 103.9 FM, W-O-Z-O Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, digital free thought radio hour. Hello and welcome to the digital free thought radio hour on W-O-Z-O Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, March 14th, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes or a doubt or five. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Hello everybody. How are you today? You look like a puppet. Yeah. For the radio audience. They was using a filter made and looked like a puppet. Okay. And whether it's today or as our guests are George one and two and Scott. Hello all. Actually, it's a, what is it, Brooklyn? Oh, Brooklyn. Brooklyn and Buffalo. Buffalo, Buffalo. That's right. Okay. Radio, digital free thought radio hours, a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in Knoxville, why are you just not? There are several atheist free thinking and rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville. And we'll be telling you more about how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. If you'd like to interrupt, interact with us during the show, go to Facebook, search for our digital free thought radio hour page and use the messaging function to send us questions or comments. Wombat, what do you have for us today as far as topics go? I want to talk about a really interesting thing that was brought up in last week's show when Boudreau bought up the idea of pick farmers and how religion was thinking about like, hey, you know, there's the argument could be made that back in the day, you don't want to have gay pick farmers. You just want to have pick farmers. And he was sticking it out. And I just thought it was the funniest analogy that he was coming out. We all, we eventually came to something a bit more concrete, but it did touch on something a little more interesting, which was why does religion have an issue with gay people in the first place? Like what is the rationale behind it? And if it's not pick farming, like what is like the actual reason for it? And so I want to go over that along with a bunch of other topics today. But I do want to touch bases with how everyone's been doing since the last time we've talked. Buffalo, we'll start with you. Have you been? How's daylight savings time treating you? You look perfectly clocked. And I think is the right word for it. It's been fine because my wife changes the clocks. Otherwise, I wouldn't be talking to you. Nice. Nice. But yeah, no, I've been fine. Been breaking out a little bit. Both my wife and I have had both shots. And so we're, but when we, we've been to two restaurants in the past year and that was all in this past week. But we call them up and ask them what time they have a huge number of people there. And so we're beginning to re-enjoy going and eating out. Nice. Are you sort of missing the opportunity to not go outside anymore? Like there's no longer an excuse to just be like, ah, but I can totally skip that bar mitzvah. Or I could, I don't have that person move anymore. Like, isn't that, wasn't that a great excuse? I don't know. I think since I'm retired, I don't spend that much time out in public anyway. So I guess I really hadn't thought about it that way. Fair enough. No, we've, we've just, we've enjoyed being able to get back out and see the grandkids a little bit more and that sort of thing. That's good. It's an issue of choice. Now you can choose to go out. Yeah. Scott, we'll throw it up at you. What new music or weird gadgets or stuff that you got now going on? Oh man, we've got all kinds of gadgets. Hold on a second. Oh, okay. Okay. You've got the button. Got the new sequence. Oh, oh, that's a new thing. That's brand new. Oh yeah. That looks cool. Okay. So it looks like a keyboard. It's a keyboard with buttons on the top. It's very, very. It's called a sequencer, the Arturia keystep 37. But yeah, I've released a album. It's distributed all over the place. Amazon, iTunes, everything like that. You can get it also on, of course, my band page. So I've been doing that and the remixes for old C.C. Peniston is coming out soon. C.C. Peniston was an old dance music artist in the 90s. Okay. So we worked out a licensing deal and actually releasing that soon and then other stuff. So yeah, the music is really keeping me excited and busy and all of that all week long. So I got the same question for you that I got for Buffalo. Now that, you know, we are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel as far as COVID is going. Are you going to feel sad that you won't have as much time to just be processing and buying stuff and setting up your music anymore? Now you're going to have to go outside and actually do things like interact with people. Oh my gosh. Right, right, right. You want to make your music. What's going on? How do you feel about that? Well, that's the fun thing is that this gave me the opportunity to really just get my little arsenal together and get my clan together, force me into that, into that mode. So now the groundwork is laid. Nice. Hopefully as, you know, we'll be able to do outdoor functions. I'll be able to like gig and get out there and stuff. And that's the plan. I want to definitely get out there and perform and all of that good stuff again. So Scott, what's the name of your album before we move on? Yeah. Collapse reality. Okay. Collapse reality. So it's like an electronic music, like different genres of electronic music is what I'm exploring on that one. So it's a little jet. There's a lot of jazzy sort of chord progression with it. Nice. And then there's also some really strict dark electronic. There's some melodic electronica. Yes. Different, different little flavors on that, on that record. It's always a hard thing to describe what your music sounds like with words. Isn't it? It's just like, uh, so, you know, if Dave Matthews went to third grade in, in New York, it would sound like that mixed with like lemonade and it's like, what are you talking about? It's like, oh, you got to listen to the song to understand. It's like, oh yeah, I see, I hear it. I feel your pain. And we'll have you happy to play your end of your music on the show. Just let me know, send me something and we'll be able to play during the break. No doubt. George, how you been since last week? I heard you got on a fight. Yes. We'll have three things to mention. So I'll try to make them all real fast. Okay. The first one is, um, I've gotten my COVID shots. My second one three weeks ago. And, um, I want to report that I had side effects, uh, 24 hours after the second shot. And the side effects went away 12 hours after that. Fantastic. And the side effects that I had were pretty much