 And this is generated from an article that was written by Konstantin Kissen. I don't know if you guys know Konstantin Kissen. He is a well-known blogger, a podcaster in the UK. I think he's been on Lex Friedman. He interviewed the guy on the left that everybody likes or doesn't like anymore. Anyway, he's a big shot out there. And he wrote an interesting piece called The Atheist Delusion. By the way, again, Konstantin Kissen, very good on a lot of different issues. Very anti-woke, very anti-crazy left, very anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine. So good on a lot of things. He wrote this piece called The Atheist Delusion. And the piece really kind of talks about the fact that when he was growing up, he was exposed, yeah, he's got a show called Trigonometry. And he did the famous interview with Sam Harris. So Trigonometry is his show. Anyway, he's got this, The Atheist Delusion. And obviously this is a reference to Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. And when Kissen Groot was growing up, he was exposed and a big supporter and really interested in the then very, very popular and growing movement of New Atheists. If you remember, New Atheists really came to the forefront in the late, in the 2000s, post-911 with their attack on Islam and then more broadly with their attack on religion. Of course, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion in 2006. But Sam Harris was, of course, part of this, Hitchens was part of this. Dawkins, if you don't know, is the writer who writes a lot about evolution, wrote The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. But others were part of this. Daniel Dennett was a philosopher who was part of it. But it was the four husband were considered Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett. And they were considered the New Atheists. And they wrote extensively about not only about the kind of religion was wrong, irrelevant, but they often wrote about the evil of religion and why religion was destructive, destructive both at a societal level and destructive both, but also on the individual level. And the destructive was that religion was something negative. And as a consequence, a lot of people, I think, became atheists. These guys were hugely popular. They attracted thousands of people. This is Jordan Peterson phenomena before there was Jordan Peterson. It made Sam Harris. Sam Harris was relatively unknown before the New Atheists really took off. And because there were four of them, they kind of fed off of each other. They supported each other. They did events together. And it became a substantial significant movement, which has, interestingly enough, appeared it out. But the consequence of that movement are all around us. We talked about this on past shows. The poll after poll show that both in the United States and in Europe, religion is in the decline. The religion is going down. More and more people consider themselves atheists. More and more people consider themselves non-religious even if they won't call themselves atheists. More and more people, even if they're religious, are not affiliated with that organized religion. So what you have today is that atheism and the critique of religion that the New Atheists provided has had a real impact. It's had real imports and, you know, changes out there in the world have indeed happened. It's affected both the United States and Europe. And this has created an interesting kind of, over the last, I'd say over the last three, four years, maybe a little longer. But over the last three, four years, there's been a certain backlash against this among people who really supported the New Atheists in the past. So, you know, the New Atheists would be good. They kind of fizzled out, but their impact remained. And Kissen, who I mentioned, was one of them and he became this big shot. But the reality is that Kissen now doesn't call himself an atheist anymore. Another well-known atheist, who I think was influenced by the New Atheists, but has really changed his Dave Rubin. Both now argue that religion is important. The religion is necessary. We don't know exactly what their particular religion actually is and what religious stance they actually take, but they argue that religion is necessary. And all, both I think, and you know, I haven't really talked to Dave Rubin about this, but from what I've read and what I've seen of what he says and what he's written, both take the position that really the problem is that once you become an atheist, you lose the concepts of good and evil. You lose the concept of truth and falsehood. You lose the concept of justice. And this is a quote from Kissen's article. The central positive feature of the religious worldview is to ensure that human beings do not see themselves as the sole arbiters of truth and justice. That having torn God down from his pedestal, we do not put ourselves in his place. So what religion does is it prevents us from having the arrogance, Kissen tells us, that we should be the arbiters of truth and justice. That we should put ourselves on the pedestal that belonged previously to God. Well, certainly if God doesn't exist, who else is going to be in that pedestal? If God doesn't exist, who else is the arbiter of truth and justice? Who decides what is right and what is wrong? And at the end of the day, they have no answer to that. They don't want to see people put themselves on their pedestal because they're scared, they're petrified of what they'll actually do. Indeed, they think they know what they'll do. Basically what I think Kissen, and I think to some extent Dave Rubin, or maybe to a logic then, I don't know, blame much of the new left on atheism. That it is atheism that it gives us woke. That it is the problem with the new left is that they have placed themselves as arbiters of truth and justice. And hey, we have no, they tell themselves, right? We have no argument against that. What are we supposed to say to them? How are we going to argue against them? So they want to religion because religion removes man, you, me from that position of deciding what truth and justice is. And puts it, puts it in the hands of a fictitious, and somehow they feel strong with that. They feel more confident around that. They say, I mean, and this is, you know, Kissen, you know, blames Stalin and Hitler on atheism, right? I mean, this is so a historical, it's stunning. But it is what he says about Hitler and Stalin. And you can think about this as woke and left and everything that they hate, right? Their ability to rationalize their actions and to persuade other people to support them was a product of the sense in which, in the absence of God, we get to make up whatever rules we want. Without a worldview in which we are all worthy of dignity and respect by virtue of being children of God, we have to reinvent that particular wheel through the UN. I mean, God, where did they get this stuff? Now, so let's just start with the fact. And God, I don't have enough time to really cover this properly. We'll have to come back to this whole issue. But let's just start with the fact that Christians and Jews and Muslims have slotted people en masse for thousands of years. The Old Testament has no conception of human rights. The Old Testament has no conception of human dignity. The Old Testament is all about slaughtering those who are not Jews. Christianity put to the sword. What was it? You know, the famous, God, I can't remember his name. Anyway, you know, how many pagans did Christianity put to the sword? Tens, hundreds, millions, hundreds of thousands, millions? All in the name of what? They wouldn't