Speaker 1: Studies from Harvard and Duke Universities have shown that the
efficaciousness of prayer is identical to not praying. From a
number's standpoint, you're just as likely to have your prayer
answered by, in fact, this rock than you are for Jesus,
Allah or Vishnu. All of the data we have for
God points towards there being no God, which perfectly explains
this next statistic, which is that your child is three
times more likely to be assaulted in a church than
even the second most commonplace, which ironically twenty five percent
of them are designated as religious institutions. This data is
provided by actual insurance companies paid by the same churches,
which means companies are literally betting money that your child
will be harmed in a church versus anywhere else. The
numbers literally contradict Jesus's own words when he says, are
not two sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one
of them will fall to the ground apart from your father,
So do not be afraid you are of more value
than many sparrows. His own words are a gamble. If
you take that gamble, you will lose. Numbers do not lie,
which is why insurance companies always post a prophet and
the house always wins. But today you can test your
luck playing Jackpok Jesus, or go all in for Allah
and make the odds look silly. The show starts now
and the lines are open. We'll be waiting for you
to prove that your God does in fact show up.
I bit the dust reading Jesus'.
Speaker 2: Own words, it's a sign. It is what it is.
It's a sign that he didn't want to be here.
Is what it was. Is that he could have helped,
He could have shown up, and he could have guided
you through it, but in the end he just wasn't around.
Speaker 1: It was like, listen, I know there are three million
babies dying of starvation, but this motherfuck over here misquote
and me, we're going to take care of that.
Speaker 2: Yep, that's what it's all about.
Speaker 1: Well, everyone, today is September the seventh, twenty twenty five,
and I am joined by someone who needs absolutely no introduction,
a baron of biology, a duke of DNA. Welcome, Forrest Falcai,
getting worse everybody, Forrest.
Speaker 2: Pleasure to be here, Forrest.
Speaker 1: I am so glad to be on the screen with
someone who can understand the biology because I'm not built
for that. I'm built.
Speaker 3: I feel the same way about the Bible, to be
honest with you, Yeah, exactly, I'm built for reading stuff,
committing it to my memory, and regurgie dating it at
the right time.
Speaker 2: You'd be surprised by just how much of biology is that. So, like,
I think you'd be fine in my field. Honestly, I
feel the same way because I you know, I've read
the Bible and I've got my highlighted to death copy
over here. But like, there are certain things where like
it's it's you really do It helps so much to
be able to quote the original Greek of this part,
in the original Hebrew of this part, in the original
Latin of that, and understanding the connections and the ways
everything goes together. I watch you and Dan McClellan and
everybody else, and I'm just I'm blown away by like
how deep these cuts go where it's like, hey, not
only is this just not what this person is claiming,
because it's not only is this not whatever Christian on
the line is saying, but also there's about thirty different
reasons why it's just something you shouldn't be taken seriously
in the first place. At all those things blow me away,
and it strikes me the same way is when somebody
calls me and says, you know, there's a secret hidden
code in DNA and that proves Jesus. It's like, no,
I'm sorry. It is equally as ridiculous as when you
know somebody calls you and try to state the Bible
at a context. So I'm stoked to death for this show.
I'll be honest with you. We've already got some callers
calling in. But hey, if you're out there and you
think that we don't understand the Bible, or if you
think that evolution isn't true, or if you think that
the Earth is six thousand years old, or if you
think that there's a reason to believe in some you know,
filthy blood sacrifice in you know, Palestine two thousand years ago,
that makes us now beholden to some monster in the sky.
The number of the bottle of the screen there is
five one two nine nine one nine two four to two.
Or you can use the weblink give us a call
because we want to hear it. That's what the show
is all about. They're running for I don't even know
how many seasons and we've yet to hear one good
argument yet. So let's talk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we're on season twenty nine, and it's interesting.
If you've heard seasons one, two, and three, you already
know what's happening in season twenty nine. It's like there's
almost no good new arguments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's what bothers me is Like, I grew
up watching AXB.
Speaker 4: You know what I mean.
Speaker 2: I remember, you know, by my old job. I was
working at a science museum and I would spend days.
I had to sit there and solder together little motors
for kids to build robots with. And that was like
I spent you know, days and days doing that at
one point at this freaking job, and I would just
sit there and just do this, and I'd have XP
in my head and I would sit there for eight
hours a day, just building motors, listening to AXB. And
I after like a year or two of doing that,
I was like, I know two things. Number One, I've
heard this exact same argument on today's episode ten million times.
I have never heard anyone do any better than this,
and it sucked every time. And number two, I got
to get on the show, because I was like, it's
just it's crazy, and now here we are here in
the same terrible arguments a decade later. It's rough, man,
it's rough.
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to get through it. Maybe, hey, maybe
it's today. Maybe it's today today that the house loses
and somebody brings in the argument that beats all the odds,
and I mean, it's I'll see you in church in
seven days.
Speaker 2: Maybe That's what I'm saying, is all right, We've now
learned this thing, and I guess I have some changes
to make about my whole style. Still not worshiping the dude,
but at least I'll be up here saying he's real.
You've got that going on for you now, you know.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Let's run our intro and then we're going to
get our first guest in. The Atheist Experience is a
product of the atheist community of Austin. If I have
a one C three nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion
of atheism, critical thinking, secular humanism, and the separation of
religion and government. One I'm particularly fond of. Do you
have any callers into QUIT that you think you might
want to take.
Speaker 2: First, let's talk to I mean, I would say line
three I disagree immediately with, but beyond that, it's up
to you, my friend.
Speaker 1: Sure, let's grab line three, then let's pull them in.
Looks like it's going to be and I could be wrong,
and it's not just maybe the best card game on
the planet. But our new caller is Rook. How are
you doing, Rook?
Speaker 5: Hey, I'm doing great.
Speaker 6: Thanks for taking my call for being here.
Speaker 1: Un can you flesh out your your intro? I've got
your intro. As God existing isn't necessarily a bad thing,
except when used for anti science rhetoric. I think Forest
might have a few things to say about this. Yeah,
is there anything more that you want to add?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I just I misspoke a little on the phone.
What I was trying to say is that people believing
that God exist is it shouldn't in a perfect world,
shouldn't be an issue, but they can. But in the
imperfect world it can be used to push not just
anti science rhetoric, but just hateful, uh negative things and
to the detriment of humanity.
Speaker 2: Okay, so, like, what do you mean perfect world in
this case? Because I I don't see a way in
which believing in a God does not run an extreme
risk of justifying hateful behavior, excusing a willful ignorance, of
leading to you know, false beliefs, Like I don't see
a way in which that happens, So explain what you
mean my perfect world?
Speaker 6: Basically, the the concept that I'm trying to get at
is that if half the population believes that God exists
but just like kept it to himself, like they could
have whatever beliefs they want, but they could they could
just think of their head, Oh whatever that person. I
don't gu what that person's doing. They're probably going to
go burn in hell. Anyways, I'll continue to my day.
That's like the perfect world, or everyone just kind of
mind's their own business and doesn't and doesn't push it
on other people. But in our world, the natural, like
human instinct is to make everyone believe and follow you.
And when people with dangerous beliefs get in the power
because enough people are following them, it can turn into
just hate without it's not even connected to their it's
barely connected to their belief in God. Just they hate
this group of people and are using religion to justify
it and justifying doing horrible things.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I see how that's the extreme. The issue
that I'm having is that, like, even in the most
benign sense, if you are holding a belief that you
don't have real justification for especially like because everybody does.
Everybody has little little things that they play with themselves
or in their head about all the things that they
believe that they may not interrogate quite as well as
they could potentially, Like everybody makes mistakes, everybody has all
these issues. But when you have something that's this extreme
about the creator of the entire universe and the nature
of like the entire reality that you live in, that's
a much bigger thing to worry about, you know what
I mean. So, like that's for me. I don't know.
I I have a hard time with this idea that
it's only a bad thing in the extreme case that
somebody uses this to like force hateful behavior on people.
I don't know about that.
Speaker 6: Like what I'm trying to get at is if two
people have the same beliefs, they can go they can
go believe together and do what they want. Even if
even if they believe on the earth is flat, and
someone's saying, here, look at all this suvidence of the earth
is flat. The people who would who just believe the
earth is flat can go like listen to them and
be happy and not and not push around other people.
But the issue is is that it's pushed on everybody
when you broadcast, So people who don't believe it get
angry at those.
Speaker 2: People, and people who do believe they get it. That's
the case getting angry, that's the case about any belief
about anything. Ever, if that's the way that we're using
the term push on people, then like anytime anybody talks
about anything, then that would be pushing something.
Speaker 6: Not necessarily because you could just say, hey, I believe
in God and then that and that's it. Like I
believe in God and the other person can say I
don't and that's the end of it. But that's not
human nature. Human nature is to say I believe in God.
Speaker 7: Why don't you believe God?
Speaker 6: Well, I don't because all the evidence you're just being
stupid believing in it. I think you're stupid. There's so
much evidence for this, And so.
Speaker 2: Is the issue that you're having is that some people
are a little bit of an asshole? Like is that
I still I fundamentally maybe I'm missing this. I don't
understand how this works. Where you're saying that belief in
God is a good thing as long as people are
not necessarily a bad thing, as long as people aren't
being jerks to each other about it, like I'm sorry, no,
I think fundamentally the belief in God, even for the
individual living in a vacuum, is going to be a
hindrance on that person.
Speaker 6: I totally agree that it would definitely be a hindrance
on that person. What I'm trying to get at is
that if everybody just kind of didn't yell at each
other about it, that person could be hindered and be
happy that they're be happy that they don't think they're
being hindered but they are. And they can go sit
in a corner and be hindered and not and not
cared because they're happy and they get to believe what
they believe.
Speaker 2: And that's and that's what you're calling a perfect world.
That's what you were calling a perfect world is a
world where we don't care enough about each other to
call out harmful believe though.
Speaker 6: A perfect world is people would believe what's actually evidence
for and what there actually is evidence for, and that
they should be like kind or whatever, just the good beliefs.
But people will inevitably have bad beliefs. So the only
way to make that work is for them to just
go believe what they believe instead of trying to force
it on other people.
Speaker 2: You just said the same thing in a circle. It
would be best if people have true beliefs, but inevitably
they won't, and so the best thing to happen is
that they just believe whatever they believe and nobody stops them.
And I disagree. I think the best world would be
one where we can have these kinds of discussions and
debates in a really productive, healthy way, where yes there
are emotions involved, but not necessarily letting those emotions get
in the way of your reason. And yes there's reason involved,
but not necessarily letting super strict, crazy logic getting in
the way of your humanity. And like, it's like, these
are things that I think we're actually doing pretty well
as a culture, is that we're able more and more
to talk about these things, discuss these things, and yes,
get angry about these things because these are emotionally charged topics.
To have someone just want to go sit with their
shitty beliefs is to not respect them enough to want
to call them out and say, hey, this is a
terrible thing you're believing here, and I love you enough
to point out the fact that this is a hindrance
to your life and your society, because at the end
of the day, there's beliefs that they have are not
stopping with them. Even if it was just hurting them,
that would be bad enough, but it's not stopping with them.
It it changes the way they treat other people. It
changes the way they vote, It changes the way that
they behave, It changes the way that they think about
the world that they live in and how they're going
to treat that world. Like, I'm sorry, I don't agree
with you that a perfect world would be one in
which people just shut up about whatever they believe.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I use perfect world in a weird sense.
Speaker 4: I'm just going to curify a little bit more.
