Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because.
Speaker 3: I put my hand on a book and made a.
Speaker 1: Wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast, hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: The broadcast this week originated as a U Tube live stream,
and it's one of the longer shows I've ever done,
so I understand if you parse this out. Some people
are used to three hour broadcast, four or five hour broadcasts.
Not my thing. I'm usually about an hour, maybe an
hour and a half. This one, I think runs close
to two and a half hours. But you know there's
a lot going on. And the YouTube link in the
description box if you want to go back and watch show. Okay,
your calls on any subjects, So whatever's on your mind,
I'll tell you kind of what's on my mind. To start,
which is how I roll in the monologue. Some people
like the monologue, some people despise them. It's funny. In
the comments section, there's always somebody who jumps in and
they're like, show actually starts at thirteen minutes and eight seconds,
meaning that's when I shut my blathering pie hole and
we take calls, and other people say, screw the calls,
please rant thought. I can't please everybody. I'm just one man.
Something on your mind, would love to talk to you.
Natalie and I and a friend named Sam we went
to a candle making shop last weekend. I don't know.
It's something that they thought would be fun, a nice distraction,
bubblegum for the brain. Didn't know we even had one
of those? How didn't know we had? Yeah, that's right.
It's called wick and flame or something like that. And
you go in and you pay I don't know, thirty
bucks something like that, and you sit at a counter
and then they say, what do you want? What is
the aroma that you are seeking? And then they walk
you over to this big wall of little cops of
various scents and it could be anything. Could be cinnamon,
it could be the smell of whiskey. It could be
leaves and grass, it could be some other thing. I mean,
there must have been one hundred and fifty and you're
supposed to go through and it's sample, and then if
your nose is overwhelmed, you clear your nasal palette by
sniffing this thing full of coffee beans that's supposed to
reset you. I guess, almost like a wine tasting. And
then you go back and you sniff some more until
you find two or three that you really like. And
it's funny because of all of us that were there,
we all had different goals. I went up and I said,
I would like something that smells like October, because you
know me, I love the month of October. She's like,
uh huh, we don't have anything out front, but in
the back I could go retrieve a few things. Oh yes,
special treatment for the fall of romas. So she came
back and she brought me something called pumpkin buttercream, which
was as delightful as it sounds. Then she had bonfire smoke,
and it's like we're sitting outside with roasting marshmallows over
the bondonfire. And then she wanted something to kind of
spice it. Up. So we took a Moroccan spice and
I mixed them all together, and she set us at
our workstation and we appropriated the different ratios of chemicals together,
poured it into our thing, and then came the wax,
and then we set the wick and it began to
set up, and then I put glitter on the top,
because hey, I just want glitter. I got copper colored glitter.
And I'm tonight after a week of curing and asked
to cure apparently because the smells have to talk about it.
I don't know how it works. Tonight weight, Well, shit,
you hear my cat? Can you hear that? He does that?
He just walks the halls and howls. I'm becoming a
little concerned about his health. He's fifteen, sixteen ish, starting
to show some signs of decline, but he's also living
a good life. I did not plan this. This was
not a pre recorded soundtrack. This morning, when he was
sitting on my lap, he was totally zending me out,
and so I grabbed my phone just quietly and I
took a little video of him doing what he does
on an early morning. So maybe this will be some
ASMR for you. Check it out. Sweet little kitty. Right,
sweet little kitty totally relaxes me. So he doesn't seem
like he's in discomfort, but he does. And he has
always howled like a banshee, and he's not keeping his
food in as much A couple of times a day.
We're finding a little discovery reason. I'm like, well, what
does that mean, because don't cats yack a lot? Anyway?
If it gets any worse, he's going to the vet.
It's just been that kind of week. And I'll get
to that in just a second. I had an experience
with technology that might interest you. So we had a
front doorbell with this cheap ass camera thing on. You've
seen the camera doorbells, but the one that we had,
I forgot exactly where it came from. It was years
and years old, and the app barely pulled anything up,
but hardly ever worked. So if someone rings your doorbell,
in the theory you get a live video feed on
your phone or you have to go pull it up,
and you're supposed to see who it is. Is it
a solicitor, is it a friend or family member, neighbor
or whatever, But all you could see was an outline
of a shadow because the light, the back light from
the yard and the street blew it out. You couldn't
see a damn thing. Resolution was terrible, and it finally failed.
I went by and it was flashing this red light.
I couldn't do a reset. Screw this. So I looked
online for newer video doorbells and the technology has gotten crazy,
and I found one five star reviews across the board.
I'll go ahead and tell you what it was. Let
me pull it up. It's Tapo. T is in tom
Ta Po Tapo, and they do cameras and they do doorbells,
and they do other stuff. They even have like a
smart rumba thing, a vacuum that goes around your house,
and they got products never heard of Tapos, Like, all right,
well it's seventy nine dollars, I'll get it. This thing
is crazy and we've set all kinds of parameters. It's
got a two K camera on it with a light
on the actual doorbells, so if somebody comes up, it'll
actually boost the light so you can see their face better.
The clarity is better, it plays with the light better,
and then you set boundaries so if they walk up
to your door, you decide you want to know about that.
You tie it into your home system, and all of
a sudden, it says someone is standing on your porch.
What then it rings the doorbell, you know, or someone
rings the doorbell, and someone is ringing your doorbell ding dong,
and your phone rings, and you can answer it from
wherever you are and have a video conversation immediately with
whoever has rung the doorbell. And there are all kinds
of crazy options. You can set it to detect pets.
You can have car detection or ignore the cars. And
so I went and bought a companion camera for it,
and I stuck it on the front corner of my house.
I can see what the hell's going on all around
my neighborhood. I've got some already installed, but I thought, well,
I got to try this out. It's two cameras in one,
each facing a different part of the street, and you
can set those detections cars, animals, kids, sidewalking down sidewalk, driveway,
no driveway. You can draw a line and say, if
anyone crosses this point to this point, I have an
invisible boundary. Somebody crosses this line, they're not on the sidewalk,
they're not just hanging out near the street, but oh
they're in my property. Somebody's doing that shit. I get
an immediate notification on my phone in my house. It's insane.
So I am just it's not just a toy, but
it kind of is. I've just been astounded. And then
of course I'm like, well, I'm not tied into a cloud,
or do I not know I'm tied into a cloud?
Are we being surveilled? Are my patterns being documented when
I go, where I go, what I'm doing? Am I
being watched in a surveillance state? These are fair questions
to ask. Remember the with It the Ring commercial on
the Super Bowl when somebody's straight dog had walked in
front of a camera and all of a sudden, all
the ring cameras talk to each other and they're like, hey,
Bob's dog who lives You know, this guy lives five
miles away. Somebody contact Bob, his dog's over here, and
people the commercial was saying, what a great interconnected information database.
This is the dog he was rescued. You and I
are thinking, you gotta be shitting me, right, This isn't
surveillance network running by itself? And how far does that go.
But I'll admit it's been kind of awesome. I mean,
somebody walks up during the broadcast today, I'm in my
home studio. For now, I'm in my home studio after
a downstairs flood. We are waiting for the repair of
the floor. They came in, ripped the whole damn thing out,
and they brought in industrial fans and tore out sheet
rock and they just finish repairing the wall. So now
we're waiting on floors and they say they're going to
move us out for a few days. So that's one
of the reasons that I'm doing a broadcast in advance
here is because we may be ousted. And if I'm
in a hotel somewhere as we're waiting to get access
to our home and they have to stain the floor,
I'm going to be doing I think some more writing.
I'm working on a book project that you know, projects
like that are you start a painting, you start a
piece of music, you start a book and you don't
even know if you'll ever finish it or if it
will go anywhere, but you just nibble away at it.
It has been this way for months. How many words
am I in like fifteen thousand words in so I'm
kind of committed. So I'll probably do that. When will
it release? What's it called? I'm not even going there
because I can't even promise you that you will see this.
You won't. I can't promise you'll hear the audio book.
I can't promise it'll ever happen. But you know, if
I've got three days, it's going to be me and
the dogs and cat Cat in a hotel room. I
don't know how that's gonna work out, you know, Flip
He's he's going to be doing that stuff in a
hotel room. I look forward to explaining that to the
rooms next door. It has been kind of a traumatic weekend.
And I only bring this up because I know you
this has touched you in your life, and I just
want to talk about it if I can, and my
wife would would not. I'm not betraying my wife's trust.
She would be obviously a little shy about all this,
you know, as far as attention, but she would certainly
be fine with me telling you. Okay, So her mother
has advanced Alzheimer's. I think Sue is upper seventies and
a few years ago we got the diagnosis. We saw
the signs and she was deteriorating, but she was insisting, no, no, no,
I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, there's nothing wrong with me.
I'm fine. You became almost belligerent, which is understandable. He's
panicking because her cognitive abilities are declining, and she's desperate
for control, and she doesn't want to become an object
of pity. You know, there's so many gears in that machine,
and the rest of us are watching helplessly, and every
day it gets worse, on the order of months and
then a few years, to the point where Natalie will
spend time with her, and she knows that Natalie is familiar,
but she doesn't know that Natalie is her daughter. She
feels safe enough, like there's something about you that is safe,
but I don't know that you're my kid. I don't
know your name. Sometimes she says it's my sister, sometimes
she says it's my friend. Sometimes she doesn't know. And
Natalie is just a freaking gladiator, you know. She spends
all this time and she works on triggers for memory
that take her to a joyous place. And there's something
about music, at least for Sue the music of her youth.
She was a big fan of the fifties, you know,
genre of the sixties. She even sang in like a
do wop band back in the day, you know. And
so Natalie will go over and pull up Pandora or
whatever and choose that channel. And this woman who does
not know her daughter's name, doesn't know where she is,
will see every lyric to the songs is crazy. And
then she smiles and she kind of bounces in her chair.
There's some science to this. Forgive me for not knowing
more about it, I'm sure you may. And then the
music ends, and the visit ends, and Sue goes back
to this near panicky place where she's almost she's like
a piece of thin glass. She becomes weepy like that,
and then she will go blank faced, and then she'll
look around, and then she might smile for a second,
and then she begins to cry again. In a matter
of a minute, this cycle happens, and Natalie is watching
the deterioration of her mother. So it was brutal. So
nat gets a call Friday that her mother her husband
takes her everywhere because she can't be left alone. She's
still not in perpetual care. She still lives with her husband,
who is not a great caregiver, but he's doing the
best he can. And she collapses low blood pressure. She
just hits the I think he caught her on the
way to the pavement in front of a Costco and
so she was rushed to the emergency room and has
been admitted and has been in the hospital for a
few days. And so they've been working in shifts. I
was up there last night with everybody, and she can't
really sit up. She certainly can't stand or her blood
pressure plummets at as all this is going on, she is,
she's lying there and she knows that she's among people
that she should know, but she doesn't know us. She's
lost all faculties. She can't control really anything. And we
go through that minute by minute cycle. There's a smile,
there's the plant stare, there the tears, there's the reset.
And I'll tell you, I know, Sue and I have
never been super close. I mean, she's always been lovely
to me and vice versa, but we just didn't hang
a lot, you know, But you know, my wife. To
watch somebody you care about go through that is tough
because there's nothing I can do. Right. I'm the husband.
I'm trying to be a fixer. What can I do
for you? Can I bring you food? Can I go
what I tell you? Know, I'm totally helpless and she
feels the same. And it's such an insidious disease. You know,
if there is ever any evidence that there is no
benevolent God, this is up there on the list the
cruelty of Alzheimer's, the cruelty of it. You lose them
a day at a time, you know, and yet they
are still here, but they're not here. They're drawing breath,
their organs are working for the time being at least somewhat,
but they're not them, Like Sue died a long time ago.
