103.9 FM, WOZO Radio Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, digital free thought radio hour. Hello and welcome to the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday morning, June 20th, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes or Doubter 5 and as usual we'll have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. One fist for justice, the other fist for... For what? Justice against. I can't tattoo it. Yeah, peace. Okay, just cut it out. Yeah, I know. I don't know what happened. We got a bad way. Anyway, what are you going to do? Today's guests are Don Fire, George Brooklyn, we're two and a half, Richard Higgs and V. John Richards. Hello all. International show for sure. Digital free thought radio hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. Conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faith, God's holy books and superstition. Wombat, what's our topic today? We had so many topics going into the start of the show, but generally we're going to touch on a couple of subjects. One being is religious thinking harmful. And two, does it do more harm than good? And what else flourishes from those kinds of conversations? But before we get into it, I'm going to throw it up to our own Dreadpire Higgs for our weekly invocation. There's noodly... How rudely, Lord, who art in a colander, hallowed be thy noodles. Thy flood be run, thy sauce be yum, with meat as it is with vegetables. This day our garlic bread, and forgive us our cussing, as we put up with those who cuss against us. We need us not into ketoism, but deliver us some carbs, for thine are the noodles and the grasses and the grog, whenever and ever. Raw. Now here's the thing, I'm trying to do some sodium reduction. Does pasta farinism offer any salt-free or salt-reduced sauces for a pasta? Or does that last for me? Absolutely, no, no. Fantastic. You can do whatever you want with your sauce. Guys, I want to do a quick, super fast. You won't even realize it before it ends. Super, super quick, wonderfully short summary of how everybody's doing all at once. We're all just going to say how we're doing it at once. No wait, never mind, I have a better idea. Dreadpire at one at a time, how have you been since last week? Well, not too bad actually, and I was just on with John Richards yesterday for an hour-long interview with his free thought channel. And I thought that went really well. We had a good chat and a fun time, so yeah, that was good. Now here's the question, were you actually able to meet on time with each other? Yes, yes, we in fact got together 10 minutes beforehand to make sure we were all queued up. Fantastic. Yeah, and also we had our past at on Friday, so much feasting and grogging and fasting. Very, very cool. I'm happy to hear that. That's good vibes all around. John, we'll throw it to you. How have you been? How's the interview? How's the family? Well, everything's fine here. Thank you very much. I got an excellent father's day present, which I could be wearing, but I'm not. It's a shirt, so I'm very pleased with that. What's the shirt saying? You can't just leave it at that. No, it's not a t-shirt. No, it's I guess it's a denim. Can I mention a trade name here? Sure, absolutely. It's that firm that makes jeans. Okay. So I'm very pleased with that. Very cool. And not only was I hosting thread last night on the free thought hour chat show, but also I staged my usual weekly global Atheist news, which went out just before. So I'm trying to take over Saturday nights. Not bad. Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of updates on my YouTube and the stuff that you produce is pretty good quality too. Where can people check that out again? Just at the start of the show. Can you plug that? Thank you. I'm going to go to YouTube and go to free thought productions. Free thought productions. There's an archive of all my shows. Yeah, global Atheist news. That's one of the playlists. Yes, that goes back to the beginning of this year every week. But there's other playlists that go back three or four years. Wow. Because I've been making these videos, doing these live streams for a long time. Very cool. All right. So now we're going to throw it up to Scott. Scott, you got a light show. You got laptops going on in the background. What's going on? Oh, man, I am learning my new software that I downloaded. And so, you know, I'm just tinkering around trying to figure it out and optimize on that. So other than that, I mean, the new music project started for me. I think I mentioned it maybe last week, but it's Debra McGone written by Grammy, you know, songwriter, Grammy winning songwriters and stuff like that. This is dedicated to secular humanism. Oh, cool. This song is called A Better Place. It's how to make how we can all get along and talk to one another and make the world better and work together towards that end. So it's a really good song. It's picking up steam. We're even talking about a guy named RuPaul doing performance on it. Yeah, so he wants to jump on it. Nice. So that's going on last weekend. My channel called Exploring Epistemology. I had Anthony Magnobosco on last weekend. That went really well. And we're just looking forward to this next show that's coming up Tuesday. And I'm going to try to do some SE with a Christian presupposition list on whatever he wants to talk about. So that's going on. And other than that, I would say I measure greatness not based on the actions of one person, but how well that one person can help other people become great too. And you have been instrumental in helping me find good sense to look for and nice to figure out like what the best quality sound is. So there's a real greatness there. And I thank you very much for sharing it. Oh, you're welcome. No problem at all. We're going to go to the troublemaker himself, George Brown. George Brown, how you Vincent's last week? The notorious. I've been good. Nice. I was like, Ben, in general, have you found any new coffee that you you're into? Yes. Well, yeah, I've been digging around at the stores. Nice. I'm slumming. I went to Walmart and I got Walmart's. What is it? Walmart's own espresso. Interesting. Interesting. All roads leave. It's right. It's right here in front of me right now. What do you think? 10 out of 10, 11 out of 10? It's surprisingly decent. It's surprisingly decent.  But I've been getting into rock and roll and into country music. I'm classically trained musicians. So I'm, I'm just kind of like rediscovering pop music in the popular realm and enjoying myself. You are like. Behind your leagues behind. Let me tell you something. I saw I had a friend who I was had a daughter who sent me a YouTube video of a song that she liked. And it was like something by Lil Nas X. And I thought I was good on like where pop music was for kids these days. I have no clue what I was listening to. I had no clue what I was watching. It had 230 million views. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this, so this is where we're at now. Okay. Well.  So I'm going back into the beginnings of rock and roll. Nice. Nice. And of course, R and B was way before it too. Confession. Oh, go for it. I remember that too. So you, I was just going to say a word that I'm not supposed to say. Yeah, please. Larry throwing it up to you. How you been since last week, my friend? I've been just fine. I'm just doing some writing. I got back out yesterday and wrote for about an hour or so. It's beautiful. Nice. I tried to do it early in the before the heat in the day. There's my back. There we go. See it for YouTube viewers. And I'm really enjoying it. I put over. It's got a four sale sign on the front of it. It's got a four sale sign on it. Yeah. That was a couple of years ago, but I'm 71. So if anybody wants to buy it, I think I'd let it go. I'm sure my, my better half would be happy for me to do that. Nice. Nice. She worries about me. Okay. I've been learning how to play disc golf since COVID's been over and finding some new activities to do outside. Thing is my form's not very good. And I've been doing nothing but nine holes for like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I feel like I'm doing harm to my back, but what could be more harmful than disc golf, then religious thinking possibly? Oh, there's a transition for you guys. Larry, why? There you go. Larry, why introduce the topic? What do you think? The topic? Yeah. Oh. Well, I've got a base, what I was going to say today on a podcast, I mean, a blog that I have on my site on digitalfreethought.com slash blog. And it's called, what is so wrong with religion? And we could go.  I know you're reading this article for the next hour, but let's just go over the very first thing, which is divisiveness. It divides us into us, them groups all over the country.  I was talking to one Christian the other day and I was telling him how divisive religion was. And he said, yeah, sure. But if everybody was a Christian and understood the truth of Christianity and converted to Christian, we wouldn't have any more wars.  But it's more than that. It's like the decades of violence between the Jews and the Muslims, the decades of violence between Catholics and Protestants, capital crimes against women's health centers. I mean, they feel so emboldened by their religion. Self-righteous? Yes, self-righteous. They have actually gone into women's health centers, abortion clinics, if you want to call them that, and killed doctors before and threatened the people who are waiting outside trying to come in. And not to mention 9-11. It was us versus them. It was a religious faith-based act. And then we had a war on terror after that, more or less based on religion. And then we had a conflict of unity against Islam at the basis of it. But it's just on and on and on. And that's just the violence. And I didn't really get into the history of it, like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials, perpetuations, slavery, just on and on. John, you wanted to comment? Yeah, and it's in all directions, isn't it? I mean, yes, the attack on the Twin Towers was an Islamic fundamentalist attack. But shortly afterwards, George W. came on and said, you're either with us or against us. So the divisiveness is mutual. Oh, yeah. You know, I would say this. It's not that religion, here's my slightly opposite take. I know it's a bit nuanced, but I don't think religion makes people want to cause harm or have wars. I think human beings have a proclivity to conflict, especially in groups, because it's very hard to make empathetic people or understanding. And it's a lot easier to react in a violent way, just to immediately protect the things that you hold dear. Like we evolutionarily cited towards quick reactions of violence to protect the things that we care about rather than empathetic understanding of people. But because of that, religion also is a tool that helps people make very rash generalizations about other groups of people. And I feel like that's the crux behind it. John, what do you think? You're absolutely right. There are other reasons for tribal divisions. But there's only one reason which is based on a non-evidential deity. There's only one that's based on a non-evidential. All of the other reasons for having tribal differences might be considered to be genuine, real grievances. But this one that's based on him up there has never been shown to be substantiated by any evidence. I'm going to think about that. Larry, what do you got? I've talked to people and they say, well, you think getting rid of religion will get rid of war? It would get rid of one of the major reasons for war. We still have wars, but that would be, like John was saying, for other reasons like territoriality, commerce, maybe even race. There are other reasons that people fight each other. But one of the main reasons is religion. And it would get rid of that reason. Yeah, I was going to say that, of course, I used to be a Jehovah's Witness and one of the things that they taught was not to eat blood or take blood products.  