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Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 4: We talk a lot about the Bible being written by
men and how Christians are often saying, you know, it's
it's a pro woman book. And I want to get
into that with the authors of a new book just released.
It's called Clearly Written by Boys, A Woman's Guide to
the Bible, written by Karis Burkowski and Dave Fitzgerald, and
they joined me here. So good to see you both.
Speaker 2: Absolutely great to see you, Chris.
Speaker 4: I know that you've done some writing in the past
about the man made nature of gods. I just did
a speech on this. I'm always referring to my previous
speeches and because you know how it is. You do
this long enough, and there's always a reference work in
the queue in the holster. But we see our gods
that look like us, and so this is this is
very familiar territory for you, right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean the first book was Why Men
Made God? And then this time when David came up
with the idea clearly written by boys, I just jumped
on it. I loved it because it's so much more
appropriate like that. The nature of that thinking behind why
it was written that way is far more like a
bunch of nineteen year old in celts than it is
about you know, mature men.
Speaker 4: It is a biblical Mannosphere. Oh, we're going to talk
about that. David Fitzgerald, historical researcher, is a buddy. We've
known each other forever because we're always talking about his
heretical works, including Nailed Jesus, Mything and Action Playing God.
The Evolutionary History of World Religion is book on the Mormons,
you blasphemer going after God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's fun, it's a living.
Speaker 4: Well all right, let's before we get into more unfamiliar territory,
because this is a well versed audience sewing in the
bimless misogynistic, and it was even the garden and blah
blah blah. But you guys take a much much deeper dive,
which is why I wanted to have the conversation. But
we got to talk about Eve. So Eve is tempted
by the snake. The snake's whispering in Eve's ear, she
whispers in Adam's ear. God is somehow surprised, and then
he gets pissed, and there are punishments. Now, the punishment
for Adam is to he's going to have to labor
on the land, but the punishment for Eve is a
labor of a different kind. Caros will start with you
even the garden. You want to get into some of
the problems there.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, her big punishment is because she's
seeking knowledge. I mean the serpent, which we kind of
talk a little bit about being a character out of
the old Great Goddess kind of stories, the pre biblical
belief system when the Great Mother was the birther of
all life on the planet and all of that. But
the serpent whispers to her that she can gain knowledge.
Wants to gain knowledge, so she takes the apple. Well,
that's just can't be. That's just the biggest crime ever.
So you know that's what makes God meant so he
punishes her physically. She's going to have pain and suffering
and all that kind of stuff, and she's going to
be lusting after her husband. I'm not sure which interpretation
of those words we talked about.
Speaker 2: How it can be desire for your husband. Yes, you
shall rule over you.
Speaker 4: No, I totally. I totally read it as you will
want to have sex, you will have sexual desire, and
this is part of Eve's curse. In fact, it was
how my sisters were taught about biblical womanhood in our
very evangelical home. So yeah, I mean that's how I
read it, Keras anyway, okay, but.
Speaker 2: It's interesting how many different ways you can spin that,
and none of them are particularly good for women.
Speaker 4: Okay. So, by the way, for the pedantic in the audience,
we know the Bible doesn't say apple, but Christian tradition apple, right,
we got even the apple. That's how we come to
I'm just I'm getting in front of it for you, Kiris,
because I know where you're going with that. You included
a poem in the first part of the book, and
I just want to read it. It's very short by
Daniel Coffin. It's titled If Adam Picked the Apple, and
it says there would be a parade, a celebration, a
holiday to commemorate the day he sought enlightenment. We would
not speak of temptation by the devil. Rather, we would
laud Adam's curiosity is desire for adventure and knowing we
would feast on apple inspired fair torts, Chutney's pancakes, pies.
There would be plays and songs re enacting his courage.
But it was Eve who grew bored, weary of her
captivity in Eden. And a woman's desire for freedom is
rarely a cause for celebration. Powerful stuff that.
Speaker 5: Is so good. Where when we discover that poem, like
it's perfect fit.
Speaker 4: Interesting that it's a sexual punishment for Eve, like for Adam.
You're gonna work your ass off, there will be weeds
on the land. Okay, fine, Eve, it's gonna hurt like
a mother to reproduce, and you're gonna have the hots
for your husband, who will rule over you. I just
mind that. Fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And of course it's the it's the woman's fault
that men get horny for her because you know it's
it's woman's desire. Yet, you know, we don't hear much
about husband rape in history. We hear a lot about
spousal rape, you know, of wives.
