Joe Rogan & Lawrence Krauss on Questioning Religion

Hello, freak bitches. That's the problem with a lot of what's happening in our government. People think, you know what? I really want to believe in this absurd story and therefore I refuse to accept evolution. If you're Mike Pence, the vice president of the country, you say, I don't believe evolution because it doesn't agree with my ridiculous fundamentalist ideas. He said that in Congress. He said, we shouldn't be teaching evolution in schools. We should be teaching intelligence online. Why? It offends his personal faith. Perhaps. It might also be a political ploy. It might be, I think, he knows that a large percentage of the country finds comfort in a leader that subscribes to the same sort of superstitions that they do. Yeah, that could be. He did this before he was in a national office. He was a congressman. I suspect he did it. It sounds like he believed it, but you're right. Who knows? But the point is that we should realize that we shouldn't listen to that kind of nonsense. Because there are a lot of people in this country who do think that evolution directly confronts their belief in God or the Big Bang directly confronts their belief in God and therefore they don't want their children to learn about that. But what an awful thing to do to your children to withhold evidence about how the world really works because you don't have to believe in the Big Bang, but it really happened. You don't have to believe in evolution, but it happened. It's like Philip K. Dick said, the science fiction writer, reality is that which continues to exist whether or not you believe in it. You may not want to believe in it, but it happened. For you to withhold that kind of knowledge from your kids because you're worried it's going to affect their faith is, in my opinion, child abuse. Because you're hindering their capabilities as an adult in a society which is highly technological to function effectively. They're doing it because they believe it as well. Well, they believe it's right. I'm not believing they think they're helping their kids, but I don't know if you're a parent, I am. I am. We've all screwed up our kids. We all do things for our kids because we think it's good for them and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. I'm not saying these people are doing it because they want to hurt their children. They think somehow that not believing in God makes you a bad person. But there's no evidence of that. In fact, as Steve Weinberg, who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, said, and I love it, he said, so they're good people in the world, they're bad people. Good people do good things, bad people do bad things. When good people do bad things, it's religion. Do you think that religion in its earliest stages was, in a sense, primitive man with no science trying to figure out the world and trying to have some sort of rules, almost like a scaffolding in order to move to the next ... I mean, if you see that it exists in so many different cultures, that it might have been something along the path. Of course, that way it was their effort to understand the world around them based on what they knew. It was noble. They tried to understand the world. So there's nothing wrong with it. But claiming that we today should be guided by the worldview of illiterate peasants in the Iron Age peasants who didn't know the earth orbited the sun and wrote down scriptures based on their beliefs at the time, they argued that that should guide our life today when we discovered 100 billion galaxies in the universe and discovered all this stuff, is ludicrous. So you're absolutely right. The birth of science and religion are the same. And in fact, modern science grew out of religion. People point that out and they say to me, how dare you talk about religion as being outdated. Science grew out of religion. I say to them, well, that's fine, but children outgrow their parents. Right? It's so great. No doubt religious ideas and all early scientists were religious because it was the only game in town. You couldn't be educated except the church controlled all the universities. And so it was like the National Science Foundation of the 16th century. It's not surprising they were all religious because that was the only game in town. So that helped create the birth of modern science, but science outgrew it. And that's okay. Outgrow their parents, thank goodness. Well, I think maybe that might help kids outgrow their parents. Why? I mean, getting religion forced down your throat is one of the best ways for kids to reject it as they get older. For some kids. For some kids, yeah. Kids like you and me. But I get lots of letters. We made this movie called The Unbelievers, which followed Richard Dawkins and I around the world as we talked about this stuff. And it was nice and maybe, and I hope, and it's a well-made film. I like the filmmakers who made it. But I found people come up to me. I had no idea of this. It's one of the negative aspects of religion that I never appreciated. I have people come up to me almost every day. I write me and saying, you know what? I saw that movie and I realized I'm not a bad person for asking questions and I'm not alone. You know, these people from small towns in Georgia, they have no one to talk to. They think they're the only ones who's asked the question, is God real? Is it okay to not believe in God? And they're told by everyone else, not only you'll go to hell, but you're a bad person. And suddenly they discover that's not true. And so I think there are a lot of people who have that force down their throats. It's really hard when you're a kid, you know, and have these, and that's why I do think any kind of religion for kids is kind of child abuse. Not no matter what, because these concepts of a deity and the possible existence of a purpose of the universe are very deep and subtle concepts. And to expect a three-year-old kid to ram that down a three-year-old kid's throat is unfair because the kid can't address it. It ends up being internalized in ways. And a lot of people, you know, I hear a lot of people who've had deep religious educations who say, you know, it's hard to outgrow that because when that's thrust into you as a child, it's really hard to ever overcome it. The guilt feelings that many religions introduce, the fundamental notion that, you know, you're ultimately sinful, and no matter what you do with sinful, is something a lot of people have hard times with. And that claim of sin is just so, you know, I've debated people who argue that homosexuality is sinful. You know, and it's unnatural. God intended it to be otherwise. And then I point out, well, you know what? You take all mammals, 10 percent, in every species almost, 10 percent have homosexual relationships. Sheep have long—10 percent of sheep have long-term homosexual relationships. Are they sinful? Okay, it's not unnatural at all. It's a natural consequence of whatever—now, why it's a case, it's an interesting evolutionary question, but it's certainly not unnatural. It seems uniform then, if it's 10 percent. Yeah, it's a—well, you know, plus or minus a little bit. It certainly seems to be biology. There's some purpose. There's some biological purpose to it. And so to argue that it's both unnatural and wrong is to misunderstand biology, but people grow up being told it's evil because the Bible said it, and then they don't want to give people who are homosexual the same rights as other people because they tell them—they say God didn't want them to have the homosexual. So the problem is people are told these things that are ultimately wrong because, you know, maybe—because for whatever reason, the tribe that wrote down that scripture wanted to make sure that there weren't homosexual relationships in the group. Well, it's really baffling when you talk to people about the Bible and the Old Testament versus the New Testament, and they don't even understand where the New Testament was created by Constantine and a bunch of bishops. They threw a bunch of stuff out. And by the way, they think it's kinder or gentler. Sure, the Old Testament is one of the most—you know, look at the—people say the Koran is violent and vicious. Read the Old Testament. You know, you're supposed to stone your kids if they disobey you. Yeah. You're supposed to kill people who wear two different kinds of cloth. Exactly. And the reason that nowadays, sort of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity may seem a little less violent than Islam for some people is because, you know, people take the Koran literally. That's part of the sort of fundamentalism. Very few, very few people take the Bible as literally as—namely, hey, we're going to stone kids. In the 12th century, they may have, but now we've outgrown it. And Islam is 600 years younger. And so it's just—the Old Testament is just as violent as the Koran, but no one takes it seriously. But people, most people who call themselves religious, they pick and choose the things they like from the Bible or the New Testament or the Old Testament. They pick and choose the nice, kinder, gentler things. You know, Richard Dawkins Foundation in England did an interesting survey. So the British government does a census, you know, and they ask people's religions as part of it. And in the last census, remarkably, only 55% of the people said they were Christian, Church of England, which was one of the lowest ever. But fine. They went to those 55% people. They did a survey of those. And they said, okay, why do you call yourself Christian? Do you believe in the virgin birth? Do you believe in transubstantiation? Do you believe in—and went down the list and people say, no, no, no, no, no. And then they'd ask, why do you call yourself Christian? And the answer was, we like to think of ourselves as good people. So religion is usurped morality. And somehow, people throw out all of the evil—and it's not just the Old Testament. No one talked about hell more than Jesus Christ. Okay, the guy who's supposed to love everyone talked about hell, this eternal damnation for people who disobey, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, God is like a cosmic Saddam Hussein. But worse, because Saddam Hussein used to just torture his enemies while they're alive. God is worse. He takes the people that is like it, tortures them from all eternity. Who wants such a God? What an awful, disgusting idea.