 Γειαρόν, Διβέιτ, Ευρώπ, Βολιόν 3. Ευχαριστώ για έναν άλλο επεισόδιο και σήμερα η συμφωνία είναι η Ιλίγιον. Στο πρώτο μήκο, εμείς συμφωνήσαμε με τον Μαρξίσ, το δεύτερο μήκο, το τραδικό. Σήμερα, εμείς έχουμε τη συμφωνία με τη Ιλίγιον. Πολλογήουμε πολλές. Είναι υπάρχει ένα Βόδιο, νομίζουμε ένα Βόδιο, μπορείτε να έχουμε μορραλίδι μετά ο Βόδος, μπορείτε να έχουμε... Πρέπει να χρειαζόμαστε οι ιδέες της οικογένειας, αν θέλουμε να προηγούμε οι ιδέες της εμφρήτητας στην πολιτική, και κάτι άλλο που η συμφωνία μπορεί να μας χρειαζόμαστε. Ο Γειαρόν's διβέντες σήμερα, είναι η Γιώργια Ελ-Γελ-Χόλλης. Είναι ένα καλύτερο επεισόδιο, να μην προνάζει το δεύτερο μήκο, αλλά εγώ κάνω αυτό με όλοι. Είναι, πραγματικά, η Βόδια Ιλίγιον was the only person whose name was short enough so that I could pronounce it properly. You can't even pronounce my name. So, Γιώργια is a social commentator, she's active in the freedom movement, and she's going to take the side that is more pro-religion today. Also, we'll have to say goodbye to Giorgia a bit earlier because she's gonna be on BBC Radio 5 talking about the recent controversy in King's College London, where apparently the fact that the university sent an email with the photo of Prince Philip is something that constituted hard. But this is an issue where probably we agree with Giorgia, so today we're gonna focus on issues we don't agree because otherwise it's not as good fun. And as every Tuesday with us, Yaron Bruc, Yaron is the chairman of the board of the Andron Institute, he's the host of the Yaron Bruc show, and he has co-authored books like Equal is Unfair and the Free Market Revolution. So, without any delay, let me go through the usual rule. So, each side has eight to 10 minutes for some introductory remarks. What are your takes on the topic? And the other side can either reply or you can have your own remarks and then we have more time for discussion. Now, our audience, you send your questions via Super Chat, Raj is gonna see the Super Chat, he gonna send them to me and then I'm gonna pass your questions to our speakers. And before we start, obviously many thanks to the Andron Institute for supporting these series, soon we're gonna have Yaron in person in Europe if the state authorities allows him to travel, but until then we have these great debates. So, Yaron. Am I on some banned list that the authorities need allowing me to travel? Yes, you are in the no fly list. So, let's begin, Yaron, the floor is yours. Thank you. So, today we're debating religion, which is obviously a big topic and there's a lot one can say about this topic. Just a quick definition off of a dictionary, what is religion? The belief in and worship of a supernatural controlling power, especially a personal God or gods, a particular system of faith and worship and you could go on, I'm sure there are various variations on this, but the essential characteristic of religion is faith. Faith in some form of supernatural being, some form of God. It usually comes with a whole set of commandments or reveal truths that are the constant part of the religion that usually establish a certain moral code, certain traditions and certain guides, certain behaviors of those who practice the particular religion. And indeed, religion served, I put that in the past, an important role in human development. Human beings need answers to the fundamental questions that they encounter. We're not like other animals, we're not in green with knowledge, we're not, we don't have genes that tell us how to do and what to do and what's right and what's wrong. All of these things from understanding the physical world to understanding our moral behavior need to be figured out. They need to be discovered. And this is a very, very difficult, cognitive, conceptual task. And what religion served, a conceptual task by the way that the field of study for is philosophy. And what religion served for, religion served for, I don't know, 100,000 years maybe, is as a primitive form of philosophy, as a primitive attempt to provide explanations. And it evolves in a predictable way. So very early on when man understood very little, everything was a God. So we didn't understand the tides. So there was a river God or ocean God. We didn't understand the sun and the moon. So there was a sun God and every feature of the natural world which we didn't understand became a deity which human beings worshiped and believed they controlled something. At some point there was this significant innovation in religion, which is the idea that instead of assigning a God for every specific thing we don't know or don't understand, let's just have one God and we can dump on that one God everything we don't understand. And then you don't have conflicts between the gods, they don't fight, they don't argue. There's just one dogma. There's just one set of commandments. There's just one set of revelations that then we follow. And that's the establishment of monotheistic religions in at least in the Mediterranean world and then ultimately over the entire world. But the fundamental in monotheism is still faith. God, nobody actually communicates with him. Books are written by human beings that are attributed to him that contain supposedly the truths conveyed to them. But the whole point is of modern religion as it evolved, is that one cannot prove the existence through reason. One cannot prove the truth of any revelation or anything through reason. And at some point basically human knowledge and philosophy overtook religion. Once we had a scientific revolution in the 18th century and one could argue even before that, the need for God goes away because suddenly we discover that we don't need a river god to understand the tides. We don't need a sun god to understand the sun. Indeed, much of what is told us in the Old Testament turns out to be false, like the idea that the earth goes around the sun, the sun goes around the earth, not the other way around. But that we have the tool for knowledge that negates our need for faith and that tool for knowledge is reason, human reason. And indeed, there isn't anything that we cannot discover. Now that doesn't mean we know everything. It means that we now have the tool to discover what is true. The tool that makes it possible for us to figure out what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, what exists and what doesn't exist. And that we don't have to