 Hello, and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio, R-N-W-O-Z-O Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. I'm Dodder Five, or Larry Rhodes, and we're recording this on Sunday morning, July 2nd, 2023. As usually, we have our co-host, Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. It's raining. It's pouring. Yeah, it's continually doing that these days. Yeah. And guests, we have Dred Pirate Higgs. Welcome, John Richards and Boudreau. Welcome. Digital Freethought Radio, R-N-W-O-Z-O Radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, Satanism, Pustifarianism, and the sciences. And also we will be talking about religions, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not a bet on it. In Knoxville, here in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us, or a lot of us around. We're the atheist society of Knoxville, or ASK, and we'll tell you more about them after the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? God's raising cats, and we need to stop them because we love cats on this show. But before we get into that, I'd love to touch into some logical fallacies. And before we get into that, I'd love to have a fellowship of our newly patronages supported and led by our own Dred Pirate Higgs. Dred. I could do that. A short one. Remen, no flying spaghetti monster, grant us the wisdom to resist dogmatism, the courage to question, and the compassion to embrace all those who seek truth. May we ever use our newly appendages to reach out in friendship and understanding. Love it. What the fun thing about Dred is sometimes he logs into my Zoom call to do his sermons or whatever, and I'll get a little notification at work, and I'll buzz in just to see what's going on, who dialed into my show, and then it's just a really, really nice passive little uplifting sermon. I'm like, this is cool. This is cool. This is a good use of corporate resources. Keep doing it, Dred. You're all right. Dred, I wanted to do a quasi double introduction roundtable on a topic on logical fallacies. Do you have a logical fallacy that you'd like to bring up? Yeah, actually, I've uncovered one, and because it's timely, because in British Columbia, we have a lot of unsettled treaties with indigenous peoples. There's a lot of different tribes here in British Columbia, and unfortunately, there's an appeal, which is kind of like the naturalistic fallacy, where nature is, everything in nature is good, and all things science are bad. But it's called the indigenous fallacy, and it refers, and I'll just read this out, it refers to a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument or line of reasoning relies on essentializing, generalizing, stereotyping indigenous peoples or cultures. It involves making unsupported unjustified assumptions about the beliefs, values, behaviors, or characteristics of indigenous communities or individuals based solely on their indigenous identity, and where it can be employed is it can manifest in various ways, such as appealing to the inherent wisdom or spiritual connected associated with indigenous cultures without providing substantive evidence or logical reasoning to support the argument. It can also involve dismissing opposing views or valid criticism by asserting they come from a non-indigenous perspective and are therefore inherently flawed or illegitimate. That's a very bold thing to say on this show that old people are wrong, because I think we get voted off the island. Yes, that's right. Yeah, we're not pulling our weight, I guess. In a nutshell, that sounds basically like people want to rely on old traditions to do stuff that we already know science has better solutions for. Is that unnecessarily curt or accurate? What do you think? I think it's pretty accurate. I mean, they employ it a lot when you certainly environmental activists do, and you talk about putting a pipeline through or the site CDAM, or whatever. It's not a sound argument often. It's not based on science or the study of ecology or the impact on the environment. It's just saying, this is our traditional hunting ground and blah, blah, blah. It just devolves into, while this is the way we look at it, everybody else is wrong. Let's get some other ideas. Larry, you made a weird face when Dredd said, everything in nature is good and science is bad, as far as describing a viewpoint of those who would use the natural or indigenous fallacy. I wanted to see what you were thinking when you did that. It just kind of struck me as weird because science is at its base of the study of nature. We're using the tools that we developed through using our intellect to study what makes the world, what makes the universe, what makes things that we find in nature. And the great thing is everything that we use to study that comes from nature. There's nothing supernatural about the tools of science. So truly, nature is just nature looking at itself. Thinking about itself. Right, right, right. There's nothing wrong with that. What do you think, John? Well, where this goes wrong is when the manufacturers of products propose that they're natural in the expectation that that also means good. Yeah, yeah. And what is it? The worst bacteriological poison ever, you know, that one thimble fool could kill, botulinous toxin. A thimble fool could kill the entire population of the planet if distributed fairly. So what you can't do is equate natural with good. Pooja, I've got a question for you. What if your kid said, I don't want to take a shower, my body odor is natural, and I want to keep it. I want to stay natural. And they're using that at fallacy. What do you think? What do you think? Is that cool? Does that fly in your house? I would say, are you spying on me through Alexa or something? Because the kid just said that. I mean, I would try to appeal to logic and say, you know, you know, your friends are going to, you know, think you're stinky. And oh, you're talking to me. Social pressure. I love it. You have the right, you have the right mechanics in your