Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through.
Speaker 1: The rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If
I tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth,
not because I put my hand on a book and
made a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Usian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: These are just a few thoughts I have released in
video for that YouTube link is in the description box,
but the audio is right here and it runs about
thirteen minutes. I know that you and I are doing
our best to engage with our day, do our jobs,
take care of our families, fulfill our obligations. But when
you have just watched seventy two million of your fellow
country men and women vote to set fire to the
Western world, it's hard to focus. And so I thought
I would just say out loud what I think a
lot of us are feeling quietly. I remember twenty sixteen,
the unexpected Trump victory felt like an electrical shock. I
was so mad, I was so indignant. It motivated me
to express every ounce of outrage verbally in writing online.
Eight years later, I still feel shock and indignation, but
the electricity not as much. It feels overshadowed by a
kind of numb resignation. I just look around. I can't
believe it. Seventy million Americans looked at the grifter, the predator,
the bully, the child, the Khan, the anti democracy want
to be king, and they said, yeah, I want that.
It is hard not to feel the way that gor
Vidal felt about Western democracy. He wrote these words. He said,
as societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent too. Words
are used to disguise, not to illuminate action. You liberate
a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse,
so that at election time people will solemnly vote against
their own interests. You know, today I feel two sensations.
First of all, the idea of spending any time in
the direct vicinity of family members, friends, associates, people that
I bump into in my life. The idea of being
in a physical space next to them sickens me right,
the people who voted for an assault on democracy and decency,
I just feel resentful. And two, while I will continue
to speak to my values, I am also preparing to
watch people gleefully destroy the American experiments. You know, this
country may well choke to death on the smoke of
its own bonfires. And sometimes it feels like all the
rest of us can do is put on a gas
mask and point garden hoses at the flames. I mean,
I still feel like a crusader for what is just,
but I also feel like a spectator. You know, I'm
standing behind the led she in advance of the dirty bomb,
hoping people might survive this. My evangelical trumper associates right now,
people that I know personally, they are likely celebrating. It's
probably a party. They're high fiving and thanking Jesus right
and whatever their intentions may be, maybe they think they
are being noble, it's about the abortion debates or something else.
Or maybe they bought into the myth of the billionaire genius.
Maybe they believe in divine destiny. Whatever their glee makes
me sick, God's sheep are likely thanking their sweet Lord
for bringing unto them. A shepherd, and they see these
events as destiny biblical. They have combined the cult of
Christianity with the cult of Maga. All the while they
are discarding the best teachings of Jesus Christ, humility, general charity.
Their bibles say that the love of money is the
root of all evil. They worship rich people. Their bibles say,
don't take vengeance. They cheer the guy who says, get
even with your enemies. You have so much to do.
You don't have time to get even.
Speaker 1: You only have time to get right. Well, revenge does
take time. I will say that does, and sometimes revenge
can be justified.
Speaker 2: Their bibles say to forgive. They admire the guy who
holds grudges and threatens the rights of those who criticize.
Their bibles say, do not oppress the foreigner. Meanwhile, they
are vilifying immigrants. Their Bible declares in Matthew that those
who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble
themselves will be exalted. They love the egomaniac. Their bibles
say not to perform their prayers in public. Go to
your quiet room. Right. They applaud Christian nationalist prayer theater
in the halls of power. Their Bibles say they should
commit themselves to serving others, and then they turn around
and send their money and give their allegiance and adoration
to someone who serves only himself. Self service seems to
be part of the MAGA movement. You and I express
real concern, right great concern about the rights of women,
the rights and the safety and the equality of marginalized groups,
minority groups, the victims of atrocities in foreign lands, the
cruelty and the bullying, and the crazy word salad disinformation
that defines most of Trump cult. And these people look
at us, and what do they do? They complain about
the price of a dozen ages or many of these people,
immigrants are both lazy leeches who are milking the system
without paying any taxes or having any societal responsibility, and
they are also hard workers coming to steal their jobs.
They're convinced that devil democrats want to padlock their churches
and come into their private homes and confiscate their bibles
and make Christianity illegal, which is crazy because these supposedly
persecuted American Christians are the least victimized, persecuted, and endangered
demographic in the entire country. They seem to value things
based on borderlines that were subjectively drawn by people that
they don't even know. They hold up their fingers and
they say, we're number one, talking about a nation that
fails next to all other developed nations in almost every
metric healthcare, cost of living, education, violent crime, etc. They
don't see the whole world because to them, the US
is the world, and everybody else is somehow less important,
less interesting, less valuable. I think it's ironic that we
are still called the United States of America United, except
that we're split in regard to almost every opinion that
we have. And sometimes I have this thought, I wonder,
I wonder what might happen if we divided the United
States into two separate countries, Nation A and Nation B.
So Nation A could discover what MAGA really means. A
dictatorship at the mercy of Trump and Vance and the
rfks and the elons, and the demagogues and the oligarchs,
the agents of religious and financial privilege, the managers of wombs,
the purity police, the school boards who are writing mythology
into school curriculums. It could erase or at least airbrush history.
So lessons from history would not be learned by future generations.
Nation A could make scientists the bad guys. It could
ignore deadly viruses and reject vaccines. It could choke the
planet with unregulated industry. It could pray to the sky
against all these afflictions happening on the ground. It could
pretend that the rest of the world doesn't even exist
or it doesn't matter. Nation A would be an alternate reality.
It could be a place where people were finally forced
to experience the consequences of ignoring the true reality. And
on the other side would be Nation B. And this
is where I would like to live. Nation BE would
return to the original motto of the United States, e
pluribus unum out of many one. Our diversity would be
something to embrace and celebrate. We wouldn't vilify the immigrant.
We could disagree and discuss, even argue about things, without
fear for our rights, or our safety or our lives.
We could recognize that we are both individuals and we
are a community. We could enjoy personal liberties while also
embracing collectivist values. We would be both one of us
and all of us. We would protect and empower science
and scientists. We would use our great advances to inoculate
and improve and save people's lives. We could make sure
that people had individual rights to be religious. We would
find for their right to be personally religious, but we
would also ensure that government never became a church. We'd
see ourselves as citizens of America, but also citizens of
the world. Everybody a part of the human condition. We
are all brothers and sisters. We take better care of
our environment, serving the planet that has served us. We
would teach our history without air brushing or erasing it.
We would be honest about what our country has been
and what it's done for better and worse, to help
educate and inform the future. We'd celebrate success without allowing
the oligarchs and the hoarders. We would elect an accountable
president and not a king. And I wonder how these
two nations would fare against each other, You know, you
have to wonder. Would Nation A come knocking on the
doors of nation be begging for equal rights that they
had eventually lost, Begging for medicines that they had previously
thrown in the trash. Can you know, give me a vaccine,
give me prevention, give me a cure. They would beg
for cleaner air and water. They would beg for safe
haven against bigots. They would beg for teachers instead of preachers.
They would beg for leaders that didn't act like gods.
Questions like these, scenarios, like these, realities like these, they
are why we should seriously be teaching our history. You know,
you and I know that the historians of the future
are going to look back at the United States today
and they're going to look at us much the same
way that some of the rest of the world is
looking at us right now. They're going to say, what
the hell happened? And for my parts, while I do
feel real despair, I'm going to try not to look
at the headlines as much as I look at the people.
Tens of millions of people voted for authoritarianism, corruption, grift, oppression, division, hatred.
I'm going to try to remember them, But I'm also
going to remember the tens of millions that resisted. And
I refuse to do what MAGA culture wants me to do,
give up and let them operate unchecked and uncriticized. They
want us to check out, right, because if we check out,
then nation A becomes Nation A and B. Standing against
the threat is the only hope we've got of somehow
salvaging what the United States was supposed to be. The
agents of harm must be they must be confronted by
the advocates for humanity. And even if this country self
destructs all around us, we can hold our heads up
and say that we never gave up, we never stopped fighting,
we never surrendered our values, our humanity. We can say
proudly that our conscience is clean. Let's work together to
make sure historians also remember that.
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