Speaker 4: I know it's going to be a subjective answer. And
we see a ton of female evangelical preachers leader figures
here in the twenty first century. But it's been the
case for the longest time. You know what comes to mind,
off Rod, We've got Joyce Meyer, we got Beth Moore,
we got Paula White, we got Victoria Ostein, et cetera.
Many of these people are just freaking celebrity, best selling millionaire,
celebrity pastors. How do you think these people reconcile their
leadership with two Timothy? You know the woman be silent thing, Karrots,
you're a woman, do you have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 3: Well, they just figured out how they can use the
religion to buy into the patriarchy and get some power,
so they're going for it.
Speaker 4: So you think they're using the system.
Speaker 3: Religion as a tool, so they will use these women
as helpers to use it as a tool.
Speaker 2: And honestly, at the end of the day, they're quistlings.
They're selling out their own sex for their own money
comfort power.
Speaker 4: Because they're not just preaching to women. I don't think.
I think they're preaching to everybody.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, and yet, yeah, there's any number of Bible
verses you could throw at them for to not do that.
And yet somehow, the fact that they are as successful
as they are shilling for this toxic message that they're selling,
it's just heinous. It's really heinous, and it's it's just
another example of Christian hypocrisy. It's like they're all set
to throw a Bible verse at things they don't like,
stuff like this. It's explicitly forbidden in their own scriptures.
Speaker 4: No problem with it, Keros. I know Dave's background. Did
you come out of a fundy faith or have you
always been smarter than me?
Speaker 3: No? I was very much a good little Christian. My
sort of moment when I lost it was in confirmation class.
I was an evangelical Lutheran and we were in Confirmation
class and we were learning about transubstantiation and consinstantiation. You know,
where the priests is the magic words and then the
bread and the crackers turns into the body and blood
of Christ and then we're supposed to eat it. And
I freaked out in the middle of confirmation classes and
I'm not doing that.
Speaker 5: That's cannibalism.
Speaker 3: And that I got told to talk to him behind
after the class, and things just fell apart from there.
That was the moment when I started looking at all
of it and thinking, this is.
Speaker 5: This is nonsense.
Speaker 4: I hear a lot of stories like that, the curious
young Catholic and then the nuns sort of slapping among
the knuckles with the rulers, so to speak. You know
of scenario on well, you're too much trouble, and then
often they just get booted. You know what, we don't
like questions, have a nice life, We'll see you later.
Did that happen to you?
Speaker 3: No. He kept trying to recruit me and I because
it was a very like it's a small town and
there was a tight Christian town, and I would have
been shunned at high school. I would like, everything would
have been a terrible thing if I said, no, I'm
not going to do confirmation and this is crap. So
I had to go along with it and just not
say anything.
Speaker 4: I'll admit though, that I don't know much about the
Lutherans and their teachings about women. Was it subjugation teaching
in the Lutheran Church.
Speaker 3: Not overtly, but it was still the man was the
ruler of the family and you know, closer to God.
And we still had wear head coverings in church and
stuff like that back then. It's not so much anymore,
but it was pretty pretty traditional in those.
Speaker 4: Ways, written by boys. This Bible, let's stay in the
Old Testament for a second, and I'll just let you
take it where you want. But I got to start
with Jezebel. So I walk into it a Sunday morning,
Sunday school classroom, say the word Jezebel. I'm guessing I'll
bet you twenty bucks. The first thing that pops into
the brain to the people in the room slot murderer. Right, Jezbel.
I'll start with you, I guess, Dave, you want to
tell me about Jezebel, Describe who Jezebel allegedly was and
what the story is here.
Speaker 2: Well, we've got two Jezebel's. We can talk about the
one in the Bible that we get the most worst
person you can imagine, or we can talk about the
real person whose name was not Jezebel. By the way,
it's not even her real name, Ihabeil, who was not
only a real person, and you can't say that about
a lot of people in the Old Testament, but she
her husband's family, their dynasty. They were the first royal
family that put Yahweh on the map as a god.
Before them, yahwas just one more storm God worshiped by
the ancient Judaeans and the ancient Israelites and Samaritans. So
the ironies just start dog by them so fast. Jayhu,
who wiped them all out, killed them in the Bible.
This he's God's guy, He's God's hero doing all this.
In real life, he was one of the golden calf
worshipers at Shiloh. That was his So he was a heretic.
So the irony that these guys hundreds of years at
least three hundred years later writing this story, are making
the people who put Yahweh on the map heretics, murderers,
bad guys, and their killer held up as God's anointed
when he was in fact a heretic himself. It's it's
mind blowing.
