Breakfast with a Heathen EP5: Hungry Babies & The Cost of Faith: Sex, Consent, and Religious Hypocrisy.

This week, we dive into the deep and often hypocritical intersections of faith, social welfare, and personal ethics. The discussion opens with the shocking findings from the viral TikTok experiment where churches denied basic aid like baby formula to the needy, contrasting this with the impending government shutdown and asking: Where is the promised Christian charity when the most vulnerable are suffering? The episode also explores the data showing a massive drop in religion's importance in America.

We pivot to the evolving moral landscape of sex and consent. Is the traditional religious argument against premarital sex fundamentally flawed? We explore the secular, pragmatic case for physical intimacy outside of marriage, focusing on mutual respect, consent, and well-being over outdated contractual concepts. Finally, the conversation tackles a foundational philosophical problem: The cost of faith and the question of consent—from mandatory school activities and Bibles in public spaces to the ethics of infant baptism and the profound, unconsenting nature of existence under a supposedly loving God.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Good morning. It is a Sunday morning. It's already the middle of the month. You know, is there a point in the time is there a point in the month, and then certainly in the year where it doesn't make sense to say it's already because it's November 16th. But to say it's already November 16th, I mean it's taken, you know, a 10 and a half months to get there. At this point, it come on, the year's closer to being over than it is to starting. So it's it's not really already. It's it's been almost a year, right? Uh but here we are, it's November 16th. Uh winter is set in in Chicago. It snowed this past Monday, although today, this weekend, has been beautiful, but it did snow at the beginning of the week. So that is typical weather for Chicago, early part of the year, or early part of the winter, I should say, where you have snow one day and then it's 60-something degrees. Which for those of you that are in the south, like I grew up in Florida, 60-something degrees sounds like it's absolutely freezing. But if you live in Chicago, 60-something degrees is like when it warms up and it's beautiful out. So take that for what it's worth. But if you are first time tuning into the show, thank you and welcome. But the show is Breakfast with a Heathen, and I am the Heathen. So welcome. Um, but if you've not tuned to this show, this is a very chill Sunday morning show where I just go through a series of questions. And these are questions that people have asked me. Uh, they've sent in, they've responded to a video that I made on our Atheistville channel, on TikTok or on YouTube, and or maybe it's a question I found on Facebook or Reddit where someone asked an atheist or they asked a skeptic, or they just had a general question, and I thought, well, that's a good question. I'd like to answer that through the lens of an atheist. So that's the uh that's the perspective that I take. Whether you're an atheist or not, this channel and this show is for you to listen to. I I'm more than happy. I you'll find I am not fiery in that sense. This isn't gonna, well, I I hope it doesn't rile you up because it's Sunday morning, right? Or again, maybe you're listening to this on the car on the drive-in early in the week. That's fine too. But um, I'm not here to to fight with anybody. I'm just trying to give my perspective and to help normalize what I like to think of as just another perspective in life. Meaning, the atheist that I am is probably no different than the young woman who lives across the hall from me in my building. I don't know what she is, but let's assume she's not an atheist because most people I meet are not. I I talked to her. She seems like a lovely young woman. She looks like she's mid to late 20s. She seems like a lovely woman. We get along fine as we pass each other on the hall, or we're getting each other, you know, getting the mail, or sometimes I bring her packages up. If I'm walking up the stairs with mine, I might as well grab hers as well, right? Um, she has no idea I'm an atheist, right? Because I'm just a normal person. And that's the whole point of this show. It's just to normalize that. My perspective is a little different, but it's a little different, but so is yours. Whoever you are listening to this show, your perspective is different from mine. Even if you agree with me in terms of atheism, your perspective is different. So that's the whole point of the show. That's kind of a long way to go, but here we are, nonetheless. So go ahead and get yourself some coffee. I've got some coffee and I've got a donut from Stan's Donut. And Stan is not um not sponsoring the show. Although Stan freaked out, man. I love Stan's donuts. I like the old-fashioned donuts. Even though I grew up in the South where Krispy Kreme is king, I would rather take an old-fashioned donut. So don't tell anybody at Krispy Kreme. So whatever you grab, go ahead and settle back, get yourself some coffee, and let's go. So there's no way I could do the show today without addressing the biggest story that's come out over the last week or two or whatever it has been on TikTok. So here's the premise. This woman, and her name is, I'm gonna say, I think it's Nikali, N I K A L I E. Nikali, she's on TikTok. I think she's from the south someplace, um, just judging from her accent, maybe wrong. So, what she's been doing, a bit of a social experiment. She's been calling churches throughout the land, and she's been asking them. She set this premise. She said, Look, I've I've got a two-month-old baby, and I ran out of formula last night, and I'm a single mother, and I don't have the money. Um, is there any way you could help me? That's the basic premise, right? Uh, and I listened to a handful of her videos, and they stick pretty close to that general script. Um, unfortunately, when I looked at the last one where she gave sort of a stat, and this was from five days ago, she had at the time 41 churches she had called. Nine said yes, they would help her. 32 said no, which was um, let's say surprising. Maybe not as surprising as some people might think, but it is surprising because I think we are all under the impression, because this is what churches put out, is that churches are there to help you. I mean, they are a charity. People give their hard-earned dollars to these churches, and for the most part, at least the image and the and the way that churches present themselves is that money goes back to the community. Now, the cynic in me says it does, but not until that$100,000 light and sound system is paid off. Not until that basketball stadium building is paid, you know, not until the preacher's Rolls Royce, we've seen this in the last couple of weeks, is paid. So that's the cynical part of me, but this is a Sunday morning show. We're gonna keep it civil and calm. But again, I think most people will be forgiven for thinking, oh, of course, if a woman that needed food for her baby calls up, that the first thing the church is gonna do is how can I help you? That's the first thing they're gonna do. And unfortunately, on the calls that I listened to, that often was not the case. They would usually ask ask a series of questions. These are legitimate questions, and I'll get to why people have pushed back on this premise. But they um some people would say, Well, have you checked with you know this organization or that department or this, that, and the other, in terms of like local um, you know, the food bank or the uh some sort of women's shelter or whatever the case may be. I'm making these things off the top of my head, but you know, various organizations that might be inclined to help you. The problem, of course, was she is calling a charity who says they do help people. It's you, it's you, First Baptist Church of XYZ. You are who she's calling. Now, in in the defense of the church, and I'm gonna I'm gonna be sort of straddling the line with, you know, maybe to a degree. Um some of the pushback came and they said, well, the person who answered the phone was giving them legitimate resources, resources that were better equipped to handle a request like that. Okay, all right, I'll go with that. The problem was that that's a she called you, you know, and if your only answer is to say, well, maybe call somebody else, it's not really the answer you would expect from a church. The answer you would expect was, you know, oh honey, we don't have a formula. Um, you know, how much is a formula? It's one I saw. They asked her how much, and she said, I don't know, it's like$20. And she's and the person said, you know, um, boy, we just really can't help you. You don't have$20? Not the lady, not the person who answered the phone. I'm saying the church. You don't have a gift card? You don't have a Target gift card, a Walmart gift card, uh, something like that. Or you don't say, you know what, um, maybe come in on Sunday and I bet we can get you somebody because we're gonna have you know 200 people here, and I bet we can we can help help you out. Or, you know what, we give all of our money and our extra, we give it to this, that, and the other organizations who are set up for that. We have a food bank that we contribute to, and I know that they're open tomorrow from 6 to 12 or whatever the case may be. That's unfortunately not what happened. So that was the premise. And this has taken TikTok and you know, the world, if you will, the online world by storm, because you can see the problem right there, depending on which side you want to look at it as. The basic bottom line was a woman said, I need food for my baby. And 32 out of 41 churches said no.