believe those who claim to have discovered revelations. We don't have to believe ancient books. Indeed, the ancient books might be quite negative. And so religion has lost its purpose because it's been over, it's been basically shown to be ineffectual at discovering real truth at providing any kind of real guidance to human beings. So that's one aspect of this. It's just that what do you need it for? It's not there. The second is just that the damage religion has done and particularly from a modern perspective, we can look back. We look at horror at the death and destruction created by fascism and by communism in the 20th century. Look at the horrors that religion has created for millennia, the death and destruction, often commanded by God, by the way, if you go back to Old Testament, but even odd, the Protestants killing Catholics, Muslims killing everybody else, everybody else killing Muslims over religion. So religion encourages the violence. So religion not only has served its purpose and it's time for it to die as you know, to kind of paraphrase Nietzsche. But religion has done a lot of harm. There's no accident that the enlightenment, which starts trivializing religion, comes after things like the 30 year war, maybe the bloodiest war in human history on a per capita basis. But religion is fundamentally associated with anti-cognition, that is with faith. Faith is anti-reason and we should reject religion because we should reject faith. And let me a final word on the connection with liberty. By trying to defend liberty on the basis of freedom or capitalism, on the basis of faith, we're basically admitting that we can't do it on the basis of reason. We're basically admitting that we can't convince anybody because it's on faith. Faith is by definition unconvincible. We're basically relying on emotion, not on reason. We're basically giving up the battle. So I think the strategy of trying to base capitalism, freedom, liberty on religion, on faith guarantees that we will lose. And if we win, what we get is not liberty, it's not freedom, it's not capitalism. So it's time to reject religion as something of the past, served its function for human beings and now needs to die and be replaced by a philosophy based on reason, facts, science, evidence. Thank you. Thank you very much, Yaron. Georgia, the floor is yours for your opening remarks up to 10 minutes. Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me. Yeah, okay, great, you're smiling. So I mean, you can hear me. Yaron, I completely agree with you that to simply defend, you know, liberty capitalism, small sea conservatism, whatever your sort of ideology is through religion alone is completely ineffective. The perspective that I would comment that question with is that there are material arguments for certain things and certain issues and then there are the wider philosophical or I guess immaterial arguments for the objectivity of certain systems. If you pardon the pun, obviously, I know you guys are objectivists. Ha ha ha, very funny. So I think that for me, when it comes to, you know, financial policies or my certain political beliefs, I wouldn't necessarily say, oh, you know, it's time for me to look at the Bible, the Quran and I'm gonna decide my perspective on this certain level of taxation in the UK or the US or whatever. But my perspective is that while religion is obviously an umbrella term and it is the term that can be described, you know, a massive plurality of belief systems, you know, that are completely at odds with each other on every issue you could think of, in terms of your belief in the overall system, it obviously is about faith at the end of it. However, sorry, someone's messaging me, I'm getting distracted. I think that if you want to believe in an objective morality then and an ordered and purposeful universe, it's pretty much impossible to do that without either having some kind of religious faith in those things being objective and there being, you know, an ultimate arbiter, ultimate difference of justice in the form of a god or several gods plural. I think that it's impossible and that's not to say that I'm saying that, you know, you can confirm these existence of a god or gods through material processes. I don't think that's possible. It wasn't possible 100,000 years ago. It's not possible now. However, I think that, of course, you know, certain individuals have their own moments where they might come to faith or whatever, but I think for a lot of people it can be a choice and I think they would prefer to live on the basis rather that there is objective morality and there is a purpose to the universe which means that the universe is ordered and also you'll notice the way I'm speaking really is in the language of Western Europe, Christendom, influences of Islam and Judaism, of course, but, you know, historically Christendom. And I think that in this debate I was thinking, you know, it's going to be difficult not to maybe talk in that kind of language, but at the same time we can't really be sitting here and saying, you know, this religion is one of this one or defending different religions because then the debate is just going to spiral. But I think that while it's not to say that you have to believe, you know, in every sort of Christianity, for example, I think that, you know, you were on your saying, for example, that religion in general is anti-reason and it's, you know, a symbol of, I guess, poor cognition, et cetera, et cetera. I think that on the one, of course, there are people who are religious because it's all they've ever known, they've never even thought about it. I think that in Western society nowadays, maybe not in some areas of the US, but obviously the UK is quite different to the US. I think that it's often not like that. I meet so many new people who, they weren't raised religious and it's something they came to through study or philosophy or theology or history. Some people who, maybe they were really religious, they sort of flat out with it and they came back to it through those means. I think that you can, of course, be in terms of a person, not speaking by myself. And be comfortable with being religious. And as I said, I think that the main issue for me is that, like I was saying, there are material arguments. So for example, let's say, okay, this form of taxation is too harsh on people, it's not working, we can see this