 on this computer, the OZO radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, January. I'm sorry. Yes, it is January 29th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ Doubter five. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Hey, I'm the Wombat. What's up? Everything, all of us. Guests today are Dred Piratig from Western Canada. Lou Jo, all the way from Kentucky. Hello, and John Richards from London. Well, South of London, I believe England. South Coast. Sounds good. London's that way in the north. Fifty miles. Well, that way doesn't work real well on the radio, but otherwise. Digital Freethought 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. If you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in your town, well, I'm betting you're just not here in Knoxville in the middle of the Bible belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us and that's just one town. We're the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. And if you'll stick around till after the break, we'll tell you more about it than Wombat. What's our topic today? OK, and I'm saying this as input from the questions, but why don't Christians jump off a cliff and then like it's not a it's in. And then it's more of a thoughtful answer of like, hey, why don't they actually do that after life is better? But listen, we can get into it. We can get into it. Hey, what's up, dad? Five, I see I see you. I was going to answer the question, but he's excited, he's excited. But before we get too excited, let's go into our weekly invocation and then check on everyone's doing. And then we can jump into the meat. All right, our noodley Lord, who art in a calendar, I'll daunte be thy noodles. Thy blood be run, thy sauce be yum with meat as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread and forgive us our cussing as we forgive those who cuss against us and feed us not into ketoism, but deliver us some carbs for the meatballs and the sauces and the grog whenever and ever, Rob and guys, it's been a really, really nice Saturday, first sunny weekend day in this whole month, got it out of our system. And now we're back to the doom and gloom of the the return of winter. So we'll have probably two more snows where we're at right now. And Dred, you've been, you know, snow, you've been born snow is in your blood. But for us, it's like, oh, it'd be nice if we could have something other than overcast and ice falling out on the ground or why I need rum in my blood to keep the snow and in the freeze. Right. So let's do a check in before we ask the question about why Christians don't why don't they just jump off a cliff and fall into the greater theme of today's questions, which is cognitive dissonance. Dred, how you been? I've been well, actually, just in this last week, I've been contacted by our our prophet, Bobby Henderson. Nice. And we're moving forward with the expressions of interest for a developer of a app for pastafarians. And it's one of these things that you strictly opt in anonymity. But you can identify amongst other pastafarians like signal or and what is this app called? Please give me the best name ever. Well, well, I'm not the one that's going to come up with the name myself. So that's still under consideration. And it depends, I guess, on what its ultimate functionality is. But it'll have something to do with the like noodles or something. Is it pastafarians? Pastafarians. I don't know. At least put it on the list, at least put it on the list. Boudreau. Yeah, that's that's a little hard to get around the tongue there. So I'm sure. Pastafarians is, I always thought, OK, all right, all right. That's fair. That's fair. Boudreau, speaking of things to get hard across the lips. How have you been, my friend? Boudreau, hard to spell, too. I've been well. I've been I've moved my exercise schedule around. I've moved my exercise schedule around to be able to join today and excited to be here. Yeah, good to see you, man. Welcome. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. OK, OK, OK, very cool to have you. Let us know. So you are a big movie buff. What's the the latest movie that you've actually gone see? Well, just last night, I watched you people. Nice. It was really, really entertaining. Yeah, I saw the ad for that. But we were going to go see Avatar in the theater and just got busy. So again, so we may still do that. But other than that, I can't think the last movie I saw. Yeah, here's my thing. I just recently saw a Suburbicon based on recommendation. Yeah, I told you guys about that. Same vein as you people, but also not because the the the racial commentary tree is in the backdrop. It colors what is much more, in my opinion, of really, really fascinating dark comedy in the foreground. And when I saw that movie, I was like, this is really good because it's it's taking for granted how people were back there by just saying, hey, everyone's racist, but bad stuff is going to happen. Don't worry because it more or less everyone is. It was so good. And it never was like called out or pointed out was like a bad thing. It was what it is. But here's this other story that's in this world. And so when I saw it, I thought, what a great depiction of it because, you know, it out so often things get so melodromatic melodramatic. And there's like has to be some cool thing where there's one white neighbor who's here to help out and all this stuff's like, no, it's not about them. It's about these terrible, this terrible family. And when I when I went to see the reviews, what I was unfortunate to find out was like, nobody got the joke or nobody like like that, right? Right. Right. And so there's nothing more frustrating than watching a good movie that you think is good and then finding out that nobody else like that movie. And I think that's how cult followings begin. And so yes, absolutely. There's a whole realm of them. And and to believe it or not, Blue Joe has a whole wallpaper at Pantheon of like all of the cult movies were like hangover. It came out. Nobody liked it, but the people who liked it did like it and they supported