Speaker 1: The Thinking Atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
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Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not
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a wish and working together for a more rational world.
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Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: Okay, is there something suddenly in the drinking water in
my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma? I mean, I was born here,
I've lived here. It's just what it is. It is whitebread,
corn fed, red state conservative, maga Jesus town, Oklahoma. Right.
And then I find out a few years ago Forrest
Valcai lives about twenty minutes from me, and we become
friends and brothers in a way. We're going to actually
be at a live event coming up in March of
next year. And then somebody brings to my attention another
ex vangelical activist. Her name is Casey Malone, Kays Malone,
Elne Well. I had never heard of Casey Malone, and
the listener was like, Oh, you got to have this conversation.
She's terrific. So I browsed the YouTube channel, and there
is a ton of information, videos, content, etc. That's been
hidden in plain sight, right in front of my face,
and I missed it. So I spent a bunch of
time browsing her content. She's got videos debunking Christian morality
and quote unquote Western civilization. She does commentary about the
Christian nationalism pipeline to fascism, how evangelical Christianity is helping
to ruin the United States, Christianity and the climate, how
faith is actually a tool of control, an atheist take
on the Catholic Church, an atheist take on islamaphobia growing
up in a megachurch. Lots of stuff on Christian Zionism,
which we spoke about in a conversation a few weeks ago.
Right here on the podcast, well I asked, Casey, would
you like to sit down on camera and let me
do I call it a profile or a video essay,
and it's kind of a produced piece. The final edit
I think came out to about sixteen seventeen minutes where
she sat down. I actually put a video set together
in my living room and she came by and we
had a chat. We actually talked for forty five minutes.
But the video version is kind of edited down in
streamline that is linked in the description box. It is
available to watch on YouTube, but for you, I wanted
to provide kind of the raw interview, the whole freaking thing,
which is twice the length, and it's interesting stuff. My
conversation with ex vangelical and humanist activist Casey Malone and
I began with a question about the origins of her faith,
kind of the Genesis chapter one of growing up in
a Christian home.
Speaker 3: I was raised in an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian household, school
and church, so that was here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I
went to a very Bible based private high school affiliated
with a megachurch. And it was not just an act
for me. I believed very deeply, all the way down,
all of the layers of belief. I believed everything I
was told, you know, especially when it's reinforced in the household,
it's kind of hard to escape the reality that is
presented to you until essentially when I went off to
university in another state. That opened up a little bit
more opportunities for my perception to expand. But up until then,
I had no questions, I had no doubts. It all
made sense, all of the scriptures that were taught to me,
not just weekly on Sunday sermons, but in the daily
Bible classes that were required for my education. It was
easy to piece it all together. It was easy to
never question. Everyone around you is believing the same thing.
And I remember walking away and it felt like I
was completely reidentifying. I mean, that's what the process is, right.
Speaker 2: How literal were you? How fundy were you in your words?
Speaker 3: So I use the term fundamentalist with the definition of
the literal interpretation of the Bible as the infallible and
unquestioned word of God. So that does lead to a
creationist worldview. Six thousand year old Earth. The iteration of
my upbringings denomination. Technically we were non denominational, but of
course that's a denomination. Our megachurch and therefore school also
promoted the Armageddon interpretation of the Book of Revelation, which
definitely came into play. There was always an anxiety about
the end of the world. Every year, we would you know,
pull out the lawn chairs and sit in the front
yard waiting for the rapture. I mean it was all
very fundamentally yeah, really literal. Yeah.
Speaker 2: What prompted that? Was there a date, like a save
the date it may happen today, or was it just
a random Hey, let's go out and wait for God
and the trumpet.
Speaker 3: So according to the theology that we were taught, the
offshoot of Christianity from the original religion of Judaism, right, well,
they have seven yearly feasts and the specific feasts line
up with biblical events. This was reverse engineered, of course.
