 Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour and WOZO Radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, January 28th, 2024. I'm Larry Rhodes, or DJ Douter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Two arms, two eyes, but one heart. Excellent. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in your town, well, I bet you're just not. Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over 1,100 of us. We're the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK. We'll tell you more about us after the mid-show breaks, so be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? The moral of the story. And I think it'd be a good thing to jump into, particularly starting out the New Year, trying to figure out, you know, when can we break our New Year's resolutions, etc. Like, let's think about what we can think about with regard to stories and get their learning lessons. And what better story than the book of the Bible? We'll go through the whole Bible in the Old Testament, New Testaments, and think about the morals of the stories, not just from our religious point of view, but also from an atheist or secular point of view as well. But before we get into that, let's catch up with you. Larry, how you been? I'm doing fine, except for my knee. I finally got over my knee replacement on my right knee. Not my left knee is giving me all kinds of trouble. Well, how's your right knee feel right now? Oh, it's my strong knee. It's good knee. Wow. You know, I'm 74. My left, enough knee, I think, didn't handle the extra stress, you know, during recovery very well. And now it's, it's, I'm having to walk around with crutches on it. It's that bad. Are you sure it's not the fact that your other, your left knee feels a little jealous knee? Give me attention. Yeah. I believe it. It's like, oh, I see how I get stuff now. I just start complaining. Okay. All right. Okay. Nice. Certainly doing it. Okay. Nice. I mean, the recovery went well, right? Yeah. And it was about, Yeah. Two months and I'm pretty much over. Okay. Fantastic. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, I look forward to your next cybernetic thing, because at the end, your elbows are going to be like, Hey, look at the legs got. Probably my shoulders. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Shoulders are really, really complicated. I can tell you this. We've had some really terrible weather over the last, I don't know, ever since the beginning of this month, like December was really great. I think Christmas was more or less like 72 degrees out, beautiful sunny skies. But ever since then, it's been either snowy, rainy, drizzling, cold, or just what we would call muggy weather or just straight up a blizzard like rolling through town. Right. Right now it's still on the muggy side, but I'm looking forward to being able to go outside and hang out with friends again. You know, like it's not fun when it's like, especially sunlight during the weekday when you're working. And then the weekends shows up in the clouds come in and you're like, man, what a drag. What a drag. Yeah. Yesterday was miserable. Yeah. Cold and low, low clouds. I mean, you could, the hills around you are in the clouds. You know, it's amazing. Right. Absolutely true. I have friends who went out and played disc golf anyway, and I told them like, how'd it go? And they're like, well, the first half, the first nine holes are completely raining. And in the backhand, it was only drizzling. And I'm thinking to myself like, I know they sound excited, but I don't want to be out there. But I just want to still be out with people again. Sure. I've realized how much that social impact gets to me. Also, largely because when it was snowing, when we had that big snowstorm, I was more or less trapped inside the entire week. Right. Me too. Yeah. And man, that just with yourself and a cat and Zoom calls. It reminded me of COVID. Spring fever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Got to get out. So we got to get some good stuff to get out. My moral of the story for this bad weather that we're getting is when we get back to good weather again, I'm going to get out and enjoy myself and remember that and make good memories and experiences to last me through the next cold spell. Speaking of moral of the stories, Larry, I was working out with some friends over the week, and we had a conversation that naturally got into concepts of the Bible. They know I'm an atheist, so they bring it up. And before when I told them I was not religious, it was like a thing that they're freaking out about. But now, like when someone brings up a religious topic, my religious friends will be like, ah, let me explain to Ty what they mean when they say this. And it's not like an insulting way. It's more of just like, he must not know what we're talking about. Right. They don't realize that most atheists are post-religious. That's true. But listen, in this circumstance, it was a weird thing because I had no idea what the lady was talking about. So there was a lady who was talking about, hey, when I was in school, we had to, when we did bad things, we had to take out the sword of justice and truth and write down phrases over and over and over again. And I'm like, what is that? It's like, you know, it's from the Bible. Like, is that a bookmark? Like, is that a notebook? Like, are you talking about like a chalkboard? What's the sword of justice? What is the sword of truth? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then my friend who's a Christian who knows I'm an atheist is like, oh, that's just another name for the word of God. And I was like, oh, so it's just the Bible. You just put Bible verses down. She's like, yeah, yeah, Bible verses. And the conversation continued from there. But I was thinking about the idea of the sword of justice, right? Like, and how people come up with grandiose names for what their, what their holy books are called. Cause even Jovo and us have a very specific term for, for their holy book. I, my, my thing was, why are we so still obsessed with swords where if you read the Bible, you'll know swords are terrible and slingshots are way better. Cause the moral of the story from the book of, or I'm sorry, from the story of David and Goliath is that slingshots are way better than swords. You never project weapons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you show up to a knife fight with a gun, you're going to win the gun. You're going to win the fight. 10,000 percent. Even the smallest of them can beat the biggest of them. They have a slingshot. If they have a slingshot, like that's the asterisk is like, yeah, little guys can beat the big guys. So long as they have the, the, the right projectile weapon, if they have a guy has melee weapons, like, I think anybody can like read that. So the, the moral of the story from a Christian point of view is like, weak people can overcome big challenges or something like that. As long as they have like God on their side, maybe there's other stipulations in there as well. God aimed the stone for him and all that. Right, right, right, right. It's another taking, taking away the credit from the, from the artist, from the person who's actually doing it and giving it to God rather than giving it to the person who actually put the stone. Right, right, right. Cause it's God's will, right? God's will. God's will. But the other thing is when you look at a disparity of potential power, when you have someone who is big physically, but you have a person who's against them who has literally the all-powerful, supernatural being that created the entire universe on the side. It's sort of like a tag team match versus two people, one of them being an ultra-powerful God, the other guy just being a dude who can do bicep curls like probably longer than most average people, right? Or like has a height disparity of a little bit lighter. So it's kind of like, you know, like you're in a fight to begin with, but if you were to take that element out, the supernatural aspect, you still have a guy with a sharp stick versus a guy who can throw rocks at very high velocities at people from very large distance and they fight very, very far away from each other. Like the obvious advantage is the person with the projectile weaponry. Sling shots are better than swords. That would be my main moral of the story. Yeah. They get the wrong moral. It's not so much the wrong war. It's more of like the most obvious one that most people are missing the point of. Why aren't we seeing the slingshot of sword and truth be called the Bible of God? Because someone says, hey, my Bible or my holy books called the sword of peace and understanding. It's like, our Bible's called the slingshot. It's like, oh yeah, well that makes sense because slingshots are better than swords. Well, obviously, because of the future of weapons took off after the slingshot, not the sword, we didn't make bigger and better and longer range swords. We made bigger and better and longer range guns, which took off the slingshot, the projectile weapon. Yeah, gunpowder and then everything after that just got even more crazy. They'll put, they have missiles now that have like AI computers in them that cost more money to make than the things they blow up. Thank you, US government. But like, it's like, take this $300,000 missile and blow up that $20,000 shack in the middle. He's like, all right, fine. Tax prayers, I'm sorry. But anyway, they can guide themselves. They can fly around, but you'll never have a sword that has like an AI robot in it being like, okay, good. Now swing harder. Yeah. Now we're really cutting them. Be sharper. It has like a little speaker. It does like the whole, you know, it can make metal noises. It can make lightsaber noises. Yeah. So your point is people are taking the wrong moral away from these stories. Yeah. I feel like people are overlooking the more obvious part of the story, which is slingshots are better. And here's the reason why I think things could be better if they did look at it because they could appreciate engineering a little bit more. They could appreciate that technology advances, right? They might be able to set themselves up with better preparation because David goes through a whole training montage. He's like, I'm going to find some sticks. I'm going to find some rocks. Make sure they're the right kind of rocks. Do some aiming practice. Like he's preparing ahead of time. Like it wasn't just pray and then go into the fight and expect God to take care of everything for you, even though that is kind of how it's framed in the Bible. There was some work that went into it with regard to what are my limitations? Am I going to show up to a sort of fight with a guy who's better at swords? Or can I be a bit more clever with how I approach a problem and use that cleverness to engineer a better solution for myself as just part of my own human ingenuity? Like there's a lot of good hallmarks that could have been pulled from that story. And you know how we always say work smarter, not harder? Right? We say that as humanists, you could have had that be extracted from the Bible as like the moral to take away from. And I feel like that would have better implications for like how would it treat people and how to tackle problems rather than just sitting and praying and hoping God takes care of it for you. You could say, hey, I have a solution that I can't solve straightforward. Let me find a better way to resolve this issue. Let me get a sling. If prayer worked, then all football games