head. You have the right to take the cards to play. Though the thing is, we've had that problem. We've had doctors say, Hey, we've had doctors in the past say, I don't need to wash my hands. I'm just giving birth. There's no. You believe in germ theory. What are you? Some sort of like sanitization specialist. Come on. Come on. Come on. We're all men here. We're not, we're not dying from some stuff. Was it Florence? And I found that Florence Nightingale. Yeah. Go ahead. There was a big problem here in BC. I'm sure it was around the world where healthcare practitioners, nurses and stuff like that who did not believe in the vaccination felt that they were unfairly punished for, for not getting vaccinations and expecting to be working with patients in a hospital. Right. I've talked about, wow, talked about crazy. Yeah. And, and the sad thing is it extends even to today because we've had that whole vaccination issue in, in around the world, but mostly in the U.S. I won't, I won't give that, I won't give that baggage to the British or the British or Canadian. Count the Canadians in because yesterday, yesterday was Canada Day. Okay. And we had a pretty big flush of people in their big pickup trucks with F Trudeau, which is our prime minister, and stop the mandate and freedom and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, Canadians can be pretty fast. I'm sorry, that's trickling up. That has to be trickling up. We need to, we need to protect Canada. You guys are our last bastion in case the Republicans take office again. So don't tell them that. Don't tell them that just yet, John. Love to get your idea on the Indigenous fallacy as a, as a representative of a former world global empire. How, how, well, what is your take on the idea of, you know, we got to listen to Indigenous people. Well, definitely. We went about the world doing good. I mean, if it wasn't for us, most of the continent of Africa wouldn't have the Bible. We gave that to them. It's very true. They made a lot of houses out of it. So it's absolutely important. That anti, you know, it's yeah, yeah. All right, guys, I had some, I hope everyone's doing well. I had a weird dream and I bring this up because I was only awake. I was only asleep about 10 minutes ago and I thought, what a great topic to bring this up. Last or early this morning, I woke up with a really great experience. I had my cat in my chest and he's just sleeping, purring, snoring, or whatever he does, having a good time. And I'm like, what a great bond that we've got. And I automated, automatically made me think, oh, what if I was God? And I wasn't asleep. Yeah, you know, it's just the natural extension of this. Like, what if I was God and my role was to protect care of cats? Like, aren't I doing so much of a better job already compared to like God protecting humans? And I thought that's not fair. My Christian guy says that's not fair because God and human mortal are vastly separated compared to human mortal and their pet cat. And I'm like, well, if that's the case, why isn't there a better relationship or a better bond or an actual, you know, connection between us rather than this book and this idea of a God that I got to reach out to, shouldn't that be improved? If the power difference is improved, shouldn't it be like we're sitting with God or we have this more direct relationship with God? I didn't want to get into that too much, but I did want to make the analogies of like taking care of pets if I was God and taking the same context that was given to me from the Bible and just changing around some nouns and seeing if that made sense. Before we go into that, John, I saw you raise your hand. What's up? Yeah, well, I've seen your cat. It's black, isn't it? You know what that means. It's like me. I'm also black. No, no, it's like the devil. Right? He's going to age very well and be very good at almost any athletic activity. The other thing about cats is you think the cat is your pet, that you own it. Right. Right, right, right, right, right. Cats, cats are not pets. Pets have stuff. You're, it's the boss. We're best roommates. My food is its food, all that stuff. You want to look at it the other way around. It's God. Are you meeting up to its worship enough? Humans aren't that different too. There's a lot of humans who would say like, that's my God. They won't say I'm its God. You've never heard that. You never hear Christians say that. You'll always hear, hey, that's my God and my God's an awesome God. It's like, don't you mean it? You're its follower and you are trying to be a very obedient follower. That song doesn't exist. Larry, what do you think? Well, I was just thinking that you take your responsibility of taking care of the cat very seriously. You make, you take to the vet, you preemptively take it to the vet, not just when it's hurt. Exactly. You make sure that you don't intentionally hurt it and all of these things. But if you if you read the Bible and you're talking about God as a pet owner, where his pets, it says many times that he lightly gave us diseases and killed us for the tiniest of things. He killed everybody in the world. He's not much of a pet owner. If you think of it in those terms. Right. Yeah. And follows that up by saying, I love you and you have to worship me and here's some diseases at the same time. We have an association for that over here in the UK. It's called the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Thank you. I reckon we have that here. What about a Royal Society for Prevention of Farm to God's followers? There should probably be like a board for that. That'd be great. Boudreau, I'd love to get your opinion on this. As a pet owner, how is God doing and you have, I know that for a fact. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a dog and have had many dogs over the years. But yeah, if looking at through the lens of we're God's pets, how's he doing with us? Yeah. I mean, bone cancer and children, I mean, right? Like, and he, unlike us with our pets, I mean, he can prevent those things and snap a finger. Or at least we're told, you know, that makes me think of the, I think it's a hitch quote, impotenter evil. God's either unable to prevent, you know, disease like that or doesn't care. Yeah. So yeah. Pretty lousy. Almost like he's not there at all. Yeah. You could, that's exactly how it would work if he didn't exist. Now, hold on. What if that's intentional? I'm putting on my Christian hat. What if that's intentional and you let this to our own device? He's much worse than a cat owner. He gave us an entire universe. He gave us the seeds in the ground. Like he gave us the air to breathe. He gave us lungs free the air. Like you're not looking at the bigger picture. The way how I think of it is like, think of going back to the cat analogy. Think of it as like a big room that I threw a bunch of cats in and a bunch of canned food for cats and a can opener. And I shut the door for 14 million years. And I said, all right, they're going to be okay. I gave them all that stuff. I gave them the room. I gave them a can opener. I didn't have to give them a can opener. I gave them a can opener. Okay. Think about that. Some of them will die. You know, some happen something, but they'll figure it out. And if I do that enough times, one of the times I open up the room, 14 billion years later, there's going to be a beautiful cat society. And I'm going to be like, I did that. I am so cool. Look at what I made. All those cats owe their lives and existence to me. I demand to be worshiped. And if they don't know, that's the premise of cat in Red Dwarf, the television series Red Dwarf. That Lister, you know, put the cat and eventually over millions of years, it became a cat human. It was a pregnant cat that eventually came up with an evolved human shaped cat person. And he was super cool. Lister and the cat got so along. It was great. One of the best friendships on TV is really, really good. Way more cool than my actual cat, but like also very cat-like in his demeanor at the same time too. It was great. Great suits also. Where do you get them? I don't know. But the idea of like, should I as a pet owner who locked my pets in a room for an inordinate amount of time with some food and opened it up and found that they had a whole society and I should be, oh, great. Hey, you guys are awesome. By the way, now I'm going back to the creation story. I threw in some poison cat food at the same time too. And I had like a secret agent cat go and say, you should eat this poison cat food. And if they eat the poison cat food, then I get to be angry at them and I get to punish them because they sinned against me. Isn't that great? Isn't that like awesome plan? Like they had, I should make it as easily as possible to eat that cat poison food and they do. They're in the middle of the room. Right, right, right. It all falls together. I think this all makes sense. The idea is, while I'm pulling this up, if when you are exposed to a certain narrative, regardless of how extreme or untrue it is, let's be fair, you turn to accept the untruth of it because it's marketing, it's propaganda, it's how our brains work. If we see a pattern enough times, we begin to rely on it regardless of whether it's true or not because we like consistency more than accuracy. It's one of the faults of human thinking. And when we are exposed to a narrative over and over again, we don't judge it as harshly because we just accept that it's true. But when you take that narrative and you just put in a different framing, if you say, hey, God taking care of cats in a room versus God taking care of humans in an eating, and there's a poison apple versus a poison canned food, you immediately know why would you give poison, why would you set these people up for failure? Why would you put a trapdoor in paradise? Why would you put a secret agent cat who can communicate with the other cats and say, eat this poison food if you don't want to eat the poison food? Why would you punish them for something that you were clearly planning to do from the beginning and blame them for it? None of that makes sense. It's like true because that's the exact same context of what we have in the Bible. It's one of those situations we just don't really, or I think as atheists, we connect the dots. We can be so aware of it, but it's frustrating when you've already indoctrinated yourself with the narrative, not giving yourself any critical thoughts. And other people just simply won't see it. And actually part of that is like what they call the outsider test of faith, right? Yes. It's that you're looking, you actually turn your view on your own beliefs in order to have an objective perspective to evaluate them objectively instead of being comfortably ensconced in them and saying, well, you're crazy. I'm not, clearly. You're crazy. Right, right. Like learn to give and take advice. That's the two important things, not just one or the other. Boudreau, what do you think? It made me think, and I don't know if you guys have this feeling as atheists, but there's a feeling of clarity that I have in thinking of any of these. We've had countless conversations like this pointing out odd things in the Bible, strange things with religion, accidents of birth, and all the rest of it. It seems so obvious to me looking at from the outside, and it feels like my mind's just super clear. And that's one of the things about being an atheist and finally admitting it, you know, at a young age, just kind of like, ah, you know, just, you felt just like, okay, now I don't have to do all this, all these gymnastics in my head to make these things make sense. Yeah, I agree. I agree with Boudreau because I've never been indoctrinated with any religion. So I've always looked at these things from a dispassionate point of view. And it seems to me that the stories in the Bible are self-evidently stories. They are constructed like you would if you were writing a syndicate series in Hollywood or for Netflix. Or in nursery runs. Yeah, yeah. What you want is events. Every so often you've got to have another event, you know? And so it will be very boring if everything went right. You've got to have the poison apple. You've got to have the flood, you know? Otherwise who's going to be interested? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The flood's an interesting one. Yeah, but all that takes place in the first book. What's left, you know, just putting forward a bunch of rules. Right, right, right. Does anybody read Beyond Genesis? I don't know. I've read the Bible twice, but it's not a fun read. Like it's like an action movie where all the action happens at the very beginning. It's like a Tarantino movie in reverse. All the actions at the beginning and then the rest is just people talking and you're like, what? There's no buildup. It starts with the climax and then you're just like... And the horrible thing about it is that there's no plot development. There's no character arc. Right. You know, Jesus, for instance, is the most boring character you can ever conceive because he doesn't grow. He doesn't change. Almost like Luke Skywalker. At least Luke Skywalker had some sort of romantic interest, didn't he? Oh, yeah. His sister. Oh, geez, guys. Such a great number of topics. The idea of the flood is an interesting story or an interesting parallel because if we were to take it out of its context, if I go back to my room of cats and I open it up and there's a cat society and they don't know who I am because they haven't seen me in billions of years. The generations that exist... They've heard stories of you. Maybe they have their own stories. It's all conflicting. I gave them the word. Right. Well, they change over 14 billion years. Yeah. So I say, okay, if they don't want to worship me, instead of me just going to all of them and showing them that I exist, I'm just going to go to my favorite cat family and be like, you need to build a giant cat house, a big climbing tree. Build a big climbing tree because I'm going to flood this entire room with water and drown all the other cats. And that cat is like, oh, please don't do that. I'm like, oh, no, I got a plan. I got a plan. Get your new family and get them on here, but also get like one of every other kind of like non-cat animal that's here. Put them on this climbing tree because I'm going to drown everybody. It's like, but there are baby cats. There are kids. It's like, I don't care about them. It's just you. Just get them on the cat tree. You'll be all right. And he does that and kills all the other cats. And I'm like, and I'm so happy that I did this. I'm going to give you guys like a nice rainbow color tinsel. I'm going to hang it up on the wall. That's for you guys. Good job. Good job. I killed all the cats except for like this one family and one of every other animal. And here's a reward. Here's a little rainbow tinsel. That's a great story, guys. Well, of course, if you were the god of some cats, those who followed you would obviously have to think that you are perfect. Oh, that's great. That's great. That's great. And thank you all the genetic problems you're going to have because of repopulating the entire world with incest and one family. And then I'm going to make incest illegal afterwards. I put a little thing that says incest is okay for a period of time, and then I'll make it illegal again. So just so and don't eat pork. That's that's also that's my pork. It's my food. The the just the weirdest thing about this is I've had a friend of mine who was a fellow atheist who I at the time did not know he was an atheist. And at the time I was a Christian. And Bujo, you were asking this see this feel so obvious. And in my mind, Christianity felt so obvious when I was a Christian. Sure. And it was so obvious to the point where I just said anyone who didn't understand was just corrupted or or was misled. And that's why they have all these, you know, confusions or or or seemingly happy freedom. They don't they're not living the trial that I'm living through because God's giving me a test. And the apprehensions that I feel the loops that I have to jump through, that's God's test. It's an affirmation that he does exist. Like all that pressure I put on myself is proof that God is has his finger on my on my shoulder and is watching me every day. But when I had my atheist friend at school, this is like in middle school, his name was Joel. And I brought this up a long time ago. Someone asked him, Hey, what's your religion? And he's like, I don't have one. And they're like, Why don't you have one? He's just like, I'm just doing my own thing. And in my head, I was shocked because I never knew what other atheists look like. That was the first one I met. And it stuck with me. I didn't think at the time, Oh, he's right. I didn't think, Oh, what a cool guy. I just thought that was an option. I didn't even know that you could do that. I was just like, huh, that's so weird. And so from middle school to high school to college, I met more atheists. And finally, when I was taking my my my ethics classes, I would decide to look at the Bible more critically. And it was just this walkthrough of understanding, okay, I'm not with this religion anymore, but I don't want to call myself the a word. But I have so many good examples of a words that I know, like, and, and I went online and I saw some YouTube videos and realized after getting like a atheist for dummies book that I fall into this category, whether I wanted to or not. And it was just an issue of learning that accepting it. Yeah, the issues that I had with this term was given to me by the people who were religious. That's right. Yeah, when you're when you're very young in America, a lot of places that you're raised not to be exposed to the full menu of options that's available to you. Right. You're in your bubble. There is an interesting parallel if I may quickly share it. You know, Christians, of course, have framed the whole abortion issue into pro life and pro choice. Right. And I had suggested that in order to change that, we just change the framing of it to say pro autonomy and pro ideology. And that would take it out of the Christian hands and put it in the hands of secularists who actually look at it if they're looking at it from that perspective in a much more realistic way. Because those are the those are the issues that at at hand is whether or not people have autonomy or whether they're making choices based on ideology. Let's touch on that when we get back because I think it actually falls into the indigenous fallacy and we can Larry, what do you think? Yeah, this is the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee will be right back after this short break. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's just take a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. They were founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year now and have over a thousand members. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city and not at the Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. You can find us online on Facebook, meetup.com or just go to our website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. You can just Google Knoxville Atheist, just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Right. Wombat, where you want to pick up? I want to touch on a really great comment that was sent to us last week by a young idealist on YouTube. If you have more comments, feel free to leave them on our channels. A young idealist says, hey, guys, love listening to the show. Critical thinking really needs to be taught and learned well in this world. Something I wanted to run across you that I've been thinking, taking a deep dive into is the psychology of narcissism. Narcissism is a psychological phenomena that is common among all people. It often contributes to dysfunction and misbehavior and it extremely benefits a lot of people who have an extreme amount of narcissism in their behavior. Among the traits that characterize it is self entitlement. With studies that have been shown, people who are narcissistic tend to get paid more than those who aren't, and this seems to be pretty powerful in many people. You could see the reason at the same time that people are not being paid what they deserve because of a lack of self entitlement. I bring this topic up not to suggest in any way how people should be in their personalities, but to look at a lot of the world's problems, especially religion, which is full of self-entitled spiritual leaders who think they have the authority to speak for a tri-omni being. If you think about the charisma and guilt and the overall head trickery that goes into religious propaganda, you should know a thing or two about narcissism. The overlap becomes pretty clear and I definitely think there's a lot of sootspa in a person that thinks they can speak for God. It goes back to my analogy of a cat being like, I speak for that human who came in that door, allowed me to express myself. I don't know if this guy is translating me accurately or not, but I don't think this cat speaks for me. What do you think, Larry? I would just think about the sootspa of the average believer who thinks they're the close personal friend of the creator or the universe who can talk to them and they will grant requests for them. They can only say that because nobody can effectively contradict them. You can't make such silly statements about evidential things, can you? It's only when there's no evidence that you can have beliefs that you can fabricate anything. I mean, having a loving and loyal relationship to Mr. Gravity would be crazy. Right, right. But the non-falsifiable claims... Boudreau, I think you said this, that which is proposed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. There's a hitch quote again. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. And it's not up to us to find evidence to counter the claim that someone speaks for God. It's for someone who brings that proposal up because that's shifting the burden of proof, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. John Richards, you want to make a pun. Go for it. Well, you brought it back in, didn't you, by talking about these cats. What did you just say? The rumor of cats. Your followers. Yes. You're their god and you wanted to treat them properly or something like that. As little accurate as possible, yes. Yes, yes. So I want to point out that cats are predators and if you are forbidding them from eating pork, I'm wondering, does that include guinea pig? What about hamster? Oh, he's got more. He's got more. Should we wait? Let's wait. No, no, no. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Perfect. Got it. The idea is we're also... We have a body. We can look at our biology. We can understand from other animals in nature what they're capable of and what we're capable of. Yet some of the things that we have and enjoy are sinful by nature. And I always thought the idea is like we have teeth, we can eat meat, but there are some religions that say you can't eat meat, right? We have... And to be as family-friendly on YouTube as possible, we have a peg and a hole that are sinful to put together, but the hole is perfectly shaped for the peg. So if it was supposed to be illegal, just make the peg or the hole different. Just make the hole a little smaller. You saw that problem or put it behind it or something, right? We already have a hole with teeth. We have holes in a dark light. After all, you can't put Petra in a diesel car. So true. We're not supposed to look at women's hair in some religions. Why then do women have hair? There's just a lot of questions that I have where you could have made things so much more easier. And my hang-up originally is just why do we have two nipples? Why do men have two nipples? We didn't need one. He gave us an extra one. I have lived my entire life. I've not had a use for them since. I just don't get it, but we have a lot of unnecessary parts. Two superfluous nipples and body parts that you're not