through these statistics or family outcomes, blah, we can say that, for example, okay, single-parent families in this area aren't working well because it's having this impact on children. But you can't say, objectively, in a way that's stating, this is completely transcendent of the fiscal fear or whatever, say that, a two-parent family is the best thing. You can't say marriage should be sacred or marriage is the best thing for most people or whatever. So it's almost as if you're opening yourself up to relativism. And I think that you're on what you said about the Enlightenment, it made some sense. But the problem is that, once again, the Enlightenment, where did it come from? It came from Christian Europe. And where did some of the best parts of the Enlightenment go? They went into fascism and communism. And I think that, of course, you can look at the entirety of human history and see terrible things. And I think that, of course, certain religious aspects and certain religious in particular have, of course, played their part in that. I'm not here to sit here and defend every single person who's been of faith, of religious faith, or every single religious dogma of every single religion, because, well, for a staff, of course, they contradict each other. But I think that, first of all, looking at the history of the 20th century, we know that completely and often forcibly removing religion, which, of course, I know you're not advocating for. I hope you're not. Problem societies leads to devastating consequences. Κομμινύσταση, etc. I think what a lot of people forget about these things is that because these things happen in Europe, people assume that, OK, they were Christian, well, maybe the average person does in the UK, for example, and you think that, well, the communists were incredibly anti-Christian and they would use certain, kind of like, you know, all the Chinese families parted us today. They'll use certain branches of religions that they just should be more tame or whatever and take them over for their own purposes. But they are incredibly anti, you know, freedom. The same in Nazi Germany, they created, you know, a state church with a lot of strange imagery, but that's not the topic. And, of course, anyone of that, say, dissident or, you know, actual Christian faith and, of course, anyone of Jewish ethnicity or faith, we'll pass the term out to us. But, obviously, along with other faiths or groups, and I think that, you know, we can say, let's do a way of religion, blah, blah, blah. But I think that we're in quite a privileged position, especially in Western countries, because we're sort of living in, I would say, the afterglow of Christian morality, by which I mean most people maybe act in a Christian way without even realizing it, of course, people believe in certain things and take them for granted that say, I'm trying to think of something. I'm not necessarily thinking of things that you read Bible and instantly pops out and thinking of things that have sort of descended over time from that Christian tradition, that say, you know, freedom of expression or freedom of functions and those sort of institutions. But, at the end of the day, that can only last for so long and if we don't, if there is no objective reason for that to exist, why should it? And I think that that's why we see a lot of the cultural issues that we could be here forever talking about because I think that we're sort of getting to that point now where there is a rupture. We're really descending into more relativism and I think that, you know, that's almost become the new religion, the complete tolerance but being intolerant of, you know, objective morality, I guess. And it's also, you know, it's the absence of, OK, all opinions of relative, oh, except for my really far left wacky academic opinion, that's obviously right. But, yeah, unfortunately, this is tricking down. It's affecting everyone in, you know, regular public people who've never been to university. It used to be, you know, the sort of reserve of radical elites, that's no longer so. And I think that what, you know, as I was saying, you can't just say, oh, wow, I'm a liturian or I'm a conservative because Christianity or because Judaism or whatever. But I think that those and other traditions, of course, they can provide sort of a historical bedrock of ideas in terms of that, intermingling the philosophy as well, especially throughout these ages and the Enlightenment and they, you know, having a transcendent God, a God that is immaterial and the ultimate judge, is the ultimate reference point for objective morality and I simply, and I'm saying this as someone who was atheist, you know, throughout all my teenage years, I simply do not see a possibility for objective morality without, you know, a deity. And of course, as I said, that's not me saying, I believe that it's a religion. I think it's far more complex than that. And I think, of course, the one thing I wanted to say is, while I think that religion is pretty much the basis of morality or moralities because overall, you know, there's many different moral systems and I would agree with only a few of them or one of them. I think that, I've lost my train of thought when I was seeing my point now, but I think that, I think that it's simply impossible to stay without there being something outside of the material, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending how you look at it. Thank you, Georgia. So we already have a great basis. Before I go to the super chats, I want to give the chance to the two speakers to come back to the four main themes that we have that Georgia put on the table and I'm summing them up. First, it's either an objective morality or subjectivism and moral relativism, point number one. And this brings to my mind the quote that is misattributed to Dostoevsky, if there is no God, everything is allowed, point number one. Point number two, capitalism without the moral base of values is boring. And I agree with you, by the way, there's nothing more boring than people who, the way they defend capitalism is, let's bring income tax from 36% to 34.5% and I'm sure everyone's gonna go to barricades for that. Point number three, enlightenment without the moral system can lead to totalitarianism. We have a super chat on that and I'm gonna get back to it in a moment. And point number four, Christian morality is deeply