So these are harmful things that are rooted in religion. Now that one right there, before I became a Jehovah Witness, I never even thought that blood transfusions would be against God in any kind of way. So the thing about that is religion directly teaches people to behave a certain way that's harmful directly. So that one, I think, is a really clear cut example. Yeah, I'm putting a lot of thought into what you were saying, John, in that I cannot come up with examples immediately of other supernatural-based causes or rationales to go at war with another country. It tends to be the case that the religion aspect tends to be one of the sole supernatural motivators, or not really supernatural, but just in that category of, I have an impression of what this being is telling me, let's go to war because these guys have a different impression of what a different being might be telling them. And that's justification enough for us to go over there and take their stuff. Yeah, we agree, and then that happens. I've never heard of a war that's been fought over my ghost.  You never know. Maybe there are examples of that. Though I think it's obviously more devastating the recent examples that we have where we can see, you know, that kind of rationale being used as motivators. So even if it happened 10,000 years ago, like clearly now has more damage. Scott, what do you think? I'm going to ask you, what about the Sikhs? I think they're a pacifist kind of religion. Do they, what sort of harm do they cause? I'm trying to think. I just don't know much about them other than the fact that they're pacifists, and I think they're a branch of Hinduism. No, they're not. George, you got to wait. You got to wait. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. And then we'll go to Dredd. George, what do you think? I was just going to talk about the Sikhs, as I understand them, which is not a whole lot, but I have met a couple. First of all, the Sikh temple near where I used to live, they had a shootout, in fact, among the members. So it's a fairly new religion, and there's a lot of economics involved in it, and I don't know much more than that. I think Sikhism predates even America, so it's all a realm of perspectives of how new. I don't know if they have a Punjab, Punjab has a standing military or anything like that, and I don't know what the ideals are in terms of violence or not. Maybe Dredd, I saw your hand raised, or John, either of you guys like to fill on on this? I just want to cut in because you say, Sikhism predates even America. Yeah, we haven't been around for a long time.  Well, Stonehenge is reckon to be about six thousand years old. You can't claim Stonehenge. You can't claim Stonehenge. You get Henry the first, and that's it. Maybe absolutely the conqueror at most. All right. There was a woodhenge before Stonehenge. Okay. Dredd, did you want to weigh in? Did you? Oh, you're on mute, my friend. Yeah. So my understanding is that Sikhism is almost atheistic. They do have a God belief. There is a monotheist aspect. Well, yeah, I mean, it's a lot different than what our standard Abrahamic religions are. Sure. So it has its own sort of class, I guess. The only issue why I bring that up is I tend to see a lot of atheists who are atheists, but don't like the atheist label, call themselves spiritual or Buddhist or Sikh. And it's like those have God aspects or dogma associated with them. And it feels like you'd be better off just calling yourself an atheist, though I wouldn't say it. Call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. But don't take something that's already an established thing and skew it through a personal lens where it's like, ah, but this is really what atheism is like. No, no, it's just further mudding the water. I worry about stuff like that. Larry, you want to weigh in? Yes, I was just going to say that we're talking about religion in general. But I think that there's a definite escalation of violence in the Western religions versus the Eastern. The Eastern religions are generally philosophical. They're generally atheistic, like Taoism and Shintoism, Confuciism. Several of those religions don't even have a God. They have ancestral worship. So they don't tend to toward violence so much as the Western religions do. The monotheistic, totalitarian religions of, say, Judaism, Islam and Christianity. They're more... Good points. Also, great history awards. Oh, yeah. Right? Thanks. It's one of those things where it's like, religion only gives another excuse and perhaps even a more popular one because I can see Western religions being a motivator for a lot more damage than Eastern religions. He thinks the cup's half full. Right. I think we should move on to some other things. I've got a list of 27 things here. One of the other things that religions tend to do, which is harmful, is they tend to suppress or resist the advances of science, the knowledge that we generate through science. The original sin itself comes from man eating from the tree of knowledge and that was a bad thing in the Christian Judaism tradition. It's like the more you know the worse it is for them accordingly. But think about how they oppose the teaching of evolution. Many cosmology, even the Pope himself one time said that we shouldn't examine the Big Bang because it would be in the... It's reserved for the domain of God. Right. So we shouldn't even go there and look at it. Et cetera, et cetera. They've been resisting a scientific advancement down through the ages. Yeah. Dredd, you just took yourself off mute. Did you want to say anything? No. Cool. But I agreed. Let me tell you this, Dredd. Not only are they suppressing science, but they can't even let you take a picture with a hat on at a driver's license. And then evidence and think critically. You know there was a period of time when people thought the stars were a blanket with pop holes marked. Pop through them with light shining through from the heavens into the sky. And in fact, there are flat earthers that still do. No. Well, there you go. And you know what? A lot of flat earthers fundamentally Christian. I'm just going to throw that out as well. Like you... All the age of the earth is something else. Yeah. I've seen enough documentaries on flat earth where I'm like these guys are just hardcore Christians. Excuse me first. Yeah, but go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead, Lair. Go ahead. I was just going to say that they fight the advancement of our carbon dating radiological dating because they can't have an old earth. Because the Bible says it's a young earth and they can't have the contradiction there. Right. Evolution, of course, because they have Adam and Eve. They fight against teaching evolution in school and they can't have for over 100 years now of officially in our legal establishments. And what's your part? Go for it. I was just watched a program here produced by Bill Nye and his interactions with Ken Ham. You know, there's the Ark that he's got down south there somewhere. And then the creationist museum. I mean, clearly some of those things in there are a travesty to current understanding of humanity and of the universe and of nature and all the rest of it. It's an incredible hour to watch. Yeah. And to speak on Ken Ham, we actually, Eric and I, Boudreau and I went up to the Ark Museum to do SE with the protesters of the Ark, as well as the counter protesters. And we found a great way to de-escalate and have some really good conversations there. Those are on my YouTube channel. But I would say this.  What bothered me was that they used tax money from the state to support that and continue to use tax money to fund it despite the fact that as a commercial entity, it makes no profit whatsoever. It actually just spends money. I feel like it's a travesty that state can support one religion pet project or arts and crafts project. And it's like, stop, stop, please. John, got a question for you. We were talking about religion inhibiting science. Did you have examples of that in English schools? Because I can tell you, in the South, we know the big ones that get hit. But in England, is it a similar weight? Pretty much most English schools allow the teaching of evolution. There's one or two that are unofficial schools. I haven't been recognized. They're illegal schools where they secretly meet. They shepherd their children into a big house very often in London. And they hold a Jewish type of school. And there, the curriculum is entirely different. And if they are discovered, it's a police matter to get. Wow. Yeah. So it does happen.  Yeah. Yeah, you can't. I love it. A school must be registered. It must be registered. And these are unregistered. So that is outside of the jurisdiction. George. I don't know whether I've told this before, but I used to teach A-Level Biology, which was the pre-university qualification. And I started one year with a class in the subject area of evolution. And shortly afterwards, one of the key girls, who was one of the star pupils potentially, came to me and said that my parents say I've got to change subject. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen that and I've heard that. Even at our school at Georgia Tech, I've gotten comments like that from people. I feel like this is challenging my religious beliefs. I don't think I want to be an engineer or I should change that subject. That's right. But I wanted to pick up on something that Larry said, because as an ex-science teacher, I've got some tactics to deal with some of these young Earth creationists who disrespect carbon dating. They're using the wrong, they're targeting the wrong tool because the clue is in the name. Carbon dating dates things that contain carbon, you know? And that is pretty much organic things, things that were once alive. Not fossils. In fossils, the material has been replaced by rock. It's been ossified in one way or another. There are a number of different methods in which that occurs. But the point is that carbon dating is only a reliable method for about 50 years back, 50,000 years in the past, because the half-life of carbon-14 simply isn't long enough. And to date things that are older than that, you know, give the truth about the age of the Earth, we've got to use other isotopes like uranium and radon, for example. Nice. Very cool. Thanks for that lesson. George, it's not only if you want to say something a bit back. Do you still remember? Do I remember? I wanted to ask John something that he said. I was curious about this. You said you were talking about some sort of age school that was religious and you said it was a Jewish type of school. Can you elaborate on that, please? I could Google it and send you a link. Hey, how about that? I don't have it in here, I'm afraid, but I know that it comes to my attention periodically, because as you know, as I said at the start of the show, I do a weekly global atheist news show. And I get a lot of items which are about religious horrors, religious atrocities, mostly from countries like Nigeria, Pakistan, sometimes Iran, but news doesn't come out of there very well. And in my crawling the internet for information which might be a useful news item, it's come to my attention that there are these illegal Jewish schools that are operated, they're a fee-paying school, they're not recognized by the country. And because they are secret, they do their own curriculum. It's like being homeschooled. Why are they illegal? That's my question. Right, it's because to hold a school in this country, you must be registered, you must be on the list on the register so that you can be inspected by Her Majesty's education inspectors to see the standard. I dig it. So I'm assuming that there are legal Jewish schools where you are. Oh yeah, definitely. Okay, that was my question. So where I live here, there are Jewish temples listed among the churches that are listed in the weekly newspaper. And they're not real Jewish temples. They're fake as far as I'm concerned. They're messianic after the fact, Jewish organizations. So I get confused and that's what I wanted to answer. That's totally fair. Guys, we're nearing the bottom of the half hour pretty soon. Jesus Jews, that's what you mean. Yeah, rounding out. Larry, would you mind taking us out and then we come right back in and we'll catch up when we left off? All righty. Excuse me, this is the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. 