Speaker 4: Well, when you say, in real life, how do you
verify that? Are there rather historical records that document the
character of Jezebel.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, unlike most like ninety nine of everybody in the
Old Testament and of everybody we know and love from
Sunday School, Jezebel was a real person. And we have
Greek sources for her. We know her family, and we
know who she was married into. We have Assyrian records
about them and about the the guy who wiped out
their whole line. What her real what she was real
like as a person, will never know that because they
don't tell her story from her point of view. They
tell it from their point of view. And to them,
the biggest crime was that they were so successful, because
in real life they would have loved somebody who stood
for yahweh as much as that family did.
Speaker 3: And in the first the first five sections, we take
five characters of women from the Bible and we have
them tell their story in.
Speaker 5: Their own voice.
Speaker 3: So we have Jezebel introduced as this fifteen year old
getting sent off to marry a king in a different kingdom,
and her whole story from there all told in her voice,
and then we go on and do a commentary about
all of the parts of that story so we can
wear a whole different character. Like all the things, all
the facts, still happen, but the how and the why
in the way are different.
Speaker 4: Well, I noticed you did it with Adam and Eve
write off the bat, so clever to say, rather than
read chapter and verse, we're going to tell the story
and we're going to really humanize it and contextualize it
and paint a three D verbal picture. And to do
that with these characters is fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think we were really faithful to telling
the story as it is in the Bible. We didn't
go off on preagey tangents, but we did make the
switch of telling it from her point of view and
having the character tell us her story.
Speaker 4: I love the Genesis account where they're hiding from God
in shame God's wander around the garden like he's not
on to care. Wait a minute, I thought God could
see everything into it. How do you hide from God?
I don't understand that. It just makes no sense to me.
Delilah was another sort of Old Testament villain in a
lot of ways. Caros, I'll start with you tell me
about Delilah.
Speaker 3: Oh, well, we have Delilah meeting Samson at at the fair.
So well, they're sitt in the marketplace and she's with
her her girlfriends, and she's looking at this hot guy
and she's going, yeah, I.
Speaker 5: Know he's a bad dude. I think I can wrap
am out.
Speaker 4: She likes the bad boys.
Speaker 5: He likes the bad boys.
Speaker 3: So she starts walking across towards him, and he sees
her coming and he's looking at her like, oh, yeah, honey,
I think so. And so it's just all effects of
the you know, like that when they kill him and
all the things they do to him and everything, but
it's all told from her perspective. And so she's having
fun with this story and all those times where where
they tell her to find out how to tie them
up with things that he can't break out of, and
and we have like sex gigs like where they're times
and stuff like it's different.
Speaker 4: It's old Testament sex tape. These are words I never
would have put in the same sentence myself. Hey, if
you want to jump on here, I was going to say,
do you want to jump on Delilah? Let me rephrase it.
Would you like to talk about Delilah from your perspective?
Speaker 2: We don't just tell the story. I mean we do
tell the story, and that's super fun, but then we
give commentary after it. It's like, yeahs are always saying, oh,
you're taking out of context. Oh well, let's give the
context then, and when you do, you find that the
story is even worse than we already think. I mean,
we all sort of know that the Bible's misogynistic, we
all sort of know that the Bible puts women down.
But when you actually do a little bit of a
deeper dive into just how these stories were written, why
they're written, and what's happening, you know, in the context
of these stories, it's even worse. It's even worse. And
that's true whether you're talking about Old Testament or are
they're talking about the New Testament.
Speaker 4: More on some of the lesser known women in the
Old Testament, and then we got to get into the
New Testament with Jesus and Paul and some of the
tragic attitudes and writings about women. I will continue with
my special guest next next up on the conference Roster Nashville, Tennessee.
It is Nanocon. What a lineup for that. Matt de
la Hunty promised Backland Hemmet, Metta, Glenda Jordan, Forrest Valkei,
and so many others. Also in August, the World Humanist
Congress Baja con those are both in Canada. The Unholy
Trinity Reunion that's in Fort Worth, Texas the last Saturday
in August. The FFRF National Convention in Milwaukee October sixteenth
through the eighteenth, and then Rocket City Reason Huntsville, Alabama,
October twenty third through the twenty fifth. Details links everything
you need the Thinkingatheist dot com slash events. Authors of
the book clearly written by boys Keris Berkowski and Dave Fitzgerald.
You got a couple of illustrators. You want to introduce
your illustrators for me?
Speaker 3: Yeah. One of them is David Hayward, who's a cartoonist
and a lot of the people that are on this,
they're watching you right now. I might actually know him
because he's called the Naked Pastor. He used to be
a minister and now he does cartoons and they're they're
sort of religious themed and with things that we take
two pages to describe, he can put in one cartoon
and there it is, right in your face.
Speaker 2: And he was so on board right from the get go,
sin As we told him aout the project. He was, Yeah,
the board and his cartoon just nail it. I mean
so many stuff was just absolutely perfect.
Speaker 4: Well, Hayward's interesting to me, right because he's a Christian, right.
Speaker 2: It was, he's a deconstructing Christian. If not you fully
because I was going.
Speaker 4: To say, cartoons go hard at the Bible, the foundational
text of Christianity, and he's given shit to the Bible
all the time, and I thought, this is this is
a weird believer.
Speaker 2: Weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's very pro LGBT and his Jesus is very
pro LGBT, and that's that's kind of cool to see
that happen.
Speaker 4: I mean I like him, I really do admire and admirers.
Speaker 3: Okay good yeah, yeah yeah. As soon as we told
him about it, he was right on board. So we've
got sixty five of his cartoons in the book.
Speaker 4: And you're second illustrator, Kathleen or kat Hardy.
Speaker 3: The second illustrator is a female, and she has drawn
portraits of the seven I guess women that we really
talk about the five at the beginning that we tell
their story and then Mary both Mary's very magnalate and
married mother of Jesus, so we would give her a topic,
like we asked her to do a Mary mother Mary,
and so she sent us one usual you know Mary
with the downcast eyes or you know, like the usual sweet,
modest Mary. And we said no, no, no, no, no, no no.
We told her what else to do. So she did this,
and yeah, that's much better.
Speaker 5: She's got to be looking up.
Speaker 4: A So how many Mary's are there in the New ten?
There's Magdalene, and then there's the other Mary and the Mary.
Matter of mean, how many Marys am I talking about? Here?
Speaker 2: We focus on two of them, Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene,
but even though there are multiple versions of those two
women as well. And it's it's ironic because in a
way we have many Mary's, in another way, we have
almost no Mary of any of them. If we didn't
have the Book of John, we wouldn't know anything about
Mary Magdalen really. If we didn't have the Book of Luke,
we wouldn't know anything really about the Virgin Mary. It's
it's so amazing that we've got these tiny little slivers
in the Bible, and yet it's blown up since to become,
you know, a whole cot industry of Mary Magdalene and uh,
the Da Vinci code, all that stuff, you know it.
It was like the legend, the medieval legends of Mary
Magdalene just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, bigger.
Speaker 3: And we talk about the fact that the real Mary Mage,
if it was a real, real anything in there. Mary
Magdalen was a disciple, and she was a She gave
them money, she helped them, she did all this kind
of stuff. And then this one pope gets confused and
configures he's he conflates her with the woman the sinner,
you know whatever, and and from then on she becomes, uh,
this despicable Harlotte who's.
Speaker 5: Trying to be forgiven and just totally messes her up.
And so we talk a lot about that.
Speaker 4: So back to the Old Testament. Everybody knows there's a
book of Ruth. Nobody knows anything about Ruth like Hell
is Ruth.
Speaker 3: Oh we have great But with that, she tells her
own story too, and so okay, she's doing the with
it thou goist and she's so sweet and innocent and everything.
And we talk in the commentary, we talk about, well,
what's really going on in the country at that time
and how would she have been treated after marrying somebody
from outside of her land and now he's dead and
she doesn't have a man to look after her.
Speaker 5: So Mary Naomi wants to go away, so she wants
to go with her because what the heck guess is
she gonna do?
Speaker 3: And then we get her back in Judea and she
meets Boaz in the grain field, right, and she goes
back and tells Naomi, and Naoi gives her this sole planable,
this is what you're gonna do. Hun You can get
all dressed up in your best stop it puts a
perfume one you're gonna sneak over there in the middle
of the night. And so we talk about all that,
and that's a story you don't usually hear very often.
So and we give her agency like she's doing this
on purpose because she wants to preserve her life and
find somebody will take care of her and Naomi. And
then at the very end, after she has the baby
and marries him and everything that she has the baby,
they take the baby and they give it to Naomi
and they say, oh, Naomi, is that a child? And
it's so like the Handmaid's Tale, like it's just you
can't you can't miss it. It's great, Like, yeah, we
have fun with that one too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is another case where the context really blows, uh
blows your mind. So we blow your mind twice with
every single character.
Speaker 4: Does remind me I'm not as familiar with Ruth in
the Old Testament? Is she is that story played like
she's sort of a hero of the faith or does
it go there?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And ironically, if it had been a moad Bite
girl saying to a Jewish girl saying to her Mobiite
mother in law, oh, your people will be my people,
your gods will be my gods, you know, we would
hate her. She'd be a filthy idolatry. But yeah, and.
Speaker 4: Then we've got Esther, who eventually would become the queen
of Persia. I don't know if there was a real
Esther or not. I'm just familiar with the biblical Esther.
Speaker 2: Story though a great story. And we talked, and that's
another thing we do, is we talk about how we
know these stories are just made up BS stories and
not based on real people. And there's lots of reasons,
there's lots of giveaways that do that, and and so
we don't just talk about the origins of them, but
we talked about how they were interpreted later and how
Perham came out of that, and there's just so much
more behind all these stories that's fun to get into.
Speaker 4: But I mean, how many of these, like the christ
myth et cetera, were borrowed from other or surrounding mythologies.
A bunch of them, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I keep going
back to is one of the reasons I like Jessicbel
so much, not her real name, but that character so much,
is that she's one of the very very few people
in the entire Old Testament who's a real person and
that we actually have historical sources for, and we know
who her niece was, and you know these things, and
it's it's wild to me how many of them are
just not And this is how we know the story
of Ruth is made up. This is how we know
the story of Esther is made up. It's just one
thing after another.
Speaker 3: And so the book is in three sections. The first
section is five stories of five important women in the Bible,
told from their perspective, and then the commentary that goes
with them. Then there's a great Then there are a
bunch of topics like menopaus and like menstruation, which is
you know, like unclean, unclean, all that stuff.
Speaker 4: Depart the camp for seven days until now stop bleeding
it and then thou might return kind of thing.
Speaker 3: And a big section on virginity, because the virginity, the
whole thing about making virginity such a big deal leads
to so many things like making young girls the one
that you want to go after, which then we kind
of kind of tie it into the Epstein wells and
we did, you know, like there's a whole lot of
stuff in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's some very interesting things when you get
into the nitty gritty of what the Bible says, who
the Bible says you can have sex with, and who
you can't, but mostly who you can have sex with.
There's some really jaw dropping moments in that chapter.
Speaker 4: Without being too graphic. I mean, I always it has
to be asked, so I will ask the question. But
if god soldiers go in and they kill the Midianites
and capture the virgin girls, and if you're going to
take a woman and test her for her virginity, how's
that done? In the Old Testament times? I mean, it's
now my brain is going to some very dark places.
Does anybody else ask those questions?
Speaker 2: Book? Is it provokes all these conversations, that provokes all
these questions. That's what we're really loving about it from
the reaction of the people who've read it so far.
Speaker 3: Right, and we even talk about how there's a kind
of surgery you can have done now in the modern
world that rebuilds the hymen, so you can conte that
you were a virgin, like I mean, we talked about
how that's being done in various countries, and we've met
female doctors talking about that stuff.
Speaker 5: Now we go right into it, we do.
Speaker 4: You've got a chapter in your book called your Hymen
or Your Life, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because why if you didn't bleed on your wedding
night and there weren't signs of blood on the sheets,
then you got stone to death.
Speaker 4: Let's come back to clearly written by boys. I'm reversing
in my brain the King Solomon scenario. Right, So let's
say it was Ruth or Naomi or you know, one
of the Mary's or whatever that had seven hundred spouses
and three hundred male concubines. How would that have gone
over in the older New Testament, right.
Speaker 2: And there's so many things like that that they just
throw it out and we just we've heard it all
our lives, so we don't think about it. But when
you stop and think about it, well, if this is
the other way around, it changes their perspective.
Speaker 4: Well, Karis, if I'm talking to someone who is talking,
I mean, let's get into the this relates to today
as we see the people that are going after LGBT marriage,
et cetera, and they're saying one man, one woman biblical marriage,
and these same people are okay with seven hundred wives
and three hundred concubines, Keras, how do you think they
get around that?
Speaker 3: Well, they like what they like. They just take it
from what they want, just like the whole Bible's written
by guys who wanted to make things be the way.
Speaker 5: They want them to be. So yeah, it's really not We've.
Speaker 3: Got a section and I was just trying to find
the cartoon it shows my vout marriage.
Speaker 4: With the Biblical I've got one illustration queued up and
it's got this. It's got a man sitting on what
looks like a throne with a crown, and he's surrounded
by hot babes, and Christians are okay with that. They're like, ah, hey,
King Solomon, what an admirable figures? And then the other
Then I come back to more logistics, Well, how do
you how do you deal with one thousand, seven hundred
wives and three You wouldn't need an Excel spreadsheet to
keep up with your own relationships?
Speaker 3: Is all a really nice section about when the queen esther,
when she gets chosen to be one of the concubines
before she becomes the queen, and we describe what that
would have been like, like what the what the concubine
facilities were for the king?
Speaker 5: It's yeah, we we have a lot of fun with
all these topics.
Speaker 2: It's a fun book. It takes you places you didn't
know you were going to go.
Speaker 4: So, when we talk about rape culture in the Bible outright,
but especially in the ot, is it true that the
rape of a woman was not considered as much a
violation of the woman but a property crime against a man.
Speaker 3: Goes right, and you could pay the father some money
because you've rapped his daughter, and he could accept that money,
and then she would have to marry him and live
with this rapist and you know, the father could say, yeah,
that's fine and let that happen, or he could say, no,
you don't have to marry him, but the guy still
has to pay him money.
Speaker 2: But her opinion has no part happen to do with it,
however whatsoever.
Speaker 4: I have this trick that I occasionally use. Some people
agree with that, some people don't. But I get into
the kidnapping of the virgins, and you can keep her
for thirty days and change your appearance, and if she
doesn't please you, you can release her like a straight cat.
And the buying and selling of women, how they're devalued
by half, and the bitter water test, where if she's
suspected of adultery, you drink the thing. And I always
I start with I read these horrible things in the Quran.
Islam is such a barbaric religion, and the Christians like,
this is horrific? How can anyone believe this? And then
I pull the rug out from underneath him. Some people
think that's an a dishonest and underhanded approach. It may be,
but I do it.
Speaker 2: I do so yes, what they instantly do, it's like, oh, wait, oh,
you're taking that seth oh it's really beautiful and wonderful, or.
Speaker 4: Even more alarming, is divine command theory or vertical morality? Well,
if God wants it that way, then it becomes moral
by default, which is terrifying.
Speaker 3: We talk about the fact that this has led to
even modern like in modern times, and I think it
was in the sixties in Italy you could still do
rape marriage like you could rape a girl. And we
talked about a specific case and give the chapter in
verson names of the newspapers have talked about it, even
where this guy captured a girl out of her house
and raped her, took her away with her his buddies
for a while, and then let her go back and
went to the father and said I want to marry her,
and she was supposed to marry him, and that was
the law of the land at the time.
Speaker 2: She was the first one to say, no, that's not
going to happen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Oh, you don't say that in a world of men,
in a book written by boys, do you?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 4: If I move out of the books of the Old
Testament into the news, one of the arguments from at
least the casual Christian is well, yeah, God was kind
of a barbaric nasty, judgmental, temperamental asshole back then. But
Jesus is love and light. New Testament.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so horrible Old Testament stuff. Now we have the
New Testament.
Speaker 4: Yay, Jesus, How do you address that? How do you
Jesus loves everybody, and he honors women in the NT.
How do you respond.
Speaker 2: He doesn't even honor women by ancient standards, and ancient
centers are not exactly a high bar. But there are
pagan and foreign religions that do a better job of
treating women than Jesus does.
Speaker 4: Well. I mean, I know he compared the gentile woman
to the dog, and I want to say it was
Mark or is one of the gospel obviously one of
the gospels. But you know he and he treated his
own mother pretty poorly, as I remember, didn't Caros.
Speaker 5: Yeah he did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he distired a couple of times. And we've got
a section in there that's like a cosmo quiz, and
it's called these Jesus a bad boyfriend, And we take
all these different questions and answer them based on what
it says in the Bible. And I know, I had
a couple of Christian friends read the book and they
were fine with everything up until then they said, Oh,
it's educational and it's funny, it's well written, and it's
fun and I like the cartoons and everything got to
Jesus and it was like, oh, no, I can't say this, no, no, sorry,
I had to stop reading.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's why we want you to give this
to your Christian women friends. Buy this book for them,
because yeah, everyone is willing to, you know, take a
pass on the Old Testament. But as soon as you
start pointing out how Jesus is not that great either, boom,
that's a whole different.
Speaker 4: I mean Paul Paul's famous approach to women throughout the
What thirteen book that he had penned. When he references women,
it's usually go home, tell your husband. You don't have
the authority to open your mouth in church. I mean,
Paul was not a fan of females.
Speaker 2: Knew that's a whole different rabbit hole we could go down.
I will say in his defense, the most misogynistic things
attributed Paul come from forgers in his name, like Titus
first and second Timothy. But he's wildly indifferent to the
thought of sleeping with women. And he says, I don't
understand why all men can't be like me, perfectly able
to withstand the temptation of women, you know, while he's
gallivanting with his buddy Barnabas and his boy toy Timothy.
Speaker 4: And yeah, short break, and we will continue this conversation
in just a second. Talking here with my very special guest,
Dave Fitzgerald and Karis Burgkowski, authors or co authors of
the new book Clearly Written by Boys's Guide to the Bible,
which is linked in the description box. Both of you
took me back in the book. You took me back
to my high school days of true love weights and
abstinence pledges. And I remember there was one I had
a friend and their parents said, if you will abstain
from sex until marriage, we have like in escrow. And
this sounds made up. It it's true five hundred bucks,
which was a lot of money anyway, but it's really
a lot of money. Back in nineteen eighty three. We
have five hundred dollars that we'll just give you if
you promise us and you keep that promise. And I
thought that's jacked up, Like that's jacked up, guys, But
you get keros old pinball to you purity culture. In
the book, tell Me where you go with this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked about the purity balls and the purity
the whole purity culture.
Speaker 4: You got to describe a purity ball because there will
be a few new listeners who haven't heard us talk
about it.
Speaker 3: Where the father and the daughter go to this ball
and they're all dressed up like they're going to a
wedding practically, and she promises not to have sex and
puts already gives her a ring and like gets like
he's her boyfriend for till she's old enough to get married,
and oh my god, it's really creepy.
Speaker 4: If you want to see examples of this, go to
YouTube and type in my name is Seth Andrews, and
then a speech called God likes to watch because let's
face it, biblical marriage is always a threesome, right, and
you and your partner and God is overseeing, so it's
always a threesome. But I show examples of fathers who
are telling their very young daughters that you will I
will be your boyfriend until you get married, and in
the purity ceremony, creepy like eleven year old girls in
a wedding gown. Sometimes looking up before these big, looming,
giant crosses and kneeling down and writing their names on
these pledges. And they've got rings with scriptures on them.
And it's freaking culty. It's very culty. And in the book,
purity culture is rooted in actual verses of scripture. I mean,
these fathers and pastors and guardian mothers, whoever can go
back chapter and verse right.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, And because David's been working with those kinds
of things in all of his other books, Like every
thing we say has a Bible verse, like you can
look it up in your Bible, Like pretty much everything
is backed up, and we give them lots of tools.
And then at the end we have a whole section
for book clubs, like get your friends together and have
a book club, and here's the questions you can ask
and things you can look up and yeah.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, one thing I really appreciate is that you
really go far beyond the surface again of what this
audience is going to know. Whether it's the bitter Water
test or slavery or I don't know, the treatment of
women by Jesus. These are things that are often well known.
You guys go a lot deeper so as you were
doing your research, I mean, give me something that surprised you,
something that maybe you didn't even know starting the journey.
Was there something where you're like, oh, like shit, this
is crazy, anything popped to your mind.
Speaker 2: I mean, there were several that like, wow, it's even
worse than we thought, especially when you get through the
context behind these stories. You Yeah, things get really disturbing
really fast. And then there's just things that are happening now,
like female circumcision that's just so horrific we can barely
even stand to think about it. Well, there were some,
there were some surprisingly optimistic things we came across too,
And that's that Now, since the pandemic, since this whole
the last twenty years or so of Christian evangel evangelism
becoming so misogynistic, openly misogynistic, that for the first time
in recorded four decades of Christian trend tracking, there are
more men in the pews than women women are. They're
not protesting, they're not making a fuss. They're just Irish exiting.
They're just we're done.
Speaker 4: In Irish exiting.
Speaker 2: They're just gone. And now there groups like the Barnet
Group that track they make their living tracking Christian trends.
They've never seen anything like it in all the years
they've been keeping track.
Speaker 4: I'm sure. I'm sure. I literally see a line in
my brain, a line of women walking out of the
Southern Baptist Convention that still thinks it's the year eleven.
By the way, Yeah, you know, I Caris, you've been
watching what's going on with the SBC and all of these,
Like I tended to think that even even mainstream Christianity
was kind of over it, like we're going to get
rid of all this other stuff and we're going to evolve. No,
there's a whole section that's going back. They literally want
some sort of a gender feudalism, right, yeah, phrase, I.
Speaker 2: Wish we'd put that in a book.
Speaker 4: You're welcome, I'm a giver project.
Speaker 3: They want to take a loans rate to vote, like
one vote for household.
Speaker 4: And then we saw it was at a Turning Point
USA event where there was a group full of women
and they were like saying, I'm good with it. The
slaves are celebrating their chains. Karas. So you're a woman,
does how does a woman go into the auditorium and
say less liberty for me? Yay?
Speaker 5: What do you think is happening there rainwashing?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, literally, we were talking to Brady Goodwin, who
is a black ex Christian recording artist now turned atheist.
And it's the parallels between the way the Bible treats
women and the way the racism and the sexism of
the Bible kind of go hand in hand. And like
the slave sermons. Jeremiah Kamara, who did that amazing book
movie Contradiction and amazing books on slave sermons, they are
so indoctrinated to be slaves, and all Christianity is meant
to be slave. The very fact that we hold our
hands like that the way a slave gets his wristbound.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Dan Barker's pointed that out these are all this is
a slave religion, and and it's not black people, it's everybody.
Everybody is a slave in this religion. Some have managed
to become on top of the slave pile and make
lots of money of it and lots of power, but
they're all still slaves.
Speaker 4: Kris, would you have an extra thought? I heard you
jump in.
Speaker 5: I can't even remember what I was going to say.
Speaker 4: I do the same thing. Well, I noticed, like this
proof I've read the book Everybody, but you reference the
Civil War era civil rights activist Frederick Douglass, who was
an amazing human rights activist in regard to slavery, and
Douglas's words really resonates all these many many years later,
don't they.
Speaker 2: Basically you said, of all the slave owners, the ones
that we most feared were the religious slaveholders, because they
were the worst, the most vicious, and they slept easy
at night knowing that they were living a righteous life
for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as the Bible tells them, they can beat their
slaves and how to beat them and what to do
with them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, God wills it has been the biggest freaking cop
out in history, has it not. Women can't vote during
the suffrage. You know, they're protesting God wills it. The
ownership of people LGBT people. You know, it's God's idea,
not mine, not my problem. I always think of that
Susan B.
Speaker 2: Anthony quote when they're having babies numbersticker. I said it,
God believes it. That settles it.
Speaker 4: I think Susan B. Anthony was quoted as saying, I
distrust when someone tells me what God wants because it
usually coincides with what they want. I totally paraphrase that.
Any final thoughts about the book before I let you
two beautiful people go, I'll start with you, caris you
want to do an elevator picture? Anything I've missed.
Speaker 3: I just think that the book is worth reading just
because it's fun to read. It's written in a conversational,
fun kind of a way. You learn a lot, but
you don't feel like you're in class like you learn it.
Some of it will make you laugh, some of it'll
make you cry, some it'll make you really really pissed off,
because some of our readers have told us that they
just had to slam the bookshut and sit there for
an hour before they could go on and read some more.
So read it because it's going to be an experience
to read it, like you'll learn stuff.
Speaker 5: But read it because you're going to enjoy reading it.
Speaker 2: David, I would like to say, speaking as a man,
even though I'm half mother on my mom a half
woman on my mom's side, this is not a book
for women. It's a book for men. It's a book
for atheists, it's a book for Christians, it's a book
for everybody, because at the end of the day, it
points it's it's talking about how the Bible misuses women.
But where it miss uses women today, it misses men tomorrow.
You're next. As long as you let the Bible do
this to women, or to gay people, or to trans people,
or to black people, whatever you are, you're also in
those crosshairs. No.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's the main thing. There's no such thing
as the word of God. And don't let anybody tell
you this is God's word.
Speaker 4: Just what that makes me want to buy copies and
send one to Joyce Meyer, Paula White, Beth Moore, Victoria Ostein.
Speaker 2: And that's all your Christian women friends, all your Christian
men friends.
Speaker 4: I'm sending it to you in love, in the Love
of Jesus, In the Love of Jesus.
Speaker 2: Yours in Christ, Seth Andrews.
Speaker 4: Harris Burkowski David Fitzgerald, co authors of the new book
Clearly Written by Boys, A Woman's Guide to the Bible,
which I will link. You got what paperback, hardcover, kendall audio.
You guys do audio on that, you do the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Audio wills come when we can make that happen. Okay, Wow,
it's gonna be paperback and audio.
Speaker 3: Paperback and ebook, sorry, book, but audio will come and
it's going to be fun too, because we're going to
make it more like a radio play with each of
these women talking in different voices and stuff like that.
Speaker 4: I love it. I love it like a like an
audio stage play. That's going to be fun. Okay, well
linked in the description box. Congrats. I know this has
been a labor of love a long time coming, and
I'm telling everybody it's good and it's a little different
than you think it's It goes beyond what an educated
person even about the Bible, will expect, and I think
it might help you in conversations you have about the
Bible's approach to both men and women. Thank you both
for talking to me today. Good to see you, Thank.
Speaker 5: You very much.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Sam, and we'll see it baha,
yes see you.
Speaker 4: Bahaka in August, Sarnia, Ontario, Bahcoon dot com. An amazing conference.
Thanks again, guys.
Speaker 5: Thank you, thanks all.
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