it and they kept coming up with new ones and stuff like that. So that that's how you start religions. That's how you start cults. Great show to talk about that. John Richards. You've been. Well, that sounds like Star Trek, which was a flop in the beginning and then developed into a cult anyway. Yeah. Anyway, I've been fine, which is, you know, I like to wake up every morning and so far it's successful. But I made a lovely a UK atheism UK podcast this morning because we have some issues going over here. And one of our friends has been de-platformed because he got an item onto the agenda of one of our local committees for religious education and and it was about assemblies because a 1944 law in this country and bear in mind that we were not a second country constitutionally. We are a church of England, you know, religious country, which is ridiculous because you're going you're on the downhill side like Canada just awake. Yeah, this anachronistic law specifies that at school every pupil has to meet once a day. All of them together in an assembly and have a Christian religious worship. And of course, most of the schools ignore this, but nonetheless it's on the statute book and we're campaigning to get rid of it. Good. Good for you. Yeah, yeah, good luck. Well, it was just like in Canada. It was only in 1978 that blasphemy laws were taken off the books. Yeah, yeah. Right. I don't like this. You know, in a non in a non religious sense, I also like to see Pledge of Allegiances just go away to in America. Yeah, there's no real need for that. You can't force somebody to make a pledge. It's coercion. There wouldn't stand up anyway. Exactly. Like let's let's think about what that actually means. Dr doubt or five. Since we hate America, how you been? We hate America. No, we don't. I'm fine. I got a new graphics card so that I could play Star Citizen better and it's working fine. Okay. I've got a new in what do you call it? Devotee in dread. He's yeah, playing it now too. Oh, really awesome starships. So you guys are like space engineers together then? More like combators. Okay. Okay. Okay. Soldiers, power makers, pilots. Nice anyway, a lot of fun. Cool. Man, that's awesome. So who would imagine when you were born, you'd be virtual simulated space pirate or a computer programmer because I was born in 1950. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Think of this world. What a great, what a great. All right. We're going to go into some listener comments. The aspect of today's show or the general theme is cognitive dissonance. And we talked about in discord, what questions would you guys have for a group of atheists or for religious people? And the first question that we had was why don't religious people just jump off a cliff? Pause, pause, pause. Actually, that's a really good point because they believe the afterlife is better than the life that we're in right now. So why don't they jump off a cliff? Doubter five. You're excited. So let go for it. Go for it. Well, it would make sense. Yes, of course, but the church found out pretty early on that that's not a good idea. So they made it a sin. Okay. I mean, they would lose memberships and they wouldn't get their tithes anymore. So they made it a sin so that the last thing you did was commit suicide. You go to hell. So how about presumably you could help your friend by pushing them off the cliff? Yeah. Well, that's the thing. You don't see them like just ignoring safety though. I mean, you'd think that if they thought they would live forever like profess like they profess to do that they would, you know, choose safety belts looking both ways when they walk into traffic, you know, because what difference does it make when you rather reside in heaven than here on earth with all the pain, right? But they don't do that. Do they they seem to know better at some level. Well, help me out. My mom's job witness. She doesn't accept blood transfusions and that could actually go to save her life. Is that considered one of those loop holes where it's like, oh, I need a blood transfusion. If I don't get one, I go to the afterlife where I will party with God and Jesus forever. Yeah, I don't have an answer for that. I don't I don't know why they would do that. There's nothing in the Bible that I know, of course, they could probably tell you why they don't according to the holy scriptures. But to me, it makes no sense. Pujo, what's that? So I had to pull up the the book on my on my app but but why there is no God simple responses to 20 common arguments for the existence of God. It's by Armin Navabi. I don't know if anyone's ever read it. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, if I recall and correct me if I'm wrong here, John, the kind of the intro to the book was him. I think he's Muslim and he was talking about how he jumped off the roof of a building to try to commit suicide because he was so terrified of not getting into heaven and that there is a loophole in in their religion that if you're under the age of 13 or whatever it was 14, you'd automatically go to arrive a good place and he didn't he didn't die and recovered and then, you know, found his way toward atheism and wrote an excellent book. But it is to me, that's that's frightening and yeah, yeah. I mean, that's another thing. Even in a mainstream Christianity in America, there's a there's a common belief that if you're below like seven years old, that you automatically go to heaven and Andrea Yates took that to the logical conclusion and killed five of her children in one afternoon, correct? Yeah, you're talking about that. I mean, you can, you know, you can go on Google and look up Andrea Yates for the full story. That's it. And Catholics, of course, have an answer to unbaptized babies, you know, they go to the guff or whatever it's called some. Actually, that's been abolished. Yeah. Yeah. I understand, but they nevertheless had come up with something, right? But they did. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. This word was talking about Andrea Yates as well. They're bringing that up as an example of a woman who drowned all five of her children in the bathtub in the bathtub one afternoon just to make sure that they would go to heaven. Just they do that loophole, right? In an evil world. Dred, there's another comment. Oh, it's actually to me. Jovo witnesses don't accept blood because they they are told that humans must not sustain their life with another creature's blood, which includes other people. And that's why it's unholy. I'd like to get the scriptural references on that. If they're listening and would it matter? No, I'd like to look it up and see what the actual wording is. Okay. And what's funny is I was talking to a Christian earlier this week on Facebook and I quoted a scripture to her and she said, well, you can't take it literally. That would pretty much end of the conversation. That's great. That's so great. I mean, like I should I should not take God's on hearing word for it. Oh, that should go to a human to interpret it. Yeah, we live in a weird zany twilight zone. It really is. John Richards. Why don't Christians just jump off a cliff? Well, Dred's right. They made it a sin. And probably or was that you Larry and probably because they don't want to reduce their congregation. They want to expand it. It's a business. It's right. It is. Yeah, but what I think we should add to this conversation. The fact that heaven is actually a gay club in Charing Cross London and I've not been there again. I club. Yes, but I've not been there, but I think that it might not be so unreal as they like to imagine. But the interesting thing here is what is and what isn't suicide because one of you raised the point that you could deny medication. And whilst you wouldn't actually be positive, yeah, while you wouldn't actually be positively killing yourself, you would be sort of negatively killing yourself. So is that is that suicide or is that just, you know, allowing nature's way? Suicide by negligence. Yeah. Well, is it suicide by negligence? Okay. That's there must be smoking cigarettes. Eating poorly. Yeah, not exercising. I would love to see the kangaroo. I'd love to see the the afterward eating ABC special where it's just courtroom in heaven where they're just like, yeah, you're here, but did you kind of kill yourself? Did you conspire to commit suicide? There's a thing here and then go through the pearly gates. Well, it's a very gray area. Now you've raised all sorts of things like not taking enough exercise. So discord is asking. Do you guys think that like not wearing your safety belt or taking medicine seat belt seat belt seat belt or taking medicine count as ways to increase your chances to go into heaven and why aren't those taken more often? And maybe that's why anti-vaxxing is so. I was going to say, I was going to say that. Yeah. That isn't anti-vaxxing. It's just like not wearing a seat belt and then isn't that passively exposing yourself to which by virtue of that would be suicide by negligence. Let's go. As the resident traffic engineer on the call, I have to step in and say, we've actually demonstrated that people that don't wear their seat belt actually incur a burden, a cost on society by. I'm sure it's the same thing with motorcycles and helmets and helmets. Yeah. And then and then you could make the same argument with vaccines to, you know, yes, fewer people vaccinated. So that it's so that one that one's tricky. Wow, there maybe they're trying to get more people into to die prematurely. Yeah, I was good. If I may add to Boudreau's comment, a part of that anti-vaxxing, which is a real thing that you can see is how it overburdened the hospitals and that's what they were, that's what they were afraid of. And of course, people who don't vax and have been hospital straining the system costing everybody who needs more people sick. Yeah. And those who really need the services don't get them because it's clogged up with all these other people. Yeah. So here's an interesting thing because if we're going down this suicide by negligence route, there's a number of avenues. Isn't there? I mean, there's not eating well. There's not taking enough exercise. There's smoking. There's drinking excessively and so on and so forth. Is it possible that there's a cumulative effect? How many of these, how many of these negligencies adds up to one suicide? Right. Great comment, John. It should be charted on an Excel spreadsheet. True. There's a really good follow-up comment that was just posted on Discord saying that Jesus Christ as a human sacrifice is in its own right, an example of a suicide where he had multiple opportunities to say, hey, if I just stop being a jerk, excuse the colorful language, I won't have to kill myself on the cross yet. He knew he was going to do it. He knew he was a plan and he did it anyway. That's the example of meditated, premeditated suicide. Yeah, it's willful negligence. Yes. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Okay. Guys, are we getting close to the end of the break? Dartify, what do you think? No, we still got another good five minutes for the break. All right. I got a good comment from the plug who says Christianity. This is a comment as feedback to John Richards is in fact the business you can tell because they don't have a single package deal. It's always a subscription service. You can't just do a one-stop payment and be like, I'm done. I'm good for the rest of my life. You have to go to church. He says it's literally called service. He's right. It's a service. But the Bible tells you in 1 Peter 3 15 that you got to go out and spread the word. I mean, it's a you got to do it if you're talking about things you have to do for the Bible. Right. Yeah. Right. It's not a God will do it for you. Okay. What I want is for the governments to recognize and it's a business and start taxing them. Yes. Absolutely. They're all parasites on the rest of society. We have to support them through our taxes. Yeah, right. Good comment on that. There's private schools that are often filled with rich people who benefit other rich people because the schools get property taxes that go to that school. Whereas