convert. They wouldn't convert. Islam, all over the Middle East, in Asia, in India. Religion has been far deadlier than any ideology in all of human history if you take into account the percentage of the population whenever they were killing. The bloodiest war probably in human history was the 30-year war in Europe where Christians were killing Christians because they didn't agree on the trinity. On whether, you know, when you take that piece of thing in your mouth, it is truly the flesh of Christ, which would mean you were cannibal. Or just a metaphor for the, God, they slotted each other over this. This is a reflection of respect for human rights, for human dignity. The only killers are atheists. What are these? What is somebody like Kissen who is well educated, smart? What does he get the stuff? Yeah, if you look, if you look at the 30-year war as a percentage of the population of Europe, how many people were killed? How many people were killed? I think you will find that it's a larger percentage of the existing population in World War II or World War I, died in the 30-year war. And in some ways, more brutal, you know, hack to death, burn to death, I mean just horrific stuff. Because that's how you fought back then, right? And that was Protestants and Catholics killing each other. So I don't get that. I just have no concept. It's as if, before communism and fascism, the world was at bliss. Just this amazing peace. Indeed it was. I'll get to that in a second. During the period of relative capitalism, during the period of a political manifestation of the Enlightenment, it was at peace. But pre-enlightenment, part of the reason, part of the motivation that drove Enlightenment thinking, I think, to think the way they did about religious freedom is because of what they saw happening. I mean, again, Kesson is not ignorant. He certainly writes like he is. I don't believe he is. He says, and this is maybe his answer to what I just said, right? It is extremely easy to prove that religion is evil. But I'm not convinced that proving it causes more evil than its absence is quite as easy. So he's saying, yeah, maybe religion is evil. Maybe you're on your right. Christians slaughter a lot of people. Religion slaughters a lot of people. Islam slaughters a lot of people. But is getting people to be atheists, is it going to reduce the amount of evil in the world? Well, first I'd say the answer to that is yes. Knowledge is a good thing. Knowing what is fantasy and what is truth ultimately is a good thing. Even if some people will abuse that fact. Even if some people, even if some people will use that fact to achieve evil. Overall, diminishing falsehood, diminishing evil out there, exposing evil, is a good thing. Not a bad thing. Always a good thing. But then yes, we must find a proper way of living. So, you know, Kesson goes on to say, in respect of how scientifically true religion may or may not be, it is nonetheless both useful and inevitable. Both of those are not true. How can falsehood, how can lies, how can deception, how can mythology that affects every aspect of one life be useful? And it's certainly not inevitable. It's certainly not inevitable. He says the absence of religion seems to produce only a vacuum into which a new religion rushes in. And now he's talking about the left, right? Whether it's communism, whether it's wokeism, all of those. He says the reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer to the rest of us. Now here I agree with him completely. We must answer the question of meaning and purpose in a non mystical, non arbitrary, not emotionalist way. We must provide answers to what truth and falsehood are and how to discover them. We must provide answers to what good and evil is and how to know. We must provide answers why it's absolutely appropriate. And it can only be that man as an individual for himself is the arbitra of truth and justice. That is the role of philosophy. That is the job of human knowledge. That is the role of ideas. So absolutely, the new atheists kiss and they present a challenge. What is going to fill the vacuum created by religion? Now I believe the vacuum in and of itself is a good thing. It's a step in the right direction. Destroying one evil allows us to at least not have to deal with one evil so we can discover truth. And there's only one way to discover a proper morality, a proper way to live, a proper way to function in a community as a society among nations, among individuals. And that is the use of logic and reason. That is the use of our mind. That is to embrace what we are as a human. We are the rational animal. It's to abandon a past as perceptual animalistic collectivist tribalists and to embrace who we really have the potential to be, individual human beings, with a mind to guide us, with logic and reason to discover what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is evil. There is no gimmick out there. It is wrong to replace one God with another. And if one understands that fundamentally religion is about emotionalism, that fundamentally religion is about leading with one's feelings, with one's emotions. That collectivism fundamentally is an abrogation of one's own personal responsibility to one's own life. To one's own responsibility to think for oneself. Then you can reject all the so-called secular religions out there, whether it's wokeism or communism or certain forms of fascism, as equally evil to the old religions. Religion is religion is religion. Emotionalism is emotionalism is emotionalism. The random, the arbitrary is random and arbitrary. The only standard is reality, the world out there. And our job is to figure it out, to learn about it and to use that knowledge, to figure out what's good for human beings and what's bad for human beings and then to dedicate ourselves to using rationality to pursue the good. It is not an accident, not an accident at all. And the more I read about this, the more obvious it becomes. And I'm reading a really good book right now. On the culture, the cultural, cultural entrepreneurs you can call it, from 1500 to 1700. It's not an accident that you get the enlightenment which brings the respect for reason, individualism and political freedom. And ultimately peace, non-violence. It's not an accident that comes to the foray as a kind of outcome, as kind of a generated form the age of science. The development of discovery of science, the elevation of science, the integration of science into the culture. Because science is the most obvious manifestation out there for most people of reason. It's the application of reason to solving our material needs. So you have to have a scientific revolution in order to get a political revolution. You're never going to get the founding fathers without Isaac Newton and Galileo and Coponicus and the many, many, many hundreds, thousands of scientists who worked between 1500 and 1776. Maybe a little before 1500. A renaissance and enlightenment have to happen for America to be created in that sense, have to happen for us to have the tool and the proper understanding, a proper understanding of a good and evil, really. Morality comes from understanding the world out there. And using the tool we as human beings use to understand the world out there. So the challenge that the New Atheist created is to provide answers to the questions of morality, meaning, and purpose. The answers to those questions lies in philosophy. The answers to those questions lies in you applying your reason, your rationality to your life, to the pursuit of your values, to achieving the best life that you can achieve. Your life, an individualistic life.