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Atheistville is your audio passport out of faith and into reality, featuring raw stories, unholy debates, and unapologetic reason from those who left belief behind.
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Faith, Freedom, and Facts: Atheists on Leaving Religion and Finding Community
In this episode of The Unholy Roundtable, a panel of atheists explores the rise of Christian nationalism, the persistence of gender inequality in religion, and the powerful social bonds that keep many in the pews. We share personal stories of deconstruction, confront historical myths about America’s founding, and challenge the logic behind religious control. Whether you’ve left religion or are questioning, this conversation offers thoughtful perspectives on belief, community, and freedom.
What was the single biggest turning point that made you start questioning your religious beliefs?
📑 Relevant Topics / Chapter Headings
- Introductions and Why Perspective Matters
- Christian Nationalism vs. Declining Church Attendance
- Women and Religion: Why Stay in a System Built Against You?
- The Social Pull of Church and Replacing Community
- Pascal’s Wager, Doubt, and Critical Thinking
- Hypocrisy in Religious Morality
- The “Prayer vs. Heimlich” Debate
- Historical Myths About America’s Founding
- When Belief Meets Reality: Family, Love, and Change
📚 Suggested Reading List
- The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American by Andrew L. Seidel- https://amzn.to/3IScuc7 A sharp legal and historical dismantling of the idea that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation—essential for understanding today’s church-state debates.
- Why There Is No God by Armin Navabi- https://amzn.to/45fBUta A concise look at common theistic arguments and how to counter them with reason and evidence.
- Leaving the Fold by Marlene Winell- https://amzn.to/3GqjZ9l Specifically addresses the psychological challenges of leaving authoritarian religion, including the social isolation Mike describes.
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And now, making their way to the studio, the reason there's now a no-heckling sign at St. Patrick's Cathedral, it's the Unholy Roundtable!
SPEAKER_07:Welcome to Atheistville. My name is Mike, and tonight is a special kind of show. This is the Unholy Roundtable. We bring people together, various atheists from various walks of life and backgrounds, and address your question. So right now, if you have any questions, get them loaded into YouTube, and we will try to get to all of them. We also have some questions that people gave us earlier that we're going to address, and I collected these people, kind of a a rogue band of misfits and miscreants to address them from different perspectives. As I've said from the beginning of this show, I want people from different backgrounds because I only have my own experience. I don't know their experience. So their perspectives may be the same, maybe completely different. We can disagree. We're all friends. That's fine if we disagree. Nobody cares. Just disagree. So those of you who are on the call, Mike, Scott, Annette, Larry, feel free to say, you know, it's not what I think and go a different direction on it. So with that, real quick, I'll give each of you like a five or 10 seconds just to say hello and your name and anything else. But just real brief to let people know. I'll start with Mike just because he's the first one on my screen.
UNKNOWN:Hey, everybody. How you doing?
SPEAKER_07:Thanks for having me on again, Mike. It's a real pleasure to be here. It's going to be nice to be able to talk with Scott and Annette and Larry and, again, you. So looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_06:Welcome. Hi, I'm Scott. I'm really glad to be back on here. It's great to talk about like-minded people and to get points of view that we may not understand because of our gender, sexuality, gender identity, background in church, or even different religions. So it's really cool that we're getting heathens from different walks of life all here to heathenize together. It's a thing. I'm claiming it.
UNKNOWN:All right.
SPEAKER_07:Larry or Annette, whichever one. Ladies first.
SPEAKER_08:Oh, thank you, Larry. Annette, and I'm a recovering Christian. Maybe I should say that I identify that way. And I'm happy to be here. Apparently, I'm representing all of the female race here.
SPEAKER_07:All of the
SPEAKER_08:female.
SPEAKER_07:Four billion women in the world, and that's all you.
SPEAKER_08:Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_07:Sure. Larry, we'll wrap up. The thing that I appreciate about what you're doing here, Mike, is we're creating a record. It's another little small bit of information for the internet. People can come by here at any time in the future and perhaps get a perspective of what
SPEAKER_01:atheists really are and the genuine thoughts that we have and how we live much happier and less stressed lives than most religious people. Also, I think we identify as not a rogue group, but
SPEAKER_07:more of a, I don't know. A motley crew? Motley crew, maybe that's it. A motley crew, I love it. But you just said something. It's a good point, Larry, and I did want to kind of add that on. And that was another thought when I first came up with the idea of these shows in general was that we're all out there we live next door to you we work next to you we ride the bus or the train or we're kids soccer coach or any of these other things and um people have a an idea scott and i specifically we both grew up in the south and there's very strong opinions i'm sure there's strong opinions everywhere but in the south it's very guns and jesus kind of a place and if you say you're an atheist you know there's a baggage that goes along with it it's not true but it's there nonetheless. And we have to battle that. So the idea was I'll bring people like you guys on and other guests that I've had on that we'll bring on in future shows, just to give an idea that we're just like everybody else. Like we got kids, we got parents, we got jobs, everything else. We're just trying to get through life. You know, we just have a little different perspective on it, but we're still all want the same basic things in life, which is just to get to the finish line as relatively unscathed as possible. Right. So with that, let's go with a hot take right out of the gate. This came up, you've probably all seen this on the news, and this is going to be a video clip, but this rise of Christian nationalism that we've seen, I've actually done a future video that I've already got sort of in the can, where, and I think you probably have all heard this, over the last several years, church attendance has gone down. The nuns, meaning the non-affiliation, which is atheists, agnostics, and people who just don't say, I'm part of any religion, has been the fastest growing group of Americans. At the same time, Christian nationalism is rampant, right? So it's a very strange sort of world we're living in right now. But I'm going to go ahead and throw this video up from the other day. This is a CNN video of a guy named Doug Wilson. And let's just watch that and we'll comment on the other side.
SPEAKER_04:You suck. as a parent
SPEAKER_07:who lost. Probably help if I do the right video.
SPEAKER_02:Doug Wilson makes no apologies for his beliefs on God and country.
SPEAKER_01:I'd like to see the town be a Christian town, like to see this state be a Christian state, like to see the nation. be a Christian nation. I like to see the world be a Christian world.
SPEAKER_02:And now Wilson's controversial views as a Christian nationalist are gaining sway in the nation's center of power with the recent opening of his new church and high-profile parishioners like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Is planting a church in D.C. part of your mission to try to turn this into a Christian nation?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So every society is theocratic. The only question is who's Theo in a secular democracy it would be Demos, the people. In a Christian republic, it'd be Christ.
SPEAKER_07:So there we go. I've got my thoughts, but let's start with... Any of you want to jump out on this one? This is an open question for the entire group because it's a little crazy. But the first thing that struck me when I
SPEAKER_01:saw that earlier was that he said he'd like to see it be a Christian nation, which is counter to the A lot
SPEAKER_07:of the people I've heard before, all the Christian nationalists saying, we are a Christian nation. True. They're wrong, but he's essentially admitting that they know that we aren't. That's a good point, actually, because you're right. The average Christian nationalist would say, we are. We're founded as a Christian, which is always bullshit, but that's what they say. You're right. Anybody else? If you consider that the country was originally founded because, or one of the driving factors, or something that I should say that was very important, was that all religions had an opportunity. There wasn't anything that was, there weren't any, you weren't demanded by the king to be any particular religion. Right. That was our point.
SPEAKER_06:Right?
SPEAKER_07:The
SPEAKER_06:other side to that is, though, that there have been laws like in some states you couldn't hold public office without being a Christian. And that's, you know, since since the Constitution was even formed. And of course, you know, the First Amendment was what they used to to bat those laws down eventually.
SPEAKER_08:It was controversial when JFK ran for president because he was Catholic. is this kind of lean toward nationalism and more extremism. We're seeing this across the globe. And so my worldview kind of comes from this perspective that it's, you know, religion is all part of this machine that's tied to, you know, patriarchy and tied to white supremacy and tied to trying to control other people. And so when I hear people say like, I want this to be a Christian nation, I also hear kind of behind that, this desire to want to, sort of like legislate people's morality and their behavior. It's an attempt to control people and determine what the norms and the expectations across society are. I believe that the lean toward nationalism is also like this rebound. This is our punishment for Obama, right? It's like the punishment for
SPEAKER_06:this-
SPEAKER_08:like marriage equality and, you know, like all of these trends that have been trending more in that, you know, kind of leaning more liberal. And, and now we're seeing like a rebound from that.
SPEAKER_07:It's the pendulum swinging back. The pendulum swinging back. Does it worry you about how far it's going to go? Or do you think we're towards the end of that pendulum? Where, where are you guys in Larry, since you were starting, I cut you off. We'll start with you. Where, where do you think about where we're at in that, in that phase? i'm i'm more concerned now than i was before the overturn of roe good good um because i believe i mentioned in my episode before you see them chipping away and chipping away um you know school vouchers is another little insidious way to accomplish the overall goal
SPEAKER_01:that is becoming more and more apparent in my view. One other thing, I believe the other Mike mentioned about the founding of the country. I kind of take the idea that the country was founded by various sects and religions. Each colony kind of had their own religious, uh start in other words you know the protestants of one flavor were in one colony and a different colony had primarily something else and i think
SPEAKER_07:there was an i there's an idea that we were taught in school especially because i believe i'm about the oldest here in grade school we were taught that um uh the people on mayflower came over to escape religious persecution which is a good story and somewhat true. But I think more precisely, perhaps they and the other colonials came over to not just escape religious persecution, but to be able to persecute others. To rape and pillage. In their own religious way. I see exactly what you're saying. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, they kind of wanted to see that table, and they didn't have one there. So they came over here where they could take over. The freedom to worship, as I believe, means that I can't abide by some of the things that these other sects do.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. And interestingly enough, I think when people talk about, oh, the pilgrims on the Mayflower, they left England and came to the United States to escape religious persecution.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:What people don't realize is there was a gap of over 10 years, I think, when they were in the Netherlands. Yeah,
SPEAKER_03:because they
SPEAKER_06:were away from religious persecution. And not only was that persecution creeping back up on them, but their own kids were becoming less Christian and more secular. And the reason that they did end up coming to the United States was not for religious purposes. It was because they had an opportunity to work for a company and be paid to go to the new world. It was about leaving England. Yes, that was about religious persecution. But coming to the coming to here was it wasn't as much about religious persecution as people like to pretend it is.
SPEAKER_07:I just fairly recently with us a few years heard that whole 10 year thing. And you're right. It was the Netherlands. I'm pretty sure it was the Netherlands. just like you think. And I, as a kid and Larry and I, you and I are a little off on it. We're probably the two oldest and we're not too terribly far off from each other. I definitely never heard that. I mean, well, again, I only heard this a few years ago, so I definitely was never, that is not the story we tell from Americans.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, we just fled the church and we fled the king and so we could set up a shop here and do what we want, but not really. As everything we do in America, there's always a little extra story that we kind of leave out, right? Kind of like the Bible. We don't tell all the books right away.
SPEAKER_06:There's a lot of stories. I just want to note in that last video, I don't know if you can replay it, but did my eyes deceive me or was he wearing mixed fabrics? And this is the problem that I've got is it's People are throwing around Christian nationalism. It's like, which version of Christianity? Wow. There's over 10,000 different things, different denominations. So which way would you go anyway? I mean, they tried to narrow it down in Arkansas. It was Arkansas or Oklahoma where they had to have Bibles in the classroom. And when they finally got it narrowed down exactly what they had to have out of those Bibles, it was the Trump Bible. The Trump Bible. The Trump Bible was the only one. Literally.