103.9 FM WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm Dodder Five and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9 FM. I'll get it right in a second. 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday June 20th, 2021. And now let's talk about the Atheist Society of Knoxville or ASK founded in 2020. I'm sorry, make that 2002. We're in our 19th year. ASK has over a thousand members and we have weekly Zoom and in-person meetings. In-person meetings are at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria in Knoxville's Old City out on the patio. You can also find us on Facebook, meetup.com or at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville you should still go to Meetup and do a search for an Atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. Right, one where you want to pick up. We're learning about Jewish schools and the illegal Jewish schools. This is a brand new concept for me. But Dredd has now something he'd like to bring to the table. What's up, Dredd? Well, it's just going back to something John had mentioned earlier about radio carbon dating. And that there's a number of scales by which we measure things in the past. Dendrochronology being counting tree rings. And that'd be a simple, very obvious way of determining how old something is and then how that matches up with radio carbon dating. And these overlapping scales of geologic time allow us to have considerable confidence in each of those methods of dating things. So I just wanted to make that point. That's a great point. They correlate each other. Different systems telling the same narrative is a very compelling series of tests in science. I would like to say this though. My issue isn't so much with the veracity of element dating. I have a very good degree of skepticism for it and it stood up to that skepticism which makes me very confident that it's a reliable test process. What I have an issue with is double standard that's applied when a Christian hears carbon dating and they think, yeah, but that's not organic material and there's a lack of scientific veracity for these 10 elements. Fluoride actually has a different half-life versus when they apply that same standard to their God belief. It's like, well, it's true because it's in a book and my pastor said it's true. It's like you have two completely different levels of skepticism that you're using and the one that you have more skepticism for you're not allowing through and the one they have the least amount for you're letting through and that's dangerous. Scott.  You've never seen that. So how are you ever going to convince me? And I'm like, but have you ever seen Jesus resurrected? No. Two standards. That goes on and on. And that argument, Scott, is what the Kim Ham uses often. Oh, my gosh. That's so silly. Bill, I would say this. It's pretty simple to say, hey, do you have kids? Yes. Do they look exactly like you? No. Do they look exactly like your grandparents? No. What do you think you call that? You call that small changes over generations, right? There's a word for that. You might want to look it up. It's awesome. It's the third pillar of biology. Larry, you had a comment too. Was it just to tell us to take a break or did you have some compelling new things? Are you moving down the list? Yeah. Yeah, I can certainly go on to the next one. One thing about religion is that they tell, they teach us, especially the Western religions and not so much the Eastern, is that we're born tainted with sin or impure and dirty from being a baby. I mean, we're born with guilt and we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to make up for the sins of the first humans according to them. So, I mean, you like start off in the hole.  You start with a debt. Yeah, that's right. And then you have to try to work your way back to it. It's like built in guilt. Which, you know, as a mental health perspective, isn't good for you. Dred, do you want to weigh on that? Yeah, well, I was just going to say, it's interesting that the whole, of course, the whole idea of sin is, you know, inculcated into children and whatnot by people who claim to be the only way out of sin. It is both the poison and the cure. It's like the guy who's selling you the antidote is also the person who injects you with poison. Exactly. Dan Barker. John, one at a time. What do you got? It's a protection racket. It is. Larry, what do you got?  There's a lot of suicidal homosexuals who think that the way they are made is sinful. Right. Suicidal trans, suicidal lot. Yeah, especially. Yeah. Larry. Well, I like to put it, it's like you have an omniscient God watching every thought and every move and every action ready to cast you into hell, you know, an eternity of painful torture for the slightest infraction. And to me, that's just the very definition of paranoia. You've got somebody watching you all the time, and that can't lead to positive outcomes of mental health. But he loves you. Yeah, but he loves you. That's even worse. George. That's reinforced with Santa Claus. George, you wanted to weigh in. What's up? Yeah, I got a couple of things to mention. The first one is that as a very non-observant person with a Jewish background, I'm not aware of Jews being born with original sin. Hmm. What was the whole garden thing? Yeah. Well, it somehow, it just doesn't seem to come out in the wash, you know. I'm just never heard of people. But George is an organic atheist. Like he's never had that. Yeah, I'm an organic atheist. It's maybe something that I don't know. But believe me, I have never heard. I mean, coming out of a city where there are a lot of Jewish people around. Do they believe in sin? They believe that sin is real? Yeah. Larry, the only thing I can answer you with is that I have never heard a Jewish person use that term or come anywhere near original sin. Yeah, but I'm asking about sin. Anything like it. Original sin. Sin in general. Were there sins when your community, even as an atheist? Not, not, it's just not a big deal. Okay. So it was aware, but it wasn't a prevailing thing. That's right. Christianity would take that term from the Old Testament. The situation where Adam and Eve sinned against God and they called it the original sin. But the Old Testament was the Jewish Torah. Yes. Yes. However, there's a lot in the interpretation of it though among the living practitioners today, let's say, is very different, I think. And of course, you got to understand about the Jewish religion is that there are at least three major divisions of it and that the belief structure may not be quite the same from one to the next. I'm going to throw this out about Christianity. The main thing I've always was taught from the Old Testament was Genesis, like all the stories that were there. So the concept of original sin was something that was at least on a monthly basis drilled into us, whether we're Baptist or Methodist or Pentecostal or Evangelical or Methodist, if I had said that already. Like whatever church we went to, drilled in the idea of original sin. So Christians really have taken that and made it more popular. So I wouldn't be surprised if for Jew it's like, there's so many other chapters in that book. It's a pretty good book. John, I want to finish what I was saying, if I may. Sure, sure, sure. Which is the next part of this, which is that around here were a lot of people who believe in a get out of jail card, which is that at the end of Woodall, if you confess that you believe in our Lord, you're going to go to heaven anyway. So it doesn't matter. I'm just saved. That's their tagline bumper sticker. You know what I'm saying? John, you're looking relaxed. No, that's something else I don't have experience with, so I can't say. John, did you want to say anything? You were looking relaxed there on the beach. Judaism seems to me to be a religion which you can unobserve quite and get away with it and still be considered to be a Jew. And yet you will still check the box for Jew when it comes to selection describing your religion. Sure, yeah. I mean, it is one of those things where it's like as much a cultural identity as it is a religious practice and you can easily spifercate the two. And that's not limited to Jews. No, no, no, no. Pasifarians got that too. Black people got that as well, yeah. Hey, George. George, you're back on the mic. What's up? I want to give an example of that. If I can tell a little story. Oh, George, the short show. Go for it. Go for it. Well, many years ago, we were living on a farm out in the country in Connecticut where there were a lot of Jewish farmers and my landlord was a Jewish farmer and he was Orthodox Jew. So it was Saturday and my wife and I were driving down the road and my landlord was trudging down the highway with his son and he waved at us. So I stopped. He said, can you give us a ride to the temple? I said, sure, get in the back, you know. So Max got in the back seat with his son and I said, Max, aren't you supposed to not be driving in a car on the Sabbath? He says, ah, it says in the Torah, you're not supposed to drive.  Now, I think that... I have to say that in my experience there's a tradition in the Jewish culture of reasoning and arguing and working things through and I think that's a lot of it, you know, is to look through the Torah and see what you can get away with. Interesting. Scott. Yeah, just real quick. A couple of years ago, kind of a long time ago, a Jewish kid on a Saturday asked me to light his cigarette for him and he gave me the lighter. I was like, what? And he said, because I can't make fires to the Sabbath. Yeah, I understand in Israel they have a whole tradition of doing this stuff like that. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of... maybe it's not so much an innovation of science but also just practicality as well in a lot of cases where it's like, hey, I need a light of fire or tie a shoe or drive myself somewhere.  But if you take him to the hospital anyway, you know, breaking the rules of your religion, is it worth the extra guilt, you know? What are you going to do? You can, but why even... why would you have to ask for forgiveness if you're trying to protect your kid in the first place? Yeah, I hear you. What do you got? What's next on the list? Well, you know, you talk to Christians or whichever religious you're talking to and they'll tell you that the reason they believe it, even though if it doesn't make sense, is faith. They've got to have faith. They've been told all their life, you know, it's just believe on faith. Like faith will give them an answer, but it doesn't. It just stops them from asking questions and you can prove it to them real quick by saying, you know, are Muslims correct? Is Muhammad the latest, greatest prophet of God? And you see, you know, they don't believe that Jesus was the prophet. No, they're wrong.   Their imams and preachers tell them that they have to believe what they say based on faith. Every other religion in the world uses faith to believe whatever they want to, but Christians or whatever will think while they're going to hell. Faith doesn't give you the answers. They're all mutually exclusive. John, when? Yeah, I go around. I get invited to speak to humanist groups and atheist groups and secular groups and university groups and places like that. And very often I give a presentation on belief. So I go through my reasoning and I end up showing them that belief is just an opinion about the unknown. You see. And then I cap that by saying... Oh, that's good. ...and faith. And I want to devalue belief. It's regarded to be too important. So I tell them, I get to the point of belief is an opinion about the unknown. And then I top it by saying and faith is belief on steroids. George, in your upbringing, was faith at all ever a component? We were talking about sin earlier, but have you ever used faith? Even colloquially? Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. It was completely alien to me. Okay.  He was raised in some sort of a Baptist type orientation. And one day he started talking about God to me. And I didn't know what he was talking about. He said, don't you believe in God? I said, gee, I don't know. And I asked my mother, I said, do we believe in God? She said, no, we believe in nature. I said, well, Lee just asked me. I said, what should I tell him? She said, tell him we believe in nature. So I went back and I told him I believed in nature and he didn't understand what I was talking about. So we were even. I can throw this out real quick. Maybe we can get a quick down table before we close out the show. But we have a very religious president, but one that is also open to the idea that there are other religions available. Like I think one of the things he did was protect abortion rights despite the fact that he's very Catholic on his own right. Very, very good. I'm America first, my own religion second. Great example. We didn't always used to have good presidents. And when we're going through that election night, I was very, very freaking out because it looked like we were going to have another uncomfortable four years. And I use uncomfortable as a euphemism in this case. But one of the things that our current president said during that night was to keep the faith and just keep believing despite the fact that the numbers were shifting slowly towards his end. And I had no other good scientific evidence to prove otherwise other than just staying optimistic and hopeful. And I think in that night, faith did help me get to sleep a little bit better that night. I'm not saying faith, this is what I'm not saying. Faith is not a good decision-making tool like to come up with conclusions. But I do think it's valuable in keeping you feeling nice. And as long as you're not using it as a, as a means to determine what's true and what's not true, you can use it as long as you're not doing that or using it to harm other people. I feel like there's some value there. Larry, what do you think? Does that seem reasonable? Well, we have to be careful not to equivocate. Okay, go for it. If you look up faith in the dictionary, you get two or three different definitions. Words can have different definitions. The faith you're talking about, like the faith of stepping on your break and having faith that it will stop your car. That's reasonable expectation based on everyday experience and years of everyday experience. Religious faith, I like the thing, and I think the dictionary will agree with me, is believing not only without evidence, but in the face of contradictory evidence. So you don't want to start using the word faith interchangeably when you're talking about religion and everyday stuff. You ought to make a distinction. That is a very good point. I'm actually going to take, I'm going to say it's not the distinction, the break example. It's exactly the, I don't have any scientific evidence to prove that Biden will win. In fact, it looks like he won't win, but he told me to keep faith anyway. And so in spite of the obvious data of numbers in front of me, I'm just going to go to sleep and hope that by the time I wake up, it's going to go like this, despite the fact that it's still trending this way. And I felt like in that aspect, in that aspect, it's like, ooh, there's a little bit of faith here, but I'm not going to use that as a tool. In that case, you're interchanging your faith with wishful thinking. It's wishful thinking at the best point. Yeah. And in my head, faith is a lot closer to that. Yeah. I feel like faith is a lot closer to wishful thinking than a lot of definitions in the Bible. Scott, what did you think? I was just going to say, you just proved that faith works. Dread. My favorite definition of faith is faith is belief without evidence. Believing without evidence. And I think it's important making sure that we also don't conflate the words faith and belief. Belief is based on observation on research experiments. And you know, you have, you actually don't have faith that your breaks are going to work. You have belief that your breaks are going to work based on the evidence that supported it. Can I throw that out? I actually like Dread's definition here. I would say knowledge is what you can demonstrate to be the case. Right? If I can't demonstrate it, but I still can be inclined to believe that it's true, then I have faith because I just lacked the demonstration for it. Maybe I have some good evidence to support it. And then when I have no evidence, I'm in faith territory where it's just wishy-washy land. Larry, what do you think? Well, I'm a little shy away from the word belief like that because there's so many believers out there that believe on things because of repetition. Things that they are told are true. And they take them on faith and end up believing on those and having these whole set of beliefs that are not based on any fact. Yeah. So I'll go back to what John had said. Yeah, I'd be valued belief because of that only because I'd rather have knowledge. And I'm willing to say I don't know it if all I have is belief in faith to support an idea. I'd rather just be like, hey, I don't know that. That's on the shelf. And I don't know it's a wonderful answer at least in the realm of science. So John, what do you think? Well, a couple of things. First of all, you, as Scott said, you proved that faith worked, but no better than a teddy bear, which could also have helped you to sleep. I did have a teddy bear growing up, but I don't know where it is anymore. Isn't that one of those sad things you think about as an adult? Kids keep the bears. Give us a sentence of interest. We'll get you a new one. John, could you plug your show again? Where can we find you at? Free thought productions on YouTube. Very, very cool. Yeah, there's lots of stuff there. Who's your next guest? Have you already lined it up? Well, it may be the bearded heretic. But I'm still waiting for him to confirm. Last time he was due to come on, he had to pull out because of a family event. But I can tell you that the week after, that's July the third, I've got Catherine, what's her name? Catherine Johnson. Catherine Roberts. She is a very interesting Canadian from Nova Scotia, who spent about 30 years as a pastor and then about 10 or 12 years ago. Not pastor. Sorry, sorry. Pastor. So sorry. So sorry. The main Canadian I know. My brain was like... She's at the other side of the country. She's in Nova Scotia. Okay. But she gave up the cloth about 10 or 12 years ago. And she's very active now in helping people to recover from religion. Well, speaking of interesting Canadians, Dred, where can we find your stuff at? Well, I stream this live every Sunday at 8 a.m. Pacific Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Time, depending which it is. And it's under Mind Pirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. Very nice. Scott, I know you're looking forward to getting back to that music station behind you. Where can we find some of your stuff and keep track of your progress? You have a music vlog too. What's going on? Yeah. The best place is to go on dubshine.bandcamp.com. It's where I'm putting all my latest releases and stuff like that that I want to showcase. And you can download it from there. And of course, you can find me on Spotify, SoundCloud, everywhere else. But that's just a really good place to go to see what's happening with me. Very nice. Speaking of music, George, you're getting into rock and roll. Please give me some recommendations. I don't want to have any. I mean, I've been just listening to James. Oh, I don't know. Why do fools fall in love? Joni Mitchell, James Taylor. Nice. Very good. Names pop up. I find them to be very good musicians. Very, very cool. Yeah. You might love math rock since you have a classical background. There's some really, really intricate mathematics that go into the percussions of math rock. I'll make you some recommendations after the show. But you can find me on Let's Chat on YouTube and Let's Chat in general, Patreon, all that stuff. We'll see you next week. Larry, I have this real considerable problem. I know we're at the end of the show. We've been talking about it and I didn't want to say it, but I don't know what atheism is about. So like, can you, we maybe should have defined it, but do you have anything that I could, maybe a matter of fact, figure out more stuff about it? I have a book on that. Get out of town. It's called Atheism. I do. It's called Atheism. What's it all about? It's available on Amazon and it's also available on Kindle through Amazon. My own content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show archives, atheist songs, and many articles on the subject. If you're on YouTube, you can find me by searching for Daughter 5 or Larry Rhodes. If you have questions for the show, you can send them by email to askanatheistatnoxfilatheist.org. If you're a member of clergy, a preacher, a pastor, or a priest, but no longer believe in the claims of religion, there is help for you at theclergyproject.org. That's clergyproject.org. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. This has been the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio.  The time to worry about it, it's when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and we'll see you next week. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody. Am I going to your hell?


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Michael Humer, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of 2013's The Problem of Political Authority. So let me just start by asking you about the title of the book. I mean, what is the problem of political authority? The problem is basically what is the basis of the state's authority? And what I mean by this is two things. First, why is it that we're obligated to obey the government when they make laws where we wouldn't be obligated to obey anyone else who made similar commands? And the second question is what entitles the state to coerce other people to obey them where it would not be permissible for anyone else to use coercion in similar circumstances. And that comparison is your main strategy there. Yeah. So for example, if I decided to tax people in order to provide benefits for the poor, I would be considered an extortionist. In fact, then the state would come and arrest me and put me in prison and the rest of my society would approve of their arresting me. But when the government does the same thing, it's considered to be praiseworthy. Isn't the answer that, well, they're the state and states get to do stuff like that and non-states don't? Yeah, it seems like we need more of an answer to that. That is, we need an answer to, and why do states get to do things like that? Now, as far as I know, nobody has actually proposed that there's no further answers just because it's a state. Usually they try to say something about the state that means that it gets to do those things. And it seems to be required if, generally speaking, normal groups of people are not allowed to do certain things and there has to be some difference between normal groups of people and the state if they're allowed to do it and normal groups of people aren't allowed to do it. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, you could say, oh, the difference is just the property of being a state. As far as I know, nobody thinks that that's an adequate explanation, right? You begin in the beginning of the book, you have a section about this hypothetical of someone going around locking people up in his basement. Maybe you can go through that to kind of tease out a bit of why it's weird when we think about people doing the sorts of things that states seem to do every day. Yeah, so the story is there are some bandals in the neighborhood and for whatever reason, nobody's been doing anything about it.   And unfortunately, if they should decide not to pay you, then you will have to label them criminals at which point you will also kidnap them and lock them in the basement with the vandals. Now, I think people would have maybe mixed feelings about kidnapping the vandals, but definitely if you kidnap the neighbors who don't pay you and lock them in your basement, that would not be okay. Right, but this does seem to be like the behavior of a government. Right, so they make rules and then they decide the people who violate the rules that they made are subject to long-term confinement in very unpleasant conditions. Well, it seems like at least one initial obvious objection to that is that you didn't provide them with due process and rules that were sketched out beforehand and things that we think are good for governments to have. Yeah, so you could say that, so we could imagine that you write down some rules that describe the conditions under which you're going to lock people in your basement. Right, and you know, you can make the rules whatever you want, but that doesn't change most people's reaction, right? Just because I wrote down a description of how I'm going to proceed when I kidnap people, that doesn't really make it okay. And if I provided a trial too, I might seem like if you added enough protections in there then just the justness of what you're doing ends up giving it legitimacy in some way.  Right, or if you're super principled enough, because I mean, Sans, the part about asking for money from your neighbors so far what you've described looks a lot like say Batman, and we all kind of applaud when Batman does his thing. Yeah, well, so as I say, you might have different feelings about locking up the vandals. If the vandals are really bad, and if the punishment is fair and proportionate, some people would say it's okay, and provided that the mechanism for determining people's guilt is really reliable and fair and so on. Okay, but really almost no one would say that it's okay for me to demand money from the neighbors for my services and then lock them up if they don't pay. It really matters what the rules are that I'm making, right? Imagine that I decide that my neighbors are not allowed to consume certain substances because I decided that they were unhealthful. And then so I kidnap people who are consuming the unhealthful substances and I lock them in the basement too. Right, and notice that the people who believe in the authority of the state do not believe merely that the state is allowed to make correct rules. They believe that you're obligated to obey the law and that the state is entitled to enforce the law even if the law is not so great. So like there are very few people who think that because the drug laws are not just that a police officer who enforces them is equivalent to a kidnapper. Let me ask, because you've been saying in a lot of what you've said, you've said things like some people might think or some people might not think and we're talking about moral questions here and so these are these things that people might think or not think are our opinions about moral matters. So let's maybe take a step back and talk about the moral system that we're operating within. You have an earlier book called Moral Intuitionism. Yeah, Ethical Intuitionism. Ethical Intuition – sorry. So is that what we're talking about here? Are we just talking about – it seems to people so they have intuitions about this because we might have reasons like we could posit a utilitarian system where we say what's morally right is what produces the most happiness and having a state leads to more happiness than not so therefore the state is morally permissible no matter what our intuitions about individual people doing this sort of thing or we could have some sort of natural law rule or whatever. So how does ethical intuitionism fit into this? Yeah, well, I am relying on people's common sense moral intuitions but I don't think that there's any alternative starting point that's not more controversial, right? I mean, so when I say things like well people would not accept locking the people in your basement because they didn't pay you that's a pretty widespread moral judgment among both liberals and conservatives and whatever your theory of morality is, as long as you believe there is such a thing you should accept the value judgments that are pretty much uncontroversial at least as a starting point. But isn't it generally uncontroversial that the state – it's okay for the state to do these sorts of things? Like I mean if you went around and polled people and said do you think that the state's authority is legitimate my guess is the majority of people and especially people outside of philosophy departments would probably say yeah it's okay for the state to lock people up, it's okay for the state to tax people and it's not okay for an individual to do it and that's what my intuitions tell me. Yeah, basically the problem is that people have inconsistent judgments so that is I think people's judgments or intuitions in moral philosophy are incompatible with their intuitions about political philosophy. In just ordinary moral philosophy when you're talking about the conduct of people it's considered pretty much uncontroversial that it would be wrong to do the equivalent of taxing people it's wrong to extort money from people even if you're giving it to a good cause with very few exceptions but then in political philosophy people endorse exactly the same behavior on the part of the state. Now you could render these two positions consistent if you could find some relevant difference between the state and non-state agents but in fact the attempts to do so don't work out very well. And the interesting thing too is that you do not sketch out a theory of rights or property as your starting point as some people political theorists often do. That's right. I mean I think a general theory of rights or theory of property or even more so a general theory of morality like utilitarianism or social contract is going to be much more controversial than the ethical intuitions that I'm starting from. So I think there's no way that for example you could be justified in starting from utilitarianism if you weren't justified in starting from just common sense moral intuitions. Explain that a little bit further actually. Yeah so I mean the judgment that I'm relying on like you shouldn't extort money from people. That's more obvious than the judgment that the right action is always the action that maximizes the total utility of society. Right. They maximize total utility principle is sort of vaguely plausible. You know it's not obviously wrong and you know it seems plausible to many people but it's quite controversial. If you think that that's justified you know things that are even more obvious and less controversial should be more justified. Right. It's hard for me to see how somebody could reject the more obvious on the basis of the less obvious. And so the obviousness the agreed upon this possibly or the obviousness is counts in favor of it being true in comparison with something that is less obvious. I'm not going to talk about it's obviously wrong to torture children for no reason versus a more complex theory that is a because this is something a lot of philosophers would disagree with and it sounds maybe weird to people that the obviousness counts in favor of its truth because philosophers seem to say things that are so counterintuitive and not obvious so many times. Yeah right. Well so you know what could what could be the possible alternative basis for your philosophical views and that's what seems to you to be the case. Right. And you know I've argued in previous work that basically there is no alternative. If you're forming a theory it's based upon the way things seem to you. Given that it would be irrational for you to take the things that less that seem less obvious rather than the things that seem more obvious. Let me ask a bit more about this obviousness before we turn to your takes on the theories that are often given in support of the state's authority because again it seems a lot of people think it is simply say obvious that the United States government has the kind of authority to do these sorts of things locking people up taxing them that Trevor doesn't and that the reason is because the United States government is obviously a state in the way that Trevor is not no matter how much he might you know stomp his foot and insist that he is or that he has these powers and so could could we say something like you know a state a state derives this from being thought of as a state that when enough people just simply see this thing as a state then it gets to do state like things and so that's where the disconnect is just that we can't really analogize back to individual behavior because an individual is obviously not a state and we then would need a story of how states get to be and how they cross that threshold from obviously not a state to obviously a state but that doesn't necessarily apply in the real world where we have lots of obvious states. Yeah so first I don't think that you would really want to say that just being a state gives you the entitlement to coerce right so that would mean that because the Nazi government is a national government they're entitled to coerce. Most people who believe in political authority or almost everyone thinks that there are some restrictions that there are some conditions that the state has to meet before can become legitimate right not just the property of being a state maybe it has to be at least somewhat democratic maybe it has to do at least a minimally good job of protecting people's rights and so on. Okay well that's the first thing but second thing is it's just extremely implausible that merely the property of being a state is explanatory for why it's permissible to coerce people right so what is that what is the property of being a state it's something like the property of being a powerful organization that has claimed a monopoly on the use of physical force in a geographical area something like that really that gives you the entitlement to coerce. If we go to some of these theories though we say let's look at social contract I'm sure some people right now thinking well we have a constitution of the United States society Locke believed and others believe we had a social contract that was created so if we all got together and voluntarily agreed about something so for example if we're trying to decide where to go to dinner tonight and we say well whoever gets to whoever wins a coin flip gets to pick and we all agree to that then that seems to be a good way of governing ourselves so how about that as a theory of why the state is justified. Yeah yeah there would be there would be great the only problem is that it's false right and the only problem with that theory is that there wasn't any such agreement so but if there was it would be cool I mean right in other words no nobody ever presented me with that contract and asked for my signature you know remember that ever happening you know if you want you can try sending the federal government a letter telling them that you don't agree and that's not going to get you out of anything right they're not going to stop charging you taxes. And last I heard it cost something like $20,000 to renounce your citizenship