So for example, Passover is a Jewish feast kind of
celebrating the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. This
was all taught to me. Again, I'm not a Jewish scholar.
But then when Jesus died on the cross, this was
supposed to be the biblical fulfillment of that Jewish feast.
So that's one example of the seven. While the first
three Jewish feasts throughout the year, according to Christian theology,
have been fulfilled, and then the next one, the first
autumn feast that Christian theology says is going to be
fulfilled is the feast of trumpets, which is reverse engineered
and considered to be the rapture. So every year when
the Jewish Feast of Trumpets was coming around, that's when
these evangelical Christians in Tulsa, Oklahoma and throughout the United
States would sit, you know again on their front porch,
waiting for the rapture. And this is why recently when
the Jewish Feast of Trumpets was coming around, there was
that rapture panic pretty much every autumn. So that's why
we see that there is actual theological backing behind it.
Speaker 2: Were your parents weird, nervous, afraid of public school?
Speaker 3: I think there was an anxiety about public school on
behalf of my parents. But I also this is something
I talk a lot about on my platform. I think
there is a very weird tension when you start to
deconstruct or you do deconvert. There's this anger, totally valid
anger of feeling like we've been lied to our whole
lives and manipulated our whole lives. But then when we
get into it, for example, me looking at my parents,
I know they weren't actively lying to me. I know,
they weren't actively trying to raise me in a harmful environment.
They were actually just doing their best. And so that's
a weird tension because I still feel like I've been
lied to, but I don't blame that, if that makes sense.
So they did have an anxiety about public school and
the secular world and modernization, a lot of those themes
that we see as fears presented in evangelical culture. For sure, I.
Speaker 2: Feel the same way. The religion was a lie. My
parents were not liars, correct, And that's weird for some
people to try to process, right. My anger was more
about boundaries totally. Once I left, was yours a culture
of shame being a female in this space. Can you
talk about growing up as a woman in a fundy faith?
Speaker 3: Sure, so it's easy to use the terms patriarchal Abrahamic
faiths when we're talking about Christianity. That is accurate when
we get down to the lived experiences of women raised
in an evangelical fundamentalist church. There are a lot more
layers that I think are important to point out. For example,
the simple fact of gendering the creator of the known
universe that does set up a psychological aspect of little
girls in Sunday school manhood or masculinity with divinity, and
there will just constantly be a hierarchy associated with that
moving forward throughout the rest of our lives. The resulting
culture from those kinds of mentalities, the he hymn of
Divinity itself, the Hehmn of Jesus, all of that results
in a differential treatment once we get into say, adolescence
and what it looked like in the environment I was
raised in, definitely boys and girls were treated differently and
purity culture. I am not the expert on purity culture,
but having lived through it, I can tell you it
affected the both boys and girls, but it affected girls
in such a way that I think the damage is
a little bit more longer lasting. Now there is, of
course the argument like purity culture results for the boys
who are taught, don't worry about you know, there's no
culture of consent, there's no culture of Maybe that's not
true obviously, I'm not, you know, jaded at all, but
I just think, for EXAs example, whenever we had the
talk in chapel during high school, they would split up
the boys and the girls and they would give us
different messages about how to navigate hormones and adolescents and
dating and all of these different things. Obviously, abstinence was
just the only possible avenue for any of us to take.
But the way they presented abstinence to boys was to
resist temptation. The way they presented abstinence to girls was
it's your job to make sure that the boys resist temptation.
And so in that way, the girls were kind of
pulling double responsibility in managing their own attire for the
sake of the boy's attention, in being responsible for any sin.
I mean, this even gets into Adam and Eve, who
is the sinner?
Speaker 2: There?
Speaker 3: Eve ate the apples, she is considered the first sinner.
Now there's all different kinds of theological arguments. Well, Eve
didn't know any better. Adam was actually the first sent
and you can interpret it a million different ways. But
really what we see when we do these theological interpretations
of scripture like that, are you still using your reverse
engineering your arguments and these scriptures so that they hold
up to whatever moral or ethical or logical point you're
trying to make. And in that sense, the question is,
did we really need the scripture in the first place
if that was the stance you were going to take.