SPEAKER_07:That was the freaking plan. The Trump Bible. And it also didn't have the Declaration of Independence at the beginning.
SPEAKER_06:Declaration of Independence, which isn't even a legal, that's not even a legal framework of the United States. The Declaration of Independence has nothing to do with our legal system.
SPEAKER_07:No. It's just mind-numbing. That's not the Bill of Rights. It's a whole different, I mean, it's an important document for our history, our shared history, but it's not, and again, it's not religious. It's just insane. But yes, it was Oklahoma. And I don't have that clip. Incidentally, that's the guy who just, I think I did a mic drop on the Atheist channel. They just got in trouble for watching porn during the school board thing. That's the same guy. The Oklahoma guy. He's in his office. He calls him back to the office. He's two people, also Republicans. He called them back to their office to talk about- Educational
SPEAKER_01:board members.
SPEAKER_07:Educational board members. He wanted to discuss a point that they didn't want out as far as their normal quorum. And while they're sitting there, his TV behind him is hooked up to his computer. It's got porn on it. And the man and the woman, again, Republicans are like, are those nipples? Am I seeing nipples? Scott or whatever the hell his name was like, Jesus.
SPEAKER_08:Well, if you see like, um, and they show maps of like the highest, uh, rates of porn usage are also overlap with the parts of the country that are purportedly the highest, you know, rates of religious people to
SPEAKER_06:grinder too. Yes.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Grindr crashed how many times during the Republican National Convention? And that was right here in Milwaukee. That was insane. All right. Let's move on to this one. So, Nat, I'm going to give you this one. As you said, you're representing every woman from every walk of life in the entire world. So no pressure, though. This is a question from Reddit or Facebook. I kind of got questions from everywhere, but this is a good question, I thought. I'm actually, I'm going to read these out loud because when we do the podcast, they won't see them. So this is for Annette. The woman asked, I'm assuming a woman, why should I as a woman keep trying to reframe myself into a religion that was never built for me? It's a legitimate question.
SPEAKER_08:It absolutely is. And, you know, I mean, I guess I would say my, just my personal story. I grew up Christian and I, I started my journey to atheism in college, I would say. I
SPEAKER_05:took
SPEAKER_08:many philosophy classes, and it kind of led me down this wormhole of just really teaching me how to critically think, honestly, which ironically happened at a Catholic university. But I just kept following things to their logical end, and I'm like, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. So I'll just give you one example, which was, you know, the question posed by my professor at the time was, how can the end of the world be determined already? Right. Like God has already said that this is how the world will end. It's spelled out in Revelation. And if that is how it will end, if it's already determined, then how do we also have free will? How can both be true at the same time? And so that was the first real significant kind of crack in my Christian belief. And so it continued from there. And when I started to realize that like, oh, I do really have a choice. I don't have to be the religion that I was born into. I can decide for myself, what do I think happened? And when you start to reflect on that, and as I was also learning more just about feminism in general, I realized that I could find like whatever needs that I got met in Christianity, which for many people like me is, you know, a sense of belonging and community and friends. And, you know, it helps with coping at times when you feel like you have like somebody to talk to all the time. You're like, oh, I'll just pray, you know, and ask God for advice or what does he think I should do? Right. And so when I realized that I could get all of my needs met better in other places or with other tools, then I started to realize that I didn't need it anymore. So not only did, you know, like first step was to, you know, the craft to stop maybe believing or to, you know, start questioning my actual faith. And then it's like this other, you know, like the logical part of it is not also the emotional part of it, right? Like those are separate. And so like the emotional part of like, how do I get my needs met then elsewhere? And I realized like, oh, you know, like I can go to yoga and I can join this group and I can actually like have this group of friends. And, you know, I don't have to have like my entire community just centralized in this. So And then when I realized that it's, yeah, it's not made for women. It's a power structure made for men. It was much easier to leave it behind.
SPEAKER_07:Did you... And this is kind of a group question and the handful of us are here in Chicago and we have a regular meetup, regular, it's not as regular as it used to be. But we try to get together and you hit something Annette that I've always, that I did not realize when we first started doing those meetups 10 years ago, Annette and Larry both were at the very first one that we did 10 years ago. I didn't appreciate how much people missed that community. of going to church. So when we first started these, and even now, I thought of them as a social club that happens to be atheist, right? And I thought, okay, we'll just get together. It's not an agenda. We're not having a meeting. There are no notes to take. It's not a speaker. We're just getting together. We're hanging out at a bar, restaurant, whatever. What I didn't realize, people would come to the group and they just wanted to get it off their chest and say, I just don't understand what I had to go through. And I finally have broken free. And I can't believe I've met all you people that are like-minded because they used to go to church and that was a social thing. And they don't have that now. They've been waiting to talk to anybody and be able to speak freely. And like you said, it might not be any different between men and women or anything else, but I didn't fully appreciate that because I didn't grow up in that level of socializing within the church. But I thought it was really very interesting once I started to clue in on that, how much people really stay in church very often as much for the social aspect as they do the belief. And Mike, you probably know about that because as involved as you were on the administrative side of it, if you will, for lack of a better term. Yeah, absolutely. It was very difficult to lose that connection with everyone else. There was always someone there. There was always something going on where you were interacting with people that's really just what it comes down to and when I stopped attending those things I never went to and when I stopped going to Sunday school or when I stopped going to church period well then choir was really the only thing that I had left you know and I was still going through some things so that whole process was it left a void there was definitely a void I had to relearn that hey I'm just a mammal running around doing mammal things and i can do it with all my other mammal buddies you know i don't have to have my blinders on
SPEAKER_03:yeah
SPEAKER_07:now it's yeah i i really i try now when we have these meetings to to to broach the subject to a level that allows them to know that hey it's okay if you want to talk about it it's okay if you don't if you just want to have a beer and talk about the last movie we saw that's fine that's why we're here But if they start to go down a road of like, this is what I experienced or whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm here to listen to people. I just let them talk. I don't try to dissuade them from it. But again, it was important for me to learn that. I wish I could say I learned that on the first meeting. I didn't, but nonetheless. All right, let's move on to the next one. Let's see here. Larry, I got a question for you. Oh, I
SPEAKER_08:think Scott's trying to talk, but we
SPEAKER_06:can. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I wanted to give a very succinct answer to that last question. Why should I? reframe myself to fit into a religion that doesn't fit XYZ version of myself,
SPEAKER_08:you shouldn't.
SPEAKER_06:Period. That's point blank and period. You should not. Unless you're going to change an 8,000 year old God, it's not going to work out for you. I wrote that down. You shouldn't. It's a good point.
SPEAKER_07:It's a
SPEAKER_08:good point, and you're absolutely right. We have to unwire ourselves that way, right? Because when we're raised in religion, we're taught to do that, right? We have to conform to those expectations and whatever. They become these cultural norms. And I think that it is very common. That's why we see the pray the gay away. And people are more willing to try to twist themselves into something that they're not rather than to lose the community that they have. That's what's at
SPEAKER_06:risk. Even the flip side of that is what I call cafeteria Christians who are like, I applaud people for trying to be very LGBTQIA friendly. Read Leviticus 20. The God you are worshiping specifically says queer people should be put to death. You cannot square that circle. Women are property. In the 10 commandments, when it gives a list of property that you are not to covet, your neighbor's wife is on that list because women are property. You can't square that circle with as many yet, but Jesus came. I'll
SPEAKER_08:add to that question that you just had to like, why should I reframe myself? Like, why do, why should I work hard to fit into a structure that is like, I have to justify my own existence in my own dignity, right? Like I have to, like the fact that I'm fully human isn't, that's not part of, you know, the, the building blocks of it. Yeah. I'm not a cattle.
SPEAKER_01:You have to understand. It was built that way for a reason. I remember learning about the Council of Nicaea when they put together the Bible. Absolutely. There was the book of Lilith. Now, nobody knows about Lilith because Lilith was created the same way Adam was created.
SPEAKER_03:And
SPEAKER_01:the Council said,
SPEAKER_07:wait a minute. That would make her as a creation equal to man. We can't have that. No. It was Adam's wife. Pure chaos. That's not what we want. We don't want women to be all... She's probably mouthy and everything.
SPEAKER_06:Lilith was definitely mouthy. Read more about
SPEAKER_07:Lilith. That book is out. Be more like
SPEAKER_08:Lilith.
SPEAKER_07:We'll bury that. We don't want to talk about that. Let's get that Eve in here. She's all compliant. Very submissive.
SPEAKER_03:She did go eat that fruit, though.
SPEAKER_07:She's a part of Adam. She came from Adam, so she's lesser.
SPEAKER_08:We have the eternal punishment because of that. I feel like I gave birth. I paid my dues.
SPEAKER_07:This is the longest sentence ever. i mean you know i could steal all kinds of stuff i don't you know i'm out in six months but this thing is ridiculous it's such a silly story but it's
SPEAKER_06:forever indebted and there's no ac
SPEAKER_07:yeah all right that's good uh this one's a layer i mean again i'm gonna read these just again for the podcast later when i do rebroadcast these What if I'm wrong about deconstructing from Christianity, thinking that whatever reasons I have for leaving are facts, but in reality, it's just the devil trying to trick me into abandoning God, which is actually, it's not a bad question because I'm sure any one of us could say, yeah, someone told me that. We're being tricked. We're being pulled. We actually just mentioned the whole eat thing. I mean, you're being tricked, but eat the apple. It's this age-old story, right? What if you're wrong? Yeah. There's a lot in that question. Boy. What if I'm wrong? What if you're wrong? You know, the old Pascal's wager. Same question.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_07:Pascal's
SPEAKER_01:wager. You know,
SPEAKER_07:as a quote I remember I think I told earlier was Hitchens
SPEAKER_01:said that all religions, they can't all be correct. They can't all be right. But they can all be wrong.
SPEAKER_07:So, I mean, that's the first part of that question. If I'm wrong, but I've arrived at these facts that I have through genuine research and thinking and sussing out evidence,
SPEAKER_01:And it turns out that it's really the devil trying to trick me into abandoning God. And I appear at the pearly gates. And they go, well,
SPEAKER_07:the devil tricked you. I said, well, why did you let the devil survive? Aren't you all powerful? Couldn't you have just defeated him and removed that influence from me? And I arrived in my non-belief genuinely and sincerely. Right. Whereas someone who is faking it until they make it because they're they have all the societal pressure to be a Christian or religious or whatever Saying well, you know, just keep just keep pretending and eventually you'll you'll believe it or Believe it in your heart and and you know, it'll come true Well, that seems kind of disingenuous and wouldn't it all knowing God know that you were faking it.
