising meme of going back to the text or the dogma of the church or,
00:49:45.100
or, or what have you. Uh, but I, Heraclitus, his conception of logos is different than that.
00:49:51.600
Like the truth you are getting at is a darker, more dynamic truth. Uh, it is about tensions and
00:49:58.560
opposites. Um, it is not just simply, you know, a, a, a reading the text. I think logos in a platonic
00:50:05.420
sense is something that is, yeah, I mean, you are, I don't think it's just a metaphor. You are exiting
00:50:10.240
the cave and seeing the world as it is. You are seeing the chair itself. You're seeing beauty
00:50:15.280
itself. And I think returning to pre-Socratic, um, philosophy would be a, a, something that we need
00:50:23.720
to do kind of in the wake of the death of God, because I mean, I think we would all recognize even
00:50:28.800
the most devout theists would recognize that. It's so cliche that one of the questions they might ask
00:50:34.100
you, uh, like a philosophy interview for a university is to say on what makes a table,
00:50:39.960
a table. That's the essay. Exactly. Yeah. Well, there was this joke. Respond. That is a decadent
00:50:47.040
question. Well, the best response. Ask that question. Yeah. Um, the, the best response is
00:50:53.340
there was a philosophy seminar and the, the professor put a table up on, on, uh, in front of them all.
00:50:58.980
And he said, you know, describe tableness to me, uh, in, uh, less than 10,000 words, you know,
00:51:05.200
in, in your blue book, uh, in the next five hours, you know, have fun. And, uh, that's the smartest
00:51:10.500
student. We handed back the blue book early and he had one sentence and said, what table question
00:51:15.580
mark. Yeah. Deep. All right. I find that funnier than you do. But, but I, the only thing I would
00:51:26.520
say is that we, you, you have to find something because even Craig or, or other people would not
00:51:33.900
deny that we are living in the death of God in the sense that the, the Christian system is
00:51:40.980
self-critical. It's had the wind knocked out of it at some level. And we are living. I mean,
00:51:47.860
I don't, we're, we're living in a secular age to a degree. Now I, I'm, I am highly critical of that
00:51:54.300
term, but you understand where I'm going. We are living at a point where it is more and more difficult
00:51:58.900
to justify, um, actions on the basis of the church or a book or the Christian tradition. Um, and also
00:52:08.180
these things have been, have been suffering from withering or attacks that would not have
00:52:12.580
been tolerated previously. You didn't need to justify that was the thing. But when,
00:52:15.460
when there wasn't religious society until I know the fifties in Europe or a bit later in America,
00:52:20.020
you didn't need to justify them on those grounds. It was just obvious. Of course you can't,
00:52:24.180
of course you can't steal. Of course you can't lie. Of course you can't kill people. Of course you
00:52:28.020
can't. Of course it's bad. And, and, and, and when, when society fragments like this into,
00:52:32.500
into these group selected versus individually selected camps, then, then there's absolutely
00:52:38.740
no crossover. There's absolute polarization, which is when you get very, very serious problems.
00:52:44.660
And, and which is what we're seeing, uh, now, but I, I, I'm not sure about the debt. We're
00:52:49.300
living through the death of God. I think that if you look at the data on who's has, who has babies
00:52:53.540
or who's breeding, who's having children, then we could be, we could be living through the,
00:52:58.420
the event, the, the, the rebirth of God, but, uh, but, but, but, you know, even at the lead,
00:53:06.180
I, I agree with you. I mean, this is, um, something that, you know, just Nick Fuentes types,
00:53:12.100
high, high, religious, high and extroversion. That's what we seem to be selecting for.
00:53:17.060
Ah, that's a horrifying thought. Get ready for a world war on thoughts, I guess. Um, when WWT, uh,
00:53:26.820
is it, yeah, I mean, I, I agree with you to a large extent. I mean, we, we, we talked about this in,
00:53:32.740
in your book with like Eric Kaufman and the fact that the religious shall inherit the earth,
00:53:38.660
you know, effectively they are out, they are having, what is it like one and a half children in, in America?
00:53:44.500
Um, evangelical Christians are having one and a half children for every one child of a wasp. And then
00:53:50.740
if you, if you take it out further, it's kind of like a fundamentalist Muslim is having three children for
00:53:56.100
every secular humanist Western. I mean, it is pretty, it is dramatic and, uh, and, uh, a, uh,
00:54:02.740
an Amish is having seven children. Hmm. Um, I don't think the Amish will take over the world anytime
00:54:08.980
soon, but, but I, the point stands that it's, it's like, we might be at the end of a secular age and
00:54:15.140
it was kind of a secular moment. Um, at that being said, I think the, the intellectual crisis is still
00:54:23.060
going to persist among the elite and culture makers. I, I don't think we can go back. I don't
00:54:29.700
Well, yeah. Once that, once you've reached a tipping point of about 25% or something like
00:54:33.700
that of the population being religious, then, um, and they, and they'll be religious remember
00:54:38.420
for genetic reasons. So you can be religious for environmental reasons. You can be religious
00:54:42.260
for genetic reasons. The environmental reasons are out. Stress is so low that that's probably not
00:54:46.740
a factor. People that are religious now or a right wing now or a conservative are utterly resistant
00:54:51.700
to the environment, utterly resistant to an environment which is telling them to be maladaptive.
00:54:56.180
They're totally resistant to it. And once those people become about 25% of the population,
00:55:00.980
those are the people that are breeding, then you, then you get a tipping point and then you
00:55:04.420
get a change in the elite. And, um, that's the kind of thing that one would, as I'm writing a short
00:55:10.180
thing on this at the moment, that that's the kind of thing that I would suspect is going to be
00:55:15.460
Hmm. I think the, I'll say, yeah, I think, uh, you know, I think this current of,
00:55:21.380
um, relativism and materialism and humanism. I think it's, uh, I think it'd be a mistake to
00:55:27.860
see it as, as, uh, as something that has any kind of permanence. I think it's, I think it's largely a
00:55:33.220
reflection of, uh, sort of technical progress in, in civilization and how that influences people's
00:55:39.220
thinking. And I don't think it's, uh, I don't, I mean, there was no great revolution of thought
00:55:44.020
that displaced theism or Anton. So I think this is entirely...
00:55:47.380
I think how quickly these things, these changes can happen, how fast they can happen.
00:55:51.540
And often as well, it's when, it's, it's when the, the system feels itself under threat
00:55:56.740
that it doubles down and becomes even more extreme. So the height of conservatism was probably the
00:56:02.340
fifties where you, you were at a point where illegitimate children born to working class
00:56:07.540
people were put up for adoption. That didn't happen in Victorian times. That was happening in the
00:56:12.900
fifties. Um, that was the, the height of extreme persecution, homosexuality. They went from being
00:56:18.820
tolerated in the thirties and forties to being persecuted heavily in the fifties in Britain and
00:56:22.980
America, uh, McCarthyism and whatever. It's when it's a bit height that it tends to, that's when
00:56:27.780
you know it's falling apart. I mean, I think about Ireland, the change has been so rapid that when,
00:56:34.340
when I went to Ireland in 2002, it was, it was Ireland. It was the stereotypical Ireland that we all
00:56:40.100
know of. And when I went there in 2015, it wasn't. Um, and it completely changed. And that was in,
00:56:47.300
that was in just about 13 years. Yeah. I mean, it's easier to like up to 1992, uh, almost sexuality
00:56:54.420
was still illegal in Ireland. So you want an example of how quickly things can change, you know?
00:57:00.660
Yeah. And now you've got basically everybody that runs Ireland is gay.