supposed to touch, but feel really good when you do. I don't know. It's very bizarre. Larry, what do you think? And appendix, which can kill you. It has no purpose. Not only that, but teeth in your head that can completely misalign all the other teeth in your head and cause you great pain. There's a lot of weird things going on, but I didn't want to touch on what Dredd brought up in the first half. Dredd, you brought up the pro-choice pro-life. Pro-choice pro-life brought to us by narcissists, narcissistic argumentation. And the reason why I say that is because it's a dishonest argument. It's a false dichotomy to say pro-choice or pro-life because you're bringing up two completely unrelated things and putting a one for and against the other. When pro-choice or not pro-choice should be a true dichotomy or pro-life or not pro-life. That's a true dichotomy, right? That is, there's no middle ground there. But when you present pro-choice or pro-life, there's a middle ground there that's actually fairly reasonable that we are choosing to or choosing to ignore by virtue of how virtual or volatile the argument has become over time. And I think those who are in their religious respect prefer to exclude that middle ground because it makes their marketing more palatable, right? And that's why it's been framed and that's why it's been framed the way it is. If it were framed by secularists, it would be pro-autonomy or pro-ideology because that really is what it's about. It's not that other choice, which makes it all pro-choice. While you're choosing to kill somebody or murder somebody. And that framing has stuck as long as it has is the biggest detriment to anybody that is in favor of Roe versus Wade, for instance. They're fighting the battle using Christian terminology and that's where the issue really lies. They need to change and reframe the argument in order to make it much more secular friendly. John Richards. I think this is an argument about terminology, but I think the terminology that's being used incorrectly is the word baby because they like to say that they're saving babies from the moment of conception. They're not babies. They're either embryos in the first couple of weeks, maybe seven weeks, or fetuses right up until birth. But it's only after they're born that they're babies. That's why we have the expression, babes in arms. You've got it. It's in your arms. And out of all of the conceptions, something like four out of six never make it through gestation. So it's a foolish mistake to describe them as having an existence independent to their mother. Right, Larry. So what do atheists eat? Do they eat fetuses, embryos, or babies? Well, even in the Bible, it says that life begins with the first breath. Oh, yeah. The breath of life, the breath of life that Yahweh breathed into that lump of clay, right? I always fall back on the logical absolutes as just a way for me to know if things are trying to present themselves to me in a misleading manner. And if you were to say the autonomy argument, it could be as easily pro-autonomy or anti-autonomy. And that's much more clear to me because there's no middle ground there. And it's just in the nature, in the subject of women's autonomy, are you for it or are you against it? Like, that is, you can't be halfway on it. It's like, I'm falling. That's right. The law of the excluded middle, right? Right. Exactly. Just make your variables very clear, and then just set it up as four or not four or this or not this. And we can work it out. But when you bring up two different agents, potentially, there's a middle ground that we can work towards. There might be a way where we can respect people's ideology, but not in the disservice of the autonomy of other people. That is a ground that we need to walk on. In my mind, it's the autonomy that we should prioritize, not the ideology of those who want to govern over the bodies of other people, because that's not fair. Boudreau, hate to throw you under the hot seat on this one, but we're going to give you a quick quiz. I didn't study. Okay. So the idea of narcissistic thinking governing our lives, do you have an example that you'd like to present to the board here on how religious narcissism actually affects and impacts your life directly? Because one of the comments that we do get on the channel is, you guys always talk about generalities. You guys are always complaining about things going on around the world, John Richards, or things that never actually happened to you, you're such cry babies. Tell me something that actually happened to you. Boudreau, do you have as a family man, as the neighborhood's friendly atheist, do you have an example of religious narcissism actually affecting and impacting you specifically? Oh, do I? I bet I do, if I dig. I do feel like somebody, this is pretty minor, but just to kind of get maybe the thoughts go on it, I'm pretty sure somebody tried to pry off my glued on flying spaghetti monster decal on my car and broke one of its appendages. No way. Yeah. I don't have proof of that. It's just it's on my car and it's missing one of the pieces. I'm pretty sure someone tried to pry it off. That's some self entitlement right there. What do you think, Larry? Well, laws affect us daily and the smallest details and these religious right people and their hubris are casting laws to make everybody which Larry, which one you I see you playing video games and riding your motorcycle and doing whatever you want all day. Tell me how how big government, big religion is on you? Well, let's talk about abortion then. I mean, it's not really affecting me. I don't have babies and I'm not at the stage of life where I might, but I have female relatives who they're the religious writer taking away the bodily autonomy. That affects me. Okay. Maybe I'll just piggyback on that and say my example would be my I feel like my daughter has fewer rights than my wife had, you know, at this point. Oh, very good point. I was reminded of the story that you brought up with the coach who came up to your daughter and was like, what's your situation and religiously and the daughters just like, I mean, what's your problem? That coach is like, we need to talk about this. Like, no, we don't. I hate to be fair, maybe to kind of full circle on it. You remember, I mentioned, and we should get the dread. I know he's being patient. I'd mentioned we were worried that she was going to be adversely affected by it by starting, you know, play time and all that. But she she successfully made the top team next season. So I feel like no issues of that deal with it. So now the coach has to deal with the fact that he can't thank God for everyone because he's got agents on his team scoring goals from making passes that's now they'll break him down eventually. Dread, what do you think? Well, as you know, I have been dealing with the ongoing issue of trying to be photographed in my official ID wearing my tricorn, my symbol of my religious affiliation with past appearance. And of course, I've been stonewalled for this is coming up on seven years now, seven years I've been doing this. The most recent defeat was in finally a complaint with the BC ombuds person, the office, which is, you know, subsidized by the government and taxpayers, where they said they found no administrative errors in the application of these policies. And it was so glaringly obvious that the person who had been assigned to investigate to do the pre investigation to see whether or not they were going to even investigate it, decided had come to a conclusion based on the content of my faith and had decided, well, I'm, I'm, I'm just looking for the facts that will support my conclusion that this is not worth investigating. And so I complained and that person has been reassigned. Nice. And I, well, this is all under the cover. This is all under the cover. So there's a new guy on it. And I actually wrote a lengthy piece. And then I consulted chat GPT. Good. And I said, compose a sound legal argument to support my wearing a trike, my holy headdress in my photograph. And it did it. Yeah, it was amazing. Don't be surprised. So, so anyway, I included those as attachments in my response. And I'm waiting to hear back from this fella. But I've also consulted my, I've also cc'd my minister of the, one of the ministers of the legislative assembly for my region. And I actually, I know this fella personally, a good guy. So he, he said, because I told him I had something to talk to him about. And he says, well, yeah, right. So I sent him the whole package. So, and I'm now at the point of hiring a lawyer. I've got a very good lawyer. She's on the TV all the time for other cases. Like she's the hottest lawyer in Vancouver right now. And she's my lawyer. Keep it up. Keep it up. I want to throw out John Richards, your lifelong atheist, former president of the atheist society of basically the world leader of chaos. What so clearly, religion has never affected you particularly so personally. So yeah, you know, you're, you're completely untouched. Well, what's your problem? Well, it's, it isn't my problem. It's how I observe. I'm, I'm like the visitor to the zoo, you know, and I don't like to see the animals being abused on my cat house. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. I always say it's like a zoo for me, for people who have been zoo animals and like realize they can get out of their cage. It's like an episode of the Twilight Zone where you are mystified that you are at a place where you used to be. And you can see people happy there knowing that they might be happier out. You may, you may not know that, but you do know that whatever confines that they put themselves or their own design. And you, you desperately want them to free themselves themselves, but they are, they are ultimately you're blinded or in a position where they can't due to like the stability of their current lifestyle or want to but lack the tools needed to get out. And you want to be able to help as many people. It's like a deeply empathetic position to put yourself into when you see your friends and loved ones in there. And if I were to say anything that affects me personally, the, the, how religious narcissism has affected me, it's black culture is steeped in religious tradition. And when you are a black atheist in the US, the number of outlets that you have to go to dramatically decrease. And that goes from older family members who don't have a way to contextualize your problem in a secular fashion or leaders in your, in your community who often may be religious and will let to recommend you to their pastor. Or even like just the lack of secular representation in black communities is largely non, at least for when I was growing up, non existent. I have to work really hard to get in touch with like Mendeza Thomas, who runs black non believers and met her a couple of times, made some in groups with groups on Facebook. But it's a sparse group to find people who think like you who also look like you. And I can't tell you how important it is to have something like that just for you to feel even less paranoid when you step out of your religious circles. It's nice to have a community there that understands the nature of looking like how you do and also not believing at the same time too, because there's a lot of assumptions that come with that. John, not only have I never been tainted by religion and look at it as if I'm a zoo visitor, but also if religion ever does die out, there's nothing for me to gain. I mean, what would I report on in global atheist news? Where did all my subscribers go? Where did all my patients go? What would we talk about in views on the news? Oh, yeah, I think Sam Harris would be like, oh, who can I sell my boring audio books? He's boring. He has a very, I don't either. Yeah, I was just gonna, you know, we're talking about this religious narcissism. So when I went to the human rights tribunal, their response to me was, you, this is a quote, you are a pastifarian, a member of the church, the flying spaghetti monster, which mocks religious beliefs and certain religious practices. So I put back at this, I said that is like saying you are a priest and a member of the Catholic Church, which practices pedophilia and buries indigenous children and unmarked graves. Dread on top of that. Any religion is mocking any other religion by virtue of the fact that I was saying we are the true religious person, right? There's very few religions that say our God's true. And by the way, everyone else's God is also true. There's an art press to think of anything like that. So imagine religions hijacking other religions, right, right practices and stuff like that happens. Think about the Easter Bunny, right? There's been far less deaths. You don't even have to bring up pedophilia and like unmarked graves. You could just be like, yeah, but like, what do you, Christianity is the practice of telling everyone else's God. It's monotheism. At the end of the day, have you not gotten that memo? The context is so bizarre. And the fact that someone can write that and think they're making a valid point, just shows how, how locked into a certain narrative you can be without that context. Yeah. How divorced from reality. Right. If I said I have a room full of cats and I'm not necessarily abusing them. And someone said you are because I have a room full of dogs and I drowned them all last night and everything was great. And I'm like, you're doing the exact same thing I'm doing. How, how are you, how did we get here? How did we get here? Just a lack of context. We need to have the context and we need to have God be a better cat owner. We need to have him involved if he's going to be involved at all. And if not, get out because we are clearly taking care of ourselves. Final thoughts, Dredpire Higgs. Well, I, like I said, I'm doing a regular sermons for the Pastafarians. And of course, I record this stuff live so you can come check out my YouTube channel, Mind Pirate. I've been getting quite a few subscriptions. So I guess our content. So yeah, come check it out. Very cool. You can find my stuff at Let's Chat on YouTube. Just search Let's Chat. You'll find, you'll see me at the top. And that's also my YouTube name now too. So at Let's Chat. And I'm also happy to say, hey, my commercial came out for my company. Very good. Thank you. Thank you. We had some really good social work that we've done at our school. I made it a point to not just be a really cool person at our lab, but go out to schools and play disc golf and celebrate engineering. These are all exercises in understanding nature. Science, engineering, and enjoying the outdoors in my head are three components of the same thing, which is enjoying nature and coming to better terms with it and understanding it at the same time too. You can do all those and they're not at they're not in they're not in opposition to each other. You can love the world that you're in and try to understand it. And what science and engineering is, is like the application and the process of understanding it in the most accurate way possible. I found it to be the best tool that we have to understand nature and it's a part of nature too. So don't let people believe that it's a don't let people persuade you that it's a foreign thing that we have to be suspicious of. It's something we should celebrate. It's something we made ourselves and got us here. John Richards final points. Well, I just want to advertise that you can see some of our latest stuff on atheism UK channel. That's atheism UK channel on on YouTube, where we're now posting the videos of the changing minds in changing times event that we staged about a month ago in London. Very good. It was so good in fact that we're doing another one in Birmingham in September featuring Lawrence Krauss again. He's flying. I love that you're coming to do that. That's so good. That's so great. True true true. And listen to his orange podcast all the time. He's a good man. Yeah. I've met Lawrence Krauss. Also, I wanted to add, did you write the script for the commercial you did? So that was a guy talking to me. And it was excerpts from an interview that we were just giving off the top of our heads. Yeah. Okay. No no fixed script. Okay. That is just well it was well done. Oh, thank you. If you listen to it, you can hear when I hear that commercial all I hear are the cuts from the questions that he taped together. So like very good editing on their job to take my rambling and make it seem coherent. But that was great. I don't have anything to check out. But I would we'll say we went to holiday world yesterday, which is a theme park, a water park and we wrote a bunch of coasters. And it was a lot of fun. And yeah. Boudreau, no spoilers. But I think if you haven't seen the latest Spider-Man movie, you should go see the latest Spider-Man movie. All right. Catch yourself up. It's a really good family experience that you you would get meaningful high level thoughts of like you'll keep you entertained as an adult and I'll keep the kids entertained as like the kids. It's not it's a it's a really good movie. It's it's in the plan. By the way, I saw Indiana Jones yesterday. Not that great. I know we knew we knew it. We knew it. We knew it. We knew I'm going to watch it and I'm going to love every minute of it. You only get one shame on me once. You have twice or something like that. You fooled me once already. I'm not going back. Larry Rhodes, we're at the end of the show. It looks like atheism is over. Anything you want to say before we all become? Well, you can find my content at digitalfreethought.com. There's lots of topic, atheist topics there. Be sure to click on the blog button for radio show archives, atheist song to many articles on the subject. My YouTube channel is at doubter five and you can find my book Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. 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 Wednesday night at 7 o'clock here on WOZO radio. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody.