 Peter. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 29th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes, our DJ, Dowder 5, and as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Hey, it's me, the Wombat. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, freethought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk 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. You're in Knoxville in the middle of the Bible, but we have a group of 1,100 of us. We're the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK. I'm going to tell you more about us after the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? You know, I was looking over comments from last week's show while we're talking. There have been some interesting ones. The topic today's show is God Detector, something that we had talked about way, way, way back when, maybe about two years ago. But I wanted to revisit the subject because I thought it would be interesting to talk about not just what we would do with a God Detector, but what people who are religious would do if they had a God Detector. And how honest would they be if it comes to switching lanes. But before we get into that, we'd love to check in with you, see how you've been doing. I could tell you personally, I've been having a hard time trying to find a good video game to get my head into. And I've been bouncing back and forth between a lot of games and realizing that I just don't want to commit the time to get good at a very complicated mechanically driven game. I just want to be able to jump in, have a good time and jump out. And so I've been having some fun with like very short experiences. Some that I would recommend is there's one called Metro City. I believe that's the name for it. It's basically a minimalized city design. It's a simulator. Many motorways is what it's called. It's basically design a town with all the streets. And you have cars that need to get from their homes to a location. And you can bounce back and forth between designing, making roundabouts, trying to figure out the best way to have roads curve into each other, making highways. And it's all very plug and play. You can play it for five minutes. You can play it for a half hour and you're out. What's it called again? Many motorways. And what I like about it is it's like Tetris. It's a game where you will lose eventually, but half the fun is just experimenting and trying to keep up with the system as the demands continue to build on top. I wouldn't have thought that it would have had a win-lose scenario. I just thought that you, you know, you build and watch it and then you keep growing it. Yeah. I don't know. My personal win is if I can make over a thousand points, if I can help a thousand people commute, then I'm happy. So some people will come up with their own challenges. So you're right. There is no like Tetris. There is no like true lose. Playing is the fun. And I had never played that game and felt like I was wasting my time. In fact, I've only felt like I've had a deeper appreciation for how roads are designed today. And when I see like a right turn on something, I'm like, why did you make this curse so sharp? Or if I see traffic lights, I think to myself, that doesn't solve problems. It creates problems. They create traffic. Traffic lights create traffic. Waste of gasoline and brake pads and all kinds of things at the time. Yeah. You're just making my where I need to go slower. You should have. Yeah. We need more roundabouts. That's for sure. Larry, how you been? Oh, I'm fine. I've been playing the star, star field. And if you're looking for a game that you can just jump in and jump out of it, it's pretty good. It does have some longer scenarios later on in the game. But what I love about it is at any point in the game, let's say you just jumped in and you've been playing for a minute and a half and then your significant other wants you to do something, you can hit save and quit. And it does save the game. It has a quick save and auto save and all these other things so that you never lose any playtime. And as you get stronger, the game gets a little harder, but you're leveling up to meet that. So you can really play from the beginning. And it's not that hard. You can set it to normal, hard, easy or very easy. And I've always been a fan of being able to set it to easy because I want to play a game for fun, not for frustration. Exactly. Larry, you hit it the nail right on the head. There are so many games out now that are like you have a badge of honor if you complete it because it's so challenging and so hard. And we're both adults here. Like the greatest things that we'll ever do will not be complete a video game. So when we go to video games, we're here to just have fun and relax. We're not here to be like, I beat this game. It's like no one cares. We're all having enough stress through the day. I don't need relaxation time. There's new elections coming up. Like we're all stressed out. We don't need more stress in our lives. We don't want to like die and like find some weird new er-tree or like some bonfire. It's like, no, I don't have any satisfaction from being a very difficult boss. I have satisfaction for completing things and having a good time with my weekends. You know? I will say this. At my job, I've been feeling really good recently because we had two new babies. I'm part of my team. So like both of the people who work for me successfully had healthy babies. I just want to give a quick shout out for them. Even though they're out, I'm happy that they're well. But I've been more or less by myself because we've been strapped for people since they've been out. We've had to dedicate other people in my team for dedicated support in other groups. And so it's basically just me right now. Like if you talk about who's responsible for testing, I'm doing the, I'm wearing the hat of a lab manager as well as our quality technician, as well as our test engineer, as well as our general laboratory analytical support. I'm wearing a lot of hats right now until we come back to everything and look for the people to come back. There's some stress. It is. But you know what? I've been accomplishing goals still. And I've been going to work and I told you before I had this training program a while back ago when I was in Cleveland training. And I came back to work and I was utilizing two things that I felt were valuable that we had talked about on the show, which was providing recognition and awards effectively. And there's a lot of people who will hold back on recognizing when people are doing a good job. But I found that by recognizing when people are doing good work or making it personal and having that one-to-one feedback for them has enabled a culture at