UNKNOWN:I
SPEAKER_07:Good point. I'd rather be genuine and look for a basis for the facts that I have and the truth that I'm living. When I started asking my pastor hard questions, he said, well, Mike, that's the devil working in you right now. That's why you're asking these questions. So I took that. sat on it, chewed on it for a minute, and I thought to myself, well, this is a little absurd. If all I have ever been doing is doing absolutely everything I possibly can to stay as one with God as possible, then why? There's absurdity there. And it was slowly but surely, a number of different absurdities started coming up. And all of a sudden, the foundation started to crumble. And thankfully for myself, I was able to make it through. There's others that haven't. So a person, and I think I even talked about this when I was a guest last time, a person has to, at some point, get to the point in their mind where they realize that although they are going through the phase of although they are going through deconstruction there has to be a moment where you say god does not exist the devil does not exist it's not the devil isn't tempting you
SPEAKER_03:right
SPEAKER_07:it's all of these thoughts and feelings that have been pushed on you and you've been educated in a particular way and there's traditions and there's a number of other things going on there, but like we expressed before, until we have someone like ourselves, this group here, an unholy round table, a lot of times people don't understand that and they have a more difficult time getting to the point where they realize it's not God and it's not the devil.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think if the devil did not exist in their lore, if they had not invented the devil, then we would all see their God as the baddie because it's there.
SPEAKER_07:The evidence is there. It's just covered up by the fact that all that bad stuff,
SPEAKER_01:that's the devil. That's
SPEAKER_07:this
SPEAKER_01:other entity that we have no hope of defeating
SPEAKER_07:for some weird reason. For no reason, yeah. I mean,
SPEAKER_08:you were basically being told not to think.
SPEAKER_07:Ah. Yeah. Lean not on your own knowledge.
SPEAKER_08:Just don't think the thoughts that you're thinking.
SPEAKER_07:Stop trying to be critically
SPEAKER_08:thinking. Stop trying to be one of those thinkers.
SPEAKER_07:Something you must have learned in school. My dad actually told me that. He says, the Bible says, don't lean on your own understanding. I said, well, who else's would I use?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's a very good point, because it tells you to think like a child. It tells you not to lean on your own understanding. And part of that thinking like a child is because children They have to look to authority figures because they don't know anything. And children's reasoning centers of the brains have not fully functioned yet. So like the book literally says, hey, for you, in order for you to do this, you have to pretend like you don't know anything. Listen, blindly follow authoritarian figures and pretend like you can't follow reason and logic. Those are the instructions in the book.
SPEAKER_01:And the same
SPEAKER_06:authoritarian
SPEAKER_07:figures that are saying that will then say, well, we can't understand the mind of God. Right after they've told you what God wants, thinks, does, and how he acts and why he does things. I actually have a video that I've made and it's not dropped yet because I saw someone made a very good point, which is what you guys have just said, is that I'm not rejecting God. I'm rejecting you because you supposedly say what God's telling me. If God hasn't told me anything, I've not seen God from the day I was born. I've seen you and I've seen you and I've seen you. I'm rejecting you. God wants to come down there and show himself or themselves to me. I'm more than willing to take it on, but
SPEAKER_03:I'm
SPEAKER_07:just rejecting a human being, a man more than likely who has an agenda. Might be a good intention agenda, but it's an agenda nonetheless. I'm rejecting that person. So that's, I always find that a very interesting, when I heard that, I was like, that's exactly the point. And most of us have agreed on the different interviews where I've done it with each of you. I'm open to the idea there could be a God. I do not believe there is, but okay. One presents itself, fine. But in the meantime, Father Jones, I'm not buying it, right? Because you're the one telling me that.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Not only that, but the question then becomes... a a subset of a any god like a god's creation has to have the same evidentiary warrant as the god itself does so the question then becomes okay you think you're being fooled now when you were believing think back to then did you have evidentiary warrants to believe that satan existed and if that satan is powerful enough to have the powers of the god so you couldn't figure it out then your question is dumb because you wouldn't be able to figure it out. Otherwise, your God is limited by your ability to beat his non-figureoutable person. It creates a logical loop.
SPEAKER_07:It creates a void that the human pastors and leaders can step into and manipulate.
SPEAKER_06:Right. With fallacies. Yeah, typically with fallacies. It all goes back to fallacies.
SPEAKER_07:And the more I looked at it, and I think the more anyone looks at it, that void is filled with absurdities. And I can't abide that. I
SPEAKER_00:cannot abide that.
SPEAKER_07:And I know that that might sound very offensive to some listeners, but there are certain things that all of us find absurd. And really think about it. They're so close. Those absurdities are so close. It just takes one tiny little move on one side of the line, and it truly is absurdity. yeah the problem you know my favorite
SPEAKER_08:absurdity i just want to say this really quick was like the most absurd to me is like really and one of the more popular stories is noah's ark and i'm like like okay two of every animal so how did noah know which flies were male and which ones were female and also How did he get two of every... How many insects are there on Earth? There's millions of insects. There has to be thousands and hundreds of thousands at least,
SPEAKER_07:right? If just the species of ants... We're no longer on the planet. Our speed through space would change.
SPEAKER_06:I just want to know which of the eight humans on that boat got the privilege of carrying the STDs. Did they separate them out? I love that!
SPEAKER_03:You're right. The
SPEAKER_08:antelope survived because none of the lions ate them. Nobody needed to eat.
SPEAKER_07:It's so funny. Scott, when we were just talking about it, I was thinking not only the animals and the mammals and the birds and the insects, I was thinking, well, what about the amoebas and the germs? These are living organisms. You, Scott, made my point. I went there. I went there. The reason I pointed that out is because...
SPEAKER_06:I'm not going to be like the other Mike. I'm not going to worry about offending people because I want people to know this. If you can be convinced of absurdities, you can be convinced to commit atrocities. Voltaire said that centuries ago. If you can believe all of these things, this is, you know, if you can be if you can be. Taught to believe absurdities, you can be convinced to commit atrocities. So I don't care who gets mad that I call them absurdities. You have to figure that out.
SPEAKER_07:The biggest absurdity with Noah's Ark is where did all the poo go? That's where
SPEAKER_08:the STDs were,
SPEAKER_07:maybe. You know, if anybody's curious from the religious perspective, the answer about Noah's Ark is God made a... God performed a miracle... So that it was a natural, it was a magnification. This is how it goes. There is a magnification of natural situations so that all of the different, what do you call it? All the natural instincts were just sort of turned off and everything was able to come together. And God specifically said, chose a male and a female and you know compelled them to go and there were of the unclean animals there were um two of each there were two pairs i believe of the unclean and i think it was it's a number more of the clean animals in pairs seven because you know you have to eat the clean animals and uh yeah so that's just like the plagues uh miraculous magnification of natural events. So there you go. Now we know. Now we know. We got some absurdity. Magic. That's the answer. Yes, magical thinking. Yeah, you left that part. All right, let's move on to the next one. So this is for you, Mike. um again why are christians this is such a good question why are christians so firm on homosexuality but not premarital sex or to scott's point earlier mixed cloths or any of the other sins why is homosexuality this massive the worst sin you could ever create worse than killing people in terms of the way we view it in this society yeah i i and I've looked into this, and it says in the Bible that if a– well, obviously, we have the horror of what's told to us in Leviticus. If two men sleep together, they should be put to death. But they also talk about a man and a woman– if a man and a woman are married and they commit adultery– they should also be put to death. So there's a differentiation there between, or I should say, there in that moment is established what is an offense that you could be executed for. Later, it talks about premarital sex. Yeah, it talks about, especially in the New Testament, and I think it's in Romans, it talks about where Jesus said to a woman who was a prostitute, go forward and sin no more. Those are the only words about it. So when religious scholars start to break things down, they've got, you're going to get put to death or you can bring something to the foot of the cross, right?
SPEAKER_03:You
SPEAKER_07:see where there's a, there's a difference. And when you bring something to the foot of the, you're able to bring something to the foot of the cross and say, I repent and Jesus is, and the Holy spirit are going to work in my life. Well then, you know, that's your 11th hour, get out a free card, but there's no 11th hour, get out a free card. That's established in the, in the scripture for, um, uh, homosexuality or, um, what's the other one? Adultery. Those two explicitly say you take them outside the city gates and stone him to death. So then we end up with, um, on the premarital sex side, Hey, the reality is sex feels good. And as human beings, we have a window of opportunity where And all of our genes, they express or they don't express during certain periods of our development. And what we end up with is just a regular standard mammalian response. And that's something that everybody experiences all the time. They don't necessarily experience homosexuality. So it's easy to go after a minority. The other thing is, is homosexuality was very common in and it still is in us in different cultures. But particularly at that time, you know, the homosexuality among the Greeks was completely commonplace.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:In fact, it actually helped to define a lot of what we have from the Greeks, all the information that has come to us from them. So when the proto-Jews, you know, the pre-Jewish people in the early Old Testament were going around, they needed to differentiate themselves from the other tribes that they were present with. So they pick and they choose and they I think that's what we end up with. Do you think, because you said something that I've always heard, and we know it to be true, that various homosexuality, I'm searching for the right word, not lifestyle is not the word I'm looking for, but you'll see where I'm going. It was more accepted in different cultures in the ancient past very often. But I think you said it was very common. I wonder if it was more or less common or just accepted. to therefore out. We're now, even in America today... That's a great way to say that. I think people are naturally born however they're born, but we choose to act on what we choose to act upon. I know that butter tastes amazing, but I'm not going to have it in my life because I just got my cholesterol checked and it's just not something that's for me right now. We can make these decisions, but... No, I think that– oh, maybe. Maybe it's possible that there were more or less homosexuals in– in other times, but I know for sure we can look at the writing. We can look at what Josephus has written about other cultures. Josephus being an incredible historian and his descriptions of other cultures. And we can clearly see that things were more accepted. To your point, yes, things were more accepted. If we go to Afghanistan right now, it's a terrible documentary. I should say it's a well-done documentary, but it's terrible. to have to experience and watch, but it's called The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. And it's just, it's really something. Could I add something that perhaps... Yeah, go ahead, Larry. Perhaps you aren't all aware of, I know I wasn't until this past week,
SPEAKER_01:there is a documentary called
SPEAKER_07:that came out, I believe, in January. I just found out about this last week. I have not watched it yet. It's called the 1946 mistranslation, where in 1946, the RSV version of the Bible mistranslated a word
SPEAKER_06:that changed it
SPEAKER_07:from abusive relationships to homosexual, LGBTQ type relationships. so before 1946 no bible said anything about homosexuality in that context
SPEAKER_06:well
SPEAKER_07:the i don't know if any of you have seen that documentary
SPEAKER_06:yeah what was what was changed in the 1940s was specifically the word arsenal koitai exactly which was a greek word that was it was more along the original version of the word pederasty which was adult man pubescent or prepubescent boy. And it happened a lot in the churches. It also happened a lot with fighting forces like the 300 Spartans and stuff like that. There were specific groups that was literally men and their boys that would go out. And the interesting thing about that in parallel with what Mike said earlier talking about, that was in John 8. It was the last sentence in John chapter 7 and most of chapter 8 was Pericope Adulteri, which was the adulterous woman that they were going to stone. And that's when Jesus apparently said, go and sin no more. But that also added later that was not seen in any translation in any of the books and stuff that we have until the fifth century. I mean, it wasn't in it was one of like over three dozen passages that were added that were not in the earliest copies we have, which is Kodak Codex Sinaitis and Codex Vaticanus. That's not in there. It is like the Book of Mark. It does not have it doesn't show a risen Jesus. The Book of Mark stopped after the women ran from the empty tomb. So there's a lot of changing about this based on this specific topic. Cafeteria Christians picking the parts that they don't care about and virtue signaling the parts that do not affect them. And I think that's what it is. That's why they, that's why they, they get, Oh, you know, you've had multiple sex partners. You're some umbrella of queer community, you know, whatever, whatever it is. We don't like that because it doesn't affect us. Now the stuff that we do and even some of the stuff they say not to do, they still do. You know, there's a big hypocrisy there, but yeah, I think it has a lot to do with just picking and choosing the parts that you want to be that you want to ignore.