and is deeply in our sense of life in Europe. And if I understood well what you said, the good things, the benevolence, the kindness, how we treat each other with respect is based on moral values of Christianity. So Yaron, these are the four points that Georgia put on the table. How would you respond to them? And then Georgia's gonna respond to you and then we go to super chats. So I think there's only really one point there, not four. And that is this question of objective morality, of objective morality. So to me, I have to admit that it's a little bizarre to think of religious morality as objective. Objective for me is something that's provable. That's something that's observable. That's something that is identifiable in reality by human consciousness. In my view, religious morality is completely subjective. There's no evidence of it. There's no support for it. It's written in some book, written a long, long time ago. Supposedly it was told to somebody by God who nobody has seen in a long time. And it's completely up to the emotion of the person who is reading the book to determine what it actually means. Indeed, in Judaism and I think in Christianity, there's plenty of evidence of this. No two rabbis agree on what any moral commandment actually means, right? And look at how many Protestant sects there are to see that no two Protestants agree on what these things say. The anything but objective, they're the exact opposite. They are completely subjective. And if anything has led to moral relativism, it is religion because it has not offered an objective proof for morality. It has treated morality as something above and beyond science that science cannot relate to. See, my approach to morality, Ainran's approach to morality which I think is the right approach and you could argue Aristotle's approach to morality. Our approach to morality is scientific. The question is what about human nature and what is it about reality that necessitates morality and what therefore can we induce from reality to provide us with guidance in our lives? That's not subjective. Any more than Newton's theory of motion is subjective. It's an examination of reality, which is all we've got. Using our consciousness to determine what is right and what is wrong based on the idea that what is... The purpose of morality is to sustain human survival, to sustain human life. Anything else is random. It's arbitrary. It's plugged from the heavens. It's the opposite again of objective. Now, given that, I completely agree about the issue of capitalism. I mean, I go around the world, have been for decades now, talking about the morality of capitalism. I find the whole idea about the economic value of capitalism boring because we won that debate a long time ago, like Hayek and Mises and these guys won it. It's over. We won, they lost, and yet we keep losing. We lose because we're not willing to make the moral argument, the values oriented argument. But in my view, the only way to make the moral argument is to abandon Christian morality because Christian morality is incompatible with capitalism. And if we go back to the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is the exact opposite. The Enlightenment is the repudiation of Christianity, the saying to Christianity and generally religion. At home, you can do it at home, but it has no relevance in the public sphere and it has no relevance in politics. And we're going to create a wall of separation, if you will, between religion and state, which was one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment. But it reduces the importance of religion in society, not increases it. And I think to think of Europe, modern Europe, I think Europe is a product of the Enlightenment. It's a product of the age of science and the age of reason. And ultimately those are the products of ancient Greece. So I attribute Western civilization a Western success and Western achievement. And it is the civilization, I know that's not politically correct to say that, but the civilization is Western civilization. But Western civilization is predominantly Greek. I mean, George, I mentioned that today we're influenced by the Christian morality, but Christian morality is heavily, the whole world of Christianity is heavily, heavily influenced by Plato. I mean, all the early fathers of Christianity were Neoplatonists. So even Christianity goes back to the Greeks, but certainly a secular Europe today is the better parts of it are Greek and the bad parts of it are German. We can talk about why they're German and not somewhere else, but they typically are German, because all the bad parts come from Germany, it turns out, or France. So I think of Western civilization as Enlightenment civilization as Renaissance civilization. Remember what the Renaissance is? The Renaissance is discovery of what? Not of Jesus, the Renaissance is a discovery of Greece. It's a discovery of Plato, the art of Greece, the sense of life of Greece, everything that was Greece. And so the Renaissance through the Enlightenment are what established Western civilization. And it's about the trivialization of religion and the elevation of science and secular art. And look, I am with you completely in rejecting moral relativism. And by the way, I don't consider communism or fascism as representatives of a reason-based atheism. I consider them different forms of mysticism, but that's a whole other. We could do a different debate about communism and fascism. All right, that's my spiel. Thank you. Georgia, comments on this. And then we go to the audience's question, which are already coming in. A reminder, people can send a super chat on the live chat on YouTube. And we're gonna pass your questions to our speaker. Georgia, pick anything from what you're on set and you can reply to anything you want. Yeah, sure. First of all, yeah, of course, the dialogue with Greece, with Rome, maybe more particularly Greece, never ended. I think there's often quite a lot of misconceptions about our relationship with Greek sources. And of course, there was a period in the early Middle Ages in particular in Europe when, for various reasons, you know, the fall of Western Empire, et cetera, language barriers, the destruction of certain sources, all the loss of them. We weren't interacting as much with those sources as we previously were, you know, during the classical era. That dialogue never