Hello, and welcome to my podcast. This is an audio version of my
videos available to make listening to my stuff in the background easier than YouTube makes
it. But since my videos are primarily made for YouTube, there may be
occasional references to visual materials. If you'd like this podcast ad free, you
can join us on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Vice Rhino. Please enjoy.
Hello and welcome to my channel, Vice Rhino. Here today, I'm
headed into chapter five of Pastor Dickey's The Problems with Atheism book. Click the
card in the corner and watch this series as a playlist if you miss the
previous chapters. This is the dark chapter, which may as well just be
called Godwin's Law, but typical of Dickey's verbosity, it is instead titled The
Atheists Cannot Escape the dilemma that his worldview is responsible for so much in humanity
to man. Anyway, if you're following along with the bingo board, I'm
just going to go ahead and preemptively take the stalin slash MoU slash Hitler slash
etc. Where atheists square, because that's pretty much all this chapter is.
This might end up being a shorter installment in this series, because there's only
so many ways that I can say those guys are not representative of atheism as
a whole, and if you think that they are, then you have to
come to grips with the fact that your worldview has caused at least as much
in humanity to man as atheism, and to a significantly greater degree if we
assume that the stories in the Bible are true. So, with our bingo
game for this chapter finished before we even begin, let's get onto the video.
But first, I'm actually going to be issuing a content warning for this
one. I don't get into graphic descriptions, but I do talk about some
stuff that might be upsetting to some people, mostly Jeffrey Dahmer related. I'll
put chapters in this video to make that part easy to skip. So with
that out of the way, let's go. The chapter opens with the statement
the rise of Darwinian atheism in the twentieth century led to the rise of Stalinism,
Nazism, and to talitarianism. This is a statement that is not entirely
false, but it is oversimplified to such a great degree that it may as
well be false. If we look to the writings of people like Marx and
Engles, we say, a nuanced view of religion. Yes, they called
it the opiate of the people and the sigh of the oppressed creature, but
they also called it the heart of a heartless world. They saw religion as
something that had satisfactorily been shown to be false by the intellectuals and philosophers of
the eighteenth century, and those who remain religious did so not as a matter
of intellect, but of social need. So there is no need under Marxism
to persecute religion or to fight against it. It will die on its own
when it ceases to be necessary. And there is actually something to this.
The Marxist view does also lack nuance, though to a lesser degree than Pastor
Dickie. But not only is there a correlation between religion and poverty, with
more impoverished areas tending to be more religious, but there's also evidence to suggest
that some causality is there. That is, that high levels of religiosity can,
if not directly cause poverty, at least contribute to it. For example,
it is well established that higher levels of uation lead to a decrease in
poverty and a general increase in economic output, but In some religious cultures,
people are encouraged to get married and have kids fairly young, something that can
get in the way of an education. And often in these religious cultures it
is taught that your economic position is predetermined by God or the gods at your
birth. These religions promote the status quo by promising more in the afterlife than
you could ever hope to obtain in this life. So be a good little
worker, be slaving away and whatever destitution you find yourself in, and you'll
be rewarded with a solid gold mansion after you die. Such ideas are way
more emotionally appealing to people who have no hope in this life than to those
who already live relatively good lives. Of course, like I said, this
view lacks nuance. Even if religion contributes to keeping people in poverty, it
is not solely responsible. And contrary to Marx's opinion, I highly doubt that
religion would just up and vanish if earthly society became a utopia. So that's
Marx. But Dickie mentioned Stalinism. What of that? Well, the thing
is Marx never really laid out an actual system of government in his writings,
so the governments that arose using the name communism were born of the desire to
enact the principles found in Marx's writings, but had to kind of figure out
the whole governance thing on their own, and specific to Russia, not a
whole lot changed for most people when the government transitioned from Czarist to Communist.
There was a civil war that lasted several years after the initial revolution that put
Lenin in power, in which both Communists and the White Guard and alliance of
Czarists, right wingers and anti communist left wingers used terrorism to further their goals,
which did a bunch of damage to Russia's already weakened agricultural and economic systems.
Stalin throughout the whole thing was a high ranking general. He was the
one that suggested the execution of the Czarist government officials and royal family to Lenin.
Stalin was bloodthirsty, power hungry, and opportunistic to a degree that even
Lenin dictated instructions warning of his dangerous disposition and advising that he be removed from
power. Lennon died shortly after leaving those instructions, and Stalin was able to
suppress them, remaining in a position of power and gradually getting rid of anybody
in the Communist Party who opposed him. Now, this does not exonerate Lenin
from wrongdoing. Like there's this misconception about communism that Lenin was the good one
in Stalin was the bad one. But Lenin was perfectly willing to use Stalin's
ambition as long as it benefited him. My point here is that it was
not atheism that drove the Communist revolution. It was dissatisfaction with the status quo.
People were angry about having poor working conditions and low wages. People were
starving to death. Well, the czars were throwing lavish parties in their palace.
People were fed up. Communism promised food, peace, and prosperity.
It didn't deliver on those promises, but the people who lived through that time
had no way of knowing how badly it would go. They still had she
working conditions and low wages. They were still starving while those on the top
were feasting. And none of it had anything to do with atheism, except
maybe tangentially a Stalin did certainly oppose the church and did persecute all religions,
but that was not because of a push for atheism. That was because he
saw organized religion as competition. He wanted people to worship the government. He
understood how religion was used to control the masses and wanted that control to belong
to the government and by proxy hymn. It's not atheism that caused the tragedies
of the communist regime's rule of terror. It was desired to maintain power and
control. Now, with that in mind, shall we compare it to religion?
How many have died as a direct result of religion trying to maintain or
even expand their power and control. Yes, the Crusades had an overall lower
death toll, about five million, compared to the one hundred million that died
to communism. But when we look at it as the proportion of the total
population, I actually have no idea because I'm not a statistician and calculating the
average percentage of a population to be killed in the Crusades every year over a
period of two hundred years, as opposed to the average percentage of a population
killed by Communism over a period of about eighty years, when the population of
the world was growing significantly faster during the eighty year period than it was during
the two hundred year period is just beyond my skill level. But my point
remains by proportion of the population, religion had a massive death toll as well,
And if we go back to pretending that the stories in the Bible literally
happened, then we wind up with a malevolent god who killed greater than ninety
nine point nine nine percent of the world population in one fell swoop, a
feat that no governmental regime, no matter how brutal, has ever accomplished.
So yeah, in terms of absolute numbers, Communism might win the brutality Olympics,
but that's mainly because the rise of communism happen to coincide with a massive
rise and world population, as well as the rapid development of new technologies that
were capable of killing people much more efficiently than the swords, spears, and
arrows of the Crusades. I imagine it would be a different story if either
the Christians or Muslims had access to tanks, automatic weapons, and massive bombs,
both nuclear and otherwise during the Crusades. All this to say that it's
people. People do bad things to other people in the pursuit of power and
wealth. Sometimes they use religion as their tool to keep the general populace in
line. Sometimes they use political ideologies, sometimes they use fear and intimidation.
Most often they use a combination of the three. Anyway, remember when I
said this was going to be a short video. Yeah, we're literally one
sentence into the chapter so far. But hey, I put a bunch of
nuance into this claim. That should mostly clear it up. So maybe I
can skip past a bunch of the but also Hitler. But also, wait,
no, all we got is communists and Hitler type stuff, and keep
that in mind. For atheism, they have communist governments and Hitler. For
Christianity, we have the crusades, the Inquisition, the residential schools, the
domestic terrorism, the financial mismanagement, the sexual abuse of both children and adults,
and more, all spanning decades to centuries to probably realistically millennia. Oh
yeah, they have to fudge past the Hitler stuff too, because like,
well, he might have been an atheist. Privately I don't think he was,
but he could have been. He didn't use atheism to accomplish those ends.
He used Christianity. Anyway, Just get past a bunch of stuff that
I've already dealt with to get to the second page of the chapter, we
get him saying that while the Bible teaches the sanctity of all human life and
teaches that all men are made in the image of God, atheism creates the
basis and rational sick to devalue human life. Aside from the fact that he's
excluding women from having been made in the image of God, with his choice
of language here, it is worth mentioning that God commanded and committed many genocides
in the Bible. This is incompatible with the idea that all human life is
sacred. If all human life is sacred, then genocide should be the absolute
worst sin you could possibly commit. And yet God doesn't seem to consider genocide
to be a sin. Kill all the Canaanites, Kill all the men,
women, and children who live in Jericho, Kill all the Amalekites. Hell,
just kill all the humans except for Noah and his immediate family. But
yeah, the guy that commanded all of those atrocities surely thought that human life
was sanctified and precious because men were made in his image. He then states
that because of the influence of atheism, we now have to wrestle with international
problems of population elimination, abortion, and euthanasia, prostitution, pornography, the
sex slave trade, and illegal drugs. Now first and foremost, figure out
what you want to do with your commas there. Like that was really hard
for me to read because it just didn't make any sense, and I emphasized
it in a weird way because of how it's written, Like there was an
attempt at an Oxford comma just before euthanasia, which got abandoned as he just
continued the list only to end it without the Oxford comma. I definitely prefer
the Oxford comma, but I understand that it's just a convention. It's not
worth a sick tag just for not using it. But you can't use an
Oxford comma in the middle of the list and then remember that you have more
items on the list just to make it one list. Now, all of
that aside, do you honestly think that none of these things were issues without
atheism? Sure a number of them are things that atheists generally don't consider inherently
bad porn and sex work, for instance, But what's with the population elimination?
Won is Dicky a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the evil atheists are trying
to cull the world population for some unknown reason. The only evidence for such
a plot is on the Georgia Guidestone, which are supposed to be principles to
build a society on after we mostly wipe ourselves out with war, environmental destruction,
or whatever. So the one about keeping the population to five hundred million
is meant for a population that has already been seriously reduced. It's not advocating
that we actively engage in population reduction in order to get there, but all
that's kind of beside the point, because the vast majority of atheists don't take
the Georgia Guidestone seriously anyway. Abortion is a matter of bodily autonomy more than
that of atheism. On top of that, the only mention of abortion in
the Bible is either when soldiers slice open the wombs of pregnant women in an
act of violence that is sometimes directly commanded by God, or the test for
unfaithfulness, in which a priest will prepare a potion, and if God himself
steps in and aborts the baby after the woman has taken the potion, then
she was unfaithful to her husband. So abortion is sometimes commanded by God and
sometimes performed directly by God, but is never condemned. The sex slave trade
is again something that is indorsed by the Bible. Exodus twenty one, verses
seventh eleven explains how a Hebrew man can sell his daughter into sex slavery if
he wants to. Deuteronomy twenty verses ten through fourteen explain how to take sex
slaves after conquering a city. Numbers thirty one, verses seventeenth through eighteen has
Moses commanding soldiers to kill all the boys, men, and women who are
not virgins, while taking the young virgin girls as sex slaves. But in
my experience, atheists are pretty unanimous in their hatred of sex slavery and human
trafficking. Now, really, if we want to compare the morals of atheism
to the morals of religious people, here's a fun little experiment that you guys
can try. Find an atheist organization and google its name followed by the word
scandal. Do you know what you'll find? Generally speaking, there will either
be nothing, or there will be someone who lost their position of authority as
a consequence of their bad actions. American atheist scandal silverman fired for sexual misconduct.
Atheists of Florida scandal nothing American Humanist Association Dawkins retroactively losing an award for
being transphobic. But pick a Christian denomination, and before you even start looking,
you already know exactly what you're going to find. A bunch of scandals
surrounding not only the sexual abuse of children, but of the church actively working
to keep the scandals under wraps and protecting the perpetrators of the abuse from having
to face any sorts of consequences. Southern Baptist scandal, a two hundred page
report outlining hundreds of church leaders sexually abusing children, with the churches covering it
up. Catholic church scandal. Play the same game again, but pick any
random diocese. We all know that story. Lutheran The Evangelical Lutheran Church had
a scandal where a guy who hadn't even been ordained yet was known to have
had a history of inappropriate conduct with boys. Church officials covered it up and
ordained him anyways. Then they moved him to a new church. When it
became apparent that he had a chronic problem with exposing himself to boys in bathrooms,
they didn't warn the new congregation of his behavior. And now they owe
tens of millions of dollars in damages to his victims. So yeah, if
you want to claim to be judging atheism based on the consequences of an atheist
worldview, then it seems that Christianity has a lot more to answer for than
atheism. Those who are taught that there is no God, no moral absolutes,
and no final judgment day coming are being given freedom to become human monsters,
says the man advocating for an organization known for protecting child rapists and avoiding
taxes whenever possible. He does acknowledge at this point that not every atheist is
as wicked as can be, and while I do agree with that, I
would ask why he disagrees with the Bible. Psalm fourteen one says the fool
says in his heart there is no God. They are corrupt, they do
abominable deeds. There is none who does good. That is pretty clearly saying
that those who say that there is no God are incapable of doing good.
So I wonder why Dickie is okay with ignoring that part of the Bible,
especially given that he doesn't seem to have a problem quoting the first half of
that verse. The next bit is a fairly lengthy quote from an article on
why atheism and evolution caused the column Mine shooting, followed by another lengthy quote
from the same article, but this time about one of the three total school
shootings that Finland has ever experienced. Notably, the article that Dicky is quot
doesn't seem to recognize the difference between an example and a causal relationship. The
Columbine bit is of course used as an example of the shooters believing that they
were more highly evolved, and then the section on the Finnish shooting starts with
the statement another example of this type of relationship between atheism and immoral behavior comes
from Finland. The obvious conclusion that they want us to draw here is that
atheism causes school shootings. But if that were true, then you'd expect Finland,
a country with roughly similar proportions of Christians and unaffiliated people as the United
States, to have roughly similar proportions of school shootings. But Finland has had
three school shootings, not three this year, three total. The US has
had nineteen so far this year, so that doesn't track. There's also the
fact that atheists are underrepresented in prison. In the entirety of the United States
federal prison system, there are a total of one hundred and forty three inmates
that are atheists, with an additional sixty three being secular humanists. This adds
up to a whopping zero point one percent of the population. Given that atheists
makeup about four percent of the general population, we'd expect them to make up
more than four percent of the prison population if atheists actually have a greater proclivity
for living a life of crime and violence. Of course, these numbers should
be taken with a grain assault. Despite being illegal to discriminate against someone based
on the religious beliefs or lack thereof, there are well known benefits to being
religious well in prison. In addition to having extra free time to associate with
fellow believers, judges, prison guards, and parole boards are more likely to
see you in a more favorable light if you are known to be religious.
So these numbers aren't exactly a clincher for this argument. But I mean,
in Dickie's mind, we're already talking about people who believe in God but are
so angry at him that they pretend to not believe in him in order to
live immoral lives. And I can't really see such a person being willing to
take on the Christian label in order to escape certain aspects of punishment, given
that they actively reject it, knowing that that reject and will lead to an
ultimate punishment. So you either have to accept that atheists really don't believe even
God, unlike what Romans one twenty says, or you have to accept that
Christians are more likely to be criminals than atheists. After that lengthy quote,
he brings up Nietzsche again, this time calling him the architect of the God
is Dead movement, which is not actually a thing, at least not that
I could find. There is something called Death of God theology, which is
actually a largely Christian theological movement from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
There were several versions of it, but my favorite is the one that actually
manages to make the Trinity makes sense. God the Father was negated and effectively
died when Jesus came unto the scene, and jesus death in this version is
actually a sacrifice, as that is literally the death of that form of God,
with the Holy Spirit being brought into being to take over after Jesus death.
Dickie goes on to call Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini students of Nietzsche,
which I find interesting given that Stalin labeled Nietzsche the philosopher of fascism.
But that's beside the point, as we now immediately transition to another story of
a school related killing. This time it was of a robbery gone wrong where
two kids attempted to rob a couple of professors, with the plan being to
threaten them into giving them their pin numbers. Yes, I know, it's
a tautology, sucket. The way they got into the house was by pretending
to be students doing research for a school survey. The killing started when the
professor chastised one of them for not being better prepared with his research questions,
resulting in the kid getting angry and stabbing him. But what I find most
interesting about this particular story is how Dickie ties it into the topic. He
claims that these two young students named Robert and Jim read some Nietzsche and then
went on a murder rampage, confessing afterward that Nietzsche had convinced them that God
is dead and no moral values. Existed in previous stories of shootings or killings.
Dickie has not shied away from using the full names for anyone in the
story. This time, though, it's Robert and Jim killing two beloved Dartmouth
professors. This is a bit suspicious, especially since when you look it up,
not only does James go by James and not Jim, but there is
no mention of Nietzsche or a philosophical moral discussion at the trial, just a
typical robbery gone wrong kind of story, which makes me think that Dickie obscure
the information just enough to make it harder to research, but not enough to
be representing a completely fictitious event, though really, with how he represented it,
it basically is completely fictitious. At this point, I'd normally call this
the moment or I'm coomfortable saying that Dickie is lying rather than just being ignorant.
But honestly, with him, it wouldn't surprise me if he were under
the impression that every word he wrote in this book is true. But he's
just copying bad information without properly vetting or attributing it. But I mean,
that's a kind of dishonesty on its own. So either way, Dickie is
being dishonest, and yes, you can apply this opinion retroactively to the previous
chapters. After he's done blaming atheism for individual murders and shootings, where at
best it was only tangentially related, and at worst it wasn't even a factor
to begin with, he turns to the writings of Aldus Huxley in order to
support the statement that many of those who embraced atheism did so because of their
desire to live immoral lives without guilt. To achieve this, they had to
kill God and deny the word of God in order to sin without guilt.
I'll get to the Huxley quote in a moment, but first I would just
like to point out that the ability to behave immorally without guilt is something that
Christianity accomplishes by offering a system of forgiveness by proxy. Did you do something
that hurts someone else? Sure, feel guilty about it, but then confess
that sin to the Lord and rest easy in the knowledge that He has forgiven
you and has washed your sins away. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer interesting detail about his
story that has often left out when apologists use him as an example of what
atheism causes people to do is that before he converted to Christianity, in prison
while being arrested, he said, for what I did, I should be
dead. In later interviews after his conversion to Christianity, he said, if
a person doesn't think there's a God to be accountable to, what's the point
in trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges, Which is
a typical type of thing to hear from apologists. So if I had to
guess, I'd say that this was a thought that he retroactively applied to his
life, rather than something that he actively thought well committing his crimes. But
my point is before he became a Christian he admitted to feeling guilty for what
he had done. After he became a Christian, he was able to release
his guilt without ever requiring that the friends and families of his victims forgive him,
stating I have accepted him as my Lord and Savior, and I believe
that I, as well as everyone else, will be accountable to him.
In other words, he doesn't need to feel guilty anymore. He will be
held accountable to God, which in pretty much every Christian denomination I'm familiar with
means that he gets to go and enjoy eternal paradise, but his heavenly mansion
will be a bit smaller than others because of his sins in this life.
If Christianity is true, he got to live out the last years of his
life guilt free and is now enjoying eternal bliss, while several of his victims
are no doubt being eternally tortured for the crime of having died without accepting Jesus
as their Lord and savior. Some of them were kids. One of his
fourteen year old victims was on the run from an abuse of stepfather. Does
a kid trying to get out of a dangerous home situation deserve eternal torture from
being desperate enough to accept fifty bucks in exchange for some nude pictures? Does
Dahmer deserve eternal paradise because he apologized to Jesus for sending that kid to eternal
torture. Christianity has this weird double edged sword where it weaponizes guilt against good
people for harmless things like masturbating, but then absolves the guilt of horrible people
with nothing more than an apology to Jesus. The more heinous the crime,
the more emphasis there is on freedom from guilt, with the harmless stuff being
exaggerated in order to keep people feeling like they need to go to church and
more importantly, tithe in order to not be guilty anymore. This is why
churches have such a problem with sexual predators in their ranks. Their system could
not be better designed to entice immoral people into positions of authority. Then they
get to abuse their authority to do their immoral things, and when they get
caught, they appeal to the forgiving nature of the religion. We're all fallen
humans in need of God's grace. I am ultimately answerable to God, so
no need to involve the secular authorities or anything that would only damage the church's
reputation. Of course, the apologetic answer to Dahmer's confession that he felt guilt
before he was a Christian is simply that this is because no matter how hard
the atheist denies God, God's moral laws cannot be ignored. The problem here
is that this just undercuts the very reason that atheists are said to be denying
God rather than actually not believing in God. Not only does such an attitude
leave the atheists looking like petulant children who know that they'll face consequences for their
actions, but think that pretending that they won't face those consequences will somehow let
them live guilt free. But since they feel guilty anyway, what is even
the purpose of pretending that the consequences don't exist? Do Christians think that atheists
are no better than the four year old who boldly proclaims that he owns the
house now so he doesn't have to go on time out. If that's how
you truly see atheists, then I hate to break this to you, but
you're actually the one who is in denial. You deny that the atheists is
being truthful when they tell you what happens in their own inner life because you
want to hold onto the idea that the Bible is the word of God,
and the Word of God says that atheists are petulant four year olds, so
that must be the case no matter what they say. Now, this is
not me just engaging in two koqua. This is Christians obviously being in denial
because they literally have to deny what countless atheists have already told them about their
own inner lives. In order to hold on to their beliefs. And while
you can say that countless Christians have told atheists that they are just suppressing the
truth in unrighteousness, it is a fact that an atheist is a better authority
on what goes on inside their own head than a letter that was written to
a specific congregation in Rome that was facing specific issues with that portion of the
letter basically explaining the hedonistic behaviors common in Rome and in treating the Roman Christians
to avoid those same behaviors. Actually, read through the first couple of chapters
of the Book of Romans sometime ignore the headings and chapter divisions. Those were
not in the original text. It was just one long letter without those divisions.
There it is clear that the message Paul was sending was geared towards the
Roman Christians who are preaching against the hedonistic behaviors of Rome while still engaging in
them themselves, so that they are without excuse. Line in Romans one twenty
actually looks like it's being directed at Christians who are engaging in the dishonorable passions
and the lusts of their hearts and whatnot, Given that chapter two starts with
therefore you have no excuse, o man, every one of you who judges,
for in passing judgment on another, you condemn yourself because you, the
judge, practice the very same things. And then it continues on a tirade
against hypocritical Christians. He even goes on to say that when the Gentiles do
what the law requires, even though they do not have the law, this
shows that the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience bears witness,
and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when God
judges the secrets of men. He's not talking about Christian gentiles here. He's
talking about everyone who is not born Jewish and saying that their consciences can give
them an excuse on judgment day. But of course, apologists don't generally like
contexts. They like to take verses as individual and complete thoughts, even though
the authors of the various books of the Bible were not generally writing that way.
With a few exceptions, like the Book of Proverbs. Paul did not
separate the chapters of his letter to the Romans. He didn't put in the
headings in various places to separate the chapters into subcategories. He just wrote one
letter, and when you read it through without stopping where your daily devotional says
to stop, it looks like Romans one was an admonition against Christians who were
behaving unrighteously. I could very well be wrong here, but even if I
am, it is abundantly clear that Romans one eighteen through twenty three is not
a passage that is meant to be taken in isolation and does not mean what
apologists say it means when they do isolate it. So anyway, Huxley,
remember Huxley. Dickie quotes a lengthy segment of a chapter from Huxley's Ends and
Means where Huxley states that the philosophy of meaninglessness was how he and his contemporaries
justified indulging in sexual freedom. Of course, this quote is found in the
middle of a chapter where Huxley explains why he considers such a philosophy to be
wrong, saying things like it was the manifestly poisonous nature of the fruits that
forced me to reconsider the philosophical tree on which they had grown. And a
philosophy of meaninglessness is accepted only at the suggestion of the passions and is persisted
in only by those whose heredity and upbringing make it possible for them to live
as though the world were at least partially meaningful. Worth mentioning here is that
Dickie introduces Huxley as a famous atheist. Huxley was not an atheist. He
was an agnostic and was quite spiritual. This whole chapter is filled with him
arguing for a deeper meaning to the world, and he uses things like art
and music and the transcendent seeming experiences that they can bring on, as well
as religious experiences as evidence for this deeper meaning. He was inducted into the
Vedanta Society of Southern California, an organization formed to study, practice and spread
the Hindu philosophical tradition of Vedanta. The dude was not an atheist and was
using his admission about why he engaged in the philosophy of meaninglessness for basically the
same purpose that Dickie is here to cast dispersion on anyone who doesn't believe in
a deeper meaning to the universe. But hey, Dickie gave Huxley a long
quote, so I'll do a longish one too. Examples of reversion to barbarism
through mere ignorance are unhappily abundant in the history of Christianity. The early Christians
made the enormous mistake of burdening themselves with the Old Testament, which contains,
along with much fine poetry and sound morality, the history of the cruelties and
treacheries of age people fighting for a place in the sun under the protection of
its anthropomorphic tribal deity. Christian theologians did their best to civilize and moralize this
tribal deity, but inspired in every line dictated by God himself, the Old
Testament was always there to refute them. Ancient ignorance has been sanctified as revelation
that seems relevant to this chapter. We now move on to Christopher Hitchens and
his book God Is Not Great, with Dicky saying Throughout this book, Hitchens
repeatedly attacked the Christian view of morality and decency. It is clear that Hitchins
wanted to liberate mankind from the standards and laws of God's Holy Word that prohibits
sexual impurity. While I haven't read it in a long time, and certainly
Hitchens did advocate for sexual liberation from Christian puritanicalism, I don't recall that book
really having a whole lot to do with sex. It was mostly about the
hainous and immoral acts carried out by believers, with explanations about how they use
their religion to justify those acts, with the underlying message that a belief in
God is always detrimental. Whether you agree with that conclusion or not is irrelevant
here, so not going to get into it. My point is mainly that
Dickie is representing that book as though it is a long winded screed complaining that
Christians should let people have more sex and nothing else. He finishes his chapter
by listing a bunch of Bible verses that give what he calls universal principles and
laws, most of which seem superficially to be good to the modern reader,
things like Micah six eight. What does the Lord require of you but to
do justly, love, mercy, and to walk humbly with your God Ephesians
five two. Walk in love as Christ also loved us and Ephesians four thirty
two. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just
as God in Christ also forgave you. And sure, if we ignore the
bits about having to walk with God as being a moral principle. It's all
fine and good, I guess, but this book has been an exercise in
hatred towards atheists. Where is the love your enemies? Bless those who curse
you, do good to those who hate you, Pray for those who spightfully
use you and persecute you. I mean, he listed that one too,
but he doesn't seem to practice that one, or any of these for that
matter. He seems rather to delight in the idea of atheists getting what's coming
to them. The final moral principles he gives are just the ten commandments,
the first three of which are to not have any other gods before Yahweh,
don't make graven images, and don't take God's name in vain. None of
those are inherently moral commands. It essentially just amounts Dickie saying be the same
religion as me. Commandment four is to keep the Sabbath day holy. So
we're four for four on commandments that not only are not inherently moral but basically
add up to suck. God's five is to honor your mother and father.
But this one is hardly a universal I don't think even Dickie would want it
to be applied universally. I doubt very much that he would agree that a
Muslim child should honor their father and mother by remaining Muslim. Six is thou
shalt not kill. We needed to get through half of the commandments before we
get to one that is actually a good moral principle, though notably, Christians
of Pastor Dicky's persuasion are often pro death penalty, pro military, pro police
being able to use lethal force, indiscriminately, pro gun and so on.
Of course, they get around this by pointing out that the word translated as
kill here usually carries a connotation of murder rather than just killing, so it
should be thou shalt not murder. And when the government, the military,
the police, and people defending themselves kill, that's lawful killing, not murder,
so it's okay. But then those same people will turn around and refer
to abortion as baby murdering, even when it is lawful, so some consistency
would be nice here. Anyway. Six is a potentially good commandment, but
lacks nuance, so it's subject to manipulation by motivated reasoning. Seven is to
not commit adultery, with the modern definition of adultery sure, I can agree
that this one is good, but the biblical definition of adultery is essentially exclusive
to a woman cheating on her husband. The men are apparently free to sleep
around, and we can see this play out in the story of the Woman
Caught an Adultery and John. They say that she was caught in the act
of adultery, and yet they only brought the woman before Jesus. The man
she was with apparently got off scott free. Eight is Thou shalt not steal,
which is generally a rule I can agree with, but I'm not going
to turn someone in if I see them stealing food or baby supplies. Nine
is thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, But interestingly, Dickie
abbreviated it to thou shalt not lie, which is it itself a lie.
The commandment was about giving testimony in a legal setting regarding your neighbor, essentially,
don't lie when you're on the witness stand. To misrepresent it as an
admonition against lying when it is not is amusingly perfectly fine given the actual ninth
commandment, but is strictly forbidden given the version that Dickie is presenting, But
of a catch twenty two. If you ask me, if I lie about
it and say it's a commandment not to lie, I'll be breaking my own
commandment. But if I don't, then there's not really an explicit condemnation of
the act of lying in the Bible. Well, okay, I mean there
is in a lot of places, but it'd be missing from the big ten
and they're already in desperate need of bolstering. And the tenth and final commandment
is to not covet don't want things, which again is very interesting coming from
Dickie. From my own personal experience with the man, which if you aren't
familiar, he was essentially the official pastor of the multilevel marketing thing that I
was in. But from that experience I know that he is very much pro
capitalism. The fundamental driving force of capitalism is covetousness. I want more,
so I will work more to make more money to buy more things. Even
in the ridiculously naive rose colored glasses view where capitalism is based entirely on empathy,
the market punishes bad actors, and the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones
with enough empathy to recognize and meet the needs of their customers. Capitalism is
still based on wanting more. Here, the entrepreneur who meets their customers needs
does so because they want more money to buy more stuff. The one who
fails to meet their customers needs ends up with a failed business, which is
considered to be a failure for its lack of ability to provide money for the
owner to buy the stuff that they want. We have a whole ass economic
system that stands in violation of the Tenth Commandment, an economic system that Dicky
vigorously defends, and yet he also calls the tenth Commandment a universal principle or
law. He ends by asking the question what universal principles and laws can atheism
give us? And yeah, he's actually got us here, because atheism is
simply saying no as an answer to the question do you believe in God?
It doesn't actually provide any principles. It can certainly be something that informs your
principles. I don't believe in forgiveness by proxy, So when I've done something
to hurt someone, I would consider making amends with that person directly to be
the right thing to do. Now, Secular humanism is a moral framework that
is informed by empathy rather than divine command I don't want to say informed by
atheism here, because there are highly religious people who are also secular humanists.
But they've come up with several principles that beat the snot out of the Ten
Commandments, and they do so without even endorsing slavery. Like the Ten Commandments
does things like securing justice and fairness in society, eliminating discrimination and intolerance,
promoting altruism, integrity, honesty of responsibility, etc. So that's it for
today. Today's Common to the Day comes to us from Sean Meyer, who
says about Matt Powell saying the sun burns different than fire on Earth because the
air and space is different than the air. Here, may I just say,
when Matt Powell said air in space, I suppose he was referring to
the hydrogen gas that is found in space, followed by him explaining that hydrogen
is everywhere in space. I can see why you might think that's what he
said from the clip that I played, and I don't need much of an
excuse to play them ontag or so let's just hear it. But in space,
wouldn't it be a different scenario based on the fact that the space and
the air in the space is much different than the air we have here.
That out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks, the fire leap out.
The dinosaurs they discovered have the dragons they've discovered have chambers in the back
of their head. It's where they can breathe fire. But that's just a
couple of things. I mean, if it's about survival of the fittest,
and we evolved from African Americans into other Americans, what about the African Americans
that are still alive today. Well, I don't see anything wrong with quote
mining. I believe if we study history, you know, the Confederates were
able to shoot parod actyls t rex. They had short, stubby arms,
and apparently now the chicken is able to do a handstand with those arms.
Think about this. We have more in common genetically in certain areas with a
gorilla than with an ape. Yet they say genetically we evolve from apes.
We can tell based on genetics. Honestly, John, I don't know a
ton of technical terms. I'm very simple when it comes to science. I
just enjoy simple science. So yeah, out of context, you don't know
that he's talking about why the sun can burn, but in context, that
was actually him explaining that we can't know how the sun burns because fire would
work differently in space because the air is different. Sean, I know you're
a Young Earth creationist who's embarrassed by Matt Powell's tupidity, so I'll give you
this tip. If you're looking at anything that Matt Powell is put out,
not only is he always wrong, but he is always wrong in a way
that is even more wrong than you thought it was possible to even be.
Thanks for watching. I'll be back next Friday with more, but if you
need to get your Rhino fix in before then, I live stream with service
every Wednesday at eight thirty Eastern on my other channel, The Watering Hole.
Thanks to Tim Robertson for being my Patreon and sponsorship's manager, and special thing
is always to my patrons, Thrash, a GI builder, and all the
rest who are the videos that I introduce as probably being short before proceeding to
make the longest video in the series. That is my channel. If you'd
like me to constantly guess wrong about things that are hypothetically completely under my control,
you can join us on Patreon for as little as a dollar per week
over at Patreon dot com, slash vice Rhino, or by supporting the channel
in one of the other methods that can be found at links dot vice rhino
dot com, which is also where you'll find links to my other projects.
If for whatever reason you want to send me stuff my pelbox addresses in the
description, See you next time. If atheists actually had a greater If atheists
actually have a greater proclivity proclivity. The word is proclivity, proclivity, not
an amateur clivity, a proclivity. Really, don't believe. Fuck off your
un Do not disturb. Why are you disturbing? Killing two beloved Dartmouth professor,
killing two beloved Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Dartmouth, dart Mouth, dart Mouth,