Breakfast With A heathen Ep2: How Religion Warps Politics, Parenting, and the Way We Think

This Breakfast with a Heathen episode covers a range of questions from faith and politics to parenting and personal belief. We start with how religion was never out of U.S. politics—Trump only made it obvious—and look at what happens when faith becomes a tool for control rather than reflection.

We talk about the idea that atheists “believe in nothing,” the emotional damage of teaching children about hell, and the isolation that often follows when you stop believing. There’s a discussion about finding hope without faith, why you don’t need all the answers to live meaningfully, and how religion has traumatized people who once trusted it.

Lighter moments include alternative swear words, the ethics of infant baptism, and how to respond when someone says “God is science.” We also look at the claim that most Nobel Prize winners believed in God, and why historical context changes that picture.

It’s reason over rhetoric, curiosity over creed, and coffee over communion.

Visit us at www.Atheistville.com for more content from Mike Smithgall and the Atheistville team

📺 Subscribe on YouTube: youtube.com/@atheistville

💬 Want to be a guest or submit a question? Drop us a note at CONTACT

Check us out at: https://atheistville.buzzsprout.com

🔥 New episodes weekly from Atheistville — Mike Drop with Mike Smithgall, Ask an Atheist, and The Unholy Roundtable

© 2025 Atheistville Media

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Welcome back to another episode of Breakfast with a Heathen. My name is Mike. I urge you to get a cup of coffee and settle in, maybe grab a donut or a croissant or whatever it is that you have for your Sunday morning breakfast and hang on like a second and get a cup of coffee here. With my very worn-out Navy dad um cup I've had now for gosh, 10 years, I guess, when my son went into the Navy. Very proud of that cup. You ever notice that there are things in your house that have absolutely no real value? But if your house was under threat of a tornado or a hurricane or a fire, there's a handful of things you would grab, and people will say, Why did you why didn't you grab the big screen TV? It's like, yeah, I could get another TV. I can't get this cup with all this wearing on it that I've had now again for 10 years. And it just it's a little piece of, you know, my son and him leaving. He's my youngest and going off and joining the Navy and weird things like that. I remember seeing a video of a man uh who had a spool of wire, and uh he was he was sitting on a bench or something, and he was trying to show his wife he had this spool of wire that had come down to where he only had you know a small amount of feet left. And he said he had had this, well, gosh, like I feel like it was for decades. You know, he bought it when it was a large spool of wire, and he's used it over over time for various projects. And you know, it was it was it was not the wire, it was it was the the life that that that the um the usage of that wire represented. And I always thought that's a yeah, I get it. I think I think every man that saw that video got it. It was just like, yeah, there's some things in life that have no value, but they represent a portion of your life, and it's uh it's very important sometimes. Oddly so. I don't know how I got off on that tangent, but I'm gonna take another cup of coffee because apparently I need it to uh wake up on a Sunday morning. So hold on a second. All right, let's get into some of the questions we have here. We've got a handful of questions kind of all over the board this time. This first one, I'm gonna qualify this a little bit. Um, if you don't really know me personally, you've only known me through this Atheistville channel and some of the different shows that I do on this channel, you would be forgiven for assuming that I am a flaming liberal and always have been. Uh, you would be wrong. You'd be partly right. I am a flaming liberal, I guess. Uh, but that was not always the case. In fact, growing up, I was very much a Republican. As a young teenager, I guess. And yeah, I say young, meaning a young person, and as a teenager, uh, I was a Republican. My first time voting, oh gosh, goodness, I was turned 18 and 88. So that would have been George Bush, the senior. I think, I think that was my first vote. And I don't think I voted Reagan, right? Because Reagan was going out of office. Uh, so I think George Bush was my first vote. I voted Republican at the time. Um, and up until um my 40s, I was hanging on and losing grip with the Republican Party. Meaning I uh stood for, and I still associate myself with the need for smaller government, smaller across the board. That does not mean get rid of every single department in the effort to make it smaller, right? We all have things we we waste money on. That doesn't mean we cut every single expense and cut it to the bone, but there are some expenses that are obviously inflated. I am um pro-military. As I mentioned, my son is in the Navy, my father was in the Navy, my wife's father was in the Air Force. Um, I grew up in a Navy town in Jacksonville, Florida. So I have no problem in the military. I think we probably do it a little excessively, but at the same time, I live in a country where I feel fairly secure, have complaints about the country, but I don't feel that we're under attack. Um, I've always worked in a sort of large white-collar financial institution sort of environment. So I'm a big business guy. I did own a company, so therefore, in the entrepreneurial spirit, I owned a uh a couple of retail stores. My wife and I did. So I'm I'm a big business kind of person. I'm an MBA. So all that sort of thing that Republicans say they used to stand for, I am, I'm with you. But they lost me. They I like to say they moved out from underneath me. I didn't move