Speaker 6: What I'm trying to say is that I'm sure you've
had friends in your life where you've talked to them
and religion just hasn't come up, and just somebody could
just say I'm in their heads, say I believe that
I believe that was created six thousand years ago, whatever,
and then you can believe that it was creating billions
years ago. But as long as but as long as
like they don't fight about it, basically, and as long
as it doesn't affect their life. When it starts affecting things,
then it's time to have like healthy conversations and good
debates to try to fix the problems in the world.
But but on an individual basis in between people. If
we could just like leave it alone, then everybody would
be happy, and then the big issues we can work
as a group to discuss.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I still more exactly where we have been
this whole call, justin do you have anything else?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: I feel like we've made no progress here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't actually think it's possible to believe something
and not have it tained your reality and the reality
of those that are living among you. Because we have
to vote, we have to serve in government, we have
to be on school boards, we have to make decisions
for the well being of our children. We have to
make decisions for the well being sometimes of other children, right,
and all of these decisions are going to be informed
based on a host of beliefs. One of those beliefs
is like your belief in God and I'll give you
kind of an example. This is one of my favorite
collections of books. This in English is referred to as
a bibliography of prohibit Books, but originally it was in Latin.
It was a library from the Catholic Church of books
that were entirely banned, sometimes as sections of books that
were entirely banned because they were considered dangerous. These are
dangerous ideas, right, And so when you have a large
group of people that have a collective belief, then they
can actually enact policies that are based on that belief.
And sometimes the policy is harmless. Sometimes the policy is like, hey,
we think it's bad for kids to fall into go
into a library and be able to get different pieces
of literature that are meant for adults. I think we
all agree on that, Like, there are certain protections as
a society that we want to afford for other members
in society, right, But if the majority of your government
is part of a religious group, it's certainly true that
they're going to make their list of protections different than
if I wasn't religious. And then you can go even
further if you get like a government that is mixed
religion and mixed government meaning they have religious authority, then
they can do truly horrific things, like there's an edict
that was issued in fifteen sixty three to basically just
execute Anabaptists. These were Christians giving edicts to execute other
Christians because they just didn't believe the religion the way
that they wanted to. It says, if any minister of
the Christian Church is found guilty of having rebaptized anyone, he,
together with the person thus rebaptized, provided that the latter
is proved to be of such an age as to
understand the crime, shall be put to death. And so
this is what happens. When you have beliefs, you act
on them. It's not possible to believe in something and
not have it spill over into your life, into your family,
into your government. That's why religion poisons everything.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I actually being on this calls, I didn't prepare
it really well because I thought I would have to
win the whole Thank you for taking it, but I do.
Speaker 1: It's a fair point. I understand what you're saying though,
Like you're saying, like you know, really we don't have
to view religion as something as inherently bad. And I
can't say necessarily that I would view all of them
as inherently bad, but what we've seen from history that
some of them should just should not be tolerated. They
need to go, they need to disappear and go back
to the Bronze age.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're yeah, I honestly you've I believe you. Like now,
I just thought of a point and it's good on
a surface level, but digging any deeper like we did
on this call, it ends up not working out. Thank
you for taking my call though, I'm very happy, very happy.
Speaker 2: I appreciate you bringing up an ideas. It's fun to
talk about. I appreciate you calling in and listening to
us and hearing us out. It's been great. Thanks Rip,
all right, thank you. A couple of things. Number One,
to the person in chat talking about pronouns, call in there.
There absolutely is a need for that, and it is
not obvious of whatever you're talking about, and I'd love
to discuss it with you. Number two, much much more importantly,
at the beginning of everything you just said there, justin
you totally said the word taint and that was great.
And also other person in the chat who talked about
me being borderline anti Semitic. You should call into let's
talk about that. Would love to hear you defend that claim.
Lines are open. Let's have some fun.
Speaker 1: All right, We've got a theist in the queue. Before
we grab our next caller, let me do our announcements.
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Speaker 2: Tina just on the phone slacking off. Shame on her, jeez?
Speaker 1: Or is she busy cooking someone right now? I don't know.
Speaker 2: Right she is our call screener. She's talking to someone
on the line right now. But as far as I'm concerned,
she's just completely wasting time. It's just like her.
Speaker 1: Oh Man, Tina, Tina, Tina. Well, I think Simone is next.
We've got a theist named Simone from United Kingdom, all
the way across the pond. Proof of God. We are
part of reality, so we exist. Our thoughts are part
of reality, reality, so they exist. We think God exists.
What if we think is part of reality, then God,
as part of that reality exists. Quite a Those are
certainly words.
Speaker 2: At least it was a syllogism.
Speaker 1: Those were words, credit words.
Speaker 2: Duell Hello, can you hear me again?
Speaker 4: Hello?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Okay, cool?
Speaker 7: Thank you for having your show.
Speaker 1: Welcome, you for calling in Simon, for for at least
my sake, can you lay out your argument in a
in a straightforward, coherent fashion for the slow ones like me?
Speaker 7: And yeah, so these more like like you thought, you know,
just to kind of my thought process is not necessarily
to prove or disprove. It's more about trying to kind
of get to the point where I understand what is
who or not? And so I thought, you know, say,
if we are part of you know, our reality people,
so we know that we exist, our thoughts, so what
we think they need to be part of the same reality,
so they should exist as well. And if we think so?
Speaker 1: Can we pause there? Because I feel like this this
is going to be a really long broken syllogism. Are
you suggesting that thoughts exist in that like they have
like some sort of metaphysical ontology the same way like
I exist?
Speaker 7: Not necessarily mean if our thoughts are part of what
with you know, what we think and what we are,
so because we exist, then our thoughts exist as well, right.
Speaker 1: Well, our thoughts are produced. Sorry, I go ahead verse.
Speaker 2: No, I this is going to sound like I'm being
a jerk, and I am a little bit. I just
I need to know, like Simon, like, is are you
is this actually your reason for believing in a god?
Or is this just a fun thought experiment about Like
if I imagine a seven headed hippo dragon, then that
technically exists because my thoughts technically exist, Like does there
or is this actually a reason that anyone should believe
in a god?
Speaker 7: And I don't know?
Speaker 2: Actually, Okay, I can imagine a creature that eats gods
that ate your God? Does your God no longer exist
because it's been eaten by my imaginary thought creature? Right?
Because that would be silly, right, because thoughts are just thoughts.
And while thoughts do exist in the reality that we
live in because they're created by our brains, they are
not real things that have like real impact on the
world around us unless we produce that impact. They just
stay in our brain. So again I ask, like, do
you actually believe in a god because you can imagine
a god? Or do you have a different reason for
believing in a god that you would actually use to
justify belief in anything else?
Speaker 7: Ever, Well, this so that my question is do I
really believe in a god? That I don't take the answer.
Speaker 2: For that you don't know if you believe a thing.
Speaker 1: You don't know what you believe.
Speaker 2: I'm lost now, and kind of I mean it's real rough.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, we agree on one thing. Neither one
of us know what you believe, neither for us nor you.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't get the point. Man, Like, let's
if there's if you don't know whether, Like it's okay
to say you're agnostic, that you don't know if there
is a god or not, But saying you don't know
what you even think about the matter, that's that's a
different claim entirely. So is that we're trying to say
that that you're agnostic to whether or not there is
a god? Or are you saying you do believe that
there is a god.
Speaker 7: And I would like to believe that there is a God,
but I'm not convenient.
Speaker 2: Okay, why do you want to believe that there is
a God?
Speaker 7: Well, if let's assume if there be a heaven or
a hell, I would rather go to heaven.
Speaker 2: So okay, what if there's a different heaven and a
different hell than the one that you believe in, and
you go to the different hell? What if you believe
in the Christian God and you go to the Muslim hell.
Speaker 1: What kind of a God would create a hell anyways,
such an arbitrary invention, Like I can certainly understand a
God wanting to like segregate itself from somebody who is wicked.
I certainly have no idea why God would want to
light them on fire for all of eternity. That is
entirely nonsensical. So how does spirits burn in fire?
Speaker 7: The thing is between the two if there is, if
effectively the reason goal I would rather go to heaven
and hell? Whether did you think?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 7: I don't know, and we nobody knows.
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree that we would rather
not be let on fire for eternity. I'm not sure
there's much debate there. The question is whether or not
it's even rational to be concerned about that. Why would
anyone be concerned that there's some petulant sky daddy up
there who's like so upset that you don't worship it,
that it's going to light you on fire for a
trillion trillion years?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 1: How is that a sensible thing to believe in?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 7: I mean, I understand what you're saying, it's just from
Christian point of view, you know in the foundation of Christianity,
you know, do you you have that belief of heaven
or hell?
Speaker 2: So yeah, So just to be clear, do you do
you like in the Bible like it talks about depends
on which verse you read, but like there it's pretty
clear that like you don't have to just randomly believe.
You also have to do the believe things and like
be sincere about it and all those things. So if
you believe that part of the Bible and you believe
in God, then it doesn't matter because you're not going
to pull one over on the smartest being in the universe.
You're not going to trick the most intelligent creature in
existence into letting you into his theme park. And in
a more rational sense, if we're really analyzing what kind
of person this God is, because the question isn't just
whether or not a god exists. If the God does exist,
what God are we talking about. We're talking about the
God of the Bible, the God of Islam, and the
God of whatever, these big monotheistic gods. This God isn't
worth anything, or isn't worth worshiping, isn't worth aligning yourself with,
isn't worth sacrificing your dignity and your humanity for so
why would you want to go to heaven. You're just
doing this to avoid suffering, and that should tell you
everything you need to know about this God, that this
God would hurt you because you didn't think the right
thoughts for a brief moment of time.
Speaker 7: Oka, I mean, make makes sense, define sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds like you're just maybe a little bit
afraid of hell, and that happens. I think a lot
of us went through it. But the reality is like
the more you think about the Hell, the less sense
it makes, and the less sense it makes, the less
reason to be afraid of it. Once you've thought about
it long enough, and it becomes utterly ridiculous in your mind,
Like being afraid of it, it just sounds equally as ridiculous.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, it's not only about
making sense of Hell or heaven. It's just making sense
of the whole Christian you know, philosophy and teachings, you know,
because I don't know if you remember, just but I
think it was like on the twenty ninth that we
spoke at I was on your on your show, I.
Speaker 1: Reckall and you gave me, yeah, and you gave.
Speaker 7: Me kind of food for thoughts, you know, and then
I've kind of done a bit of thinking and then
I kind of came up with this, you know. You know,
if you are part of the I think we think,
you know, the code exists, then why is it not
part of the same reality. I'm just trying to understand.
And I think I'm kind of getting into that kind
of deconstruction path and I just I'm just curious, you know,
I just want to understand what I've been taught, you know,
since I was I was a kid up to now,
why I still why I have you know, questions and
why you know, I'm not so sure about you know, God,
and you know, apart from Christianity, you know, all the
other you know, religions, I don't. I don't understand so
many things there. They're not right, you know, in religion,
you know, And I just want to understand why I'm
so hung up on Christianity in a sense. But you know,
I'm going through a process of you know, and probably
understanding a bit more, but I still have questions.
Speaker 1: Well I think it takes time, you know, as they say,
Rome wasn't built in today. It took me then near
ten years to deconstruct the point where I'm at. So
like you're gonna it's a slow process. You're you're gonna
slowly work through all the individual items and eventually you'll
probably come up with something that you feel is like
something you can hold on to, something that you can say, Okay,
I've thought about it, and this is a thing that
makes the most sense, and then you can move forward. Right, So,
it sounds like you're near the beginning of your deconstruction.