unknown: 8:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 8:44

Now, in what has to be a masterclass on how to screw up your PR, a handful of pastors from these churches that said no got very butthurt, and they went on TikTok scorched earth, Sherman through the South style, to make it to just deflect and justify this. There's not a lot of justification, but I I alluded to one of them. The person who answered the phone didn't know how to handle it. Okay, maybe you should train people better, but this isn't IBM, this is a small church. But a lot of people were like, that's not what we do. Well, stop. Stop right there. You know, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Don't go further with that statement. That's not what we do. Almost anything that comes out of your mouth next is a problem. Because again, the promise that churches make with society is that we are here to help. In fact, if you listen to sort of the more politically minded Christians, they will say, Well, we don't need this in school, or we don't need this by the government, we don't need this, because if people need help, they should just go to the church. Well, this person did go to the church and they were told no. The other real common complaint from these sort of fiery pastors was this woman was faking it. She didn't have a baby. I don't even know why that's a point. Again, stop digging. You're already in a hole. To say that this was a social experiment and not true, what is that? Who cares? No social experiments are true. That's what they're called, they're an experiment. They're false by nature. The point is, the woman or the man that answered the phone did not know whether this was true or false. Their first inclination should be that, okay, this woman has a baby and that baby needs food. What can we, as this church, do to help? And they often failed that. So I'm gonna give them some benefit of the doubt. Some, but unfortunately, not a lot. And as these people came back and really just lost their minds trying to justify that. Oh, the other one that I thought was almost ridiculous, but I'm gonna have to say it again because I hate to repeat it, but it's so stupid, was that we don't have formula here. She never asked for formula in the sense that she didn't say, Do you have a can of formula? Of course you don't. You're a church. She knows that. She's asking if you could help with that. Help is a very broad term. If you have formula, she'd be happy to take it. If you have a gift card to Walmart, she'd be happy to take it. If you have$20 in your pocket or in the church slush fund or whatever the case may be, she'd be happy to take it. She was asking for help for the baby, not for you to give her a can of formula. There's a it's a huge difference in the two. When I walk down the street here in Chicago and a homeless person says, you know, I'm just really hungry. Can you help me out? Do they want money or do they want food? I have had them tell me both, two different ways. And I've I very often, my wife and I do this all the time. We'll ask them, Well, are you are you hungry or do you need money? And honestly, I don't really care either way. But if they say, Well, I'm hungry, like, okay, well, let's go. And I will walk into a restaurant, the nearest, you know, restaurant. There's a restaurant every damn block here in Chicago, usually multiple ones. I've gone into plenty of these fast food places that were because I usually eat at fast food places. I mean, like a burger joint or a diner or whatever. Order what you want, man. Yeah, get yeah, you can have the double cheeseburger. Yeah, get the fries, whatever. But what is it gonna cost me? 10 bucks? I'm not gonna go broke by$10, but that guy might eat, right? There's a huge difference. But for me to say, oh boy, I really just don't have that money. Um, have you tried calling this, that, and the other? They probably have the money. I could do that. I might be forgiven for doing that because I am just one guy, and I haven't had 300 people show up on the weekend and hand me cash for free, right? So I know I'm a little bit of my cynicism is coming through. I don't necessarily mean for it to do that, but uh you can see where we're going with it. So again, this was a massive story, and I've seen about a hundred different videos, either her doing it, preachers responding to it, or just general people, uh, pro and con. So again, the woman's name is uh Nikoli, uh Nikali, I think she says her name, Nikali. So go ahead and check her out. I I didn't have the actual name of her channel. I think it's actually I say I do that. I do have the link, Nikali Monroe. So she's on TikTok at Nikali Monroe. Go ahead and check her out. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. All right, let's move to the next one. All right. Um, let's see. What's a good question here? All right, so here we have another interesting story. So there has been a 17-point drop in uh US adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life. From 66%, this is people that said that religion is very important to them and part of their daily life. 66% of the people said this in two fifth in 2015. 49% say that today. That is from Gallup. That is a massively uh that is it's huge. That is a really, really big difference um in a very short period of time. The US is dropping quite drastically. Uh, again, that's a 10-year period. Um, says such large declines in religiosity are rare since since 2017. Only 14 of more than 160 countries in the world have experienced drops of over 15 percent. Wow. Wow. I can't tell you what to attribute that, but that is a very interesting thing. Now, there's a lot of different guesses for it, and it's not it's not 100% clear because it's not there's not one answer, but wow, we have dropped by 17 points in 10 years. I'm curious what you think the reason for that is. You know, part of me, part of what I think is a lot of young people just don't have the need to join things like their parents, which would be me, my age, and our parents, my boomer age parents. Uh, I've read this before, and follow me if you will. When I was a little kid, my parents belonged to a lot of things. There was a bowling league, and my dad was, mom and dad, I guess, were in the JCs. I guess that's the junior chamber of commerce. Um there was the um, what's the uh I always think of carpenters. My grandfather was part of it. Um, oh, the name is escaping me. Um, it's always that secret sort of organization. It's gonna come to me in a minute, but you're not maybe if you if you guys know what I'm talking about, I always think of carpenters because something's making me think that when I when it pops in my head, I'll blurt it out. Um, but there's always various organizations, the elks, the moose lodge, uh Masons. That's the word I'm thinking of, the Masons. Um, there's all these sort of organizations that people belong to, certainly in our boomer age parents. When it got to the Gen X, which is what I am, um, a lot less of that to my kids' age. When I I have one who's uh I would think she's a millennial, she's 35, 36, I guess, actually. And my son, who's 28. I don't know if he's still millennial or if he's in Gen Z. Can't remember what the cutoff is. Um, I think they join things a lot less. So the joining aspect of anything is probably a lot rarer than it was. That means they don't join churches either. They don't join that organization. They may believe to some degree, but they don't join. And the lack of constant reinforcement and the fact that they're not going on Sunday and they're not going to a Sunday school, and they're not going to a sermon, and they're not joining or yeah, to a service, and they're not joining the choir, and they're not going to the pancake breakfast, and they're not going to this and that and the other, means it doesn't really affect them on a daily basis. Again, they may believe. This didn't say they didn't believe, they just didn't think it was part of their daily life. I think that is a big deal. I always found it fascinating that both my kids put off getting a driver's license. I could not wait. I mean, I, you know, the minute I woke up on the day I turned uh 15, so I could get my learner's permit, I wanted my license that day. I can't remember if I got it that day, but I got it as soon as I possibly could get to there with my mom's car, right? I wanted that license. And as soon as I turned 16, I wanted that permit license so I could leave the house. When my kids came along, they really weren't that way. When my son turned 16, he didn't bother, he didn't care. He he just didn't bother. He got around to it eventually, but he saw all of his friends online. All my friends were at the mall. I had to get in a car and drive 15 minutes or whatever to get to the mall. So the joining things is a really big deal. Just getting out and being among people is a little different. I think that's kind of part of it. Also, I think religion in today's world, the current sort of US American sort of perspective, Christian nationalism and the fight between Christians and Muslims for the last 20-something years, and just the rhetoric is so toxic, if you will. Why would you want to join that? Even if you are a believer, you believe in a God, but do you want to join one side of this fight? I I just I don't see why you'd want to. But 17-point drop, that is tremendous. Now, of course, the question is where does it go from there? Is it gonna go further down? Is it gonna get higher? Uh, I mean, well, I guess that's the same thing. Is the percentage going to get higher? Meaning there's gonna be fewer and fewer people. Is that going to turn at some point? I just don't know. I find it absolutely fascinating. All right, what else we got going on here today? This is another good question. The person says, I don't understand, uh, I don't understand how in 2025 there are schools that force students to practice religion. Now, I'm not sure where this person thinks there's schools that force them to practice per se, but I did do a video on this a couple of weeks ago on Louisiana putting uh and trying to hold, I think it was Louisiana, no, Oklahoma, excuse me, from Oklahoma trying to maintain this law that has been struck down and they're going back to fight it and we'll probably end up in front of the Supreme Court to put the Ten Commandments in the classrooms. So I I see that as somewhat of a practice. But again, in 2025, it is interesting that we've sort of reversed course on that. For years, we've been getting away from putting religion, and when I say religion in this case, I am 100% meaning Christianity into the classroom. And now we have reversed courses. And at least under the Trump administration, when more things have, well, he would say uh more things are going back to the state, and you really just have to pick and choose which one of these things are a state issue versus a confederal issue. He has no problem sending in the National Guard into a state, but then when it comes to sort of religious sort of things, and it's up to the state. So he's back and forth, he's a wishy-washy one of that kind of stuff. But nonetheless, we have more of these things going back to the state, and the states, the red states, and these are more southern states in general, are definitely trying to put more religion, Christian religion, into the classroom. So this person's question about I don't understand how in 2025 that that could be the case. Yeah, that is actually quite surprising. When I was uh in fifth grade, so what am I, 11 years old? Yeah, 11 years old, we moved from Pennsylvania to Florida, where my mom is from. And we weren't particularly