would end up with a sling. Football games would end up being a tie. Because both teams pray before they go to the arena. Right. How about that? Let's just have that be the proof that God exists. It's like, well, there's another football tie. Well, did both teams pray to win? Yes. Unfortunately, guys, it's a tie. They both prayed to God. Neither one scored at all. Neither one. It was all nullified because no one trained. They only prayed. Instead of training centers or praying centers. All right. All right. All right. That's enough. You wouldn't have hospitals either. Yeah. Though I would love to see the slingshot tattoo on people, right? Because everyone's got big swords on their arms and their chest as a tattoo, but no one has like a cool little slingshot, even like those big Y ones that look like Dennis the menace was pulling him back. You know, like, why isn't that way more intimidating than the guy who has a sword on his back? We already know slingshots are better. Like the guy with the slingshot tattoo is way cooler, right? Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. But that's that is the moral of the story that we should be taking away. All right. I got another random moral of the story that I'd like to pull up. This one is a is a minefield between Larry and I, because we tend to when we talk about this, we go off on a lot of different tangents, but it is the book of the garden of Eden. And I think we have a lot of agreement there. Oh, really? Really? Really? Really? I'm sure we agree. Definitely. Right. But it's always it's always weird when you talk about the story because it's just you have to like it's like you're in the middle of Walmart and you have to like cut through the kids. Oh, there's so many layers to there's so many problems with this. But the main problem is you have a talking snake, right? That Eve believed and led her to eating the forbidden fruit. And it's so easy to blame Eve and maybe even Adam for what their actions were. Even though we know they have any capability of understanding what was right around before they ate until they ate the fruit. Right. And though we know that God set that up to happen, that God could have made a tree that was 10 feet longer. He made a trap. He made a trap. He even gave the trap instructions of like, hey, find this person and tell them to eat this thing. But if you were to take that aside to a point, if you were to take that to a side, what you have basically is a talking animal. And now my thing is, is OK, so there's a talking animal, a talking snake telling Eve what to eat. And why did she believe the snake? In my mind. Where is God? Where was God at this time? Where's the only present? Scott? No, God. Where's God? Oh, God, God, God. OK, OK. I thought you said Scott. All right. But my main thing is God has in the Bible demonstrated that he has the capability to shape shift. He's been a talking bush. He's been a talking dove. The guy can turn into animals and talk to people and give them instructions to do certain things. In fact, that's sort of his method of operant. That's his demo from beginning to end. So like, how was Eve supposed to know without eating the forbidden fruit that gave her, you know, the knowledge to begin with of right and wrong that the animal that approached her that was speaking the same language that she could speak was not God already. And it was her impression to be like, oh, there are just a lot of different kind of animals here that can speak. It's like, no, there's there's God, all these animals. And if someone gives me instructions and they're in a fursuit, I'm going to assume, oh, that's just God and God loves me and he wants the best for me. I'm just going to do whatever that being says. In my mind, it didn't even have to be the adversary who was giving Eve instructions. It could have literally just been God and snake form tricking Eve so he can hurry up with his master plan of basically offering first sense to everybody. That's conspiracy. Why wouldn't she suspicious? I mean, did all the animals talk? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, here comes a snake and he's talking to it. Why wasn't she suspicious about that? Oh, wow. Larry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go back to this crime scene. That's a problem. Like you you you clearly are capable. So like the trigger didn't hit until I was literally like driving home one day like Wednesday. I'm thinking God did turn into a dove when John the Baptist was giving a to Jesus and God literally landed on John the Baptist's shoulder is like, I'm God. This is my son. I'm like, wait a second. That's a talking animal. I thought we stopped doing talking animals from the Garden of Eden. I thought you learned your lessons. Like, no, no, I'm always capable of doing this. Like if you could do that, then let's let's turn the chapter back a little bit, shall we? Because now you have a talking snake being like, I could I know everything about the Garden of Eden and only good things are here and you should eat this thing. I'm like, wait a second, maybe a snake didn't get into the Garden of Eden. Maybe that was just God being like, man, these naked people. Yeah, you never see them together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. The snake doesn't hang around when like it's the apple and she's like, oh my gosh, I know so much stuff. And then she goes to Eve. The snake's like, I'm just going to disappear. Gone. And he hides behind a tree and next, you know, God comes out from the same place and he's like, how dare you eat those apples? Well, but first he had to look for me. He pretended he didn't know where they were when they were hiding in the bushes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's like, what snake? I don't see