poor neighborhoods do not. Poor neighborhoods are loaded with churches that don't pay property taxes. And so they are essentially in money sink for education. Yeah, it's worse in other countries in countries like Nigeria, which desperately needs some welfare and education in hospitals and the only rich people in there are the pastors, you know, right? Yeah, and don't forget that the vouchers for religious schools take directly take government money from the regular schools, public schools to fund religious schools. And so that's a that's a money sink from from our educational and tithing. So if you tax 10% of a poor community, they're paychecks. That's money that goes literally nowhere. I think it goes back to feeling false hope. Joe Pire, what do you got? Well, I was going to say that that happens a lot in Canada. That's a big portion of the public purse for education goes towards religious or schools with religious programming like Christians and Islam Islamic schools. And also now I can't remember where I was going to say but I'll add on to that. I would say, you know, the the idea of cognitive dissonance or cognitive bias also is if you're a Christian, you think, well, my church is a contributing to the community. Is it or is it contributing to only to other Christians? Right? Because you have a building that only satisfies the needs of the people who go to it. And meanwhile, everyone else that needs that property tax or that money or that funding or that support system, don't get it unless they subscribe to your dogma or they build another church down the street and suck more money from the community. Yeah, well, it's it's an icon from medieval days to to to the present, you know, certain neighborhoods the nicest building is the church, right? It flows from the community to the church with bells. You know, it hoards the money or built the church or whatever. And then when you go when when they need money, they come to you, but when you need money, they tell you to go to God. Right. Yeah. Oh, you know, it's a great moment. So dialed. So here in the UK, we have laws against discrimination. So what I would like to see is those laws being extended to the usage of faith buildings so that if on Monday they have a Christian meeting in their hall on Tuesday, they've got to have a Muslim one on Wednesday, they've got to have a Jewish one. And that applies to all of the different or or secular ones that could open it as a community club certain days of the week. Yes. Payback, you know, they say about McDonald's that McDonald's is not in the business of selling hamburgers and fries. They're in the real estate business. That's what that's what religions are when it comes to that thing. They're not saving souls. They're selling they're collecting real estate. That's it. They're cold. Yep. They're they're making that money. That's what we do. Well, we don't sell it was generally so. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, are we getting close to the bottom? Yep. All right. Let's get that right. Okay. This is digital free thought radio. R and W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you everybody. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK. We were founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year now and we have over thousand members. We also have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's Taft Room in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables over its pretty weather outside on the deck. We also have a Tuesday in Zoom meeting. If you'd like to join us, email us for details at askanatheistatnoxfilatheist.org or let's chat s e at gmail.com. You can also find us online on Facebook, meetup.com or go to our website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or you can just Google Knoxville Atheist. That'll take you there. Just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to a meetup and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. One bet where you will pick up. Hey, we're going to go more into the cognitive dissonance. Well, but first let's check in with Boudreaux Boudreaux. You know, not to pick on you with your Catholic background, but did you ever have a favorite Catholic saint? The people want to know. Yes. And why is it St. Lucy? Okay. That was the question. Yeah. So, uh, you thought I paid attention way more, uh, when I was in Catholic, Catholic, uh, Catholic church service and then some Wednesday night Catholic after school things. I wasn't, I wasn't paying attention. We call it CCD. I forget what it stood for. But since I'm a good steward of the internet, I Google searched my favorite saint, which is going to be St. Agatha. Okay. Because apparently she's the patron saint of breast cancer patients, martyrs, rape victims and others. So, so how is it a saint? They didn't even know about breast cancer. Did they? You can make new saints, right? Like that's how it works with the Catholic church. You can just like make new ones, but there's one for breast cancer. That's good. Well, this one apparently, um, St. Agatha also invoked against earthquakes, natural disasters and fires, which to me makes it sound like she's like a bad guy in a video game. So I'm going to say Agatha. Okay. Okay. Now it's on the list. Thank you guys. Clark says, thank you. John Richards got a question for you. Um, you are a scientist. I would love to know why are there religious scientists? So here's the actual question for real though. If there's any scientists who are religious, I'd like to know how they think the universe started and how that ties in with their beliefs. Why are there religious scientists in the first place? That's a question that's always puzzle. It's just. Go ahead. If you are a scientist, you are working day by day, looking for evidence. And there is no evidence for any God whatsoever that's come to my attention anyway. And we've been looking for two and a half thousand years or so. So longer in that. Yeah, indeed. So what happens when they, is there some sort of, you know, you know, at the airport you go through this arch and they, they