religious. I've mentioned that. Uh I was a casual Christian. I was Episcopal, you know, we went to school, uh Sunday school, and then we didn't think about church until next Sunday. I went to a uh a church, and non-church, I sorry, I went to an elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida, right near our house, normal neighborhood school. And my first day, first day, um a lot of different things happened that first day. But that first day, my fifth grade teacher, I want to say his name is Mr. O'Brien, if I'm remembering correctly, read to us from the Bible. I was I was taken aback at 11. I'm shocked at 55. Now this was 81, but 81 though. That's not normal in 81, but I hadn't lived in the South before. So maybe that was very common, but I didn't ever experience this. I I mean, I I had never seen a Bible outside of church or maybe, you know, in saying laying in someone's house, but I had never seen anybody in a public forum read from the Bible. It was very odd to me. I don't know if it had a deeper meaning or deeper sort of impression of it, but I just remember thinking, well, this is really weird. It's like we're going to church. And at the time, I probably couldn't have told you much of a difference between Baptist and Episcopal, and I knew we weren't Catholic, and certainly I knew we weren't Jewish, but Catholic, Jewish, and then everybody else was kind of the same. I, as I look back now, again, at 55, like, what the hell was going on? Why was that guy reading from the Bible? I never liked that guy, anyways, but not because he didn't read the Bible, he just seemed, I don't know. He wasn't my favorite teacher. But yeah, how weird is that? And that was in '81. I thought we had gotten away from that, and here we are, we're going back to it. Should we be? I don't know, man. I I don't think so. But uh I I imagine some people will disagree with me on that. What else we got here? Oh, I thought that was this was actually an interesting interesting question. I feel like I may have addressed this before. Sometimes I have questions that I I uh I set up for this call, and then you know, at some point I just I think, well, uh the calls run long enough, so I don't get to them. But I know I looked at this question before. This person said, uh, have you ever thought about how messed up infant baptism is? Yeah, that is odd, isn't it? It's very I was baptized as a child. My son and my my two children were baptized as a as a child because I was episcopal, my wife was Catholic. It's just what you did, just just part of the routine, right? It didn't really give it much thought, quite frankly. Now, my mom, who was episcopal all her life until her 50s or so, and then became Southern Baptist, she got rebaptized as an adult, as did my niece on the same day, who was I I always mess up. I have to look up to see when Tori did this, how old she was. I feel like she was a young teen, but I might be off on that. But my mom was definitely in her 50s or 60s, probably, I guess 60s at the time, when she did this. And she got re-baptized. And to be honest, I think that's actually the better way. When you're baptizing a baby, what are you doing? It's a baby. What sins does a baby commit? They're a baby. I remember when my wife was pregnant. Now we were kids, we literally were kids, we're 19 years old. My my uh my wife was pregnant, my girlfriend at the time, because I'm a heathen. Um, so I knocked up my girlfriend, and we've been together ever since. But I knocked up my girlfriend, and she was pregnant at 19 years old, and we were quite responsible for 19. I will give us credit and pat myself on the back. We went to Lama's and we also attempted to go to um the the uh church because again, she was Catholic, and I can't think of the name of that process. But basically, you go and you learn about the baptism in preparation for the baptism. Now, funny side story, real quick. The priest apparently did not know that we weren't married. So he he handled all that and we weren't married. He wasn't supposed to, apparently. That's what I understand. Um, but my mother-in-law, who went to that church, apparently didn't tell him. So I guess my uh my uh daughter, Elisa, was baptized under false pretenses, which means I guess she's going straight to hell. I don't know. But nonetheless, I digress. But uh so, anyways, so we went through the baptism. And I remember sitting in that class, and it was a class at the church, and I'm 19, I'm already really not a believer, but I'm not really an atheist yet, because I just haven't formalized my sort of perspective. I've just realized that I don't think this is really true, but you know, I'm going through the motions. And my girlfriend was, you know, Catholic, and everyone expected our children to be baptized. So, okay, fine, no big deal. But I remember watching a video. So they had a video of various people talking about their uh be their children being baptized. And I and I remember this very, very clearly. Another chink in the armor here of Christianity. The woman was had a little tear in her eye because apparently the baby was born very ill of some sort. And she said she she remembered uh basically just being desperate to get the priest there because um the priest needed to come baptize the baby because if something were to happen and the baby didn't make it, then the baby might not go to heaven. And I remember being floored, floored. Because again, you know, I I was raised episcopal. My youngest brother was born when I was six, so I didn't really remember the baptism, really. I was aware of what baptism was, but I didn't know it in any great detail. And I didn't realize that was the case. I mean, I'm 19 years old, I don't know anything about anything. I didn't realize, though, that that's what people believe that if your child wasn't baptized and they die, they