ended, you know, you can see it in Aquinas, you can see it post Aquinas, you can see it, you know, the Karen Indian era, but a prize Aquinas, you can see it in the course of Renaissance going forward. And there are many elements for that which are and have been hugely influential on Western civilization. I mean, you know, you walk through Washington DC or even in London, you know, there are these buildings that are maybe banks or government buildings and they look like the ancient Greek temples, you know, that's for a reason. We not just architecture of course, many of our ideas, you know, obviously the word democracy and many other words in English language and various other European languages come from that and so do the ideas. However, I think that it's important to remember that, but I think that in more ways we are different to the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans and those, you know, the civilizations in the sphere that say, you know, if you look at the ancient world, you know, of course, if you look at the world now, there's profound cruelty and corruption and terrible things happening and that's the entirety of history. But if you look at say, you know, somewhere in the Roman Empire in whatever century, you know, this is not a world that's rather that's recognisable to Christian Europe, I would say, not even in terms of, you know, of course, prior to adoption Christianity in the Romans period and so was Greece, whatever. I think that if you look at those civilizations, it was, I guess, based completely on exploitation and most formidable, you know, women would give birth, an ancient Greek woman would give birth to babies that did not seem to be, let's say, viable, health-wise and they would kill them. Men had complete control, not to say there haven't been issues with women's rights in every civilization, but men had, the head of the household, you know, had complete control over that, let's say their dependence, so their slaves for a start, you know, Christianity has a massive role in them and of course, slavery still exists, that's not going to touch our topic. You know, if they're slaves, if they're wives and if they're children, if they disobeyed the head of the household, they could be killed, I think that it's not a recognisable world when you actually get to grips with the classical world to ours, so while I think many wonderful things we have got from them and of course, you know, like you were saying, the church fathers and whoever clearly had something to gain from the classical world, you know, they lived in it, they inhabited it, I think that it's often a bit sort of, a bit of a narrow approach to just say, you know, Western civilization is basically Greece and basically Athens, obviously in particular, because I don't think it is when you look at the details and I think that simply saying that Christianity is anti-science is not really the correct approach. I think that, well, of course, in the Middle Ages, you know, we didn't have the technology to be examining certain things. I think that there was a sincere dialogue with natural philosophy and philosophy and I think that, you know, there was endless amounts of geniuses, most of which, obviously because of the nature of the time, were in the church because they were the people who were literate and I think that, you know, it's, I guess, just more evidence that you can be a completely intelligent person, believe in transcendent faith and I think it's also important to realise that people say, might say, oh, you know, well, they would have been a Christian society, of course they were, but atheism, you know, atheism exists in the ancient world, it's not really a magical, shiny new thing that, you know, us, you know, modern people, the best people ever have just discovered and of course it sort of was room, the greater the enlightenment, as you said, and I think that while a lot of elements of the enlightenment were anti-Christian obviously and anti-other faiths, I think that plenty of, you know, the best figures in the enlightenment, I think, for example, the example century, I believe it was a quite dissident, Protestant faith, but he very much had faith in a god and I think that's where a lot of these movements started out because how can you propose, as we were saying, an objective moral system without believing in that ultimate option of justice and I think it's the main place where I'm crashing in because of course what you were saying, Yvonne, about, okay, you know, just quote-unquote believing in so-and-so book or so-and-so text, of course, you know, as people have been arguing for centuries and thousands of years over certain religious texts and I'm certainly not qualified to do so, we could be arguing over this proper and I think that it would be silly to say that, oh, because this book says this one thing on a certain time, because that everyone's been arguing about for thousands of years, this means that religion is an objective morality. That wasn't really my point, I was trying to approach it from a non-denominational and a more of a logical perspective that, okay, just because this thing is on an ancient text doesn't mean it's true, just because I think so or I don't touch it this way, I don't think it's right, but there's no possibility of anything in this context being right if there is no ultimate right. That's my point and I'm glad that you believe in objective morality very much so and I think that, of course, those kinds of elements of religion can feed into relativism. I think that if you look at, for example, the writings of Deedra and others in the Enlightenment, I think that, well, more relativism, obviously, because it's simply the flip side of the projectivism is also, you know, something that's existed since human's absence, humans have tried to get to grips with, you know, something larger than themselves. I think that that was something that was re-envigorated during the Enlightenment, not to say, obviously, that nothing great came out of the Enlightenment. You know, I don't, we probably not be sitting here on computers, internet without the Enlightenment, but I think that it just came out of a Christian tradition, even though a lot of it was profoundly anti-Christian and I think that there were many negatives, as I was saying, but one of the things that I was saying earlier when I lost my trade