some sort of detection mechanism works out what you're carrying on you, whether you're smuggling, I don't know, guns through or whatever. Do they have one of those at the door to their scientific establishment? So that once they've walked through that, they're cleaned of the need to seek evidence. Oh man. Wouldn't that be great? I would love that in the future to just be like, here's a, here's a scanning device that just clears you of all unneeded dogma in your brain. Use you from like all these really bad ideas. You go through it and you're like, hey, Ryan Seacrest is a pretty good host. You know, just like, this is okay. Yeah. Because I think something like that must happen. They've got this double personality. On the one hand. Partitioning. Compartmentalizing. Exactly. It was, what was it called? Non-overmapping. Magisteria. That's the one. Yeah. What happens? They've got this compartment in their brain, which works on Sundays. Yeah. Yeah. From Mondays to Fridays, that one switched off. And the other one switched on the rational one. And you can, I think it was a Steven J. Gould that came up with that. Yeah. Yeah. And himself being a scientist and all. Yeah. Yeah. A very interesting way to look at it. When you're saying switching off parts of your brain, when you do like these talks with people like Larry and dry pirate, and I have done, you can see it happen. You can see them talk. Hey, tell me why you think tectonic plates are a thing. And they'll tell you, they'll list off a number of criteria that are all very well substantiated. Well, research, not absolutely sure, but altogether make it such that they've met the, the claim of why are there tectonics and like very well evidence. And then you say, like, so then if you have all this evidence for this, why do you believe in a God and then switch? Well, back when I was in third grade, my had a sore stomach and I asked my mom to give me a prayer and it went away and not prove God exists to me. I'm just like, whoa, look at that. Look at that. A little firing search. That are five. It looks like you want to go for a thread. Well, I was going to say, you know, talking about calibration because that's what we often do. And, and so cratic examination is to calibrate confidence and beliefs. Yes. And, you know, sometimes like you were saying an example of the tectonic plates where you could have that conversation with someone and then ask them, well, what is your confidence that that is in fact the case? Well, you know, 95% that's kind of what the evidence is. Correct. And then this thing about mom praying for you and carrying your stuff for a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Right. How could I lower your confidence by one percent? Absolutely. Yeah, it's a bizarre situation. So you're closed minded on it. No, I'm not closed minded. I'm just, we'll never change my mind about it. I'll hear things like that. But listen, what you were saying before, John Richards, it was really interesting because you had this idea of scientist jobs or finding evidence and they haven't found evidence for God. The thing is they found evidence for God. It's just not enough evidence to support a God claim. They have terrible antidotes, antidotes, my bad. Don't don't don't arrest me, John Richards. I'm sorry for pronouncing the C and antidote, but they have, you know, personal experience. They have arguments from comfort. They have a book of claims that they believe are true. They have arguments from authority. All of these things do not add up to any worthwhile belief or demonstration of a God existing. Yet they've reduced their criteria to, to a second standard where they will use that to confirm that a God exists. Whereas for everything else, they have a completely different standard. And so essentially they're operating on a double standard. They found evidence, but they're willing to believe it on that low standard. What do you think? So they, so they leave their laboratory and then bar lows right down to ankle height. Correct. Correct. Yeah, it's really frustrating. Hey, what gets me is when, when, and I did this myself when I was believer or getting close to non-believe, you know, give me a sign. And anything that out of the ordinary that happens is quote a sign from God and not only just a sign from God, but like sign from that particular God, which supports that particular religion. Like I asked one guy, I told him I was an atheist and he couldn't believe it. Why do you, what convinced you that God was real? He said, well, one day I asked for a sign and everything, every number I looked at had sevens in it. We just all over my paycheck, you know, everything license plates. So that was good enough for him. Right. Yeah. It's just, it's so shame. It's just not a phone call. It's like, oh, I'm God. I, I, I zip by the way I exist. That would be at least better than I found a seven. Yeah. Going by that reasoning, obviously 007 is God. Okay. Dread. There you go. Yeah. I was going to say that like in, in for, for Pasifarians or for myself as a Pasifarian anyway, my, my, my Pasifarianism is, is based on the idea that there are unknowable aspects to existence that I will never, ever have a solution for. And it's serves kind of like as an avatar or as a placeholder where I can celebrate those things without, without conflict. You know what I mean? Sure. So do I believe in a literal flying spaghetti monster? Well, probably not, but you know, you think about quantum entanglement and string theory and, and the, you know, the, the forms of matter inside a neutron star, which are related to forms of pasta. These are all really just as good an explanation as any, right, those things that will never understand fully. I see. That's where I, that's where I place myself. Pasifarianism is a avatar for a celebration of the unknown and complex. And, and it is a shrinking unknown because we are figuring things out, but it's so vast that it's like, Hey, we'll be here for a while. This unknown things. Let's just have some pasta and enjoy the fact that there's going to be some things we won't ever figure