So yeah, I mean, the culture of shame really did
go deep. The culture of responsibility for sexuality was just
solely on the girls in the environment I was raised in,
and I think really so, I graduated top of my
class of the private high school I went to, and
I'll never forget that on graduation night when I gave
a wonderful valedictorian speech, got a standing ovation. It's not
a big deal. Obviously I didn't peak in high school.
But I'll never forget how many people came up to
my dad, who's kind of walking around in the after
you know, the afterwards ceremony, and told him he's going
to make a great two options pastor's wife or English teacher.
That's what I was told on graduation night. So that's
another example of the differentiation between boys and girls, because
that just would not have been the case for a
boy who was the valedictorian. So examples like that are
certainly a lot. They hit a little bit closer to
home when we're talking about the lived experiences of women
being raised in the church, and it's a little bit
heartbreaking to see a lot of the girlfriends that I
grew up with and loved so much. They are adults
now kind of doing all of these mental gymnastics to
explain why it's important for them to submit to their
husbands and why it's important to let him lead. And
I'm just kind of watching and sitting here and supporting
them as women. But it's tricky to navigate, I'll admit it.
Speaker 2: Tell me about the seeds of doubt. When did you
start hearing a tiny ping?
Speaker 3: I was always a reader. I read C. S. Lewis
and AW Tosar and a lot of other kind of
more in depth theologians starting in high school. I was
very curious and very studious that I brought with me
when I went off to public university in a different state,
outside of that bubble in which I was raised. So
originally I started taking religious studies courses at university for
the sake of proving the validity of the Bible. Right
that was my original intention. And as a result, of course,
I kind of got knocked around a little bit with
a lot of the ideas that were presented to me,
and was a lot more difficult to prove the validity
of the Bible than I expected. So as a lot
of people in the deconstruction space talk about, I really
considered deconstruction a journey, not a destination. I'm still deconstructing
aspects of evangelical upbringing and that mindset that I was
raised with. But I did have a capital M moment,
and that happened when I was reading Lewis and ein
Rand simultaneously. Now, neither one of their actual ideologies do
I really align with, But what really happened was I
was seeing how these two very different authors were infusing
their fiction works with their own ideologies. And that's what
did it for me, was realizing that authors always have
an agenda, and so that kind of kicked my brain
into gear. I had already been kind of confused about
the Bible, and obviously I didn't have my home church anymore,
so the community aspect of traditional evangelical culture I was
lacking as well. I had tried to go to a
church in the New State where I was going, but
it just didn't feel right and nothing would ever replace
the friends I made growing up. So there were a
lot of different factors that played into it. But once
I realized that writers and authors always have there at
the very least their own personal biases when they're writing something.
The validity of the Bible broke down. So again, it's
not that I was super persuaded by Rander Lewis. It
was that I saw that they were infusing their ideology,
and to me, that was the thread that was like
the through line of my entire belief system, was the
validity of the Bible. Again going back to being a fundamentalist.
So once I realized that this book had been translated
thousands of times for thousands of different reasons and used
for thousands of different ways, it just kind of broke
down the rest. I mean, that was the pillar on
which the rest of my faith was resting. And so
that started the process. I remember walking through campus and
looking around and realizing is really what it was a
realization that I was not a Christian anymore? And I
knew nothing. I didn't know what to wear the next day.
I didn't know why I was brushing my teeth, I
didn't know why anything, what, anything, who anything?
Speaker 2: Did you confide in anybody about all this or was
it always just buried.