At the beginning of your deconstruction, you have way more
questions and answers, and that's okay. Just go ahead, and
you know, do the work on the questions you have
right now, and you know, when you work through them,
we'll probably give you some more questions. Yeah, okay, all right,
all right, someone, thanks for calling here from me again.
Speaker 7: Okay, thank you very much. Yeah, take care.
Speaker 1: Here's yeah, I talked to Simone not that long ago,
just recently. Actually, we do have a quite a few
people in the call. For anyone watching or calling in,
just know we do prioritize theis and agnostics. We've got
quite a few atheists, not that we wouldn't love to
talk to everybody, but we do have a time limit
and this is kind of a debate call in show,
so just that's where our priorities are. With that being said,
let me grab a couple of super chats and then
we're gonna get our next caller. We've got one Theist
in one Agnostic in the queue Forrest, do you have
a preference on which one we go to first?
Speaker 2: I mean definitely the Agnostic, but like I'm down, I'm
down to talk to the Theis too. We'll get through
it together like a family.
Speaker 1: We certainly will. We've got a super chat from our
friend Adam Brown. Great to see you, Adam. Adam says,
glad to see you back. Missed Forrest at con those
lines though. Yeah, I'm at the Compria but had a
great time and got to bring some COVID home with me.
Happy cooking rock hard for Doug. I see if we
didn't get to the super chat on the screen, but
it'll show up eventually. We can worry about those later.
We got a super thanks from our friend Larry Beck.
So much. Thank you. Back to you there we go.
Thank you, Larry. I appreciate the support and you want
to grab it. Next two Forest Forrest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me grab the documents there and I can
see where they are. No, I don't because I apparently
don't have access to them at this time. Might have
the wrong one open. This is my job.
Speaker 1: That's how I figured out I was getting fired too.
Don't worry. Yeah, yeah, what do you mean I can't
log in? We got a five dollars super chap from Woolight.
Mammoth says, justin, you're looking more jacked. Keep it up,
and may Doug give us strength to lift heavier and
heavier stones. It's only by the power of dog. Actually,
now that the summer is over and my schedule is normalized,
I'm actually back in the gym agin with my good buddy.
It is therapeutic. Of the many things you can do
in your life that's therapeutic, aside from sleeping and drinking
water and actually doing therapy, working out's good for you.
Speaker 2: And then we also have Susan Robertson who sent in
two Canadian dollars and seventy nine Canadian cents. I was
just say, AXP is doing Odd's work, all hail mighty
Odin turns out I did have the right document over it.
They just put those in a different tab now, and
I'm very dumb and didn't review that before the show,
And so that's kind of what's going on over here
on this side. We're gonna my actual job can't stress
that enough.
Speaker 1: We're gonna grab our next caller. And looks like it's
Brisbane and Agnostic from Arizona and Brisbane coming in asking
wondering about Satanic atheism as a philosophy. Could you put
some meat on the bone there, Brisbane?
Speaker 4: It says, promote a philosophy of self indulgence and individualism
and a rejection of altruism and hiptogically outlined in the
Satanic Bible.
Speaker 1: Is this not Chuck that I just talked to a
week ago that shouted over top of me that human
sacrifices egregious to God? Are you a Christian? Last week?
Speaker 6: Negative?
Speaker 4: Out there? Well?
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, anyways, Brisbane.
Speaker 2: I do want to throw are you are you familiar
when you talk about Satanic atheism? It sounds that you're
talking about the Satanic Temple, not like actual devil warship,
which would then be a theistic thing. Right, You're talking
about the Satanic Temple. Who are atheists who have, like
I said, a belief in a code they then record
registered as a religion that they can then you influence
public policy like a religion can. Is that what we're
talking about.
Speaker 4: I'm talking about the AI overviewed as visit promote the
philosophy of self indulgent.
Speaker 2: So just we're just so we're clear there there actually
are real human beings, not robots trying their best with
what they pulled off of Reddit, that actually laid out
their beliefs. And what I've got here is the actual
Satanic Temple website who have their seven fundamental tenets that
they've laid out, And you tell me which ones you
disagree with. Number one we have one should strive to
act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance
with reason, Brisbane. Do you agree or disagree with that tenant?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 4: What about cock row to it? That's all creatures that
just said?
Speaker 2: He So you don't you don't agree that we should
strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures
according to reason? You don't think that that's right?
Speaker 4: No, I'll kill a cock road real quick. Done. Next?
Speaker 2: Okay, So let's try another one. The struggle for justice
is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over
laws and institutions.
Speaker 4: Well, it depends on your definition of.
Speaker 2: What That sounds like a lazy cop out to me,
but we'll keep going. One's body is inviolable, subject to
one's own will alone. Do you believe in bodily autonomy? Brisbane? Hey?
Speaker 4: Wait now, feel confused about Okay, all right, go ahead
say it again.
Speaker 2: Sure, this one is about bodily autonomy. It reads one's
bodily one's body is inviolable subject to one's own will alone.
Do you agree with that one?
Speaker 4: I would say someone of their full cognition, you know,
i'd say John Stuart Mill on Liberty outlines it a
lot better than that. But that's a ripoff of that. Okay,
go ahead.
Speaker 2: So that was really not a yes or a no
about whether you agree with bodily autonomy, but it's about
what I would expect from the call so far.
Speaker 4: It's a ripoff of John Stuart Mill. It was written
like sixteen.
Speaker 2: Okay, still still haven't said whether or not you agree
with it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 2: There you go. Also, the freedoms, this is Number four,
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom
to offend to willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms
of another is to forego one's own.
Speaker 4: Too willfully as and at say like if you take
criminal law, fighting words like certain words that start within
and end with the or stuff like that. If you
provoke someone, then you know, there's sometimes justifiable kind of
things that happen there.
Speaker 2: Well, you're talking about are repercussions. This is talking about
actually restricting freedom. There's a major difference there.
Speaker 4: If it's fighting word, if it's fighting word like that,
or you're disparaging any particular group in a prejudice way,
then yes, you are the problem, and they have laws
or stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're we're you know, have an discuption on
freedom of speech there. Number five. Belief should conform to
one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should never
take one should take care to never distort scientific facts
to fit one's beliefs. Do you agree with that? One?
Speaker 4: Confirmation by yeah, Hey, look I could cover all this
with one one here. Do whatever you will as long
as you don't in friends on others freedoms and liberties
in the course of your action done covers ray, murder, molestation,
you name it that, I'm done with one. We don't
need all these seven and furtherm.
Speaker 2: That's that's covered, that's covered by number three, and it
does nothing to address the fundamental thought principles that are
also covered, like example and the one that I just
read about scientific understanding and how you should inform your
beliefs to scientific understanding out the other way around. It's
wild that I'm explaining this and you are still just
yelling and at no point have we actually said anything
even close to the AI overview that you thought was
a serious declaration of faith and called in to be
a laughing asshole about.
Speaker 4: Can't you explain fundamental thought processes or whatever you're talking about?
Speaker 1: Can you stand topic?
Speaker 2: I literally, I literally did a minute ago before you
switch topics to something else.
Speaker 4: You said that, but you did explain, please define that
if you will, fundamental thought process.
Speaker 2: I didn't say fundamental thought processes. I said, like the
way that these folks are laying out the structure of
thought and scientific thinking and how that's important as opposed
to just saying do whatever you want, and so what
I'm just trying to get at here because it's it's
very clear that like seven new thoughts was a bit
too much for you. But at the end of the day,
all I'm trying to do is show you that the
AI overview that you came in here shouting about isn't
accurate or useful. And if you actually take the time
to learn about other people's beliefs, you might be impressed
by what you find. Maybe they actually have something to
go off of here, maybe they actually have something interesting
to say. You're still just yelling, so I don't expect
that you would take the time for that, But if
you tried, you might learn a new thing, and that'd
be a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: They need to get their programming right on the algorithm.
Speaker 2: No, you need to learn not to trust AI overviews
because that's a dumb thing to do. Their programming on
their website is completely concise. You read an AI overview
and thought that it was reality. That's a you problem,
not a them problem.
Speaker 4: I had read the seven Tenants, they were packed philosophy
from the sixty didn't even get it right. You didn't
even have the haircut right.
Speaker 2: So you did read the Seven Tenants and then instead
of remembering that you just read an AI overview and
called to make fun of people about something that they
don't actually believe.
Speaker 4: Oh, does it not promote self adults? That's what you're saying.
You're going against.
Speaker 2: No, no, it doesn't at all.
Speaker 4: Well, we'll have to get this AI corrected and they'll
fix it. Problem, you know what?
Speaker 2: Or again, can't stress this enough. You have control of
your own brain, and so you could just choose to
not trust an obviously fucked up AI overview, especially considering
the fact that it has been consistently proven to be
fraudulent and to be faulty over and over and over again.
You could take responsibility for yourself instead of complaining about
the AI.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to do. You adhere to the Satanic Bible,
did though, that's what it is, So you here to
that bright.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not a Satanist. I don't disagree with their tenants,
but I'm not a practicing member of this church.
Speaker 4: It seems like you're very kind of fervent for the movement.
Speaker 2: I literally just read what they wrote on a website
because you couldn't be bothered to do that, and you.
Speaker 4: Just happen to agree with everything it said, you know,
disparaging people and rip it off John Stuart Mills on
Liberty with that bullshit and everything.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me one part of that that I
specifically said that I agree with everything that this says,
and you're.
Speaker 4: Defending this religion and it is one Just so you know,
dogma is as dogma does. Bible followers lobby Congress Congress
just like Christ did. They have special interest groups.
Speaker 2: So you so it's pretty clear that you have a
problem with paying attention because you remember at the beginning
when I did say that this was a registered religion.
You're not making any points here. That's part of the
reason why I don't join with you. So it sounds
like you're having an argument with your soap bottles in
the shower and you're putting it now on the show,
trying to have it with me. Sorry, this shit doesn't
work the way that it does in your head. And
it appears that that was a bit too much because
now he's hung up. He tried, he tried to say words.
It's things like that, like we talk about this a lot,
but we have a real problem on these shows with
what we call pose law. Pose law is this idea.
It's this old Internet tenet that it's without context, without
any disclaimer. It's impossible to know if somebody is just
trolling and it's just saying dumb shit to say dumb shit,
or if they're sincere in how ridiculous they're being. And
I think that was a great example of it. It's
really hard to tell if that dude really thought that
he was cooking because he read an AI overview about
something and was going to shock us all about the
revelation that the religion was a religion. Who knew? But
at the end of the day, if you just listen,
if you want to know what somebody believes, listen to
what they say. They literally have a website they published
on their own with all their beliefs right there. Anybody
can read it and it'd be real easy. And if
you don't believe those things, if you know except those
things you know you do, you don't join easy squeezy
As for me, definitely like number one, acting with compassion
and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason, definitely
Number two. Struggle for justice is ongoing and should we
be a necessary pursuit as prevail overall laws. Definitely, one's
body is inviolable. Definitely, freedoms of others should be respected,
including the freedom to defend to offend. Absolutely. I think
that there's a really interesting discussion to be had there,
But overall, fundamentally totally beliefs should conform to scientific understanding
the world one hundred percent. Number six that we didn't
get to. People are fallible. If one makes a mistake,
one should be their best to rectify it and resolve
any harm that may have been caused. I don't see
how anyone could disagree with that. And finally, number seven,
every tenant is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility
and action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and
justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
So that whole bullshit rant at the end there that
dogma is as dogma? Does they have a thing about
that in there, about how this shouldn't be taken as dogma.
You'd know that if you bother to actually read the
fucking website instead of an AI overview letting some fucking
bot do your thinking for you, try thinking for yourself.