out. Isn't that cool though? Isn't that actually interesting? I like that a lot as a, as an approach to it. Boudreaux, I saw your hand. What's up? Yeah. Yeah. I like that. How you, um, uh, summarize that Pasifarianism. That's, that's a good. Yeah. So, um, Neil, Neil deGrasse Tyson did a, um, I saw it on a YouTube video. I'm not sure if it was a lecture or what it was, but he basically, he turned the question. A lot of people look at, uh, religiosity compared to, uh, degrees, you know, in education and there are, there are, um, um, you know, X percentage of religious people with people with bachelor's degrees, let's say, and the, the, the, the percentage kind of drops as you get to, you know, higher levels, levels of education, you get into masters and PhD and, and it drops even most significantly when you get into the real harder sciences, um, you know, astrophysics and, and so on. And so, you know, people have said for, for years, you know, the more advanced degree, the more advanced scientist, uh, uh, again in the hard science, nothing, nothing against the other scientists, but I think it stands to reason that there's different type of thinking that goes into some of these hard sciences and right. And those ones naturally would, would, um, reject the God. What Neil deGrasse Tyson did was he looked at the interesting pieces. Let's look at the actual religious people that have these advanced degrees. Those are the people worth talking to, studying, interviewing. You, you will have this advanced degree and you're a huge minority in your field. And because you still believe in a God, those are the, those are the interesting people. So I don't know if there's been a follow up to it, but I'm, I would be really curious too. And you probably see it tie in your, in your, uh, uh, work and field. But yeah, you're, you're surrounded by, and I see it sometimes too. And on, on campus and engineering, it's like, you know, the, the, it surprises me to see someone with a PhD in advanced degree and still, you know, right. Well, the most famous example of this, of course, is Francis Collins. Yes. He was, um, key person in the human genome project, wasn't he? Yeah. He was a pure scientist. No. No, go ahead. He was a pure scientist who had a revelation when he saw a frozen waterfall. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That made him become a Christian. Yeah. Wow. Really? And convinced him a hundred percent. I can show him a bunch of waterfalls right now. You can go on Google. Yeah. Did he have Google images back then? Here's an idea though. I think we've, now we've got chat GPT. Yeah. We should ask it. We should ask it. Why are there religious scientists? Ah, yeah, I can do this next meeting. We'll do a chat GPT where we will generate 50 or 10 questions for the show. Ask 10 questions that will stump atheists. How about that? We'll ask chat GPT to go back to us and see what we can feel them. So that this is a new chat box program or something? Yeah. Oh, it's an AI. It's, it's state of the art AI. It is. And it's called what? Chat GPT. It's a step forward. So a quick sidebar, there's things called Turing tests, which is like a really fun. They actually make a, they actually make a competition where you can see on YouTube people competing against each other with robots that they produce that are made to trick other people that they're actually people or a chat robot. And we've, since 2012 have made a chat bot that can actually more than 50% of the time actually convince people that they're actually talking to an actual human being companies have been buying those programs and use them for their like customer service operations. Like when you go on Amazon and you think you're talking to a person, maybe from like India or somewhere, it's actually just a robot that's like using the fact that it's foreign to cover up some of the grammatical mistakes that it's making, but it's still just fixing stuff for you automatically. And then finally they have an open AI, which is basically, Hey, anybody can use this. You can go on. It's, it's partially owned by Google or sponsored by it, but there are $29 billion owned privately owned distribution of open software. You can go on chat, GPT, log in and play around with this computer that will write song lyrics for you poetry on very, very short prompts. My friend from work said, write a poem about our job, posted it and we got like this epic Odyssey of like everyone about our job, the nature of the work that we do. And it's all in lyrical sense. I'm like, this is scary. This is actually very well. Very scary. Imagine how you'd feel if you're a writer for shows. They could just take. We're going to get some better writers for shows. Most shows are really bad. There's only like one or two good shows. We all know that. Right. I was going to tell you that most of these, these chat GPT interactions are all text-based. When you go there, you have to type in and then give it back in text. However, if you go to YouTube, you can find a lot of videos where they have taken the text and run it through an emulator of a person, you know, who's talking the lines and doing the speech instead of, so you don't have to read all that stuff. And they also have videos where they have one GPT or one AI talking to another that way. So the conversation is very interesting. What's really fun. There's a cool point where some of those videos, the two robots are talking to each other and the other robot's like, are you a chatbot? And the other one's like, yeah, are you a chatbot? It's like, oh, we're both chatbots. It's like, this is. It is getting, it is getting really scary. It started back in the Victorian times when they had things called automatons where little manicule men, figures, like robots, but hidden inside. Was it a tiny little man who operated them? Answered all their questions. But then, of course, more recently, we have had the D-Pack Chopra generator. And chat GPT seems to be the grown-up version of that, but it is amazing. And I'm sure it would pass the Turing test. And in fact, they have given it some exams. He's