my job that I've seen change where people are recognizing each other for their works and actions, including Pat's on my back. I recognize when I tell five people that are very concentrated, very direct, and very related, good things that they're doing, they feel better. And then it starts to trickle out to where people are coming to my door and it's like, hey, I just wanted to say, you're doing a good job, and blah, blah. I was like, that makes me feel good. I feel the morale just really, really pulling up. You're doing a good job here on the show. Thank you, Larry. I can see that. I don't want to do that here. That's a really big impact. But what I would love to have at my job to make things easier would be like a detector that could just be like, hey, there's your problem, fix it. And I'm like, ah, that would make me so happy, both at my job and in my personal life. Wouldn't be great to just have, particularly as an atheist, just a single God detector or like a modular God detector. Maybe it's even an app, whatever it is that we can test and reliably demonstrate that it does work. And I want something that can at least just tell us there is a God. This is the God. This is it. This is the one that's correct from all the pantheon of different mythologies from humanity. It's this God. We can test it. We can verify existence. We can do this whole falsifiably and objectively and you can test it. I can test it. And we're all satisfied. It's this God. And I thought to myself, we had talked about this on the last show. We want that as atheists. We would love to have a God detector, right? It would make things so much easier. But then I thought to myself, man, if I had this conversation with, I don't know, a Muslim, and it turned out that Christian God was real, I imagine they would have... Oh, vice versa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They would have a lot of concerns and probably, you know, a lot of anger. And it would probably take them a while to get on board with the idea that it's this version of the God that exists. Or they end up being an atheist. Say, that's not the right God. It's not the right God. I don't believe it. Yeah. How do you know that tester works? Like, because we can test it. I mean, just push this button. Like, check it out. Like, look, I mean, like, we can say, like, make 14 bunnies up here right now. There's 14 bunnies. Like, you know this works. Like, well, how do you know it wasn't a device that made it work? It's a God-powered device. It's a bunny device. So I always thought to myself, man, there's going to be billions and billions of people who will be upset if there's ever a God detector. It's never a good business to bink a God detector. Well, let's take a time just to step back just a little bit. Sure, sure, sure. You remember back in the old science fiction movies, they'd have like a little remote that would be in the hand like you're talking about. And it would be a detector. And the only thing about it would be a red light. You know, a little red light. And if it detects something, a little red light would flash. Yes. Okay. So at this point, we've got a God detector. We wander around for a minute and it starts flashing. Okay, we have a God. At this point, we have a generic God. We have a deistic God. We don't know which God it is. We just know it's a God. So I mean, you know, we've got to start at least there. And if you had that, that would immediately, you know, if you could get the atheists all to buy in on it, then that would eliminate atheism. But it would also wouldn't be any closer to where we wanted to be because all of the different religions would claim it was their God. So I think it would eliminate atheism, but only for a brief period of time. And this is why I wanted to bring up the topic in the show. Because I think if it got rid of atheism, that would mean essentially we would want to iterate on that technology. And maybe we can get to the point where we can have a definitive answer for which God or what kind of nature of God actually does exist. And the closer we get to that specific answer, then we reach that point where brand new atheists are forming. Not because of the fact that they lack a belief in God, but because they refuse to believe in that God or they're spurned by... Or they lack a belief in that device. They say that device... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Doesn't work. Yeah. But at that point, science can continue to iterate and test on that device. I figure it like, let's just say for sake of argument in a hour long show that we had a God detector that works as the nature of the title of the show. We know it works. We know a specific God. What I'm thinking of is the timeline for atheists like you and I, who are just looking for a good reason to reach a God. Now we have an objective way to determine that. We have something that's somewhat more reliable than it was before. And we will lose our atheism, I imagine, for the benefit of having a more reliable answer for whether or not there is a God. And we can say, yeah, we believe in a God because we have an objective testable God detector. Whether or not I believe the tenets of that God is a completely different question. But whether or not it exists, that's unquestionable. I do or it's it's so reliable that this detector you're talking about does identify the God, right? The God it is. So yeah, if you want to do it in two phases where at first it just says the God does exist, but we don't know the nature of the God. Okay, sure. We'll iterate on top of the technology and then figure out which God. And as we get closer between those two points, as we get closer to defining which God we're talking about, that's when we have this new second generation of new stage atheists who are, well, I was Christian, but now you're telling me it's some jade God or some Egyptian God or some Roman God. Like, I know I'm out. I'm out. I'm out. It's like, I don't believe in that guy. It's like, how can you not believe in that God? You were just on board with the idea that God exists, that this machine works. And as we trickle down to one answer, we have all this fallout from people who used to be religious. Yeah, well, look at it. It would have to be Mars. Mars is the old Roman God of war. Look around the planet. It's got to be Mars. Sure. Sure. Sure. So if we found out, yeah, listen, I can tell you something right now. I would be worried. It would be a really good sci-fi book, honestly. I don't want to. It'd be a terrible sci-fi book, but interesting concept of we have atheists, as we understand them today, people who just don't, who aren't convinced that a God exists. But then we would have a second generation of atheists who were, well, I was religious, but