Struggling with Religious Inconsistencies and Doubts

Description: Malcolm and Simone discuss the key elements they designed into their constructed religion to make it "leakproof" against losing members over generations. This includes logical consistency, future-proofing for science advances, democratized prophets, and encouraging respectful dissent within the faith. They also explain how framing it in the Judeo-Christian tradition reduces conflict while allowing more conservative strains to potentially emerge again someday.

Some key topics covered:

* Why old religions lose scientists and logical thinkers

* Solving the "good God" problem

* Localized miracles issue with universalist faiths

* Mutiple valid revelations concept

* Future God and simulation theory

* Value systems built into hierarchy

* Encouraging rebellion tied to fidelity

* Reducing conflict with conservative faiths

* End goal of spreading the western tradition to the stars

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] let's talk about science inconsistency because this is a bigger problem for Christianity than Christians like to pretend. So Christians will be like, look at all of the great things that we, the Western tradition, have accomplished

and what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of the most important scientists in the past hundred years, if they were born within the Judeo Christian tree, left the Judeo Christian tree either during their period of most productive work, or at least before they died.

So you don't really get to, like, clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason, your most productive scientists are leaving the tradition. This is a big problem.

 It's actually interesting how symbiotic like if this takes off how symbiotic it is with traditional cultural traditions and that it literally sees it as a religious order to help protect their members from deconverting.

And it only wants to prevent the people who they would otherwise have bleeding off from it but they would really rather not fall to the urban monoculture. [00:01:00] We can act as a good backstop, which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban monoculture.

So it's acting as part of this cultural economy that prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization before it can reach the stars and ensuring that the Western cultural tradition does. Join the stars to some extent. If someone's gonna be like, Why don't you care about the Eastern culture of Lucian?

Because that's not us! Like, I have no connection to that. It would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt to simulate that, or simp that, you know. We can we can work to help them where we can, but we're not part of that tradition.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Simone and Malcolm are back.

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. This is going to be a fun, particularly spicy episode today. I always get worried because our, our religion episodes, they typically perform really poorly at first and then they do better after a while. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's lower click through higher watch time, but they're my favorite episodes to do.

Because it's a [00:02:00] topic that I just have been thinking so much about recently. And I think, you know, in the question of pronatalism becomes such an existential question for our species. Because in writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, I mean, from the pronatalist perspective, it seems to be the only thing, like, religious cultures that are able to motivate high fertility in wealthy groups, like, the only thing, like, I have not found it.

Anything else that reliably seems to do it, but then in addition to that, in writing the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, it just became really obvious to us that there's a correlation between the rise of mental issues in our society. And dangerous viral memes like the virus which is what we call the, the urban monoculture sometimes.

And the decline of religious traditions. I mean, religious traditions may have been like a janky antivirus that had a bunch of bloatware on it, but it [00:03:00] was the only antivirus we had. Yeah. And when people ripped it out. They didn't realize how susceptible they were making the population to extremely virulent and, and, and quite selfish and dangerous memetic sets.

And we're now beginning to see the fallout of all of that. But this all comes to a problem for us, right? So a lot of people are like, well, then just go back to one of the old religions. And we've done an episode on this, but, but it's something I want to pontificate on more while also talking about how we construct a system for our kids which is designed to have a low, low bleed rate, like withstand this storm, this, you know, this, this, it's like a bunch of the century storm that's only getting worse every year that all of the religious traditions have to intergenerationally weather against before we get to the other side of this.

So, so how do I build that? But in thinking about that, I think a lot of people from more traditional religions will be able to think about some of the tools and techniques that we're using. Where they [00:04:00] could implement them within their existing systems to lower the bleed rate with their own kids. Now, in part to answer, you know, why not one of the old traditions, Which is a question that

Simone Collins: constantly comes up.

Malcolm Collins: Yes I think it goes, worse talking about, so recently I was interviewing my dad about his life. We've done hours and hours of this now, so I'll see if I post it on here. And I was asking about, you know, when he left the religious tradition, right? Like when my family left the faith, because if he's half me, right?

What it means is that if I tried to raise my kids in one of these, the traditional religious contexts, they might leave as well. For whatever reason, he left Christianity, right? And he was antagonistic enough towards Christianity that he refused to get married in a church, for example. Oh, wow. And when he normally, even

Simone Collins: like, totally indifferent people deigned to get married in a church if a spouse cares about

Malcolm Collins: it.

And he bragged about never once going into the central church where all of the like a lot of formal stuff is done at Stanford. He went [00:05:00] really out of his way to avoid ever setting foot in there. So that was That's intense! That, that is, Yeah, the level of useful antagonism he had toward these institutions.

So he when he was younger was in, Sunday school and he ended up the, it was apparently a, a fairly big thing where he was punished pretty severely. Like, it was considered like a, a pretty big deal that he had done this and what he had done, was gotten very interested in the logistics of the Noah story in trying to figure out how that was possible.

Because, you know, someone was talking to you about this, you're like, yeah, all the measurements are there. Like, if you really want to, like, get nerdy and go deep on the logistics of this to try to figure it out that's the type of thing that Of course, anyone who's seen me talking, you know, I talk about humans as intergenerational entities.

It's exactly the type of thing that would have happened had my dad stayed in the faith and raised me in the faith, right? And this, that he would be punished for asking these technical [00:06:00] questions was a really hard thing for, for him to take. Like he couldn't stand following a tradition. That would punish him for asking questions like this.

And, and that's what had him turn away from it. And this was really interesting to me for a couple reasons, right? Like if I think about it as us from a cultural group, you know, if we have a group of 20 kids and one of them is just incessantly demanding answers to this, like very niggly, like technical question.

That will be our golden child. Yeah. And it's standing up to authority to do this. To me, that one person is worth the other 19 kids in the room combined. If I had a religion and I was trying to like convert people into it, I would spend extra attention to that person. And this is when we talk about like genetic selection effects and stuff like that within religious traditions, this is how you can get a genetic selection effect.

But we'll, we'll talk about this later in like personalities and stuff like that. But the, the next thing is. Is, is it's like, well, then there's lots of iterations of Christianity [00:07:00] that don't take a realism stance to the Noah's Ark story. Right? The problem here is the iterations of Christianity that typically loosen interpretations and around what is in the Bible, you know, they start saying, Oh, this is all just metaphor or whatever.

They also loosen interpretations around morality and moral rules and moral restrictions. And what I want is an iteration of Christianity that it contains a lot of the, the rules and framings that are useful. for living a good life, but is also compatible with an extreme level of skepticism, an extreme level of, of, of picking apart these stories and also of, of, of you know, sort of unrestrained scientific research and questioning.

And, and I feel like this is necessary if we're getting to the stars. Like, like absolutely necessary from the, the, the biological perspective, [00:08:00] and that it appears that we really need religion or some religious structure to stay psychologically healthy. And from the carrying on our ancestral traditions, you know, into space, into the interstellar empire that humankind ends up, or we aim for humankind to end up creating.

Um, And, and so, that's really what we're attempting to do here, and it may turn out, like a person may come to us, and they may be like, the reason why, when you start loosening the slack in this one area, it ends up loosening all the slack that's just a truism of religion, you can't, you can't, and I'm like, maybe, maybe, except the problem is, is that when I take a real history, like, Obviously, I'm very trained in religious history.

I know a lot of religious traditions. I know, like, I'm very interested in the religious history of America. This is something that is deeply interesting to me. No one's really tried this before. Genuinely, the closest is [00:09:00] probably Mormonism. Typically, when people try to adapt a religious tradition, To allow for looser interpretations or metaphorical interpretations of the older stories, they always go in the loosen everything approach.

The idea of really tightening in one area but loosening in the other is something that I just haven't seen. And so you could say our family is treating itself as an experiment, and that's why we're using Judaism as a backup. And you can see the video on why we're using Judaism as a backup to this experiment, but I actually have a lot of confidence the experiment will work. And now finally, you know, to go into this, a person might say, well, what do you mean? Like everything about the religion you created, it's, it's, it's completely like, this is just what's logically necessary for the best interest of our species.

And, and for the best health of your kid. And it's like, yes. Yes, actually. And I, I do believe it, right? But I think if it was well constructed, I would believe it. You know, that's the way rituals work. You do rituals. We're pre programmed to believe these religions. So I put this out and I believe it.[00:10:00]

But

Simone Collins: Well, but, I mean, I think it's also believable because it's, it was also based on our best understanding of, reality from what we've learned about science, physics, psychology, et cetera. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And now a lot of people will be like, come on, you guys, that's the silliest thing ever. Are you actually saying that a secular tradition about a metaphysical entity that people believe was in the best interest of kids could really do well in a world like our world today?

And it's like, Santa! Like, Santa is mopping up the old traditions in terms of its intergenerational fidelity and growth in mindshare these days. Like, we have seen that this works but I also think that it's something that we are really dedicated to and actually believe. And sometimes when people talk to me, they're like, wait, you really believe this stuff, don't you?

I can never tell.

Simone Collins: There was this one book that you had me read while you were writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion about faith. And about religion that was written by an [00:11:00] anthropologist who went into many different obscure cultures and like tribal systems and asked them lots of questions about their faith, watched them practice their faiths.

And maybe this is because it was. Very close to what you would call a super soft religion or like, you know, that kind where you just sort of go back to like, you know, reciting a spell so that your USB cord goes in the right way the first time, right? Like just the really weird sort of default intuitive religion.

But one thing that was really interesting that she observed. was that people would both, could both, and do both have faith and not have faith. So she would be like, in, in, in, you know, the same day, the span of the same day, she would ask, do you believe in ghosts? And they'd be like, obviously not. And then like, you know, in the evening, something like, oh, I just saw a ghost, you know?

You know, I'm praying to this ghost for this. And she's like, what? What? Like, and so it was very context based and the, the faith would come [00:12:00] in the, in certain settings or when it was useful or when it was needed. I also saw this a little bit in Japan, like just sort of like spending extended time with families that hosted me and whatnot.

Where, like, I don't think Buddhism and Shinto necessarily are, like, seamlessly combinable as religions, right? Like, logically for all the rules, et cetera. But like, many, many, many Japanese hold both Shinto and Buddhism. You go to Shinto when your baby's born, and you go to, like, the Buddhist thing when someone dies.

Like, there's just, like You choose this for this and this for this. And you sort of pick and choose, which is kind of indexy, right? Where you're like, let's just combine our favorite things from both of these religions. And I think in the moment they fully believe each. I had a friend when I was a kid named Nicholas who was raised.

As well, at one point my mom explained to me in front of him that he was raised half Jewish and half Christian. And he's like, no, I'm all Jewish and I'm all [00:13:00] Christian. And he was like, very serious about this. And I do, I do kind of think that that's somewhat possible because I think that only a certain strain of humanity or certain like IQ level or like genetic tendency level is going to really struggle with that logical.

logical consistency nonsense. Like the rest are able to be very contextual about how and when they believe. And I believe that there's a significant amount of both anecdotal and more systematically research documentation supporting that.

I think this study that Simone mentioned here is actually really important to understanding how we relate to religion

and how our religion is constructed. We both 100 percent believe our religion is true, but also 100 percent believe that it's something that we artificially constructed because it was psychologically useful to us and our family. And a lot of people will look at this and they'll be like, that, that can't be true.

 You can't have a religion where both the secular theory of the religion exists [00:14:00] overlapping the theistic interpretation of the religion. And it's like, well, yes you can. And historically, , it was actually pretty common for people to have these frameworks about belief.

Malcolm Collins: Because I so, we'll get to that in a second, but let's go into it. So, what I wanted to ask you to start, Simone. Sort of, let's take an inventory. Why are the various reasons that you think people leave religious traditions intergenerationally these days?

Simone Collins: Okay, so there's what you pointed out where there's just like logical inconsistencies they can't deal with.

Another one where I watched a

Malcolm Collins: friend lose Hold on, before you go further, I want to pull at this logical inconsistency thing because they fall into two categories. Okay. I think Noah's Ark is a really good example of doing this. So there's two ways because as we go through each of these, like, let's talk about them a little bit, right?

Okay. So, logical inconsistencies I think is a real one. The problem is, is that when people try to fix the logical inconsistencies, there's three routes they go down and they're all pretty bad. Route number one is just to deny [00:15:00] that there's any inconsistency and, and say that like, somehow we don't understand it or there was a a miracle involved in this that wasn't particularly noted in the Bible.

Like, maybe Noah's Ark really did have all the full animal sizes in the world on it, and just like, somehow it worked because magic. Except that's not really talked about. Like, they don't talk about the magic, like, like, so it just doesn't seem plausible to me that, that you're getting magic there. But like, It's not mentioned in the story that they were using all this magic to do this.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: there's also a bunch of other weird things about Noah's Ark, like, apparently God wasn't pissed at any seaborne mammals or fish or bacteria.

Malcolm Collins: We'll get to that in a second. So the next problem, I don't want to get into all the problems with the Noah's Ark story. Yeah. One is, is they try to create like a science y Explanation, right?

Like maybe it was all baby animals or maybe it was as I've heard more recently, maybe it was a total world flood, but like he took the DNA from all the animals and went to space or maybe I'm just [00:16:00] picturing

Simone Collins: like all the really cute, like cutest Noah's Ark ever. Everything to

Malcolm Collins: me, like, like, if you're an outsider and you're like doubting a religion or you're trying to be convinced of a religion.

They feel like sophistry and very weak sophistry. It feels like you're really trying. It's like, okay, but if that was the story, then the Bible would have said baby animals. It doesn't say baby animals. Like, you're adding things that make it plausible because we know stuff now that they didn't know then.

The final answer, which I really hate, is to say that this is all metaphors. Which I also Also,

Simone Collins: just by the way, the baby animals thing wouldn't do given the duration of the Flood because they would have most of them would have grown to like close to full size by the time it was over.

Malcolm Collins: So, so, so the, the the answer that we would come up with with our tradition for our kids to this is that this was a full revelation from the period of people of that time period, like what they were capable of understanding and if you look at when the Noah's Ark story was delivered, [00:17:00] you know, you are looking at like, Bronze Age civilization, you look at these people level of education and understanding of the world and there was probably something that was trying to be or that needed to be conveyed by this story and it was a direct real revelation insofar as we were able to understand it.

Yeah, like

Simone Collins: you can kind of picture almost like imagine someone came from the future, but then had to explain this in like layman's terms. To people of that time. And eventually like I can imagine the person first tells the truth and then like tries to like dumb it down. And then finally they're like, okay, okay.

Okay. Imagine God's really mad. And so he, he tells this 1 guy to build a boat and put all the animals on the boat. And then like he floods the earth to get rid of everything else. Like, but you can just imagine like someone

Malcolm Collins: getting increasingly. Well, no, that's what I basically think God did. Like he talked to us like we were idiotic children.

And that was the way he handled it. But then, okay, go to the next. Why did, what's the next reason people leave?

Simone Collins: Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of people that I know, or that [00:18:00] you and I know, who to a certain extent left their religion because they really didn't like the way. That certain groups and specifically certain groups that they were members of, like women, were treated by it.

And like sort of what the, the teachings were about women, specifically in this case, and the two cases I'm thinking of, it was like, well, women, you know, sort of kind of don't belong in leadership positions and they belong in

Malcolm Collins: the law. You're thinking of Mormons, right? The, the people who you're thinking of right now.

I'm thinking of

Simone Collins: Mormons and other conservative

Malcolm Collins: Christians. Okay yeah, no, it is, it is a big problem. Within our society right now. And it's a big problem in that I think that aiming for true equality also causes issues. I think another issue here is sexual restrictions that evolved. So I'm going to group these into two, into the same category, sexual restrictions and traditions that evolved within religions because they helped them compete in an intergenerational context historically, but now are counterproductive and really just lead to bleed.

So the other thing here I would say is like gay [00:19:00] rights and gay marriage within traditions. If you look at God, I don't find the guy's channel when I'm doing this, the guy who does videos on us occasionally, and we're going to have on our channels. Yeah. Paul Vanderkleid. He's done a number of videos on fights within the church.

And he's from the reform Christian church which is a Calvinist church, actually pretty similar to the, the iterations of Christianity that we came from. And the church right now is. Continually having risks and splits over gay marriage. And you see this across Christian traditions today. It's actually a really, really easy tactic that progressives can use to pull people out of religious traditions because it feels arbitrary.

And when you talk to religious people, you're like, why is this bad? And they're like, because it's sin, because it's not the way humans were meant to work. And it's like, well, it just feels really. Precious and evil that God would then make some humans arbitrarily more attracted to the same gender. Like, why would he do that?

And, and I know people who are gay and they seem [00:20:00] perfectly happy. And if you actually look at studies that have been done on gay people adopting kids, those kids actually do better than the kids in straight families. Now, the reason for that is almost certainly because those families have been much, much more vetted than straight families.

But. It's, it's still just like a truism of the studies that have been the, the, the good studies that have been done so far. Um, so, the, the, there's sort of a few problems that are overlapping here. So the question first is, is why did religions take these perspectives? If you take our worldview of this, right, they took these perspectives because the iterations of them that took these perspectives in a historic pre birth control context had more kids than the iterations that didn't.

So, you know, when they said. Don't be gay. When they said don't have sex with animals. When they said, don't have sex with your wife when she's menstruating. When they said, don't engage in pornography. When they said, you know, never masturbate outside of sex. All of these things are really just meant to increase the rate of reproductive sex individuals are having.

Even if that wasn't [00:21:00] like why the individual who came up with them came up with them. There have been iterations of these traditional religious systems that didn't have these Stipulations to them, but they were outcompeted by the ones that did have these stipulations because the ones that did have these stipulations had higher fertility rates.

And the fertility rates matter so much in terms of which religions ended up in which iterations of which religions ended up dominating and which ones didn't end up dominating. The problem is in a modern context, a lot of these stipulations are extremely counterproductive. As we continually point out, there's been great studies done on levels of religiosity in porn consumption.

The more the porn is, is like banned in a region from a social context, when it's not like actually illegal, the more people in that region will consume porn. It like has the exact opposite effect you would want. With gay individuals, you're not really increasing birth rates that much anymore by, by banning this.

And yet you're leading to like really high church division by banning this. [00:22:00] And when we get to a world of artificial wombs and stuff like that, it becomes almost irrelevant from a fertility rate perspective. And then you've got the problem of women and women's rights and everything like that. And why women, I mean, women and men have a level of sexual dimorphism to them.

Right. And. It is true that it seems that the cultural groups that put men in charge, like if you go historically, like way back, it seems much more common in these early societies, when you're talking about like the true diversity of humanity, to have some matriarchal societies and some patriarchal societies.

The patriarchal societies out competed the matriarchal societies. I mean, that's just But we see that's why most of the historic surviving societies in the world are patriarchal societies. So having a patriarchal mindset does seem to confer some advantages. However, I also think it has disadvantages in terms of the productivity of a society.

And by looping one perspective on reality, I mean, as humans, we get this cool thing. Like people are often like, wouldn't it be cool if we got to have like [00:23:00] Neanderthals here? Who could see the world from a totally different, but like kind of aligned perspective. And I'm like, but we kind of get that with genders.

And, and not fully utilizing the intellectual capacity of one gender, especially in a world where manual labor isn't that useful anymore. And, and household labor isn't that useful anymore. You're, you're leaving a lot on the table when you do that. And so I don't know if it makes the same sense to, to, to build this sort of restriction.

What are your thoughts?

Simone Collins: I have, I, and maybe an even more tempered view. I, you know, a lot of the religious traditions around what men and women should do, I think are fine. Like many of them are built on relative advantages that each gender has. Right. So like, that's great. But as we know from our research in sexuality and all sorts of other areas with both men and women, there are always outliers.

Like there, there are some, there are some women who are very much more masculine than men and much better suited for men's roles than women's roles. They're. Is a subset of [00:24:00] men that is way more suited for women's roles than men's roles. So I think like just not being so strict about like, which role you want to take on, you know, like women can never serve in the priesthood or like men can never take care of kids.

Malcolm Collins: Is, is she. Here's the interesting thing. I think if you go to a traditionalist religious framework and you start to loosen roles around women in church, it ends up loosening a lot of the moral restrictions because when people are following the rules of the traditional religious system, and they don't know why it has those rules.

Some of those rules. Are for like this evolved context and other of those rules are like actually useful rules in terms of out competing other groups are not sitting or stuff like that. I think it's really hard to loosen 1 of these rules without loosening rules across the board. If you don't have some sort of higher order logic for why some rules are loosened and not others.

Hmm.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, like, I don't know when it comes to leadership [00:25:00] positions and having perspectives valued. I mean, I think patriarchal societies seem to be fitter for a good reason, but I think that the best system is a patriarchal society that is, is built in the way that a true patriarchal society is, which is entirely meritocracy, you know, just the, the fittest, the smartest, the strongest wins.

And if one of those is a woman, fine. Hmm. Right. Like, and I think this is how things have often been throughout history. There have been many people in very patriarchal societies who have been strong enough, ruthless enough, et cetera, to make it work. Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, et cetera, right?

Like they made it work, but the rules weren't changed for them. So I just want to make it clear that I'm like not fighting for some switch over to the gynocracy with like, you know, bureaucratic rules and everyone has to listen to everyone else and things like that. I think it's just, there are some rules that are too hard and fast.

Or like, you know, your role as a woman is to grow up and marry a man and homeschool your [00:26:00] kids, which is great for many, many, many, many women. But like, you're going to lose some incredible talent. If you make that, you're going to

Malcolm Collins: lose the best women. Yeah, I mean, the highest competence, highest creativity, highest ambition women, which are the ones that we would want the most, which is also really interesting.

So, so everybody who knows sort of where we're going with a lot of this stuff, we are actually specifically trying to build a religious system that is not. conflicting with the preexisting religious systems and that it laps up these types of women who would be kicked out of these systems for being too ambitious or the people who ask too many questions, but prevents them from falling all the way to the urban monoculture or the virus.

So sort of a like we have an audience that we are building this with a, with a target for, because we think that, you know, the troublemakers within these religious traditions. So the way that we try to tackle this system on both ends from within the religious system we're building [00:27:00] is one, have an internal hierarchy where the, the social order of the hierarchy is a meritocracy, but not a bureaucratic meritocracy because bureaucratic meritocracies Overvalue the female's perspective whereas if you have a true meritocracy, which is measuring somebody's ability to succeed within a real world context which can often be measured by things like efficiency gains, which are well measured by how much money someone has earned over their life and how much money of that has gone back into the system.

These, these systems are going to be very good at filtering out. Yeah. A genuine meritocracy which will lead to a system likely where within this type of measuring capacity, you're going to get more men. But it doesn't prevent the, the best of the best women from participating in it. And it has a clear reason for how it's sorting people, it's sorting them on their ability to succeed within real world scenarios, i.

e. within the, the the big game that we're all playing within any sort of capitalistic system. [00:28:00] Or, or adjacent to capitalistic system of resource acquisition. The second category is when you're talking about things like, like gay, trans, everything like that. If we just focus on the point, it's about fertility rate and all other rules flow from that.

It removes the need to cause full schisms over things like gay acceptance and trans acceptance which would allow for better weathering against one of the core tools that the progressive movement has against religious traditions.

Now a person might rightly point out that this way of motivating higher fertility rates and religious fidelity is going to work significantly less well for less intelligent people or people with less self control. Within those communities, You can't say, okay, think about the end goal, then act towards that end goal.

You need to give them simplistic rules, like, uh, you know, get them to have more kids by telling them not to masturbate so when they want to relieve themselves, they're doing it [00:29:00] and not to have sex with your wife when she may not be fertile, like she's menstruating or something like that.

And that is true, but you've gotta keep in mind the theological end goal of our religion, which is focused around intergenerational improvement with, the, the end state being eventually becoming whatever this entity God is, , in the distant future, what this means for us is that it would be almost sinful to focus on those individuals and thus. Cares a lot less about really either recruiting or ensuring that those within the faith, who have less self control or less innate intelligence are breeding, like we actually And so, Almost would want to discourage them from breeding as heavily as the other members of the community.

So we really don't mind that effect of this, whereas other religions are generally more focused on quantity over quality when they're looking at the [00:30:00] way that their religion relates to intergenerational fertility rates.

Malcolm Collins: So what would you say a next reason you've seen people leave?

Simone Collins: I, I think it's Maybe this is too much like the other categories, but lifestyle, like they're just not into that kind of lifestyle, like

Malcolm Collins: stylistically.

I've never seen somebody leave for this. I hear a lot of people from traditions that think that people leave for this reason, but I haven't seen it myself. I have not seen somebody leave a tradition because of the rules except for in so far as how those rules look immoral, i. e. preventing this otherwise qualified person from being in this position or prevent this otherwise loving couple from wanting to marry.

Rules like, actually, very interesting, like bans on pornography, bans on premarital sex, stuff like that. What I see those rules doing is people just break them and then stay in the tradition. No, it's true, they, they do not push people out of the tradition. They, they, people break them, they may have premarital sex without the amount of contraception they might otherwise use or something [00:31:00] like that.

Or they might have more premarital sex, as we pointed out, you know, sex education delays the incidence of first sexual in activity. So You know, counterproductive but it, it doesn't actually push people out of religions.

Genuinely. I, and I watched tons and tons and tons of ex religious content.

I can't even think of a single incident of this. Not one I have ever seen. I have seen people talk about how happy they were about not having to follow these rules after leaving a tradition, after some area of logical inconsistency pushed them out of the tradition. Like, they're like, oh, this logically just doesn't make sense to me.

Or there was this contradiction here and here. Or higher reps within my movement were doing this really unethical thing. That's another thing that pushes people out often, which we can get to in a

Simone Collins: second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that happens a lot in like smaller religions where like a cult leader starts buying too many Bentleys and poisoning

Malcolm Collins: people.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's where that happens. But the, the in fact, I almost get the impression when I [00:32:00] hear people talking about, like, all of the cool stuff they can do now that they couldn't do in their religion, I get sort of a cringe crying thing. Like, it, it, you know, that meme. Where it almost feels like they're not really happy with all the new things they're doing, but there's a level of cognitive dissonance with not actually feeling that much better once they've left the tradition.

And so they try to justify it as being a good decision through talking about all of these new things they can do now. But I've never heard of it as an inciting factor. Although, although I, and I will point out here, I have heard as an inciting factor the individual. You know, where you will get, like, I wanted to do something and this was the inciting factor, was specifically things where they can't logically understand why it's being banned.

So this is not something like it's something like the gay thing, right? Or the, you know, or the women in church thing. Like, they're competent, why can't they have these positions? So then this comes to the next point that I [00:33:00] wanted to really go over, which is a lot of the individual logical problems that people end up stumbling upon within religious traditions that end up causing people to deconvert.

So first. I call it the good God problem. Right? The good God problem. We've talked about it before. There's a lot of argumentation around it, which is how can you have an all powerful God who is good, all good as well. And yet have the world that we live in today. I think that there's an easy solution to this and it's the one that we adapt, which is to just say, well, he's not a good guy.

Not in the way that we mean good. He might have some higher order understanding of good that we don't fully understand but it is patently clear to me, like you can't say that, oh, the suffering in the world happens because of decisions that humans make because a lot of suffering in the world is very obviously happening outside of the decisions that humans make.

And it's pointless. And it's pointless. Yeah. You, you, like, you could say, oh, butterfly effect and stuff like that. And it's like, yeah, well, you didn't need to set up the system this way. It's just [00:34:00] all of the little, like, niggly things you do to try to get out of this problem are one, just not necessary.

You can just say, well, then it's not an all good God. And two, if I'm actually basing this tradition on like, the Western canon history of the Judeo Christian tree, I, I, I think even just from the text, it's pretty hard to argue that like the God of the old Testament is a good entity from the way that we as humans mean good when we talk about good in the vernacular.

Yeah. So problem number one, that's how we try to get around that in terms of something that pulls people out of religions. Problem number two, which is one we mentioned a lot, but it has a much bigger problem than people believe It's that you cannot have universalizing religion that contains the possibility of miracles and have it start locally.

So, let me explain what I mean by this, right? Christianity has a big problem with this. [00:35:00] Christianity, most iterations of Christianity are supposed to apply to every human in the world. It is a revelation that is of total utility to every human in the world because it was complete when it was made. But the Problem is, is that it took so long to reach most of the world.

And a person might be like, yeah, but like what else was supposed to happen? And this is why I say you can't have miracles in these traditions. Jesus is able to do things like raise people from the dead. And yet he's not able to like warp to a few different locations on the world just to slow, to speed up the speed that it's spreading.

I mean, at least do, you know, one revelation in East Asia, one revelation in like the British Isles and one revelation in America. Yeah, like why? Why not on tour? Why not even an attempt to go on tour? Right? Like,

And this is all made slightly worse by the fact that Jesus died fairly young, and this was a death that he had preconceptions of. He knew this was going to happen. He knew he was going to die and had At least some control over where and how it happened [00:36:00] because he made himself the sacrifice, which means that, , he could have delayed that for another 25 years or so, so that he could get on like a boat and go to China, and go to, some other far parts of, where boats could take you back then, maybe South Africa, and, and then created seeds of Christianity in those two places before coming back and, getting martyred, but he didn't.

Why? Why was this a completely localized revelation when it didn't need to be and Jesus had the power to perform miracles which could have prevented this from happening given what happens to people's souls who don't have Jesus Christ within most Christian theologies or do not know Jesus Christ within most Christian theologies.

Malcolm Collins: and the, the answer that, that, that I have, I've never heard a compelling answer to this.

Mormons have the best answer, which is to say he did go on tour. We just didn't hear about it. And I'm like, well, at least they're trying. But there's a number of [00:37:00] other logical problems that come from the Mormon tradition, which, which make it not a great answer, which specifically comes from the canonization of, of future profits.

They're like, Oh yeah, we can have future profits, but then they can annihilate some of the future profits while they're still alive. Which leads to the, you're not getting a lot of time to vet what they're saying to make sure it's not going to have huge contradictions in it. Like, you know. the, the, the prophet who said, if evolution is true, Mormonism is false.

That's a problem. What? Undo. Undo. Yeah. So, but, but keep it on within the Mormon tradition. It's not that much of a problem because future prophets can override past prophets which you don't have in a lot of traditions, but to me, there's some other problems with doing that, that we'll get to.

Um, The, the Jews fixed this problem, by the way, and we were like, oh yeah, we like the Jewish system for this, and the Calvinists fixed this problem by saying it's not a universalist. tradition. It's not meant for everyone. Therefore, it's very easy to say, oh, that's why he didn't perform a miracle to deliver it to more people faster.[00:38:00]

And the way that we solve this more broadly is we're like, actually, everyone always had access to the true revelation that was meant for their people insofar as they follow their traditions. in sort of a conservative iteration, see our video on the Tesseract God for how we get around this problem.