away. They did. At some point, I started to realize, you know, I have lots of gay friends. I don't know why the Republicans seem to be so far against it. I have lots of immigrant friends. I don't know why Republicans seem to hate that so much. Uh, and they'll say they don't, but let's be honest. Um, and more importantly, in a in a grand sense, the uh evangelical, the the latching on and the promotion of evangelical values um and the turning of evangelical into a political party that happens to be religious, which is how I see it, and them taking over the uh the Republican Party, that was it. I was like, all right. And those things I mentioned earlier, the immigration and the LGBTQ issues and various other things. I I just growing up in the South, I saw some of the worst examples of that. And unfortunately, they were very often on the Republican side, not exclusively in the South. Um, racism and bigotry and things of this nature do cut across all political parties. So I'm not gonna blame necessarily one versus the other. But um, I don't think anybody would accuse the GOP of being uh small government oriented now. That would that would be ridiculous. So that's a long way to go for my first question here. But the first question I had here, uh, someone mentioned, or this is more of a point, I guess, than a question, a question. Religion was never out of the US politics. Trump just took off its mask. And that is partly true. And again, all these things are my opinion, and I make broad strokes. You're welcome to disagree with me. In fact, if you disagree with me, that tells you I'm doing my job, which means I'm not appealing to everybody. Um, I don't want to do that. That would be ridiculous. But I don't let me see if I say this right. I don't blame Trump for the America say. I do blame Trump for emboldening America. And again, I'm gonna go back to I was raised in the South mostly. I was born in Pennsylvania, but raised mostly in the South. I raised my kids in the South. I have a house in the South, so I'm very Southern in that sense. Um, I can't tell you, I I literally could not tell you the number of times I've been standing someplace, and this used to happen in my shop. I own again retail stores, but we had a shop. We did car and parts and stuff like that. I've been standing in my shop and had a white man, almost 100% man, just sort of you know look around and say blah, blah, blah. Then it'd be the most racist, outrageous stuff in the world. But they'd say it again with a little bit of a look over the shoulder, make sure no black people are in the vicinity, and they would just spit it out. Why they felt that it was okay to say out loud, why they felt it was okay to say to me, why they felt that they should even think those thoughts, let alone say them, I will never understand. I I I don't get it. I I just never got it. The difference between what I just did, which is and then say it, that part doesn't happen now. That part is you can just say it. You know, if you're a bigot, you're a racist, um, you have some outrageous comments to make about a person's color, a person's sexual orientation, their their creed, you know, whatever. Um, the looking over the shoulder and the hushed tones, it doesn't happen as much. I'm sure it does to some degree, obviously, but there is emboldenment that has happened over this last 10 years that I will blame Trump. I will lay that at his feet for recognizing that those sentiments are out there and giving um permission to basically say them out loud. And um it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate, I dislike it, but Trump is not the he's not the originator of that by any means. So don't misunderstand me. Trump, though, as a position that he holds, being the president of the United States, um has made that easier. If you're that kind of person, this Archie Bunker type, and people forget that Archie Bunker was supposed to be satire. A lot of people identified with Archie Bunker and they didn't really understand it was satire, especially in the South. But if you're that person who just wakes up and thinks racist thoughts and bigoted thoughts all day long, you can see Trump and say, Yeah, but look, look, this is this guy's a billionaire and he's making money hand over fist, and he's the president of the United States, and he has all this power, and he's married to this beautiful woman, and blah, blah, blah. So why can't why isn't it why is that bad? I wish I had all of that. Yeah, I it's really upsetting to me, but you know, what are you gonna do? There you go. Let's start this conversation off with a little bit of rant, right? Um, so the next question this is a very common sort of sentiment. Um, and there's a this goes on with a larger sentiment, which is if you're an atheist, you know, what's stopping you from doing X, right? Because if you're an atheist, you have absolutely no morals, so you can do whatever you want, which is the most ridiculous statement, but people make it constantly. So this person, I think they were being tongue-in-cheek when they say this. Uh, so now that you believe in nothing, why not be gay? And again, I'm gonna assume that they were being uh again, tongue in cheek and trying to, you know, make a point, make a satirical point with that. Um, but that's sort of the same sentiment we get with a lot of things. You know, if you don't believe in God, what's stopping you from doing anything? In this case, what's stopping you from being gay? Why wouldn't you just be gay that gay then? As if that's the reason I love women. You know, I've been married for 31 years. I started dating my wife in high school. We didn't get married to her at 25, so we had a we had some oats to sew. Um, but nonetheless, I've been um, yeah, I've always been a lover of women. You ask my mom, I had a crush on Brenda Bardot in the fifth in uh kindergarten. We were five years old. I'm