It's a lot of fun, it's interesting, It makes you
a better person. What a time for those who are asking. Yes,
Justin is dead. Uh, and so for that reason, I'm
going to move on to the next call myself. Welcome
to the Forest show. It's Forest and Only Forrest and
ah damn, the next call is just for Justin. So
I guess in the meantime we'll talk to who are
we gonna talk to? Who are we gonna talk to?
Who we're gonna talk to? Uh, you know it's cruel.
Let's talk to Robert who is calling him for Justin?
Hopefully Justin will be back very quickly, But I'm gonna
talk to Robert for a second. Unfol Justin gets here.
Robert calling from Georgia, pronouns he him. Hello, you're on
AXP with Forest and Only Forest. How are you today, Robert?
Speaker 5: Yes, fine, Forest, Thank you right on.
Speaker 2: So I would love to know what you're calling about.
Justin will hopefully rise from the dead like Jesus in
just a couple of seconds. But in the meantime you've
got me and I would love to talk for just
a second about some other stuff. All right, right, so
what exactly what are you calling about? As far as
these two prophecies, because I what it says here in
the chat is that you're are the call screen is
that you're ready to roast Justin on Jesus fulfilling at
least two prophecies. What prophecies are we talking about?
Speaker 5: Well, how do you feel about that? Do you feel
like Jesus fulfilled any prophecies?
Speaker 2: I So I'm not in any way a Bible expert
or a scholar, but I can tell you that the
prophecies that I know of, no that a lot of
it is like it said something in the Old Testament
and then said the prophecy was fulfilled in the New Testament.
And there are even a couple of situations in which,
like it's very clear that the New Testament was like
kind of massaged and force fit into this Old Testament prophecy. Like,
for example, Jesus in the Old Testament is called a
manual I believe. And so you have this idea of
this guy named Emmanuel who's going to be this messiah
figure that comes out of wherever and does and you
have then suddenly I think it's John. I don't remember
one of the gospels. Justin will know when he gets
back where It's kind of like just clearly force fitting
like they were talking about this guy, this guy Emmanuel
actually means Jesus. They just didn't know it at the time,
So things like that kind of But beyond that, as
far as actual prophecies of Jesus himself, I certainly wouldn't
want to call myself an expert on any of that.
Speaker 5: Right, Well, do you have any way to pull up
Habaka two chapter two?
Speaker 2: I don't know what that is. I can ask you also, like,
while we're here, while we're waiting on Justin to resurrect,
there's Justin. He's back right there, and oh my god,
he looks so different. I've done what.
Speaker 9: Jesus has done, exactly what Jesus did, and I was
ready directed an unrecognizable to any of my followers.
Speaker 2: That's what I am. I'm just in. I do want
to add, like, while we're here, Robert, while we're waiting
on Justin, get back, because don't want to steal his
thunder and pull up these prophecies that you're saying you
want to roast him on, Like, maybe we can focus
on some other parts of the Bible, like the resurrection story,
for example, do you agree that the resurrection story in
the Bible is totally unreliable. Or do you think that
the resurrection story makes sense?
Speaker 5: Well, it definitely makes sense as far as that's what
all the surrounding cultures had through history before Jesus, and
they kept saying that was gonna happen, and then it
actually happened.
Speaker 2: Just happened, happen with other gods and things like that,
and then here in the Bible you get four different
resurrection stories. What about like the beginning of the Bible,
like the creation of the world. Do you think that
the genesis account is real? I'm trying to find something
interesting to talk to you about as all.
Speaker 5: Right along, Well, my thing is, I could never become
an atheist just being real with you. You want honest
people and honest thoughts. And when I find out if
different things that are going on, how can I deny
the reality that we're living and it's so put together,
our minds, our bodies, creation. I'm getting ready for hunting
season and just seeing how beautiful everything's put together, knowing
all the hurt that's in this world and all. But
I could never deny now a creator, whether it's the
Islam God or the other God, any god you want,
you know, man made God. But I could never deny
a creator or a master programmer or a designer something
that had to do something.
Speaker 2: With this we gets you to a creator?
Speaker 9: What gets you there? Well, because she said you can't
deny one. But what are the steps that get you
from seeing all this we've got around us? So that creator,
there must be a series of steps that gets you thinking,
and those thought processes take us through those thought processes.
Speaker 4: All right.
Speaker 5: The thought process that I would come to is love
and hate. And there's a distinction between good and evil,
and you can choose it. It said you shall be
as God's knowing good and evil. So just our human
experience down here for the little bit of time that
we are, I just believe that there's definitely something going
on that you can experience it and have the integrity
to want to do one or the other, because some
people are just bent on being evil and I don't know,
and that's the way it is.
Speaker 2: But let me let me you know, let me ask
you then there, Robert, do you believe that this whatever
this creator is, whatever it might look like, do you
believe that it is in some sort of control of
this universe.
Speaker 5: That is really hard to say at the moment, because
it seems like he just spun it up and walked
away from it and let us figure it out as
far as getting help, you know, supernatural help it. So
I believe he's a supernatural god, but he's supernaturally spun
it all up and now we're here to experience it
and we have natural law and we just go buy it.
And you know it.
Speaker 2: Doesn't he or you talks about when when you talked
about you have to believe there's a creator, you didn't
just mention the universe existing. You were sure to say that,
like there's all this suffering and all this different stuff
going on all over the place. It sounds to me
like you were saying, there's somebody at the controls. There's
some reason for all of this stuff. Now it sounds
like you're taking a more deistic approach that this god
just farted the universe into existence and pieced out and
all of the pain and suffering and everything that we
see around us is just a natural, unexplainable phenomena that
has no real meaning. Is it one or the other?
Speaker 5: You know, it's definitely there's a meaning. That's what I'm saying.
It's hard to say that you would go through this
life and learn all the things that we're learning for
no reason, for just the waste. I don't believe that
it's a waste. I believe that there is something to
it all. And karma is a big thing how you
treat others, and it's important. I think we can make
this place a better place.
Speaker 2: So you're making a lot of claims that I agree with,
and then a lot of claims that I don't agree with.
The idea that we can, you know, we try to
treat others better, I agree with that. The idea that
there's some karmic balance that is in play here, I
don't agree with, right. And so this is the issue
I'm having is it sounds like you're just saying a
lot of true truisms like hey, life is hard and
life is crazy, and we need to try to make
the world a better place, Like sure, cool, all that,
and then you're tacking on and therefore there's some fucking
wizard that made this place this way on purpose. And
I don't get the connection there. How are you building
that bridge from one to the.
Speaker 5: Other, because I don't get the connection. How you could
look at the human anatomy and the eyeballs in our
minds and be an electrician knowing how the body works
and nature in everything, and deny that there's a creator.
I mean that breaks up so I dynamics, No, it doesn't.
Energy can't be destroyed it it can't be created. So
your big bank theory don't make sense. Someone had to
create it.
Speaker 2: So Robert, you've said, now, like just in that sentence,
there several things that makes zero sense. Just to be clear,
I have studied anatomy, and I have studied how the
body is. You know how it works and how the
different nerves go like an electrician, and how the eyeball works.
I've studied all those things, and I know what the
big bang is, and I know what the first law
of thermo dynamics is. None of these things work the
way that you say they do. So to answer your question,
you said you don't understand how I can see all
these things, and it's and not believe in God is
because I actually took the time to study these things.
And the cool thing about anatomy is that it whole sale,
one hundred percent front to back points towards evolution. There's
no part of your anatomy that points towards any kind
of divine intelligent creator or anything like that. When we
talk about the first law therma dynamics, absolutely not violated
by the Big Bang. That isn't how that works, nor
and that you didn't say this, but the most common
thing is that nor is evolution violating the second law
of therma dynamics. That's simply not the case. So the
way that I'm able to not believe in a god
while understanding these things is that I actually took the
time to really understand them. I'd be happy to keep
talking to Robert, but Justin is back if you want
to talk to about these prophecies, or I'm happy to
keep talking about science. It's it's whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I apologize. My power flickered where I live and
all my equipment had to restart itself. But I'm I listen,
you had me at prophecies.
Speaker 5: I'm all ears Well, okay, right on, Justin. Do you
have any way to pull up Habaka too? Because you
said Jesus didn't fulfill any prophecies and Habaka too, there's
quite a few prophecies he absolutely did fulfill.
Speaker 1: But sure are they messianic?
Speaker 5: Uh? It's definitely future. It's talking about future. The whole
chapter Habaka two starts out with saying run because it
will happen.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, so the Zephaniah. Zephaniah says a whole bunch
of stuff that's going to happen at the day of
the Lord, which is imminently near, and then none of
it came true. So what part of Habakuk two kim true.
Speaker 5: Well, it says that he was the just shall live
by his faith. How many people do you know today
that they say the just shall live by his faith?
And it says the just shall live by his faith.
Speaker 1: Well, it says the righteous the same thing, righteous will
will live by faith. But this was already true of Abraham.
This is not a messianic prophecy, and it certainly wasn't
anything about Jesus.
Speaker 5: So he didn't do any of those things all through
chapter two. I don't know if you pull it up
on the screen or you looking at it. I could
pull my Bible out and start hitting all the things
that there's nobody else like Zacharia thirteen six, that's just
one scripture instead of a whole haboka to the whole chapter.
But what about Zacharai thirteen sick and.
Speaker 1: What about it?
Speaker 5: Because what are these holds in your hands from your friends?
I received from the friends in my house.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you know what that passage is actually about,
because I don't think you do, right. That passage is
talking about a future person who is trying to hide
the fact that they are a prophet, because it's saying
at this time period that prophecies and profits will cease in.
Even those who were profits will basically be hiding themselves.
So this is the problem that you're going to have
as you're approaching the text and you're saying, ah, here's
one or two words, it just sounds like Jesus. I
saw the word a hole in the hand. It must
be about Jesus, right, But you're ignoring the entire context
of the actual passage, Like you can't just pick out
two or three words in an entire passage and claim
that it's about Jesus.
Speaker 5: Well, I really thought I was going to roast you
on these two, especially Habaka too. There's not too many
people that in history they can line up to Habaka iwo.
Speaker 1: If you read it, and I've read it right, Okay,
Now you want to hear like you want to hear
like a real Messianic prophecy. Sure, yeah, Jeremiah thirty three.
I mean, let me know when you get your Bible worry,
Jeremiah thirty three says. The days are surely coming, says
the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made
to the House of Israel and the House of Judah
in those days, and at that time, I will cause
a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he
shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days,
Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.
This is a king who physically rescues his people, and
it says, for thus say it, the Lord David shall
never lack a man to sit on the throne of
the House of Israel, and the livitical priest shall never
lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings,
to make grain offerings, and to make sacrifices forever. So
in the Messianic age, according to the Bible, there will
be a king on a literal throne, and there will
be actual levitical priests giving actual sacrifices by fire in
the temple. So that means the New Testament's entirely false.
Speaker 5: You know, it's hard for us to choke this stuff
them sometimes and you try to think about what it
say you.
Speaker 1: I know, I get it. It was hard for me
too when I was first encountering the Old Testament.
Speaker 5: We haven't put it through. And then you get here's
another prophecy, and then that gets shot down, and I'm
trying to find the right prophecy. And I really thought
I had you smoked on this one.
Speaker 1: I know, go back and find another one, and come
back when you find another one that you think you got.
I'll give you one prophecy that Jesus did fulfill if
you want.
Speaker 5: You're gonna agree that he did fulfill one, only one.
Speaker 1: I don't think you're gonna like it. Juteronomy thirteen. If
prophets are those who divine by dreams, appear among you
and show you omens or poor tends, and the omens
or the poor tents declared by them take place, and
they say, let us follow other gods whom you have
not known, let us serve them. You must not heed
the words of those prophets are those who divine by dreams,
For the Lord your God is testing you to know
whether indeed you love the Lord your God with all
your heart and all your soul. The Lord your God,
you shall follow alone hill. You shall fear his commandments,
you shall keep his voice, you shall obey, and him
you shall serve and hold fast too. But those profits
who divined by dreams shall be put to death.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to crash that on you. I know
you just don't understand the Trinity and virgin births and
all the stuff that we You just don't understand this.
Speaker 2: Argue that that's so rough, Robert. That's so rough that
this dude who actually has expertise in this area just
actually explain some shit that you didn't know, and you're
instead of agreeing, like, instead of even trying to grapple
with it, you're just a you just don't get it, yo.
You just don't understand this stuff that you used to
believe in, that you used to do for a living.
Speaker 1: That's so lame, Robert, come back next time, and I
promise we'll have a full dialogue on the Trinity.
Speaker 2: Okay, call me if you ever want to talk about
anatomy or the Big Bang. I would be happy, because
that's before you came back justin. That's what Robert was
saying was that, you know, if you look at anatomy
and you look at how nerves are wired and look
at the human eye, it all very clearly points to God.
And the Big Bang violates the first law thromindanamex absolutely
zero percent of which is true. And as someone who
has actually studied these things, I studied anatomy at a
graduate level, I can really go into it with you,
and we can talk about evolution out of this, really
dig into it, and we can show how no, none
of this is divine. None of this is necessary of
a god. None of this is indicative of a god,
none of that. We're here for you, but it would
be really cool if you could actually grapple with what
we're saying, rather than just telling us that we don't
understand some esoteric shit from whatever other thing you believe in.
Speaker 5: That blows just He's just trying to explain to you
that I got roasted twice. I got roasted before you
got here, and then I got roasted. You all have
a good evening, all right.
Speaker 1: Thanks for going in, Robert.
Speaker 2: Pick out Robert. I didn't even roast him. I didn't
think I really he just said some stuff and I
was like, hey, nah ah, though, is the thing that
that's not how that works? And he just kind of
dropped it. I appreciate, like if you get caught in
something that you drop it, but like, honestly, I would
rather Rob would have asked some questions because it sounds
like he's just believing whatever anybody with any kind of
authority is saying. The way he brought up the whole
thing about the Eye and the Big Bang and these
prophecies and stuff. I've never heard of Chewbacca too, but
the way he said that, it sounds like he heard
some preacher say this, and so he brought it up
to you. He's like, hey, what about Hitachi too? And
you're like, sorry, that's not what that is. And it
was the same thing for me. It was just like, well,
what about you know the Big Bang? That violates the
first law term and the next that's entirely out the window,
and that's just something you heard Kentoven say. I'm sorry, like,
that's not how that works. And if you just grappled
with it the first time you heard it, or if
you grappled with us refuting it, you would actually then
be learning something instead of just believing what somebody told you.
I hope Robert calls back and we can have a
serious discussion. I don't want him just to be discouraged.
I want him to try.
Speaker 1: I suspect he will. He's called quite a few times already.
We've got a couple of people in the queue. I'm intrigued.
Let's grab a couple of super chests and we'll get
we've got and this is rare, but we've got a theist,
a Hindu theist, waiting to get in. And I'm most
intrigued to hear about this. But let's grab some supertech.
Our friend Carlos is with us tonight. Carlos, thank you
so so much for the three hundred MX. Carlos says,
what a killer combo Forrest and justin saludos. Thank you
so much, Carlos. Great to see you tonight.
Speaker 10: Thank you for the.
Speaker 2: Mid guard xylophones. I don't know that's so stupid. We
also got psychological projectionists sending five monarchy books. Who says,
as love normally means extreme preference, does all loving ie
lack of preference actually mean the same as all indifferent?
As in meaningless? I like to think of it like disinterested.
You know what I mean, you're so you're just if
you just don't have any preference any way. Yeah, it's
yeah for sure.
Speaker 1: And five from our friend Simones. Moone says, thanks guys
for taking my call. I really appreciate your help. By
the way, I think the caller after me was drunk
cause a camel and I could not agree more. If
he wasn't drunk as a skunk, I'd hate to see
him like when he was.
Speaker 2: It can't be good. That was rough and like I
can't stress enough. If you're like I, if you get
nothing else from this show, people out there watching, don't
just trust the AI over you don't do it like
it's a terrible mistake. Do you remember when Google first
rolled that out and there were like screenshots going around
like how do I deal with depression? And the AI
overview is like you should try jumping off a bridge
and it's like you and that was real, or like
you know it's healthy to eat five to ten rocks
per day, and she like just it just says shit.
It just scours the Internet for things that look it's
a search engine. It does the exact same crawl that
it does with a search mainly from Reddit, and it
just pulls bullshit and puts it into a semi coherent sentence.
It's not real, and it's not reliable, and it's not trustworthy,
and it's not accurate. It is a robot mimicking human thought.
You need to think for yourself. Please please do it.
Googling was already the easy way. I just want to
be clear if you've been, if you have believed this
long that taking the time to google something was labor woof,
but like it's now taking the stat and making it
even dumber. Just please please try reading oh four No
two dollars from Woollte Mammoth justin just underwent the transfiguration absolutely.
Speaker 1: Indeed, and twenty hours from our friend Nobody on fire,
big w Nobody with a quotation of real scripture from
a court see in four twenty to sixty nine. The
forest is grounded upon Doug. Doug biogenesis was the spark
that brought all. We build our fire upon rocks. The
rocks boil and purify the water of life. Never hazardously
fill one's bro rock hard for Doug, absolutely, I always
remember stay rock hard for Doug, and sinfully wet for Sharon,
let's grab our if you.
Speaker 2: Know, you know, I love that every every like atheist
commentator has like their own silly ass deity thing, and
they all are just loaded with inside jokes and they're
all just grotesquely sexual and it's great. Have to be great,
I have to be.
Speaker 1: It shows the nonsensicalness of presuppositional apologetics, like when I
could do the same pres up for a pet rock
that you can do for your god, it shows you
just how silly it is. Yep, man, Well, we've got
our friend from from India, who I, as far as
I can tell, is a member of the Hindu faith,
says consciousness and Vedic concept of God. And then no
question or actual proposition. Can you put some meat on
the bone as to what you're referring to or suggesting
that consciousness somehow proves that gods exist?
Speaker 10: I just stand forrest. Thanks for accepting by Paul. First
of all, thank you for I have no idea. I
have no version or hatred towards Eighteist or anything. Because
as for the Hindu worldview, even atister will come to
be Hindus, they can be Hindu eighty says, But that
being said, I saw that you guys are talking about
compatibility of science God, right, So I would say that
the Vedic model of God, the Vedic worldview of what
God is and what is the relationship with God and
creation and so on, is actually compatible with science. To begin,
I would like to give you what the Vedic model
of God is. Is that something you as interested in?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 6: Can you?
Speaker 2: Before you do? Can you please tell us what is
your name? Really quick?
Speaker 10: I would like to recall that Hindu.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's fine. I wasn't sure because I see you
call in the web caller, and so sometimes things get
mixed around. So I wasn't sure if the word Hindu
got put into your name accidentally or if that's what
you prefer. So we'll call you Hindu for the rest
of the call. That's fine.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, like, I don't know much about the Vedic model,
but my understanding is that the Vedic model has multiple deities.
Speaker 4: Is that correct?
Speaker 10: The Vedic model, in the ultimate sense of reality, has
only one God, which is called Brahman. The many deities
or manifestations of that one is actually used he as
those different names and forms and functions, sort of like
personifications or manifestations of that one.
Speaker 1: So it's like a modalist view where there's one supreme god,
but it can manifest in multiple ways.
Speaker 10: Kind of it's more I will say it's a penentheestika
where pes like pantheonsm okay, So like in your world
view then or in your opinion, what would be like
a good argument for why this would be the case
that this god or this reality exists. Yes, So I
kind of like following this debate about whether consciousness originates
from the brain or whether it is actually an ultimate
reality of the universe and song. So from what I
could gather so far, neuroscientists, neurobiologists, whatever human called ai
to prove conscious emerges from the brain. Even if you
look at the debates going on between philosophers, mainly the
philosophers who are not materialist non physicalism philosophers, they they
thaim that you cannot prove consciousness emerges from the brain,
whereas the ones who are materialists, the neurobiologists, they say, you, oh,
we can definitely prove consciousness emerges from the brain. But
as you've seen so far in this debate that the
neurobiologists have failed to prove that consciousness emerges from the brain.
And even in physics, I see what is emerging is
sort of this idea that space time paradigm is itself flawed,
and they say, we have something deeper than space time paradigm,
and may be most public the space time paradigm is
evolving our manifestation on cond reality of which according to
some philosophers this is Donald Hoffman, which has Bard Bernardo Castrophe.
I think apologies to find mispronouncing. Then, according to them,
consciousness is the ultimate reality. And as for the very
concept of God, the God that you believe in, the
main one God brahman Aka is consciousness. It's pure cont
So in this worldview, in this framework, science and our
concept of God is very much compatible.
Speaker 1: Right, So, Hindu, I guess what I'm trying to figure
out though, is if if you and I have like
a roughly comparable model of consciousness, except my consciousness doesn't
include your God. My model of consciousness just includes the brain,
what would be the factor that would lead me to
add in like the Hindu God or God's or manifestations
into the equation.
Speaker 7: So can you please refrase the question?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so what I'm saying is like, in
my worldview, consciousness is derived from the brain. You're saying
that consciousness somehow exists outside of the brain. So what
I'm trying to figure out is what would be the
evidence that would lead me as a person to believe
that consciousness drives from outside of the brain, like some
source like the Vedic source.
Speaker 10: Well, not necessarily Verdic source. It's like vedas essentially like
Veda translates to knowledge, so it's not exclusive source for example,
it is it's just one way to say what is
actually it is? You know, And uh for research lined
to see where science already has come to the conclusion
that consciousness images from the brain, because so far in
academy of what I have followed is there is no
proof that consciousness images from the brain, even uh, the
eurobiologists are failing to prove that controls brain. And the
thing is, I cannot I'm not that eloquent to put you, guys,
how consciousness leads to all that we see.
Speaker 7: But as but the radic.
Speaker 10: Concept, the separateness, the multiplicity that we see in creation,
I mean that that's the wrong word. Creation is the
wrong word. I cannot say creation creator. But actually the
idea is the problem under one consciousness manifest Do.
Speaker 1: You think that our consciousness is how we get our personalities?
Speaker 10: Consciousness is like the he and everything, Like.
Speaker 1: When my body dies, while I still have the same personality.
Speaker 10: No, but this personality is ingrained to the mind.
Speaker 1: That's right. Okay, So if consciousness is a source of
like our characteristics and our personality and things like that,
it's really weird that we can drastically alter our personal
characteristics by either modifying the brain or modifying chemicals going
to the brain. Like, for example, someone who's like really
angry and aggressive can get a prescription that makes them
not angry and aggressive. This is a really weird thing
if consciousness is outside of the brain. If consciousness is
outside of the brain, we would expect that whatever traits
and behaviors that your consciousness has, it would just be
transposed to the brain, nothing more. But it's actually the opposite.
When we tinker with the brain, the parts of our
consciousness that we would say is immaterial or outside of
the brain changes. Right. So I just don't think the
model that consciousness is like the driver of the brain
rather than the brain. The driver of consciousness.
Speaker 10: Works personality, the brain, everything is just the emergent phenomena
manifestation of the underlying supreme reality, which is the consciousness.
Speaker 1: Like, no, you can say that, but saying that is
just restating the conclusion. I'm asking for evidence that would
lead to that conclusion, because we've done quite a bit
of studies, and all the studies I'm aware of would
demonstrate that consciousness would necessarily be a derivative of the brain,
not the other way around, which is why, Like if
you do read the Roger Sperry split brain experiments right
where they split people's hemispheres in half, and then what
do they do, The people's consciousness starts to have internal struggles.
For example, there was a guy after he had his
brain split, needed to relearn how to do basic tasks
like put on his clothes, get dressed, button sure, And
it turned out that it was very difficult to just
do something like button a shirt because he couldn't coordinate
even though he intended to he wanted to, he couldn't
actually coordinate the motor skills with both of his hands
at once. He said, one hand would come up to
button the shirt while the other one was going behind
it unbuttoning the shirt. Right, This would be completely unexpected
if consciousness and decision making and all that nonsense was
happening in some sort of immaterial presence that just happened
to inhabit the brain. But I just don't see why
I would look at any of the data points we
have and interpret it as some sort of external factor
influencing the brain.
Speaker 10: What the example that he gave is talking about something
which is not necessarily conscious. The motor skills are all
like these are all related to the brain, and the
brain in this model of consciousness is sort of like
a receiver. Conscistion is just to make sure that you
understand what I'm talking about. Sciousness is pure awareness, That's
what I'm talking So, but.
Speaker 1: I'm still I'm still waiting for some type of evidence
that would lead us to believe that consciousness is acting
on the brain, not the other way around.
Speaker 10: What do you mean by consciousness is acting on the brain.
Speaker 1: So you just keep restating your belief, And that's not
an argument. You can't just keep restating your conclusion. You
need to support your conclusion with some sort of evidence
or fact.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: So, like when I was a freshman in high school,
we had to learn how to write essays is you're
not in junior high anymore. You're in high school. You
have to write good essays. And it said, start with
your conclusion, do your research, and then fill in your
supporting paragraphs. So you already have your conclusion, I need
you to fill in the supporting paragraphs. What are the
information that you can put down to support your conclusion
that consciousness exists outside of the brain.
Speaker 10: Well, I need to know what your definition of consciousness
is to move forward.
Speaker 1: It's your definition. My definition is yours.
Speaker 4: Sorry.
Speaker 2: First, yeah, no, no, I I was going to say
the exact same thing you. You defined it as awareness
a minute ago. Can you even if take take even
brain out of it, can you give me one example
at all of something being aware that is not made
of matter? Awareness outside of matter? Does that exist?
Speaker 10: Since awareness cannot exist? But because the brain is like
a receiver, you know, it channels into that and it
becomes aware of it.
Speaker 2: So here's here's the issue I'm having is that and
this is you know what the problem I'm having with
with hearing this is that you started this call by
saying that, like, you know, neuroscientists and whatnot, they say
that consciousness comes from the brain, but they can't back
that up. That's just this this thing they're saying. And
then you also have over here the idealists, people like you,
who are saying that consciousness, awareness, whatever, exists fundamentally and
then brains are able to tap into this. It's like
an antenna, like a receiver or whatever. The issue that
I'm having is that from my standpoint, right as a materialist,
as a biologists to someone who studied neuroscience, or just
any level of this, if I'm looking at it from
the idea that matter comes first and consciousness comes later,
I can identify several steps to get to where consciousness is,
and I have evidence for every single one of those steps.
Most importantly, I have direct evidence to say that if
I change this matter, then consciousness also changes.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: We have countless examples of somebody's brain changes and their
consciousness changes, their awareness changes, their personality changes. Justin touched
on this just a moment ago. On the other side
of the coin, if we start from the idealist standpoint
and say that consciousness exists first, literally, all we have
is that statement. You have the presupposition that consciousness is first,
and then the brains that what actual experiments, what steps?
What evidence do you have between the conclusion and the conclusion?
All I'm hearing over and over is just the statements
that the consciousness is out there and everything else taps
into it from the material asside, I have a tremendous
amount of identify a whole steps and evidence for every
single one of them. Where are you where?
Speaker 4: Where?
Speaker 2: All I'm hearing is just the presupposition? So what else
do you have?
Speaker 10: First of all, consciousness doesn't change the change of brain.
The consciousness that I'm defining is aware, so you are
aware that you are someone else, but you are still aware,
so that is still there. Consciousness is not.
Speaker 2: I would argue awareness can also change what changes in
the brain.
Speaker 10: But go on, oh can you can we talk about
the concept of observersantum mechanical observers?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 2: Boy, I bet you it isn't what you say it is.
Speaker 1: This is not going to go well, can it tells me?
Speaker 10: What do you think that is?
Speaker 2: So just I'm happy to But just before we get there,
really quick, do you have any training in quantum physics? Okay,
I don't either. I'm a biologist. I have general physics training.
At an undergraduate level. Justin do you have any training
in physics at all, specially quanta physics.
Speaker 4: Uh No.
Speaker 1: I went to school for electrical engineering and to learn
fairy tales from the Bible.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we have three non physicists here on the call.
Is there anything that we can talk about? Because I'm
happy to do it, But is there any discussion that
can be had between the three of us that will
actually elucidate whether or not this makes sense? Because I
don't think there is. What do you think?
Speaker 10: Okay, So let's let's think about this. Okay, let's think
about it a dream, our dream?
Speaker 7: Okay.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we're moving on to something else. Now, that's good.
Speaker 1: It's it's weird that you didn't answer his question. I
thought it was a pretty easy question.
Speaker 10: No, I'm trying to I'm trying to talk about something
that is common to That's why I'm talking about dream.
Speaker 2: Is it a common experience or is it something that
any of the three of us have actually studied in
a real sense and have real training it.
Speaker 10: This is not training.
Speaker 5: Required to talk about dreams.
Speaker 10: Like we all experience the dreams where we feel that
everything is real and the dream.
Speaker 2: Right but there is, but there is training necessary to
talk about what dream fundamentally actually are and where they
come from and whether or not they mean anything spiritual
like that is something that you should have some training in.
And I've studied quite a bit of neurobiology, but I've
never studied dream states.
Speaker 10: I'm talking about the.
Speaker 5: Dream world, you know.
Speaker 10: Like so like, the idea is we sleep every night.
Sometimes when we dream, we see that it seems real, right,
but ultimately when you wake up, you see that it
was just a manifestation of your mind. Where you in
the dream, including the dream was just your mental products.
So you were in that dream and that you are
aware of that dream. There is a dream world also,
but all three are just manifestations of your dream a
few of your mind and expert this analogy. The idea
is this that the physical world that.
Speaker 7: We see.
Speaker 1: Hindu. I don't think this conversation is going anywhere, and
we've got time for just one more guest, and no
amount of like talk about the immaterial reality of dreams
is going to get you to the finish line. But
we pretty come up and having a chat with us.
It's definitely intriguing to hear people from different religions talk
about the religion least as interesting to me. So I
appreciate that, but we've got to we've got to move
on to our last caller.
Speaker 2: Okay, I wonder what he believes about dementia. You know,
my grandma died with dementia and lost her mind slowly
over the course of years as she did, So I wonder, like,
did just part of the fundamental of reality leave her
from piece to piece? Was her receptor breaking?
Speaker 4: Was away?
Speaker 2: Like, how do you swear that circle? And you're talking
about stuff like that? I don't know it just it's rough.
That is a tough one.
Speaker 1: I'm going to bring in Robin, and Robin looks like
an atheist. But has I think an interesting question? Robin says,
Color's family claims that the spark of life at conception
is visible in proof of a soul.
Speaker 2: That's news to me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so.
Speaker 1: Forest probably has a lot to say about this. But
before we get started, Robin, can you hear me?
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, thank you for waiting for so long. You've
been online for an hour and forty two minutes. Jesus
a big w It's okay, I've been doing hell yeah,
hell yeah.
Speaker 1: So Robin. I'm familiar with the claim that you're referring
to the sparkle life claim because it made huge news
in like Christian circles, And as far as I can tell,
there's there's two problems. One is they for the first study,
the original study was on mice, which means if it's
some sort of sign of a soul like entering at inception,
then it's weird that mice have souls the same way
humans do. But the real problem is just that they
don't understand the study. So what they did for the
study is they're doing a chemical analysis of what happens
when the egg gets fertilized, and in order to do that,
they need to bombard it with with how do you
call it, like flora and eight flora? What's the word
I'm looking for for for the there's a type of
optical device where you bombard something with fluorescence so that
you can detect particular chemicals that are only detectable when
they're under heavy fluoressince lights. I forget the name of
the device. There's a name for it, very scientific, long
sounding name for it. But basically what they did is
they use a device that bombards the fertilized egg with fluorescence,
and then the fluorescence allows them to see particular chemicals
that you wouldn't normally be able to see. Right, in
this particular case, it just detected zinc. It turns out
that when an egg gets fertilized by a sperm, there's
a zinc reaction and zinc just happens to be visible
under a heavy amount of fluorescence. Right, And that's all
that is, right. But the way that Christians were like
spinning the study was that like under no outside influence, right,
whenever you just if you have it in a microscope
and you just looked at a sperm fertilizing an egg,
you would just see light being emitted. But that's not
the case. Actually, what happens is the light bounces. The
light reflects off of zinc rather than being absorbed, so
it shows up like a spark of light when you
observe it.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Anyways, that's my understanding of the study and my understanding
of what Christians are getting wrong about the study. But like,
the article is available for the original it's on the PubMed.
The name of the article is zinc sparks are triggered
by fertilization and facilitate cell cycle resumption in mam million eggs.
This was the twenty eleven study on mice and it
talks about how they did it, what instruments they did,
and what the results were.
Speaker 2: I have another study here. This one is from scientific
reports from Nature Research the fertilization induced zinc spark as
a novel biomarker of mouse embryo quality and early development.
Just reading a bit from the abstract, here, upon activation,
mammalian eggs release billions of zinc ions and an exo
exoccyitotic event that means coming out of the cell, termed
the zinc spark. The zinc spark is dependent on and
occurs coordinately with intercellular calcium transients, which are tightly associated
with embryonic development. Thus, we hypothesize the zinc spark represents
an early extracellular physiochemical marker and the developmental of the
developmental potential of the zygote. To test a psypothesis, we
monitor thes blah blah blah blah blah, and they say,
let me see here. I'm seeing if they actually put
a conclusion here. Zinc sparks can thus serve as an
early biomarker of zygote quality. So the idea in this
thing is that these biomarkers are present and they kind
of show that maybe this particular embryo will survive, and
that's maybe what somebody wants to try to stretch to.
I don't know, but yeah, I think you summarize it
pretty well though. It is just it was a study
in mice that it was the big discovery where they
found that there was this little flash of zinc. And
if you want to understand what that is, if you
ever hit a flint and steel to make a spark,
it's the exact same thing what you're doing. When you
hit flint and steel together. You're not actually knocking bits
of the flint off, you're knocking tiny, tiny atoms of
steel off. You're knocking little bits of that steel. And
when the steel is now oxidized, is this bit of
raw steel comes into contact with the air, oxygen binds
to it, that creates a spark. It's an exothermic reaction,
and so that's what we're seeing. We have a little
bits of zinc out and that is now causing a
little spark. For whatever reason it is. I don't know
if it's oxidation or not, but it's the same basic concept.
It's just this release of a metal that is now
doing a thing that's emitting a tiny bit of light
in these particular conditions. I don't know if that's all
the time or just when they're using whatever magical zinc
ray they were using in that particular setup.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot.
Speaker 8: More sense than what they were telling me. See, my
aunt uncle they both breed horses, and ever since figuring
out that I'm atheist, they've been trying to feed me
little fact to convert back to Christianity, and that was
one of the things they were They were claiming that
while breeding horses that they themselves can see this spark
of light and that that's evidence of the soul and
if they could, nah, they can souls in us. And yeah,
I was just really confused, but I didn't know what
to say. And that was like the first time they've
ever stumped me. So they got their one gotcha moment
in the past like ten years that I've been atheist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I even if this was something that was
somehow like, first of all, no, this is not a
visible thing outside of the horse, Like you're not going
to see that that doesn't make any sense. But like,
even if there was a consistent, persistent every time in
egg is fertilized, there's this marvelous flash of light and
we don't know where it comes from. The idea that
you would then build the bridge to this is magic
is pretty wild. There's so many implications. And number one,
I just learned that horses have souls. That's neat. Number two,
what about things that don't reproduce this way? What about
asexual organisms? Are you telling me that you know something
that does cell division just goes through that doesn't have
a soul because it doesn't have a fertilization point. Is
there not a spark of light there? Like, what's going on?
What about other things that cause sparks of light? What
makes this spark of light different than that spark of light?
Like it's just like question begging. That's not really right term.
It's just it's just a massive assumption. It's taking something
you don't understand and assuming that it's some big, crazy thing,
when in reality it's it's remarkably mundane. It's just a
neat thing that happens that we didn't know before. And
it is what is usual is creationists take a neat
thing that we didn't know before and try like hell
to cram that into their dog.
Speaker 8: Yeah, pretty much. We got as far as going to
They said that, well, basically, only animals that.
Speaker 4: Conceive this way have souls.
Speaker 8: And then I was like, well, what do you define
as a soul? Because I get a different answer from everyone.
The most intriguing answer I ever got was from my
pagan roommate, But all my Christian family members just say that,
like pretty much, that their soul is consciousness.
Speaker 2: Well, then there you go. Is that tells us that
number one, if all animals that conceive this way have souls,
then the only thing we have proven thus far is
that mice have souls. So I hope that these people
take away all their mousetraps because those are souls that
they're hurting, especially the sticky ones. Those are just inhumane.
And that for what the fuck are the implications of that.
Second of all, if this is what we're saying, that
souls are linked to consciousness, way more animals than just
mice got that going on. Let me tell you we
have evidence of consciousness in tons of things that you
don't want to have souls or to deal with the
ethnical Olympic gations of having souls. It's it's no no
for a lot of reasons.
Speaker 10: For a lot of ye.
Speaker 1: So I'll say one last thing. The the when you're
searching searching for this internet, because you're gonna want to
find this on the internet, most likely to talk to
your family. The process, which I couldn't pronounce, is called
fluorescent microscopy, which is an absolute mouth mouth.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that's what you're talking. That's all it is. Okay, Yeah,
we use that all the time for stuff for a
bunch off, okay, cool, Yeah, I very knew what it was. Like,
I didn't know that's where we're talking at you. You
were describing fluorescentce. I'm like, uh huh, and like as
this device that like sees these things. It all makes
sense now you explained it perfectly, and I'm incredibly stupid.
That's all.
Speaker 1: Okay. So that's that's all there was. If you want
to look it up, that's the Those are the buzzwords
you need to look it up.
Speaker 8: Okay, thank you, down where I need to go.
Speaker 1: And thank you. Good to hear from you, Robin, take care,
good day, A w.
Speaker 4: Robin.
Speaker 1: That didn't take as long as I thought it would.
We got time for another one. If you want to
take a theist from Kansas.
Speaker 2: Let's do it. Let's power through one more.
Speaker 1: All right, let's grab a theis from Kansas. We've got
Chris and the que says, we're asking our Old Testament
prophecies circular reasoning. Now, remember we're talking to two atheists,
which means we're probably going to agree with that statement
in some fashion. Can you put some more to it?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 11: Absolutely. So I am reading through a handful of books
looking for a consistent hermeneutic that would be able to
falsify the claim that Jesus fulfills prophecies. And I've been
studying some of my old seminary textbooks actually, and so
I just finished one today. And so I'm talking about
Isaiah seven, the Emmanuel verse and the whole of Virgin
and then Matthew claims it. So it appears to me
that Matthew claims this as a prophecy. There's nothing in
the original text contextually, and we always talk about how
context is important. This author and this textbook says that
earlier in the book, but there is no context to
make that a prophecy. So Jesus is the Messiah and
God and self savior because he fulfilled prophecies. But the
prophecies are prophecy because we say their prophecies they're fortunate.
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean okay, yeah, Chris, you've quoted me exactly.
I've said those exact words before.
Speaker 11: Oh okay.
Speaker 1: So to be sure, this is the circular part of
this prophecies about Jesus part right, which is we know
contextually speaking, that this prophecy was to King a Has
about a child born during the reign of King a
Has before that child is old enough to know right
from wrong. The two kings that are attacking the kingdom
of Judah, they're going to be laid waste by the Assyrians. Right,
So in order to make this about Jesus, you have
to add a new second layer of meaning to it.
You'll say, well, originally it was referring to this, but
secondarily it was referring to this. But the minute you
add a secondary interpretation, it becomes circular, right, Because who
to decide what the secondary meaning is and who gets
decide which prophecies get two meetings or three meetings or
four meetings right. So then what the Christian will do
is they'll say, well, Jesus is the Messiah because he
fulfilled all these prophecies. And when you read the prophecies,
not a single one of them refer to Jesus in
the original context. They all require secondary meanings or some
type of like not do a fuliment, partial fulfillment, or
some nonsense like that. So then you would ask a Christian, well,
why would I accept these as being prophecies about Jesus
because they're not in the original context. And they would say, well,
because Jesus was the Messiah. And now you've got an
entire circle. Right, These prophecies that aren't prophecies about Jesus
are their prophecies because the messiahs said So, why is
he a prophecy because he fulfilled these prophecies? Or why
is he the messiah because he fulfilled the prophecies about
the Messiah? So I think you've nailed at Chris. It's
entirely circular argument.
Speaker 2: Okay, I mentioned that earlier on the show and did
a much worse job.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was great.
Speaker 2: That's why you were gone.
Speaker 5: Have given good.
Speaker 11: Content kind of trying to prop this up and fight
you on it. See I see if you can help
me knock down. So here are the potential explanations that
the author gives for why Isaiah seven fourteen could legitimately
be interpreted this way. The first one is that it's wrong,
which obviously he's going to say is that's not a
valid claim. The second one is that the Holy Spirit
kind of flipped us in. And most Christians will talk
about a dual authorship, right, and however you want to
define that God helping humans or the cooperating or dictation
or whatever. So couldn't you say, okay, well, within God's
divine authorship there is an authorial intent pointing towards a
Messiah figure, right.
Speaker 1: And I think the problem with that type of a
hermeneutic is now you're still starting with the conclusion. The
conclusion is that the Holy Spirit has hidden something within
these prophecies that you wouldn't know just by reading them.
So now God is being deceptive. And in Deuteron the eighteen,
God tells you that you can determine if a prophecy
is coming from God and whether or not you need
to kill or not kill that prophet by determining if,
in fact, the words of the prophets come true, right,
which means at some point you have to know that
the prophecy is being spoken as a prophecy. It can't
be some secret that people hundreds and hundreds of years
later would just stumble upon and be like, oh, interesting,
that sounds like something else. It must be a prophecy, right.
That doesn't seem to line up with the God of
the Old Testament. Nobody, like no reasonable Jewish person would
accept that as an interpretation for these prophecies. The only
people that would accept that are people who already are
at the conclusion that Jesus must be the Messiah. Then
you work yourself backwards. It's a sharpshooter fallacy.
Speaker 11: I wish I could fight you more on this, man,
but like I can't argue, I can't find ways to
poke hole in your arguments. It's so frustrating.
Speaker 2: Man, Let me show you.
Speaker 1: Let me show you one thing. I got a copy
of the Dead Sea Scrolls in English, and they do
something really interesting in the Dead Sea Scrolls where like
a number of the prophecies of the Old Testament don't
really kind of come true, or they come true, but
like not all all the way, and so what they
do is they just go in and they reinterpret them right,
and hopefully this, you know, the secondary interpretation doesn't fail.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: So if you go to like the this is the
Habit Cook pressure. Pressure is a Hebrew word for like
a like a reteaching or an interpretation. So in the
Habit Cook Pressure we've got a line from Habit Cooke.
One it says, for I am now about to raise
up the Chowdeans, that reckless people. Well, we know who
the Chowdeans are. The Chowdeans are, in fact the Babylonians, right.
But since this prophecy didn't didn't have any impact on
what was happening at the time of the Dead Sea,
they added their own layer of meaning. They said, this
refers to the Katam, who are swift and mighty in war,
annihilating many people. And then they give a whole interpretation
of this completely disconnection from the context. And of course
the prophecy failed because this secondary interpretation proved to not
be true as well. Right, the only difference between what
they were doing at the Dead Sea and what the
Christians were doing is at the Dead Sea they were
reinterpreting the prophecies and still giving some sort of future
prediction with it, and we can see that the future
predictions fail. The Christians didn't do that. The Christians took
the story of Jesus, didn't make any predictions about the
future until you get like, there's a book of revelation
in his second coming, and then retro fitted it to
alternative meanings from the prophets, which is why it could
stick long enough, right, because the part that didn't come
true is the part that he's just he's going to
come back, and people are willing to just wait forever.
And if that's the only part that you predicted, that
he's going to come back and do a bunch of stuff,
people will wait on that all the time. We've seen
all kinds of religious cults that will wait forever and
ever on some kind of a coming of something that
are never going to be coming. But that's where the
reinterpretation by the Christians fail, because the Christian interpretation of
these prophecies, based on Jesus's own teaching and Paul's teaching,
was that jesus second Coming the ultimate fulfillment of all
of the final prophecies. What's going to happen within a
generation of the people still living as we see in
Matthew sixteen, twenty seven, twenty eight, Matthew twenty four, Matthew ten,
twenty three, and elsewhere.
Speaker 11: Yeah, okay, okay, I'll keep digging.
Speaker 7: Man.
Speaker 11: Maybe I'll pomp on your show sometime and ask ask
some follow ups. I know we're towards the end of
the show. I did have a question for for us
about trans issues. We've got time for it.
Speaker 10: Not I'll call in another time.
Speaker 2: We can make it super fast and then yeah, I'll
try what's your question?
Speaker 11: Okay, okay, yeah, So is gender is gender? Would you
say gender is rooted in sex or are they?
Speaker 2: I would say that it's how would you connect them?
I would say that it's associated with sex, but fundamentally
different things.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay.
Speaker 11: It's very strange as a Christian too. I mean, we
all we're all against trans issues because we're religious, like
that's how this works, right, And so to potentially cast
aside the religious piece, I'm left with the question of
do I even care about this stuff or or even
thinking through it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would say if I were you, if I
was in your position, I was coming from a Christian framework,
and I look at sex and gender, and I look
at trans people and I say, okay, well, this is Liarally,
this doesn't line up with a Bible where the Bible
clearly says that God made man and woman and only
man and woman, and in this verse it says you
made him at the same time and in this first
set of maybe totally, but it doesn't matter because it's
only man and women, right, blah blah blah blah blah.
I would treat that the same way that you would
treat the fact that the Bible also gets the origin
of the earth wrong. It gets the origin of life wrong,
it gets the evil, It gets concepts of evolution wrong.
It says that snakes can talk, It says that donkeys
can talk. It says that sometimes trees can talk. It
says all these different things about like just batshit. It
says that that grasshoppers have four legs. It says that
bats are birds, it says that the it says the
pie is equal to three. So the Bible is wrong
about a lot of shit in science, right, And so
you who now can decide as a Christian, do you
do what most like what the Catholics do and say, Okay,
the Bible is a book of regional stories that teach
moral lessons, and the only one that's true for fucking
sure is this whole thing about Jesus and even that
we need to really study and interpret and make sense
of it. Or do you do what the babdocostal folks
do and say, no, every single word of this is
absolutely actually true. And now I have not just one
thing that I don't understand, but just a shitload of
things that I don't understand. Like, or you can do
what I think is the best thing, which just to
really analyze whether or not there's evidence or reasonably eve
in any of this stuff and then decide, all right, hey,
there is very clearly like actual scientific backing for our
understanding of sex and gender. And this is not a
new idea. This idea is like one hundred years old
and is just like other useful models, is being proven
right over and over and over. And on the other side,
I've got this Bronze Age sex Slavery manual that says
that sometimes don keys can speak. Here, maybe I need
to take a step back and decide whether or not
it's actually important whether or not the things that I
believe are true and if it isn't, then I can
just stop complaining about any of this because I can
just decide to believe whatever I want to believe. But
if it is important to me that the things that
I believe are actually true, then maybe I can put
down this Bible and start focusing on reality a bit.
That's what I would say in this situation.
Speaker 11: When you talk about gender being on a spectrum, is
that spectrum from masculine presenting to feminine presenting? Do just
like the animalist and animalistic? I identify as a cat.
And I'm not trying to be inflammatory. I just again,
I lumped this all in a box and I threw
out the window and didn't think about it. So when
you talk about the spectrum from a scientific perspective, are
we only talking about masculine too feminine? Or do you
include all that other stuff too scientific?
Speaker 2: So when you say, just to be clear, it does
include other stuff, all that other stuff is not cat
and things. So the conflation of being trans with thinking
that you're a cat or a dog or whatever like
that's it is the same kind of just bullshit as
when we were talking about homosexuality a decade ago and
Christians were saying, well, if you can fuck a man,
why don't you fuck a horse, and all the equating
homosexuality to beast reality. It's not really part of the
conversation for people to take this seriously. It is just
a strong way when we talk about the spectrum of gender.
What we're talking about is the fact that gender is
definitionally a social construct. Therefore, by definition, because it is
something that is socially constructed, and because it is something
that we can demonstrate factually changes from culture to culture,
from person to person, from generation to generation, from day
to day. Because of that, it is definitionally spectral. It
cannot have hard, set fast, serious limits with necessary conditions
for each of these individual boxes. If it is something
that is social constructed in this way, and something that
we see is very dynamic and fluid across cultural contexts,
and so that's what we're talking about. We're not just saying,
here's this masculine and feminine side, because even the concepts
of masculinity and femininity are themselves socially constructed and therefore
are also fluid and spectral. Is a diverse rainbow of
different presentations. A great way to think about it when
you think spectrum. You may think of like a color
spectrum right where it goes from red to blue. Say,
don't think about that as a linear spectrum. Think about
one of those when you pick a color on like
a in Microsoft paint or something, and it gives you
the circle and it has all the rainbow all over
that whole circle, and you get a multidimensional thing where
it's not just a straight line. Think about it that way.
You have a lot of different ways that you can
interpret this, this whole concept of gender. It's a wide
rage of different things with lots of different factors going
into it. It's not just two poles, and you find
your place somewhere in between it.
Speaker 11: Sure would you say that the experience of gender all
the way along that spectrum is fundamentally rooted in our
brain activity and our brain waves. And so just as
on the topic of sex, you can have a variety
of conditions that go with you know, phenotypically and genetically
x y, you know typically genetically xx, and then all
the other stuff in the middle. That gender then is
an experience of the brain. And then that experience again
is just rooted in that same kind of materialism or
like physiology.
Speaker 2: I mean fundamentally, yes, everything you experience is rooted in
materialism and physiology, so that that is not unique to
gender in terms of like where gender comes from, if
that is purely neurological, as purely neurobiological, or purely neurochemical
or purely psychological, I'm not sure there is evidence for
a neurobiological component to it. But it's kind of like
sexuality in this way where it's like, yeah, we have
evidence for this in this component, but fundamentally we're still
learning a lot about where it comes from and what
it does and how it behaves. All we know is
that it is a thing that we experience and it
is not binary those thing Those are the things that
we know, just like I think you know being trans
and being homosexual or whatever, like these are different concepts,
but like you can use sexuality as an analog for
gender in this way in that in the exact same
way that sexuality is a massive and diverse spectrum, and
it is really really because it is so deeply personal,
it is very difficult, difficult to really nail down any
one label for someone's individual sexuality that can then be
easily applied to even one other person. Let alone scores
of other people. Same thing really goes for gender. You
and I. I can say that I'm a sisman. You
probably are too. I'm assuming, but I guarantee, even though
we are both men, right, even though we are both
of this masculine gender and this masculine presentation, fundamental different ideas.
I guarantee about what it means to be a man
and what that actually looks like and feels like and
acts like, and how that should be presented in the world.
So that's what I would encourage you. If you want
to learn about gender, start by exploring your own. Sit
down and really analyze. Ask for yourself, what do I
mean when I say that I'm a man? What do
I mean when I talk about it, like when I
talk about my masculinity? What actually challenges my masculinity if anything?
What makes me feel more like a man or less
like a man, if that's even possible? Read up on
there's a lot of really good psychological research about how
masculinity specifically is precarious and needs to be maintained through
performance in our culture. Read up on some of that,
Think about some of that. Wonder why it is why
so many big, buff, manly dudes get really really scared
of fingernail polish and shit, and like the idea that
they might be caught in addressed someday, like what does
that actually mean? And do you agree with these things?
And do you feel the same way, And when you
sit down to actually study your own gender, you might
have a better time looking at other people that and
saying okay. So they just differ from me in these concepts,
in these funds, and I differ from many other cisgender
men in these concepts. We live in a bizarrely heteronormative
society and a lot of people don't take the time
to explore their own gender and their own sexuality. If
you do, I think it would elucidate a lot of
these things, a lot of these things about what gender
is and how it operates, and then you can start
applying that model to other people as well and start
learning a little bit about that.
Speaker 11: Well, even when I was more deeply rooted in the
fundamental fundamentalist evangelical world, I still kind of had these
quiet thoughts of, you know, I had to keep the
binary because that's what my book says. But I always
had this ton of like, you just have effeminine men
and more masculine women, and like the boxes around those
two things are just bigger than we pretend they are, like.
Speaker 2: You just have you know, it's and isn't it funny?
Isn't it funny that the same the same hateful ass
who will tell you you're not a real man because
you're gay, or because you like to paint your fingernails,
or because you listen to certain music or drink a
fruity cocktail, are the same assholes who well, they'll tell
a trans woman that you can never change the fact
that you're a man, because you'll always be a man.
For it's just it makes no sense. It never has
made any sense, it never will make any sense. It's
just the dying gasps of an outdated sexist ideology. And
just like every other time, when we talked about sexuality,
it was the same thing. When we talked about you know, race,
it was the same thing. Who's a real human? When
we talked about civilization, it was the same thing. It's
it's just people in power, people who have control, people
who have authority, who want everything to fit into their
boxes because differences are scary and challenge their authority because
if you, if there are different ways to be a human,
then they can't control the narrative anymore. So I just
that's where I would take that. But with that, we
are now half an hour overtime and I've got an
other show after this, so I've got to I've got
to get out of here.
Speaker 1: Chris, thanks for so much for calling and talking with us.
Speaker 11: Yep, absolutely thinking about something.
Speaker 1: Chris is doing some deep thinking on these topics, and
I'm certain glad that he is. Sounds like he's in
deconstruction territory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's awesome, and like that's that's the cool thing
about this stuff is that like there's there really just
is so much to learn, and especially with with gender.
Like I said that the concept that sex and gender
are different things and that neither one is a strict
binary and all this this is like a century old.
This is this is old news, but it's still fresh
steam and hot pile of delicious information that like we're
still learning a lot of stuff about There's there's a
ton of questions. We have way more questions that we
have answers, and this is something is an active field
of research that is yielding better understandings, more complex more
sophisticated pictures, better models of what the natural world actually
is and what our place is in that natural world,
and so like, Yeah, there's a lot of questions here,
and they're great questions, and the best researchers in the
world on these topics also have a lot of questions
about it. That's what makes it so exciting. So go
out and dig into it and don't be afraid of it,
and treat it. I would say, if you're deconstructing on this,
treat it the same way you treat something like evolution. Yes,
I understand I've been lied to about this for a
long time, and I understand this is something that I
was taught to ignore because my book says to ignore it. Awesome,
Now I'm in a position where I get to learn
a lot of cool shit. How lucky am I? I'm
going to go work on learning. That's great.
Speaker 1: Absolutely couldn't agree more. I think we got three super
chats and then we're going to close out our first
super chat from Los for forty nine. I have to
give a disclaimer. This is not an advert for jet
to Holidays. But our friend Lose says nothing be to
jet to Holiday and this is apparently an inside joke
for YouTube. Apparently this is the new advert that is
in everybody's ear whenever our live streams start. And so
now if you're watching this stream, chances are you've heard
that advert today and congratulation.
Speaker 2: It's also it's a joke to me on TikTok, especially
I don't know if it's on YouTube, especially on TikTok.
It's a big thing where like every if you have
travel footage that's just freaking horrible, just anything breaking and
going horribly wrong. Nothing beats a Jet two holidays like
the thing to put over it. So as I love
every time anything goes wrong, nothing beats a Jet two
holiday sign up now for saw some of them at
all from from for that, that's thirty pounds for a
family of four. Evan Rock sent a dollar in ninety
nine cents. Couldn't afford the extra penny you cheap bastard
magic sperm equals Jesus, I'm saved. JK Hale, Doug.
Speaker 1: Fantastic lass money from our friend Patch Grabber. Thank you
for the ten dour Canuckbucks says hey, justin Forrest, I
love all your stuff. First, if you add up all
the bad arguments for God, you've heard, could you convert
that into your first bad day? It may the courts
be with you both.
Speaker 2: Nah, It's all about perspective and what a wonderful day
I've had suffering through all of this shit. So I
can try to make people think a little bit more rationally.
How lucky am I making.
Speaker 1: The world a better place? Just sleep easy knowing you're
making the world a better place.
Speaker 2: Oh man, totally. That's that's that's what this is all about.
I got to sit here and be an asshole on
the internet because it's making the world better. That's what
it is.
Speaker 1: Well, first, I had a blast. I know you've got
another commitment to get to. So we're going to close
out the show our backup and we went longer than
our backup could even go. Our backup had to cut out.
Thank you so much Ricord Richard for being here because
we needed you.
Speaker 2: Rickord really come in and he got to come in
and ask one question. He sat here for two hours,
so we get to ask one question to somebody who
didn't want to listen.
Speaker 1: And then and then the poor guy leaves and we
can't even pronounce his name of correctly. I'll do my
penance later. Thank you so much Richard for being here,
and thank you forrest, and thank you crew. We'll see
you again next week, same time, same place, five thirty
Eastern Time, four thirty full time day. We start Albay,
stop Pastingay, the balls, amry.
Speaker 2: Around, watch Talking and live Sundays at one pm Central.
Visit tiny dot c c slash y t t H
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