Religion V. Life

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]You open this door with the key of reason. Beyond it is another dimension, a dimension of truth, a dimension of freedom, a dimension of joy. You're moving into the land of both the ideal and the real, of the possible and the actual. You've just crossed over into the capitalist corner, where reason meets reality. Welcome to the capitalist corner.

[00:00:29]Welcome to the Saturday edition of the Capitalist Corner. Great show today with the great James Valiant and the wonderful Praphphanany. We are going to be discussing religion verse life. Now Pphanie did provide some reading material on the subject of the psychological harm that can be caused by religion. Uh I just want to be clear that we're no way saying that is exhaustive. There's been a lot of research. some shows, some types of religion, you know, they could be helpful under some circumstances. That was just a brief read that we did this morning and we wanted to provide it to you, our wonderful audience. But really, I want to focus on the personal experiences of the two people that are here joining me. Well, Jim, welcome.

[00:01:12]Pphanie, welcome. I hope you're enjoying your Saturday.

[00:01:15]>> I am.

[00:01:16]>> Me, too.

[00:01:18]>> It's great to be here with you two charming people. There's an issue on X.

[00:01:23]The show is not showing up on X. But either way, although it's Saturday, we still accept um super chats, super stickers. We're still doing it all. You could see how beautiful Pphanie is. She obviously got a haircut. It looks wonderful.

[00:01:38]>> Yes.

[00:01:38]>> Uh so, first Pphanie, tell us a little bit about your religious experience.

[00:01:46]So I was raised in a very religious family. My mother and my mother's whole side of the family is staunchly strictly Catholic and my father was a Mormon. So I was raised in I was baptized in the Catholic church first as a baby and until I was 10 I went to the Mormon church. So I was raised a Mormon and sort of in that whole LDS uh thing. Um, I had missionaries over at my house all the time because when the missionaries come from other countries, uh, they rely on the church to feed them basically. So, we had missionaries at the house all the time. Um, in the Mormon church, you're baptized when you turn 8, and before you're baptized, you go through six months of the missionaries coming to your house and doing Bible study with you and studying the Book of Mormon. Um, so we went through that whole thing. I I didn't end up getting baptized because I wasn't I I didn't want to. Um, and then I moved to the Catholic church and I started going to the Catholic church with my mother and my sister and the rest of my family.

[00:03:10]And we my my family took up two pews in the Catholic in the Catholic church. And um I went to catechism for my confirmation and my first communion.

[00:03:24]Never ended up doing that either because it didn't sit right with me. Uh and then I when I was 17, I did a year of seminary uh which is like extra Bible study with uh one of the ladies from my father's church, the Mormon church. Uh and in the Mormon church, you call everybody brother and sister. So uh the lady who taught me was sister kid. And um yeah, I did seminary with her for a year. I also went to a Christian to a to a Christian school for my first two years of high school and there we had Bible study every morning and in the afternoons we had like extra Bible study. So [laughter] uh I was I was properly properly like immersed in religion for the first 18 years of my life. I was baptized. I was baptized as a child, as a baby, but I was also baptized when I went to the Christian school. Um, we went on like a camp and it was when you when you're in like a one of those like Christian camps. There's this sort of like fervor, right? And so, a lot of us ended up getting baptized. And so, I got baptized when I was at this camp. I think I was I think I was 13 or 14 and I was baptized in the ocean. And when I was 18, the day I turned 18, I left the church. I said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not not comfortable going to church. I don't feel really any connection to either of these churches.

[00:05:09]Uh, and so I I didn't go back to church ever after that except for weddings and funerals.

[00:05:18]>> Jim, you also had a religious upbringing, correct?

[00:05:22]>> Of sorts. Of sorts. It was a pretty liberal background. Um my father's family were best way to describe it as country club Republicans who were university educated had very conservative political views but were also totally religiously skeptical because they had university education.

[00:05:43][clears throat] My mother's side of the family uh were labor democrats. They were totally you know uh left-leaning you you know trade union type democrats and they were the profoundly religious ones. They were fundamentalist in their in their you know evangelical in their uh Christianity and uh but both my both of my parents interestingly were independent enough from their families that they when they got married and started having kids like me uh they had a whole fresh approach. It was the early 1960s and the soi society was changing and they had very different views on a variety of things but they came together in so many ways. Both of them were sort of skeptical of the metaphysics of religion and they historically explained that to me as an adult they explained it to me. The real reason they took their kids to church is they didn't know how to teach ethics. Where else their kids would get a moral compass? And so they, you know, had a vague view of religion.

[00:06:45]My mother was classic ecumenical Californian. Um, you know, all religions are getting at the same thing. You know, whether it's, you know, Hinduism or Islam or Christianity and whatever variety, you know, that there's something that there's some purpose to life and that there's some meaning out there, there's some kind of intelligent planner, I guess, creator out there. But they're all kind of getting at the same thing. And so my mother, you know, in the first home my parents had, she had a statue of Buddha, a portrait of Jesus, and a photo of my dad on the table. And I'll tell the story one more time. My dad comes home that first night and he says, "There's only room for one God in this house." [laughter] And so my mother had to leave the photo.

[00:07:27]She chose wisely. She left the photo of my dad and the other two went. But she had this sort of broad broadly ecumenical view that all religions are finally fundamentally getting at the same thing. I when they took me to church took it very seriously. I think it disturbed my parents how religious I became because they did take us to a church. Now a liberal Presbyterian church. So there were still elements of Knox and Calvin that you could still still hear from some of the elements.

[00:07:57]But what it was for them involved all kinds of things. It was a social gathering where they could talk to their friends and the kind of debates they had weren't well you're predestinationist Protestant or you're nothing like that.