would go they I guess they wouldn't go to heaven, which I guess the only alternative is you go to hell. Not a Catholic, I guess you go purgatory. I don't even know what that means in terms of who goes there, who doesn't. But you aren't going to heaven. That was the impression I got. And if this is wrong, someone correct me, but this is exactly what I remember it being. But I was floored by that idea. And it was one of those, like, yeah, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta leave. I can't sit here for this. This is bullshit. Are you telling me that a baby who is in this case days or hours old because they're not sure the baby's gonna make it out of the hospital, that this baby will go to not go to heaven unless a priest, some dude who works in a building across town can get there fast enough. We're depending on traffic and red lights for this baby to go to heaven or not. That's what you're telling me. Yeah, no, I'm not buying that. I'm not buying that for a second. I I don't know that I believe a God or not at 19 years old, but I'm gonna go with if there is a God, that God's gonna say, Yeah, the guy couldn't get there because his transmission broke down and the baby can still come up to heaven. Come on. So I again I didn't realize that was a thing. So to baptize them as children is also strange because I get the impression, and correct me if I'm wrong, please let me know. If you're being baptized and you're washing away the sins, well, baby hasn't really committed any sins yet, and they're being baptized sort of against her will, but let's put that aside. What is there to forgive? They've not done anything. Now, my mom at 60 something years old, when she got baptized, okay, now she's got 60 something years of sins. My mom, the sinner at 63 or whatever she was. Okay, but she's at least got 60-something years of what she thinks has sins, and for her to get baptized and uh accept Jesus, okay, well, that makes perfect sense. That's a legitimately logical thing to do if you're a believer. My uh, again, teenage niece, okay, she's had fewer sins, but she's still making a conscious effort to get rid of sins and accept Jesus as her savior. That's all well and good. I disagree with it, obviously, but that's fine. Those are conscious decisions made by rational thinking people. A baby, a baby has no idea what's going on. I mean, it is brand freaking new, right? It just needs to be warm and be fed. Pretty much it, right? They're babies. So, yeah, the idea of a baptism as a baby does seem odd. And I know those of you that again, as episcopals or Catholic, um, if that's how you do it, what are your thoughts on that? How is that different? Or how is it better? I guess is the way of asking that. How is that better than say, you know, the sort of stereotype of, you know, they they walk into the lake and they dunk the guy backwards and you know, he prays Jesus as they stand up and the the people clap, they're on the side of the river. Um, yeah, I mean, that I I I kind of like that idea. Again, I'm not gonna do it, but it likes I I get it. It makes sense to me. What else do we got here? Here's another question. Uh, this person says, uh, does anyone else think that the Christian God is cruel? Sometimes I don't feel like God loves me, at least not in the way that people say he does. They speak of his God or his love as unconditional, infinite, perfect. But how can love feel so heavy, so forced? And when I never got a chance, a choice in any of this, I was born into a world without being asked. And they go on and on about that. Um, yes. Yes. I'm gonna say yes. You see me kind of hedging there for a second. Yeah, I mean, if you look at God of the Bible, the only person who thinks that the Christian, this person says, Am I the only person who thinks that the Christian God is cruel? Well, it depends. I guess it depends on what your definition of cruelty is. But if I am in a town and I don't know Noah and I've done nothing Particularly wrong, and all of a sudden a flood comes, and that flood was put there by God. Isn't that a bit cruel? Seems cruel to me. Why would it not be cruel? Yeah, seems pretty cruel. If I pray and God does not stop the tornado from destroying my house and killing my spouse, but God could have done so. Is that not cruel? You'd be cruel if if I stood there and watched you die, and I could have helped you. Me, Mike, you would say I was being quite cruel. You wouldn't thank me for that. And you'd thank me cruel for not even trying. If I stood there arms crossed and said, Yeah, you're on your own. When I could have stopped you, I could have prevented your death, you'd think that was cruel. But with God, we give that a pass. Yeah, that seems a bit, that seems a bit cruel to me. Again, I don't know what definition you're using for cruel, but yeah, I I uh I'm gonna have to go with uh the person when they said that. It makes perfect sense to me that they uh Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna go. I am gonna go with that. Okay, so I got two or three more questions, then we're gonna wrap it up here. So this one, in fact, I know I'm gonna ask this tonight on the uh unholy roundtable. This person says, Is there anything objectively harmful about premarital sex in a loving relationship? Well, boy, that's a loaded question, isn't it? Um, well, since I've already admitted that um that my wife and I were unmarried at 19 years old, you can probably guess my answer on that. In fact, one time when my daughter was in middle school, uh, she had a she had a teacher, it was um it was her film teacher, if I'm not correct, if I'm not uh mistaken, um, real nice lady, uh Jen, um, that I also uh knew sort of outside of thing because I was involved in theater and film as well. Um, so I was making uh just sort of taunting my teenage daughter as fathers are wanting to do, and I said something about, oh, I can't think of Jen's last name off the top of my head. But I was like basically, oh, you know, I saw Jen and her boyfriend, they live together, she's living in sin. You know, I'm just kind of again being a dad and annoying my 14, 15 year old daughter, whatever she was saying. And as teenage daughters are also wont to do, she put me in my place very quickly. She said, Dad, I attended your wedding with mom. All right, well, nice talk, Brittany. Thanks a lot. No, off you go. So, yeah. So, do I have a problem with premarital sex? Uh no, I do not. Is that the worst thing in the world? Uh no, it is not. If you take religion away from premarital sex, and I'm saying premarital, not teenage, not a certain age, I'm saying just the fact that you weren't married, is there a problem with having sex before that? No, come on. First of all, we're human animals, and the institution of marriage is uh is way younger than we are as procreating animals, right? So, right there, off the bat, no, because if that were not the case, we'd have no religion because religion would have never come about had we not had populations of humans that got there because somebody had sex with somebody. So, right there, you have to realize that most of the history of man has happened without a marriage certificate. Right? Okay, let's let's keep that in our pocket, okay? But the other thing is what is the actual harm? Okay, what's the actual harm? You've committed yourself to this other person, and don't give me a bunch of crazy nonsense. Let's assume that on Monday I am committed to this person, on Tuesday I get I get married, and Wednesday I can finally have sex with them. What changed between Wednesday and Monday in terms of our relationship, our commitment, our our desire to to have and to hold and blah blah blah. Yeah, there was a ceremony, and yeah, there was a something at the courthouse was signed, but Monday and Wednesday, nothing different. Nothing different. There's just not, right? If I had sex on Monday and I have sex on Wednesday, nothing is different. It it means nothing more, it means nothing less than it did two days earlier, right? So how does premarital sex really have any how is being married have any real bearing on it? Now, I can hear the answers being riled up and ginned up all across the land. Well, what about this? What about that? And what about yes? If you're gonna give me, well, there's no commitment there, well, that's wrong. There's a lot of commitment. You can be committed without a marriage, you can be committed to one another. Well, that just means you'll have sex with anybody. Well, you can have sex with anybody whether you're married or not. That's not stopping you from doing that. You can be non-monogamous. There are plenty of couples that are non-monogamous. We can get into a whole different conversation there, but that's not the same. What I'm saying is having sex on Monday, getting married on Tuesday, having sex on Wednesday, the difference between those two days is nothing. So I do not see, and again, the person's question was is there anything objectively harmful about premarital sex in a loving relationship? No, I don't know how you can really make that argument. Now, if you say purely from a religious Christian point of view, okay, that's fine. That's your thought on how you need to handle yourself for your God and your path. But in terms of the word harm, there's no harm there. Maybe against your rules, that's fine. But that's not a harm. There just really isn't, right? There's just no harm there. So this question is says options for after my child's school, distributed Bibles. Whoa, where is this school? Says my child's school, and they say middle school, had a table of Gideon Bibles in the lobby for the last three days. On the first day, an administrator and a teacher manned the table, saying, just take one, only take one. It's my understanding that since the school opened themselves up to distributing tracts, that they must accept other books, materials, or tracks from any group. Maybe this isn't the right group to ask, but does anyone think that I might be able to provide other materials on the table to be manned by staff? So they're asking kind of, they're making a point and they're asking a question here. Second part of that question, whether they should be able to man the man a table or distribute uh other materials. Yeah, they should. And I would love to see them try. That is something the satanic temple would love to do. Um, and the satanic temple, if you're not familiar with them, has almost nothing to do with Satan. They have a lot to do with making a point. So if you have a school, in this case, I'm assuming this is a public school, because if it's private, there wouldn't be an issue. But a public school that is saying, you know, we're gonna allow Bibles to be distributed here at the school, at the publicly funded school, the satanic temple will go in and say, okay, great, that's awesome. We're gonna go ahead and set up another table right beside you, and we're gonna offer a book of Satan or the Satanic Bible or whatever they have. Because you've just said you're going to allow religious materials to be distributed. Every city council that pulls this kind of stunt always has to make it a broad term so they don't get in trouble. They'll say, no, no, no, we're we're just allowing um various communities throughout the, you know, various groups throughout the community to distribute their information. Great. Well, the satanic temple will say, We're a community, we're an organization within your community. So we're gonna put a Satan's Bible or whatever they call it, uh satanic Bible, right next to the Christian Bible. There's nothing wrong with that, right? You said you're allowing everything, right? So, um, so this person's wondering if they can do that. Uh, knock yourself out. That is not really the sort of atheism that I practice in terms of I'm not really that activist kind of guy, but I understand it and I support the pushback because come on, man. Come on. Is there no safe spaces for people that just to go to school and just learn how to add, subtract, and not dangle the participles or everything else they need to learn? Why do they have to have a religious aspect of it? It's a it's a school, man. Come on. There's no lack of Jesus in this community, I'm sure. If that's if that's happening, you know there is no lack of Jesus in that community. Do they need to have a Bible at the school? They do not. This is exactly the sort of thing my sister-in-law lives for. She lives in a small, little tiny Christian town, and I think she's the only liberal person there. Uh, this would outrage her to no end. She would want to drive to this community just to make the point. I love her, but that's what she does. She's uh very good at that sort of thing because it's an outrage. It really is ridiculous. And people will say, Well, it's just Bibles. Okay, well, it's just the Quran, it's just the satanic Bible, it's just a book, right? What do you have a problem with it? Okay, and our final question for the day. This is, I had no, uh, this was not done intentionally, but I'm gonna go uh completely a full 360 here because we're going back to kind of where we started. We talked about the woman that was calling churches and uh asking if they would help with her two-month-old baby. So this person's question is Will churches back up their political rhetoric now? And this happened, uh, this question came up before the government went back to work. So they were still shut down. Says the federal government is set to make a significant portion of the country go without food and health care. So obviously they were trying to shut down the SNAP benefits and health care, everything else. Um, the shutdowns allowing the Trump administration to further their efforts to strip poor Americans of any assistance, and they've managed to scrape together, is now poised to ensure SNAP uh subsidies are pulled away from the country's most needy. Will churches who have continued to promote and support the latest Christian president that has been elected, will they step up and feed the needy? That's a good question. And unfortunately, again, make a full 360 here, they said no. The needy called, the woman called and said, I have a two-month old who needs formula. The needy called, and when that call is answered, the church said no. So, no, unfortunately, I don't think they did that. Maybe I'm wrong. If your church stepped up and they said, you know what, they're about to cut off snap benefits for millions of people. We need to make sure we have a soup kitchen, which is probably not the case. And if we do, we need to ramp it up and man it because we're gonna have a lot of people and we need to promote that and say, Come on in. If your church did that, let me know. I'll promote that. If your church didn't do that, ask yourself why. Why didn't they do that? What else did they what else did they do? Again, at its basic premise, the church is supposed to be there to help people. Your hundred thousand dollar light system and sound system, that's not it. That makes it fun. It makes people want to come. But that's not really helping anybody. If you sent five people to Uganda to build a church for the people in Uganda and you raise money to do that, that's great for the people of Uganda. But you got people right in your neighborhood that maybe need that money. I'm not faulting you for sending people to Uganda. I might fault you for what you did there, because building a church is probably not the best use of your resources. But that ten thousand dollars or whatever it costs to send X amount of people over there, the money you raised, how much formula could you have bought? So think about that. Okay, and with that happy note, we are gonna uh wrap it up for the day. Um, again, this is Mike. Uh, I am Breakfast with a Heathen. That was today's show. Make sure you go ahead and like the show and subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode. And also check us out on our various different platforms. Atheistville.com is our main website. From there, you can see uh links out to the various different uh things that we do on YouTube. For example, we have a channel called Atheistville, so at atheistville on YouTube. And from there, I have a couple different shows. We do an unholy round table, which is a panel show where we have various atheists get together and we talk about uh all kinds of different subjects that apply to life and how we see things and our perspective as atheists, could be how to raise your children or or finding a partner to spend your life with or just just navigating your way through the daily uh daily life in America when you are an atheist and everybody else seems to be religious. I also do a weekly mic drop that I do here on the podcast as well. But if you want to watch the video version of that, that's on YouTube. I do a TikTok channel here and there, and I also have a uh Substack that I send out. And again, I put a blog out on atheistbuild.com. So check out any of those platforms. I really appreciate it. And always, always, always feel free to send me a message on any one of those and I will respond to you. It's really one of the main reasons I do this show, is I like interacting with people just like you, and I want to hear your thoughts on things. And even if we disagree, I really still enjoy feeling and understanding where you're coming from. I just think that makes us a better world. The more we can understand each other, the better off we all are. So, in the meantime, thanks again and take care of