thought was what, was when I meant to say was, even though I believe that religion is the basis of an objective morality, I don't believe, for example, if some people would say that, you know, if you don't have religion, you can't be a moral person. I obviously completely disagree with that. I think that you can, I think that this is just a wider debate about, you know, what you're doing is objectively right. And I think that, you know, we get our values from our society basically, from our parents. So we didn't necessarily think about why they're right. We sort of just responding to that, but obviously many of us may not want to do what our parents want us to do. But yeah, in terms of, I'm not sure whether I had any other points, really. Let's go to the questions from the audience because there are many questions directed to you, Georgia. And of course, you are on after, so basically we have at least three questions and 15 minutes. So let's try to fit every question within five minutes both Georgia's comments and Yaron's comes back. So we have to be disciplined. So first super chat for Georgia. So how do you know when to use reason and when to turn to God? So if both faith and reason basically are important, how do you know whether in one case you go by the one or you go by the other? And many thanks for Marilyn for the question. Okay. I mean, that's an interesting question, but I think it's sort of, well, obviously the question is sort of hinting towards something that would be applicable to certain situations rather than an overall term. If I'm walking down the street and I think, oh my gosh, I'm going in the wrong direction. I'm not gonna think, oh my gosh, God, please tell me which direction to go in. I'm gonna look at Google Maps on my phone, right? I think that it's sort of that kind of thing while you may be hinting towards, okay, do I believe God? Do I look to God, so to speak? If I'm, I don't know, trying to write poetry or think about philosophy, I think that as I was saying, when it comes to, you know, I'm one of these to God or a God or gods, I think that if you're looking to justify, you know, a philosophy, that's something you need to have the perspective on. But I think that if you're talking about personal scenarios, like, you know, let's say, oh, I'm having a crisis in my life, who do I turn to, you know, family funds, whatever, do I pray? I think that's the kind of thing where, you know, obviously it's dependent on yourself. It depends on what you would do in that situation. So I wouldn't want to tell them what to do or, but I think that if you mean sort of where to turn to you on a certain issue, I mean, it depends what your idea of God is and it depends what your idea of morality is. It's not really sort of just, okay, there are a list of topics, and it depends on the situation, list of topics that I'm gonna turn to God on, and list of topics I'm going to turn to whoever or God can. You know, I think it's sort of, it's quite a difficult question to answer, but yeah. Thank you. Yaron, have you got a take on whether reason and faith can be, you know, sometimes you apply the one, but you could turn to both. But faith is the baseless. It's the lack of evidence, the lack of proof. So why would you ever turn your back to reason, which is what faith necessitates? Why not use reason for everything? Reason can, it doesn't guarantee you get the right result. It doesn't guarantee that you have all the knowledge you need, but is the only methodology consistent with truth and consistent with our means of survival as an animal, as a human being. We are equipped with this tool and this tool is what allows us to know reality and to discover truth and to default on that in any way, I think, is a massive mistake. And again, I think that that is what leads to more relativism. And I think part of George's answer before suggests that. I mean, which God do you turn to? Which book, which interpretation, you know, in what context, who are you? That's where the relativism comes in. To me, the question is, what are the facts involved? What is my goal? What is the right goal to have given the standard and the standard is human life, successful human life. What is the truth? It should morality should be approached as a science, not as our consult with a book, our consult with a priest, or consult with somebody you supposed to consult with another being, for whom there's no proof, for whom there's no evidence, whom does not speak to us directly. So, yeah, I mean, I think religion is a real problem in decision-making and is brought about the kind of modern world in which we don't have clear-cut answers to moral questions. Next question. So Supertile from Marilyn, thank you. So George seemed to suggest that the enlightenment and capitalism led to fascism and communist comments. And let me add to that, that this is a line that we've also seen it in Jordan Peterson, for example, who said that when you take ideas and a reason and ideology too seriously, you end to the gulag. So basically it's an argument that says, look, you can never really know what is the case and if you take yourselves too seriously but you know exactly what is the right thing, then we end up with the KGB thugs or the GAU lighters. So basically, coming back to the question, Georgia, what do you think is the link between reason and the totalitarianism of the 20th century? Okay, first of all, I think it could have been a slip of my tongue, or maybe the person who has not predicted me. I wouldn't say that capitalism and the enlightenment are one of the same. And I wouldn't say that capitalism, for example, led to fascism. I think that they're actually completely at odds if you look at the economic system of fascist nations. I think that's not true at all. I think that, I mean, there are many medieval precedents for capitalism, the city of Italy, for example, religious communities and their trading, that kind of thing. So I think that it really, well, it's sort of obviously bloomed from the 16th century, which is obviously pre-enlightenment. And I think that there are many possible. For it, I don't think it's synonymous with the enlightenment. I think the enlightenment put in place certain foundations that helped it flourish in nation states. But I don't think that it's synonymous with the enlightenment at all. In terms of the link between the enlightenment and fascism, I