actually friends with her on uh Facebook, and she would probably never remember that I had an absolute crush on her in 1975 or 76, whenever it was that I was in kindergarten. Um beautiful little Italian girl, and uh, she broke my heart because she did not she did not return that uh infatuation. So I'm still holding a little bit of a grudge and uh carrying a torch for Brenda. So if you're out there, Brenda. But again, I've always loved women, I've always loved little girls. I've loved that sounds terrible. I loved little girls when I was a little boy, I loved teenage girls when I was a teenager, and I've loved women since I became a man. I wouldn't turn gay simply because I don't believe a God. What? What? Neither would a gay man turn straight. It doesn't work that way. And I don't understand the people that can't understand that, right? I mean, if you don't understand that you feel something, whatever you are, if you feel an attraction to men because you're a woman, or you're attracted to women because you're a man, and you just feel it. It's not like you thought about it, not like you had to decide, not like your parents came to you at 11 years old and said, Okay, Tommy, it's time to decide. What are you gonna do? You're gonna be gay, you be straight, come on, we gotta have an answer, we're running to dinner later on. No, you just feel what you feel, and why you can't assume that other people could feel differently, it boggles my mind. But God has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with it. And telling a gay person that they're going to hell because they feel what they feel, okay. You might get them to stop taking action on that. You might get them to try to suppress that and oppress that, you know. Um, but that's not the same thing. It's like tell I I'm wearing a blue shirt today, which is not unusual because I love the color blue. Blue is my favorite color. If you told me that blue was against the word of God and I was a believer and I have to wear green, I might wear green. I might buy a green car and I might tell people I love green. I don't, I love blue, but I might tell you I love green. And if that gets me into heaven, okay. But the reality is I like blue. They can't fake that. And being gay and trying to turn the person straight by giving them a bunch of scripture, it's not gonna work. They're so gay. And again, they might pretend that they're not because they fear what you're telling them, they're still gay. This is one of the okay, here we are. I'm gonna probably have some people disagree with me on um the left or the um the atheists or however group you want to put me in. Um, teaching children about hell is emotional abuse. I don't go that far. I know where they're coming from. I've heard this before. I don't go that far. Um, I let me just say I disagree with that as it stands. So again, the the title of that was Teaching Children About Hell is Emotional Abuse. I don't think that's true. I think you can abuse people by um teaching uh children about heaven and hell and threatening them. You could abuse someone with that. Certainly, we just talked about uh people that are gay and telling them they're going to go to hell and trying to make them live a life that's not uh true and sincere because you've threatened them. That obviously could be abuse, yeah. But as a general rule, I don't feel like I was emotionally abused as a child. I grew up Episcopal, I think I've mentioned that uh on this show and on this channel, certainly. Um, was I emotionally abused as just being told that there was a hell and there's various sins um that would put me there? I don't think so. You know, I no, no, I I again so I disagree with that. It's a it's not an uncommon statement that I have heard. And I I also will allow for this because I mentioned earlier that I don't understand why some people don't understand that other people's lives could be different. I do understand that other people have had much more traumatic, and I even use that word because I didn't have a traumatic experience with religion. I just don't believe it. I was never traumatized by it. I do know people that were absolutely traumatized by their religious parents and the religious upbringing they had. And them leaving religion was a um was it was a tremendous relief. For me, it was just like a logical progression. But for some of these people, when they left religion, it was this unburdening and it's this this little weight lifted off of them. And for those people, they probably would agree with that. So I'm gonna disagree with it as a statement, but I understand where people come from when they say that. What's another one here? All right. So this is a question that has come up, or statement, I shouldn't say a question, it's a statement. It's a statement this person made. And this has come up many times actually, in in various forms on uh a couple of our shows. So we're doing a show tonight, a live stream. And so it depends on when you're listening to this. So you you may have missed the live stream, but I urge you to check in on our live streams. We do a show called The Unholy Roundtable, where we get together three, four, five uh different atheists from different backgrounds and walks of life, and we go through questions very much like this, but we do it as a group. So we all have different perspectives and and again different backgrounds. And some of us had very minimal religious upbringing in the sense that it wasn't overly traumatic to leave. Some of us had very strong upbringing, and it was very traumatic to leave. So there's all kinds of degrees of that, right? So this question is um they they made the point that being an atheist is isolating. And I'm gonna guess uh where this person was coming from. I'm just kind of looking at their the remainder of their statement here. When you leave religion, and I've talked to many people about