you're now telling me that a different God exists than the one that I believed in. And if that's the case, I'm upset and I don't want to worship that God. I don't want to believe in that God. I choose to reject this being. And then you would have the, this new brand of atheism, the second wave of atheism that's like almost religiously inspired, which is almost the same conflation of how religious people think what atheists are, people who are hate God, people who don't want to follow God's work. Like that's what we might expect when we actually find out a way to figure out that a God does definitively exist. And the scenario in my head that I'm throwing out, why I think this is interesting is because there's no way to avoid that scenario if we were to actually have a definitive way of determining if a God exists, because there's billions of people who believe in many, many, many different versions of a singular God or pantheons of God, and you're not going to make them all happy if you figured out that one of them was real. You know, the thing about it is, you got to think about why we could never build a God detector. Well, I mean, we couldn't build a Geiger counter without some actual uranium that's giving off radioactivity to test in a lab and build a device to detect it. I mean, we wouldn't know what it was, what its properties were, what to, what to build around to detect until we had a sample of it in the lab to be able to know what its parameters are, whether we could test for those parameters. And since we don't have a God and probably never will have a God in the lab to test what its parameters was, we talked about this earlier but the subject was souls. You know, we're talking about these ghost detectors and ghost hunters out there that a user of all these devices to detect ghosts, but we'd never had a ghost in the lab. We don't know what their parameters are. We don't know what kind of stuff they radiate if they radiate anything at all. So what, how can we build a detector to detect the stuff we don't know what they do? Right. If you were to go, yeah, and if we were to go off of, how do I put it? If we were to go off what we had and just say the Bible, the only sort of evidences that we have are inherently subjective and are not supposed to be used to get yourself closer to God because in the Bible specifically they say, you will, you believe with faith, not because of evidence, but because of faith. Faith is the desired way to reach God. Oh, we're going to talk about faith now? Well, I'm just saying like it's not a good method to power anything or to verify a belief, but it's very compelling that going ahead, going ahead. Oh, the problem with faith is that you can believe anything in the world using faith. Every religion on the planet believes their things about souls and afterlife and gods based on faith. Faith is not an end. It's well, it's an end to questioning because once you start using faith to get your answers, you no longer really question anything. You just stop questioning, and that is something the preachers really love, and that's why they tell you to use faith. It stops your question. It does, and it also lowers your standard of evidence for sure, and you can be trained to do stuff like that. It's like the belief of the substance of what's asked for. It's like the assurance of things that are hoped for, the conviction of things that were not seen. If you have all the evidence in the world that says, you know, you know, apples are red, you're supposed to use faith to believe that apples are purple because that's what God values. Like he wants you to think like that. That's very, very telling in my opinion of a deceitful, deceptive practice because they don't want you to use the highest faculties you have to figure out things. They want you to use a substandard criteria of evidence. However, like I said, if we're going back to this God detector, you know, I'm not arguing that a God detector can exist. What I can say, though, is we've certainly discovered things without having an example of it firsthand. What we've typically done is either observe it for the first time and just didn't recognize what it was, and maybe it was a limitation of what we were able to explain or perceive or comprehend, but then realize after the fact it's like, oh no, these giant cracks in the earth are actually moving plates. Like we just had to like update our model. And so now we know tectonic plates and like continental shift and stuff like that. We can see galaxies with like telescopes before we didn't understand what we were looking at. We thought the bright lights in the sky were pinholes in a blanket that the gods were holding up and that the lights were coming from heaven. And now we know they're stars. We know germs. We didn't understand what germs were from to begin with. We thought they're like weird demons. Now we understand like they're like organisms. So there's there's been cases where we've seen things already, didn't understand what we were looking at. And then through better contemplation came to a better understanding what we're at now and better instrumentation in a lot of cases. And who's to say that we're not in the same situation now? I'm not saying, listen Larry, I'm not saying that a God detector can exist. I'm just saying, what if we already see God every day? What if we already see souls every day? But our but our dumb, smooth, atheist brains just didn't allow ourselves to believe it was Carl Sagan. It said the time to believe something is when the evidence presents itself. Okay. You could also say the time to believe something is when the evidence and understanding. Oh, I like it. If you don't understand something, why would you believe it? I mean, why would why would you give it properties that you don't know that it has? Right. And if you misunderstand something, you would. But even in the best case scenario, let's say the God detector, all it is is a machine that gives you the understanding and points in the direction of the God that you can see already, but just aren't comprehending it because you lack the understanding. Wait a minute, this thing always points north. It's not a God. So you do it. So you do it. And it's like, there's the God. And you're like, Oh, no. So like, you finally figure out, okay, so it's this guy, or like, it's this person who's just been walking around for all of eternity, just on planets. And he's just like, Oh, no, I'm Ted. I'm God. Yeah, you found me. You finally found me. Congratulations, guys. You found me is like, Oh, wow, we found God. How many says no, you didn't with the old Jedi and mind trick. No, you didn't. But we would, we would, there's no, there's no, so like, there's no scenario where we would find the God and everyone would be would be happy. There would be a period of time where people at least who are atheists would be like, Oh, okay, that's God. Well, I'm not worshiping Ted because like, one, he doesn't seem like he deliberately wanted me to like he's been hiding for a long period of time. And we had to like, build a whole sophisticated network of technologies just to find one person like that's crazy. But like, cool, cool for him. He exists. Like, I'm fine. We're not atheists anymore. We know who God is. But, you know, we're not Ted, it's tonight's, if you will. Right. But there's no book of Ted. There's no book of Ted. And like, everything's fine. Maybe we found like, the flying spaghetti months or whatever it is. I'm just saying, on top of that, there would be the immediate fallout of the people who've deeply invested in telling the Christian line or the Muslim myth or, you know, any other popular Judeo religion, Catholicism, all the branches of Protestantism, all these huge, huge markets where they only sell false hope and make a lot of money from it because there's no overhead costs, where they have tax incentives to build their churches and their mansions and buy their cars and private jets. And now they have to start paying taxes because now, like, wait a second, wait a second, you're saying just because we know who God is, I still can't have freedom of religion to not have to pay taxes? Well, I don't see why because we already know who the real God is. Like, well, I protest that time for protests, time for wars, time to put people in and sells to to establish my power and demonstrate that Ted is, if anything, a demon, a terrible person and not worthy of anyone's worship even if he may be the one responsible for wars and cancers and everything else. If he's got a God like power is then why can't we pin it on him? Right, right, right. Yeah, the subject of a great deal of ire from a lot of people, even well-meaning people who are willing to worship him would have a riddle of Epicurus assault. Yeah, it's a terrible situation. No, it's a terrible situation. It's a terrible situation for both all humanity. It's a terrible situation for Ted who now has to answer all these terrible questions from people. Is this like, I just wanted some privacy. I left you guys your own devices. I'm sorry. I don't, I'm not involved. I'm trying not to be involved. Like, I am taking like the deast route. Like I have tried my best to like not, you know, participate in a lot of things, but, you know, I dropped the ball in some places. I made mistakes. I made some good things. I don't know what to tell you guys. Like, fix it, fix it. I gave you brains to like cure diseases. I gave you, you know, the authority to be able to like make packs and work with each other and like do it, like just do it. There's no reason why you can't do it. Yeah, I don't remember who said it, but he says, why would God give us the ability to think and then issue its use? Right. Right. Tell us and tell us we can't think like the biblical passage that says, lean not on your own understanding is basically telling you, don't think, you know, just believe what we tell you in this book. Right. And believe me, it's not God telling you that it's the preachers who wrote the book because the Bible was written by preachers of that day. Right. Now, here would be the, here would be the slightly darker version of it or other interesting. Maybe the God detector doesn't work by pointing to a guy named Ted and saying like, this is God. Maybe it's more of like, I'm going to let you see your soul. And then when you die, we're going to see the soul leave your body and we're just going to follow it to wherever it goes. And we can see all the souls converge to like a point in space. And we'll be like, ah, that's supposed to be where all the souls go. So like, how do you know that even works? What if there was like a little timer, like right up on your forehead of like, this is how much life you have. Here's your soul just being like, I want to be free. I want to get out of this mortal coil. This is terrible. And then when you die, it's like, it unplugged the USB stick. That's you as best as it can. And it's like, see you later. I'm out of here by and you're like, okay, well, that's interesting. And you can just follow the trajectory. It just goes in a straight line towards space. And with these glasses on or whatever, you can just see all these souls leave the planet and converge to one point in location. You do some black hole. Some math and you're like, oh, OK, that must be where heaven is. It's like 15 light years away. That's just outside of our visible space. That makes sense. And it's right there. Like we're not going to be able to fly there. But at least now we know where souls go. We can see souls. We know the timer is right. So everybody's satisfied. Maybe who knows who knows. But at least we now know that souls are real. Would that at least convince you, Larry, that so what? Why not? Why not? Well, if we could see them and we measure them and and know that everybody's got one. And when the whole leaves the body, it dies. Yeah, that would that would make a convincing argument. But what it would be evidence that would be a time to bleed it. OK. And then would that make you believe in a God just by virtue of not necessarily. I mean, look at the Eastern religions, Shintoism, Taoism. They all believe in what? Worshipping ancestors and which they believe are still around. In some form. So they, you know, Buddhism even believes in reincarnation, but none of them believe in an all powerful God. Interesting. A creator God. OK, OK. So even the existence of souls won't be enough for you. No, no, it's an independent issue. That's interesting. Ah, OK, I love it. All right. So we need to take a mid show break. This is the digital free thought radio hour on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll 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 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. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year and have over 1100 members now. We have weekly in person meetings. You want to come down every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at 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 on Facebook, meetup.com, or at KnoxvilleAtheist.org, our website, or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's 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. Start. That's right. One that where do you want to pick up? All right. So we had some listener comments from last week's show. Last week we had a guest on by the name of Keith Simple, wonderful lad all the way from Ireland. Now a multimedia guru. That's Keith. S-E-M-P-L-E. S-E-M-P-L-E. And I saw some of his videos on YouTube. Wonderful skilled artist and a great presenter just has a wonderful crowd presence. And a great accent. And a great accent. That goes without saying. That goes without saying. A young idealist had talked to the show and says, if Keith ever titles a show in the LA area, keep it stupid simple. Please announce it on your show incessantly. Joey Burr 29 also commented, great discussion gentlemen. We're all going to someone else's hell. That really resonated with me and my experience is low. Keith is an extremely talented musician. I was actually at his first show when he formed his namesake band. And I love what he does with his music. And now his new podcast. I'm glad to have found your channel through him. So thank you guys so much for providing comments on a side table. There's also so Larry, you may not know this, but actually you do know this. I know sign language. You see me do some talking with some people. I'll do like additional sign language tutorials on my channel where I'll watch cartoons that have deaf characters in them. And I'll translate the signs that they use in the show and I'll talk about what they how so often times what happens is a character because animating is so difficult. The character will just do this, like barely move it all. And the character will be like, Oh, you know, sign language. She's saying she wants dinner tonight. I'm like, no, not really, not really. Let's let's talk and let's show how to actually show that sign and like what the concessions have been in the history of like trying to like present, you know, deaf culture to watch some of that. There's a TV show called The Dragon Prince that has a prominent deaf character on the show. For the last three seasons out of four seasons, I've done breakdowns of how the characters use sign language in the show. I think it's the best depiction of sign language because it's CGI animated, so they don't have to drive your frame. And when they were first doing it, it was pretty poor because the frame rate was pretty low. So you didn't really get to see the details. But there was been efforts to like make the gloves white, so there's better contrast with the person's chest. So you can see the signs to have the person face the camera when they're signing rather than like from the back. You know, like there's so many other things that they've done to make it better. However, there's season four out that's now that has signing in it. And there's been some people who have been asking if I would do the translation for season four. Blazing Studio 882 says, I know it's been a while, but do you think you can translate the sign language in Dragon Prince season four? The reason I asked is because I checked the community tab, translate season four anyway, the poll for it. And it has translate season four anyway, as the majority now. My thing is season four is so bad. The cartoon has just gotten worse progressively as far as writing is going because it should have ended in season two. It should have ended like two seasons ago. Now they have no plot and they're just like the characters are just running around doing nothing. And so it's been a painful experience for me to even try to watch the show that I just I've fallen off of it. That's why there's not a translation of season four. All right, guys, thank you so much for all the comments. Feel free to leave more. You know how to do it. Just continue to do so and we'll go over them in this show. I want to talk a little bit more about how God detector. Yeah, how sci fi devices may, you know, exist in the future that gives us better answers for these big questions. And one of them I thought this is one that I think is probably of all of them, the most potential for existing. And that is a viewfinder time machine. Now it's not a time machine that lets you go back into the past, but it is a viewfinder that somehow runs a simulation of all the photons that have bounced off of Earth and just like correlates their past back to Earth such that you can actually have a visible image of what existed in the past. I know the math, the science sounds sci fi because it is sci fi. It would take an extraordinary amount of energy and calculations to be able to do that. But let's just say for the sake of argument, we had a window or a glass pane, maybe even like a phone or something that can run models on what existed at where we are. That's interesting. Let's say that you had a TV station on Earth that was broadcasting your image or a certain sporting event or something like that. Yes. And then you put a receiver on an alphacentury, proximate sanctuary, which is four light years away. Correct. Well then the person who watched that would see a picture of time. They would see the sporting event like it was new. Correct. Now the thing about it is if they turn around and rebroadcast it back to Earth, it would be another four years, but so the people on Earth could see it eight years ago. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe like a window in time. Yeah, excuse my language. What if it was simply that? Like what if it was just another planet receiving our, you know, light signals and we're like, hey, let's broadcast this back and just see what they do with it or like show we can communicate with each other. And all of a sudden we're getting video feedback of things that happened during old sporting events, during like wars, during Mesopotamia area, you know, it's just like weird things that we never thought to be able to visualize again. We're getting this visual signal again and we can verify that they've happened. This is actually really interesting because now it can actually give us the ability to verify claims that were made in holy books. Well, yeah, like a crucifixion, we'd have to find a planet that was 2000 light years away, build some kind of little receiver up there and point it to Earth and be able to, I mean, a telescope that it recorded, you know, into video and then focus it on Jerusalem at the time and record the events that happened then. Yeah, like what if we had a benevolent planet with a benevolent society that was saying, oh, we're seeing Earth is going through a lot of stuff because they're confused about what happened at a certain time. We have the technology to just send them the video. Let's just capture all the data, clear it up and hyperspeed it back to them. And it's like, there you guys go. That'll solve your problem. Yeah, can you imagine? That's awesome. And we get the video feeders like, oh, there's like 16 extra people here at this crucifixion and like God's not even the, or Jesus is even in the center. He's like, no earthquakes, no earthquakes. Oh, no, this is a problem and he's black. Oh, no. And John Wayne wasn't there