what's going on on the CDC website. Take it for, you know, give a heads up, guys. Which, which, which vaccine did you get? It was a Moderna. I got Moderna too. Yes. Um, the second thing I want to mention is that, uh, right before I came to join you people, I was listening on YouTube to box Easter oratorio. And I regard like many other musicians, I regard Bach as the ultimate composer of all time. And, um, Bruno Mars. If no, no. Okay. We have opinions. And among musicians, it's virtually unanimous in my experience, Charlie Parker. By the way. And, uh, if I were alive in the, I guess it was the 17th century and I went to church and listened to Bach every week. I would not be an atheist. And that's, that's where I'm at. The third thing was that, yes, last Sunday, I was at a local meeting in my rural county of progressives. And I was attacked. I, um, I inadvertently stuck my stick, my, my, um, I stuck my innocent stick into somebody else's beehive. Okay. And that person attacked me and that person happens to be a psychotherapist. You just call that person a psycho and then try to make it okay by saying therapist afterwards immediately. So she's a psycho bank teller. It's like the moral mean thing to say. The moral of this story is that if, if you're in therapy and you start feeling really bad about yourself, start thinking about where the therapist is at. And, um, you know, if she's got a chip on her shoulder, get out of there. Yeah. You got to be aware, be aware of that. You got to browse for the right therapist. Okay. I hope I'm not dominating the conversation too much. So I'm stopping. Out of five. I want to throw it out at you. It looks like you're eating food. You're still combing your hair. What's going on? Did we catch you by surprise? You did. I was caught off time by an hour due to daylight savings time, but I had changed all the clocks in the house except the living room. And I was on the living room and I was looking at the clock. So he got me. I'm lucky enough to have a cat. Still eating. My alarm clock is my cat. And so like, I have switched to daylight savings time automatically. It will ring. And my cat's like five minutes later, I should have food coming out of my automatic food disposal. He runs straight to it. And he's just like, I already got fed an hour ago. Shouldn't I get more food? It's like, no, no, no, no. He starts biting. I was up at seven. I just didn't keep an eye on the time. No, I got my second Moderna shot this week. I also had side effects. Chills. Chills were the worst. But for about 24 hours after I got it and for another 24 hours, I had them. So it wasn't too good. Let me tell you it's over now. I got my shot. I even posted the video on the internet. My second Moderna. And I didn't get a single symptom. I feel really bad because you're supposed to get symptoms. As you should. I was looking forward to getting sick. I called ahead to work ahead of time being like, I can't show up to work, guys. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, Tyrone. You got to stay home. I'm like, cool. I got my bed ready to go. I had like, I went grocery shopping. I had a whole bunch of like yogurts. I was like planning food out perfectly for like building antibodies. I was ready to get sick, got the shot, come home. Nothing. And I was just like, well, this is disappointing. My only complaint is I wish I was sicker. So I got a sore arm. So at least I knew that was working. But for the most part, nothing. I was ready to go to work the next day. We're different ages. And that might be the key here. Yeah. There's a tiny, tiny, tiny person at our job who got the shot and was completely devastated. And I'm like, it's the same volume for me and my giant arm. What was her, what was his or her age, Tyrone? Uh, younger than I am, maybe like in the late 20s. And so I was like, it's weird that the same volume of shot goes into every, every different phenotype of person. But it works. And I'm happy. Can you imagine the distribution system if that was a consideration? Well, for some reason, and I don't mean this in a bad way. They put all the old people first and I'm like, okay, that's great. That's great. That's great. But they're the old person by shot is the same as the young person shot. And it's just like, maybe there's some sort of thoughts. I got the Pfizer and I'm 77 and I didn't feel a thing. So I don't, I don't think the ages, I wonder, and I've read this, that what might be a factor is how you, how constantly you tickle your immune system. So if you get out and you walk in the woods and you breathe in spores and you give out lots of things for your immune system to normally attack it, it may be better prepared for an attack by an artificial. One of the good reasons for children to play outside. That's right. And not to cover the cat box at night. Not to cover the cat box at night. This is this is a new one. Guys, let's get into the topic of the show. We're going to be talking about why do, why do we think? Oh, I got everybody, right? I did get everybody right. Great. I did. Why do we think that religion actually does target gay people specifically? And so the reason why we were talking about that yesterday was we were trying to come up with an idea for why religion tends to like make enemies of certain groups of people and they have a thing for gay people, which is like its own thing. Larry, doubt or five, what do you got? Well, the earlier religions are religions from 3,000, 2,500 years ago. Their leaders were preachers. They were cultists basically. They were pure, pure than the average man. They, they had certain strictures amongst there. So man and woman, nothing shall be against the joining of those two. Man on man love is not good. So they wrote the book basically. And now we're living 2,500 years later under the thumb of long dead preachers. And you know, all you have to do is look in Leviticus and several other places, Deuteronomy in the Bible to find out that they just don't like gays and don't want to have people do anything in that vein. So they were probably, they probably were chasing their fantasy at the same time. Maybe could be. Oh, that's a spicy cake. That's a spicy cake, Buffalo. I want to come back to that. But Larry, I feel like that explains the how we've come to have religion that hates gay people. Some guy wrote it in the book. Why did they target them in the first place? Why do you think that was the case? It's just the purity of their cult and their devotion and the direction it's supposed to take. Why? Who knows? Doesn't it say in the Bible, man shall not lie with a man? Yeah, that's what I'm referring to. Where's that come from? Some guy wrote