this, for many people, religion is not just the belief part, the belief in God or Jesus or or uh or other religions, whatever your religion is. It's also very social. Um, Cynthia McDonald's is uh is one of my friends, and she's also in the Unholy Roundtable, and uh, she's a black atheist. She runs a group here in town uh called the Black Nonbelievers. And and she'll tell you very clearly in the black community, the church is the center of the community, right? I think we probably all know that. Um so sometimes when people have left the church, uh they've been asked, and I've sat in meetings with the black atheists or the black non-believers, where they've been, they've said people have asked them um that they are made the point that they're betraying their blackness, right? They're betraying their race by being an atheist because the the sense of community and the church being the center of that is so strong. So when you leave it, and this happens to white people too, it's not just black people, but black people are, it's the different level of community in terms of church-wise. But when you leave that community, the the church community, it can be very isolating. Um, my mother, who's 75-ish, 76, whatever she is now, um outside of her children, and that's about it, that live near her, children, grandchildren, that sort of thing, everyone else she talks to, for the most part, is from church, right? It's a very social part. My stepfather and her, they go to church, they go to the pancake breakfasts, and they um, you know, he parks cars when they have this once-a-year big feast that they do, and he parks cars and uh she works at the church at part-time as a bookkeeper or something. Um, you know, they're at the church doing Bible studies and they they socialize with people from the church outside of church. It is very, very social. If she were to suddenly decide tomorrow that, you know, none of this really makes sense. I'm kind of with my uh two of my sons. She has three sons, two of us are atheists, one's not. Uh, if she decided she's more like me and my younger brother, my youngest brother, she would leave all that. And I think mentally that would not be very good for her because that's that's what keeps her going. I mean, again, she's 75, 76. Uh, she was born in 49. So uh 76, I think. Um it would be very isolating for her to lose all of that. And I understand that. It's one of the reasons that we started here in Chicago. We have an atheist group. It was started out as a Facebook group, just as a normal face group group uh 10, 11 years ago. And uh at some point we said, you know, we're all kind of in this group and we're chit-chatting back and forth. Um, maybe we should all get together one night. You just hang out at a bar. And we did that. And we've been doing it ever since. That's 10 years ago. Up until COVID, we did it almost every single month. Usually took November, December off because of all the holidays, but we would do this every single month. We would get together, hang out at a bar, hang out wherever. Um, just in fact, last night here at my house, we had 15, 20 people or so from that group over for a party. No particular reason. Those are the people I know here in Chicago for the most part, but it was also they get together and we hang out and we don't discuss atheism. No, if it comes up. It's just we know that when the it's like anything else, there's a there's a shared interest. We have a shared interest in atheism in the sense that we've all left religion. That's the interest. It'd be no different if you were a Bears fan, or you were you know a fan of making your own pottery, or you are a car guy. I have a four-wheel drive, uh, forerunner that I really enjoy. And when I lived in California where I got that truck, I would go to these forerunner groups. Why? No particular reason, but we all had the same type of trucks and we would drive out in the desert and we'd have a good time and spend the day out there. This is the same thing. You know, we we have a like-mindedness in our atheist group, so we hang out. So if you're that kind of person, you're leaving religion, look for a group like ours. Look for an association like the American Humanist Association. Um, they might have meetings. Sometimes their meetings are agenda-driven, but that's fine. Go to one and listen to a speaker, talk about whatever. Um, it might be eye-opening just from an educational point of view, but you'll also meet some additional people that think like you. Or more importantly, this is what I say a lot to new people coming to our group is you might meet someone who's further down the road than you are. And one of the reasons I started this entire channel was to show people that there are others just like you. In fact, I mentioned Cynthia McDonald earlier. She was one of the first people I had on as an interview because there's a black person out there somewhere who can watch me and they're like, yeah, I get that that white guy, that middle-aged white guy is an atheist. But, you know, I'm a 33-year-old black man in some southern city. He doesn't know my life and my community. I I can't just come out and become an atheist. But he might see Cynthia and say, okay, well, okay, now she's a 40-ish black woman, and she was raised um as an episcopal, as an Episcopalian, and then became a uh Pentecostal. Um and now she's an atheist. Well, he might see that person and say, Oh, okay, well, if she can do that, maybe, maybe there's a path for me here. So find those people. Again, find groups like ours, find groups like the Humanist Association, look in your in Facebook or Meetup or Reddit, uh, put it in your city and find a location nearest you or your biggest town, and try to try to go to a meeting or try to go to a gathering or a meetup or something just to find other people. And if you go enough, you're just gonna meet people. And you're gonna meet people again that are there for the same reasons. So you're already gonna have that in common. That's a good, good way to start. Again, we've been having these group group group meetings, my mouth all mumbly, uh, these group meetings now for over 10 years. I mean, hundreds of these over the past 10 years, right? Um, this is the third one I've done at my house this year. So, you know, and I'll I love these people. I love the people that came. Uh, I love it. So um it doesn't have to be isolating, but I understand why you feel that way. There's another question. You don't have to have the answers. Um, that's absolutely true. I just did a mic drop on this, I think it was a mic drop, might have been a short, I can't remember. I do a lot of videos. Uh, on the point that um a lot of people will ask us if you're not an atheist, or let me put, let me spin this around. If you are an atheist, someone has come to you and said, Oh, okay, well, you're not, you don't believe in God then. So explain the big bang. How come you believe the big bang? And I always tell people, I have no idea. I I didn't I have an MBA. I didn't study that. I have no idea how the Big Bang really works. I know there's a lot of scientists that say it's true. I know there's a lot of science that seems to support that. Okay. That seems plausible given the science and the repeatable uh studies that they can do and they can show this and they can deduce this. I agree with that science. Am I a scientist? No, I am not. Um, do I am I gonna be able to explain it down to the seconds, the microseconds that that the earth began? No. But I'm okay not knowing either. I always tell people, I don't know who invented the wheel either. I'm happy to jump in my truck though and drive to the store with four of those. Thank that guy. I don't know how it happened. It's okay to not know, I think. This is where believers and non-believers really are really kind of go in different directions here. A lot of non-believers are like, well, we don't know. We'd like to find out. And the people that study that and that research that and go to school for that and spend decades of their lives uh pursuing the the uh the truth on that, we would love for them to discover that. And then they can tell us because I don't want to spend decades of my life worrying about it. But we know that pursuing that truth and pursuing that answer is worthwhile. Unless, if you're a believer, you look up the Bible right here, and you flip to that, you know, in Genesis, and you say, Oh, well, there's your answer right there, Mike. You don't need to study anything about the rocks and the in the ground or the planets in the air. You don't have to just don't worry about any of that. It says right here in six days. God created it all, it's right there. The firmament, and he took someone's rib and made a lady out of it. And now it's it's crazy stuff, but just trust me, it's all right here in this book and it's been here for 2,000 years. I don't even know why you're questioning it. Okay, well, you'll forgive me if I don't uh if I don't accept a 2,000-year-old answer by people that didn't understand where the sun went at night. So, but I can also tell you I don't know. I don't know a lot of things. The list of things I don't know far outweighs the things I do know, and I'm okay with that. It really doesn't bother me not knowing. I'd like to find out. I only got X amount of years on this planet, I'm gonna find out X amount of things, and then that's it. But um, I don't have to say there is an answer, and I don't have to read a book to say this answer they came up with 2,000 years ago and they couldn't explain almost anything. I'm not taking that answer. Let's see, what do we got here? Um this is actually a strange question. Uh I I know where they're coming from. And I mentioned earlier, I'm episcopal. So this person says, uh, you ever think about how messed up it is for infant baptism? Yeah, it is kind of strange, even as a religious point of view. And if you're a religious person, actually, I would be very interested in hearing the the uh your explanation as to why, say, in my religion that I grew up in as episcopal, we baptize people as infants. Uh Catholics do as well. And I'm sure there's other ones, it's just the two that I'm most familiar with. But uh, my, as I mentioned, my mother, my mother is now, having been raised episcopal all of her life and lived as episcopal most of her life, she is now Southern Baptist. So is my niece. And I went to her baptism, and she was, I don't remember exactly, I I can't remember if she was a young teenager, give or take. Um, but she was baptized at that age. That makes actually more sense to me. Again, it's not the religion I was raised in. I I wasn't raised as a Baptist. Um, but it does make more sense to be baptized when you're old enough to to uh make to make sense of it all and to understand it and to accept that and to to say yes, I I would like to be to be baptized. I guess it's sort of like taking communion for Episcopal. You know, I took a communion when I was 10-ish, give or take. Maybe it's similar. And I and I'm just saying maybe because I don't know. Goes back to my last question. I don't know. So if you're a religious person and you have an answer to that, let me know. I'm I'm really very quite curious, um, to be honest with you. So this is another question. Um, this actually, my wife and I joke about this all the time because it's so silly. Uh, I don't swear a lot on this channel just because YouTube will shut me down, but in life, I swear probably more than I should, um, which is a lot less than I used to. So it gives you any indication. I grew up a little rough, to put it uh lightly. But the question is this, or the the statement they made, uh, they just said alternate uh alternate alternative swearing question mark. And it's the um the dang or uh uh we we my wife and I joke, um, cheese and rice. Instead of saying Jesus Christ, you're like cheese and rice. She has a friend who lives in uh Vegas area, and that's what that person says. Cheese and uh cheese and rice, because that's that doesn't go against God. I mean, if you said Jesus Christ, and that's you know taking his name in vain, I guess. Um, or H-E double hockey sticks. That's the silliest one. I say that just to be mocking and stupid sometimes. But instead of saying hell, H-E double hockey sticks. I saw someone on Facebook, a kid that I grew up with or went to high school with, um, he said, We're having a heaven of a time. I was like, come on, man, calm down. You're having a heaven of a time. You're having a hell of a time. You can say it. You're not gonna go to hell for saying I had a hell of a time. I find that ridiculous, quite frankly. Um, some words are just stupid. Just, you know. I I don't you can say darn and things like okay, that's fine. Um, but when you say I am having a heaven of a time, because you don't want to say the word hell because that goes against your religion, aren't you pushing it just a little too far? Aren't you going too far with that? Um saying cheese and rice, saying H E double hockey sticks. Are you fooling God? God knows what you meant. Uh and again, God knew what you meant. You're making a statement. You know, if I smash my thumb with a hammer, I'm gonna say something. It's probably gonna be colorful. It's gonna come out of my mouth. If I used the word dag nebut, is it better? I'm just making sounds with my mouth. I don't know that it makes a difference. I I'm literally just making an expression because I smash my thumb with a hammer. Um, or one of those sounds or those groups of sounds gonna go send me to hell. That sounds ridiculous, but I don't know. Maybe I have to look in the Bible. I have to look up swear words in the Bible. I'm sure it's in there. I'm sure someone has a sin that's based on saying the swear words. But again, I'd be curious. If you have an answer for that, let me know. I'm I I don't know what what book or what uh chapter to look up in the Bible that would might address that. I'm actually kind of curious now. Uh, here's another question. Where does hope come from now? Meaning that now that you're an atheist, where does your hope come from? You know, this is actually a really interesting question. And I guess I'm gonna confess that my hope never came from heaven anyway. But I can see why people, why that might be confusing for people when they've left because their whole lives they've said, you know, if I do this, that, and the other, I'm gonna go to heaven. So they have hope that they're going to heaven and they have hope that it's all gonna work out because there's a master plan, and they have hope that everything's gonna get better. I just never really had that. Even when I was a believer, that's part of it was never really something that I really spent a lot of time on. Um, so my hope was never quite tied to that the way that other people's is. And now my hope doesn't have anything to do with after I die. I think that's for me the biggest difference, right? I've moved it back, meaning there's a lot of people out there that believe in an afterlife of some sort. And they think they're gonna live, say, 80 something years on this planet. And if after that point, everything is gonna get better, which I think I'm gonna put that to the side for a second. But everything's gonna be better and they're gonna have eternity in something grand and beautiful and wonderful and no pain, no sin, no nothing. It's just gonna be just peachy keen for all eternity. And they have hope that it's all gonna come to them at some point. I tend to think a lot of times those people do not have maybe the life that I have. And I don't say that I have the best life. I'm not flying around in a private jet and you know, living a lap lap of luxury, but I have a good life. I have children that love me, I have a wife that loves me, I have friends that love me, I have enough money in my pocket that I'm I'm you know, I'm under a roof, um, I am well fed, you know, I'm in knock on wood, pretty good health. I, you know, there's not a lot to be hopeful for in the sense that if I hope for anything, it's like I just kind of hope that it continues. But I place a lot of that on me doing the right thing. I continue to treat my children well, they will continue to love me. I continue to treat my wife well, she'll continue to love me. My friends will continue to love me. Again, they came over last night for a party because they like us, right? They must enjoy my wife and I. Um, I'm not really looking for it to get better all of a sudden to solve some sort of ills. Now, maybe you talk to me at some point and I'm going through cancer or something like that, and I'm just grasping at straws and I want everything to get better. Okay. I mean, I always give people a pass when it comes to grief and that sort of thing. I I consider like pain and illness. That's the same grief in the sense they just they want to get through it. If that, if God's the one that gets you through it, okay, fine. It's not how I'm gonna do it, probably, but I I understand it. So, hope for me is that I just continue to make good choices. My daughter says this, she's 35, and she says this to a lot of her young staff. She has a lot of young kids that work for her. And um, you know, they'll they'll leave for the weekend or whatever, and she'll say, Okay, make good choices. It's just her sort of uh almost a mom sort of thing. Um, but she means it. It's like, you know, you're 19 years old. Make good choices. You know, you're 19. You got to make it to 20. Uh, don't blow yourself up doing something stupid. Make good choices. If I continue to make good choices, I trust that good things will come my way. Not always in a straight line, but I have hope that I that things will work out for me because I will continue to pursue them in a in the right way. I don't know. Is that is that enough? I think it is. For me it is. Maybe not for you, but for me it is. And I know that when I die, it just stops. I won't know that I'm dead. Like I didn't know that I wasn't born yet. I'll be dead. It'll just stop. Hopefully, I don't even know it. I just don't wake up one day. That's how I would prefer it, right? But every day between now and then, no, I expect I'll just continue to make better choices and do better things and treat people well, and that will come back to me. So I don't know. It's kind of a good question there. Um, this question, I'm gonna put it out to you, the uh the listener and the viewer. Have you ever gotten a good answer for why God doesn't heal chronic medical conditions? No, I have not. I've not ever gotten a good answer to that. I've gotten a lot of BS answers, you know, quite frankly. You know, God works in mysterious ways. Okay, that's not really helping me. That doesn't help me understand why God allows and sits back and watches atrocities play out. Um, why does God not cure amputees? Apparently, God can cure your tumor, but he can't seem to regrow a limb, which makes me suspect that God's not really there. But what's the good answer for that? If anything, you get the well, God's very mysterious and we can't we can't question his thoughts. Well, him not doing anything is a lot like him not being there, right? So I've never gotten a good answer. Again, I just get the same tired answers over and over again, and we can't really question him. We don't know why he does his things, he works in mysterious ways, he has a plan for us. That's all well and good, but that's not really an answer, is it? So not one that I really buy into. A couple more questions, and then we'll wrap up. So these are both YouTube questions. This one I had to sort of look up a little bit here. Um, so this person and I were kind of going back and forth, and that's being generous. They were just launching into me. They they left me like seven or eight messages on my YouTube channel uh at Atheistville. Um they don't like me or what I have to say. That's fine. Um, so that what is this person's name? Uh Analogia entis. Analogia entis. That's a Latin phrase. You look that up. A-N-A-L-O-G-I-A, and then entis is E-N-T-I-S, a Latin phrase. Analogia, uh, and I think I'm saying that right. I didn't take Latin. Um Analogia and Antes. I'm gonna read this out and maybe you have to summarize it. Um, so they said I have a logic problem because I said that uh a lot of smart people don't believe in God. Not that all smart people don't believe believe in God, but you see where I went with that. Anyways, over 65% of Nobel Prize winners between 1901 and 2000 believed in God. The statistics were taken from uh Baruch Shalev's 100 Years of Nobel Prizes. I guess that was a book. And the number of theists may have been higher still, as he records that just over 65% of overall winners identified as Christian, while over 20% were Jewish. I'm kind of giving actually an emphasis because I feel how that person wrote it out. Okay. Couple problems with that. Um what and what the analogy here or the implication here is that well, if 65% of Nobel Prize winners across all the different uh categories believed in God, they are obviously very smart people. So believing in God is the smart thing to do. And they go on and in another comment, they said basically, if I'm calling them, you know, if I'm saying that there is no God, then I'm calling them all liars, which is kind of a jump. I didn't say that, but okay. Okay, but there's a couple problems with that. And then they gave a time frame, and maybe this book was written. It looks like they they do have a year of 2005. I guess that was when the book was written. So they went up to 2000. By and large, the people that won a Nobel Prize in that time frame from 1901 to 2000, uh, you know, 100 years, give or take, were raised in a time where being an atheist wasn't a common thing. Um, being a religious person was just how you were, you were societal. Um what I did look up is the book doesn't make a distinction between the person who was born and raised as a religious person versus what they thought, say on the day they won the prize. So there's a little bit of problem with that. But just culturally, a lot of people are religious culturally. They may not be strong believers, but they believe a God. They may not be something they consider overly overly, something they really, really considered. Again, the older you get, the less likely they were to be an atheist. Um certainly back in 1901, that was very unusual. Certainly be an out atheist. Um, it's more prevalent now. Something I did find out is that I'm reading here, look, it says if you look at the last decades, the numbers shift sharply. Surveys of leading scientists today show that the majority scientists do not believe in a personal God. Um, the Nobel data reflects history and demographics, not divine confirmation. So that shift has changed. But again, this went up to 2000. We've had 25 more years. The person who wins the Nobel Prize 80 years from now may have a very different uh perspective on religion than the one that won it 85 years ago. That's fine. Life changes. You take a lot of the great thinkers of ancient history, they believed in God. That doesn't mean there was a God. That means they believed in God. And just because they won a Nobel Prize for this doesn't mean that that proves God. That's the correlation causation thing. It has nothing to do with one another. So they were trying to make an argument here, they were trying to lure me into this battle, but I was like, all right, I'm not playing. But again, they left me like eight comments across different videos. So they were they were on a roll that day, but it's an interesting