saying, oh, surely this is the Son of God. It's almost as if like this is like, and he didn't have a six pack either. This is terrible. He didn't look at him. And the stone didn't roll away. That type of thing. Right. So what do you do in a situation like that? Does that, okay, so let's do the inverse of it. Let's do the inverse of it as atheists. We will say, okay, so now we have the video feed and we can see the three crucifix on a hill. We do see Jesus. We do see earthquakes. We do see a strangely Italian confirmation of all this stuff. Yeah. Now what? Larry? Well, we'd be, we would have evidence and we would have reason to believe at that point. However, you could say, all right, let's say that it was a God. Why couldn't it have been just some really powerful aliens doing all this stuff? So now if we, if we open the book to, now aliens exist, how do we know like the Jesus wasn't an alien? Is that what we were saying? Well, not only that, but I mean, it could have been that, you know, aliens fabricated the video and sent it to us or fabricated this viewer to show us what they want us to think, you know, and one of the things I've always thought would be the easiest task for an atheist to take over the world, not atheists, aliens to take over the world is to come to earth disguised as Jesus or whichever religious figure they happen to want to land in, like land in China as Buddha. And you would have all these people ready to capitulate and hand over all the reins of government to that person because of their beliefs. You say that. I actually think the opposite would happen because I don't think the racket of Christianity is open to ever having a prophet. No, no, I'm not talking about just him showing up on the street and saying, Jesus, I'm talking about the sky is opening up. The Jesus Ray is coming down. He giant Jesus floating down to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Covered on ABC, NBC, like there's a bullet proof. But that would not be beyond the capabilities of some really advanced aliens to pull it off. And then we would just capitulate and handle the reins of government. Now, if they did that specific version of the reins of government, you think government would do so? Like, honestly, I don't think I think the Republicans are infiltrated totally deeply with mega religious zealots. I hear you say that. Most of the Democrats are Christian. If you think about it, I agree. But when we know about politicians isn't such that they're doing so because they care about people from a genuine point of view, that's from a self serving interest. And if there is a being down here that says, great, now I want you all to have your interest towards me, there's going to be an influx of ego. If if aliens were powerful enough to pull this stuff off, they have a powerful they had the power to punish people who don't officially. But you but you are one thing you're not recognized as that there's an inherent profit to misinforming people. And it's it's been employed by almost every single person that's in our politician group. And if there's a truthful answer, even if it's a disguise, if a truthful new agenda comes down and it's popular, but it's counterintuitive or counter to someone else's profit, and they also have power, there's a conflict of interest. And my OK, OK. So which can you identify the conflicts here? Yeah, power. This guy's asking the specific entities involved in the conflict you're talking about. If you want to do specifically Republican Party, if you want me to name a specific person, I could talk about aliens versus humans. OK, you got the aliens who are coming down presenting themselves as Jesus incarnate. Yes. Right. Yes. On the other side, you have humanity, half of which are ready to capitulate. Yeah. The other half are going, I don't know about this. No, I totally hear you. I totally hear you. But you know for a fact that the aliens if in our state, we have two churches with the exact same name on different sides of the same block who don't even agree with each other because they have two completely different versions of Jesus. You're not following me. If the aliens were powerful enough to pull off this kind of thing, they are powerful enough to punish the people who do not capitulate. Ah, now there's a different. That's a new element. That's a new element. So you're saying they are not only are they revealing themselves, but they are actively destroying, pointing at and blowing up the ones who don't follow. They don't have to do it all, just enough to establish their dominance. Just the third street Baptist church and the fourth street Baptist church. But the first and second and fifth are OK. You're OK. But I'm just I'm showing you I can. All right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Well, now you have a complete. I'm not saying to be the easiest. Yeah. I'm saying it would be the easiest way for them to take over. Yeah, a demonstration of power where my self interest isn't so much my influence on others, but my own self interest of staying alive. Now you've I'm still not believing you because you are God. I'm believing you because I'm afraid of you and I don't want you to harm me. Like that's that's the that would be the political route that gets most people on board with this. That would be the James Kirk's of Earth. Yeah, they would be working to undermine this illusion and throw overthrow the power that's come to take over. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it'll be like the Terminator. But again, it wouldn't come from a point of self interest or a point of what's the right word? Altruism. Like I'm not doing this because I believe in this being I'm doing it because I'm afraid of this being that being would have to make a clear demonstration of power to get most people on board. Interesting, interesting tangent. But I think we're on the same page where yes, there would be some people would be susceptible to it. But I can definitely see conflict of interest for those who are already in power to deal with it, unless if there was some greater demonstration of power such that they would have to realize, OK, at least for now I'm capitulating, but not willingly. And in the same sense, even as an atheist, when I see a being blow up people who don't believe in him, that doesn't I believe the God exists, but it doesn't mean that I believe that this entity has some power over us that they can blow us up. But it doesn't mean mean that we have to believe their claims of supernatural. It's the exact same thing. Yes, tyranny does not make a point any more valid than it was beforehand. It just is duress. It's just obedience enforced through, you know, duress and punishment. It's all. Listener comments. No, no, that was our listener comments from last week. I'll throw out some more too. So time machine viewfinder. We did discuss that. I would like to talk about a miracle detector. And a miracle detector. Now, we are we are still we're still dipping a foot into the supernatural. However, we are now talking about shared observable phenomena that whether or not it's a miracle through supernatural intervention or not is the is the point of contention. And so why I bring this up is I've talked to a lot of Christians. I'd videotaped it. When I say that, don't don't think I'm just like, oh, he talks a lot. I was like, no, it's been a concerted effort on my part. And oftentimes when I asked when they say, well, miracles exist, that's why I believe in God asked them what they mean by miracles. And they will present to me an example of what a miracle is. And oftentimes what they will present is there was a person who was sick, and then he wasn't sick. And so I'd ask, do people get sick and not get sick on their own? It's like, yes. And it's like, well, then how do you distinguish that from a miracle? Like, what are you using to determine if a miracle exists? And that's when the conversation stops and we jump to a new topic because they don't have a good answer. But in some conversations, I was actually able to delve into the idea of what actually the what would it take for someone to admit that something is a miracle. And so I use an example where I would do a trick where I would show them like a deck of cards and be like, you can hold this deck of cards, you can have the deck of cards, you hold it yourself, look at all the cards and they look at all the cards, standard deck. And then I snap my fingers and they look at the deck of cards again, it's all aces. It's just all aces. And I asked the person, would you consider that a miracle? And they said, yes. And it blew my mind because in my head, I could just say, you know, that could just be a really advanced magic trick on my part. You mean illusion? Yeah, I could have just tricked you. Why would you, why would you, why would you ever put yourself in position where you would consider that to be a miracle? Because the answer should always be, well, I don't know because I don't have a supernatural detector. I don't know when supernatural intervention has ever occurred. And until then I could just fool you with very advanced trickery or I could pay someone to tell you that they saw that and then you would believe them because you already have a standard that that's a miracle. We could start a whole religion just on secondhand information. And when you look the Bible, that's that's functionally what you have. Just a book of people saying, I saw this and someone saying, well, that's a miracle. Like you didn't see it. You didn't test it. You didn't talk to those people yourself. You're just believing a book of claims. And if one thing I noted with your say claims. Exactly. And one thing we don't know who wrote any of the books in the Bible. I mean, any Bible scholar will tell you the authors are unknown. And every single time I've done a magic trick or every single time I've heard someone explain a magic trick to me, it's never the they always tell me a different thing than what actually happened. They just say, well, he shuffled a bunch of cards. Then he pulled out all the kings on the top. It's like he didn't shuffle the cards. He put the kings on the top and then he showed you the kings that he put on the top. Like he looked like he shuffled it, but it was a false shuffle or he looked like he mixed them up or he looked like he pulled the card off, but he actually had an extra card in his pocket and then he showed you that card. Like there's so much stuff that you don't see that the way how I express myself when I'm in our wonder is never truly the mechanics of how things exist. And if a world like that exists, and we could demonstrate it exists, then why would I ever be inclined to call something miracle? But I'll tell you why because we have a miracle detector. And now that we have a miracle detector, Larry, now that we have a way of actually saying, Ah, no, you can walk on water if your faith is big enough. No, you can move a mountain if you have enough faith. No, no, you can make water turn into wine. Yeah, like all like you can detect you can test it and you can tell the difference between magic tricks and actual miraculous events with this device. Now that we have that and we can go through testing miracles just by people who have a lot of faith and are capable of doing these these stunts. Would that make you more any more inclined to believe in their claims? Supernatural claims? Larry, I wonder. Again, I don't see how you could create a detector without knowing how to detect. Larry, don't go that. I don't change the question. I gave you the question is now we have a detector we now can tell the difference between stunts and actual miraculous events with supernatural intervention. Now that we have that, are you willing to believe the claims of the people who have these miraculous events at their capabilities? If I say this is America, I can turn water into wine. Okay, look, we can verify that it's a supernatural effect. It's not a stunts. We can do it over and over and over again. That's all we would know. That's all we would know at that point. We have a we have a detector that can actually detect supernatural events. Yes, that's all we know. That's all you know. Causing the supernatural events. We don't know if they're verifying any particular god or religion. We don't know anything more than that. It's just a miracle detector. Just a miracle. We know now that miracles happen. Yes. Now, we don't know if they can do miracles. We don't know that they're uh what is Buddhist miracles or uh Muslim miracles, Christian miracles. We don't know or some miracles who have a source we've never heard of. Right. But to me, a miracle is just something we haven't scientifically examined enough to understand. I see. I see. I see. I see. In my opinion, um before we go to a miracle detector, a miracle is just defined as a miracle, an inexplicable event, right? At at best. But with some thought understanding, it's not may be an event that never happened. It could literally just be a claim of an event, right? Um but if we had a system where it's like, hey, you have cancer, let me pray for you to my one specific god and we'll see if you're healed and if you're not healed, move on to the next person and pray for you and they'll pray to their specific god and then suddenly you're miraculously healed and the miracle detector says a miracle just happened. We'd be like, oh my gosh, it's this person's god. We figured it out. We figured it out. I'll tell you jumping to conclusions. What