that in a book somewhere. Why do they write that? Where is that in the Bible? Google search will tell you. I don't know. I think it doesn't really matter. I think it's Leviticus. Yeah, maybe. Buffalo, I'd like to go back to that spicy point that you made. You said they were potentially envious. Like what was going on there? What was that mind? Not envy. They had a secret fantasy that they were practicing while they told everybody not to practice it. Now, there is groundwork for this because before Christianity took over, like you go into Greek society, even Spartan society, pediatry, gay men hooking up, women hooking up, that was like an expected societal norm, right? And if you think about like, where is it that, and when Rome took over Greece and then began to foster what we now have as Christianity, like the bedrock of people relationships were not so marginalized as you can only have man and woman. Like that is a fairly novel concept in the culture of humanity. Maybe in the last like, around maybe say 5,000, maybe I would say 3,000 years where it started people being like, hey, this is the best way. This is not the best way. These are the ones that we're going to need to punish. These are the ones we don't need to punish. So I think there may be some groundwork there because I would not be surprised. Native Americans, they call them two spirits. Man and a woman in the same body. George, what do you got? You know, I've been thinking while you're talking that in a world where they're divided into us and them, there are people who have a lot to gain from attacking them. It gives them more power. They focus other people this way. And so it's important for them to have a them to point fingers at. They'll create one if they don't have one. They'll create one if they don't have one, maybe. Yeah. And in my opinion, the thing that gay people have never had in their benefit was numbers. And I think that's what makes them the easy target because they were a minority that didn't have a voice, that were easy to target and would have no chance of propagating in the future. Just on the basis of how things work. And so it's like, there's a great group to target that we don't have to worry about in the long term. And while we target them, people will flock to us because they are an easy target. Scott, I want to make one last point before we jump to you, but I'm thinking the reason why they do that is the SMM mortality. Because if it wasn't gays, it'd be Jews. If it wasn't Jews, it'd be Saxons. If it wasn't Saxons, it'd be albinos or women. It would find a group of people regardless to support the ideology of we are the good side. They are the bad side. Join us because we have this basal human programming that wants to be on the good end. And we know how to do that. We need to find something to demonize or attack. We have a really unfortunate system where it's like we want to know where the tigers are in the jungles. And we are so desperate to know where the threats are that we're willing to overlook our commonalities and exercise empathy so that we can make sure that we are on the side that is observant of a threat because that makes us feel safe. And that is a problematic situation that religion loves to strive on itself on. Scott, what do you think about that? And what's your opinion? Well, I was just thinking here that not all religions condemn homosexuality. Very true. Like, for example, in Buddhism and Hinduism, homosexuality is never directly forbidden in any text. But there is a range and at particular times, Buddhists and Hindu cultures may have looked at homosexuality as a defilement or some sort of disobedience to nature, some kind of genetic fallacy or something. But this isn't really expressed in the text themselves that they base those religions on. But I think that most of what you're going to find with homosexuality being like a sin or wrong is in these Abrahamic religions where they even have concepts of sin. So they look, and even in though, like I was speaking to a Bible scholar last week, he's an Old Testament and Sumerian Bible scholar. We call him Dr. Josh. And he was saying that actually, even in the Abrahamic religions, that was homosexuality and prostitution was a norm. It was called temple prostitution and Judaism. And male prostitutes would be in the temple doing that. And then it just evolved over time politically to kind of get rid of that practice and condemn it and call it like a sin. But it was an ever-evolving thing. So even in Abrahamic religions, homosexuality was always considered bad at some point in time. George, you want to weigh in? Yeah, I just have a question. Where are Unitarians in all this and coming right after that? Is Unitarianism, is that a religion? You know what? I would say it's definitely a congregation that has a philosophy or a dogma that's more about accepting different points of view. It's not as straightforward as standard-feet forms of theism. But if you're an atheist, you can go to Unitarian and have a really good time. And they're very open with gay people, too. And so it might be worthwhile just to have that. That's a good point, George. Larry, what do you think? I'm going to say that they leave the dogma, as it were, up to the individual. You can believe whatever you want. They're all about interfaith congregations. The one thing that they do agree on, Unitarian Universalists, is that everybody is going to heaven no matter what you believe. I mean, no, that's it, really. I did not know that. So have a good time. Get together. Be with your fellow man. Don't worry about what they believe. Follow your own conscience. Can I join? No, hold on. Anybody can join. So the Unitarians in Kentucky, I only went to one Unitarian church, so it's not representative of everybody. But the ones I was there did definitely have Christians there. But every single person I talked to was atheists when I just asked them flat out. They're like, yeah, I'm an atheist. So that's cool. That's why I went the first time everybody told me that atheists were welcome. And what's really funny was the very first time I went, they had a going way. It was spring, so I had a lot of people moving out after school. So what they do is they let a person or two give a sermon in their own faith before they leave. So what did I get the first time I went? Baptist Christianity. No way. Which is my own upbringing. So it wasn't much different than at least a lecture, but everybody else was nice. OK, that's cool. Scott, I do want to throw something at you. Yeah, I don't think Buddhists have documented anything against gay people, though their appreciation of women, at least in their structure, their culture, is not one of esteem. And so we always look at, hey, if I say Buddhist monk, you're not thinking of a woman. You're not thinking of a woman to shave that. There's a reason for it. And so it's like, it's a different brand of targeting. But while the topic of the show was why is it against gays, I don't think there's really any group that benefits from just a complete, equilateral, non-blaming ordination of any kind of group. I would even say this, just as a weird point. The deaf community, not the whole deaf community, but there are aspects or fringes of the deaf community that will look down on a deaf person who just got a cochlear implant, which is a surgery that allows a person to hear again. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of mistrust, because similar to like, well, I don't want to get into even more weeds, but there has been a history of people testing on people who have disabilities in non-moral ways and inhumane ways. And the deaf community was brunt of that, especially for the mistreatment of just being called dumb. The word dumb comes from a connotation of a person who can't speak. And yet we still use the word dumb when it refers, when there was a word taken from, what we would refer to as a deaf person. There's been a lot of mistreatment against that culture that's been ingrained and internalized. And so when science finally comes back after a period of time of very bad mistreatment and says, hey, we figured out a way to cure you, that is, one, something that's very offensive to a lot of deaf people, because it's like, hey, this is my identity. What do you mean you're curing my identity? Are you making my skin lighter and I'm not going to be black anymore? It's like, I would be immediately affronted by that. But there's also the idea of like, hey, I just want to be able to communicate with people. I want to be able to, I still learn sign language. I'm still deaf. I still have my family. But now I can hear. It's like, oh, but now you're one of them now. You're one of the hearing people now. I would have thought that. That is a thing. And it's really unfortunate. It's not a reflection of the entire community. Absolutely not, in fact. But it is a thing. Also, there's like, if you're a coda, I'm quasi coda. My mom's hard of hearing. So coda means child of a deaf adult. You are seen as less deaf. Or there's a tiered bracket of you're not as exceptional as a deaf person who, who can't hear in both ears and no sign language and doesn't talk. Like there are levels in place. Gallaudet University had this really big fiasco where their new Dean was a person who could speak, but was a deaf woman. Like she was deaf woman, but she also knew how to talk. And the school kicked her out of the position just because she was a speaking person, because she wasn't deaf enough. So there are, in fact, even in any community that you go to, as far as security tests. And levels, levels of being oppressed, like levels of victim, victim identification. Striations, dude. Yeah. Striations. That's a good word for it. And we need to get out of that. Oh, Scott, what do you think? I was just going to say what you seem to be pointing to. Is the fact that every human institution, including all religions, have some form of social codification involved in it. It's almost like it always comes hand in hand with a human institution. Whether that be a political organization or even a humanist organization, even all sorts of human institutions have these social codes that they go by. And it's just so interesting. But that just kind of points again to how religion, if we were to get it back to religion, religion is just a human organization. It's just a human institution. It's a product of a human mindset. It's a big plan. It's a big plan that has many sects. That's right. But it's such totally marked as a human product. Like when we say, here's a spiritual thing that brought down from us. By the way, I'm going to wear the Santa hat. You're the tier one people. You're the tier two. It's like, that's what humans do. What a spiritual being would try to come up with. That is a human thing that we always tend to do. And so you've got to credit or discredit whatever you want to put it. This is brought out very well in an evolutionary sense in the book Sapiens by Harari. Where he puts us all in the context of human evolution. We needed clans. We got clans. And we still have now many, many more different kinds of clans. And we probably will always have them. Yeah. I agree. Well, hopefully we can at least have them not be as big a part in the way how we think and see each other. Like we can still have them like we have eyebrows, but we may not need to use them as a way to determine value in each other. And I think that's the most important distinction. Larry. I like that. What we're talking about is some self knowledge in a way. You know that one thing that I would like to see is that everybody on this planet understands themselves. Yeah. You know, I'm working on it myself. It's a never ending process to learn to love yourself and know yourself. And if it was easy, everybody would do it. A lot of people are not doing it. And a lot of people aren't doing it. So, and we can't do it for them. But at least we can do is make sure that, you know, we can, we can start with ourselves. And I think that's the important part. Now the word humility is appropriate here. And I wonder as a biologist, I wonder how humility ever came to be. Hmm. Yeah. That seems like a weird thing. And what does it even mean? What's the definition of humility? Well, I guess. Let's make that a topic to the future. We got to take a break. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Larry. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. I'm Dr. Fiven. We're on W.O.Z.O Radio 103.9, LP FM, right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, March 14, 2021. Now let's talk about the atheist and freethought groups that you can join right here in Knoxville. There is the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK. Founded in 2002, we're under 19th year. Ask has over a thousand members and we have weekly Zoom meetings that you can participate in to join the group or just want to come in. Find us on Facebook by looking for Knoxville Atheists or just do a Google for Knoxville Atheists and you'll come across this. Another large freethinking group here in Knoxville, the rationalists of each Tennessee. Go to Facebook or go to rationalist.org to find out more information about that group. Earlier in the show, we said we talked about the Knoxville Atheist video show. Well, you can find their archives here at YouTube. Just search for Knoxville Atheists or Knoxville Freethinker Coalition of Knoxville. I guess that's a double. But anyway, you can find it by searching for archives of our show. And hopefully we'll see you there. If you'd like to get involved with this show or the TV show, just come to an ASK meeting or RET meeting and let us know that you're interested. Mom, where do you want to pick up your wombat? I want everybody to give me an F. F? Give me an A. Hey. Hey. Give me an N. N. What does that spell? Fan roll. Yeah. What a fan. What a fan. What a fan. What a mighty good fan. Fan mail. Mighty, mighty good fan. Whatever. Hey, I want that song sung with even more less enthusiasm, please. What a fan. What a fan. What a fan. What a mighty good fan. Nice, everybody. So nice. Everyone's so great on this show. I love it. So we're going to be going over what was it, Larry? What was what? Listener fan mail. Oh, that's right. He's still getting used to daylight so we're going to give him some time. Anyway, we got this picture that was posted to our messenger group. It said Pope Francis holds landmark meeting with Iraq's top cleric, Sistani. And I made the comment that this was the greatest meeting of people playing pretend of all time. And Bruce had a great, great question that I thought put me in my place a little bit too. Because he asked, do you think the Pope is actually pretending God exists? Or do you think the Pope genuinely believes God does? Or some other option? And I was like, you know what? You're right. I can't get into the Pope's mind. I can't figure out what he actually does believe. But I can say from the consistency of his actions and along with other Popes in the past that they do not meld well with what is being purported in the modern interpretation of Catholicism in terms of what they support and what they don't support. There's a lot of really, there's a really great history of notoriously bad Popes or notoriously corrupt Popes and destruction and destruction and warring Popes and just very downright disgusting Trump murderous. It's so bad. So bad. It's a really, really, really bad collection. It's really, really bad Pope. But as far as I'm aware, I just haven't found a lot of consistency between, hey, love everybody. You're everyone's brother and sister. And we all should get along with each other. And there's, there's bad people that we can help, but we will do so in the best way possible. And we should use our money to be able to support the poor and all this. We don't see that. We don't see that. I think he needs a better Habadish, you know? Maybe he needs like a bigger hat. Maybe. Yes. The other guy's got a big beer hat. Yeah, there's the problem. That's the problem. It is funny that you got a guy who wears white, white, white and a guy who wears black is just like, my thing doesn't stain and stains are a really big problem here. It's like, well, I have tons of people will clean my clothes for me. It's like, what's going on here? What, what are the thought processes? The difference is the beard. So the guy in black has a suit catcher. Ah, there you go. It's weird also this little box in napkins is like the most important box in napkins right now. It's just like this box, a tissue graduated to be able to sit between these two people. Yeah. And what's more surprising is they both theoretically worship the same God, but everything else from there on down is different. Yeah, it's a weird situation that we're in. Scott, I'd love to get your feedback on what you think about the Pope. Do you think he's pretending God exists? Do you think he genuinely believes God exists or is it some other option? Well, generally, I would just grant people, if they say that they believe something, and just as a rule of thumb, always grant people whatever they say, you know, because I can't read their mind. Your mind is already what you believe, right? Yeah. So I would just grant that he believes in God and Catholicism and stuff like that, even, even despite the behavior because of things we know about how the brain works and how we do, other than what we say we believe. It's all an after story for our behavior. But as far as his belief, I don't know. I would say I don't know, but I'll just grant him that he believes in God. Sure. You know what? I can give him the leniency of, sure, you believe it, but it's also, but it is also a question of, why do you believe it? And if your book is reporting, everybody should believe this? Why is it that you don't have a reasonable reason for why you believe this as well? And it would seem to me that if you cared about what your book believes, especially as the leader of a figure that's trying to spread Catholicism across the world, that you should have a good reason to be convinced that it's true. And if you're not working on that and any meaningful capacity over the last thousands of years, there is a problem with your Conductor because you don't seem to be meshing well with what it is you are representing. Doesn't walk the wall. Yeah, that was always going to be a problem with me. Buffalo, do you have any final thoughts on this? Yeah, again, I bring back the biology argument of the normal distribution curve, the Gaussian curve, and I think that you've got to have people at the extremes. And so you can have a murdering pope and you can have a very loving pope, not that I think this one is, but I don't question his actions because I think they are humanist reactions or they can be construed in that way. And so he's different from many of the men that have preceded him. So in what area of human history is that not the case? So I think he's close to the end of the distribution curve that is so more pure thinking. And so I guess I would give him the benefit of the doubt from that point of view. I think Larry has a philosophy where it's like the more you're exposed to just the variety of different people and you try to appease general public in general, the further you're pulled away from your specific dogmatic ideology, which makes you more in kind with how we want to treat each other and less involved with how your book wants you to treat other people. The better kind of a person you are, the farther you leave your dogma behind. And I wouldn't make the argument. In fact, I would support the argument that this is the most worldly pope that we have. I mean, he's traveling the world, he's shaking hands with people, he's meeting people, he's shaking presidents and stuff like that. He has access to people and information more so than any other pope in history. And we might be seeing that rubbing off on him compared to anyone else. But hey, weird thoughts. Buffalo, I'd actually like to go off of what you were saying in the first half of the show before we go into any other topics. You were talking about humility as a potential genetic defect, right? Like, why is there any evolutionary advantage to humility? Before we begin, maybe George, would you like to define what you think we mean about humility? And we'll just do a quick review of what we think, what we mean by humility. I'm at a loss for words for that. But I'd love to hear what your definitions are. I would say humble ability to separate yourself from your ego, ability to learn at the deficit of maybe what your self-confidence wants you to purport that you are. You can learn things and be open in a way, even if it's self-deprecating and maybe puts you on a lower tier. Scott, what do you think about that definition? Larry, don't look it up on the internet. I know, I see, I see him. He's like Google.com to find humility. I feel it. I feel it, Scott. Humility is sort of like being genuine to your limitation. Oh, I love that. That is a musical way of putting it down. That's your name of your next album there. Genuine to your limitations by dump shine. Okay. Yeah, I love it. Buffalo, what do you have as humility? I would agree with what Scott just said. But what my puzzle is, since I try to bring everything down to an evolutionary basis, I mean, what would have led to this in the creation of the human mind? I wonder what is the purpose of humility? At this point, I would just say it's a counterbalance to the necessity of knowing where one's place is on the ladder with other people. That somehow nature requires that, a balancing sort of idea. But I don't have it all figured out. I feel where you're going with that. It's like the seesaw to what we were talking about in the first half of the show. We need to have striations. We need to have strata of people. We need to have people of value here, here, and here. And humility is like, that doesn't really matter. None of these things are illusions. And if I'm there, I don't want to be at the top. I exist equally with everybody else. I'm not any better than anyone else. There's a humility. I think it adds to an ecological balance is what it does. And in the case of biology, to me, in biology, usually we know the least probably about ecological systems because they're so complex, they're so integrated. But they really represent a balance. And to me, the counterpoint in humankind is empathy. And to me, humility leads into empathy. And it probably has an ancient purpose in our wiring, in our brain. Larry, I'd like to get your definition of humility. And then we can get to Scott's question real quick. What do you got? No, just like I said, George, that was very, very well put. I don't know. I think it's recognizing your humanity or your membership in humanity and its many imperfections. Perfection's a big part. And going from there. Scott, what do you think? What was your... Yeah, I was going to say it seems to be, again, a social component to humility. Like people like humble people. Because kind of like, if you're a know-it-all, you know, that is a bad connotation of that. And if you're always talking super smart or super, you know, uber special, people tend not to like you because it sort of makes them feel bad within themselves. Where were you for the last four years? That's right. You're not paying... I have some thoroughly information to show you. That's a weird point, though. That's kind of paradoxical because I do feel like I've experienced directly... In my younger years, hearing a lot of people talk very... I used to think atheists were arrogant, which is the opposite of humble because they seemed to know that religion was crap. And so... And a lot of religious people even today, and I talk to them all the time, they don't like arrogant people. So there's a social component to it. But then again, they really like people, like leaders that are very, you know, arrogant. So I just don't get it. It's almost like there's some sort of contradiction there. Man, you're raising some really great points. I have an offhand analogy. Let me just try to condense real quick. If self-esteem was a limited resource, we would... And we all had to share from the same pool of self-esteem. Humble people are ones that we would like to have around us because they would be taking less of that resource compared to the ones that we need, right? And in the same aspect, we tend to look at people who are boastful... I want to say braggadocious. I'm not even sure if that's an actual word. I feel like it is. It's one of those weird third-grade... Yeah, I'll understand that anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like just terrible, jerk-like, but magnanimous people. They look like they have so much self-esteem that I don't need this pool of limited self-esteem resources. I will just hang out with this guy. So there's the appeal of, hey, if I just hang out with this very confident person, I can feed off of their confidence and I'm part of them. I'm part of that group. Likewise, there's the idea of I like being around humble people because that means potentially more self-esteem for me. But I also feel like on the true benevolent point of view, the true benevolent point of view, there is the idea of we laud loud confident people a lot, but they tend to outshine the people who do the best work, which are the cautious, humble, thoughtful, critical thinking leaders that we have. We can always say a Mussolini hit there at Trump. We can name them off the top of our head, but we are very rarely to bring up a Kennedy or Obama or Hamilton. I know he just had a Broadway play, but no one will talk about Hamilton before then. No one's saying anything about Hamilton before then. But we tend to forget the quiet people who do a lot of good work in the shadows or at least don't make a big show of it. And we tend to at least remember the really loud people, at least as a warning signal for what to stay away from. The enterprise of science seems to be grounded in humility. Absolutely. Yeah. How many scientists can we name off the top of our head that like made half the things that were around right now? You'd have to. And everybody around you is criticizing or looking at your work critically, helping it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. I think, Buffalo, I'd love to get your feedback on this. We're both scientists, right? Do you think you would only garner worse attention on your articles if you went out with every article? Be like, and I'm the best scientist to ever science ever. This is the best article. No one else knows. It's like, oh, you were just asking for more. You're asking for more. Never going to take it again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To my experience in science is as the braggadocious scientists are usually left behind pretty quickly. Yeah. Because they're not trusted. And for good reason. And for good reason. Yeah. My question always is, you know, in matters of science, when somebody describes an experiment, I say, well, what were the controls and how many controls were there? And to me, that represents humility in science. Yeah. That you don't really know. So you really should be careful. I also get weirded out whenever someone names a variable after themselves. I don't know if you ever see that. But it's just like, why are you naming this thing after you? Like, oh, come on, man. Just call it pi. You don't have to be Mr. Brandon's pi. Like, we don't have to call it Brandon's pi. Just call it what it is. Come on. We already have words for things. I'm just searching for immortality. There you are. It's always better when you have, for example, an element named after a scientist who's already dead, passed away, and we're just going to honor this woman or man. That's great. But there are a lot of elements that were discovered that are like Berkleyam, California. And Harvard's trying to come up with one, two. And it's like Harvardian. It's like, oh, stop. Stop. Don't do that to science, man. Who cares about your school? Let's just use these as milestones to honor great advancements moving forward and not tuition rates that you want to have and what is inherently a really, really bad education loan system that I don't want to get into right now. Anyway, fun topic, fun topic, fun topic I want to get into is things, well, we got 10 minutes left, things that you know you can do better than God or things that you know you can do that are more impressive than God. And this was a short list that came up with Bruce. We'll go to Larry first. The idea behind this list is can you name something that you think you can do in a more impressive manner than God? Larry, we'll go to you first. Good things. Oh, true. Go for it. The first thing, show up. All the time 24-7, I'm here. And he hasn't shown up a single time in my 70 years. Number two, write a better Bible. If you go to my blog, digitalfreethought.com blog, I have a book that says what the Bible should have looked like. Depending on, you know, if it was acting like an omniscient of all powerful God or as some micromanaging warlord, which is what it looks like. But anyway, that was my two cents. Show up. That's a great one. Write a better Bible. Number two, George, what do you got? I'm better at being humble than God is. Better at being humble. Better at... I'm writing these down. Being humble. Are you saying you're the most humble? I am the most humble person. He's the best humble person in the world. It's always hard to be the most humble person in the world. I feel like... I used to be champion. I used to be arrogant, but now I'm perfect. I'll tell you this. If I was a God, I'd be a trickster God. And the only thing I would do is I would randomly give people trophies that say most humble 2020. Or 2021. I would just randomly give one person a random trophy. And I'd be like, I wasn't even trying to get this trophy, but I guess that's the point, right? Oh, okay. Oh, I guess I'll put it on my shelf. And then it disappears. Like, seriously, put the trophy anywhere to show other people it's gone. It's gone. That's the way how it operate. I have too much fun. Buffalo, what is your thing that you know you can do more impressive than God? Well, I don't believe in God, a God or... I didn't ask that question. What can you do more impressive than pick your guy? I got you, but that's my purpose. And so when I, and I studied nature for my entire life, and I know that I don't understand anything absolutely about nature. And so, you know, I don't think I could do anything better than nature. But the question is, what can you do better? Can you please have fun with this obviously hypothetical question? What is your thing you can do better than God? Who is not nature? Who's obviously a caricature that we are referring to as a group of apes? What is your thing? Yeah, okay, okay. Pay less attention to history because history was what bogs down religion. Pay less attention to history. Pay less attention to history. That's an interesting one. So what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, you know, religions, most religions as we know it are stuck in history. And while they strive to modernize, to evolve, socially evolve, they can't because they need to fill the pews. And so there's a contradiction there. So I think if they... Well, I'd have to think this through a little bit more, but I don't think I can do anything. I consider myself to be a learning person, not a knowing person. Okay, it sounds like your takeaway is like, hey, I am future-minded. I can look forward to things in the future. I can be, you know, not necessarily opportunistic, but what's the opposite of pessimistic in the sense that you're looking forward progressively and trying to... Optimistic. Is that optimistic? Okay, well, that's what I meant by connotation. You're not judged by the past. You're looking forward to the future. And I think that is in fact a nuanced, better thing than a God can be. I want to get to Scott. I want to get to Scott. And then with time left, we'll go to George. Scott, what's your thing that you do better than any God? I'm not as needy as God. Not as needy. Oh, good. I don't need worship. I don't need to be demanding. Fantastic. That's true. Very, very true. I can't tell you how important that actually is. That is a great thing. And I would say anything that demands worship isn't deserving of worship in the first place. Yes, indeed. George, what's your point? I'm a better atheist than God. Should I pry? What do you mean by that, George? You want to rely on it? I am so God-like. I don't have to justify my words. I don't have to define them. Oh, well, there we go. Where was your humility thing? Didn't you give us theater and being humble? I'm so humiliated. My two things were, one, I can admit I'm wrong and apologize, which isn't something that you get a lot from God. Typically, when God performs an accidental or a purposefully accidental plan, accidental genocide, he's like, okay, well, here's a rainbow. And I'm like, we still got dead families and there's water everywhere, God. It's like, okay, okay, well, here's twice as many pigs. Here's an extra wife. I'm like, no, no, no, no. You can't tell me Bryant me. You can't cheat on me and then give me a diamond ring afterwards. It's like, no, this is, you need to apologize. We need to have some admission that you are wrong and face me person in person and look me in the eyes and apologize. I can do that. And I've done that many times. My second point is I can make a better pork sandwich. Yeah, all about that. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. You don't get that a lot. I'm letting you create things that are going to suffer and die. I know that, like, if I know that the only way my creations can have free will is if they decide to go to hell. I don't think I would just create anything. I wouldn't need, feel the need to do that to someone just being. So I'm not saying lying. I'm willing to pick up other people's trash, right? Like I'm willing if I see like a water bottle on the ground and there's a trash can nearby, I'll pick up the water bottle and I'll throw it away. With COVID, I have not done that as much, but I used to do go around with a bag just to pick up trash around my neighborhood just for fun, just to be able to walk outside. And I'm looking forward to actually doing that again, to be honest with you. But it goes back to the idea of, you know, if you saw like a seal with like fishing line, you know, wrapped around its body and cutting into its skin, there's a group of people who just go to beaches just to free the pollutants that are wrapped around marine life, including seals and stuff. And it's like, one, why have a system where, you know, there are animals that are suffering needlessly, innocent creatures needlessly suffering? And two, why isn't a God automatically vaporizing that kind of pollutants on these innocent animals? It's human beings who are going out. And yeah, human beings created the pollution, but there are also a group of humans that are also going out and trying to resolve that as well. And I feel like that's better a person that recognizes there's a problem and trying to fix a problem that they are in part involved in creating than a being that's all powerful and choosing not to do anything whatsoever. And I feel like that makes, in a large part, humanity better than a lot of the God claims that have been purported or presented to us. Larry, we're running down to the bottom of the show. I'm going to do a quick rundown. Dub Shine, where can we find your stuff at? Please go to dubshine.bandcamp.com and check my album out, man. It's called Collapse Reality. And it's brand new. And I'm excited about it. You've got to be more excited when you say that. I know, right? Take two. You just say I'm excited. There you go. There you go. Get in my album today. Yeah. I just put out a new song. I'm really, really happy with it. It's called Invincible. And for a long time, I've been making music that's been skewing towards different genres. But like I found, like I really do like the mix of, and here's the weird word salad that we're going to come up with. But like African world beats meets Dave Matthews meets Everclear. Sort of like 90s staple rock mixed with African beats at the same time, too. It's a very weird mixture. And there's some shown in Japanese rock, anime rock in there, too. A little bit of it. He was like, oh, but it welled so well. It feels like it's so fun. I loved it. I loved it. I appreciate it. George, you had mentioned the book Sapiens. Where can people get that book at? Or what is the, who wrote that book? His name is Yuval Noah Harari. Nice. And just Google his sapiens. It's an excellent book. Nice. It puts a lot of things into perspective. Geology, biology, human. Well, it's entitled, the subtitle is A Brief History of Human Kind. Very cool. Very cool. Nice. George Brooklyn. You got anything you would recommend? You had mentioned that you got in a fight with someone. How did you get over the fight? What were your tips? I haven't gotten over the fight. Boy, I was going to say something and I have forgotten. I'm too old. All right. I'll share some wisdom with you, George. We'll see maybe if this helps. Whenever I get an argument, even if it's like a very non-volatile argument, just like a silly thing someone told me, I always remember something that my mom used to say where she would look in a rear view mirror and there was a little message that says objects in rear view are larger than they appear. And takes distance before they get back to the regular size. Right. And that's a lot of the times when I argue with someone, it's like, ooh, I'm so upset. When I'm looking, am I seeing it for what it is? Or am I looking in that rear view mirror? You know? And I feel like a lot of people should just recognize that. A little bit of time puts everything to perspective. Doubter five, I have a really serious problem. Listen, I went to the drug store and I said, do you guys have any atheism here? And they're like, we don't have any atheism here. I'm like, what's going on? Am I even in the right store? It's like, no, you got to go to the library. So I went to the library and they're like, do you guys have atheism here? I was like, no, we only have books here, sir. I'm like, oh, libraries are useless. And then I went to grocery stores. I was like, do you have any atheism? Like we got bananas. And I'm like, I'll take a banana. But I'm still looking for atheism. And I don't know what it's all about. What can I do? Help me out. Well, when I'm in the drug store, there's plenty of atheism there. Matter of fact, I've taken my book, and I assume that's what you're referring to, to the library locally and offered to give them a few copies for the shelves, and they would not take it. Gas. They said, no, it's got to go through a process, which is just an excuse for saying, we don't want to put atheist books on them. The Knoxville Library shelves. They have one or two by Dawkins or Hitchens, but those are widely circulated bestsellers, and they feel obligated, I'm sure, to put them there. But I'm a local artist, and they're supposed to put local artists on there. They won't take my atheist book and put it on the shelf. Anyway, it's called atheism. What's it all about? And it's available on Amazon. If you have questions for the show, you can send them by email to askanatheistatKnoxvilleAtheist.org. We'll answer them on future shows. If you're having trouble relieving religious beliefs behind, you can find help at recoveringfromreligion.org. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. And this has been your last episode so far of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. Even mine. Don't worry about it, because the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life, and we'll see you next week. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.