[00:08:11]So although it was in name Presbyterian, it was kind of hippie- dippy and it and it was very also a rather ecumenical congregation they took me to. But nonetheless, I was Mr. sit in the front row looking up because if this is important, if this is the truth, if this is the real meaning of life, boy, I wanted to be front and center. And so I went to Sunday school and I was the, you know, the kid, Mr. Bible, Bible Man was actually a nickname that the kids had for me like when I was in sixth and seventh grades because if you'd asked me then, I would have told you, I'm going to be a theologian. I'm I'm going to be an academic who studies religion or I'm going to be a preacher, an evangelist, clergyman. Um, if you'd asked me then before I was blown away by Perry Mason and decided I wanted to be a trial lawyer and that actually happened first, but there was this overnight conversion when I was between 12 and 13, between seventh and eighth grades. It was like an overnight and it was one summer where I was wrestling with these issues and really trying to think in principle and it just all cracked and crumbled and it was really wild you know I could hear before that happened I could sort of remember the whispers of my parents you know he's kind of deeply religious well it's a phase he'll grow out of it and uh so then when I turned atheist I thought well people are going to think I'm an idiot I' I've gone from one extreme to the other because I mean I became a capital A atheist overnight it all just crumbled. And uh it took me a little while to admit to everyone, but I did in the course of the next few weeks admit to my family and friends that I didn't believe in God at all. And they took a hoham because I was still so philosophical.

[00:09:56]The kind of way I would respond is I'm not giving up ethics. Don't worry. I'm not going to, you know, offend the family if I can avoid it. But I just can't say that I believe in this anymore. um and they were totally accepting of that. So I had great parents in one sense they just didn't have the right philosophy uh to teach their kids morality morality. So that later as I become a teenager and I'm reading start reading philosophy I start reading things like Frederick Nichze and then Irin and boom I'm becoming anti-Christian in a very significant way. My parents abs they were following my journey step by step with me. It was unbelievable. And by the time I was done with high school, my if you would ask my whole family, my brother, my sister, my father, my mother, they basically agreed with me. Yeah, religion is BS. We've got to place reason firmly in her seat, as Jefferson said. And my family sort of joined me in my journey. But they weren't as religious as I ever was.

[00:10:56]Seeing my journey arc uh influenced my immediate family.

[00:11:00]>> So for both of you, and Praphanie, answer first. Both of you adopted religion at, you know, at a young age.

[00:11:07]Jim more voluntarily so than Pphanie.

[00:11:10]Um, and both of you grew out of it at a pretty young age. I shouldn't say grew out of it, thought your way out of it at young ages. But what I'm interested in is things that we pick up at young ages, stick with us for a long period of time, even after we've sort of learned that the, you know, the silliness of them, whatever.

[00:11:32]For how long? Like I said, Praphanie, go first. And to what degree did the religious notion of ethics still impact your thinking and behavior?

[00:11:46]>> I It still does. It still does. If I there's a lot of things there's a lot of instinctive uh instinctive decisions that I make and instinctive judgments that I make that when I sit and I think about why I've made that judgment or why I feel a certain way about a certain thing uh I can easily trace it back to growing up in the Mormon church or my Catholic upbringing. Uh so it took a very up until I was about 20 27 um I wasn't religious but I still felt I I I I wasn't a part of institutional religion but I still felt very strongly that there was something there was like some sort of I don't know I felt some sort of pull towards that kind of thinking up until I was about 26 27 and Still now um I a lot of my a lot of my instinctive judgments are influenced by religion in some way and I I have to consciously think about whether those make sense and a lot of times they don't. Uh so still now at 36 >> I thought you were 25. Jim, how about you? Oh yeah, it has a lingering the things that you know we grow up with.

[00:13:16]Our childhood is so formative on our psychology, our subconscious and it's affecting us in ways that we really don't appreciate. Uh but looking back on it now, I can see when I was, you know, a 10year-old praying for to God to make me less selfish. I mean I literally when you're in that kind of a the one thing I got you see was the moral message don't be selfish I got I absorbed an altruism from Christianity and that was the biggest part and I think that was the appeal of philosophers like I ran to me when I was a teenager I was gravitating towards finding moral meaning I wanted to find moral meaning it was very important to me to find the truth about how I should behave and what is right and wrong and what is the grounding of that that led naturally to that question and even when I found better answers in philosophy even when I discovered objectivism and started studying it more and more seriously as I was going through my teens and my 20s it it I would superficially I would advocate this philosophy of rational self-interest and like pphanany reports I still had this psychological tug that told me Oh, you're being selfish. Oh, you're And you know, so much of our etiquette and manners is to be self- aacing, right?

[00:14:41]And just automatic good manners to me and altruism, you know, fit like that.

[00:14:48]And so, if I was being polite, I wouldn't be so rude as to assert my selfish needs or wants in this moment.

[00:14:54]And I felt sort of guilty for that. And it took me into my 50s. It was still affecting me. Um, I have to say it's only in say the last decade that I've been pretty confident in my my natural subconscious reaction. Before that I would have friends who other admirers of Iron Man who would observe to me, Jim, why are you doing that? You don't have to sacrifice yourself. You don't have to put yourself last. Why are you doing that? And it it didn't really strike me.

[00:15:27]Now, there were I think there were other psychological issues that fed into that about my self-esteem and so forth, but I those are inherently connected to religion as well, frankly, in some ways, but the combination of say childhood self-esteem issues and this lingering effect of Christian ethics was still tugging on me. [laughter] For all I know, it'll still have a tug on me. And I have to self-consciously check myself that I'm not buying into altruism, that I'm not putting myself in the back seat as was my trained instinct when I was a kid and I was taking Christian ethics seriously >> for both of you. Um, was there Well, I think there was. Talk to me about the types of psychological and emotional harms that this caused you. Pphanie, go first.

[00:16:23]>> Uh, Catholic guilt.

[00:16:26]Uh, guilt about enjoying anything. Uh, from my Mormon upbringing, I'll never get a tattoo ever. Uh, I I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm a very alternative person, right? I have tons of piercings.

[00:16:48]uh I will never be able to get a tattoo.

[00:16:51]Uh even though I think they're really cool and I would love to, there is just something about it that I I can't. And it's because of the Mormon church and it's because of the Catholic Church is they believe that if you get a tattoo, you're going to hell. I mean, the Mormons don't believe in hell, but the Catholics believe you're going to hell.

[00:17:11]And I remember my grandmother telling me like that my grandfather had a tattoo cuz he was in he was in the Navy and he had a Navy tattoo. And my I remember my grandmother telling me and like she was quite upset about it. She was like she's so upset because she knows that he's going to hell. And I was like okay. And my father was like a Mormon and I grew up in the Mormon church. And they don't they don't drink. They don't drink caffeine. They don't smoke. They don't get tattoos. And my father was like so staunchly against tattoos. I I I find it the idea of getting a tattoo like even though I I kind of want one, I I wouldn't be able to do it. Like that's one thing. Uh alcohol. have a very bad relationship with alcohol and with gambling and with all of those things.

[00:18:05]Not because I find them like morally wrong, but just because of the the influence of the church and uh relationships.

[00:18:16]I have relationships in the Mormon church. You get married young. Uh sex also [ __ ] up. my relationship with a lot of things is really kind of I think messed up because of the way that I grew up. Uh so all of those things.

[00:18:38]>> What say you Mr. Valiant?

[00:18:41]Well, some of the extreme effects of religion I think I was inoculated against because of the extremely relig some of many of the religious members of my mother's side of the family. Uh were case studies and how religion makes people miserable. uh one of my mother's brothers uh he was a marine and he was shot by friendly fire in Korea and really almost died and his wife was deeply religious I mean charismatic kind of four square they had a bunch of kids and she just kept having kids and it was a way too hard on her and she just kept doing it because she thought it was her religious duty and then the way the kids were being raised I could tell it was a far more intensive brainwashing than my parents ever attempted to do on me. And there were other aspects. My mother would tell me about her own experience when she was a child being taken to um Amy Simple McFersonson's uh if you ever fay Dunaway played her in a movie. She was a charismatic evangelical preacher in Southern California. My uh mother actually went to her school and she said when people started talking in tongues that freaked her out. In fact, she was so concerned if there's any evidence for Satan, it's these weird people talking in tongues trying to manipulate kids.

[00:19:55]And so to some extent, the liberalism of my parents inoculated me from some of the more extreme elements. The other good thing that I had is because I had discovered objectivism, many of my friends were also great fans of objectivism. And when I was young in my late teens and early 20s, my friends, and I will I'll cry if I think about it too much, out of sheer gratitude, they told me to get to knock that crap off whenever I would be uh altruistic, they would tell me, "Enjoy yourself. Take your time. Savor that meal. Savor the sex. Sex is great. You mean you're with this most wonderful person you've ever met in your life and you're not enjoying yourself to the maximum with that person and taking your time and savoring it and being selfish? And I realized, you know, Iran would say things like, can you imagine approaching sex for the physical act of sex unselfishly?

[00:20:55]It wouldn't work. Okay, it is exactly the opposite. It's a case where the more selfish each party is, the better the sex is. And I had partners, let me put it that way, and friends. And most of all, my dear wife, my God, who I've been together now with for decades, she told me and taught me, Jim, enjoy yourself. Slow down. Take pleasure in life. Don't put yourself last. If you really need something, say it out loud. Assert your needs. And that dramatically helped me. Now I as I say still there's a lingering psychological effect into my 50s that I could notice still with all of that. So uh it wasn't as bad. It wasn't as bad. I had great friends. I had a great philosophy early on that was starting to point me in the right direction. Objectivism because I discovered objectivism in my teens. I discovered secular philosophy in my teens.

[00:21:59]you're on mute.

[00:22:01]>> Thank you. I had a hunch uh this morning because people often say, well, you know, a lot of people do benefit from religion and you know, it's helpful.

[00:22:14]And what I thought to myself was the degree I would bet to which this is helpful is the degree to which people actually ignore it. For instance, I mean, if you look at Judaism, uh, you know, stoning people on the Sabbath if they're working, for instance, or Christianity, you know, it's so evil, uh, to be rich. It it's more it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle and, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth, that that sort of thing.

[00:22:44]And I actually so I looked into it this morning and it it seems that the less literal people actually take their religion, the less they practice it, the more there can be seen some kind of a benefit from it. What What do you think about that, Jim? I want to ask Jim about this because he's actually an expert on religion.

[00:23:05]>> Well, the first thing to note is that philosophy is important. philosophy.

[00:23:10]Just having a philosophy is key to happiness. Even if it's wrong in some ways, having a philosophy is absolutely essential. It's not optional. Religion is sort of mankind's primitive approach to being philosophical without having the answers. It is obviously a projection of human consciousness onto the metaphysical universe. Obviously, it is fraught with all kinds of philosophical problems. On the other hand, it as Einran said, it's a primitive form of religion that gives people canned answers to most of the questions. And if you've got this pre-anned answer that it is the benefits of knowing what you believe in, what your values are, what your morality is is just a priceless thing. Modern philosophy, secular philosophy over the last 300 years has dramatically failed failed to provide an objective ethics.

[00:24:09]And that failure, that monopoly that religion has enjoyed on ethics, it's not the metaphysical arguments for the existence of God. Those have been shattered. And intelligent people don't really take it seriously. And you know, a lot of the people that I grew up with, even at church, they didn't they weren't going to argue over God. They knew there was fraught with problems. But look, we've got this value perspective that is healthy. Look, we say don't murder, don't steal. You know, it's good to you have a positive relationship with your family. You know, there are all kinds of benefits that philosophy gives you. And a philosophy, a semicoherent, even if not fully coherent, a semicoherent philosophy is better than sheer nihilism. If you believe in uh in total ethical skepticism, even if you're like some of these Sam Harris types, it's an evolutionary product of our biology, that doesn't validate it. I mean, what if my biology told me some bizarre self-destructive behavior or taught me to do something that was simply useless, some appendage of evolution? Would that be good because it's part of my evolutionary? It didn't answer the question. And so you see a lot of new atheists saying like Richard Dawkins saying you know he is a atheist atheist and he says I'm a cultural Christian or you see Ion Ali Hersy uh for example converting into Christianity. Why?

[00:25:35]Because secular philosophy has dramatically failed. It does it makes you skeptical of all knowledge if you go by Hume. We can never know reality. So this radical subjectivism and skepticism that you get from so much of academic philosophy is counter to happiness. A degree of certainty is essential to happiness. When you enter morality, it gets pointedly painful. Now your values are insecure. You don't have secure values. More than that, you remember the show we did about ritual >> and symbolism.

[00:26:09]>> Symbols and ritual.

[00:26:10]>> Oh my god. They serve a vital psychological role in my in my own secular view of things. I go through certain rituals and I have certain symbols that are meaningful to me so that I can experience my values. This worldly secular realityoriented values and yet symbolism and ritual help me to concretize what uh the new secularism of our age has created a moral crisis in part because it's taken away something of psychological value without offering anything in replacement for it. an affirmative philosophy for living on earth, a positive morality most importantly for living on earth. And so when I hear studies which say religious people tend to be more happy or more content, that is not surprising to me when I look at the substance of secular atheist philosophy and how unsatisfactory it has become to many atheists. It has failed because it has failed to give us an objective ethics.

[00:27:10]It failed because it's failed to give us the proper psychological approach.

[00:27:14]Now th that's one half of it. Now you talk about the people who take it seriously. That's when you're going to get into trouble. That's when it has disconnected from reality. You're not uh flexible in your religion. If you're rigid and fundamentalist in your religion, that's going to lead to all kind guilt uh because you can't live up to it. Uh confusion because it's just as subjective and irrational as you know the contemporary nihilist philosophers are.

[00:27:44]Right. So if you were to ask me all other things being equal, having some philosophy is better, having an ethics is better than having none. Yeah, absolutely. But if you take the an irrational phil the more seriously you take an irrational philosophy the more contradictions you're going to have in there the more problems you're going to have and the more self-defeating to the whole purpose of philosophy integrating my knowledge and giving me a sense of truth and values that in itself is going to be questioned if you take it in a fundamentalist way. So yes these fundamentalists who take religion too seriously are falling off the other end.

[00:28:23]Um, I got Yeah, it does. So, you said something interesting to me that people say, "Yes, these are good things. Don't kill, don't uh, you know, don't steal, that sort of thing." And it kind of reminds me of what we talked about last week with Plato, the horns of what the hell, how do you pronounce it here?

[00:28:39]Euthifer, where the question was, does God love good actions because they're good, or are they good because God loves them? In the one case, that means that good actions are arbitrary because they're just at God's whim. And the other they're good regardless of God.

[00:28:56]God has to discover them. So, what do you need God for? And when people say things like, "Yeah, but these things are good." Well, either you're relying on the religion itself, which you'd have to validate it, or you have a standard outside religion, which means you don't need it. And you mentioned that religion is sort of uh it's a uh what's the word I'm looking for? Nassent philosophy or sort of a primordial philosophy. And religion entails a metaphysics that the earth isn't that the the reality isn't real. It's arbitrary. It's you know premacy of consciousness. It's all at God's whim. An epistemology that's based on faith rather than reason. And an ethics based on self-sacrifice. Now, I called this episode intentionally religion verse life. So, I want to ask both of you, Jim as an expert and Pphanie as a layman. And Praphanie, I want you to go um second on this. The effects of having a world view wherein reality is completely contingent on the mind of some being, where epistemology isn't based on reason, and where ethics is based on sacrifice. Well, ho how is that anti-life, Jim, in your expert opinion and then pphanany in your uh layman's?

[00:30:15]>> Well, if you really are a mystic, it has to be destructive of this world. If in fact you posit a supernatural dimension that's setting your values, then your values can only be contrary to your the needs of actual life on earth. If this world is simply an illusion, a veil of tears through which we, you know, it's a test or something that God is giving us, then you diminish every precious, irreplaceable second. Valuewise, your life is every any second you waste on trying to get into heaven. Any thought you give to trying to give into heaven is a distortion is a you're going to your values are now set against life on earth. your values are now set against reality. Deeper than that, if you really do believe reject reason, if you do reject metaphysical realism, then you really under and to the degree you seriously take it. Now, since Thomas Aquinas, reason has been reinjected into the Christian world and it increased increasingly so up to the enlightenment.

[00:31:16]So, Christianity and up to the 21st century even more so. So, Christian many Christians have compromised with science. So for example, when I went to church, evol people would bring up evolution. Well, that's just how God does it. You know, Genesis is really just an allegory. It's just a metaphor.

[00:31:32]And if we take all of this metaphorically, we can dilute the damage that this will have on us. But look, if you don't have r confidence in your own ability to think and know, that's going to undermine your happiness. If your values are not based on your the needs of this world, that's going to undercut your happiness. Your values are now set.

[00:31:52]I mean, if you're going to take it consistently, you should go be a monk or a nun or something. And you we discussed this you the last time we spoke, if I was a or one of the recent times, if I took Christianity seriously, it's eternity out there yawning in front of me, I could knock out 80 or 90 years of being a monk like that if I really believed it. If I really believed it. Uh but you see, they really don't believe it. And they've compromised with it. And those compromises are the only thing that makes Christianity in the contemporary world actually livable. Um, now for me when I was young, I could see all kinds of metaphysical problems stretching in various directions. How it undermined ethics, how in fact it undermined reason and all of my knowledge and at some point if you are rational and committed to reality, it will cause you to have a crisis in confidence. So many people who lost their religion are people who I mean Frederick Nichze who said God is dead.

[00:32:47]He was the son of a Lutheran clergyman.

[00:32:50]So he hated Christianity in a way that only the son of a Christian clergyman could hate Christianity. Because if you take it seriously and then you at the end you realize I've been repressed. My emotions have been repressed. I've been sexually repressed. Any selfish you know in the good sense selfish impulse I have is sin. Is the sin of having a material body. It's the you and that's you know as I've said before you simply posit a supernatural dimension and you're driven a wedge between the real and the ideal between mind and body between theory and practice and so you become a divided being and uh you you know you're in effect a sinful corpse with a with a ghost stuffed in it walking around for a period of time. If that's the way you look at reality, it's going to have a negative and distorting impact necessarily. The thing about philosophy is that it will have effects all the way down the line in everything else we do and think. That's how fundamental philosophy is. But it that's how important philosophy is. And so until and unless our new atheist friends get their act together and can uh abandon universal skepticism and abandon the view the human view that you can't get an a from an is that religion will always have a foothold in our society because they're the only ones who say we've got answers. People need answers.

[00:34:15]We have a rainbows.

[00:34:18]Rainbow wits. I like that.

[00:34:21]Maybe we're related somehow. Jim, thanks so much. Okay, Pphanie. Now, um, from a, you know, your common sense sort of perspective, uh, how does a world that that a magical universe combined with a faith-based source of knowledge and self-sacrificial ethics, how does that, um, impact your life or life of of people, you know, or life in general?

[00:34:48]So my sister is my sister is deeply religious. My sister is is deeply she goes to the Christian revival church. So she's deeply religious and the the impact that religion and this Christianity has had on her as a person is horrible to see from an outside perspective. Um and having grown up in the Mormon church and seeing what that did to people. Um, the community was great, but the the the way that you had to live as a Mormon, it was it was damaging to people. The way my sister lives and the things that she puts herself through in the name of religion, uh, I can't look at that and go, that's a good way to live. Um, the decision the the the things that guide her decisions is not rational. and she acknowledges that if she weren't religious, she wouldn't be making the decisions that she's making. And for me to hear that I know that what I'm doing is detrimental to my life, but I have to keep doing it because it's what God wanted, which is essentially what she's said to me.

[00:36:14]Basically, in so many words, what I'm doing to myself and what I am doing to my children, I know is not right, but I have to keep doing it because religion.

[00:36:25]That's all I need to know to know that that is not a good way to make decisions. the way that I've seen people damage their lives and how unhappy religion makes them. When something bad happens in my life, I know that it's not because there is a man in the sky who is punishing me. When something bad happens in my life, I don't think why has God abandoned me? And I know many religious people that when something terrible has happened, that is a huge crisis that they go through because they don't see it as just something bad has happened.

[00:37:03]They see it as something bad has happened and I'm being punished or God has abandoned me. And now on top of this terrible thing that has happened, now they've also got this crisis of faith which is hugely like damaging to them.

[00:37:20]So I've just I've seen the effects that religion has and the the good effects that I've seen of religion are not from religion itself but are from the communities that are within the religion. So in the Mormon church there are benefits to being in the Mormon church because it is a good community.

[00:37:40]It's a community that looks after each other. The actual religious part of the Mormon community is [ __ ] up. the the people are very willing to help each other. But that's that's that's the benefit of the Mormon church that they they spend time with their families that they will help their communities. That's the benefit of the Mormon church. The religious aspect is crazy.

[00:38:07]Christianity, the the the benefit is is community, but you could get that anywhere else. and the the negative effects of how it makes people live their lives is just too obvious to me. I can't look at someone who does things that they know are are bad for them and for their families and for their children and say, "Sure, yes, that's a good that's a good way to live your life."

[00:38:34]>> I just have to pick up on something you say there. The word community is you know many people in the objectivist world are allergic to the term community but uh human beings do thrive in social contexts.

[00:38:50]We're not evolved to live alone on a desert island. I would be perfectly miserable and have all kinds of difficulties if I was actually alone.

[00:38:59]the benefit. You know, it's funny because when you go to an objectivist conference, one of the things that objectivists will say is [snorts] they'll have an emotional epiphany. Oh my gosh. I mean there are a bunch of other there are hundreds thousands of other people who believe like I do and they go through certain rituals believe it or not with one another and they find tremendous my objectivist friends out there who call themselves objectivists you know I'm not sure about the term applying to myself for various reasons but to all the people in the objectivist community you guys all know the benefits you get from attending an objectivist conference you guys all walk away from your f your first objective of his conference saying how cool it was to interact to have political and artistic opinions and psychological approaches that were similar and to find pe like-minded people and to interact with them. It is a huge enormous value and when you pointed out that the benefit and now I will absolutely confirm my experience with Mormons is that they're happy value you know happy and depending on how seriously they take it of course there's a variety of it they tend to present as very happy familyoriented people concerned with taking care of their you know fellow Mormons and in fact their community at large they tend to be hardworking ambitious people many of them very successful uh but also very concerned about how they raise their kids and uh they are the mo some of the most friendly people. Come over for lemonade. You know, I grew up in a a community where there were a bunch of Mormons and Catholics by the way. Um and the Mormons really had it in terms of u presenting as happy presenting as you know, hey, this world isn't isn't all rotten. You know, we treat ourselves with respect. We take care of our own.

[00:40:47]We're family oriented. You there's a South Park episode about this. I think the Mormon kid is just so happy and then they go into the BS of the Book of Mormon and we're the fraud that Joseph Smith was. You know, dum dum dum dum dum dum. So, no matter how dumb the metaphysics behind Mormonism, it's really dumb. Okay.

[00:41:06]>> Really is.

[00:41:07]>> I mean, really dumb. Joseph Smith finds these golden tablets and this translating stone anda d >> sticks his sticks his head in a hat because he's like [laughter] only by sticking his head in a hat can you can he translate these golden plates.

[00:41:25]Yes, it's insane.

[00:41:26]>> Yeah, it is ridiculous. And yet they will have family game night. And yet they'll make sure their kids do their homework. And yet they'll encourage their kids to be ambitious and get into sports. And yet they'll be the friendliest neighbors who bring over cookies when there's, you know, a loss in the neighbor's family. I mean, you're like, "Wow, you people present as happy, benevolent, generous, you know, you know, and yet the metaphysics behind it is absolutely insane." And what it >> so in in the Mormon church, the way that they treat their kids, no, the way that kids are mentally [ __ ] up by the Mormon church is one thing. The way that Mormons treat their families and treat their communities is genuinely amazing to me because when there were missionaries, so when kids are 17, they go on mission for a year, right? And they go to a different country or a different part of the city.

[00:42:30]So we had missionaries from the States and from Hawaii, from everywhere when they're 17. And it was only after like when I was older and we met up with missionaries the other day for breakfast because they are friends of the family.

[00:42:47]And it was only when I looked at these kids and I was like you are a child. You are a child who is far away from home and you are you are living in like in church housing. They've given you a car.

[00:43:03]You're driving around neighborhoods that you don't know. You're knocking on doors and you're saying like you're going I to me it was just I was like this is insane. You're a you're a child. You're a baby. You shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be going into into neighborhoods and trying to teach whatever. It was so messed up to me. But when my father died, you know, the the the Mormon church, they were amazing to us. They came to check on us all the time and they brought us food and they were checking on my mom and my sister and myself and for like three months after my father died they were they were amazing. They rallied around us. We weren't members of the church but we you know my father was a member. And so the community aspect of it like is truly great, but the religion itself, if you see what Mormon teenagers and what Mormon kids go through and the stupid, stupid ideas that they get, like it's wrong. I So many of the kids that I grew up with got married at 18 and then went on to have like seven kids.

[00:44:18]And I'm like, that's not a it's not a life. It's terrible.

[00:44:22]>> Yeah. We had a Catholic family that lived, you know, across the corner from us. 11 children because the parents absolutely did not believe in birth control. They did believe in be fruitful and multiply. But for this poor mother raising I mean when the older girls got to be teenagers, they were in effect helping to take care of the younger kids, but each of the and I knew those kids and they could not get the attention from their parents they really needed. They were constantly starved for the kind of parental guidance they needed because the the dad was working hard just to feed 11 kids and the mom was overwhelmed with having 11 kids. But boy, when the pope came to Los Angeles, they were there front row and center. Um um yeah, and that's the thing that when re it's not based in re when you go all the way down to metaphysics and epistemology, it's not based in reality.

[00:45:14]The more thoughtful you are, the more independently thoughtful you are, the more rigorously honest you are about what you're believing, and this is of course how I lost religion altogether, the more problematic it's going to be.

[00:45:26]The more you're willing to get along and go on, but like I say, Christianity has really softened in recent centuries. So softened, you got an American kind versions of Christianity that say go out and be prosperous, get wealthy. the divine right of prosperity. Um Becky Cole Whitaker or whatever or you know what was really also interesting now I grew up with TV evangelists like Robert Schuler you know who had the you know power >> Crystal Palace >> the Crystal Palace in Orange and and he had huge television audience across America. It was more he would take one little passage from the Bible and then he would launch off into a dissertation that was more informed by contemporary psychology. So, it's a giant, you know, Sunday morning psychotherapy hour, which really had little connection to the Bible, but he was giving you practical psychotherrapeutic advice.

[00:46:18]>> Some of it was egoistic. Some of it I could even tell was not >> his books, his books helped me a lot.

[00:46:24]>> I just for we've got something going on in the chat that I don't understand where Janette says, "Don't believe in Christ." But I don't know what it refers to. Uh, please clarify, Janette, so I so I know. I'm I'm just thinking about religion in general. And like I said, it's called religion verse life this episode. So, I'm thinking about, you know, in the Jewish Bible or the Old Testament, you have a God that tortures a man for no reason other than to prove to his arch nemesis that this man is loyal to him. You have a God who turns a woman into a pillar of salt because or she turns around when he told her not to. who instructs invading uh armies to kill everything living to also to saw off pieces of the penises of babies.

[00:47:14]Let's not forget that. In the New Testament, you have uh the you know admonitions to hate your mother and father, hate the world and hate your very life for the sake of Jesus. When we go to uh Hinduism, they have sati or sati sati uh a historical practice where a widow emilates herself on her husband's funeral p. It's considered a supreme act of devotion. And by the way, it's still legal. Uh in if you read the Quran, there's commands to make war day and night, you know, uh don't don't stop making war on the infidels, that sort of thing.

[00:47:54]All of the ethics are not this world oriented to, you know, it's all about what you're going to get in the next world.

[00:48:03]This life is so valuable partly because it's so short, right? If we are are fortunate, we get maybe 80 years on this planet and we can either live our best life of joy, happiness, love for ourselves and love for the people that love us and that we love, or we can spend it worshiping a [ __ ] fiction, a fictitious deity that was invented who knows how long ago in order to soothe the curiosities of people who did not understand what was going on around them. Like somebody in the chat here says, "Well, how do you explain existence? How do you how do you explain God?" And every time that that you don't know an answer, they plug in God. You know, the God of the gaps.

[00:48:54]>> Well, you don't know that must be God.

[00:48:56]You don't know where thunder comes from.

[00:48:58]Must be God.

[00:48:59]>> In modern religion, skepticism is the in fact in ancient religion to a large extent, skepticism is the necessary prologue to dogmatism. Reason doesn't work. Reason has some gap. Reason has some failure. Reason can't know. You can't really be sure. That's what's underlying skepticism. Underlies real mysticism. You don't need to skip reason to some Ouija board or some revelation or some crystal ball unless there's a problem Houston with reason. And so the only real means we have of knowing is being explicitly rejected.

[00:49:35]You know, and more than that, a God who God is the frightening thing. Eternity is the frightening thing to me. People said, "You wouldn't you prefer a universe with God?" No. No. No way am I buying into that. That would be madness.

[00:49:49]That would be like enter going through the looking glass and living in a mad world. You know, you got these Christian presuppositionalists. You can't have logic. You can't have morality. You can't have anything if you don't believe in God. God is the logical presupposition in effect of doing science. Now, of course, they'll reject evolution or whatever science gets in the way, but you can't even use logic.

[00:50:12]You can't even have morality unless you believe in God. So, they have these rational where philosophy is just a mind game and these rational what you're doing is you're messing with your mind.

[00:50:21]Your only tool of dealing and coping with reality. So, it's making you less and less able to actually cope with reality. as I say except to the extent to which a religion has been compromising uh itself getting you more and more oriented more and more the more you can't consistently live a religious ethics but you're absolutely right you read the Tanakh that is to say the Hebrew scriptures what Christians call the Old Testament you know there's like the Amalachites God tells the first king of Israel Saul to go wipe out the Amalachites and when I mean wipe out I mean wipe out the women the children the slaves the livestock s king Saul goes and genocides the Amalachites, but he spares some of the livestock. And when Samuel the prophet comes along, he hears the tinkling of the bells on the livestock.

[00:51:07]He's like, "Saul, what's that I'm hearing?" That was the sin that lost Saul the kingdom. God Samuel says, "You're no longer going to be king because you didn't wipe out all the animal. You killed the babies. You killed the slaves."

[00:51:19]>> And that was good.

[00:51:20]>> That was good. You did. You almost completed the genocide. Um or Noah, look, God can get so pissed off he'll wipe out the entire human race except for one family. Now God, you just created this universe. You just created this humanity. You knew exactly what was going to happen. And yet within, you know, 10 generations, you're having to wipe out the whole project.

[00:51:42]I mean, it is madness and fear of God.

[00:51:44]That's the phrase they use, fear of God.

[00:51:47]So, it's really a very bad, malicious motive that's underlying all this. It really is a fear of a punishing God who can arbitrarily because he's beyond our understanding. If I give them the problem of evil say, well, why would God create a world in which children suffered or which there was war and things like that? Well, it's beyond your ability to understand, Jim. And so, okay, shut off your brain. Shut off your brain. And the and you see, the mind is really an integrating mechanism. If you're telling me to shut off in certain compartments of of certain subjects are off limits or unknowable that what you're done is systematically shut it's like when Hal gets his brain shut off at the end of 2001 and you can only sing Daisy at the end. If you take the more consistently you take religion the more systematically you shut off your mind the more systematically you separate your values from this world in this life. Um what else can I say? No, you you put it you put it absolutely >> so >> spectacularly.

[00:52:50]>> Thank you.

[00:52:50]>> Someone in the someone in the chat in on the capitalist corner the other day said that religious people are more moral and more ethical.

[00:53:02]And I just remember thinking that that was so funny because in my experience, the people who say that they are more moral, the only reason they are more moral, behave more ethically, is not because they are more ethical. It's because they're afraid of God. They're afraid of being punished.

[00:53:20]>> The truth though is is that atheists and agnostics have a significantly lower crime rate. For example, that's it's not a I'm not making this up. over a period of decades now it's been demonstrated that uh Christians for example represent a higher a higher percentage of Christians are criminals I mean significantly so than people who identify as atheist or agnostic who tend to have much much lower crime rates. So this notion that secular people can't be ethical is just wrong u because it to some in some ways that's just not the case. Besides, when you've got a a a religion of for my I was raised a Protestant and the way my Protestant relatives would explain it to me, you know those Catholics, they have an escape clause called confession and they've got a purgatory where they can work off sins and you know in the in the Renaissance you could actually buy indulgences, you could pay the church for [laughter] any sins. So if I can go get a clean slate, if I can commit murder and adultery and theft, and then I go in on Sunday to confession, father, forgive me for I have sinned, and you know, I murdered this guy. I stole a million dollars and I'm a cheating son of a I'm constantly cheating on my wife.

[00:54:35]Okay, you're forgiven. Eotabalvo, you're forgiven. Clean slate. And so there becomes this thing, you know, the sinner sins all his life and converts on his deathbed. He gets into heaven. this person who is an atheist, they don't never violate anyone's rights. They live an honest, productive life. And at the end, nope, sorry, you didn't believe.

[00:54:53]You go to hell because classic Protestant view, John 3, you know, here, see the signs people hold up. John 3:16.

[00:55:00]If you believe, you're saved. John 3:17.

[00:55:03]If you don't, you're already condemned and condemned to a lake of fire. And so belief, and that's what really got me as a kid, you know, believe and you're saved. sin doesn't really count. This is the Protestant view. Obviously, it's it's pure. It's the Pauline pure faith is what saves your soul. That's classic Protestantism. So, I was thinking to myself, look, you believe in Jesus, you get saved. You don't believe and no matter how good you are, you go to a lake of eternal. I said, this is just not justice. Besides, it's coercive.

[00:55:36]>> People shouldn't accept truth based on a threat, a reward. You should base it on fact and logic. There's also >> if you don't if you don't know about Jesus, you don't know about the Bible.

[00:55:46]So like tribes in Africa, they were fine because they didn't know. So that was okay. They wouldn't go to hell because they didn't know any better.

[00:55:56]>> Or or they'll have be given a chance.