happened? What would you say? I mean, we're concluding that because that guy has a particular religion and a particular god and he can perform miracles that is the religion's god that's performing them. We don't know why they were being performed. Maybe he's just a magical person. Maybe he's a leprechaun. Maybe he's dead at the end of the day. Or a leprechaun or a fairy in the human disguise. We don't know anything. True. Ask what we know. Maybe there's a separate benevolent god that doesn't want the attention and it's just like listening to some other god's voicemails. Yeah. Right. It's the old thing about deism. You know, if you believe in a god, you really don't know which god that is. Right. And there's no even if the universe is evidence for the creation by a god. You have no idea. You have no proof, no evidence that it's your particular god. I'll throw out another one too. Say when I send you an email, it doesn't go to you instantaneously, right? Like it might take a couple of minutes for it to go up into one server, transfer over and then drop back into your computer, right? So if I if we had one person come in and pray to someone's cancer and nothing happens and then we bring in the next guy and then they pray and then their cancer gets solved, how do we know it wasn't just lag from the first guy? Right. That's true. And there was a first guy could have been like, guys, I'm telling you this works. It's like, no, but it lit up when the second guy came. It was like, but I already had mine processed in. That's not fair. That's not fair. All right. Nine fifty five. We got maybe eight more minutes. I want to do one called direct intervention detector. Okay. It's pretty close to miracle detector. You want the idea is when you see a boxing match and they're like, hey, what got you through this match? God. God helped me beat that other human being. God, the supernatural creator of the universe chose me to win and it was me and the supernatural being with unlimited power versus this or whatever sport you you choose to insert here. Right. Right. Right. It was just me and my God versus this guy with two pillows around his fists and that's a fair fight. That's why I won and in my mind, I'm like, what a terrible thing to admit if in a world where you can't even take steroids that you admit that you had an entire God helping you. But what if we had a way to detect that? So if we had a direct intervention detector that we could pull up to a person who was explaining from a sports team, we won because of God and you push the button and you're like, no, he's right. God did help him. I say we take it back that guy's trophy. I say we put we penalize the teams like as a bylaw in our code of ethics for sports, you cannot have God help you. How could you do otherwise? I mean, he obviously had a supernatural advantage. Yeah. In sports, you're not even allowed to use steroids like you were saying. Right. That's an unfair advantage. Right. It's the David and Goliath story where most people don't realize that Goliath was the underdog in that situation because David had not only was his weapon just better clearly like a projectile weapon is going to be the guy with the sword, but that plus God, you have literally the most strongest tag team partner in a two on one fight. And what's the other guy have height? That's it. A reach advantage versus a guy with a projectile weapon. That's not a fair fight. Goliath was Well, that's the point I think of the Bible and the story itself. It's not a fair fight because God will kill any of your opponents or at least take them out. Yeah. I mean, that's that's the point of the story in the Bibles. I think the point of the story was like God will protect you even if it seems like you're at a disadvantage and that feels great. But Goliath was at the disadvantage there. And I say we take back the win for David. Say we take back any sports team that says who I got hook out you through this fight. God, you don't get you. We take back the win. You get penalized. We're going to take back your trophy. We'll take back. We'll find you. We'll find you. Our law says that you cannot have God help you and we verify that God did. We know God exists. There's no more atheists, but you can't use God to help you win sports teams, man. That's not fair. It's unfair. So that's my point. I think I think that's overall it. My final thoughts, at least on this is we think a detector would solve a lot of our problems. But if anything, it would only highlight the amount of differing opinions and differing approaches that we're using to believe in God, which isn't based on the fundamental system of caring about what's true and caring about understanding or recognizing what's false. It's because there's agendas at play, people who finance off the fact that people are misinformed by the gods, people who benefit from the versification of power. And whenever that system's upset, even if we had a detector to objectively guide us, there's going to be conflict of interest. Right. We only get another. Oh, go for it. There's another aspect of this. It was me and God. God and I, one, is that they're bragging on themselves, saying, I am the worthy one. I'm the one who has been living a good life doing what God wants them to do. God shines his light on me because I'm more worthy than that guy. Yeah. And how upsetting would that be if the other team was also Christian too, or the other guy? Well, of course they are. Most of them are. God, what was up with that? They're not going to blame God for the loss. Right. I would love to see an atheist win a match and be like, how did you win? I don't know. I guess God loves me more than that other God, even though I'm an atheist. You can't say that. It's like, what? Christian, say that all the time. Christian, say that all the time. All right. Larry, where can we find your stuff at? Oh, mine is at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to look for the blog button. We keep all of our show archives there, atheists, songs, just all kinds of great articles on atheism there. Also, we keep a lot of our stuff on YouTube. Your channel is what? Let's chat. Yep. Let's chat is at let's chat or what? It's just you search let's chat on YouTube by pop up. Okay. Mine is at doubter five to find all my YouTube stuff. You can find my book, Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. And if you remember, if you're having trouble leaving religious beliefs behind, you can get help leaving religion and the problems that it happens, emotional societal, etc. at recoveringfromreligion.org. Give them a look. 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 seven o'clock. You're on wzoradio.com. Cool. I love it. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye.