Why People Leave Their Religion & How We Will (Try To) Guard Against It

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