SPEAKER_08:I think it's picking and choosing the parts that make them uncomfortable. If they feel discomfort, they want to just do away with it and shame people out of portraying that publicly.
SPEAKER_07:Christianity has a huge problem with genitalia. If they were honest with themselves, I put this to my uncle once. He was ranting and raving about homosexuals and transsexuals and everything. And I said, what harm has come to you because a certain person loves the same sex? Personally, what harm have you been inflicted
SPEAKER_01:with? That's when he unfriended me, which I was happy to be unfriended.
SPEAKER_08:Bye, Felicia.
SPEAKER_07:And the twist is his... transition from a female. Oh, wow. Which he still loves, and I see them, you know, celebrating birthdays and everything. So, hypocrisy once again. Yeah, you know, it's funny when we have several relatives that are super dyed-in-the-wool Christian, you know, hardcore kind of people, and then, surprise, your daughter's gay. Okay, now what are you going to do? You know, I... There's two sides of me. There's the good and the bad side of me. And the evil side of me is like, yeah, Serge, you're right. Because now you see what all these other people have had to put up with, and you're now living with a person who you love, and you're now having to wrestle with that.
SPEAKER_01:Not necessarily, Mike.
SPEAKER_07:Well, and that's the other side of me. It's like at the same time, this poor child is having to deal with all that. So I understand why I can see where I come from on both of these sides. So in the long run, I'd rather they didn't have to deal with that. But it is sometimes just like... These people don't understand any of these issues until all of a sudden it lands on their front doorstep, right?
SPEAKER_01:And then
SPEAKER_07:they've got to wrestle with the reality that Scott and Mike have dealt with and all of our other LGBTQ friends have dealt with. Or nowadays, I just saw an article today about this guy who had four Trump burger restaurants in Texas, in Houston, and he's being deported because he overstayed his visa from Lebanon. You open a place called the Trump Burger. You open four of them and you're here illegally. The hell is wrong with you? But now all of a sudden he's like, well, wait, I'm one of the good ones. Like, no, you're not. It's
SPEAKER_06:the cougar eating your face party.
SPEAKER_07:Right.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Cougars eating your face. I didn't know the cougars would eat my face if I voted for the cougars eating your face party. It drives me crazy. All right,
SPEAKER_07:let's move on. I'm going to get off on that one. This is Scott. So Scott, here we are. I think this is a Lawrence Krauss question. So just someone had reposted it. I thought it was a good question. So you're choking. I have two options. One, I perform the Heimlich maneuver. Two, I pray. Which one do you want me to do? It goes to prayer and how people say, oh, prayer will solve everything. Okay. Good luck with that chunk of steak in your throat. So Scott, what do you think about this?
SPEAKER_06:man this this one really hits close to home i had a friend of mine one of my best friends in high school and he was uh had a lot of health issues he was morbidly obese uh he was always involved in the church he had his own church he literally helped build schools and stuff in africa as a missionary and things like that but his health issues got where he was up to 700 pounds spent a lot of time in hospitals but he was always praying he was always talking about how good the gods was and A year ago right now, he was just getting out of the hospital after a seven week stay because he had to have a heart thing, but they couldn't do the heart thing because it would mess up his triglycerides. But fixing that would mess up his hydration, which would throw off his sugars and stuff like that. Always talking about prayer, pray for me because God is going to see me through this. And he even after he got out, he said, my doctor said I was going to be on this oxygen tank for the rest of my life. But I got up on Sunday morning and I prayed and I didn't need that oxygen tank. And God is good and God is healing me and this is a person that i i was an accountability partner for for a very long time and i had to stop being an accountability partner because he was taking off health stuff but adding like prayer group stuff to his to-do list his accountability list
SPEAKER_03:yeah
SPEAKER_06:and uh six days after he put the post about you know not using the the um oxygen and stuff anymore uh his dad did a wellness check on him and found him dead so
SPEAKER_07:i know that i We were
SPEAKER_06:in a different group. No, this was like from high school. He never traveled out.
SPEAKER_07:No, no. You and I are in a different group, the food group, and there was a guy that used to be in that. Yes, yes, Tiny. Tiny. Okay. Well, that's not his real name unless, unless it is, which is Alabama. It could be as God. Yeah. Um, but
SPEAKER_06:no, he, uh, yeah, I remember that
SPEAKER_07:guy. He was very big and I've never met him, but I just, his pictures on Facebook at the time, just like 10 years ago, a long time ago that I remember seeing him on, but I hadn't seen him since. Okay.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. He passed away August 28th of last year, like three weeks, two and a half weeks from today. And this, this is right after that. I, man, I, I have a special place in my cold, dark heart for people who lean into religiosity rather than taking personal responsibility for things like that. Yeah. Yeah. For people who deny their children medical care. That's my
SPEAKER_07:Christian scientists.
SPEAKER_06:There is one. There is one option. There is one option. You're choking to death. You perform the Heimlich maneuver. The other option is they die. You can put prayer on there if you want. You can pray over them as they die. But that's going to be the result. I
SPEAKER_08:love that God has a plan and he's perfect and his plan is perfect. And somehow us praying, it's like trying to convince God to change his all-perfect plan.
SPEAKER_07:Perfect plan. How are we to impose on this relationship? Exactly.
SPEAKER_06:And to go deeper into the question, there's more that was involved in this question about medical professionals and how medical professionals have to deal with spending 16 hours without a pee break on somebody's surgery only to come out and have the family go, well, thank God. Yes. We'll take him to the church next time. But the thing is, if every success is... a little up to God, doesn't that mean that every failure is a failure of that God? Because when you start doing the, if it doesn't work, it's the Lord working in strange and mysterious ways. That's just you doubling down on BS.
SPEAKER_08:You get to take credit. You also have to take accountability.
SPEAKER_07:The other feature of that thanking God for all these big things is they also begin to thank God for the little things. It becomes just... it becomes meaningless. I remember once I had to print some labels at work and the lady that was running the production line
SPEAKER_01:had come in just as I had finished the
SPEAKER_07:labels looking
SPEAKER_01:for them.
SPEAKER_07:And if she didn't have the labels, the line was going to stop and she didn't want that. So she came in and I said, oh yeah, they're finished. Let me take them off the machine. She goes, oh, thank God. I said, no, this was me. Right. It's pronounced Larry. I do the mundane things. And it occurred to me after I was thinking about that later, I said, well, if they're thanking God for these trivial, tiny little things and the great big things, doesn't that dilute everything? Doesn't that minimize? Yeah. I do wonder about that because you're right. And I thank God, of course, the statement that we all kind of just say because we grew up in the United States. But I think you're right, though, because how many times we saw it? You know, I've seen it on Facebook. You know, someone I've gone to school with. Oh, I got to thank God I got the apartment. What? You had a good credit score, enough money. That's how you got an apartment. There's not much to it. But you're right. It's like if saving a child from bone cancer and getting your apartment are on the same scale with this guy.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:you're right it's diluting it and it it seems it does trivialize whatever awesome power that a god should have or be concerned about why and i know some again sometimes it's just said but sometimes they truly i mean i i remember in one person i and that was a specific example she did say thank god i got the apartment and she she was a hardcore christian not necessarily a bad way just a very sweet girl but that's what she said i remember it's just an apartment it's He's not looking out for you, or he would have maybe not put you in a position where you had to be so desperate to get an apartment. You know what I mean? Yeah. Why didn't God get me a house? Why do we have to even be here? You know, like that woman in the very beginning, she says, you know, your kid is, or I'm sorry, we only saw it for a second. I'll go ahead and wait on that. Yeah, I'll go ahead and wait on that until it actually comes up. But the one thing I did want to add here is that You know, we can really prove that it's that the difference between the Heimlich maneuver and praying. I mean, even our government will go ahead and send parents to prison for praying. Yeah. Because if you do not take your
SPEAKER_05:child.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah. Yeah. You do not take your child when into, you know, into the hospital when they need it. You know, the federal and state government will go ahead and prosecute and you'll do a lot
SPEAKER_06:of time in prison. No, there are some states. There are some states that have laws that protect parents from making religious based medical decisions and their child dying from it. I think Utah is one. Right. Idaho is another one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:And even in the Mormon community, there have been parents who have been jailed because of child neglect. They actually have. Even though they fall under those protections.
SPEAKER_08:They
SPEAKER_07:like going up to the Jehovah's Witnesses too. The Jehovah's Witnesses. Yeah, because they're the blood transfusion and everything else.
SPEAKER_01:The Mormons are real big with kicking their kids out for non-belief as well.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, that's a whole other kettle fish. The Jehovah's Witness and the blood transfusion. And this is where I'm not at all on their side. And I'm going to try to say this so it doesn't come off the wrong way. How do you wrestle with I'm their parent. I know what's best for them. And because that's a broad statement. And then but someone say up until this point. And what is that point? You know what I mean? Because if I say, well, no, no, no, my kids who's 11 and Scott, you and I know someone who has a young child that's a trans child, a young child. How do I say my kid says they're trans and they're eight years old and I'm going to allow that because I believe that's fine and I believe all that. Another parent across town says, no, that's absolutely wrong. Where does the government, what line do you find where the government can say, okay, but you're raising them wrong and you're raising them right. And you say blood transfusion, and maybe that's not a guaranteed cure, but you're allowed to believe that, or you shouldn't believe that. And therefore we as doctors should agree with it or not agree. There's a line. I don't have an answer. I'm really throwing it out because I see where the wrestle is. And I don't know how you would quantify that from a law.
SPEAKER_06:This gets into a very deep conversation about where where I feel that secular humanism is a better moral system because it's based in the well-being of the people involved and that well-being, no matter who well-being would have specific markers. When you talk about rates of suicide for transgender children plummeting when they have one affirming person in their household, that is a definitive marker that shows gender-affirming care is working in the best interests of that child, especially when it's backed by every medical, psychological, biological, and lexicographical organization on the planet almost. Whereas if the child dies, you have a very valid metric that if a child does not get blood that the child needs, it's going to die, which is against its well-being.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_06:So that's and that's where I think secular. This is a why I think the government should stay out of decisions like that when it comes to religious based things. The well-being of the child should always be first and foremost. And that decision of well-being, A, should involve the child as much as possible. And B, be backed up by evidence-based data. Because when you talk about prayer, prayer has been tested. There was a blind study of one of the religious groups. They had three subsets. They had almost all the same surgeries, groups that were being prayed for. groups that wasn't being prayed for and a group that was being prayed for and were told they were being prayed for. The group that was being prayed for without being told and the group that wasn't being prayed for had about the same risk of the same numbers of complications and stuff like that. The group that knew they were being prayed for actually had slightly worse outcomes. because just like anything else, if you think you got it on easy street, you're going to be lax. You know, that specific one was a small sample study. I was thinking it was like 700 or something like that, but there's no evidence. It gets back to evidence-based stuff. There's absolutely no evidence that prayer works in any evidentiary fashion.