So what do you do with that? Cat? I'm trying
to have a moment with you, and my cat comes in. Cat,
what are you doing? Honey? He's sympathizing. I don't know
why I brought this up. It's I just can't not
think about it. And she's at the hospital now and
there's nothing I can do. I'm like, can I come
up now? Whatever? I had this very hard conversation and
I had a version of it after my father passed
a few years ago, and he died of cystic fibrosis,
which means his lung scarred over and he suffocated to death. Right,
They're bringing in oxygen that doesn't keep up, so they
have a bigger machine that doesn't keep up. Finally, there's
not a bigger machine, so they're limited, so they pump
morphine into him so he doesn't panic himself off the
bed until finally his body just gives out. Holy shit.
And he was a devout, evangelical, right devout, and taking
his own life or taking control of his death would
have been a sin because he would have been playing God.
It never occurred to him, never occurred to him, And
I thought, nah, never, not for me, Not for me. Right,
you tell me that I'm going to suffer to death
and I don't know what it looks. I'm calling final exit.
I'm going to Portland, I'm going to Switzerland. Cat, what's
going on? It's the most odd monologue I think I've
given in the last ten years. I've got candles, I've
got Alzheimer's, and I've got a cat that apparently wants
to sing in a hair band. So let's say I
get the diagnosis tomorrow and when we had and Natalie
wouldn't mind me having this conversation with you either, because
you probably had it in your own life. I get
the diagnosis, Seth. You are going to lose your mind
one day at a time for eight years. You will
lose yourself. You won't know your wife, you won't know
your neighbors, you won't know the members of your community.
You'll be vacant, You'll panic. Your brain will lose the
ability to tell the body how to do what the
body does. Your heartbeat will flutter, your kidneys will fail,
You'll be going to the bathroom all over yourself. You'll
lose the ability to walk. You will be a vacancy,
your body rebelling against you forty years. And on top
of that, especially in the United States, you will likely
bankrupt the family you leave behind. Perpetual care in this country,
good luck with that. Call it what I think. Some
of those places run forty or fifty thousand dollars a year.
Or if you're home, you've been slaved the caregiver to
do the most awful of tasks and lose their own life,
years of their own life as they watch you die
over the course of half a decade. No, not doing that.
I live in a state where that's I think it's
illegal in Oklahoma to do like medical aid and dying.
And then comes the question, because I'm a frontline activist,
and I understand that that comes not with a lot
of risk, but certainly in this climate there is a
measure of risk. So I have life insurance to make
sure that if something was to happen, my wife will
not be abandoned financially, that she'll be taken care of. Okay,
you have Alzheimer's seth and I say, fine, I'm going
to employ a physician, or get an advisor, or take
control of how I exit right. Not in a macabre way,
but in a liberating way. I Am not going to
give up who I am and the decision making process
about my life and death. Not doing it. It's not
playing God. It's living with dignity and dying with some dignity.
If I decided to do that, does it nullify the
policy that I've been paying on for years and years
and years to make sure that my family is not
financially abandoned and goes bankrupt. I've been sitting here while
she's been at the hospital, and I've just been stewing,
and I'm so sorry to burn you with it, but
I know this has touched you in your life. You
have either you have been a caregiver, or you've known
somebody who contracted some long term debilitating Oh my god,
what are we going to do? Disease or condition, and
it disrupted every part of your life, and you found
yourself grieving that person and incrementally over the course of weeks, months, years,
and everybody loses. Everybody loses. I don't know. I told
Natalie that if I knew I was going to pass away,
I'm doing my own eulogy, like I wouldn't burden her
with it. Now, I certainly don't trust somebody else to
organize it. Oh hey he's dead, let's hire a princher. No, No,
not doing that. And I'm a professional communicator, so I
if I know it's coming, while I still have all
my faculties, I think I'm going to do my own eulogy.
Welcome everybody, you don't wish I was here. I thought
about doing those cards with the Luigi boards. You'd seal
them in envelopes and you'd hand them out to everybody.
When they come in and sit in the seats, and
then all of a sudden, I have them open them
and there's a Wigi board inside a ouigi board and
a plan hut, and the message on the Ouiji board says,
let's keep in touch. My religious family would freak out.
Everybody else would be howling with laughter, howling with laughter,
and I get a chance to say to the people
I care about, what I've always wanted to say and
what I try to say every day. I'd be able
to speak to my values and talk about the world
I've left behind and what I'd like to see happen.
And then I would tell everybody, don't dwell on this.
Go live. Life is short, life is finite, life is fragile.
Live remember me. Somebody better do some crying. Somebody better
be crying over my ass. But when you're done crying,
I want you to go live. Terry Pratchett has a documentary.
It's an hour long piece that aired in Britain. He
received a lot of criticism for it about medical aid
and dying, and he chronicled two or three different stories,
including one guy who was he had I think an
autoimmune disease. Some degenerative disease for which there was no cure,
and the guy still had his mental faculties, but his
body was failing. He was miserable and decided this is it. So,
alongside his wife, with Terry Pratchett in the room, he
decided he was going to go ahead and plan and
carry out his end on his terms, and so he
allowed cameras in the room, Terry sitting in a chair
across from him, and an exit guide sitting across and
his wife's holding his hand, and with all dignity he
thanks everybody, Thank you for everything you've done, thank you
for everything you are on his terms. And then he
drank a little thing of liquid and he fell asleep,
and his life was over. You could see Terry Pratchett,
who had been I think diagnosed at the time with Alzheimer's,
himself very moved and I'm sure of really how to
feel because of what I've just seen that, I thought, yeah, yeah,
surround me with the people I care about, give me
a measure of control. I'm sorry forgive. I'm just be
laboring it. I'm going to move on. I did not
mean to make the opening monologue about right to die issues,
but I can talk to you, and I know you relate.
I know it's touched you in some way. I'm sorry
for getting emotional. So anyway, whatever you want to talk
about for the rest of the broadcast, I'm all yours
for what it's worth. Plenty of people waiting on the
switchboard and many of your calls on the way next,
thank you so much for listening today as we do
kind of an extended show, and go to the phones.
Is it Corwin dialing in.
Speaker 4: That? It is Seth.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the show. Thanks for your patience as I do,
you know, a half an hour of rambling. What do
you want to talk about today?
Speaker 4: Well, first, I'm sorry for what your wife and family
is going through being there done that. It's hard, It's
very hard. So thank you, sympathy to all of you.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 4: So on to me. I'm a trans guy, he him pronouns.
I came out when I was forty five, about five
years ago, almost sixty years ago, and for most of
my family, they're mostly atheists, and it went reasonably well.
Being atheist doesn't guarantee a good reception, but you know,
we worked our shit out. The exception is my sister
and her family hardcore evangelical born again people, and my sister,
I'll be honest, is one of the kindest, most generous
people I've ever known in my entire life. She literally
works with her whole careers being working with kids with disabilities.
You know, she's now the program manager for youth you know,
at risk kind of program kind of thing. So she
is a really good person. She is also incredibly bigoted
towards all of the usual suspects when it comes to
Evangelical Christians, and I just don't really know how to
deal with it. At this point. She refuses to use
hee him pronouns instead just uses my name, refers to
me as her sibling as opposed to brother, et cetera.
And it just keeps coming up, and I know, willing
to cut off the relationship, you know, talking about death.
In the last you know, seven years, I've lost mom, dad, stepmom, grandparents,
like they're all gone. She's virtually the only family I
have left. And I know not all Christians are bigoted.
I know some activists Christians in the LGBT human community
who are extremely accepting and amazing allies. And I just
don't know if there's anything I can say to my
sister to switcher over.
Speaker 2: I mean, I ask how you've lost your loved ones?
I mean, was it parents to age? Was it tragedy?
You know, it sounds like a great many.
Speaker 4: Of them have cancer. Cancer was a big one. She
got both my stepmom and my dad. My stepmom quite young,
my dad at seventy five ish, and my mom just
passed about two years ago, basically the complications of COPD.
Speaker 2: May I asked, when you came to terms with your
own gender identity, you know, and how did they respond
at the time, Mom and dad especially, So.
Speaker 4: I started figuring things out when I was forty. I
was a late bloomer, although I came out as by
when I was nineteen, so you know, I've always identified
as some level of queer, and then I didn't come
out till I was forty five. But then I speed
ran the transition. My dad was shockingly good about it.
I've never had a great relationship with my dad. He's
anger management problems, to say the least, but he was
just like I have I don't understand what this is.
I just don't. I'm too old, but I don't freaking care.
In the best possible way, my mom. Oddly, although she
was born and raised in San Francisco, ended up being
the hardest one to deal with. I had to cut
off communication with her for about two months because it
was just like you just I can't deal with it.
Every time I talk to you, I get angry. I
can't do it. But she eventually came around, and when
in the independent living place she was at, she eventually
introduced me to the people there as her son. So
that was really good. My kids have dealt with it
really well. My ex, who I still live with, he
just did not care at all. So for the most part,
things went really well. My sister there were some bumps,
but she decided to not make it a huge issue.
So we are very close.
Speaker 2: How does the bigotry manifest itself if you're clothes and
it's not a big deal to her, but you're still
hearing bigoted things, How do these things manifest?
Speaker 5: Okay?
Speaker 4: So as an example, this just happened last week. We
were we go swimming at the rec center the fauna.
There's always chit chat and talk with everybody, and there
was this guy there that has two younger kids, like
twelve and eight, and I was just we were talking
about trans stuff, and he's like, I just don't think
kids should be allowed to make decisions on transitioning. And
I said, do you mind if I explain, you know,
sort of what transitioning for miners.
Speaker 5: Actually looks like.
Speaker 4: My sister was also there, and so I explained how
puberty blockers work, that there doesn't cause sterility, you know,
the benefits of it being that, you know, kids who
don't have access stuberty blockers get on illegal hormones, which
is really not good. That's not a good idea for
miners to be doing do it yourself transition, especially where
I am. I'm in Canada. In BC, kids do have
access to puberty blockers, so with full medical consents and
all of that good stuff. And my sister jumps in
and goes, well, you know, trans kids can't be trans.
She's jumping in with her, And I don't think children
should have the right to, you know, dictate their own,
you know, what they do until they're fully adults, you know.
And so she so she was jumping in basically saying
contradicting everything I said, you know, and you know, I
don't I don't agree with adults doing it, but I
can't stop them with her, I think literally, is what
she said. So that's just an example of the kind
of stuff she's told me. She thinks I have a
mental illness, that kind of stuff, And.
Speaker 2: Yet you maintain a close relationship. Do you feel like
that is you doing most of the stretching because she
is one of the last of your bio family. Yes,
do you, I feel that you are. Do you get
fed emotionally intellectually? Does having a connection with her? And
I'm not a not a psychologist, but we're just talking
having a connection with her, what does that do for you?
Speaker 4: So outside of like the religion and the trance stuff,
we are really close. So like we have had for
the last like thirty years kind of a policy of
just don't there are topics we can't talk about. We
can't talk about abortions, we can't talk about LGBTQ rights,
we can't like there's some things we can't talk about.
But at the same time, you know, there's all.
Speaker 5: The rest of life.
Speaker 4: We can talk about her kids, we can talk about
our work, you know, we can talk about books and movies.
So I mean we're very very close outside of those areas,
which I mean she she honestly feel like she has
said to me, I'm afraid to talk to you about
my religion because at some point you're gonna fly off
the handle. Which it's like, We've been doing this for
fifty fucking years. She's only a year, just over a
year younger than me.