[00:55:57]There's some religious views that say, well, there's a sort of anti- room, a waiting room where if you haven't heard the word, you're given a chance at salvation before you the final judgment occurs on you. All kinds of excuses. But you know, my great-grandmother, she was strict in her fundamentalist Christianity on my mother's side. She said, "No, I'm sorry. Those little babies in Africa and Asia who never heard the word of Jesus, I'm afraid they're condemned.

[00:56:21]>> They're in hell.

[00:56:22]>> They're gone.

[00:56:23]>> And they and they deserve it." Right.

[00:56:25]Yeah. So, yeah. Um, there's something in there. I got one last question for both of you, but I do want to say this.

[00:56:33]>> The idea that salvation is based on belief. Belief is not something that can be forced. You can't force your mind to believe something it doesn't. It's not possible to do it. I mean, you could maybe, you know, keep repeating a mantra over and over and half belief. Well, whatever. But belief ultimately is not something to be compelled. Even if you're making an argument, even if like Jim, when you and I argue, let's suppose I want to agree with you. I I it doesn't happen. it it you need to actually convince me and you can't do that against my will. It just doesn't it can't occur. So the the last question I want to ask of either of you and Praphanie you go first is this religion verse life. I want you to summarize succinctly and clearly as possible in plain language Panie why you think religion is anti-life and then Jim you do the same.

[00:57:33]I am going to go back to what I said earlier. Religion often makes you live in ways that are contrary to what is best for you. And any any belief system that is forcing you to go against what is in your own self-interest on pain of eternal torture is not good and is not right. And that's all you need to know.

[00:58:04]>> Thank you, Pphanie. All right, Jim.

[00:58:08]>> It uh disables your mind. It disables a healthy system of values by necessity. Religion makes people hypocrites and it makes them liars if they take it to the extent they take it seriously. Especially in the modern world, the reason why religion is a failure is because it's taking a vital need, philosophy, and orienting it against human life. It is no accident that mystics of both east and west become uh uh aesthetic. And so you'll have the uh the the you know u in India you'll have these religious intense people sit in one place for hours and starve themselves down to bones because they're literally at war with their body. In the west you'll have monks and nuns living on purpose lives of poverty celibacy uh sleeping on stones whipping the flesh in the classic literally in the classic game. So when you divine when you posit the supernatural, let me just put it this broadly. When you posit the supernatural, you have set yourself down a path where it is you're you're at war with reality and in particular at war with your body. The only way to really be consistently religious is to wage war against reality in your mind and to wage war against your own body in your ethical conduct. And so there's a theory practice as I say mind body real versus ideal dichotomy and not just a dichotomy but a waring opposition that is mandated to the extent you take religion seriously. So uh if you if integrity is a value, you know, and we've talked about that in other contexts. If integrity is if honesty is a value, if rationality is a value, if these are the critical values to success and happiness here on earth, then religion is one of the fundamental enemies, you cannot be anything but a hypocrite because you can't live up to the ethics of Christianity. It's not about this world. It's about getting into the next world. you're sinful and corrupt and material and that platonic dissing of the material world that sneaks into almost every religion when Plato hits it. It's reality versus this religion. And it is your happiness in life versus the values that are implied by it. It's that fundamental to to the extent you take religion seriously, you've disabled your mind and you've set your values against your life, not for them.

[01:00:36]Okay, before I give the capitalist art of the day, Jim, where can the folks find you for those who don't know? I mean, you are the the great Jim Valiant.

[01:00:46]I'm sure they they do, but for anybody that doesn't know, >> I'm active at Facebook almost every day answering questions, James Stevens Valiant. And you so hit me up over there. I'm to be found at the Objectivist Media Network. sometimes the daily objective and their membersonly seminars like tomorrow we're doing a deep dive on uh Leonard Peacov's objectivism and philosophy of Ein Rand and you can find me here you find me the rational egoist you can find me uh you know I'm some for some reason this lieitz guy >> has me on again so >> because I'm Jewish I think but uh but anyway >> come at a good price >> that that was for this guy Sean who's watching anyway um what about that book over your uh right shoulder Tell them about that because the other ones is you can't buy it but that you can buy.

[01:01:32]>> Yeah, for over 30 years I studied after I cured myself of my Christianity. I had all this religious knowledge in my head and I didn't know what to do with it. So I started studying religion and the origins of Christianity and the upshot of 30 years of studying the scholarship on the or the historical origins of Christianity. uh a a great author and a dear friend of mine, Warren Fay, and I wrote a book, Creating Christ, which argues that there is a political dimension to the origins of Christianity that has been overlooked for 2,000 years. And um um I am a scholar of the origins of Christianity. I intend to write more about it. But in creating Christ, we discuss where the unique features of Christianity really come from historically speaking in the first and second centuries of the common era.

[01:02:23]>> Okay. So, capitalist thought of the day.

[01:02:26]I advocate for capitalism based on a lot of reading and observations that capitalism is the moral system that capitalism is the system that allows human beings to flourish and to be happy. In order to learn that and in order to advocate that we need to use our minds. We need to use reason. Arguments that aren't based on reason are invalid. So if we're going to advocate for individual rights, personal freedom, we need to do so on a rational basis. Religion undercuts that at the root. It tells you to believe in something that you cannot prove, you can observe, you cannot demonstrate rationally.

[01:03:17]Religion therefore is antithetical to capitalism. On the other hand, capitalism under a free system, you are free to believe whatever you want, whatever you'd like. Nobody would ever stop you. But to advocate capitalism, we need reason first. Thank you everybody.

[01:03:39]Thank you Jim. Thank you Panie. Thank all the comments and chats and everything. Uh, we will see you Monday on the Capitalist Corner, 12:00 p.m.

[01:03:48]Eastern time, 9 Pacific, for our regular show. And we'll be back here next week.

[01:03:55]Until then, check your premises. Peace.

[01:04:00]>> [snorts]