SPEAKER_05:You know, I think, Do the Heimlich. Or watch
SPEAKER_06:them die. Pray while you're doing the Heimlich. That's
SPEAKER_03:fine. I hope I do this right. If I'm in a car
SPEAKER_06:accident and I'm giving someone CPR, I'm an atheist and I might still be praying if I really... Why not? Throw it out to the universe.
SPEAKER_07:It becomes a little more crowded, Scott, when you look at an issue like homeschooling. or school vouchers where the parents say, well, I know what's best for my child despite all the evidence that most of them don't. Some of them do. Some of them are capable of preparing their children for higher education or whatever. I believe the vast majority are not. And
SPEAKER_01:the vast
SPEAKER_07:majority of homeschool is religious-based.
SPEAKER_01:They get their
SPEAKER_07:curricula from religious organizations, which are demonstrably inaccurate and just bad. And then they try to go into college and immediately struggle. So I think that kind of clouds the situation. the people who want to homeschool or have this so-called parental choice will point to bad schools or bad teachers or situations with public funding of schools, which ironically they're making worse by pushing for school vouchers for private schools. Yeah, it's going to get worse. And say, well, see how terrible it is. I can do better myself and I should have the decision on what to do. Yeah, that's the same type of question. And that's exactly what you're, Larry, is exactly the point. It's like, okay, there's a line. I don't know necessarily where it's at, but I've never been a big fan of homeschooling because I've known too many kids that were homeschooled by morons and they grew up to be morons. And now they've got their own kids that will be morons. And it's sad. I mean, I'm making, I'm joking about it, but it's a sarcastic and bitter joke because it pisses me off. And I've got close people look to me. because there's no reason that that child should have ever been schooled by you. You're an idiot. You're just not a good, smart person. Why do you think you have any credibility teaching this other person what you don't know? And I know you didn't really teach them because you don't know it anyway. And the more it goes on, the more it harms society as a whole. As a whole, right.
SPEAKER_08:Take on the role of being a teacher without any training. Same thing pastors do that too. They take my work of being a therapist and they're like, oh, I'm a counselor. And it's like, you have no qualifications for that whatsoever. So yeah, it's like me trying to be a doctor and I'm not.
SPEAKER_07:Purely biased education. They're a counselor from a Christian perspective. which doesn't help if you're not Christian. I was talking to my mom one time. I think I told one of you guys on a call. She lives in Florida, and she lives in a small town, and she was saying her pastor, who is the pastor of the biggest church in this town, Callahan, Scott, he's a counselor, a grief counselor. She's like, if the case was everything going on at the school, brother or whatever his name is, he can go in and Yeah, that sounds real good. But what about Muhammad, who might be a grief counselor at the mosque? Like your little town would lose their collective fucking mind if mosque guy comes in there, right? But he's just equally qualified because he went through training too. He just didn't go through Christian training because he's Muslim, you know? So it's like, you're not a counselor. I mean, anything's probably, well, no, that's not even a good thing. I'm about to say anything's better than nothing, but that's probably not true at all.
UNKNOWN:No.
SPEAKER_07:be way wrong, right? Right. Nothing is better than a bad thing. You're a Christian. You're telling him to pray to Jesus. That's not going to help, right? Right. Yeah, move on. Try to keep us rolling. Now, this is actually a question I really wanted to get you guys as a group because this probably comes up. We've all experienced it. And this person says, an acquaintance of mine is dying of cancer. She has young kids and is in the process of moving to another state to be close to her family for the last days. What do you say to someone, and this person was an atheist, that's dying? And there's a good question there because it's really easy for a Christian to say, and we're going to get to this other segue later, but it's easy to say, you're going to go home to Jesus. You're going to see your grandparents, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We don't say that. We can't say that. what do you say to these people that you've met and they're dying as a that you feel is comforting or how do you do it i'm curious i i think the first thing comes to my mind is i would simply say i'll remember you there you go yeah i like that actually
SPEAKER_06:that's all i can do i see the situation we're going to die there's nothing we can do and i'm i'm going to echo exactly what he just said It's going to be about our memories. It's going to be about shared experiences. It's going to be about we we still if we are able to, we should still be creating some shared experiences now that we know that that time is coming. I think. Anything, anything involving afterlife living sweet in the bosom of Jesus is just it. I can't tell you how vehemently I hate that, like. Live, live. Those future things that this this whole earth is just dirty rags for the next life is just so limiting. And, you know, there's no there's no reason to even look. We don't know what's out there. So why bother with it? We comfort. We be there for them. We let them know that we are there for them. We let them know that we're not alone anymore. We keep creating memories. We keep it creating experiences. But there is absolutely nothing that a religion that you haven't already been indoctrinated into is going to help with that. No matter how much of a therapist the priest thinks he is.
SPEAKER_07:Right. Yeah. I've been in a situation where my father-in-law and my mother were both dying. and my mother knew full well that i was atheist and i thought to myself how am i going to talk to mom about all of this and i said you know what my goal here is to do no harm but my goal is also to not deny myself the way that i feel so i say to the person who's on their deathbed you have your particular belief so as you're going through this transition focus on the important parts of your belief because it's not going to matter.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:It's not going to
SPEAKER_06:matter. I'll agree with that. Yeah. I'll agree with that. But at the same
SPEAKER_07:time, it absolutely sickens me to the core. I'm very, very much in the same boat as you. It's just, I have, I guess I've learned in my old age that, um, People are always going to let me down. Or I should say human beings are capable of letting me down in one way or another or causing me grief in one way or another. And how I perceive everything makes the makes the difference. You know, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if I can do no harm and I'm not going to be shocked. when I'm in a situation where either I've been let down or someone, or I should say, and then at that point, when someone does something, I'm not necessarily let down or hurt or whatever. It's just part of what humans, the way humans act, the things that humans do.
SPEAKER_03:And
SPEAKER_07:then I'll gravitate toward folks like y'all, you know? But when I see someone in a position where, Where, so like my mother was dying, I just said, hey, mom, you know, all this is going to be over with soon. You know, you're going to be with Jesus. And she says, how can you say that? You don't believe it. And I said, well, it's really simple. There's no reason for me to tell you anything else. I understand where the origin is. I was part of that. You're the one who taught me everything. My mother was the one who taught me everything about religion before I started going to school. I went to... kindergarten already knowing the Lord's Prayer the Nicene Creed the Apostles Creed the list goes on and it was because of her so when I'm faced with her mortality right then and there I just thought to myself I guess I'll just I'll just do no harm but it bothered me so much inside that I had to that I wasn't able to say anything against it. But then the other part of me says, what good would it do? What good would it do? Yeah, I'm the same way. When it comes to grief, it's like talking to a child. It's kind of both ways. If you talk to a little kid and you want to just boost their esteem by saying whatever. That was your grandmother. That's the best picture of a horse I've ever seen. He's got five legs and he's perfect, but it's the best picture of a horse I've ever seen. It's not the best horse. It's not the best anything you've ever seen. But to that child, it's important. Or to an older person, say you're talking to your 90-year-old grandmother, you know, and you look beautiful. No, she looks like a 90-year-old old lady. But does she want to hear that? No, she doesn't want to hear that. So you're right. It's the same thing. Like, that's not true. But we say these things because it's comforting. And if saying or letting them say and not disputing it, that you're going to go and be in the arms of Jesus. if I get some through that last day or month or whatever, I will live to fight the argument. All these things we talked about, I'll fight those battles when they're due, but that individual, if it makes them feel better, fine. But yeah, they're foreshadowing Mike brought up earlier. We are going to have a video here a little bit where that is not necessarily a good answer, but it's a common answer, right?
SPEAKER_01:Here's the dichotomy though, is if it was an atheist that was dying,
SPEAKER_07:A
SPEAKER_01:religious person would come in and try to get you to believe in Jesus. Yeah. Actually, my father
SPEAKER_08:did that on his own deathbed to me. I lost my father to cancer about 14 years ago. And I had the privilege of taking care of him when he was dying. He was on hospice for a good while. And there was this particular, I was still working at the time, but I was taking some FMLA time, you know, intermittently to care for him. So we had home health coming. And, you know, this one week in particular was really important. to me at work and I had a big meeting and I was like getting ready to go into this meeting and I had a call and I had told the front desk person like hold my calls this until this meeting is over and they poked their head in and I was like I told you to hold it and they're like you're gonna want to take this one and I just my heart sunk for a second because I thought this was the call right and it was in some sense but it wasn't the call I thought I was getting anyways I pick up the phone and it was my stepmom and she's like he just won't take no for an answer and that like you have to get here He's like demanding that you be here right now. And I, I mean, I had to like cancel the meeting. I'm dry, you know, took me an hour to drive to their house. I get there and I'm like, hi dad, I'm here. Like, what is it that you needed to stop heaven and earth to like get me here today for? And he said, I was worried. He thought he was dying. He said he was worried that he was going to die, uh, without, uh, talking to me about my eternal soul. Basically. He was like, I, you know, he knew that I was an atheist.
SPEAKER_03:Um,
SPEAKER_08:and you know, he was, he was respectful about it for the most part for being as religious as he was. Um, but on his death, like when when he really thought that moment was coming, that he was going to go, he thought like he just had a panic and was like, get her here. And I have to just, he wanted to use his dying breath to try to save my damnation.
SPEAKER_01:One of the last things my father said to me before he passed was he hoped that my brother and I would be born again so that he would see
SPEAKER_07:us.
SPEAKER_08:So I guess I would just answer the question quickly by saying, what do I say to a dying person? It really depends on who they are and what they believe. I'm not going to lie to them and pretend like I believe something that I don't. But I think I would try to say things that are comforting without lying. And I think I would... listen more and talk less. That's what I
SPEAKER_07:think. Yeah. No, it's probably a good, good, um, you know, listen more and talk less. That's probably, and really, you know, that's probably what they want. They just want to get this off their chest. And both of you guys is a situation. This person's there was her dying wish. Okay. You know, it could be worse, right? I
SPEAKER_08:just said, dad, I, I don't know what will happen in the future, but I appreciate that you care enough for me to, to want that for me.