Speaker 2: So when you talk about LGBT issues, does she fly
off the handle?
Speaker 4: Well, not fly off the handle, no, but she I
mean she won't use him pronounced, So I mean, what
is flying off the handle? I mean, I don't get
angry at her, but she acts like I could suddenly
freak out all over her, which I have never done.
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of that is, I think her way
of discrediting the witness. You're just being emotional, when a
lot of it might just be you know, she's projecting
some of the high emotions that she is feeling. I
in my life understand, I've got some relationships now where
there are people and we stand apart on some very
important key issues. But I have decades of investment in
their lives and theirs in mind. And this sounds odd,
but they would give me the shirt off their back.
They would probably advocate for me. If somebody was talking
poorly about me. They are generous in so many other
areas of their lives, but in this one compartmentalized box,
it's problematic. And I go back and forth between can
I overlook this and then am I part of the
problem because I'm allowing it and not drawing the hard line?
Or do I maintain the connection? What is there in
the hopes that we can enjoy what we have and
then maybe I can be a positive influence along the
way to expand their horizons away from those bigotries. And
I don't know the right answer, but I'll bet you
can relate to everything I had just said, right.
Speaker 4: Oh, absolutely, And I guess what I was wondering is
if you know, because I mean I do have meant
many like extremely devout Christians who are absolutely one like
perfect allies. Like in the city where I live, one
of the biggest LGBTQ organizers is h I mean, I'm
assuming he's sists and heterosexual pastor of a Lutheran church
who is I mean, he is hardcore, he marries queer
couples and stuff like. He's as ally as you can get.
So it's not a matter of the Christianity. I mean
obviously I have disagreements. I'm I mean, I'm a hardcore
atheist myself, but you know, obviously I have disagreements with
that belief. But as far as the practical application in
the world, I have no problem with you know, somebody
like that at all. He's doing amazing work, and I'm
just wondering if you know of any methodology. I'm not
trying to make my sister not a Christian. What I'm
trying to make her is ideally not a big aga.
Speaker 2: Well, and therein lies the challenge. I have a hardcore
evangelical maga mother. How do I make her not be
a part of the cult? You know? How do you
make an addict not addicted to a substance? And that
is a burden that we often take on ourselves because
we're desperate to see someone else be liberated from bad ideas.
But it's not realistic because we can't make anyone do anything.
I think all we can do is provide the opportunity
and say here is why I think it would be
good and why everybody's life would be better. But you
and I are in this situation where we can't make
anybody do or think or be anything. And I think
for you, all I can tell you is how I
would approach it, and how i'd, in my imperfect way,
approach it is that if they say, well, I disagree
with abortion, and we can have a conversation about reproductive rights,
and maybe they invoke the Bible, and I talk about
this or that and then the biology of it.
Speaker 6: And.
Speaker 2: Yet they are not They're not in a way coming
after me personally belittling. If we're having a respected, respectful
conversation in the way that I might have when I
was anti abortion, then that is easier for me to
abide and be around than if somebody came after me
and said, you just want to murder babies, you evil Satanist, Right,
So I have to have a cost benefit situational conversation.
Every time I engage someone in that way and say
I was once the victim of bad ideas, will I
give them a little bit of latitude because I know
overall they are perpetrators of bad ideas, but they're also
victims of bad ideas, and they're operating as in their
minds as best they can out of malice. But because
they simply have married themselves to what kind of mythology
and can I maybe help expand that horizon that makes
it easier to hang. But if they're like you know,
those evil, wicked Satanists and in your case, those perverse
trans people who've messed up God's model in eaborating the
world and they're targeting our children, etc. That's a different
conversation and I think only you can decide how much
of that you're willing to abide and tolerate. But if
you do end up drawing a harder line, please know
that that's not your fault. I think an authentic life
is something that she should want for you. And if
in some way she wants to deny you your own autonomy,
your validity, your humanity, then that's a line that she
drew that has nothing to do with you. She's forced
your hand, and for your own safety and mental health,
you may have to draw awkward, But that's a very
intimate and personal conversation that only you can have with yourself.
Just know that if you get there, she forced you
there and it's not your fault.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Does that help it all?
Speaker 6: Bro?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Do you want to hear? Do you have one more
minute to make this all more complicated?
Speaker 2: Go ahead and me I we'll take a minute super quickly.
Speaker 4: My youngest child, who is seventeen, has recently just come
out as trends and is still one in the closet.
I say recently, I mean within the last couple of years,
has come out to friends and his dad and I,
and so it's feeling a lot more high pressure is
because when they come out, that's going to be like,
whatever level of acceptance of the situation I can have
for myself, that's going to be very very different when
we're talking about my kid, and that's going to get
that could get very ugly very quickly.
Speaker 2: And your child needs that advocacy, right, I mean, and
I think it's set's a good example about authenticity and boundaries.
I mean, respect starts with self respect and so but
if it comes to if it comes to taking the
scissors to the cord, I think from my vantage as
best as I can hear that you are much more
interested in coexistence then she may be. And if that,
if worse comes to worse, that's simply something that was
forced upon you. That decision is not your fault. I
think a lot of it may be about about self
respect and setting that example of self respect for those
around you, including your child. It's it's not a professional opinion,
but it's an encouragement, and I'm sorry for the trouble
that you've had, but I'm glad that you have found
who you are and are living authentically and I hope
your life is amazing.
Speaker 4: Okay, Yeah, thank you so much, have a great day.
Speaker 2: Honor speaking with you. Thank you for calling me.
Speaker 4: Thanks, bye bye.
Speaker 2: That's people ask me for advice and I feel hyper unqualified.
Excuse me, I'm still sniffling. That's just so dumb. I'm
on camera and I'm sitting there with it, and forgive it.
Let's see, because I don't want to sniff into this
microphone because I was just gross. Now, yeah, here's Here's.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 2: I had two conversations recently with different people. One person
with someone I've known for thirty five years, still MAGA,
and I reached out and I was like, all right,
where's the line I forgot which atrocity had happened? And
I just was like, is this enough for you to
say enough? And she hemmed and hawed and hemmed and
hawd idiot right because it was going to be Trump regardless.
She's married to the idea, But I didn't think there
was big a tree there. I think she was just brainwashed.
She'd been Fox News into thinking he was a genius
and he loves America because he hugged an actual flag
on a pole and he says all the right words
and waves a Bible in the air and all that
shallow bullshit. She's not a deep thinker about this stuff,
I will admit. But I thought, well, I I don't
think she's trying to be bigoted. And I asked this question.
I said, okay, well, if Trump goes on television tomorrow
and uses the N word, would that be enough of
a line for you? And she paused and she said,
well it would be wrong. Yeah, I know it would
be wrong. Would that be a bridge too far? Would
you stand alongside me shoulder to shoulder to condemn it? Pause?
Well it would, It's I don't He's not a perfect man.
You can hear could hear playing twister in her brain?
You know, we've all we were all imperfect. God sometimes
uses imperfect people, and there's some things he says that
I just don't like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, if
he uses the N word, will you stand alongside me
and condemn it publicly, and I got a very vague answer,
and so I rephrased the question or ask a different question.
I said, would you still support him? And she said yes,
that's what I needed to know. Goodbye. We haven't spoken
since the black light at the scene. Man, it's exposed
the bigotry and the dehumanizing cruelty, the racism, the sexism,
people that I'd never expected in my eve it And
I was like, okay, well you've Maya Angelou once said,
when someone shows you who they are, or tells you
who they are, believe them. I took the scissors and went,
yep done. Some would disagree and say, no, you got
to keep trying now. Not for me, maybe for you.
If he said the N word, I'd still support him. Snip.
There's somebody else voted for Trump three times, and over
the last twelve months has finally started to raise an eyebrow.
I don't know who they'd vote for again, but I
know that they are. They're having some moments and they've
they've kind of checked out. Well, you know, I just
don't want to think about it. I just don't. He's
just a bad it's bad. It's I don't know. They're embarrassed.
They're embarrassed because they know my stance and remain friends.
And I'm watching this progression in them while taking a
very definitive and hardstand for what I feel is right
on my end, publicly coming forward day after day, time
after time and saying why. And something interesting happened two
days ago that person who voted for Trump three times
sent me a sign that they saw. There's a protester
over near seventy first Memorial in Tulsa, and they're out
there all the time holding up a sign. And I
guess he was driving by saw the sign. He took
a phone picture and he texted it to me. The
sign said Fuck Trump. He didn't put any commentary with it.
He didn't say there's one of your people. He didn't
say this is hysterical. He just sent me the picture.
So a person who was going through I think a crisis,
late to the party by a decade, but going through
a crisis sent me a Fuck Trumps sign. That's a relationship.
I'll continue. There's possibility there, but it's messy. And when
people ask where do I draw the line, I just
don't know because I don't always know on my own life,
I don't always know. People are so freaking complicated, aren't they?
Speaking of Donald Trump? Before I get to my next call.
Everybody's talking about this big state fair that's been going on,
giant two hundred and fiftieth America Anniversary carnival that's been
going on, and there's spectacle of all kinds. And if
you look at if you look at the pictures, and
I brought one here to people are saying that nobody
showed up, and still going on at the time of
this recording, and the photographs show that they're are I
don't know. There are exhibits all the way down the
mall in front of the Capitol rather and he's put
up this fake arch, this fake triumphal arch, which people
are calling the timu Arch, and there are there's a
smattering of people on the lawn And so the headline
among my fellow liberals is nobody showed up. Look, it's
a disaster. Dozens of people celebrating at Trump's magafare ha. Okay,
I understand the emotion of it. This is lazy liberal shit.
There's no time code, there's no timestamp on images like
these that are being posted we have to be better
than this. I have every desire to see this thing
fall flat on its face. Everything he touches dies, everything
he touches becomes algae in the reflecting pool. Right, But
this could have been pre event, This could have been
during a lull. It could have been You and I
are creatures of context, and so what happens is in
the instances where we look at this and we kneed
jerk and we say ah ah ah, look nobody showed
up and not very well. May be true, but if
we can't bring receipts and we get busted, we look
like the idiots. And they have another piece of ammo
in their Fox News gun, and it matters. Facts matter.
It was the other ninety eight percent page, which is
a high emotion progressive, liberal Democrat page, and I appreciate
their verve. They're lazy. The stuff they post is just lazy.
And there are many who would get mad at me
for directing criticism toward my own camp when there's so
much happening over here that's even worse. Blah blah blah,
not us. But how dare you, how dare you point
to the speck in our eye when they have a
log in their eye. That's bullshit. We are creatures of
the evidence. So it may be an accurate photograph from
the middle of the day, when this thing is supposed
to be going heyday in full swing. It might be true,
or this might have been taken before they even opened officially,
or a couple minutes after. And then people show give
me time stamps, give me some code, give me some context.
We owe the conversation accuracy, and that's not unfair, not unfair.
We have a lot more conversations in the queue and
more of your calls in just a second. Thank you
so much for being here and for listening, and for
your support on Patreon, which makes a big difference. I
say it all the time, makes a big difference. So
maybe that just disappears you don't hear it, but it
makes a difference. You know, we see a lot of
challenges when we are doing a content creation because more
and more there are platforms like YouTube that continue to
really restrict here's a great example. So i'd done this
recent show about the Manda Green and I played seven
second audio clips, not the song, not even a big
piece of the song. Seven second audio clips. YouTube gave
me a copyright strike anyway, demonetized the entire freaking show.
Then it put its own ads in wherever it wanted,
and it sent royalties for eight second clips to the
record companies. This is kind of what it's like to
do even editorial content online. So to help fill those gaps,
patrons are there. It's just huge. So if you'd like
to support me and the work and the show, Patreon
dot com slash Andrews with my thanks. I've got down
dialing in d A W N dialing in from two
three one. Are you there?