We also fixed the multiple face problem with this, and the multiple face problem is a much bigger problem than a lot of practicing Christians seem to realize it is if you are trying to convert somebody who is an outsider to Christianity. This is the problem of like a lot of their arguments against atheism are arguments against atheism more broadly, but that are not very compelling for just go to their tradition versus other traditions.

And we have a few systems that we've used to attempt to get around this one is the Tesseract God concept. It'd be like, Oh, these multiple Christian traditions are actually full. iterations and full revelations, but then we also use our profit system to get around this. So our profit system is to say, well, the, you determining which messages are from [00:39:00] God to you is a democratized thing with a few stipulations around this.

So we say any individual can decide by, by Prayerfully examining evidence and by evidence, you know, we're looking at things that can't easily be faked. Like the person one predicted future events or like verifiable miracles happened around them. You can use these individuals are meant to communicate some information to you.

They might be only to communicate information to you. This also fix the textual inconsistency problem. So, for example, people who are familiar with like texture. Textual differences in biblical traditions. The number of the beast was in different traditions of some old texts. It looks like may have actually been 616 or believed to be 616 throughout a large portion of the Christian world.

Well, what we would say is, well, actually both iterations are completely true. And the 616 was meant to be read by somebody within the region, or maybe a number of somebodies within the region that was [00:40:00] read, right? Um, so, that is, that is how we get around that problem is by democratizing it.

Now this leads to another problem. If you allow for the possibility of future profits, then you have the problem of a person being able to say, I'm a prophet. Follow me. Right. Listen to everything I do and it can become very culty. So the way you get around this is you make a rule basically. All prophets have to be dead.

That's just a rule. You cannot say that someone is a prophet, and you should not look for prophetic wisdom from an individual who's not dead. That is just not the way God communicates. God will only communicate through dead prophets. This

Simone Collins: also helps to prevent prophet profiteering, whereby you have someone start to exploit followers in ways that are really bad and selfish.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah so then the next problem you have is science inconsistency. And, and the big problem here is the teleological and ontological arguments, which people think are good religious arguments, [00:41:00] but they're actually really bad religious arguments and they kind of argue against religion in a way.

And they're both solved and remove questioning here from People who, so first let's talk about science inconsistency because this is a bigger problem for Christianity than Christians like to pretend. So Christians will be like, look at all of the great things that we, the Western tradition, have accomplished in the past, you know, 200 years, right?

And what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of the most important scientists in the past 200 years, or I'd say at least a hundred years, if they were born within the Judeo Christian tree, left the Judeo Christian tree either during their period of most productive work, or at least before they died.

So you don't really get to, like, clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason, your most productive scientists are leaving the tradition. This is a big problem. And it's a problem with science inconsistencies of the Noah's Ark variety that we were talking about. We get around these with the, you know, one, [00:42:00] the individual revelation problem, but two, the So when I talked about the mass problem, so I'll get to the ontological and teleological arguments in just a second.

But the, the future God problem, where we're like, okay, in a million years, in a hundred thousand years, if we're still alive, would you say our descendants are more like a God than a man? Consistent with our existing science, consistent with our existing understanding of the world, to say they would be more like a man than the way we would conceive a God is just not consistent with that.

So to argue against this perspective, Really, the only argument you can make is time travel is impossible or, or influencing the timeline is impossible, which is a pretty bold claim to make when, like, I would just be like, well, how do you know that? Like, you have no more claim to knowing that than I have to knowing that it is possible.

And so it makes arguing against this religion from a scientific perspective pretty difficult unless we get some like hard scientific understanding in the future that definitely [00:43:00] 100 percent there is no way that you could manipulate the timeline but that would rely So, On a full and complete understanding of physics which I don't know how close we are to being at yet and a full and complete understanding of physics, which rules that out, which I don't think it looks like if the direction physics is going, like when you look at a lot of quantum stuff and stuff like that, it actually looks like future entities likely can, if we're sort of extrapolating into the future of, of The physical understanding of the universe can probably influence events in the past.

Now let's get to the ontological and teleological arguments so the ontological argument is the argument against ACS where they're like, okay, well, what created the universe then? Which in the ACS mind is of course, well, then what created God then?

Right? And then God, people are like, well, we don't have to answer that question because God's special and you're exempt from having to answer that question. And then the Atheist is like, well, that's very uncompelling to me if you're making me answer that question, but you say you don't have to answer that question.

Because I could just say, well, the universe has existed in an endless cycle of existence and nonexistence, and he's just saying the universe is the type of thing that needs to start, you know, you could have like a big bang and a big crunch, a big [00:44:00] bang and a big crunch, right? We solve both of these problems by saying that the universe Did potentially have a beginning.

You can see our what's behind the fabric of reality video on this. We talked about this a few times. I don't want to go over the full argument here. But basically it's mass exists outside of the universe. Things that are described by mass exist as graphical equations of those things.

So you don't need to actually be. playing them. And so anything that can be described by an equation exists as an emergent property of that equation. If that didn't make a lot of sense in the way I just explained it, just watch our video, our full video on what's behind the fabric of reality on, on this particular topic.

I figure it's probably worth taking a few minutes just to give a fuller explanation of how this model for reality works. Because it is the model for reality that I have seen. That takes the fewest presuppositions. And the few presuppositions that does take, seem intuitively true to me. The first. Is that two things in two things is always four things, whatever reality you're in. , yes, you can get things like non-Euclidean geometry, [00:45:00] but mass broadly holds constant across all realities and is therefore a thing that exists outside of realities.

Too. That if you have an equation, like a graphical equation. The line that that equation is representing exists outside of that equation as an emergent property of that equation. Even before I graph that line on something like a piece of paper, that equation is in a way that line.

Finally.

That our reality. Can be described by a single or set of mathematical equations, EEG, the laws of physics, and the way things interact with in our reality can be defined by a single mathematical equation. If I only hold those three things to be true, that means that our universe must exist. Like even if a material universe exists in the way that we think our universe exists with. You know, Adams and everything like that. Alongside [00:46:00] that universe, a separate graphical representation of the mathematical equation that described how those things intersected must also exist and therefore, via outcomes raiser, we don't need to. Assume that the physical reality that we believe exists, exists. and so this, this model argues that because our universe can be described by a single equation and all equations exist outside of time., and all universes. This universe would exist no matter what is a graphical representation of that equation and all universes. That can be described by a single equation exist. This is also why our understanding of time is kind of funny because we see time is just one variable in this equation and not a particularly important or immutable variable within this equation. All moments of time exists simultaneously As simply variable points within this graphical representation. I'd also note here that this way of framing reality [00:47:00] means that we no longer need to answer the question. Why does the universe exists? And universe must exist. Math exists. Instead, we need to answer the question. What brought math into existence, or why does math exist?

 Asking why math always exists as an inherently. True thing feels a lot closer to the type of thing that you don't really need to prove in the same way that arguing, well, God exists as an always inherently true thing.

Does. Or at least. Seems like an easier presupposition to me than an all-knowing sentience entity that is infinitely complex versus the simplicity of math.

Malcolm Collins: but it solves a few problems. It solves the ontological problem. And it solves the teleological problem.

It also solves the what happens if we're in a simulation problem in that it makes a universe that is being run within a simulation functionally from a moral standpoint position identical to a universe that is not in a simulation. Again, watch the video [00:48:00] on what's behind the fabric of reality if you want to learn more about this.

Malcolm Collins: The teleological problem is like, how did we happen to be in a universe that had these exact laws of physics play out exactly as they did? Like, you needed numbers to be so precise. Now a lot of people fix this with the anthropic principle.

It's like, well, why did humans evolve on a planet with water when we needed water? Well, we wouldn't have evolved on any other planets. We wouldn't be asking the question if we didn't have water. But then it's like, yeah, but it is kind of weird that the universe happened to be created this way. But if you believe this math iteration of why reality exists, Well, everything that could be described by an equation exists, so there are parallel universes, all the, the other universes where humans wouldn't exist to be asking this question, also exist, and people aren't asking this question, and that's why we're not in one of those universes.

Any, anything you want to add to this, Simone? Because I've been talking, ranting, for a while. No, I mean Hold on. We got some, some more ones here that are actually pretty important. Another one is historicity. [00:49:00] Historicity is I think a bigger problem for strict Christian interpretations than if you haven't left Christian circles, you're really going to be aware of we're building out a school system right now for kids.

Right. And I want that school system to be usable by people who have strict Christian interpretations, because we want to be an ally to these. Burps. We want to relieve them of their troublesome members you know, if, if, if, if that's a problem for them, but we also want to protect them from the virus because I think that they we could be wrong about creating this tradition.

And if we are, then they're probably the only hope we have of our species seeing the stars and, and achieving what we're meant to achieve at the species, at least what, what you and I believe so. Uh, that in this, this tree, we have a certain marking for nodes, like, like pieces, mastery levels that are associated with things that I think could get a really strict Christian interpretations of reality mad at us for and.

If you buy it and you click the, I don't want any of these things in here, it like, just deletes all those nodes from the tree.[00:50:00] The problem is, is it pretty much has to delete everything around Jesus's life to except for the stuff that's just in the Bible, to everything at the Great Schism.

All of that stuff is just like, Thanos ed when you do this. Because if you talk and you look into a lot of this stuff, you know, he wasn't the only Jewish miracle worker in the, the, the, what is now Israel in that time period. You know, there were a number of others that you're talking about, like Honey, the circle drawer or Hania Bendoza or someone bar Yahi.

And it's, it's one of the things where it's like. He just doesn't seem that particularly remarkable outside of the impact he has had on history when you compare him with other well known miracle workers of the time period and, but, but then you say, well, he performed more miracles than them and it's like, yeah, well, we have a lot more text on him.

We only have the names of a few miracles that these other people produced but, and, and the knowledge that he was seen as similar to them in some texts, right?

Simone Collins: Such a [00:51:00] lesson about, you know, the importance of marketing.

Malcolm Collins: Investigating, right?

I'm forced to point all of this out because a lot of people mistakenly believe that Jesus's miracles are , people purporting to have seen Jesus's miracles is evidence of Jesus's divinity when miracle workers during that time period and at that part of history were actually fairly common, and the list I gave was not even exhaustive.

You know, you also have individuals like, , Apollonius of Tiana, who was a Greek philosopher who lived in the first century A. D., and was seen performing miraculous deeds having supernatural powers. And who raised people from the dead.

 Even if you're just constraining your knowledge of this to the Bible, you have individuals like Simon Magus, who the Bible talks of as a sorcerer, somebody with magical powers.

Now, of course, he tries to buy Jesus's magical powers, which is where the term simony comes from. , but it shows that even when he, a sorcerer, saw Jesus's magical powers, he was like, [00:52:00] Oh, it's another magician. I should buy these. So that is the way that Jesus's powers came off. to professional somatological performers of his own time period, even within the context of the Bible.

I should also point out the virgin birth thing is also not particularly unique. Even in the United States today, 0. 8 percent of women who give birth claim to be virgins.

, now what's interesting is, I have to take things out, like, you know, when we take out this sort of stuff, or what's going on in, in history during this time period from our courses, , that go to strict Christian households, you might be like, well, why would you do that if they know from the Bible that individuals like Simon Magus existed?

, and it's, well, because some Strict Christian theology finds ways to gloss around this, or to not mention this. , and it is kind of sad to me, because I think it's actually more powerful to say that Jesus is set apart, and I believe he is set apart not because of his miracles, but because of [00:53:00] his prophecy.

But that is, you know, neither here nor there.

Malcolm Collins: But from our perspective, because an individual's efficacy as a profit.

is determined by the impact they have on history, those people are next to irrelevant. It solves the historicity problem for us. And then the the, the final problem I wanted, well, the irrelevant rules problem that we, we talk about a bit here. But then this has a, a, another. really important thing that we really wanted to work into this, which was we wanted to structure the religious tradition in a way where individuals who are completely atheistic could live and work within it, going all the way up to individuals who are much more like actually believing it.

So it needed to Have interpretations that work for both of those and then it also needed to have interpretations that work for children and adults and, and dumb people and smart people.[00:54:00] And this is really important because if you look at pretty much all the successful traditions, they do this, right?

Like, uh, you know. A child who sees God as like existing on a cloud and like an old guy with a beard and then basically they're thinking of you know, an interpretation of Zeus really but, but certainly not the Christian God but it's, it's the way that we explain these stories to children, you know, some people make fun of us, they're like, well, hey, you guys are taking like actual like Warhammer 40k stuff and just explaining to your kids, that's how your demon you know, world works works and it's like, well, And I'm like, well, okay, you're a Christian.

Do you believe in like a red devil was like hooves and horns that is not from the Bible. That is all extra biblical fan fiction. A lot of religions do this. And the reason why, like you don't throw out that interpretation of the devil is because it's iconic and it's good and it helps get across certain lessons.

And we've had different interpretations of the devil throughout time, like the devil at the crossroads who is, you know, maybe making [00:55:00] deals or playing a fiddle or something like that. Right. Like, these were. relevant to convey certain concepts to people of those periods around like con men and other sorts of swindle men that were around them and not deleterious to the religious tradition.

So, so I want you to talk a bit about how our tradition is sort of built for kids and stupid people. Like what does that look like for us?

Simone Collins: I mean, a lot of it looks like, and we've been discussing this internally forever, holidays because that's how so many people primarily relate to religion.

People always talk about like, well, what kind of Christian slash Jew are you? Like, do you go to church every single day, week? Or are you only there for like Easter or Christmas or like these special holidays? And that's I think where we decided to start when it came to building traditions because it's the holidays that people show up for, especially if they follow the right holiday criteria, which include things like being super [00:56:00] photographable and really fun and very kid friendly often involving gifts often involving fun decorating schemes, often involving fun meals, that kind of thing.

And

Malcolm Collins: so that's how we've done upcoming holiday, the future police. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: So we have the future police, which is. We will also call like among adults, the agents of provenance in our religion steal things from our children that are sort of addictive Skinner box like devices or

Malcolm Collins: toys. The audience knows about this tradition.

Yeah. Talk about what they look like, like the way that we portray them to our kids.

Simone Collins: So with Future Day, the vision of the future police that our kids are normalizing around is more like stormtroopers or robocop. And not so much like this very amorphous could not, you know, we can't even fathom, more like what Wynwood Reed had described where, you know, just like it, you Who knows what, what is embodied?

Like it's such an abstract concept, like totally above us. So obviously with our holidays, things get dumbed down because it makes it more approachable and fun.

Malcolm Collins: [00:57:00] So, the gist is that the future police was in our tradition. They look like stormtroopers to a kid, right? Like they look like actual futuristic police, like they would see in a sci fi or something like that. Whereas to an adult in our tradition, they follow much more closer to the words of when would read, you know, You, I think it's ethereal beings of which we cannot even conceive.

They're, they're a being or a type of entity that is beyond our powers of conception.

The words we were looking for were, You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream. You pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth. And if we're going to look at how he describes sort of what they look like, or the way they should be conceptualized, he says, These bodies, which now we wear, belong to the lower animals.

Our minds have already outgrown them. Already we look at them with contempt. A time will come when science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained [00:58:00] to us, we could not understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, or steam. Disease will be extirpated. The causes of decay will be removed. Immortality will be invented. And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun.

The Earth will become a holy land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will be masters of the forces of nature. They will become themselves the architects of systems, the manufacturers of world. Man then will be perfect. He will then be the creator. He will therefore become what the vulgar worship as a god.

There is but a difference in degree between the chemist who today arranges forces in his laboratory so that they produce gas, and the creator who arranges forces so they produce a world. Between gardener who plants a seed and the creator who plants a nebula. We do not wish to extirpate religion [00:59:00] from the life of man.

We wish to him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy. We wish, in fact, to give him a religion, for now there are many who have none. And that really just aligns with our mission here. We are not looking to remove people from religion, we are looking to create a religion that people who right now live without religion, or who would otherwise deconvert from religions, can accept.

And a religion which, as he says, will harmonize with his intellect, in which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy.

Malcolm Collins: And this is not the way that we sell this to kids. We sell this to kids as, you know, stormtroopers, basically, right? And you can even do different iterations of the future day tradition where you have like evil future day police before the kids promise to make the world a better place.

And then like nice looking ones where you change their visual schema. And this also is true with our prophet [01:00:00] system, right? Our prophet system can be taken by a child to mean that these individuals are actual prophets in the way that, like, other religious traditions mean it, where it's like a god is talking to someone and that person is passing on moral advice.

Or if you take sort of the adult understanding, these are individuals who are being, Influenced by potentially quantum events and like butterfly effect stuff to go down specific pathways to say the things that need to be said, but it's not necessarily a revelation from God as in an entity is actually talking in their ear.

Now, it might be, but it's not necessarily.

Another thing that we haven't yet really mentioned or delineated is it was in our system we see the mystical arts or mystical approaches to things to always being a pathway to evil. And I should point out here I did not say that they are untrue or inaccurate. I am just saying that opening your mind to those sorts of possibilities [01:01:00] innately destroys human intellect, in a way that is really, really damaging.

 A human's ability to process the world in an ordered and structured manner. If you want to word this in the way we would explain this to a child, I would explain it very similar to the way that, you know, in, in like the, Warhammer 40k universe you would talk about chaos.

, opening your mind , to the warp or to chaos would potentially give you, , some level of, of magical powers or prescience or something like that, but it is an incredibly dangerous thing to do, and it's how demons can come in and take over your body. , so you see there, we're using a metaphor to explain something that we think is just a useful thing for a person.

, in terms of how they're mentally developing and how they engage with the truth to prevent them from falling off the path of, of logic and righteousness.

Or to put it another way, a witch is a witch. It doesn't matter if they became a witch to to try to make the [01:02:00] world a better place or help people, it doesn't matter if they became a witch using instructions that came from one of the Abrahamic traditions, being a witch will always corrupt your mind and soul.

You were telling me that it f***s with your head. The certain amount of it after a while, it just f***s with your head. That's why I'm usually kind of like almost autistic is I'm just being constantly.

Why? Because lower entities will come in and violate your free will. They know. All your b******t, they see right through you. They will not manipulate your free will unless you ask them in. I have dude, do not say that I'm gonna get killed. I've a hundred percent communicated with something. I'm not judging anybody.

I'm just saying, okay, be careful. The question is whether that something was actually in my imagination or in my mind, or that something was something that takes place in another dimension. Once you open that gate, it's all bad. They have, so why is it all bad? Why? Why can't you experience that interdimensional?

being and learn something from it, and be a better person when you [01:03:00] come out of it. Because, because every time it gets control, it starts murdering everybody. They wind up killing everybody later. In every case. And it always starts beautiful. It always starts great. Problem is, some of it makes sense. That's where the psychosis comes in.

Whoa. It's going to create a giant societal crisis where most of the people are already going to get killed. Because an evil force wants conflict. So I'm saying no, no, no. It's all chaos. Stop it. This is the nature of the beast.

Now people might be like, well, do you really believe in those sorts of things? And the answer is no, like the logic side of me doesn't believe in those things. But I do think it's useful to build into a religious construct a wariness of the mystical stuff. So

Even if we do have dumber people join our tradition, we can explain to them in a way that they can understand why it is not useful in society for them to engage with mystical hoodoo. In addition, it provides some layer of buffering against any would be magician who wants to try to prove that they have some sort of magical or supernatural connection and use that to pull people from the path of righteousness. If you're [01:04:00] wondering why we take this view on witchcraft, well, when I look at the wealthiest people of the world or the most powerful people in the world, I don't see a bunch of people who are practicing this sort of mysticism or witchcraft, which leads me to believe either it doesn't have real world efficacy or there is some additional cost tied to using it at that sort of a level, , which prevents people who do use it for these sorts of grander things from achieving their desired outcomes.

In fact, when I look at people who practice mysticism, they primarily seem to be on the lower end of the power scale, which leads me to, again, take away either it doesn't work or it has a huge, very negative blowback effect on the individuals using it. Either way, it's worth warning practitioners about.

Malcolm Collins: Another thing that this. System allows for is the incorporation of more modern profits while also understanding that profits are relevant insofar as they are useful to kids. So one that we were talking about [01:05:00] recently was

, the martyr Marvin Haymeier and the miracle of the killdozer.

Simone Collins: Miracle of the

Malcolm Collins: Killdozer. So this was an event that happened in 2004. Anyone can go and learn about it if you don't know what it is.

Trouble began in 2001 when the Zoning Commission approved the construction of a concrete factory adjacent to Marvin's shop. For many years, He Mare had used this route to get to his shop, as it was really the only access road leading there. Construction of the plant would block this route, however.