SPEAKER_07:I agree. Randy, I put Randy's question up. I said, but I was like, I don't know what that means, Randy. But then you corrected. He said, yeah, sorry. Fat fingered it. Yeah. I'm hoping none of them guys know that answer because I don't know what it means. Like, all right. No problem, Randy. Thanks for checking it. But Randy did say, yeah, religion only has is on the gas. No brakes. And that's exactly
SPEAKER_05:it. Yeah,
SPEAKER_07:it's totally true on that one. I'm going to jump to another one. Go ahead, Mike. With what Randy said with religion having all gas, no brakes, I think on the flip side of that, we should, as secularists, as humanists, as atheists, we should try to live by just these two little things. Do no harm, but take no shit. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. Yeah. In a lot of cases, this is exactly. We know that they're going to have, that they're always going to be on the gas pedal. So I don't know. Maybe I'll add lead by example. Yeah. We do need to push back, which is, it's fine. I have no problem pushing back. I don't really go out and start fights, but come on. There's a point. No, no, no, no. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Let's jump to another one. This is for you, Annette. This is another representative of all womankind. We talked about this before. I think you and I have just talked about it. Why do conservative Christians bash only the women in porn? Why do they not bash the men? The women aren't having sex with themselves, right? Which is legitimately a good point. I think it even goes back to the loathe kind of thing, right? Yeah. Why is it only women? When it comes to sexual things, women... are always treated far worse the harlot sort of mentality right all the other four of us we could go out and screw everything we want and like oh that's just boys being boys you know a little wildlife you do it in that we're like you know what i mean it's like instantly it's not even you know i'm in gray area for a lot of people right it's a weird thing but what are your thoughts on that
SPEAKER_08:yeah i think you're absolutely right like at the it it you know singles out women as these like moral corruptors, while men, we have to ignore, we get to ignore, you know, minimize their participation in, you know, in that, their role in it. I think that that imbalance really reflects like these broader patterns that we see in religious spaces about, you know, sexual morality is that like women are held to different standards than men. You know, like that is right off the bat. And like our moral misgivings in this way are, you know, we are we are seen as. less forgivable maybe in that way that men are it's just like it's expected that they'll be tempted it's expected and that we are the temptresses right and that goes back to I mean that's why ultimately it boils down to why women even in other religions like Islam they're expected to wear a hijab right the hair in orthodox Jewish religions too like I live in a community here in Chicago where there's There's many, many Orthodox Jews that live in this area. And you can kind of tell because the women wear wigs, right? And the same thing, like they're covering their hair because their hair is, you know, somehow some sort of like part of their sexual strength and that they, you know, are using it as a tool to tempt men and they're expected
SPEAKER_06:not to do that. The married
SPEAKER_08:women. Oh, right, right. Oh, good. Yeah, that's a good distinction. But still, like... We are expected to use our agency in that regard where men are kind of let off the hook for that.
SPEAKER_07:No one's ever questioned me about that. I mean, no, my entire life. No one's ever looked down on me for having sex with girls and women throughout my teens and then early 20s or whatever. No one's ever said anything about that. No one ever thought anything about that. Plus, they knew me. Like, okay, that's what Mike does. Whatever. You know, a little bit of a wild past. But it was wild in a almost admirable way in the sense that, you know, not the same girl that would be doing the same things I was doing would have a 100% different reaction,
SPEAKER_06:right? That's because you're... you're defiling her father's property.
SPEAKER_07:Oh, brother.
SPEAKER_06:And that's why Islam, Judaism, all of the Abrahamic religions that have roots in the Old Testament, I said it before, women were property. Property, yeah. When a young woman is raped, you don't send him to prison. You pay her father for taking her virginity. He has to marry her. And
SPEAKER_07:then marry her.
SPEAKER_06:She has to marry him. It's always an ownership type of a thing, even in slavery. Jewish men were released in slavery after seven years. Women were not released. It's an ownership thing. When a woman is cheating, she has defiled her husband's property, so she should die. To me, that's what it all comes down to, is it's just about this property and sexual purity is about the sex should be specifically for the man you're going to be bought from or for.
SPEAKER_07:Even in the way we say things, maybe not as much as we've done, but there's still the idea, I'm going to ask her father to marry her. The hell do you have to do? Right. I mean, I don't I don't know that that's a common thing with, say, a younger generation. I got nieces and nephews in their 20s. I should ask them that. But that's you know, we all know that's a thing. Right. Yeah. What the hell? I mean, how old is that left over from that literal thing where I am her father and therefore property? You know, I'm sure that still goes on very common. I just it's not in a world I live in. But there's a lot of
SPEAKER_08:traditions around weddings, like even just the bride wearing white and, you know, just like the veil and the giving father gives her away and like all of that.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. And the white is not purity. The white, the white is not purity. Let's go ahead and make sure we nix that one. The white was never about purity. It was about affording a dress that you can wear once and not get anything on. I think it was Queen Victoria. It was a Victorian thing. She wore a white dress because most women wore regular, you know, whatever. So white became the wedding thing as a symbol of affluence. You wear a white dress because it's something you can't wear for housework or yard work or field work.
SPEAKER_07:There you go. Oh, wow. That's what I acknowledge. Randy is jamming. Thanks, Randy, for jumping in. putting some comments and we do appreciate it.
SPEAKER_08:So overall, I guess I just want to say like, I'm not at all anti-porn. Like I'm actually like pro, I'm pro-porn. I'm sex positive, right? Watch all the porn you want. I don't give a shit. But honestly, like where, I mean, there are lines that I draw just like any other media that I consume is that like, I like to draw the line at like violence against women. And I also want to plug for, you know, I'm very, anti-strangulation and choking in porn and sex in general because it really is that place where it crosses the line into... That is life-ending. There's a lot of research to show that there's an overlap between men who strangle their opposite sex partners. There's a very high correlation with cop-killers terrorist activity and murder. Period. Like if you choke your partner, you might as well raise your hand and say, hi, I'm a murderer.
SPEAKER_05:But other than that, domestic violence.
SPEAKER_08:Exactly. Yeah. And killing animals, too. That's another thing. Yeah, it's a big one. That aside like that. I mean, and I know that's a whole side conversation, but just, you know, I'm I'm I'm sex positive and watch all the porn you want. But yeah, there are a lot of the way just like any other topic, you know, the onus is always on on women to We are expected to be obedient and silent. And if we step out of line, we get the punishment.
SPEAKER_07:Right. Right. No, I'm going to go on. I was just thinking, I'm now, I mean, I've talked to your husband, like, you know, I, what does she want for Christmas? Not joking, not snuff films. You said very clearly, no snuff films. All right. Whatever. Hilarious. This is, again, this comes up all the time, and we kind of hit on these in different things. I hate when people say, God kept me alive during a natural disaster. Does that mean that people that didn't, that didn't make it deserve to, am I reading this right? So does that mean that the people that didn't make it didn't deserve to live? It really irks me when people say that. That's always bothered me as well. God kept your house, destroyed your entire neighborhood, but kept your house because you prayed harder? What the hell?
SPEAKER_03:yeah
SPEAKER_07:um yeah but there's once again you give me a lot in every question mike thanks um you're welcome so uh one of the things that i thought about was uh several years ago maybe 10 years ago or so there were some tornadoes that went through washington illinois destroyed the destroyed the majority of the town and i remember at the time i got to work and the news was on the tv in the break room and i was watching it before i went to work
SPEAKER_01:and the uh the chicago media was down there and this guy says
SPEAKER_07:oh yes and one final note before we go back to the studio uh of the six churches in town none of them were damaged that's news right now my thought was if there's a god and he knows which which church is doing it correctly he had a chance to destroy the other five
SPEAKER_03:right and he didn't do
SPEAKER_07:it um so so yeah um uh the other thing is i
SPEAKER_01:don't know if we should get into a
SPEAKER_07:story i'll try to make it quick um my dad as you know was a very evangelical uh believed in demons possessing inanimate objects um you know very Way out
SPEAKER_01:there. He was also a bailiff at a jail in southwest Missouri for a while. And he told me a story one day. And he said, yeah, we had a guy that was in the jail because he was going to be going on trial for murder. He killed some people and it was a big case and everything. And my dad being the jailer there would talk to him and he was trying to bring him to Jesus. He was evangelizing. and he said the guy accepted jesus and we were so uh
SPEAKER_07:overcome by this and everything he says and and the reason that he was a murderer was because when he was a little younger he had played dungeons and dragons he'd done and he'd done the evil moves oh my god so my question to him i had to be careful because i was driving at the
SPEAKER_01:time um Started to question me says no, that's the way it is. It's a fact and there's no arguing act Yeah, that's how strong he believed this and I simply wanted to ask him
SPEAKER_07:What about all the other hundreds of thousands of people that played Dungeons and Dragons and didn't kill anybody? Yeah So it goes back to cherry-picking goes back to you know Well, I prayed so I survived the problem is is Some of those people that died also prayed, but we don't know about it because they're dead and they can't tell us that they prayed and lived. That's the situation nobody sees. You can't ask them. My wife shouted to me from the other room when the floods were happening in Tennessee and North Carolina. She shouted to me from the other room. She said, uh-oh. Some people in Tennessee and North Carolina really effed up. Yeah. Exactly what she meant. They're being smited. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08:Right. Or hard enough.
SPEAKER_07:It's so annoying. Just on a human level. It's like the questions we just said, you know, we ask, it's like, what does that mean for the people who tried to pray and tried to do everything that they thought was the best and they still didn't work. And how do you justify that? I, I, And I guess that's where people come up with the idea of a survivor's guilt. Yeah. My brother was killed in the same car accident that I was, and you feel very bad. I can see. I mean, it's a human thing. My brother was hit by a car when we were little. He was five or something. And my stepfather, he lived. So, um, but my stepfather had just been talking to him and he left my stepfather's house and was going to run down the street to where we were living. We weren't married at the time and ran right on the street and got hit. So my dad, stepfather felt bad for years because like, had I just said one more thing to him, I would have talked to, I would have stopped that one second. The car would have gone and Alan wouldn't have got hit by a car. Like I, you human wants to say I could have done this, but you can't, it's just life. Chaos goes on. You can say, oh, I prayed, and that's why he didn't get hit.
SPEAKER_08:Correlation is not always causation.
SPEAKER_07:I have a friend who... I was dying to say it. Yeah. Correlation does not equal causation. You're right. I have a friend whose son is a teenager or just an older teenager, 17, 18, 19. And they lived in the north suburbs. And one night he was hit by a car. He was kind of sideswiped. So he went to the hospital. He had mostly just bruises and contusions. And, you know, they had to check him out and everything. And she said she was so grateful because she knew that her recently deceased
SPEAKER_01:mother was his guardian angel. And I couldn't say this to her because she's such a nice person, you know, and we're friends.
SPEAKER_07:I would have, but... He has a terrible... terrible guardian angel because he got hit by a car yeah she's a little slow you know push him out of the way a little bit sooner you know right he wouldn't have got hit by a car but he got hit by a car right yeah He's like Clarence. He hasn't earned his wings yet. He's obviously a terrible guardian angel. God kept me alive, but he got my attention
SPEAKER_06:with a Volvo. If you think a human becomes an angel when angels were in heaven before humans were created based on that really horrible book, even the Goat Herder's Guide to the Galaxy does not say that people become angels. Nothing about that does. And if I'm not mistaken, most Christian sects, sects, cults, whatever you want to call them, most Christian denominations, I think they believe the soul rests until the rapture. Well, Catholics won't get to guardian
SPEAKER_07:angels. When asked about it, in the Hebrew, there's a bunch of different words that they use for the same thing. Or I should say, there's a number of different words that they will, or spellings that they will use for the word death. There's one way you would, well, you're dead in Christ, so you were a believer, and you died, and now you're waiting for the second coming. You're dead, you're a dead soul, you're lost, you're... You're not going to be able to obtain the kingdom of heaven. And then just to experience physical death, just as a matter of, you know, pragmatic, secular sort of that person is no longer alive. And it clearly says in the Bible that the dead know nothing. So the idea that we would be able to come back in any kind of form. That's completely inaccurate. There's no evidence for that being said in the Bible at all. I believe it is Jesus that says the dead know nothing. Really? I just want to do a real quick shout out to Brian. Yeah, I was going to say,
SPEAKER_08:Mike, we got an OT in the house. Brian
SPEAKER_07:Bueno. There's another person here in Chicago. At least I say still Chicago. Brian, I haven't talked to you in so long. I don't know if you still live here. But yeah, surrendering all critical faculties and God will love you. That's exactly it. And then Cynthia, jumping on your point, Mike, humans and angels are different categories according to the Bible. Yeah. I mean, you know, and again, which is always kind of funny regardless, like, okay, it's still the Bible we don't believe in, but at least the people that do believe it, you're not even reading it correctly. You know, it's just ridiculous. Right. Another example of atheists having a lot more, or I should say, it's another example of, in my experience, that atheists have a lot more understanding of what's really stated in the Bible than a lot of Christians do. And it's probably goes back to, you know, there's only so many, things that you hear every time you go to church. It's the same thing. It's regurgitated.