Speaker 8: Yes?
Speaker 5: Sorry, I forgot the asset Sean.
Speaker 2: Sean, I'm sorry. It's an auto screen process so I'm
sure the speech to text was wrong and therefore I
was as well as Sean. I'm glad you're here. Let's
talk what's on your mind.
Speaker 5: Appreciate it. I'm just full disclaimer. I myself, I'm Christian,
not college educated by any stretch. I grew up on
a farm, joined the military, so I'm not eloquent, and
I have a tendency to cuss a lot, so I
hope you're okay with that.
Speaker 2: Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. What's going on, Sean?
What do you want to talk about.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, so I've been trying to sort of listen
to different secular atheistic podcasts and to sort of understand
your guys's position, and just so, I don't know, I
guess I could be better around it as a person,
for lack of a better word. I respect that, And
I've been listening to you. You talked to the previous
individual about you know, bigotry among Christian family members and
this and that. Just to kind of posit like possibly
another perspective, you believe that, say, for example, the LGBTQ
community has an out like, you know, because we talk
about society's obligation to use preferred pronouns and this and that.
You believe that the LGBTQ community has an obligation to
society to conform to societal standards.
Speaker 2: Well, I think societies are made up of different different groups.
I think we can be part of a society but
also still be a diverse and authentic individual. Also, I'm
not sure that society has an obligation to use preferred pronouns.
I just think it's I think it's the human thing
to do. It doesn't cost me anything. If someone wants
to be referred to as he him or or she,
her or they doesn't cost me anything.
Speaker 5: Well, but I mean sure, but by that, by that standard,
it doesn't cost the person who goes by different pronouns
to be pronoun incorrectly. It's the same thing if someone
if I whose preference wins.
Speaker 2: Out, Sean. If I say, look, I want to be
called Tim. You know I don't like Seth. Tim's my
name for all practical purposes, it's how I want to
be identified. But you know my legal name is Seth
and Tim is nowhere on my birth certificate. The humanistic
thing to do is to say, no problem, Tim, I'll
call you later. Tim, have a good day, Tim. Right,
It costs you, sure, And I don't think it's really
all that different. Someone has an identifier that they prefer,
doesn't cost you anything to use it, and it doesn't
mean that I've changed your name, Sean, You're still Sean, right.
Speaker 5: No, I totally agree. Do you think pronouns are identify
or a descriptor?
Speaker 2: They can be both, aren't they? I mean, my name
identifies me.
Speaker 5: But I would say I would say they're strictly a descriptor.
Speaker 2: In this context, because we are assigning them to ourselves.
I think they can be both. More than one thing
can be true at the same time.
Speaker 5: Right do you assign pronouns to yourself or is it
simply a statement of what exists?
Speaker 2: I think either could be true. I myself identify as
a he. But if I realize that I am not
comfortable with that, it's not a good fit for me.
I then can mold that to be identified in a
way that better suits my gender identity, and then other
people hopefully will respect that. Again, I'm not sure where
the point of contention is for you, Like, why, what
is it cheap?
Speaker 5: Go ahead? Yes, sorry, So my point of contention is,
for example, take your previous caller and I understand he's
not here to defend the position and you you are
not that person, but you know you literally gave him
the advice. Well, if this person who for the record,
listening to the phone call, it sounds like their aunt
was nothing but cordial and within the compliance with their
own belief system, which happened to disagree with the callers belief.
Speaker 2: Hang On, hang on, hang on, Sean, hang on, hang on, sean,
sean sean. His sister. His sister said he was mentally ill,
tell me what's cordial about that?
Speaker 5: And huh did did.
Speaker 4: I mean?
Speaker 5: Up until five minutes ago the CBC recognized.
Speaker 2: Uh, hang on, hang on, Yeah, what's cordial about your
mentally ill? What's cordial about that?
Speaker 5: Is it a statement? Is it a statement of fact?
I would say, I would suggest that someone who performs
general mutilation. Here we get state of mind.
Speaker 2: There was so you don't believe that gender identity is
a spectrum like so many other attributes of human beings, sexuality,
there were so many different layers to that onion. And you,
in your mind, say, someone who is attempting to simply
live their life without harming anybody else, to be true
to themselves and live authentically. Your first thought, or one
of your first thoughts, are, you've mutilated your body, which,
by the way, lot of trans people do not have
gender reassignment right, they don't go there, so that's not
part of the conversation. But your next thought is, Okay,
you are mentally ill. Do you think that's fair, Sean,
Do you think it's unfair? I do think it's unfair.
And how does it affect you in any way? Negatively?
How does it affect you if somebody else says, I'd
like to be identified by this name. I'm more comfortable
expressing myself in this way. But does that take away
from you? Why do you care?
Speaker 5: Well? I mean, I would say personally, I care about
its affects in society and the objective reality of truth.
Speaker 2: Hang on.
Speaker 5: I prefer to live in the society where truth matters.
I think that that is a genuinely good thing.
Speaker 2: So so where does your objective truth come from?
Speaker 5: Sean Well, I mean I already I was already pretty dish,
pretty honest, straightforward. I'm Christian. I believe that there is
a God. I believe there is an a mago day,
and I think that we can derive morality from that.
Speaker 2: Maybe you can. But I'm not a Christian, and I
don't require Christianity. I don't require the Bible. I don't
require any religion to have a value system or see
the world. Nor do I believe that the Bible has
provided any kind of objective moral standard. And I know
my Bible. So on this you and I simply disagree.
Now you can show up by matter of declaration and say,
oh shit, someone say, is not living by my rules
set in place by my religion? But nobody else has
to respect that. And honestly, it's your personal faith. You
have a relationship with Jesus. Knock yourself out. I'll fight
for your right to be a Christian. And that ends
at the tip of your nose. It ends at the
tip of your nose. Man, Sorry, it ends at the
tip of your nose. Right it doesn't.
Speaker 5: So you believe, so you believe Moraley is strictly subjective
personal preference.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's subjective or there are some
objective We've had this conversation with ethicist Aaron Rabinowitz, but
I do see ethics as part of our evolution pro
social behaviors. I don't think it's unethical to be LGBT,
and I certainly am not going to base that opinion
if I thought, I'm not going to base that in
the Bible, because no one knows who wrote any of
the words in that book. We've seen the apologist across
the board for two thousand years disagree on what the
book actually says. And for the things that we do understand,
there's all kinds of problematic hashtag moral behaviors and commands
and edicts in there. The execution of children, human sacrifice, slavery,
you know, healthology. Come on, these were primitive men who
didn't fully understand humankind and the world.
Speaker 5: Dive into all of that. But that's a little outside
the point.
Speaker 2: If you're going to say, this is my foundation, but
the foundation has nothing but cracks in it, how can
we remove it from the conversation.
Speaker 5: Well, because my foundation is based on human value. You
literally just said moralities derived from evolution, which means you
don't have a moral aught. You have a derivative of
human behavior, which you don't get an awe from. You
just simply get a descriptor.
Speaker 2: I think we understand the concepts of harm because we
have felt harm. We also understand hang on. So we
also understand that pro social behaviors which benefit others, also
reflect back on us. We are stronger together when we
act in pro social ways, and while there are aberrations
out there, we survive and thrive much better when we
are kinder and more moral and work together. No religion required.
Speaker 5: None, Well, I mean I would argue that you just
smuggled in a bunch of religious terms.
Speaker 2: No, I didn't that critique, But religion has religion as
hijacked presupposed moral.
Speaker 5: You presuppose a moral awe, you presuppose like, let's just
take harm for example, Okay, let's say I agree with
your saying, or let's just produce less harm. Okay, I
say less harms. Let's not mutilate children, and let's let's.
Speaker 2: No one's arguing mutilation of children. I think we were
clear about that in the conversation. No one's arguing gender
reassignment surgery. Hey, I'm going to finish this sentence sewn.
Whether I mutual call or not, I'm going to finish
my point. Secondly, okay, go ahead. Secondly, you have just
assigned to Christianity morality, You've married those two. And then
you're saying, well, I snuck in religion when I was
talking about ethics and pro social behaviors. But I don't
think that's the case. I think religion hijacked those from humanity.
So you and I simply disagree at the end of
the day, and you and I can go around and
around and around. These people are taking nothing from you.
You just think they're icky and you don't want to
share the country or the world with them. I mean,
be honest with yourself about that, and I think you
may be using your religion to excuse the fact that
you're uncomfortable.
Speaker 5: Okay, let me, do you mind if I explore that
a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll take a few minutes. Go ahead, as long
as the listeners are good, I'll watch the chat and
let them vote. But keep keep talking. Let's give this
conversation a little more oxygen.
Speaker 5: Sure, all right, So let's let's go back to the harm.
All right, and human flourishing. I say, human flourishing is
it's it's derived from an understanding of human value and
also is carried forward through reproduction. Now, as a society,
do you believe that I'm sorry, As a individual, do
you think that there are individual obligations to society?
Speaker 2: Hang on, what do you mean by through reproduction?
Speaker 5: I think that there is an obligation that I mean
because there's certainly if you want, if you simply want
to talk about humanity and human flourishing, reproduction is a
big part of that. Otherwise we cease to exist.
Speaker 2: I think if we see flourishing only as continuation, but
what about a flourishing of our finite existence. Let's say
that we lost all the ability to reproduce, and I
only had forty years left. Let's say I had forty
years left my goal to flourish, to reduce suffering and
increase the joy. That that's not negated by the fact
that I couldn't have kids and that there would be
no next generation. Flourishing could happen in the here and now,
in the finite, could it not.
Speaker 5: I'd have a hard time getting behind that because then
again it becomes your opinion versus my opinion. So if
we limit it down to the finite and say humanity
has another forty years left because everyone's sterile now, all
of a sudden, human flourishing is just personal preference, because
there is no long term a thing. So therefore, if
my personal preference is harming another person, you, there's no
possible way you can tell me I'm wrong.
Speaker 2: If I say, hey, Sean, I'm gonna buy you two
hours in the spa and you're gonna go and you're
gonna get a massage and facial and you're gonna get
you're gonna get soft music, and they're gonna give you
wine or beer or coffee or whatever. You you're gonna
be pampered out right for one hundred and twenty minutes.
It's on me, pal, you enjoy that. If I say, hey, Sean,
I'm gonna show up at your hat with a machete
and I'm gonna hack your ass to pieces, tell me
you don't understand that one of those is harm.
Speaker 5: One of those is harm to me and visual but
is a harm to? Is a harm to?
Speaker 2: I mean, grand and hang on and anybody else who
understands what a blade does, what the nervous system does,
what suffering and harm and violence is, which is all
of us, We understand the difference between help and harm.
Speaker 5: And my body will still be made up of the
same amount of molecule as it was before you inflicted
this quote unquote harm to me. All right, And now
let's say, for example, I mean, because at the end
of the day, the only difference between versus between pain
versus joy is a chemical reaction in the brain. So
what though, if I say I'm sorry, so.
Speaker 2: Whatever the trigger is that causes me to feel something,
so what I'm still feeling it, you know. And by
the way, I find it interesting that you put quote
unquote around the machete attack. I mean, why would you
put quote unquote around the around a machete attack. That's
all I'm saying.
Speaker 5: Did I put around the machete attack around harm?
Speaker 2: You're talking about harm in the context that I just
gave you. Look, man, I don't want to frustrate our
people because I don't run a debate show. But I
think you and I simply disagree that morality needs Christianity.