He Mare tried to appeal the Zoning Commission's decision, but was denied. He tried to petition the city with neighbours and friends, but was once again unsuccessful. The concrete plant was going to be built. So Marvin said, alright, alright, you win. I'll just have to find another way to my shop. He petitioned to construct a new access road, and he even bought all the heavy machinery so he could just do it all himself.

Well, guess what? He was turned down AGAIN. To add insult to [01:06:00] injury, the construction of the factory cut He Mare's connection to the sewage line. And Granby Town Council fined him for not being hooked up to the sewer. With his livelihood seemingly in ruins, Marvin felt he had no recourse. He began planning his next move.

He would write notes and record audiotapes about his predicament. I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.

Malcolm Collins: But it did contain a miraculous element which was that multiple individuals had been in his shed and saw him building a tank and none of them noticed or thought to ask him about it.

And his interpretation of this was that God was occluding their vision.

and that's not even the most unbelievable thing about all of this. Numerous people had actually visited Marvin during the year, and had been in his shed. And not one of them [01:07:00] said anything about the homemade tank sitting in the corner. Like, what was going through their heads as they looked around that garage?

Hmm, nice toolbox, may get one of them for meself. Broken boiler there by the looks of it. Ooh! Expensive power drill. Might ask for a loan of that. Real old pair of boots there. Giant bulldozer fitted with composite armor, three gun ports, and its own surveillance system. Thornmoor. He may have believed that God had built him for this job, and that it was God who clouded the judgment of the people who entered his shed.

Malcolm Collins: Well then this means that we can then. Take multiple interpretations of this, right? First, also the miracle that nobody died during the, the, the killdozer, as people would call it, rampage right, righteous rampage against bureaucracy.

 On June the 4th, 2004, Marvin lowered the armor onto the Killdozer cabin, one last time, sealing [01:08:00] himself inside. He began his rampage by tearing through the wall of his muffler shop, and then the concrete plant, before making his way into town. For two hours, he terrorized the town of Granby.

He destroyed the town hall, the office of a local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a judge, and many others. Every building he destroyed was owned by somebody that had previously wronged him. In all, he smashed up 13 buildings, causing about 7, 000, 000 worth in damages. But it should be noted that nobody was harmed.

Police made continuous attempts to stop the rampage. Local and state patrol, including a SWAT team, followed the killdozer everywhere it went, firing shots at the cab with no effect. They then tried to take out the cameras, which again failed as they had the bulletproof shielding. They climbed aboard, trying to figure out a way to put a bullet inside the beast.

A flashbang grenade was even [01:09:00] dropped in the exhaust pipe, but nothing they could do could stop it. They even brought out a wheel tractor scraper to fight the machine, but the killdozer just pushed it aside.

Malcolm Collins: So it, it teaches us the evils of bureaucracy, what's expected of us in a no win situation against the evils of bureaucracy. It It happened there was, it was miraculous in, in those ways, but it also shows the way that God can intervene with things. God can intervene with things through occluding people's vision of something that should be obvious to them.

And we're going to go into this with the Hasidic community, I think, in a different video. We're going to go over the well, we'll save this for the other video. That's another way that can be used. Another thing that we use in terms of like the kid version versus adult version is we take as the core prophet of the religion, Wynwood Reid, right?

And we say as efficacy of his tradition, you can look at how his predictions. turned out, right? And it is pretty supernatural how accurate he was. Much more [01:10:00] to my, from my perspective, supernatural and accurate and no vagueness in his predictions. Like you have in a lot of other like Nostradamus y sorts of predictions or, so that's useful to us, right?

In terms of providing some sort of like logical proof to our kids that this was actually inspired by some sort of divine entity. But it's also useful to us that we were able to vet the prophet, you know, Hundreds of years after his death, instead of having to appoint prophets while they're still alive and world opinions can change pretty dramatically and stuff that they were involved in either scientifically, like views they have end up being just like super wrong.

Like Wynwood Reed, he was famously involved with the writing of the descent of man, right? You know, one of the most important scientific books. So you could say he was at the nexus of but then he, he also, you know, if I read, you know, things he said, so. You know, he was around during the civil war,

so this is him talking about, you know, giving black citizens equal rights. And he says, But it need not be [01:11:00] feared that they will become hostile to those with whom they reside. Experience has shown us that, whenever aliens are treated as citizens, they become citizens, whatever may be their religion or their race.

 It is a mistake to suppose that the civilized black American calls himself an African and pines to return to his ancestral land. If he is born in the States, he calls himself an American. He speaks with an American accent. And he loves and hates with an American heart.

And I think that, you know, we're able to vet for this, you know, make sure the guy who we were choosing in the profit didn't say a bunch of stuff that would get him disqualified.

With the obvious hard contrast here being Mormonism, which accidentally built racism into its theology and then had to override that with future prophets, but obviously that's going to push a lot of potential converts away from the religious system.

 Oh, yeah, you were, you were just telling me this morning, this story about one would read that you didn't even know about originally when going through all of his texts, because he doesn't personally. about it very much anywhere. No. [01:12:00] But he spent extensive time traveling through Africa. And at one point he found himself, inconveniently either put into a position of servitude or like literally enslaved.

Simone Collins: And he was, he was posed with a series of very difficult, seemingly impossible they were supposed to be impossible feats, which he then executed with, you know, aplomb and grace. You know, thus. securing his release. You know, this is the kind of stuff that prophets do, you know, just crazy, crazy stuff.

In addition to, you know, really calling a shot also proving that they could do insane things. And I, I love that kind of color

Malcolm Collins: of a historic prophet. I love it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, you see this with, with Catholic saints all the time, just like these insane stories about the quirky things that they did that were impossible, but so cool.

You know, it's, it's so clickbait, but that's what you need. You know, you need some of

Malcolm Collins: that. And as I talked about, like the Mormon profit problem, was there anything else that you wanted to say to this concept about preventing sort of intergenerational bleed and the ways we've sort of thought about [01:13:00] this and how we constructed our religious system?

Simone Collins: Yeah. I wish that organized religions would think more about this from a really practical standpoint. Because I think right now the conversations are how do we keep people from leaving more just like how do we get people to lean more into the religion instead of looking within. I think you can kind of look at it from like a relationship microcosm of it's as if people are in these relationships that may not be going so well, like they might not be sustainable.

They're like, Oh man, like how can I, you know, how can I get my wife to just stay with me? Like, you know, what, what do I need to tell her? Like, how do I, how do I convince her that this is a really good marriage instead of like looking at oneself and being like, how can I be a better husband? Like, am I, am I doing something wrong?

Am I not showing enough appreciation? Maybe I should help out around the house more. Maybe I shouldn't abuse her. Like all sorts of things. Right. Like, and so I think that the churches need to look not at their members, but rather at [01:14:00] their own policies and doctrine and understand deeply what they need to internally change to keep people.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and so there's a few other things I wanted to sort of, note here. What is, is, is the way, like a lot of people wonder about the Christian, like Judeo Christian framing that we've chosen for this. Like you could probably construct something like this without a Judeo Christian framing. But we believe in, like, when we think about Go to the Stars, we want to go to stars with a contiguous cultural tradition, you know, the Western cultural tradition, which I think is encapsulated within the Judeo Christian tree of religions.

And through framing and through taking their prophets as our prophets What we can do is prevent or lower the probability of attack from these groups while also making it easier to talk to these groups from their own perspective. A huge problem that a lot of religious groups have when they're trying to convert people out of different religions, or trying to relate to people from different [01:15:00] religions, is they will talk to them from the perspective of their religion.

They're like, how can you doubt Jesus when he did, you know, the Bible says these things about him? And it's like, well, they don't believe the Bible, so That's why. Now, if you take the Tesseract God concept, that means if ever anyone from this tradition, like any of our kids, are talking to a Jewish person or a Christian, they believe that that Jewish person or a Christian has a whole revelation of God.

So, one, they're not going to be as interested in converting that person, unless the only alternative is that person is going to leave their ancestral tradition and move to the virus, right? So, in that case, they would pick the person up. Rebels who we're talking about, but there's no one real motivation to be dangerous to devout Christian or Jewish groups because they believe that these people do have full access to tradition.

But when they are talking to that person who's deconverting, they can argue from a Jewish perspective to that person. They can

Simone Collins: speak in someone's own terms.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. While also lowering the probability of attack. So if a Christian group sees you as [01:16:00] an iteration of Christianity or a Muslim group sees you as an iteration of Islam.

They are less likely to attack you, so long as you aren't a very closely related iteration. So the two highest attacked groups that you're going to get within traditions are, and you can see our Judeo front problem video on this,

That we do a lot of. Talk a lot about this is when religious traditions are very closely related, like Shia and Sunni.

You're gonna have a lot of conflict there. Or the early Catholic Protestant split, but when religions become more distantly related, but are still part of the wider grouping of religions, you typically get pretty low amounts of conflict. And when religions get very distantly related. Like Christianity versus pagan religions, you get a really high amount of conflict again.

A great example of both of the dangers of playing this stratagem, too closely or too far we can see in the Mormon tradition. In the early days of the Mormon tradition, they were much more differentiated in terms of their lifestyle and beliefs than modern day Christians. And as such, they were often in active [01:17:00] and very hot conflict with, , nearby Christians.

I mean, at one point they went to war with the U. S. government. , that's how much conflict the Mormons used to be in with nearby Christian communities. But as time has gone on, A unique, and I'm not sure if it's a genetic thing within Mormonism, or, or something that has become a norm within Mormonism, but more than any other community, Mormons seem to want to really, really be seen as normal and fit in, and be respected for being normal and wholesome.

But this has led to a problem in that they have started to cover up the ways that they are different from other Christians. And this has happened through two core sort of chains within the Mormon tradition. The first is a huge number of their converts are Catholics due to where they are converting people, which has led to a level of Catholicization of Mormonism, which makes a lot of sense.

I mean, you could draw a lot of parallels between the Mormon central hierarchy and the Catholic central hierarchy [01:18:00] from the perspective of a new convert. But then you have the second problem, which is the Mormons who are in the, , Utah, the traditional Mormons. Mormons of the original Mormon, cultural and ethnic group.

 They have done very poorly recently, because that's the group that really, really has this strong desire to fit in. And so, when they are being preached to by their pastors, or whatever you call a pastor in Mormonism, many of those pastors will often leave out the way that Mormonism is different from mainstream Christianity, because those are the things that if they're , parishioners repeated in public would get them chastised, you know, the multiple mortal prohibitions problem or the,, ideas about intelligences and the ways that human reincarnation may exist. ,

Or the idea that humans will eventually become gods themselves, or like God.

 and we go into this in the Are We Mormons videos. But the point being is when Mormons come to us and they go, Mormons don't believe this, what they mean is that their local [01:19:00] preacher, doesn't mention this stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's a problem because historically, your prophets used to talk about this stuff all the time.

 And me as somebody who really likes studying those sort of weirder aspects of Mormonism and finds them much more compelling than the more modernized iteration of Mormonism, , is really into those works, , like the old, , Orson Pratt stuff, but this leads to a problem, in that the Mormon church has lost a lot of its identity from my perspective because of this and is becoming more and more just like any other Christian tradition, which is, of course, a risk that, you know, suppose.

our system takes off and our kids do really well and they stay within the system and it becomes this large religious group. Well, if it's existing alongside other Christian groups and it doesn't have built into its DNA this internal, drive to rebel and to paint oneself as, as different and to be sort of an iconoclast, it will face the same problem Mormonism does, which is just shave [01:20:00] off all the parts of it that are really, really sharply different from other streams of Christianity.

And it doesn't need to like actively decide to shave it off. As I've said, it can just be due to where preachers are shifting the focus of their teachings.

Malcolm Collins: So this allows us to lower the amount of conflict, but also logically lower the amount of conflict because we're not an active threat to their devout members. Like we view it as one of our religious duties to protect people from deconverting from these conservative religions and develop systems that help protect people in these conservative.

Traditions because they increase the diversity of religious systems out there. Like if you look at the motivations of our system but two if they believe that their system is really the true system, our system captures all of the teachings of their systems. So if we end up being one of the traditions that goes to the stars, their systems could re emerge out of our system.

You know, it could be God's way of, of taking certain religious faiths to the stars that end up dying out through other means. Also, everything that we're aiming to do [01:21:00] you know, protect conservative religious groups, as well as ensuring that humanity becomes an interstellar species. , and ensure the continued diversity of humanity.

This might be a problem to some progressive groups or some totalizing religious traditions, i. e. traditions that eventually want to convert everyone. But those religious traditions and those traditions are typically enemies of all other religious traditions because they're totalizing, right? You know, so we, we get to be nice there without also having any form of, of open conflict in regards to that.

And also people should keep this in mind from our own perspective, so they understand that this isn't just altruistic or anything like that. We send people back to the other conservative traditions, because one, we believe that increases the diversity of ideas out there in our belief system is really centered around, I guess, what you could call cultural Darwinism, or the idea that the cultural traditions that survive are God's will, and that is how God displays his will to us.

But for cultural traditions to compete, you need multiple cultural traditions. A [01:22:00] healthy ecosystem is a diverse one, and that is true at the cultural level as well.

But in addition to that, part of the reason we are not interested in the people who are active in rebelling against their ancestral traditions actively is because We view them as inferior. We specifically want the type of people who ask a ton of questions in our video on the genetics of religious traditions and how quickly you can get these sort of sociological tendencies concentrated in religious groups.

We are almost, you could say, specifically. farming rebellion because we see that as being the core of the human fire of the human spirit that allows humanity to thrive and is what allows this cycle of intergenerational improvements and what will fuel the next generation of our practitioners to Go against us and try to improve the system while still having enough of a drive to compete and enough of a drive towards logic that they are okay with being judged [01:23:00] directly against us.

This is where our system of encouraging our children to rebel comes from, which is to say, our system, if you look at the index in the pragmatist guide to religion and the way it's structured is it encourages our children to rebel, but still stay within the larger framework. , and then. They get judged against their own parents, and then other ancestors, and other members of the tradition by their own children in terms of their efficacy in rearing children, i.

e. in terms of how those children come out from their own perspective.

If this is your first time hearing about this, essentially we tell our children, anything that you think that we did poorly as parents or in this tradition we constructed, we strongly encourage you to try to make it better, to build better systems. To adapt systems from other cultures that you think are stronger than the systems that we used with you, but do know that there is this central book called the index, which you write, your perception on how these traditions ended up affecting you in, [01:24:00] but your children are also going to be writing in.

And when your grandchildren are choosing how they're going to rebel and are choosing different. , structures of traditions, they can use this book and judge whether or not you actually did a good job in your restructuring of things and they might go back to ancestral ways, believing that you did not build a system that was effect as effective as the systems that came before you.

And so the only way a person would deconvert from this, really, so long as they're not converting to one of the older traditions, is if they didn't think they could do a better job, or if they didn't like this metric that we are using to judge a person's competence or the competence of their ideas.

, and that metric is how their children judge the competence of those ideas. So all of this is completely. egotistical from our perspective, , us one, not wanting to convert people out of conservative traditions, but also us sending people back to and protecting people from deconverting from conservative traditions, , as well as, , our belief [01:25:00] in, you know, we see ourself as an ancestral chain.

We see ourselves as intergenerational entities and that ancestral chain comes out of the Judeo Christian traditions. So obviously we're also going to. See some benefit to protecting those traditions, which is also why we encoded them in all of this. It's not all just about protection. However, it is also about protection.

our goal of intergenerational human improvement at both the spiritual and biological and technological level means that we have Faith that within five or six generations, members of our tradition will be fairly unassailable from pretty much any other existing tradition in the world today, especially when you look at things like, , the, the dropping rates of the apologetic scores that are associated with IQ and the general population, our.

The real goal here is just to protect our practitioners until we can reach the stage in which this form of protection is no longer necessary, i. e. protection because we are not an active threat to [01:26:00] these groups and they rightly see us as carrying on their traditions and as, in a way, a part of their traditions.

Malcolm Collins: The final thing I wanted to touch on is value systems which are determined through the ways that the internal hierarchy of a religious tradition works. And that this hierarchy is passed down through the way you teach kids what to value and what not to value.

Something that we have repeatedly set up in videos that we have done is we do not. It is appropriate for anyone to be a preacher unless they have a alternate source of income that they earned on their own. IE it's not mom and dad's money. And IE they are not being paid to preach. Like we see both of those things as having really negative incentive systems.

 and I should point out here that we're not the only religious tradition to have this prohibition. , this used to be part of, one chain of Judaism. Obviously it wasn't part of Judaism during the second temple period, and it hasn't been adopted by the Hasidic schools of Judaism.

But if you do look at what is [01:27:00] written in the Talmud, you'll get lines like, rabbi Gaman, the son of Rabbi Yeta Azi, said, excellent is the study of the Torah together was worldly occupation for the exertion. In both of them, it causes sin to be forgotten.

All study of the Torah in absence of worldly occupation comes to nothing, and in the end leads to sin. Which is what we believe. All religious study that is done in absence of labor that moves society forwards is always going to lead to sin, like physical labor or inventive labor or basically anything outside of just teaching. So do you, , this group or persuasion of this time period? Any rabbi that came to them and did not have a job outside of being a rabbi. Like they did not have another way that they were supporting themselves was teaching and preaching sin and only sin.

And it should be clear that they, they mean this pretty explicitly here. If I go [01:28:00] on with this quote, it then says, and all of the work for the community, let them for the sake of heaven, for the merit of their ancestors sustains them. And their righteousness will endure forever. And for you who work for the community.

God says, I credit you with a great reward as if you yourselves had done it on your own. And then another quote here, Any father who does not teach his son a trade teaches him banditry. And then the other person, , exposes some surprise at this statement. And he goes, can it enter your mind that he actually teaches him banditry?

And then the person basically replies, Since the son has no profession with which to support himself, it is likely to turn to theft for livelihood, which is what we see the selling of preaching as being. , the selling of preaching is a form of theft within our tradition. But you can see this is why it is useful for us going back to the traditions of our ancestors, back to the wisdom contained within this [01:29:00] Judeo Christian tree, for this extreme wisdom which is still so relevant today. All religious study outside of a worldly occupation ultimately leads to sin. And this is because of the negative incentives that you're going to get when people begin paying you to tell them what they want to hear.

This is why you have so many churches bending on their key principles to keep their parishioners.

Malcolm Collins: But what it also does is it leads to part of the way that you judge a preacher is their real world efficacious accomplishments, which means you need this level of real world efficacious accomplishments. And there is some level of status hierarchy within the preachers of this system based upon independent research that they're doing that allows them to Add to the human body of knowledge and keep the religion being a living religion, as we call it, versus the dead religion, where living religions are religions that are constantly in an internal communication, updating themselves and, and [01:30:00] producing really top tier thinkers, whereas dead traditions and anyone can look out at historical traditions and see this are ones where they used to produce a lot of top tier thinkers, but they haven't in a few centuries.

And so it ensures that we, we stay that yeah. Well, also preventing the negative, and then you've got the profit system where you can't go around claiming you're a prophet or something like that. That is for sure a sign that you're not a prophet within this tradition if you're doing that. This can only be determined after an individual dies which prevents that level of abuse.

But also allows individuals, like, it's very hard to, like, want to be a a preacher within this system to make money if that's seen as a sign of, like, a low status preacher. Right? So you don't have the same negative incentive structure there. What else would you say, Simone? I

Simone Collins: So our religions value systems which we're all a lot around, obviously.

long termism, but also industry efficacy, working hard. But also being very intellectually minded and open minded are obviously like reinforced by values and the texts that we choose.[01:31:00] But also like sort of, we'll say low culture elements. Like we have a list of approved films and they range from movies like Clueless to Indiana Jones to Starship Troopers.

Like these are not. You know, I don't know, like weird, obscure documentaries, this is very popular media. But then, of course, it goes back to our holidays. You know, our holidays are just Future Day, for example. Another holiday we have we currently call Lemon Week. It may get a better name eventually.

But it involves of course, colorful fun motifs of lemons and lots of citrus treats and meals. But over this week of citrus treats and lemon decorations and all that fun each family member who's Intellectually capable of doing this has just liked a topic that deeply deeply offends them.

Like just, they, they hate it so much and they have to very earnestly steel man their position and share it with the family. So they have to dive into these, you know, these groups, subreddits or their texts or their videos or whatever [01:32:00] it is, and really, really understand it from a good faith perspective and then explain it to the family.

And give a very strong pitch to the family and the family will judge if you have not been intellectually honest, if you are just straw manning them, if you're making them look bad, we will judge you and shame you. And then at the end of the week, everyone gets to plant a fruit tree and then enjoy the fruits of their bitter, but productive exercise.