SPEAKER_08:If I end up in a conversation with Christians, I often ask them, and I try to ask them respectfully, can I ask you if you've ever read the Bible before? You know, and if they're being honest, you know, usually they say no. And I think that goes to, this is just kind of like, you know, what they're born into, what they're taught growing up. It becomes part of the culture. But, you know, they don't, I'm like, I don't understand how you can subscribe, you know, with what's at stake, which is your eternal damnation, you know, to a book that you've never read. Yeah. It
SPEAKER_07:seems kind
SPEAKER_08:of silly
SPEAKER_01:to me.
SPEAKER_07:Cynthia, also, read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Exactly, Cynthia.
SPEAKER_06:It's a horrible book. Zero out of ten.
SPEAKER_07:Horrible main character. One star on Amazon.
SPEAKER_06:You've got part one, the Old Testament, part two, the New Testament, part three, the Book of Mormon. Part 1.5, the Quran, all four of them, horrible, horrible main character that everybody thinks is the good guy. Just zero out of 10, do not
SPEAKER_07:recommend. Trump's favorite book is Two Corinthians. So yeah, it's a bad
SPEAKER_06:joke. Two Corinthians
SPEAKER_07:walk into a bar.
SPEAKER_06:The funny thing about that, he was actually asked one time what his favorite Bible verse was. And he said, I don't know, probably the one about an eye for an eye, which is literally the only, Mosaic law that Jesus directly contradicted.
SPEAKER_03:It's so ridiculous.
SPEAKER_06:It's written in the book that the character of Jesus supposedly said that. Let me be very clear about my belief in whether that was actually uttered by a person.
SPEAKER_07:So let me put one more point on this question. One quick and then we're going to jump. Yeah. So the ones that prayed, said God kept me alive, they would also have to explain all those that survived without praying.
SPEAKER_03:Say that again. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_07:They would also have to explain all those people who survived the same natural disaster without praying or proceeding to a God. Did prayer really work or didn't need it? Well, yeah. There's no blind study when they come to that, right? They just, yeah. No control group. Yeah. All
SPEAKER_03:right.
SPEAKER_07:We're going to wrap up here in a bit because I want to ask one more question. I'm going to ask Mike this question just because it's on my mind. And then we're going to go to the video that we had earlier. Where's this question? Mike and Scott both kind of answer this question before the rest of us. I think this is it. Yeah. So this lady claimed that God cured her gayness. She preached about how Jesus is the way and how she detransitioned and no longer dates women and how her husband was also turned straight, which I just love that. Like, okay, you were both gay, which is, I actually know a couple of couples like that for sure. They were both gay. They got married because of the era that they grew up in. It was easier to get married than it was to both come out, you know? Did they turn straight? No, they absolutely did not. But in this case, this person said, yeah, I used to date women, but I'm over that. And so is my husband. He no longer goes to the manhole or whatever gay bar he was going to before. Scott and Mike, but Mike, I'll start with you. And Scott, jump in. What do you guys think about this cured gay, pray the gay away? Yeah, the pray the gay away makes me want to gag. But I can say that this really does speak to the wonderfulness of humanity. We are so widely, so our experiences are so wide and so diverse that we we have such a cool brain in us that we can experience a desire in one way, or we could experience a desire in another way. We can feel comfortable in multiple different ways. And if a person feels, genuinely feels, because everybody's perception is their reality, that they felt a particular way, and now they feel a particular way after a period of time, good. Great, good on you. But when you start to... But what is just sickening is the idea that you can call upon some Bronze Age text... from written by people who didn't know where the sun went at night. And I know that I've said this before, but to call on some bronze age text from some illiterate shepherds from a mixed bag of tribes and use that as the reason and your way that you're going to think about how you feel inside, the way that you're born. I mean, come on. And I kind of got to get off that one. And I'm going to hand it over to Scott because I get so hot about it. Yeah, I can feel it. I don't do well with the absurdity, but I love the question. I love the question. And it has to be looked at because this is happening. And people are posting it on TikTok. You know, they're saying things like this. Oh, yeah. That's why I had to start out focusing on the positive. We have wonderful options and opportunities for ourselves. But yeah, Scott, what do you have to add to it?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I'm actually going to go a little different direction with this because This was talking about how she did transition. She was transgender. She was a lesbian. The husband was she went through this and that. And I know as part of part of what I've had to deal with with my upbringing and a lot of religious trauma based in my sexuality is I have a personality disorder that one of the key characteristics is an identity disorder. There's so many parts of myself that I don't have a solid grasp on as far as who I am. And churches are predatory to people like that.
SPEAKER_03:Religion
SPEAKER_06:is absolutely predatory to people like that. And like this person trying to find out who they are, just never finding a way to fit into a world that in those with those particular proclivities, parts of who they are, it's the world shunning them and them just desperately trying to find that spot a lot of times. My heart goes out to them, but just that's another little dark space I have in my heart for religions and churches that just really are so predatory on people like this, that you have the pray the gay away and just convince you to do that they're trying to fix a problem they started by making the problem worse.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah, I
SPEAKER_06:just think that religion
SPEAKER_08:can be really harmful. And that's something that a lot of Christians, they don't like to hear. that religion can harm. They just like to live in the world where religion is so wonderful and it helps everybody. But what they don't acknowledge is that when they purport things like somehow being gay is a choice, that's really what they're saying. Like, hey, being gay is a choice. And so I like to ask them, when did you choose to be straight? When did you make that choice?
SPEAKER_03:That's a good question. Legitimate question.
SPEAKER_08:Yeah. And what it ignores is that not only does gay conversion not work, but that it is so harmful that people who have gone through gay conversion actually have much, much higher rates of suicide. They have higher rates of drug and alcohol addiction. And, you know, it really causes long term damage in people's lives. And that has a rippling effect outside of, you know, just that person as well. But it really doesn't it doesn't take the church doesn't like to take accountability for the fact that they cause real harm to people by doing this. It's really upsetting.
SPEAKER_06:It's very upsetting. I did want to bring up one thing i think uh a post had come across earlier that said you know all of the homosexual activities were specific to men i did want to put a qualifier on that in paul's letter to the romans i think it was romans 125 or 126 he did talk about even the women gave over in their natural desires the way the men did and how they were fire and brimstone or whatever after that but no that was that was the one place i think the only place where women giving over to unnatural desires for each other the same way men do was was mentioned in the bible because again throughout the rest of the thing they were property
SPEAKER_07:yeah i think you had made that point that um that uh the bible had never had issues with lesbians so if you say it happened once but you're right
SPEAKER_06:and simply romans romans 125 i think
SPEAKER_07:but again ask anybody they've ever heard that no it's man shall not lie with a man and and Christians and religious people will couch that all as, we meant all homosexuals, but you didn't say that. Specifically, and we all know the ick factor is reserved for the men, right?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Woman-on-woman porn is going to run rampant all through everywhere, but men is like, oh, it's the scourge of the earth, right? We all know
SPEAKER_06:that. And even... Even going further than that, and it's a societal thing, too, or just like the religiosity and the patriarchy crossover is when you hear about all of these issues with the transgender community. It's always about protecting people from transgender women. You never hear about trans men. You never hear anything about someone born female at birth. It's when you get down to it, it's just like because because they still think of a trans woman as a man because they just can't let that go. That's where that all comes. And it's all patriarchal. It's just a lot of the Abraham, all of the Abrahamic religions, even Jainism and stuff at their core are patriarchal in that way.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, you know, in fact, I saw a video yesterday where they had a guy, a military guy, and he was, you know, typical sort of almost pro-type military, very buff and just hairy and just, I mean, really strong looking. He was holding his gun. He'd been in the military, in the Army or Marines, I can't remember, but that sort of infantry-looking kind of guy. Sergeant, I can't remember his role, but not a low-level guy, like 17 years. And then he showed a picture of his wife, and she's also in the same branch, And then the point of that was that both of these people are trans. The guy is a trans man. I'm sure I didn't say that correct, right? And the woman is a trans woman. They're married, and they're 17 years in the military. At least the guy was military 17 years. And now, because of a head set, they're being kicked out without pensions. That's a new thing. They've just said. 17 years. This guy's been in the military for 17 years. And all of a sudden, he's not good enough, and he can't even get retirement. Because... because it's the Bible. I mean, you know, come on. It serves no other purpose. We know it's the Bible. We know it's, and again, this is Hegseth that we saw in the verse video in the very first part of this call. He's going to that church, that Christian nationalism church is driving so much ridiculousness. It's pissing me off. I'm pissing me off just talking about it. One quick, Brian, yeah, he died for 37 hours. I always say that same thing, you know. Jesus gave up a long weekend for our souls. Okay, good. Thanks, man. All right. I've worked a long weekend, so it's not a big deal, really. Let's jump to our last question. It's really not a question per se, but I'm going to do this. We talked about this earlier when we were talking about what to say when someone dies. And this came up actually a few weeks ago during the floods in Texas, the one with Camp Mystic. And I saw this woman on TikTok and I thought I was floored by it. And you'll see here in a second. But this is when Jesus is not comforting. And I'm just going to set it up because I kind of shortened hers up a little bit. She's a Christian. She was a Christian, you know, Jesus person, the whole deal. This isn't coming from an atheist. This is coming from a person who believes in Jesus today and believed in Jesus before this situation happened. So keep that in the back of your mind. This is where her perspective is. So here we go.
SPEAKER_04:Child in an accident. Why
SPEAKER_07:does
SPEAKER_04:this picture suck? As a parent who lost a young child in an accident. Actually, hold on just one second.
SPEAKER_07:Just for the podcast, this is the picture of Jesus holding a little girl in his arm, and two little girls are running up to him. This is in heaven, and they've got Camp Mystic t-shirts on. Camp Mystic was the Christian camp that killed 30-something little kids during the floods.
SPEAKER_06:Oh, my God, and he's standing in water. I just realized he's standing in water. I didn't
SPEAKER_07:even notice that. Oh, what
SPEAKER_06:kind of horrible.
SPEAKER_07:This was very popular. What was that? A month or so ago. I saw this picture dozens of times on Facebook and others. This is an AI picture. But again, these little camp mystic t-shirt little girls are running and jumping in Jesus's arms. And this woman is responding to that. I'm sorry. I should have set that up earlier. So I'm going to restart her video just to give the people at home that are not watching it on podcast. They'll have a perspective of it. So here's what she says. about that picture.