We disagree that anyone identifying in any other way cheats you,
and I don't think society has an obligation to keep
you comfortable. I don't want to live in a society
that does this. You know that in five bucks, will
gets you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Man, you
are not the moral arbiter of what other people do.
And the more we learn about the wide, wild spectrum
of humanity, the more we see there is diversity, there
are new ideas, and we should celebrate the spectrum of
people where they are and who they are. You know,
you would want someone to respect your right to identify
as a Christian and to be who you are and
live your faith. Knock yourself out. They're simply asking for
the same equal respect and return. That's not a big ask, Sean, Okay,
that's not a big ask.
Speaker 5: I will one thousand percent agree with you that society
does not owe anybody anything. So but anyway, a good conversation, man.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Hope you have a good day. See ya. Yep,
I'm looking at the jet all right. All right, how
are we doing? No, we didn't shatter at each other.
I mean, he obviously, I'm I'm momentum, guys, So I'm
listening for specific things and trying to jump in. I
do some of this when I host a co host
on the Line, which is a debate show, and I'm
given the opportunity to be their host or co host
there once or twice a month, and they take they
take calls from a great many theists, and you know,
we go back and forth. It's a balancing act. You know,
you want you want to be able to give the
conversation oxygen, but you also want to make sure that
we're not getting off into the weeds and we're not
driving everybody who is listening and watching crazy. So I
did my best with that, But I mean to hear
that perspective and to push back and challenge. I think, yeah,
spread some light, spread some heat, and people like this
audience and that person in a Shawn's audience. Whatever that
might be Seawn's circle, they can design for themselves. David
is dialing in from five six two. Thanks for your patience.
Speaker 7: What's up, hey, sir?
Speaker 2: Welcome.
Speaker 7: So I've got an idea that or let me just
I'm a little nervous. I've never called into a show before.
Speaker 2: You're fine this.
Speaker 7: I'm convinced, but trying to stay open minded that all
living things require the death and suffering of other living
things to survive. I think that this is the nature
of living things, you know, with the exception for living
things that do chemosynthesis and photosynthesis. But I think this
is just the nature of life. And I think it's
pretty crazy that it is the nature of life and
accept it. I also genuinely think that the human species
has potential to overcome this, this being causing suffering and
death to other living things to survive. Does does that
train of thought comport with reality?
Speaker 2: Well, we may be beyond my pay grade. I'm having
a hard time thinking of a great many living things.
I mean, the squirrel who is harvesting the acorn is
not causing suffering to the tree?
Speaker 9: Is he? No?
Speaker 7: But I would say that it is the acorn was
at one point living and is now becoming sustenance for
another living thing.
Speaker 2: But the acorn is not a sentient creature, right. The
bee that is spreading pollen from flower to flower is
you know, pollination does not cause suffering. So I'm not
trying to be too pedantic, but I think if I
can show you a couple of little pinholes in the theory,
then the rest of the theory may reveal itself is
more problematic. I'm not convinced at all that we all
must cause suffering to survive and thrive ourselves. We certainly
do see that, we see it throughout the wild, and
we have seen human beings perpetrating suffering for our own gain,
et cetera. But I don't think that's true at all
across the board. I think it's case by case, situation
by situation.
Speaker 7: Right, And I do agree with you, like I was saying,
there's organisms at the bottom of the ocean that do chemosynthesis,
and of course plants are doing photo synthesis, and you know,
we get milk, some towels, or honey from the hives,
and that's not ultimately causing suffering or death to that being.
That's producing it, But on I would say generally I
would accept that that's the case, well, being open minded
to understand that, Oh maybe I'm just looking at the
big picture too much. Like I said, I still understand
that there are logism through that.
Speaker 10: Well.
Speaker 2: An open mind, I think is important to this type
of discussion. And as we scan the horizon for examples
of how we enhance ourselves and evolve ourselves and reproduce ourselves,
I think we can ask ourselves the question has suffering
been involved or has flourishing been involved? That we actually
done something that makes things and people and other creatures better.
Because I think there are many examples of that. It
is an interesting question, David. I'll let the chat take
over on that one. Okay, all right, Thanks appreciate you
calling very much. Thank you. Clarice is dialing in. Welcome
to the show. Thanks for waiting. Clarice. Are you there, Yes,
I am.
Speaker 6: Can you hear me?
Speaker 2: I can? Indeed, let's talk what's on your mind?
Speaker 6: Well, I want to thank you for providing an open
discussion for such matters so that people can bring open
themselves up to talking to other people, and by providing
a forum where argument is not the point.
Speaker 2: Which matters in question? Forgive me for interrupting, but what
matters are are we into here?
Speaker 6: Well, I myself am a trends trans woman. I am
married to another trans woman. I transitioned. I'm now seventy.
I transitioned about us God about ten years ago. And
I have my background involves being in my youth a
leader in one of the major denominations in the United States.
I even led a work camp to Alaska to double
the size of a church and sold an Alaska. So
it's not like I hadn't dedicated myself to being upright
and righteous, as many would define it. I also have
the experience of having the uh the I having a
lived a life that where I've tried not to be
what I am, and that led me to an identity
crisis of such enormous mass that really it was me
or that bridge I was thinking about jumping off of.
And you know, it occurred to me, well, what happened
to break everything? But your brain's still there, and you
know it's still full of poop, So why not deal
with your deal with your brain first? Get everything organized,
and then come at people at a reasonable level. And
that you know, I've been successful. I mean I worked
in businesses for fifty or fifty years, sold software all
across the world world, So it didn't hurt me that
I was trans as long as I was able to
be employed, it didn't change my ability to communicate. One.
I would give some points to people from my own
personal experience. I do not I'm not a fussy person
about about pronouns, and what I to say people is
call me by my first name, because every trans person,
every person of diversity, if they're making a big deal
out of pronouns, it's because you're not making a big
enough deal out of who they are. And so arguing
over pronouns is a little bit like arguing over ego.
Ego is what usually presents us our fears into the world. Well,
if you don't, if you don't honor me, then I'm
not I don't have leverage over you. I look at
something completely different. How do we not how do we
talk to the person on the other side, How do
we talk not to their mask but to behind the mask?
And in each case, when we sometimes look at religion,
religion sometimes just you know, we've got cognitive dissonance, we've
got anxiety, and it just adds to both of those
issues and makes us make decisions that sound confused. We
call up or we're talking to other people, and most
of the time we're arguing about how broken the world
is rather than seeing ourselves in other people. And so
I really am I'm very thrilled to see that you
undertake these conversations on all different types of discussion levels.
I'm also I have a kind of a different point
of view about Christianity and its beginnings and some people,
most people are followed Paul's Paul's respectives on that, I've
kind of felt like Paul was doing his own thing.
And when I think of how the person that Paul
says he follows spoke. For that person, behavior was equaled
your faith, And that was based on Habakook Spy, which
is one of the smaller books of the Old Testament,
but in that it says that faith is based on
the law, and not just the law, but the spirit
of the law. We live in a country in America
where the law we have people fighting over how we
formulate laws rather than figuring out how to live in
the spirit of our laws in the United States and
the spirit of our spiritual laws. If you are a
spiritual person, or if you're a moral person. So how
do we see light in another person? What is light?
Light is what we see in the behavior of other people.
When you see a person who you can see that
they bring peace to an argument, that they sottle issues,
that they don't get into the arguments in the first place,
you're seeing light in their actions. And so for me,
when I see a person with your balance, your ability
to listen and listen positively, it's very inspirational.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, well you're very kind. I thank you
for that. Yeah, I don't know. We can talk about Paul,
who I find tremendously problematic. I do, like I think
when you say light, much of that I think speaks
to attitude and intent, which is the mind and heart.
And there are people, often even with those with bad ideas,
who are operating in good faith. And that's a lot
different than somebody who is coming at you with malice
or you know, some ill intent. I'm also with you,
and this is a bit unpopular among some of my
fellow lefties, and I'm a Lefty. I'll just stay all right.
But you know, some people, I feel like pronouns in
a lot of ways, especially in some of these forward
facing broadcasts, become a bit of it. There's gatekeeping going on.
So if someone calls in but they don't give a
pronoun or they don't want to acknowledge a pronoun at
the beginning of whatever other conversation they wanted to have,
the host will shut them down and say, oh, we're
not even going to validate you. We're not going to
have this conversation unless you say that, you know, unless
you choose one, or we're going to ridicule you for
not choosing one. And I find that's a bit dogmatic.
I think it often happens for noble reasons, because we
want to advocate for those who have been marginalized and
we want to say we see those who are identified
in different ways. But I don't like the fact that
we can become very dogmatic. If somebody says, I'm not
going to go there, I can step over that pebble
to maybe get into a deeper, larger conversation. Is that
also fair clarice from your perspective?
Speaker 6: I think so. I'll tell you why, and that is
that I don't think the main point is that if
you're trans or intersects. You really don't have any control
over what's happened to you. It's not a choice. It's
something that it's made on a high if it's made
in any kind of realm above just our cellular level,
which obviously it is. The brain is affected by transsexual
lloy to have different sections of the brain which are
of different size, and that determines how often in the
last trimester, the effect of hormones cause a mismatch between
the size of these these these organs within the brain,
these glands within the brain, which actually are the best
determinant of what gender you will later represent and later
live out, and men those structures are larger, and females
they are smaller, and then trans people they're often slightly
in between. And so because of that, it's not uncommon
for a trans person to start out their life gendered
by their mother by because she sees them come out
and then says, oh, you're this or you're that. But
then as they get older, they as their neuroplasticity expands
into your twenty six, twenty five or twenty six, it
keeps going on, so you're when you're born. Children don't
even see, they hear they feel. So for the first
ten years of a child's life, it's going on pattern identification.
The most important thing to a child is friends, is security,
and rewards. If you are in your childhood and you
are affected by a family that threatens any of those three,
you're going to carry that into your adult life and
it will see in you when you were when you're
an adult. But neuroplasticity accounts for much of the developmental
issues that we see of people recognizing that they are
trans later on, because the longer you've got it, the
more you get irritated by it. At first, you try,
you try to fit in, but your brain is doing
what I call cross talk. You're saying to yourself, you're trying.
You will take situations you're in and explain them to
other people in order to be In my case, I tried.
I'm born with a male body at that point, but
my my, my thinking, my reactions to things were for feminine,
and so what I tried to do is I tried
to justify by over over overcompensating for even even as
in that in that situation, I had to be stronger
than strong in order to reduce my risk of being outed.
Right and that happened to me even the very first
time I was in a bathroom and a changing room
in elementary school when I'm we were taking off off
all our clothes and I'm surrounded by all these boys,
but they're obvious accrudements, and I'm sitting there and completely
totally totally freaked out right, So in my fault, my fault.
I even had complications that came after that because I
lived in a very religious family with a very religious mother,
you know, and this mother came in, she would hunt
me around the house when I was a young person.
She came out eventually and beat me for about fifteen
to twenty minutes with my father's belt. My father had
been in the same room with me and my brother
at one point and said, if either of you touch
your mother or have anything to do with your mother,
that's not It'll be the day that I lovingly strangle
you to death. Okay. So I've seen the face of
religious justification, of being just in yourself, of walking around
thinking that you were God's angel. But I also realized
that that isn't God in them. It's misunderstanding, it's confusion,
and if you are trans you are not. Nobody wants
to be trans. You are, you have to deal with it.
And so that's what's missing in the United States to
a great, great deal, is that people don't understand the
nature of it because people are on our side are
not explaining it. It's not a choice. You can't choose
this stuff. You wouldn't choose to be treated by like dirt,
by people who have no experience with your situation, or
to walk into a place and have somebody. I mean,
I would much rather look walk into a place dressed
like the nines, looking wonderful, and then have everybody treat
me like a normal person, you know, And that's what
most trans people are all about. They want to be
treated as normal people. And just a little you point
into my life. I live in Germany for thirty four
years now. Nobody makes a difference in Germany if your
trans are not. I live in a little farm community.
Everybody treats me, treats my wife, treats any other transperson
in this little dwarf like we are their best fies.
We are all cut from the same same cells, from
the same cloth, and so it's hard for me to
go through this. I feel sorry for you. In a
way because you listen to people say, well, don't you
believe this, don't you believe that? Don't believe that? Who
is the judge?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Why do we take the time to judge rather than love?
Speaker 2: I'll tell you this. I've had a lot of people
invoking God to judge and be awful, and I've had,
you know, with one exception, I've never met a trans
person who is anything other than kind and generous and wonderful.
And you know, doesn't it come down to the human
heart and what does it take away from me? Right?
So I appreciate your heart so much and you're like me,
I mean, as coming out of my faith. I was
a late bloomer, but I kind of found my own voice.
It sounds like you got there eventually too, and that
inspires me. And I'm thankful for your voice on the
show today. Anything else before I move on?
Speaker 6: No, just I would say to anybody who's out meeting
with other people, do not argue with somebody. Try to
find what you have in common with somebody. If you
want to move them in a different direction, just say
to them, have you ever isn't it funny how? And
then you can mention something that means something to you.
But if you don't, if that other person doesn't, doesn't
identify with you when you say, isn't it funny? How
if you don't know how to bring somebody else close
to you without being in conflict, then you're looking at
the world is broken, and the world isn't broken. You
can look at people as facts, you're still being a judge.
When you realize that everybody has has suffered as children
and learned to be what they are as adults, then
you'll all know that we all have reasons to be
the way we are, but we are all of the
same unity. We're all of the same body, spirit, mind.
We may not all have the same ideas or beliefs,
but we're all coming from one place. And that's why.
If there's only two two commandments and you and that
that that that wise person in Israel once said, love
your God and love the other person exactly as you
would love yourself. That means unity. You have to see
everyone else as you as an expression of what you
have or don't have. Yes, but you do not have
a right to sit in the judgment seat and say
to someone else you're invalid because we don't have that choice.
We are born, and everybody who who's hearers, who's live,
was successful. Their parents all were successful. They made it.
We were babies. Yeah, we're all successful. Well so the
people who weren't successful, they don't live. So bring life
to this life. That's what we should do, because that's
what life is all about.
Speaker 2: Be very kind to call the show. Thank you so
much for an eloquence conversation. We appreciate you.
Speaker 7: Thank you all right, see you later.
Speaker 2: Kat has not howled in an hour. That's good. No
one has approached across the line of my security camera.
That's good. My boundaries have not been violated by the way.
A lot of people enjoy this little piece of trivia.
So after we had some little church and her kids
ring the doorbell, and it was a windy day, and
I went out front. The door was pushed shut by
the wind and broke Linus's arm. His'll paw in two places.
And that was a big you know, three months in
a cast, it was a nightmare. I was like, well,
no soliciting signs hardly ever work when you put them
in your yard or on your door. In fact, salespeople
when they come by those who are not family members
or neighbors or who as someone you would welcome those
the signs are invisible. So I had my own sign made,
and also I brought it up for the YouTube viewers,
but I'll read it for the audio listeners. It says
no soliciting at the top, and then it says, if
we wanted it, we've already bought it. We've heard about Jesus,
we know how we're voting. The doorbell agitates the dogs
and we're probably watching Netflix. If you're not a friend, neighbor,
package delivery or selling the mints, we are not interested.
Thank you, well, I please with myself over. I kind
of am And it's amazing because as I'm in the
studio and I'm watching the monitor with a camera, how
many solicitors and they're selling everything from weed control to
alarm systems, to lawn com or whatever you know, roof repair,
gut ring or insurance. Who knows what they're selling. You
can see they walk up and their finger goes out
to the doorbell, and then they see the sign and
they stoop down to read it, and they stand up
and they blink once or twice. They either smile or
they just look blank, turn around and walk away. I
feel a sense of real satisfaction, real satisfaction about that.
So anyway, cav hey, you can make these. You just
go and say like, homemade sign, a small metal sign,
six by nine, and you have it made and then
they ship it to you from Etsy or whatever, and
you put a little string or a chord on it
and just hang it on your front door. It's awesome.
And the neighbors even know about it because when they
stop by, they're like, set's got an awesome sign. I'm
so glad you are here and listening in part of
this community, and so glad for my callers, with many
more to come, taking a whole bunch of phone calls
on whatever topic is on your mind. On this week's
extended broadcast, let's talk to Gail, who was dialing in
from seven to zero two. Hi, Gail, thanks for calling.
What's up?
Speaker 9: Hi?
Speaker 11: Do you know the YouTube series Beyond the Believing Mind?
Speaker 2: Beyond the Believing Mind? No, I don't think I've ever
heard of it.
Speaker 11: It is absolutely I'm a fan, and it's absolutely exactly
what you teach, only with all the details and done
in a very very non judgmental way, but just based
on facts. A lot of it's based on Stainosa, but
it's just the facts, and it talks a lot about
things that would be right out of your value.
Speaker 2: Wick Beyond the Believing Mind, Okay.
Speaker 11: I usually end up watching your videos after they happen.
I watched them a great deal, but I happened because
I have a little empathy with you right now because
we had a flood in our house that is finally, finally,
six months later, finally recovered. But I fell and got
an injury, and I'm old and I'm suckond fround of
the television because that's about all I can can't handle
right now. And I would just put it into the
comments sections that I don't have access to it because
I'm out my computer.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you called Beyond the Believing Mind. All right, Well,
when the dust settles here, I'll make a note to
go check it out.
Speaker 11: Okay, Gail's I think it's going to make you happy
and keep you busy for quite a while. And I'm
hoping that a couple of the listeners. You have some
really interesting listeners just before me, and one of them,
I hope is hearing this so that they look for
too This is exactly the kind of thing that will
cause people to start to think. And that's what the
thinking atheist is all about, right, all right.
Speaker 2: Beyond the believing mind. Nice pitch, Thanks for the call,
Have a wonderful day and get well soon. Okay, thank you,
all right, bye. Gail and I we have similar stories
because whenever I was pushing the water out the front door,
I slipped and I broke the knuckle of the middle
finger of my left hand, and I just stopped wearing
the brace. But it's hard to bend, and I guess
it takes seven months eight months to fully heal. And
I don't know why, but I for a while, I
was just walking around like this all the time with
a It wasn't a cast, but it was like a
middle finger metal brace. I just walked around flipping everybody off.
But it's, man, it's just a slow heel, one of
those things. I don't know if it's slow because of
my advanced age. I don't know if that's true or not.
A couple of notes about shows. I was just invited
to appear on a series called World of Views. They
say they talk to religious leaders, skeptics, authors, creators, activist
public intellectuals. Ha, I'm not that, but they want to
talk to me about my journey out of Christianity. So
I don't know if they're religious or not. But I
ask around to a few other activists who had heard
of them, and they say they think they're legit and
it's not an ambush. So apparently I will be one
of their guests. Moving forward, I am releasing and for
my audio listeners it will already be out a fun
broadcast about Manda Greens, which are those song lyrics that
you and I hear, but we hear them wrong, and
we learn them wrong, and we remember them wrong, and
we sing them wrong on the order of decades. And
you're thinking of a song right now, already in your brain,
a song where you're like, I still don't know what
it says, but I've been singing this way right, Excuse
me while I kiss this guy down Hendrix, right. And
there's tons of them, and they have become known as
Monda Greenes. So as a break from all of these
heavy topics religion and politics, I did a whole show
where I play nothing but clips. We get into some
brain science about why our pattern seeking minds are filling
in blanks, often incorrectly and in very entertaining ways. We
learn things wrong, and it's fascinating science and it's a fun,
fun show. So if you are watching in video, it
comes out in two days, and if you are listening
in podcast, it should be one of the previous shows.
Just scroll back in your podcast app. And it's called
it's called I'm Farting Carrots, mishard Lyrics and the Mind.
And that comes from a Selena Gomez song called fourteen Carrot.
She's singing, I'm fourteen Carrot, but people are singing I'm
farting Carrots. I thought, what a great show name. So
it's called I'm Farting Carrots, Raising the bar, taking the highway.
It's a classy broadcast, is it not farting carrots? Let's
take a look at you doing good time? I've got time,
and so I figure maybe we'll just continue to share
the moments and fellowship in the Lord. I've got two
one six high. What's your name?
Speaker 10: Oh?
Speaker 5: Come back.
Speaker 3: In the early eighties, when I first met my fiance
and his family, his sister who he was very close to,
joined a religious group, a covenant community, a very Catholic
Covenant community that was in the news when a Supreme
Court justice got nominated. So anyway, she's still in that community.
But when she joined it, my husband was very concerned
about his sister. And I did some research on the group,
and I got some information from the Cult Information Network,
and I shared that with my you know, at the
time future father in law, who was a very very
intelligent man, and his and you know, we were expressed
concern about my sister in law's mental health joining this
kind of extra dream group. That kind of scared us.
And he said back, he says, you know, her problem
is genetic. Her mother was very religious and belonged to
an intense community, which which which she dristed away from
after she married me. So there's nothing we can do
about this because it's genetic. And I thought that sounded
really crazy to me. But I went on to study
psychology and I came across the twins separated at birth
Information and found out that, you know, back before birth control,
there were a lot more children available for adults than
homes wanting children, and it was pretty routine to separate
identical twins because twins were most likely to be returned
to the orphanage because infant twins are hard to take
care of, so they would separate them. And then the
researches in the in the in the in the like
in the eighties and nineties began finding these adults now
who were separated at birth, to study them nature and nurture.
You know, if you're identical but you grew up in
a different environment, how much do you have in common
with your identical twin who has the same genome as you.
And one of the things that struck me was that
identical twins who are reared separately both tend to have
the same level of religiosity, not religion. They could be
raised in different communities would be completely different religions, but
how involved in their religion they are, how important religion
is to them, and how much time they spend with
religion seemed to be very similar. And it seemed to
have a genetic component. And you know, I continued to
study psychology. I'm now a retired school psychologist and I
taught at a community college for a while, so I
was always kind of you. I've never been a researcher,
but I've always been keeping up with the literature and
the findings, and there's a component or a one type
of obsessive compulsive behavior. Now, compulsive means you do something
like wash your hands over and over again, and obsessive
means you think about something a lot. And there's a
obsessive behavior called scrupulosity where a person worries about what
they're thinking all the time. And religion and quite often
has a religious bent. It's like, oh, I had a
bad thought, I need to pray, I need to talk
to God, or I need to you know. And for
if it's a compulsion that they may need to get
on their knees they need to pray, or they need
to do a ritual, or they need to sprinkle themselves
with water. And I mean a lot of times this
is not a it doesn't reach the level of mental
health disorder. I know myself. I tend to knock on
wood when I say something like, oh, I've been pretty healthy,
like and you seem to be financially secure. Would make
sure that stays. And so I mean a little bit
of it's not a mental health problem, but there does
seem to be a genetic component to it, and that
obsessive compulsive tendency does play into religion quite a bit,
and there is a genetic component to it. So I'm
wondering if, if, and does religion maybe become the mental
illness or does mental illness grab onto religion to kind
of justify the symptoms. It's very hard to sort out.