So, you know, these are examples of ways that we dumb it down, make it fun, make it approachable but hopefully pass down these values.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Well, we can go to the next video, I guess. Talk about this more some other time. There were other things I wanted to talk to you, but this video is just getting too long.

Yeah. And I'm talking too much. I don't like it when you're not adding a lot, so.

Simone Collins: , I don't give a s**t what people think. I don't give a s**t what people think of our philosophy. When people, like, leave all these comments on, like, you know, religious philosophy, and we'll think, and this, and this, and this. I cannot be bothered, you guys. I cannot be bothered.

Just live your lives, follow your religion, and we'll see how you [01:33:00] do. And those who accuse us of being consequentialists, yeah, mm hmm.

Malcolm Collins: We are 100 percent it is quite immoral to not be a consequentialist. Why would somebody not be a consequentialist? We're material Everyone

Simone Collins: who says, really, do you think the ends justify the means?

That's, that's people who disagree

Malcolm Collins: with us. Yeah, the, the ends always, of course, I mean, if you're, if you're

Simone Collins: leading to a good outcome. Not to most demoralizing people, so. Everything

Malcolm Collins: else is just, is just moral set dressing.

Simone Collins: That's what, that's what most people live by, Malcolm. That's what they

Malcolm Collins: live by. But I believe consequentialist groups will out compete non consequentialist groups, I'll tell you that.

Simone Collins: We'll see through the

Malcolm Collins: consequences. Right?

 for anyone who's watching this and doesn't know what consequentialism is, consequentialism is the ethical theory that judges whether something is right or wrong based on what its consequences are, rather than judging actions based on whether or not they adhere to certain rules or duties, , or intentions.

So. Essentially, a non [01:34:00] consequentialist would say, Well, I didn't intend for me sending all of that aid money indiscriminately to Africa to end up funding terrorists and leading to a huge escalation in violence. Therefore, it was a good thing for me to do it. While a consequentialist would say, It doesn't matter.

You should have tried to figure out what matters is that the money you sent made the situation worse and therefore it was a bad thing. And this is because consequentialism, and the reason a lot of people don't like consequentialism is because it requires a level Of self responsibility and accountability that a lot of people aren't willing to take.

, we saw this for us when our travel company really suffered during the pandemic. , and a lot of investors were like, Oh, you know, it's an act of God. Don't worry about it. And we're like, no, like you, you never get to shirk responsibility just because it would have been hard to predict it. Of all of the things we could have predicted something like this, we could have done more to prepare for something like this.

We are 100% [01:35:00] When we fail regardless of what our intentions are, the moment you take a philosophy that allows somebody wiggle room out of that, they will use that to justify basically just following orders or just following traditions or, well, I thought it was going to help. , and I think that this is being one of the core problems of the progressive mind virus.

It's, it, It takes such an anti consequentialist mindset, , where it really, really, really wants to push this idea of as long as what you intended was good, i. e., well, by telling a fat person that it was going to have long term negative effects. , for them to keep eating. I was trying to lessen their emotional pain, but of course that has the consequence of causing much more damage in the long run.

So they have this anti consequentialist viewpoint where they're like, well, my intention was nice and that's why I didn't mention it. , and that's why we hate this anti consequentialist mindset so, so, so much. That said, and we have an upcoming video on this. There is one instance where a deontological viewpoint that [01:36:00] is the, the viewpoint that what matters is duty and tradition over the consequences of inaction is higher utility than a consequentialist viewpoint.

And that is for individuals who are taking on the role of a Knight instead of a king within their cultural tradition.

, and we'll talk about this within a video. Basically, you always want the leaders and the people who are planning the grand strategy of a group to be consequentialist, but you want the rank and file brave soldiers pushing forward to tradition to be deontologist.

Malcolm Collins: For people who are wondering why the light's different in parts of this filming, it's because we wanted to have Simone talk more.

Well then, if we've got a little bit of extra time, is there anything else you wanted to say on the religion episode? Because I'd really love more thoughts about passing on value systems from you, good and evil, et cetera. Like, what do you think about the idea of just creating a completely, like, Constructed religion.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like, so, I guess, what would happen if a [01:37:00] family, because I, what I wonder is like, how many people are going to take what you wrote in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion and just run with it, right? Just like, alright, what the hell? And we know some people are doing this, we just don't know what their religions are like yet.

And when we start formally putting together the index, which is a collection of families who want to be loosely allied, who all have different cultures and religions, but would like to share data. on their performance of their cultural religions and sort of categorize their, their cultural practices and beliefs so that we can all sort of learn from each other.

We'll start learning from them then because we're going to catalog all of these things. However, I imagine some people are going to do some really weird s**t. Like for example, maybe someone's going to be like, Santa Claus. You know, you're just saying, right? Like, Oh, Santa Claus has taken on like a lot more than a lot of other religious concepts.

What if someone's like, let's just make this a frigging religion. Like, let's go for it all the way. You know, not just not just Christmas, but like throughout the year, you know, he sees you and what the elves are building stuff right now. And like, you know, we have to, to [01:38:00] serve, you know, I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so this is, this is really interesting.

And so a lot of people don't know that this is the way our religion is structured, unless they've seen like ancillary interviews or read the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. But we strongly encourage our kids to dissent from our theological views. But stay within the religious system in the same way that like capitalism turns the greed of society into efficacy.

We tried to build a system that turns the desire to. Prove others wrong rebelliousness into fidelity to cultural traditions. And the way that we do that is by creating strict measures by which an individual's life is judged. And we do this when an individual dies. We've talked about this in other things as we're like, what were they aiming for?

Did they live? A life well, and what do their kids think of them? Because, you know, that's how an individual is best judged. Because your kids are judging you from either the value set that you taught them and that they kept, or they [01:39:00] abandoned the values that you taught them, in which case you failed in that regard.

So are your kids judging you by an evolved iteration of the value set that you created? And that is the way we, we work with our kids. We're like, okay, you think you can do better than us. You think you can do more for your kids than we did for you. Then try, create a better system, but your kids will judge you in the same way you judge us within this central document, which is called the index.

And then future generations will judge which of us was best.

Simone Collins: Well, so I think there are some examples of already totally made up religions. That kind of started getting traction, right? Like the, the church of the subgenius, for example, which you loved when you were a kid did sort of build up a bit of a cult following, right?

Like it's sort of dedicated to hedonism. Yeah. Which is not great. Right. But I'm just saying like, there have been some entirely like ironically made up religions [01:40:00] where people have in the end started getting caught up in it. Like there is precedent for this and. Well, I think, you know, we just had this long conversation about how, you know, logical inconsistencies will leave people just wanting more and leaving the faith.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I also think another thing that a lot of people might hear all this and they're like, where are you guys actually strict within your ruling system, because you seem to abandon a lot of, you know, what people complain about in terms of the arbitrary restrictions of religion.

And that's true. We are attacking what are the arbitrary ones, the ones that people are most complaining about. Whereas we are going much further with the ones like self denial and attack on any form of hedonism to the extent where any level of self aggrandizement, all of that, are status hurting things within our cultural group.

If you go out and you are adorned in lots of jewelry or something like that, that is a sign that you are a sinner and that you are not someone to be trusted.

Simone Collins: But I oddly think a lot of this is actually [01:41:00] cribbed from our really early relationship conversations. Before we ever had kids about raising kids.

And like some of the advice that we settled on that we liked the most especially about having teenagers was like, basically have no rules, just have a very, very small number of rules that actually matters enforce them like mad. But they have to be rules that make sense, and that's it. Like,

Malcolm Collins: we Yeah, and this is, this is also really interesting.

So a lot of people look at our thing, like, our very low temperature we keep in the house, and stuff like that in the winter and what they misunderstand is when they look at this they say, oh, so you live, you know, in constant pain. Like, why don't you do additional pain rituals, right? Like the Opus Dei or something like that.

Which we would see as indulgent signs of vanity. Yeah, what a waste of

Simone Collins: time. Because

Malcolm Collins: you are wasting time. To demonstrate something pain and efficacy is something that you drive through to reach an end goal and that you should be expected to drive through, whereas signs of vanity or narrative building or self [01:42:00] indulgence, we understand that all humans are sinners and to attempt to not sin at all is a pass to personal damnation.

But to, to, to aggrandize the sin, to say I'm actually good because I waste my time working out to look good, like beyond what's just healthy, that is also the highest, one of the highest orders of sin. Although, within our system we do have the single highest order of sin. Which is stagnation that is the sin above all other sins is personal stagnation or, or cultural stagnation or any form of stagnation, which is why we talk about this concept of living in dead religions, is the dead religions are the ones that have allowed themselves to stagnate, whereas humanity's greatness is defined by our intergenerational improvement and intergenerational advancement.

Which, which does, you know, potentially put us into conflicts with some religious traditions, except we see them as, as useful as a different perspective and thus, thus worth maintaining as much as we can. [01:43:00] It's actually interesting how symbiotic like if this tradition takes off how symbiotic it is with traditional cultural traditions and that it literally doesn't want, and it sees it as a religious order to help protect their members from deconverting.

And it only wants to prevent the people who they would otherwise have bleeding off from it who are bleeding off for mental fortitude reasons instead of corruptibility reasons. So if I'm going to categorize these two things, corruptibility reasons is they're bleeding off because they just want to have a lot of sex or something like that, or they want to, you know, just indulge in their, you know, some form of personal identity.

And in which case we don't want them, but then integrity reasons is they see some area of logical inconsistency. They just can't get over. But they would really rather not fall to completely to the urban monoculture. We can act as a good backstop, which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban [01:44:00] monoculture.

So it's not acting as an outright conversion mechanism, but as part of this cultural economy that prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization before it can reach the stars and ensuring that the Western cultural tradition does. Join the stars to some extent. If someone's gonna be like, Why don't you care about the Eastern culture of Lucian?

Because that's not us! Like, I have no connection to that. It would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt to simulate that, or simp that, you know. We can we can work to help them where we can, but we're not part of that tradition.

Anyway, I love you to decimum.

Simone Collins: Would you like to go over

Malcolm Collins: together? I can go over by myself.

Simone Collins: You said it's a lot easier

Malcolm Collins: with me helping. Yeah, but I bet it's easier for you not to help.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but no, you bought me puddings today. We're going together. So meet me in the kitchen. Yeah. Okay, you're the best. I love you