believe that's the question, right? Yeah, totalitarianism of the 20th century in general, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it becomes, if you read, say, Voltaire d'Iduro, they come up with their philosophies through reason and Rousseau also, though in a different sort of manner. And they say, okay, this is where I'm going to think. And the problem is that with Rousseau in particular, and no, no, I think it was D'Iduro began it. Rousseau sort of, I guess did a bit of a spin-off. If you read D'Iduro's writing on natural law, he talks about how this is obviously a paraphrase. He pretty much says, no one who, people who don't sort of subscribe to this philosophy that I've proposed that they're less than human. They're more human, they're more obese, et cetera, and they should be treated as such. And I think that, more like I said, religions and umbrella term, many religions have different approaches to what a human is and human dignity. Confucianism, for example, it's sort of like humans get better, whereas in Christianity, it's sort of like everyone is crap, but they can do better in their lives and get up and blah blah blah. I think that if you sort of get rid of that idea of human dignity, which I think certain strands of, not all of, certain strands of the Enlightenment did and contributed towards basically getting worse on the 19th century and ending up in certain, I guess, totalitarian governments, I think that that is a very dangerous, a precedent to set, not to say that people haven't obviously been treated like shit basically throughout the entirety of history, but I think that if that's, say, everyone in your society believes that, you know, somebody disagrees with them as that's the human, which is saying that's a Germany, is saying Mao's China and obviously, you know, increasingly trying to do it. I think that, I think that that specific iteration is the inheritance of the Enlightenment. And I think that it's kind of obvious when you read, I kind of said De D'Rosso that that is really the takeaway and that's why certain, I guess, later philosophers who took that up, became more extreme in our approach to actual states. I think that with De D'Rosso it was more sort of pie-in-the-sky and utopian and then it became a bit more, okay, no, we're actually not murdering anymore. But of course, you can have those absolutist philosophies without the Enlightenment and with religion, but I think that that is a specific trend that exists and it did come from the Enlightenment where it was rebranded through the Enlightenment. Technology is another thing, obviously, that's helped totalitarianism. There's simply no possibility of, you know, a totalitarian military state in the 1900s, but there are forces now and there that became the opportunity for that in 20th century. So I think it's a confluence of things, but the Enlightenment definitely played its part, unfortunately. Thank you. Yaron, in less than two minutes because we have two more super chats, do you see any link between some of the fingers of the Enlightenment and the totalitarianism of the 20th century? No, I don't and I think quite the contrary. I think that the totalitarianism of the 20th century is the resurrection of, it's the gasping effort of mysticism and Christianity and mysticism generally to regain control over Europe in spite of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, while it's not perfect, it's flawed, it made, you know, thinkers in the Enlightenment to make huge mistakes, the Enlightenment is the birth of freedom and the birth of capitalism in the West. This idea that there were some elements of capitalism beforehand, not really, and they were short and they were not very significant and they didn't expand very far, the Enlightenment changed that. It brought about the founding of the United States, the founders were clearly Enlightenment thinkers, it brought about the end of slavery, now Christianity, the Enlightenment's impact on Christianity brought about, I mean, after all, in the Old Testament, God gives instructions to the Jews on how to treat their slaves. Slavery is not anti-religion on the contrary, it's part of it. And generally this idea that, Christians freed the world from barbarism. I mean, if you really read about what life was like in the dark ages and how Christians behave towards Christians, how they slaughtered Jews regularly, how they crusaded against Muslims or being Muslims, I'm not sure Christianity comes out as this peace-loving humanitarian religion quite the contrary. No, I think the Enlightenment, and by the way, I don't consider we're so an Enlightenment philosopher, he's an anti-Enlightenment philosopher, like Emmanuel Kant. I think we're so his host project is to undo the work of people like Diderot. And I think Diderot was treated a little unjustly by Georgia. I don't think that Diderot advocated for genocide or anything close to that. And he was one of the proponents of a secular free society and a society ruled by reason and a society that respected science. And the achievements of the Enlightenment, I mean, it's second only to ancient Athens. I think there's Athens and the Enlightenment intellectually, no other period in human history has matched them. Now, there are problems in ancient Athens and the problems in the Enlightenment, but the achievement way outweighs any problems they might have. So, Georgia, consider this training for BBC radio because I'm gonna ask you two questions and you'll have something like three minutes to face. Then we're gonna say goodbye to Georgia because he needs to leave early again because he has a... It's actually, sorry, it's actually talk radio, not BBC, I've got it mixed up. Oh, sorry, talk radio, okay, good. Perhaps it's even more popular than BBC these days. Yeah. Okay, so two questions. First, you make the historical case for religion. If God has a plan for us, would it make a difference whether we were aware of it? If we were faithful, if we were good, does God's plan depend on us? So basically this is a question that hints towards free will and if God has a plan, where is our action? And the other question is, if science discovered so much, why can philosophy, which is the mother of science, identify a rational moral code? So, God has a plan of us and maybe where's our free will and other stuff? Other question, why can science, if science is so good, not pinpoint, here's a good moral code? Georgia. First of all, the idea of, I guess, God having a plan and us going in a certain direction and culminating in that plan, that's a very biblical idea. It's a very, yeah, biblical idea of sort of time progressing in a linear fashion and it culminating in something. And I think that it's not necessarily like that is the appropriate way to describe all religions. And in Christianity, Judaism and biblical religions and obviously Islam in afterwards, now that Abrahamic religion, there are, you know, the debate about free will and determinism, divine determinism is something that has gone on since the beginning, often basically, so I can answer that question for you. However, I think that, I mean, I think the idea would be from most perspectives that it would be somewhere in between free will, but there are certain things that will happen basically. And I think that, you know, it depends what you mean by knowing what will happen because, you know, there's no religion that is proposing, okay, this is gonna happen tomorrow, this is gonna happen the day after. It's more sort of, oh, it will culminate in this divine wrath or divine mercy or whatever. So I think that, of course, if you're thinking, oh my gosh, I'm gonna be judged tomorrow, you know, by God or I can be judged in a few years by God or in 100 years, I may act in a certain way with that in the back of my mind, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you should know everything that's gonna happen or that you could know everything that's gonna happen if that's possible. And the second question, why I think it was why philosophy can't, you know, provide a rational code. I mean, despite the fact that science is so much, I think it's because everyone's a different philosophy is in most ways immaterial or it's justification as a material, as I was saying, and science material. So I think, you know, of course, us in Karen Argym right now is complete, as you know, evidence is up. So yeah, it's because with science, you know, it's easy to demonstrate something material before your eyes. It's much, much harder to settle on that when it comes to things going on inside your head and whether they're right or wrong and who decides what they're right or wrong. I think we've demonstrated that this evening. Thank you so much, Georgia. We're gonna let you go now to the radio. Hope you're gonna fight the good fight there. Thank you so much for defending the size of religion, putting forward the moral case, but also the historical case. So thanks and we're looking forward to seeing you again in one of our events. Thank you. Thank you. So Yaron, we have four more minutes. So take anything you want from these questions and add anything you think hasn't been mentioned about morality and religion or something that you wanted to say and you didn't have the time. Well, I just wanna say something about that last question. The questioner says, basically, if science is so good, why hasn't philosophy discovered an objective morality? And philosophy has. And this is why I encourage everybody to read Ayn Rand because I think Ayn Rand uses the scientific method. She uses a reasoned approach to solve the is-ought dilemma or supposed problem in philosophy to derive arts from reality, from is, through an inductive method. So I encourage everybody to read The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand where we get an objective morality without, well, I won't say without God because I don't believe with God you can have an objective morality. So an objective reality from philosophy. And you might disagree with the specifics. You might wanna argue that the virtues of values that Ayn Rand articulates as part of this should be different. But the point that she makes and the principle she uses, I think are absolutely without question correct in terms of our ability to actually derive such a morality. So I think it's a mistake to assume that. I'd unfortunately modern philosophy since Kant for the most part has been dominated by anti-reason, by rejection of reasons efficaciousness to know reality, which is exactly Kant's goal to separate reason from reality. And by doing so has left us completely unable to provide moral guidance through philosophy. But this is Ayn Rand's genius that in spite of Kant, in spite of the corruption of modern philosophy she goes back in a sense to the Greeks, to Aristotle, to some extent to the Enlightenment and returns reason to its proper place and returns reason as the source of all human knowledge as the basic means of human survival. So I encourage people to read Ayn Rand and to read Leonard Peacock's Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which is kind of a systematic presentation of a philosophy and her morality. And then if you have questions on it, that would be great. It would be great to answer those kinds of questions, but that problem has been solved. Thank you, Yaron. So next week, we're probably gonna be back to discussing politics. It's not confirmed, but we can tell you it's gonna be good fun. Now, in 15 minutes in ARC UK's YouTube channel, we have a 20 minute excerpt from the first session of the communication bootcamp with Don Watkins. So the thing with communicators like Yaron, they don't only understand the ideas, but they have a good way of communicating them. If we don't have a good way to communicate them, no one is gonna listen to us. So the communication bootcamp is open only for Ayn Rand Center UK members, but just to give you a glimpse of what is happening, we are showing you a 20 minute excerpt from the first session that took place last week. This is a weekly workshop we're having with Don Watkins, where he's giving us live feedback on our presentation skills, our writing skills. We're even gonna do things like how to write good tweets, how to condense your ideas in 150 or 280 characters. So there's so much value to be gained, even if you don't want to be a professional intellectual and you just want to give a good presentation or to write cool tweets. Okay, thank you very much Yaron. Many thanks to the Ayn Rand Institute for supporting this series. We're gonna be around for more weeks and more interesting discussions are coming. Thank you very much everyone and consider becoming members. Ayn Randcenter.co.uk slash membership. Thank you everyone. Thank you Yaron. Bye bye.