statistic. I'm not gonna read the guy's book. I mean, I if that's the general gist of it, okay, that's fine. I'm not even disputed, I'm gonna take the person's word for it that 65% uh were Christian while 20% were Jewish. Alrighty. Okay, that's fine. Uh, let's see, what is this one? Elwood Bromfeld. Yeah, Elwood Bromfeld. I like that name. Atheism is mindless faith. Faith in God is based on evidence and reason. I have faith in science and God, and I have no faith in atheist ignorance and stupidity. So Elwood was uh was a little ramped up. These are the comments I get sometimes. I to be honest though, most of my comments are actually really good uh on the YouTube channel, but um, you get some pushback like that. You know, I I I generally take it with stride, but uh sometimes I push back a little bit, but I try not to get overly snarky back because I try like they're just baiting me and I don't want to give in to them. Let them type away furiously in their mom's basement. I just don't want to give them the time of day for that. Um he makes it some strange twist though. He says uh God is based on evidence and reason. Well, I disagree with that, but put that to the side. But then his next line, I have faith in science and God. Well, that's a really strange choice of words. You have faith in science and God. And again, since he goes on to say the atheists are ignorant and stupid, I I would if you said you have faith in science and you have faith in God, maybe I could see where you're going with that. But then he says, Well, atheists are stupid. Well, atheists are have done nothing more than say God hasn't been proven. That's generally what I say. Full stop. We haven't proven God. And I always say, Elwood hasn't proven God. God hasn't come down. I'm not rejecting God. If God shows up, fine. But Elwood hasn't proven God. Elwood and people of his ilk have not proven to me that there is a God. That's how science generally works, right? You have to prove something, right? And the effort and the pursuit of science is to say, you know, I this we have a theory here, and we're going to try to prove it, and we're going to do experiments, and we can repeat those and we study that, and then we say, hey, this is what we've concluded, and 15 other people try to do the same experiments, and if they get the same results, that starts to become the evidence, right? Well, I don't see that for a God. I see people believing that something happened or the lack of something happened is proof of God. That's not really the same thing. But that's not a scientific um conclusion. It's a faith-based conclusion, right? It's it's what the person believes, it's what they feel. And that's fine. I don't have any problem with that. But let's not say it's science. The belief in God is is faith. And faith, by definition, I probably should have looked up the actual definition. But faith is when you believe something without the evidence. You believe that there's a God. Okay, we're gonna maybe disagree with that, but that's fine. You can believe that. But that's not science. So when the person says, I have faith in science and God, but they also say God is based on evidence and reason, we're gonna disagree on what evidence and reason you're using, and that's fine, because we can see two things and come to different conclusions. That's okay. I don't have a problem with it. If you look at the same things I do and you say, Well, God must have done that, and I look at that and say, I don't see it, that's okay. I have no problem with that. But that's just an odd twist to say I have faith in science and God. I don't think science is the proper word there to show that there's a God. Yeah, so I'm gonna Elwood Bromfeld, my old buddy old pal, I'm gonna disagree with you on that part because that just doesn't really work for me. But Elwood, if you are listening to this, or uh maybe I'll let Elwood know that I've added him into this uh into this uh discussion. I'm very curious why he thinks uh that he has faith in science and God. Although, again, he does say I have no faith in atheist ignorance and stupidity. So I don't think Elwood is gonna come to my uh next party. I don't think we're gonna be buddies. So, anyways, so I am gonna go. This would be my Sunday morning uh breakfast with a heathen. Let me take another sip of coffee before it gets too cold. I have a curry and I have like 27 different flavors, so I never know what I'm grabbing. I sort of grab it. It's like a dealer's choice of coffee in the morning. Um, but again, thanks for tuning in. I hope you do enjoy these shows. I enjoy making them, I enjoy giving a kind of a quiet moment to uh reflect before the my wife and the cat get up and before my day starts. It's kind of a good way for me to unwind um and see what I've had going on for the week and questions that people had for me. So if you have a question, feel free to throw me a message in one of the my videos or on the uh podcast or leave me a message at the Heathen Hotline. Um, any of those things are a fantastic way to reach out for me. And I am going to get you the number real quick here to the Heathen Hotline. You can leave a phone message for me. And if you want, I'll play that on the air. But it's also just a quick way for me to, if you want to kind of get your words out. That number is 224-307-5435. That's the Heathen Hotline. And again, look out for our live streams that we do. Um, that's a good way to get a sense of what uh I think, plus three or four other people think on questions just like this. And if you have a question for us, throw it out there and we'll get to it on the next call. So hope that help you guys have the great rest of your Sunday, no matter where that takes you. Could be to church, could be to play, play or watch some football or just do some yard work, whatever it is you're doing. Hope you have a great time doing it. Take care.