Speaker 3: The deconversion part. Yeah, I think my friends at university
weren't as evangelical as I was, they were probably what
we would call cultural Christians, and so I didn't really
talk to them other than maybe a single conversation of
I don't think I feel like I need to go
to church anymore. And they had already not really been
going to church, so they were fairly supportive. And because
they weren't raised in such a high control environment, I
don't think they ever really understood I guess why I
was the way I was, so they were just kind
of like, okay. And there were certainly other points along
the deconstruction journey when you know, maybe I would go
home for the holidays and have to come face to
face with my parents and tell them I'm not a
Christian anymore. Or my old high school friends who slowly
but surely started to kind of wean me out of
their circles, you know, blocking me on social media, only
to unblock me a decade later when they left the faith.
So that's been interesting. But I was certainly the first
one in my friend group who not only believed the
evangelical faith so fully but walked away from it. So
that was lonely.
Speaker 2: That's a tough conversation with mom and dad they freak out.
Speaker 3: My dad struggled. My dad struggled. My mom has been
more supportive and understanding, but my dad really closely identifies
with his faith, and I don't think he has been
able to come to terms with my own realization of
my own journey without it being kind of an affront
to his own.
Speaker 2: Or that, Hey, he trained up a child. What went
wrong that I failed? Did she fail?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think he considers it his personal responsibility.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I don't want to speak for him, but I think
he takes it personally that I walked away and again
he did his best. You know, I don't blame my parents.
Speaker 2: In the last half of my conversation with Casey Malone,
I want to talk talk about identity. I want to
talk about her inbox. She's got Christians, she's got some creeps,
and she's got some other folks who have sincere questions,
and she talks a lot about that and more. In
just a second hang on before I get into the
final twenty minutes twenty five minutes of my conversation with
Casey Malone, I want to mention again that I've been
given the honor of joining a wonderful nonprofit called the
Creator Accountability Network. Now I'm not on the staff, I
actually signed up as a content creator. I want to
kind of lead by example. Here can does this. They
are dedicated to trying to reduce harassment and abuse, whether
it's in the online space or maybe in person. Somebody
feels like they have been slighted or harmed or abused
in some way, and maybe in the past they got
frustrated because they didn't feel like or was anybody they
could tell, there was no path forward to try to
inform the content creator and educate them on what the
hell was wrong and how do we find restoration perhaps
even build off of that encounter. Not always possible, not
always possible, but I'm convinced that a lot of times
when somebody feels slighted or insulted, or you know, they
get creeped out or whatever, a lot of times there
is simply a misunderstanding, a lack of education. Maybe the
person is clueless as to what they did or said,
and they simply need to be educated. And I am
all about de escalation whenever possible. So you can go
to Creator Accountabilitynetwork dot org and they can help to
make it right. De Escalation take a breath, Let's find
out what happened, Let's educate each other, and let's see
if there might be an opportunity to move forward and heal.
That is my kind of party. CAN is also on
the hunt for volunteers from communities who can help. So
if you've got a skill or you've got time desire,
you can go to Creator Accountabilitynetwork dot org to find
out about volunteer opportunities. And then, if you are a
content creator, are you no one who would like to
also lead by example? They can go to that same
website to help us build safer communities together. Okay, let's
continue the long form audio version of my recent interview
with ex evangelical Casey Malone. Tell me about identity. Now,
you've emerged from the faith which informed your view of everything,
So now.
Speaker 3: What you know. Part of the reason I really started
showing up online this year to talk about this is
for the version of myself twelve years ago who had
nothing and no one to really understand what I was
going through. And I think because of the intensity of
my upbringing and the lack of support, when I walked away,
I was very directionless. I was very much in the void.
Britt Hartley with No Nonsense Spirituality talks about navigating the
void after a deconversion quite a bit, and that phrase
really resonates with me navigating the void very much alone,
and so I think part of there's a lot of
conversation about once you deconstruct, you have to reconstruct your
identity as well, and to me that has become the
more beautiful and motivational and meaningful part of my life.
I love discovering who I am every single day. However,
at first it was absolutely terrifying. At first, it was
so confusing, no grounding, and again that's kind of why
I show up and do what I do now, because
I would hope that it would become an easier process
for others. That's really important to me because it can
get pretty dark going from having everything figured out to nothing.
And so the rebuilding of identity interesting because one of
the things that I think a lot of people that
I've talked to end up discovering is how you can
deconstruct all the way down to nothing. And when we
I think for a lot of people who grew up
in such an environment and then walked away from it,
we can be a little bit more in tune with
the idea that all of our identity is constructed by
all of these systems of thought. So I talk about
these four main hierarchies, white supremacy, patriarchy, organized religion, and capitalism.
All of these hierarchies are absolutely bombarding us everywhere we
go with these thought patterns that would uphold those hierarchies.
And deconstructing those is why I say it's an ongoing journey,
not a destination. We're not just done ever. And so
when we're kind of in tune with that, we realize
that our identities can be deconstructed all the way down.
And that is very jarring initially when you are clinging
to an identity for so long for safety security, even
in a lot of cases material resources. Right. And so
then we get to this point where all of that
identification is stripped away and we have nothing. We have
no values, we have no well, I mean, I think
part of it is just realizing that all of those
values and identifications were constructed by ourselves and our social environment.
So in recognizing that, it can become a beautiful and
empowering transformation of authenticity of this is who I am,
This is what I believe this is what I stand
up for, this is what I want to do with
my life, and that takes a level of courage that
in those first moments after the de identification process can
be really challenging. And so that's again kind of why
I love having these conversations is just at the very least,
letting people know that they're not alone, because I felt
so alone and I don't want that for anyone, And so, yeah,
I guess that's why we're here. Rebuilding that identity though,
can be really fun and exciting if we kind of
don't feel alone. I would imagine you don't.
Speaker 2: Have to go here, but I'll set you up what changed, like,
give me the then and now, and you can go
point by. I don't care how you tackle.
Speaker 3: Okay, sure, So I think that religious indoctrination and political
indoctrination go hand in hand. So from my own experience,
when I walked away from religious indoctrination, I did not
really have the mental awareness that I was also walking
away from political indoctrination. Now, there's a lot of privilege
that's tied into that. As a white woman in the
middle of America, I didn't really have to face a
lot of the political consequences of essentially being raised on
the religious right. You know, they go hand in hand,
because what I've come to realize is that the way
we see reality working, the way we envision reality, whether
or not there's a creator being, how morality works, and
whether or not it's handed down from a creator being,
all of these different philosophical beliefs will manifest as our
political affiliation in a sense, not to parties, but just
in general. And so because I was able to kind
of set aside the political indoctrination, I wasn't really aware
of it. I did a lot of that internal I
guess you could say more philosophical questioning, more existential questioning
at the beginning of my deconstruction journey, and pretty quickly
I came around to, you know, being more of an
ally to the LGBTQ community and being a you know,
identifying as a feminist and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
You know, those are all I would say, I don't
want to say superficial, but there weren't really the crux
of the belief system that deep down I was kind
of raised in though, and it's only recently that i've
really been trying to analyze the beliefs that were both
political and religious in nature, and so to me, the
switch happened a little bit naturally, because once we start
to answer these bigger questions and maybe have a more
human focused sense of morality and justice instead of divinely inspired,
I think a lot of these other I guess you
could say opposing but very different political alignment kind of
comes forth emerges in a sense. So I think it's
incredibly important to have this conversation and for people who
are still in the Christian Church to realize that the
culture of a patriarchal religion, the culture of a divinely
inspired morality, those beliefs will manifest along the line as
the distribution of resources. And I try to get to
that point a lot, because as much as I enjoy
engaging in the more intellectual arguments about deconstruction and atheism
and talking about these existential questions like whether or not
there's a creator being, I think what I really try
to get back to at the end, result of whatever
internal beliefs we have, those beliefs will trickle down and
end up manifesting. For example, when we believe that there
is a creator being who wants society to be a
certain way. If that's what you believe, that's going to
result and a distribution of power and therefore resources. And
to me, that's the crux of why it's important to
have these conversations is I often say, you know, it's
not that I care what you believe. I care about
what those beliefs result in. Right. So, if your belief
is that there's this creator being in the sky who
is gendered, he him who only wants this book to
be worshiped and therefore you know his son that he said,
that's great. Conceptually, that's not my business. Go ahead and
believe what you want. If that results in only Christians
being allowed citizenship, we have a problem. That's why I'm
concerned with the rise of Christian nationalism, because when a
certain belief system has this level of hierarchy over others,
it's not so much about the belief it's about how
those resources are going to get distributed. That's why we
have social issues and social inequality and wealth inequality. It's
because a lot of these belief systems end up propping
up these hierarchies of power, and so unfortunately, yeah, we
do have to talk about the belief itself, the core
ideological root of why certain people think it's okay to
just ignore people on the street, or to ignore people
of a certain skin tone, or to ignore people of
a different nationality.
Speaker 2: I see a tattoo on your arm. Is that like
you've desecrated the temple? Is that like a liberation exercise
once you busted out of the faith or was this
pre deconstruction?
Speaker 3: No, the first tattoo after I broke free from the
faith was a moon. So very cliche, I guess, But
I have many tattoos. This one might be my favorite.
We're still working on it. It's a full sleeve and
it's the symbology of aphrodite and or venus. So I
have a wonderful tattoo artist. She's incredibly talented, and so yeah,
it's kind of been an exercise in reclaiming some feminine divinity.
Speaker 2: I suppose tell me about the people who are reaching
out to you now that you are in an activist space.
Tell me about your inbox? Maybe? Is the question?
Speaker 3: You mean just in general, not specifically from the evangelicals.
Speaker 2: No, I mean the people who found you because they're
having a no shit moment. In their own faith.
Speaker 3: That's been probably the most meaningful part of my work.
My inbox is certainly flooded with a variety. I would
say the majority, well over sixty to seventy percent, are
people proselytizing their faith and trying to get me to
reconvert or convert to a different religion. But I do
get emails every once in a while from someone with
just a genuine thank you, or with a sincere question
of advice, such as, I am realizing I'm an atheist,
but I'm I was married as an evangelical. How do
I tell my wife?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: These very real human stories that I find the most
impactful and why I do what I do. I mean
again going back to if I can just help one person,
one version of Casey twelve years ago, ease the process
a little bit better than it's totally worthwhile, and it's
worth all of the ridiculous emails I get. Of course,
there's certainly been incredible opportunities to connect with other creators
in this space, like yourself for sure, But that's also
been really important to me as well, because we talk
about how important it is to build community and then
having it really kind of play out has just been
really kind of heartwarming.
Speaker 2: Tell me about the ridiculous emails. I'm all curious now
and how much of that is just straight up sexism?
Speaker 3: A lot of it is sexism, A lot of it
is even There have been I can think of more
than one email of someone, and oftentimes a scholar, a
very well informed man, telling me this or that and
the other, and telling me that because I said that
I think I'm gorgeous one time on a live stream,
that they just can't listen to me anymore, can't believe
how vain a am, and all of you know, absolutely
apparently offensive statement to make, right, but I would say
in large part most of them are still trying to proselytize.
And unfortunately I just don't read those emails, so I
don't get into the nuts and bolts of an email
this long that's telling me all about how I'm wrong.
I'm just you know, I'm busy. I'm here for the
people who might send me an email this long talking
about their life and their struggles and you know what
advice they might need or just a genuine thank you,
things like that. But yeah, otherwise I don't you can't
read all the comments. You can't do it, It'll drive
you crazy.
Speaker 2: I'll ask the question. I know my listeners are probably
wanting me to ask. You say I'm gorgeous? Are you
an egomaniac? Or have you just retaken your power?