Speaker 2: Well, psychology is not my sandbox. I do know there
is a lot of research out there. A great example
are people who lean toward like high control conservatism. You
find personality types, people who are let's call it genetically
wired to have certain tendencies, tend to grab a hate
in certain ways. So we find that people on the
far right, they tend to travel less. They are more
locked into routine and find security. They resist new experiences
and risk. They are more germ averse. They're more afraid of,
you know, whatever might be coming over the horizon. Now,
obviously it's extremely complicated, but it helps to explain that
there is a nature nurture combination that might help us
to explain why some people live their lives in such
limited ways. While other people who are more open to
experience in the human spectrum and you know, who aren't
terrified of what's under every rock and all those things,
they end up with different value systems, and they see
the world and live in the world in very different ways.
And I think religion may may be part of that.
I don't think religion or religious people are mentally ill.
I think there may be reasons across the gamut that
people become religious childhood and doctrination. Maybe they're caught at
a vulnerable time. Maybe they have not been properly taught
how to think, but have been told what to think. Well,
that's not a mental illness. That is simply ignorance and
the lack of training of the mind to think. You know,
when I think mental illness, I see memes about this,
and I know this is not where you're going sharing.
But you know, all the mentally ill people are at
church is something that the atheist meme verse likes to
jump onto. And I just hate it because I wasn't
mentally ill when I was a thirty year Christian. I
was a victim of bad ideas and I was ignorant,
and that ignorance was fixed. My IQ didn't change, my
mental capacities didn't change. My information and what I was
doing with it changed. My attitudes changed. But it's an
interesting thing to talk about. Maybe what are our genetic
predispositions to how we live in the world, and where
does that send us? Where do we feel most comfortable.
I think that's an interesting conversation. Sharon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I you know, I didn't need to imply
that that religion was a mental illness. I'm a thing
that some people who are mentally ill, you know, schizophrenics
quite often have religious hallucinations.
Speaker 2: Yea.
Speaker 3: And people with with with extreme obsessive compulsive disorder have
a religious pick or quirk that that that they practice
as part of their their mental health problem. And and
and I can see just as much that sometimes a
religious practice can can be a stabilizing and a healthy influence,
you know, like alcoholics anonymous has has religious overtones and
it does help people deal with with addictive behavior. So
you know, it's like it is a very complicated issue.
But I think and that right wing left wing thing
too is I think the people that are drawn to
religiosity and the people are maybe drawn to right wing
authoritarian political beliefs are There's something called locus of control.
It's like, do you feel in control of your life?
Do you feel like you can make your own choices?
You can influence your own future. Do you feel confident
that if you have a problem you can solve it,
Then you have an internal locus of control. You know what,
I'm not doing well in school, I just need to
study harder and my grades will go up. Or I'm
not doing well in school because I'm just not cut
out for academics. It would be an external locus of control.
And so the internal locus of control. People are much
more likely, I think, to be comfortable with agnosticism and
atheism and left wing ideology, where the external locus of
control is. Oh my goodness, I can't control anything. I'm
stuck in this situation. I'm born into this world. I
don't even want to know what my IQ is because
you know, and but if somebody will tell me what
to do and what to think and how to do
it and what to think it, I feel comfort. Yeah,
they don't have they don't have the confidence of the
internal locus of control. It's like, whatever it is, I
can handle it. It's like, whatever it is, I better
put it in God's hand, or I better you know,
we better have a strong government that's going to get
rid of all the bad people, so I don't have
to deal with them.
Speaker 2: Oh, these are such complicated conversations, most of them beyond
my purview. I mean, I'm you're the psychologist, but I
I go ahead, go ahead, Sharon.
Speaker 3: Well, Seth, I've been listening to you a long time.
You're no lightweight. I read your book.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, you know I would never take an IQ test.
I have this. I suspect I have the IQ of
a block of geez. I just want that on the record.
I'm just one guy doing his best here.
Speaker 3: So Seth, Seth, I have given thousands of IQ tests,
and I have a sense of when I meet somebody
where they are in the spectrum. And you would definitely
have be in the in the upper quadrant, perhaps the
upper decile of people who are with with IQ's.
Speaker 2: You are. You are so very You're.
Speaker 3: Very You're very articulate, and you're very thoughtful, and you
you and you think on your feet well enough to
have these kinds of conversations and and do the kind
of balance between you know, not be you know, maintaining
civility and all that. That's this. This requires a certain
skill set that does not correlate with low intelligence.
Speaker 2: Okay, Sharon, You're not just a school psychologist. You you
were a school cheerleader. I think you're amazing. I'm I'm
going to take you with me on the road. You
can build me up before I take the stage. You
get me in the zone. I mean, you're just a gift.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I'll see you in Cincinnati. I'm planning on this.
Speaker 2: That's a date. And that's a date, Sharon, you are
most kind.
Speaker 10: I want to.
Speaker 3: Chat before I will. I will, I will come up
and chat with you and tell you how smart you are,
how beloved you are.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, oh well that's a date.
Speaker 3: And I look, if you if you weren't if you
weren't good at what you were doing, you wouldn't be
successful at it. And you wouldn't be good at it
if you weren't intelligence.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you evidence. All right, well, thank you again.
You've given us a lot to think and talk about,
which is what I want this show to always be.
And so thank you for the call. And I look
forward to meeting you in person. Okay, all right, all right,
take care bye. You know I don't get cocky, right,
I've been in the I've been in the room with
Ac Grayling, and I think I'm an idiot. You know.
There was a cardiac surgeon who and an activist at
weekend Reason in Calgary, and when I listened to him
speak just extemporaneously, I thought, I'm an idiot. It's all relative.
Of course, I have met people in my life that
do that. I don't know how else to say this.
I don't know why I'm going to tell you this.
Now I do know why, because it's funny. But there
are So there's a comedian, his name is Ron White,
and he has this I think it's the name of
an album. I don't follow his work, but I just
happened to see a clip and it's called you Can't
Fix Stupid. So the thinking is ignorance can be fixed.
I think in the Unholy Trinity promo. And by the way,
the Unholy Trinity are in raw and Matt dill Hunty
and I were going to Fort Worth August twenty ninth.
But in Matt clip, he's like, I understand ignorance, which
can be fixed through education. I hate wilful ignorance, which
I think is just stupidity. And Natalie and I were
talking about how we in this culture have gotten wherever
we are, and I think first of all, we are
encouraged to live our lives in a culture of distraction.
They don't want us to know who our Supreme Court
justices are, where they came from, what their background and
values are, who funded them. They don't want us to
know who the Speaker of the House is. They don't
want us to know Donald Trump's long history. They don't
want us to know the details of how things work
in the machine in which we happen to live or exist.
They want us watching The Bachelor. They want us glued
to some other distraction. They want us over here freaking
out about all this other stuff, or just checked out.
It's too noisy in this world. I give up. They're
all corrupt, it's all bad. I'm not even going to participate.
I'm going to take my ball and go home. They
want us that way. Was a George Carlin who said,
we don't have leaders in this country. We have owners.
And when I do hear an opinion rendered by some
of the people that I bump into here in Red State, Oklahoma,
I'm terrified of the fact that they do sort of
pull the lever at the ballot box. They have an opinion,
but they don't have an informed opinion, and the opinions
that they express are terrifyingly stupid. I overheard, I'll get
to you, Emily. You've been on hold for an hour.
I'm right there. I'm over I over here somebody in
this group, and she's like, you know what, you know?
I didn't vaccinate my kids. I mean I did this.
Homeopathy is what I use for my family because all
natural and blah Blah'm big farming and I'm just like homeopathy.
How easy is it to debunk the bunk of homeopathy? Homeopathy?
It's an every size mountain of bullshit. It is so
easily refuted. Homeopathy worshit. And it wouldn't matter what I
said to her about the process and how it's been debunked.
And I could show her the video of skeptic James
Randy who took a whole bottle of homeopathic medicine and
ate it on stage and oh deed on homeopathy and
nothing happened to him. The danger of rejecting science based medicine,
especially when it comes to children who deserve better. I
could have gotten into all that asked. She didn't care.
She didn't care. She's right because she's right. Homeopathy works.
She also believes in astrology, and I shit you not
that the Earth is flat because the Bible? Is it ignorance? Okay?
Is it stupid? You damn right, it's stupid. And there
are some people who would get mad at me for
using that word stupid. The acoustics inside her skull must
be amazing. Emily, are you still there? After an hour? Emily?
Hello Earth to Emily. Are you there?
Speaker 10: Can you hear me?
Speaker 2: I can? Thanks for your patience. What's going on?
Speaker 10: Well, first of all, you mentioned George Carlin earlier. I
just wanted to point out that probably one of my
favorite clips from him was and he's talking about how
pro life is really anti woman. But it's really sad
that how after all these years it's still relevant.
Speaker 2: It is. You know, Carlin had an amazing comic gift,
but he was a great commenter on our culture. He
just saw it and when I go back through the
classic clips, I think he got it. And he was.
He said it's unfixable, and I hate to say I agree.
I'm not going to give up. But he began to
focus more on his own inner circle and his interpersonal
relationships and trying to live a happy life. As best
he could while commenting on everything else. But he knew
we're owned the government. Politicians don't give a shit about us.
The oligarch certainly don't. The world's on fire. Human beings
have a self destructive tendency in a lot of ways,
at least the power players do. And those are the
people that tend to rise to power. And the rest
of us look around and go, oh, they want us
to Hey, we'll give him a sixty hour work week.
We'll give him maybe two weeks off a year to relax,
to go vacation, just enough of an income to survive,
and they'll think that's an existence, while we go off
and live the life of Riley and that's just going
to be normal. And Carlin was a prophet in many
ways too about what we're in today. I'm sorry I
went off on a tangent emily, what's on your mind today?
Speaker 10: I guess I don't know how to work this very well,
so let me try to. I'm a little awkward. Sorry,
you're fine. I'm an atheist, but I don't always I'm
very selective on who I come out, you know, as
atheists too. I have to like trust you, but there's
been times where I've told somebody I'm an atheist and
they push backl how how can younot believe in a god?
Speaker 3: Something?
Speaker 10: Something tornado through a drunkyard builds a plane? And like
I have like a basic understanding of like you know, biology, cosmology,
that sort of thing. So I guess my question is
how do I defend my I guess lack of beliefs
out like relying on like a appeal to authority for
a policy. You get what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Well, the conversation about evolution and the conversation about a
belief in God are actually ab conversations. They're both very different.
A lot of God.
Speaker 10: Believers, yeah, but they're the ones that usually bring up,
you know, how can you believe? You know, how can
you not believe in a god? What do you think
we came from apes? Or that sort of thing? Yeah,
I understand it myself. It's just I'm not very good
at articulating. I guess, well, it's good.
Speaker 2: It's good to know that about yourself. First of all,
for those who are listening, and they want me to
address the seven forty seven in a junkyard argument that
apologists like to use. You know, How in the world
did all these things accidentally spin into existence one of
these amazing complex machines with purpose, And they've totally misunderstood
and misrepresented what evolution is. Evolution does not operate with
an end zone in mind, right, so the premise of
the argument itself. But you already know that, Emily. I
think if you have a hard time drawing the water
from the well, if you don't feel confident enough to
engage verbally, these may not be exchanges you want to
subject yourself to. You don't owe them, right, No, And
a conversation or explanation unless you simply just want to
when you're trying to sharpen those tools. Is that it?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 10: I just kind of want people to understand where I'm
coming from, sure, and I you know, and I don't
want people like misconstruing what my beliefs are, like the
beliefs mean, does that make sense?
Speaker 2: I think from where you're at, let's distill it down.
These conversations tend to spin out of control, right, So
here's what happens. I sit in the living room and
somebody's like, well, how can you not believe in a god?
And I'm like, well, I just don't. I've read the Bible,
I've read the Kouran. Here's what I see and don't
see in nature, and I don't need it. And then
they jump into the seven forty seven in a junkyard,
or the evolution of the eye, or where do your
morals come from? And then I'm running around trying to
chase down all those things, and then that brings up
three or four other topics, and voices start to raise,
and everybody starts to straighten up and stiffen up and
sit forward, and it becomes chaos. Right, And this is
a trap. We've all falled fallen fault, We've all done
fold into these traps, Emily, And my encouragement to you
would be to resist that. I think your best friend
right now is simplicity. When someone says, how can you
not believe in God? And this is something you can practice.
Some people have used little que cards, I kid you not.
They actually are able to take a point on point
point and make a dozen que cards, and they just
are able to situationalize what might be said. How would
I approach and how would I not get sucked in?
And you just are able to say, well, I've looked
into Christianity, and I've read about this and I don't
see any evidence for God, and in my own life,
I don't need it. I'm certainly curious if evidence for
a God becomes available, I would be interested because I
want to be a creature of truth. But I in
my own life, I don't believe it. I don't really
buy it, and I don't need it. Thanks for asking
a simple answer that doesn't lead you down a potential
dozen other paths that might escalate into something that doesn't
become productive. You've made your position. I don't believe it.
I've looked into it, don't buy it, don't need it.
Thank you for asking. It's all good that may serve
you better than trying to answer a lot of these
sort of minefield questions about evolution and design, etc. Does
that make any sense.
Speaker 10: Totally? I know that helps. My background is I was
originally born into a Catholic family, not like an extreme
Catholic family or anything. We just you know, went to
church like once a week, and I went to a
Catholic school for few years. And later on, as a teenager,
I fell into a Baptist church and was with them
for a while, but then as I got older, as
I got to be an adult, as about the time
I think you started, and then you know, people like ah,
and I was falling and fill into that rabbit hole
of atheism, and I'm an atheist.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know if we're in a rabbit hole.
I think, you know, mostly we just don't buy it.
We don't believe in a gun. And you've got some
equity there. You know. I was raised in the church.
I speak the language. I understand what's being taught and preached,
and and I get it. And here's how I phrase it, Emily,
I say, I realize, and I use the word I,
not you, are they or it or you know. I
looked at I use the word I, and I say,
I realized that in my own life I'd been raised
as it to be true, but I had never done
my own thinking on it. So I came to a
point when and I did my own thinking, and I
began to read and research and reabsorb and reanalyze, and
I came to a point where I did not believe it.
And I don't need it in my own life. I
love my life. I'm doing great. And you know, I
hope that that clears it up right. It keeps them
from being usually on the defensive. It's simple, and you
don't get sucked in. And they will try to suck
you in, all right, They're going to throw the kitchen
sink at you. You can have those conversations about the details,
but certainly not at the beginning. And I think you
have to parse them out and be aware this conversations
about you. You don't owe them a defense. You're simply saying, hey,
you want to know where I'm at here It is
in a nutshell. Thank you for asking. My life is
good and appreciate you very much. I think that's going
to serve you down the way.
Speaker 5: Okay, Emily, Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 10: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thanks for calling. Good luck out there. I see you
all right, I've gotten sucked in. Family members are like, well,
what about this and what about that? And I'm like,
oh yeah, what about this and what about that? And
then they say oh yeah, and then I get into
the Old Testament of the New Testament and gun and
Jesus fulfilled the law. What about what about baby's dying
of cancer and natural disasters?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what about this? And man sin and followed man
and nan genesis, and before you know it, we are
well off into the weeds. Everybody's pissed, everybody's shouting, doubling down,
somebody hangs up. I've hung up on people. And you
don't even get the satisfaction that you got back in
the eighties when you had an actual phone plugged into
the wall with a handset. Bam. Oh yeah, well that's
all I have to say to you about that. Bam.
You don't even get the satisfaction of a good, solid
hang up. Instead, you reach for the button to go bip.
That is not satisfying. It's not satisfying the need to
bring back the handset just for the conversations where you
want to go Bye, Bram. I've done it, and I've
had to train myself. Parse it out, keep it simple.
Make sure you don't get sucked in, because those say
tell me a time, and somebody has gotten into a
shouting match like that, and all of a sudden, one
party looked at the other and said, you know what,
You're absolutely right. I've totally changed my mind on this
important issue. Thank you for being so reasonable. Never never, never, never, never,
never shouting matches like that. It may be about your
protesting you feel belittle, that's a different thing. But even then,
know when to give up and leave simple, parse it out.
Conversations take a while. What would my psychiatrist friend Sharon
say about that response?
Speaker 6: I do not know.
Speaker 2: One final break and our final segment to the show
is just a moment away. Hang on. So appreciated that
you are joining me for this long form broadcast loaded
with humanism and heathen re As we go back to
the phones, I've got a web call. I don't know
how to pronounce your first name. Please help me out here, Hi,
My howel my Howell. Thank you very much for calling.
What's going on?
Speaker 9: Hi? I called in to say that to you Americanian people,
USA people, that your president has said these things about
how everyone's used to laugh at the country. You're not
laughing now and the Bible will make it all right,
and everything out here in what I think it was
the real world, it's just laughable. It's just it's just ridiculous.
It's just it's it's it's just it's insane. Like, for instance,
your country says to us, not you personally, but your
country says to it us. Put the way we're back
in the schools prayer back in the schools. Oh yeah, yeah.
Well when I went to school, we had prayer every day.
We had him singing every day, and we had some
bloke stand up and talk to us about the book.
You know the book you know, you know what I mean,
And well I came, I was letting me before I went,
oh no, this is not happening, man, No, no way.
And that put that behind me, but still had it
going through my last job. I was working at preschool
with children are two and a half to four years old,
and because of the Education Act nineteen forty four, we
had daily prayer twice a day and we only left
from nine till twelve in the morning, nine in the
morning for twelve midday, and we had two sets of prayer,
one past ten before we had our toast. We had
a little prayer saying thank you for the toast, oh,
thank you for the food, and a nonsense and then
another one that fighters joined just before the children left,
where we say oh, thank you, thank you nonsense And
it was this is four year old who did not
understand what was going on, and they were made to
say this. And my boss turned around to me and
said to me, Oh, you've got to make them do this.
I don't know. And children were sat around the table.
Six children and me sat around the table, and three
year old just say to me, you've got to put
your ants together like this. You know what I mean,
put your hands together like this. I said, no, you
don't have to. We don't have to. All we need
to do is be quiet, to let other people get
home with doing that thing and don't disturb.
Speaker 5: So I was looking after a.
Speaker 9: Child with I was I was personally want the one
with a child. We're learning difficulty issues, say uh pre
lingual didn't speak not here, not with the rest of us,
not quite on the ball. Yeah, lovely person, lovely lovely
just didn't understand, didn't get on. And the boss is
going put her hands together. She kind of joined in,
and I know this doesn't happen a restrictor from being
distruct anyway. That's the education out nineteen forty four in
the United Kingdom, Great Britain where I live, which daily prayer. Oh,
it is ridiculous. And you want to introduce you in
your country? No, no, I know you the government there
some people what you're introduced you in the United States
and go oh, now, go for it, man, because it
will kick so many people off. And you're just and
people will go, no, I don't know, this is back
away from it because it's nonsense.
Speaker 2: Well, how's that one, if I may? I know Texas
just voted to mandate the teaching of the Bible in
public school classrooms. And of course part of me is like, fine,
let's teach the whole thing. Let's go, come on, let's
teach it. Let's teach about the kidnapping of the Midianite virgins.
Let's let's talk about burning Jeptha's daughter on the pire.
Let's talk about executing disobedient kids. Let's talk about slavery
and the beating of slaves. Let's tell them the whole thing.
Let's talk about, you know, the ejaculation upon the ground
and all those types of the stories. Give me the
book and give me half an hour and the minds
of young children, and allow me to teach the good
word of God quickly. What was your second point?
Speaker 9: Okay, that was religion, politics, just the same thing. It's honestly,
we are l we I'm saying we, we Europeans are
laughing at you. You personally, your country, You've got a clown.
And worse yet, you've elected.
Speaker 2: That clown twice.
Speaker 9: I'm so sad for you. I look at a bit
of it and go, oh, yes, probably don't this electoral college,
which was a good idea two hundred years ago when
you didn't have telegraph and and and you can let
every count every village, let the city known the city,
let the state known the state, let the country. You know,
when you don't have that. Yeah, sure, it takes three
months to get the election sorted, and then the boy,
it's always a boy, come through in January, after the
vote in November. But in my country, we have a
vote like it takes all the night to count. Sometimes
you don't come through to a midday next day by
tea time.
Speaker 2: I got it, I got it. The more Trump says
the world has never taken us more seriously, the more
the rest of the world is laughing at us, and
all of you are wondering what the hell happened and
how could we do it? I think, if I may,
I would like to say this, and this is part
of what I've been writing about in the book. That
may never see the light of day, but what has
happened is part of more than a fifty year campaign.
Much of the doings have been behind the scenes, where
people have been using the Trump presidency to be able
to secure the halls of power. So while yes, we
have a nation of tens of millions of idiots and
bigots who looked at Donald Trump and said yay more,
we are also looking at people like Peter Teel and
Russell Voe and Leonard Leo and Barry Side and a
lot of these massively wealthy organizations that are behind the
scenes been putting the chess pieces in place for a
theocratic takeover of the United States, using Donald Trump as
their way in. It's a massively complicated machine. But we
deserve mockery, we deserve ridicule, and we deserve grief and
concern by the rest of the world. Just know that
there are tens of millions of American citizens who feel
exactly the same way as you do in the UK.
Speaker 8: Okay, I've seen the kings that no kings rallies. I
know there are plenty of decent, good, sensible, logical news
reading of where people are. I just but the face,
the forward face, the presentation that.
Speaker 9: The boy using. We all look at the our pleep
the Orange person. Uh oh no, oh gosh, it's so
much sympathy for you. I hope you get better soon, are.
Speaker 2: You very exact? Thanks? Thanks for understanding that we are now.
We're not all trying to you know, shoot holes in
the hull of the ship. So it sinks to own
the Libs. Many of us are trying to save what's
left of our democracy. But I do appreciate your call.
I'm going to move on, my friend. You'd be safe
over there in the UK. Okay, all right, thank you,
take care, very zuberant caller from London. That's all I
got for you today. What we've gone a while, haven't we?
Well over to two and a half ish hours. And
thank you for indulging me, you know, telling my personal stories.
Thank you for some great and compelling and interesting calls.
A variety of calls today, a lot of stuff to
talk about. Thanks for being a part of the community.
I hope I do get a chance to see you
on the road, whether it's in Cincinnati or in Fort Worth.
I'm going to be in Sarnia, Ontario, going to Huntsville,
Alabama again. The Thinking Atheist dot com slash events does
have details on major events not just the stuff I'm
going to be I'm just stuff that's going on all
around the country, including Nanocon, freedom from religion, and I
think there's some other stuff on the way. In the meantime,
I'm so thankful for your friendship and support, and I'm
thankful for you just being here, and it means the world,
and it's been good therapy for me just be able
to talk about some of this family stuff. I hope
I burdened you with it, but it's been that's good medicine,
and so so anyway, it means a lot to me,
and it means a lot to Natalie to note that
there's a community that has our back out here as well.
So I'm gonna go and check on my whaling cat.
I'm gonna check out my wife. I'm gonna go check
on my my whaling cat, and then I'm gonna light
my magical candle and see how she does today. And
I will see you back here on the stream next time.
You take care.
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