SPEAKER_04:Why does this picture suck? As a parent who lost a young child in an accident, who received, in a very kind-hearted way, many images like this. After my child died, I'm gonna tell you why this sucks. There were hundreds of people in our corner on the day that our son drowned. They were praying for us. They were petitioning God on our behalf. My own children, the siblings of Garrett, spent hours on their knees that day, fervently praying to God for a miracle. And it didn't happen. Garrett still died. After Garrett died, people came out of the woodwork to tell us, Garrett's in a better place. Garrett's with Jesus. Garrett is so happy to be with Jesus. And he would want you to be happy that he's with Jesus too. So let me tell you what this said to my mother heart. It said to me, Your pain's really not that bad. What happened isn't really that big of a deal because look, Jesus! Jesus didn't heal Garrett because Jesus wanted Garrett back. And Garrett wanted to be with Jesus. Look at how happy they are. When a grieving parent hears over and over again, your son is in a better place, your child is in a better place, what it says to them is that you are not enough. Your arms were not enough. Your love, your nurturing, your support, your protection, it wasn't enough. He's in a better place with something better doing better things at the time and still to this day i cannot imagine a better place for garrett to be than in my arms or in the arms of his father or in the arms of his siblings playing with his siblings laughing with us spending time with us as a family it's been 11 years and it still doesn't make any sense to me why it happened why god didn't grant us our miracle i'm not speaking for all parents but i'm telling you exactly what this did to me in the early stages of my own bereavement more than anything i felt like it invalidated my pain like i really didn't have the right to feel that insurmountable pain and that kind of like soul-crushing grief because Jesus, even with my devotedness to Christianity, even with my faith and belief in Jesus, it did not take away the pain of losing him. And so when I saw stuff like this over and over again, it said to me, it's really not that bad.
SPEAKER_07:Dude. It's terrible. When I saw it, I was like, okay, I'm going to stop watching. I'm going to cry. Cause it was like, geez, that's, and how many people probably do that? And they're not thinking, and you can forgive people for not thinking, but her, her, her perspective on that is so right. I mean, as a, you know, several of us have kids, maybe all of us, I don't know. We know all of us without a doubt, can't imagine losing our children. And for someone to come say that and her perspective of like, you're saying that that person, that my child is better off without me. Well, fuck you. they're not
SPEAKER_01:and and and if she
SPEAKER_07:called them out at the time if jesus said
SPEAKER_06:that
SPEAKER_07:yeah and if she called them out at the time with how hurtful that is she would have been looked at as oh well she's she's just emotional or she's she doesn't really mean that yeah he's bad yeah or you know she's she's uh she doesn't she's against jesus or whatever it's a no-win situation The
SPEAKER_06:problem I have with this, everybody tries to put Jesus up on this pedestal. Jesus was a horrible person. When the Gentile, when the, you know, all of this free miracles and stuff for the Jews, when the Gentile woman came to him begging for him to heal her child. First of all, his apostle said, master, make her go away. Jesus' response to her as a Gentile woman was about healing her Gentile child was that he came for the lost sheep of Israel. So healing her child would be taking food from the mouths of children and throwing it to dogs. Jesus was a garbage person. And this woman, if she is still a believer, I'm sorry. I know I'm going to speak vicariously through you. I feel for your pain. This might be why you want to give this shit up because your Jesus said about this exact same situation, let the dead bury their dead. You are not supposed to grieve for those children. The book you are adhering to, the Jesus that you are complaining about, those were the red letter words in the book that you're following. If you don't like it, you might want to take that up with your God. I mean, I hate to be like that about it, but if you follow religious tenets and then complain because people are doing exactly what those religious tenets said to do, That's your chosen path.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_08:My day job, I teach sexual violence prevention to college students. And so I have a workshop called what you say matters. And I, one of the premises that I teach is that well-intentioned people can still say harmful things.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, absolutely. You can hurt people on
SPEAKER_08:accident, even when you mean well. And so here's a whole list of things that you should never say. And so it reminds me of this, you know, of the same thing when I'm teaching people, you know, about how to respond when somebody shares that they're in a domestic violence situation, you know, You don't say, well, why don't you just leave? Why don't you say that? Because it doesn't take into account the fact that leaving is a... easy for everyone to do for a plethora of reasons what if you're undocumented what if you don't have any financial support what if what if what if and also it's the most lethal time for people in a domestic violence situation to try to leave and also it's assumes that they didn't think about that right like right it's kind of insulting
SPEAKER_07:your first thought i'm sure like oh
SPEAKER_08:sorry i didn't think about that maybe i'll you know yeah you thank you for saving me um but the same thing like when people religious people say things like oh you know this is he's in a better place or this is you know part of god's plan and you know like oh it just doesn't take into account you know reality and then that or the fact that you know your specific situation is this isn't about logic this is about my feelings this is about my devastation yeah right this is about my safety my well-being and and focus on that instead of just trying to either like fix it or make it make you like trying to convince the person that their situation isn't that bad when the worst possible thing that ever could have happened to them happened
SPEAKER_07:right let's consider let's consider the perspective of her other children as well they're sitting there people are coming in and says oh your deceased sibling they're in a better place and they're going Wait a minute. Why can't I go to a better place? I'm here. This must be a terrible place.
SPEAKER_01:Why is he
SPEAKER_07:chosen and not us?
SPEAKER_01:I didn't get to go to Jesus. That's got to mess with your mind.
SPEAKER_07:Why doesn't God dispense with all the bullshit and instead of creating us, having us have an earthly existence and then finally get the prize, why just dispense with the bullshit? you know yeah it makes no sense why put us here for a brief period of time and compared to all eternity anyways like what's the whole point of this If you're just going to snatch us away at various times, at the most inconvenient time, and inconvenience is holding a lot of weight there, because it's inconvenient for me to lose a child. It's inconvenient for me to die at 95. It's all inconvenient. I don't want to die. I don't want to lose people. But what was the whole point? You know, disturb you? That's ridiculous. I'm still fucked up with the damn video. I just felt... I just was like, oh, I just want to kill her. I was like, this is terrible. But people will say, and again, I'm going to give them a little bit of grace because they're not thinking it through. But that's the problem. You're not thinking it through. You're immediately jumping. Well, Jesus solves everything. No, don't. It's another example of how religion poisons everything. Yeah, that's a Hitchens thing. And to what Larry was saying, you know, those poor children, those poor survivors left behind. You know, really, Larry really touched on something important. Those kids must be so damn confused because now they're learning that this is not the place to be. Well, then why the hell am I here? Right. And it just proves if you go through the process, the one, two, three process, it proves that God's a sicko. You want to know how I can prove that? It's because he says that we're going to have to deal with this section where we're all right now. And that includes the people who are going to be savagely abused. They have to endure that. I don't have to go into any kind of detail, but just imagine all the different ways that human beings are savagely abused. And then those little girls in that drawing. God. I noticed right away, too, Scott, that they had put that they had them running through water. I had not. Yeah, maybe even more. Drowning is considered one of the worst types of deaths. Just drowning, period. Your lungs filling with water. And those little girls were struggling to get out of a structure that was crumbling around them. And then they were pulled along in the flood.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:So they fought against it. In the dark. I'm not going to go on and on anymore about that, but just what kind of sick savage says that, I love you, I love you, I love you, but I want you to go through that first. And now you can come and see me.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Let's get that out of the way, because that's
SPEAKER_07:exactly what Christianity is telling us that we're supposed to endure. And it makes me sick. It makes me sick. The bottom line is these platitudes and prayer as well
SPEAKER_01:are things that religious can do and say to make themselves
SPEAKER_07:feel
SPEAKER_03:better.
SPEAKER_07:And in their minds, they think they're doing something for someone else.
SPEAKER_03:The
SPEAKER_07:only result of it all is, oh, I feel better because I told them that Jesus loves them or whatever the case may be. It's making themselves feel better.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:It's self-soothing and it's virtue signaling because that also makes them look good for the people around them. And it blends in with their community of thoughts and prayers. And we see how well that's been working.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Well, I end on a happy note. Well, that was fun. I should have hit that one earlier if we had time to calm down because I'm kind of annoyed right now. but uh thanks you guys for all joining into this call this was actually so much fun because this is exactly what i was hoping it would be we got through a bunch of questions and uh we had a lot of good interaction with uh our viewers but this is exactly what it was you know we all have different perspectives we came from different walks of life and we have you know a different different way that we see things and this is exactly what i wanted to show people at home this to see that we're not a monolith we have one thing in common which is why i always say our meetups here locally the only thing you should expect to be in common is that we're we don't believe but if you like a different baseball team or you have a different way of raising your kids or you have any other thing we're 100 different that's fine we only can't share that one common thing right and this gives us all that chance and even that we don't have the same exact perspective But it was interesting. I really appreciate you guys all joining in on this. This was a lot of fun. I hope we can do it again in the future. You guys have any last parting words before we go? We'll continue it at the beach in a couple of weeks. That's right. We do have a beach. For those of you in Chicago or if you want to drive down from Milwaukee, please do. We are having a beach get-together coming up the 23rd, I think it is. It's not this weekend, but next. Not this coming, but the next one. Again, it's our annual end-of-summer sort of beach party that we do, which has been a lot of fun. And again, we talked about this earlier. It kind of gives us a social thing because we don't go to church and we don't have the pancake breakfast and all that kind of stuff. So this is a good way to get together, you know?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Again, anything else you guys want to say before we go or should we wrap up?
SPEAKER_06:I think this is a great group you got. Shall we bow our heads? We
SPEAKER_08:should. Should we
SPEAKER_06:pray? No, we should not pray because when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites that love to pray in the synagogues in the corner of the streets. You should go into a room and pray in private.
SPEAKER_01:I
SPEAKER_07:can't bow my head because the glare would blind everyone. All right. All right, guys. Well, thanks again a lot. Thanks for everybody for joining in. And for those of you watching or listening, we try to do these as frequently as we can. Make sure you check out the YouTube channel, which is Atheistville. And we also have a podcast, which is also atheistville. And our Facebook is atheist. I think it's atheistpodcast.com. It'll be all in the.com. Whatever. It's a Facebook thing. It's a group. It'll all be in the show notes. So check those out. We'd love to interact with you. If you guys have any questions for any one of us. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to put you guys as any of you tell me later. I know, Scott, you mentioned it. I think Annette. If you guys don't mind people asking you questions, I'll be happy to put your contact in the show notes if it's like Instagram or wherever you want to be reached. If someone has a specific question for you, I'll put that in the show notes. So for those of you watching or listening at home, you're welcome to reach out to these individuals. They obviously don't mind talking. We've been doing it for two hours. So anyways. All right, guys. Thanks a lot. And I will talk to you all later. Take care.
SPEAKER_08:Thanks for having us on, Mike. Bye. Thank you, Mike.
SPEAKER_07:Thanks for tuning in to today's show. I really hope you enjoyed it. Do me a favor and like and subscribe to the show and tell a friend. That helps us grow and it lets us keep bringing you more voices from the other side of belief. Until we talk again, be kind to one another and remember that reason and compassion go a long way.