or something like that in fees. I thought it was 2000. Was it 2000? But then there's this you quote the hypothetical social contract that the idea that yeah of course there wasn't this agreement but if there had been we would have all agreed to it or we all behave as if it had existed or something like that so we can kind of posit this social contract even if there never was really one how does that work? Yes sounds a little crazy right. There's some circumstances in which a merely hypothetical agreement can be morally efficacious. Typically this would be when an actual agreement is not possible. So let's say you have this accident victim who's been brought into the hospital and he's unconscious and typically it requires consent from a patient in order to treat the patient even in order to provide life-saving treatment you require consent to the patient. Unfortunately this patient is unconscious so what do you do? And most people agree reasonably that well you appeal to what the person probably would consent to if they were able like if this person were conscious he probably would agree to have life-saving medical treatment so it's permissible to administer the treatment. That works fine. This is not going to work for the social contract though. You can't really make the argument that well we can just rely on the hypothetical possibility that people would agree to have the state. This doesn't work because the actual citizens are not all unconscious. It is possible to ask them if they agree. The reason why the state is not asking them is that too many people would say no. In particular if the result of saying no I don't agree is that you don't have to pay any taxes then lots of people would say no I don't agree right. That's the main reason why the federal government isn't asking them. Well it seems like there's other ways that we can indicate agreement so obviously classic one would be you're here therefore you've agreed like it or leave it right. If you're here therefore you've agreed to the basic principles of the United States government or wherever you are. Yeah that's perhaps the favorite theory of undergraduate students as to how you agree to the social contract and if you don't agree with the government then you have to leave your house and of course you have to leave behind all your friends and family and your job and to move to what? Antarctica I guess. If you don't want to have a government just move to Antarctica and that will signal that you don't agree. Well that is true possibly. That would do it. Imagine that anybody other than a government tried to make this argument right. So you know I just go to my neighbor and I say pay me a thousand dollars. He said no I go well okay you were living in your house so you agreed to pay me a thousand dollars. You don't want to pay me a thousand dollars and you have to get out of your house and move to Antarctica. No, no this doesn't really work.  But I can't demand that they get out of their own house. Similarly the state can't demand that everybody vacate their own property if they don't want to have the state. What if the state is the property owner though in some sense.  I could keep someone from coming into my house or I could keep someone from I could kick them out of my house as you acknowledge but the state so if you the state is just having a house a big piece of property then they can do that too. That's right. Yeah they could do that if they had acquired legitimate title to all of the land. But how would they have done that? Basically their only way of acquiring control over the land would be by force. Now if the state already has legitimate authority then they could just pass a law that says we all the land but we're trying to figure out how they establish their authority in the first place so we can't assume that they already have legitimate authority. If we don't assume that they already have legitimacy then there's no way of accounting for how they would own all of the territory. What about what's often called like an associational account of authority which is this kind of we owe it to each other to obey due to benefits. So this is the philosopher H. L. A. Hart made this argument that if I've benefited from a bunch of people getting together and sacrificing in some way so they all got together and built a really great park or playground and then I went and used it then I now owe them something in return like whether that's helping out or paying for the park or whatever else. And so the government ends up looking like that kind of cooperative scheme. Yeah so this would be plausible under certain conditions but not always. So if a group of your neighbors decide to provide some service and then later they just come to you and say you have to help pay for it well really really strongly depends on what the service was if it was something that you didn't want and especially if it was something that you actually told them you didn't want but even if it was something that you wanted but they just didn't ask you beforehand you know usually it would look like you're not obligated to help right. Now you might think okay but if you then go and use the service then you have to help pay for it right. Maybe but also it kind of depends upon further details. So suppose that your neighbors decided to they decided to open this restaurant that's going to be paid for by the neighborhood and after opening and they didn't consult you and then after opening it they say now you know you have to pay some of the expenses of running this restaurant. Well if you voluntarily choose to use the restaurant maybe you have to pay. Suppose though that the reason why you have to use the restaurant is that they have forcibly shut down every other restaurant using threats of violence right against anybody else who wants to run a competing restaurant. In terms of you using the restaurant voluntarily then you could have to pay only if they shut down all the other restaurants and gave you no other options is that the point you're making? Sorry if you have to use their service because they have forcibly prevented anyone else from providing the service then you don't have any obligation to them right and they're acting wrongfully. And the point here is this is analogous to the government. The reason why you have to use the government is that they have prohibited anyone else from operating like a government. So that is if you try to set up a competing organization to provide the same goods as the government the government will come and shut you down by force. So that's why you have to turn to the government.  Is this also the case to a lesser extent possibly for public schools and roads and things that libertarians often get accused of being hypocrites for even using? Now we can use private schools and possibly we could negotiate the world without using public roads with much effort. And helicopters. And helicopters and things like that. So would that help absolve the state of that moral culpability that you're accusing it of? Not really, no. So the government is going to charge you money regardless of whether you use the services or not. They're going to charge you the same amount of property taxes for example regardless of whether you send your kids to the public schools. So in essence they're forcing you to pay for the service and then you can either use the service or not. But if in those circumstances you choose to use the service that doesn't mean that you're agreeing, right? If you could get out of paying by not using the service but you voluntarily use the service then we could say that you were agreeing to paying, right? You're not agreeing to pay if you do something where no matter what you did you would have been forced to pay. What about a consequentialist argument? Someone says, okay, sure. You may not need to, it seems odd for us to force you to do this stuff but if we didn't have governments things would be really awful. Or if we allowed for competing governments then things would be awful in terms of there would be strife and war and whatever else. And so we just need you to buck up and obey and pay for it because the alternative would be so much worse than the harms you're suffering having to pay taxes. Yeah, so there are two kinds of responses to this. The first is to explain why anarcho-capitalism would not be so bad, right? And that's basically the second half of the book but that's a long discussion or a long debate that I would have to have. But the second thing is only a very tiny portion of what the state does could be justified by consequentialist grounds. So if you're making this argument that well we're justified in doing things that would normally be rights violations or maybe in fact they are rights violations because some disaster will happen otherwise. Then the only activities that that justifies are the minimal activities necessary to prevent that disaster from happening. But the state does all kinds of things that are not remotely necessary to prevent this collapse of society that the advocates of government are warning us about, right? So for example, how does this justify drug prohibition, right? Like the fact that you need the state to provide law and order. How does that make it so that I'm obligated to not smoke marijuana or is permissible for the government to kidnap somebody who's smoking marijuana and lock them in cage for a couple of years? It seems like any theory of political authority would have to accept that whatever justifies it would be sort of concurrent. It would be limited in scope based on what the nature of the justification is. So if you're saying yes, you're allowed to coerce people when there's an asteroid that's going to hit earth and everyone needs to build a big machine and we got two days and the only way to do it is to put a gun to everyone and say work on the machine. So there's some amount of authority but that doesn't get you all the way. That would be true of almost any theory of political authority. Yeah, this is basically what I'm saying that the concept of authority is not just the idea of having an entitlement to do good things or to do things that anyone would be entitled to do. The concept of authority is that the state is entitled to coerce people to obey it even when the state is actually making a mistake. So that is to some extent it's supposed to be that you're obligated to obey the law just because that's the law, not because that's something that there's an independent reason to do. And similarly, it's supposed to be that it's permissible for the government to enforce the law just because it's the law and not because there's some independent reason why everybody needs to do that thing. Right, and that's the very morally problematic part of the idea of authority. Before we move on to the consequences of not having an adequate theory of political authority, the ones that we've gone through so far you've dismissed very quickly. They obviously just don't work.  