done some exams and he's passed. Not top of the class, but he's got middling results, middling grades in, I forget which subject areas. They can create exams too. You can ask it to create a homework assignment. Let me make this out as well. There's high school teams now that can design chatbots that can break the Turing test or get through it. And that's only through iterative studies of people working together and not praying or relying on a gut to fix it, but using skills in software engineering and human understanding to improve and teach better generations more adequately so they can more effectively meet these like bars. We are so excited in science because we're constantly coming up with new things. And this is an example of a new thing brought about through the scientific method. Whereas religion is still hashing out the same 40 or six stories, 46 stories, you know, 52 stories, I'm sorry, or sometimes they reuse and we all know that pastors don't always have a new story to tell, but it's the same yearly worth of stories every single time. It's dyad and hopefully as a global community we are understanding that and moving away from religiosity and moving towards this new exciting stuff that science keeps coming up with because we need more people to contribute to that. More women, females, foreign people, everyone doing it improves it because that's the way how we get better at stuff with just all these new hands and minds working together on these new projects. I feel like that is the stuff. While scary in some aspects, all new technology was scary. I mean, I remember when we first got our first microwave, that was terrifying. We're like, what in the world? It's not even hot and it's making you hot. What's going on? And it wasn't called a microwave, it was called a radar range. Yeah, but remember how scary it was when you got like HD cameras for the first time you're like, wait a second, that's what people see when they see me. I don't like this. We always had these big swings, but in the end it always tends to improve because we make the quality of life better. I feel like stuff like this could really improve a lot of things. So, yay science and go ahead, Boudreau. Just real quick to tap on what you're saying. Yeah, remember there was a time, I don't remember it, but people wouldn't get into an elevator unless it had an elevator operator. Oh, yeah. I don't remember that, but I'm aware of that. Yes. They just stood there and said things like ladies underwear. Men's wear for fall. So I wanted to say that I want to plug because yesterday I had this fantastic guest on Freethorn Hour, very brilliant philosopher type who we started to talk about the developments in AI and his opinion is like I tend to agree with him that the Turing test is too linguistic because it would eliminate our own infants as being conscious. Just because they can't speak yet. You know, and there's another aspect there too about AI is that you never hear one say, you know, I was thinking you mean they don't use like it doesn't say while I have this idea like AIs don't come up with original ideas, right? So there you go. Next question for chat GPT have you ever had an idea? Have you ever had an original idea? Yeah, we may have to define original because they can definitely come up with things that are essentially novel just through brute force right in the same way that a human being can come up with a new song. They can come up with like a new poem. You know, they wouldn't be able to sit there and say, I was thinking about the nature of time and I developed this new theory about space and the space time continuum or something like that. I mean, that's not going to happen. Oh, you that's the last words by listen, I can tell you not GPT but there's another AI program that I'd like for you guys to check out after this where essentially a prompt and it will make art for you. I started to say Go ahead, Dredd. They already create new songs that the art that didn't exist, stories that didn't exist. They're they're, you know, you're saying they don't say that I'm thinking because that's all they do. They think they don't do anything else but they pretty much just want to put something here hopefully so like we have this idea of what thinking is that humans do and we have it the pedestal but it's actually a fairly mathematical process that could be processed and emulated very well to where the things where it's like it could be so efficient that you don't have to think or express it as well. I was thinking of a new plan. It's like, no, here's 40 new plants that I just came up with. Like, these are all awesome. I'm coming. Every millisecond comparison, comparing and producing, which is all things that computers do will. Yeah. Exactly. That was the point I was going to make is like, you know, all these chat boxes rely on prompts to do the things that they do. What would be really interesting is if you woke up one morning and there was this new piece of work that had not been prompted in any way shape or form and then that being the responsibility of an AI. Well, would argue with that. That's not even free will because none of my thoughts are in a weird way anyway. And you think about all the art, the original creations, like on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Well, they were prompted by the church. You know, Michelangelo painted this, painted that, the of the scenes we want. So, you know, those are original compositions, but he did them after being prompted. True enough. What do you got? So your free will come out always, always sparks ideas for me. Of course, it'd be really interesting to quiz a chatbot to say come up, give me a random movie. And they could very easily tap into a movie database and pick a movie at random. Don't you think that it would be pretty obvious if you if you asked for, you know, 10 random movies from from us from humans, even us on the call versus a chatbot wouldn't you get a very different sampling of movies? I mean, I would argue that. Yeah, I'd argue the chatbot would be even more random than mine because my would just definitely be more random but our our picks our picks because we're like a free will I think would be they would they would all kind of like tie to they would be recent movies or they would be really popular movies or they would be Marvel movies. Yep, marbles that really appeal to you. Right. I am not going to I'm not going to suggest a movie I've never heard of. Right. I can't I can't that won't that one but the chatbot might so I bet if you did some kind of a distribution of like the popularity or the star rating or whatever or the gross income the gross whatever the movie collected, I guarantee that the chatbot would have a much lower score on popularity or whatever versus so there's your turning test right there. Just ask ask him for a random movie. I mean it used to be would say you can never be a human being with at chess because chess is this you know really abstract sort of conversation between two very brilliant forward thinkers who can like plan things ahead. It's like no like there's a there's a way to meticulously design objectives in chess to where you can say I think these moves are better and I'm going to just try to make the best move each time and now we have computers on my phone that can beat me or grandmasters right and that's really useful to train grandmasters so like it didn't ruin chess just made people better at chess players because now there's a higher standard I feel like chatbot and like these art programs are just going to do the same thing they'll inspire more things from people but they'll also make people understand that the way how we understand things can be understood and that is a very useful thing because now we don't rely on mysticism or religion or spiritualism to explain that to us now we know the process and we can now find the best process to educate children and train ourselves at new cool things that we want to learn like this is a benefit if we just understand that everything we do in here can be fairly well understood and if anything done better and I think that's a cool thing. John Richards I think you had a comment. Yeah it's you've moved on sorry sorry buddy. It's about these illustrator programs because a friend of mine is a drummer in a heavy metal band and he uses it to design their album covers and it's so fascinating how many you put in a few prompts and like you know I don't know a devil's fork or something and it comes up with 40 different examples in three seconds and he spends hours through into the early morning trying to decide which one of these wonderful designs is the best. Right right. I'll throw one last thing up before we close the show I enjoy drawing and the fact that there's a computer that can make art doesn't take away the value that I put into the practice of drawing in the same way that there are people who love writing and the fact that there's a program that can write poems to doesn't take away any joy that that person can get from it I just think we are going to evolve to where we appreciate the things that we love to do more versus doing them to necessarily gain or profit or a notoriety or an audience or things like that when we have robots capable of doing routine tasks for us and that expansion of routine expands then more people will have more time to enjoy the things that they love to do because we have the basic needs being met through automation I think that is generally a really good goal the improvement of society through letting robots do what they want to do and then it's a question of what can we do to make the robots enjoy what they're doing before the robot wars start alright guys Dred Pirate you can find me on youtube at mind pirate m-i-n-d-p-y r-a-t-e I livestreamed this at 7 a.m. on Sunday mornings and later do the views on the news at 11 a.m. on Sunday mornings p-s-t Dred Pirate one little last note I would say you should always plug your show to the A.I. r-a-t-e it's right there for you something that you'd recommend we check out before next week oh what I recommend I was going to recommend to the A.I. people to program their bots to sort movies by a box office results and then randomly select from there so then we now they can pass the turn test so I think we solve that problem so my my random little thing is they make vacuum robots now that have little A.I.s guys in them that will now instead of just smearing dog poop all over your carpet like look at it and be like hey I think that's dog poop it's a amorphous shape I'm going to put that into my category catalog and use my neural network to recognize what everything's are in your home well you could get that you could not get that I just don't have a dog it saved me get a cat with a litter box you'll solve yourself a lot of problems John Richards what's up does it come out with a little dustpan brush and scoop up like the Jetsons right yeah it vaporizes it vaporizes my robot has lasers on it it's kind of interesting John yeah free thought channel that's where to go I strongly recommend this for free thought our chat I had yesterday with Alan Colcun and yes views on the news later on today and the sad news is that one of our panelists Frank Lovell is no longer with us he's with the newly one yeah sorry to hear that are five anything you'd like to close out the show with well yeah we're getting back to the subject originally was cognitive dissonance and irrational dichotomies of thought I on my website digitalfreethought.com if you click on the blog button I have an article there called irrational dichotomies of religious thought and I recommend if you'd like to know more about that to go there and read that what else my I have a book on atheism that's available on Amazon thank you dread for holding it up I appreciate that it's called atheism what's it all about and I take the articles from my website and put them in the book so it's a book of articles about subject to atheism my youtube is at doubter five I have a lot of content on there as well as animated 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 6 o'clock on WOZO radio say bye everybody bye everybody later