Speaker 3: It's a little bit of both, right, But I have
to recognize that under the system in which we live,
the female body is commodified, and I do recognize that
it is a certain kind of currency. And at the
same time, if I don't kind of step into that
power and embrace what it means to live with this
kind of body and this system, it will be used
against me in ways to harm others. Because I know
that in kind of the public eye there is kind
of a responsibility to kind of be aware of these things.
But at the end of the day, I've done enough
apologizing for how I look. I've done enough apologizing for
existing as a female, as a woman whatever they want
to call it. And so again this kind of goes
back to I've kind of been saying this because the
girl twelve years ago, the girl twenty years ago, she
did not think she was pretty, and unfortunately that matters
how you doing.
Speaker 2: Come on, you miss it.
Speaker 3: There are nostalgic aspects to having a community so closely knit.
And there's also a component of whenever my family life
got difficult, I had this community of evangelical Christians there
with me who kind of became my new family. And
I miss the people. They do not think they can
be unequally yoked with unbelievers, and therefore I'm not really
an option for them to be a friend. However, I
miss them very dearly, and I respect that that's where
they're at. I think a lot of especially the things
I say online, I think it can be pretty almost
scary to kind of come face to face with the
internal cognitive dissonance. And I'm just kind of like a
walking embodiment of that. So people have reached out to
me from my past. There have been people who have
reached out and said, hey, you were right all along.
There have been people who have apologized for blocking me
and kind of ostracizing me and realizing that they don't
believe the environment we were raised in as accurate as either.
There have been those people, and that's always impactful.
Speaker 2: You may have expanded their horizons as to what a
non believer is.
Speaker 3: I think it almost becomes a more humanized concept of
walking away from the faith when it's someone you love dearly,
because as children were told of these non believers and
they're just out there, they're not part of the church,
they're not in the class as we grew up in.
We don't know them. But when it is someone we know,
it creates a more human element to This is someone
I love and know dearly, and they don't believe in
the same things as me anymore. So of course, initially
that always looks like, well, I have to bring them
back into the fold. I was very often proselytized by
my closest friends and that was difficult for me, and
I imagine it was difficult for them because we're both
kind of trying to navigate, well, can we still have
a friendship now, because your belief and identity doesn't really
leave room for people who think differently than you. I
think that we can still maintain friendships. A lot of
people are dealing with this though. We are all coming
to terms with people who have different religious and or
political identification, and it is challenging for a lot of
families right now in this political landscape. Really, but yeah,
I think seeing someone you know walk away from the
faith brings a more human element to it, and it does.
It did kind of I think inspire a few of them,
at least a few of them told me that.
Speaker 2: Tell me about your head and your heart space. As
a non believer, you're supposed to be miserable and sad
and riderless and whatever.
Speaker 3: I've never felt so simultaneously myself and compassionate for others.
I never had this level of empathy as a Christian.
They were just wrong. They were non believers. They didn't understand.
I have a depth of understanding and compassion that I'm
not perfect at, but that I genuinely feel is a
lot more authentic, and it brings actual meaning and value
to my life. I feel very aligned with my self
defined purpose of helping others as much as possible. And
I just did not have that as a Christian. I
just didn't.
Speaker 2: What would you say to somebody who's going through that
uh oh moment or where things aren't lining up and
they stumble upon you, you're over coffee, they watch your channel,
What would just say to somebody who's in a journey,
even if they can't define it.
Speaker 3: For someone who is beginning to question their environment and
their belief system, and ultimately their identity. I would say
that the parts of you you love are you, and
not what you've been told to believe. The parts of
you that is good and kind, I think are you
and not because you were told by a book. And
I think that everything you've ever accomplished was because you
are worth accomplishing it, not because a creator being allowed
you to accomplish it. I think that is something I
would have liked to hear.
Speaker 2: Okay, I will link to Case's YouTube page in the
description box of the broadcast. I hope you enjoyed. I'll
see you back here next week. Be safe, Take care.
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