Or what do you see? Are there ones that seem to actually get close? Well, I think the consequentialist argument comes closest. That is, it's a complicated and difficult issue whether you actually need a government in order to avoid some terrible consequences. It's not irrational for someone to think that you do. And then from there it's not irrational to think that you justify an interesting range of government activities. But it just doesn't succeed in justifying a whole bunch of other government activities. So that's somewhat reasonable. What about voting? We haven't brought up that one yet, actually. We talked about presence. We talked about voluntary, using a restaurant for example, voluntary use of things. What about giving you the right to vote in terms of a theory of democracy that now gives you a say in what sort of things are going to be out there? So therefore, even if there are things that you don't like or things that are wrong, at least the people ought to say in it. Yeah. Well, it seems like, I mean, if this is an attempt to explain how we actually have consent, it seems like people would have to first have a say in just the existence of the governments. You would have to have had a chance to vote on whether to have a government. And then it looks like you should have had a chance to vote on the general structure of the government, vote on the provisions that would be in the Constitution and things like that, which of course none of us alive were given a chance to do. Okay, but even after all that, really usually the fact that a majority of some group votes for something, usually that does not override what you would normally think of as the rights of the minority. Right? So if there are six people in a room and four of them vote that they want to beat up the other two, that just gives them no right at all. Like the fact that there are more of them, like the group who wants to beat up the other group is larger, that just cuts no moral ice at all. That doesn't give them any kind of justification, right? So it's really hard to see how the fact that a majority of people vote for something gives any kind of legitimacy. What if we lowered it though as opposed to taking an extreme example? We have six people or 60 people or 600 people who vote and 400 of them vote and 200 don't to put a stoplight in the village, which means that as opposed to beating them up, they take a very small amount from everyone, including the 200 who didn't vote for it. Does that change? Does the degree change the moral calculus at all then? I wouldn't think so. I mean, so look at my original scenario, there's four people who want to do something to people who don't. What if the four people just want to take like a dollar from each of the other two? No, it's still impermissible, right? And the fact that there's more of them doesn't, I mean, that's irrelevant. And then the fact that you increase the number from four to 400, that's irrelevant, right? I mean, it doesn't matter that it's 400 versus 200. Now, you might have different intuitions because some other factors are changed in your version of the story, right? That is, you might have the assumption that this stoplight or the street that the stoplight is going to be put on is public property. And so if you assume that, and then maybe there are already some rules in place as to how public property gets disposed of, then it might seem like it's legitimate. Of course, then the question is how the public property got to be established in the first place. There has to be a story about how that land got to be a public property that doesn't involve violating people's rights. It does seem, though, that many people would think the scale does matter, and maybe they're just wrong, but five to one versus five million to one, if there's one person left voting against this, then there is some sort of big difference there that matters. Yeah, I mean, there might be a kind of utilitarian argument. You might think, yeah, if there are five million people, like five million people's preferences could be satisfied versus one person's preferences being satisfied. And then depending on how strong the preferences are, you might think the increase in utility is enough to justify violating what would have been the other person's rights. That's sort of debatable, right? But what in fact goes on in a democracy is you don't need a five million to one ratio. You just need to have 50% plus one, and then you get to coerce the 50% minus one group, right? Yeah, but you had your chance to vote, and it could have been 99% to one. It was the possibility, and who knows whatever came out, but it could have been that, right? Yeah, but I mean, I don't see why that matters. Let me ask about how your views play out among other philosophers. I mean, are you in the decided minority when it comes to saying none of the arguments for political authority work, or do other people agree with you as well? Because we see a lot of political philosophy being done out there, and if political authority doesn't work, that would seem to put an end to it, right? Like, we wouldn't need to spend our time thinking about what the optimal setup for the state is, or what role it should play if it can never get off the ground. So in terms of the philosophers who do political authority type of work, which is a little different, I guess, than political theory, did they just consider you a crazy person? Surprisingly not. Yeah, so there's been a lot of work on political obligation specifically. That is whether you're obligated to obey the law just because it's the law, and surprisingly it has come to be a pretty orthodox position, right? Not by any means universal, but it's a pretty mainstream position that there's no political obligation. Now, there's been a lot less attention to the political legitimacy part, the entitlement of the state to coerce, but the arguments on that issue are really very similar to the arguments on political obligation. Now, the idea that the state doesn't have authority, though, is quite different from the idea that we need to get rid of the state. So the idea that the best society is an anarchist society, that's a very, that's a small minority position. The idea that the state lacks authority, though, it's just the idea that they're not entitled to coerce you to do something just because it's the law, right? So they might be entitled to coerce you to do something because just in general, that's a thing that a person should be, should do, and anyone would be entitled to force the person to do that. They're not entitled to do that, in my view, just because they're the state and they're the law. Can you distinguish these terms a bit for us or just clarify? So we've got political obligation, we've got political authority, and then we also have this political legitimacy. Yeah, so authority is the combination of legitimacy and obligation. So the state has authority if it's entitled to force us to obey and we're obligated to obey. Political obligation is the obligation to obey the state just because the state issued some commands. And political legitimacy is the entitlement of the state to force you to obey their commands. Can one of those exist without the other? What would a situation look like where there was just legitimacy and no obligation or just obligation and no legitimacy? I don't know if there are any such situations. I have to think about that. And so you might think it's okay for the state to use force to try to make people obey, but it's permissible if you can get away with it to evade their command. You might think that. I mean, there's a possible argument for this. Like, if you have a purely consequentialist justification of legitimacy, you can say, well, there would be very bad consequences if the state didn't issue coercive commands, issue commands that were backed by a threat of coercive enforcement. However, for you as an individual, there really wouldn't be any big negative consequences if you disobey a law personally, right? Like, the state has to enforce laws in general, but from your individual standpoint, there are no negative consequences from you disobeying. And you mentioned that the idea that there is some sort of thing as political obligation is not a rare idea in the philosophical community. So I assume the conventions where all you guys meet up, they're all libertarians, I imagine? No, unfortunately not. The field of political philosophy is, of course, dominated by leftists, very dominated by left-wing thinkers. It's hard to think of a conservative and there are a few libertarians. I think there are even fewer conservatives than libertarians. So it is kind of surprising that the rejection of political obligation is pretty well regarded, right? It's probably the most widely held view among the people who actually work on that topic. They're not libertarians, right? They're leftists. And it's just because, you know, people went through the arguments and tried to come up with a justification for political obligation and they just don't work. And that brings it back maybe, though, to the point you made a few minutes ago about how this doesn't actually mean that we should be abolishing the state tomorrow and the difference between philosophical anarchism and political anarchism. That's right, yeah. I mean, most of the people who reject political obligation do not think that we need to dismantle the state. Most of them think that we need a state, you know, to prevent some kind of disastrous collapse of society and everybody beating each other up and so on. But they also think that, you know, if there's a law that tells you to do something that there's no independent moral reason to do, don't do it. You don't have to do it. And then the difference between philosophical anarchism and political anarchism, is that in that distinction there? Yeah, so what they call philosophical anarchism is it's the idea that you're not obligated to obey the law just because it's a law. So it's permissible for you to disobey, you know, provide you're not going to hurt other people by doing so and things like that. Political anarchism is the idea that it would actually be better. The best society would actually be one with no state. These terms are confusing because the terminology suggests that one of these doctrines is philosophical and the other one isn't, and one of them is political and the other one isn't, but actually they're both philosophical doctrines and they're both political doctrines. So the terminology is a little nonsensical. In the political anarchism world, the idea that the world would be better without a state, it seems like we'd have to take into account the fact that we're used to states and we live in a state-centered world now, so at least getting rid of them or changing our dispositions to be in states might take a very long time. That's right, yeah. So in fact, I'm not proposing that we should just abolish the state tomorrow. Basically, there has to be a lot of change in people's beliefs. There would need to be a shift in values, so there would need to be more suspicion of authority and more people would have to understand how the anarchist theory works, because if the state were abolished tomorrow, the next thing that would happen is the next day somebody would set up a state again. And that's because 98% or more of the population thinks that we need a state. What do you find usually after you give the reasons for your ideas? What do you usually find is holding people back? Because you would describe philosophical and political anarchism as a more moral position than a state-based system. Most people think that that's probably crazy, so after you've not done all these arguments, what do you find still holds people back from becoming anarchists? Well, I mean, if you want the psychological answer to that, I think psychologically, the answer is status quo bias. And most people are just not really up for considering a radical departure from the way their own society works, and also do not want to hold a fringe view. That is a view that's very far from the views held by the rest of their friends and so on, and that would be considered crazy. I think that's the real reason why it's hard for anarchism to make progress.  Right, and that seems to be the argument even among libertarians who are not anarchists because quite a lot of libertarians are not anarchists. They're monarchists in the vein of Robert Nozick or they're classical liberals or something of that sort. They believe that there should be a state in that it's legitimate and has authority and should enforce certain laws. She looked through those aimed at protecting our rights, and so for those of us libertarians who are not anarchists or skeptical of it, can you give us maybe the thumbnail sketch of how that works? Like without a state there to protect our rights, protect our property, protect us from violence, so on and so forth, wouldn't we just have chaos and anarchy in the way that that term is often used? No. For people who are already libertarian monarchists, they probably already know what the anarcho-capitalist theory is, but basically the theory is we need to privatize the functions of the state. If you already believe in privatization for most industries, really what you should be asking yourself is why do you think that the protection industry is different from all or almost all other industries? That's policing me. So the government provides a service of protection from rights violators. My claim is the same reasons why the government shouldn't control agriculture and they shouldn't control clothing and shouldn't control housing also apply to why they shouldn't control protection. If there's a particular provider that has a monopoly and they get to force you to subscribe to their service, it's going to be lower quality, there's going to be lower supply, they're going to jack up the prices and so on. But it seems like we're talking about potentially two different things because there's protection, but then there's control of the laws, right? So you could imagine a society where we had a state that wrote the laws and ultimately enforced them in the sense of courts, but where our police forces were all just security guards hired and private. So it seems like there might be a difference between – we can have multiple competing garment manufacturers because Trevor and I can wear garments from different places without any conflict coming out of that or we can buy our food from different farmers and different grocery stores, but that seems to be different if we could operate on different sets of laws entirely. So then what was considered a violation under my law is not for Trevor's and so then Trevor violates what's illegal for me but not illegal for him and how do we handle that? And so it seems like competing legal systems seems potentially more problematic than just having different police forces. Yeah. So the basic story is when two people have a dispute with each other, they need a dispute resolution service, right? So they hire a third party arbitrator and then the third party decides what's the resolution of the dispute. The reason they do this is that this is a much better way of solving disputes than fighting it out, right? Now in the anarcho-capitalist world where people are hiring protection agencies, the protection agencies themselves will probably require that you go to third party arbitration to resolve your disputes because, you know, again it's more efficient and they don't want to get messed up in this situation where there's this war between different customers, right? But if going to a third party to settle disputes is better enough that people would do it in the absence of a state, why do we settle so many disputes by fighting right now? I mean constantly people beat each other up all the time in disputes.  Yeah, well two things. One, no, people don't do that all the time. Like I've never, you know, in my adult life I've never been in a fight and I don't know anyone who has like in a physical fight. Well you are a philosophy professor so that might be a reason for that. Yeah, maybe, you know, to buy a sample, right? Most of my friends are intellectuals but still. But the other thing is actually so the government provides this dispute resolution service, the government court system, you can sue people but it's so bad, right? I mean it's so incredibly expensive and it takes so long to resolve disputes that it's almost worse to resolve a dispute using the government's method than it is to fight it out, right? And you know, that's pretty bad. Like, you know, you're really failing, really falling down on the job, right? Like which would you rather have? Somebody has a fist fight with you or they sue you? As soon as people are saying fist fight over suing then there probably means there's something wrong with the court system. Yeah. But why wouldn't that mean then that we would expect to see like two countries have a dispute which looks a lot like two protection agencies with different legal systems, their clients are in a dispute but countries don't tend to go to, they don't always turn, always are often turned to say the United Nations to settle it. They instead go to war which is extraordinarily costly and they know it's extraordinarily costly going in. Yeah, isn't that weird? Yeah, I mean, it seems totally irrational. Of course if you analyze political action by assuming that countries are people then they're completely irrational people. On the other hand, if you analyze political action by looking at the specific actual people who are involved in making decisions on behalf of the country, it's a little different, right? Because the enormous expense that you're talking about is not borne by the actual people who are making the decision to go to war, right? So George W. Bush did not have to pay three trillion dollars because he started that war in Iraq and he also didn't have a risk of getting shot in the war and he didn't have to shoot anyone else, right? So I mean, part of the problem is that the decision makers are insulated for the costs. And that seems to be this question of will we talk about the government in terms of the government should pay or the state should pay? If we listen to your arguments and then take them seriously, we're just talking about a group of people who happen to be named a thing, the government or the state. Yeah. There's a group of ordinary human beings who have gotten control of a lot of weapons and they've convinced a lot of other people to obey them, right? And then they decide to do a bunch of things that you would consider to be horribly wrong if any other organization was doing them, right? And if you look at the world in that way, then things like immigration restrictions and licensing laws and all that is just ordinary people deciding that they don't like certain things that are happening, which may be because they happen to have something called authority that people agree with, but there is no moral justification of them doing that, which of course libertarians in general make that claim a lot about a lot of different things. Yeah. I mean, this is really... I think the core rationale for libertarian policies is just look at what you would think of government policies if they were done by anyone else, if they were done by an ordinary person, because actually the government is just a group of people who are not superior to the rest of us, right?  So if I decided as an individual that I don't want foreigners just moving next to me and taking up jobs with companies in my neighborhood, and so I use physical force to stop foreigners from coming in, people would call me a racist and they would consider this very wrong. And basically the same applies for all of these other controversial libertarian issues, right? Consider the drug legalization debate. If anyone other than the government was issuing these edicts that there are certain substances that you can't consume and then using threats of physical violence to capture people who consume them, that would be considered very wrong. You've told me before that you advocate, I think what you call rational extremism or reasonable extremism in the... and how to advocate for liberty. Could you talk a little bit about what that means and what you think it brings to the table for the arguments that we make here every day at the Cato Institute and had all over the country? Yeah, so I am an extremist. I mean, my ultimate position is anarchism. But that doesn't mean that I'm unreasonable. I think that people have a misperception that if you take an extreme position, just that by itself is rhetorically ineffective and will make people not listen to you. But I think if you have the extreme position but you have reasonable arguments for it, then you can get people to listen. On the other hand, if you have a more moderate position but it's incoherent, I think that's less effective, right? And basically I think more moderate positions are incoherent. I basically think, I mean, the rationales for libertarianism, if you follow it through, are going to lead to anarchism. Now the reasonable aspect is, well, you know, when you're advocating your extreme position, you should listen to what the other side's arguments are and confront them. I think there's a lot of kind of libertarian literature that appears to be unaware of the other side's arguments. So libertarians frequently reject the idea of political authority and maybe not under that label, but basically assume that there's no such thing as authority, but don't actually respond to the reasons that people have given for why there would be authority. So my suggestion is read the most intelligent and informed opponents and then try to respond to what they say.  Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


Hello guys, it's been about a month since I last did a video so I thought I'd put another one up even though I've not been fishing. Reason for that is because I'm about to move home. I've got the horrible job of having to move all my fishing kit. Guess how many fishing rods I've got? I don't know, honestly I don't know the answer, I've just got to put this one away. It's my adrenaline acolyte trotting rod, lovely rod, very fragile, gets a few complaints for being a bit easy to break, but yeah, it's good people to tend to upstick it. If you're like me and you've got too much fishing kit, you might want to have a look at how you store your fishing rods. I don't have a lot of space as you can see, I've got my garage lock up. The first thing I tend to do, sorry to get my thumb out of the way, the first thing I tend to do is throw away the rod tube, they come in all the bag that they come in and I like to leave my rods set up and ready to go, but what is the best way of organising your fishing rods? Well mine sort of range from 6 to 16 foot in length and I can't, well I've started to break a few down and pile them up on the wall there. I tend to leave them set up and the easiest thing I've found is to have them hung up on the ceiling, hang them up high. I've seen loads of ways of hanging your fishing rods, but yeah I just use those cut hooks, inexpensive and you can get the different sizes, keep them secure. I know this seems a bit excessive, this is one of two garages, but I'm a fishing coach, professional angling instructor and guide, so when people ask me what type of fishing is most fun, I need to be able to give them the options of the different methods. I love it all whether it's bait lure or fly, I couldn't care less, my rod is going to go up nearly, it's going to swan in doors, nearly, yeah don't want that rod falling over. That's the other reason for hanging them up actually, you can't knock them over if they're hung up high and you can't tread on them, yeah if you're keen to give fishing a go and you live in the south west, doesn't matter whether you're a beginner or just someone that's growing tired of using the same method, give us a shout, have a look at the Fishwish website or leave a comment in the video, you can also buy a fishing gift voucher for a later date if it's for someone else. These have become really popular to guided kayak fishing, we've got the pedal drive for powering the boat so your hands are free for fishing. If it's just fishing that you were hoping to see on this channel then apologies, most of the videos are. Have a look at the fishing channel playlist for past and most recent UK fishing videos, there aren't many all-round fishing channels and hopefully there will be a few videos that match the type of fishing that interests you most. Thanks for watching and good luck when you're out fishing next and hopefully you can wish me some luck trying to shift this lock when we move in a few days time. Good luck.