a snake. Is there a snake around here? I don't see a snake at all. And he's just like cleverly tucking his snake tail underneath his robes at the same time too. It's a messed up story. So yeah. Murder mysteries need to be written better. The moral of the story for me though is, man, now that we just went through, I told you we would go on a tangent, Larry. Yeah. The moral of the story was like God can take different shapes. So why didn't she think it was God? I don't know. Don't. There's a whole bucket of problems here. But I feel like. Yeah. I feel like the most it's a terrible mystery. It's a murder mystery that no one's ever like resolved yet. Like, Colombo's done this better. Colombo, if you see, I think the moral of the story would be like Detective Colombo would have some questions if he saw it, if he heard that story. And it was like, he would read the Bible and be like, just one more thing. And he'd be like, so you saw a talking animal, right? And it's like, God, didn't you like turn into talking animals? Like, what are you implying? I'm not implying anything. I'm not implying anything. I'm just wondering like, where's the talking snake now? It's like, oh, he's gone. He's gone. Okay. So you can see everything, know everything. Just tell me where he went. I have a really bad memory and God can't account for him. It's like, isn't that interesting? Isn't it? I think God is the. That's my moral of the story. I think I think that's a if you've ever played a game of Clue, if you've ever seen like a good murder who done it, I think it's pretty clear that God was a snake to begin with, especially when he later on claims to be everything, know everything, know everything. Sure. Right. And be everywhere at the same time. I'm curious. I'm curious though, what I mean, I thought we're pretty much on the same page and as a garden even you you seem to think we have differing opinions on certain things. Like what? Okay. So there it's it's more of like we have a list of problems. Right. Yeah. Problem with it. Right. And my list of problems in terms of priority are going to be a lot different than your list of problems. Okay. So we just prioritized them differently. Absolutely. But I think we have the same shopping list. I just think if you let us both in the grocery store, we're not going to be right behind each other. We're going to completely different directions, but we'll check out at the same time. We wouldn't get in each other's way. We'll have the same shopping cards. We're like, let's get the meat first because no souls are important to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I always met one of my main problems with the book of Eden is sort of like, so like one of my top three problems is there's a job that God gave Adam, which was to name the animals. And I And pick out a help meat. Oh, what? Oh, yeah. You don't know about that. No, talk to me about that. Yeah. He told, he told them to name the animals, but he also said to search through the animals for a help meat, which M E E T. Oh, M E A T. A T, right? No, M E E T. Okay. Well, I don't understand that. Well, that's basically a mate. Look for a mate among the animals. Look for a mate among the animals. Yes. And then when he didn't really find any, that's when God decided to create one, create a woman for him. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. Man. Okay. Well, God and I know that you can't mate humans with animals. Yeah. And then immediately banned bestiality after the fact he was like, ah, dang it. That's some leftover parts of my code. Sorry about that. That's funny. That's really funny. Yeah. Just do a search on Adam and help me. So again, that touched me a little off track of where I was going, but that is, that's, that's pretty prominent. My, my thing was, it's important for me to feel like I feeling fulfilled as a human being. I feel like for people, there's certain components of your life that you need to have in order to feel actualized. And if my job was to sit down next to an ant hill and just watch the ants come down the hill and be like, Trevor, Brandon, Jackson, Stephanie, Melissa, like, what are you doing, Ty? Oh, I'm naming the animals. I'm starting with this ant hill. And I got like 30,000 more to go before I get up and move to the next ant hill. And I, people are like, even the names that, even if he was naming them based on text, the status of what kind of animal they were, we're not using those names anymore. It's, we're not calling whatever he called birds, birds. And if he's sitting there naming every single different kind of bird or even every individual bird, a personal name, we're not using any of those names. It's a completely useless job. And if I didn't have an awareness, if I was lobotomized to the point where I couldn't know right from wrong anymore, right? Like if I just had that kind of like them, maybe that's good busy work for a person like me. But as a human being, particularly with the faculties that I have now, if I was given that sort of role, I'd feel nothing but a lack of purpose in my life. And I feel like for God to give a being that as a role is such a low standard of life to give a being that has that capability of thought, you know, or, or trouble solving. And that help, that helped me passage was Genesis 2 18. And it was, it was, it says, it's not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helper who is just right for him. That was new living. The King James version says I will make him a help meet for him. Help meet. Yeah, it's not good for man should be alone. I will make a help meet for him. Wow. Yeah. So next time you see a lady that you love or want to want to talk to just be a hey help meet. How you doing? Yeah. She's going to interpret it in me 18, which won't be good. Yeah. Yeah. She's like, oh, this guy, this guy. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's true. All right. Book of Eden, a lot of problems. What do you tell me about your, is that your top problem with the Bible or book of Eden? For me, it's just actualization. Like a God would make a human being like, just stack pennies for the rest of your existence. My biggest problem, I guess there's a couple of them. He created them without a right, a sense of right and wrong. And then he expected them to know that disobedience was wrong. Yeah. Before they ate the apple. Yeah. Exactly. And two, he created a trap. He's supposed to know everything, future, past everything, be everywhere at once, all knowing, all seeing, but yet he wasn't there when, when the serpent came to talk to Eve. Or only that, but he didn't have to put the tree of knowledge where they could get to it. He could have put it on the moon on the other side of the world, anything, but he put it right there and told him not to knowing that they didn't know the difference being right and wrong. Now, there's two huge things. Here's my, here's my counter argument to step three. Okay. Sometimes I go to Burger King, right? And I have a cat, right? And I've told my cat many times, don't eat my burgers. That's right. And I'll look at them and be like, I'm not eating it when I turn around, I'm like, get away from that, then no, and you'll get down off the table and I'll be like, I submit, I submit that that cat has more of a sense of right and wrong than they did because they've never been punished for, for disobedience. Okay. Okay. Until that point, they didn't know. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, you see where I'm going with this, right? Like if I left my bag on the table and I agreed, I talked to my cat, he understands the rules sneaky little guy. I walk out the door and they come back and my burgers are gone and there's just a mess on the floor and I have a cat that's in his litter box with gas, just like making these really terrible flashes. I'm like, that's what you get because you ate my thing. I'm upset. Maybe that's the book of Eden in the short says it's just got now. How old is my cat? Yeah. He's seven years, seven years. Yeah. Seven years old. He should have a pretty well developed sense of disobedience then. Oh yeah. What you expect of him what you don't expect. Oh yeah. Absolutely. I could just I can literally for my cat. I know this is pretty early on too. I could just have a tone of how I say his name and he's gone. He's underneath the bed because he knows he knows he knows like I'll bring groceries home and I'll leave the bag down and he'll be like I think I smell some like then and he turns around just walks out the room. So I know for a fact that he's aware of it. It doesn't take much but also why creative being that doesn't know right and wrong. Like that seems like something that you could have easily instilled into people from the very beginning of just like right and wrong. Here you go. You're a new person. You're in paradise. Here's a job that's useful and worthwhile worth your time. Is everybody happy? Cool. I'm going to take this tree that has forbidden fruit on it and I'm going to turn them into rocks and I'm going to make that rock like 14,000 miles underneath the crust of the earth. Right. Okay. Is everybody happy? Good. Talking snake. You're happy. All right. See you later. Like why can I make a better version of that story immediately? And just a couple of steps. By the way, no slavery. Do what you want. Absolutely. No slaves. All right. Have fun guys. That I mean, you could have set up paradise on earth as simple as that. Why is it as me as a lowly human being? I can do that so much more. Yeah. And why did he make animals that had to kill and eat each other? For sustenance just for survival. Right. There's so many things. Of course, if you believe in evolution, of course, and understand how it works, you see why we have predators and carnivores and plant-eaters and parasites and everything else. It's all perfectly understandable. But why would an omniscient god who's all good, you know, design it that way? With pain too, right? Like of all things, like when you see a gazelle get attacked by lions in like national geographic videos or documentaries, like that's an animal that can feel pain, right? And it's screaming as it's being eaten from the hind legs up to the fore legs. You know, it's crazy that we have a universe like that. If it was not designed and it was just the wild west of nature, it makes sense. But if someone actually crafted that, it's like, I'm going to make a creature that eats things from the butt up to the mouth. No. I'm like, what is your problem? It's like, oh, this is my design. I like it. It's like, you're a terrible designer. Either that or it's a crazy person. What's the story? I'm going to turn into a snake after this. Yeah. Psychotic. Some nudist. Like you're kind of crazy. And then I'm going to sacrifice my son on a stick. It's like, oh, good. Yeah. We need to take a break real quick. Go on ahead later. I see you look at this. This is the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. And I'm ready to come back. I guess if you are. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in a 22nd year now. I have over 1100 members. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's tap room in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. You can find us online on Facebook or meetup.com or you can just Google Knoxville Atheists. 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 one. Start one. That's right. Well, I'm back. Where you want to pick up? Hey, I think we're touching on something pretty interesting and something that I might touch on before we finish this topic. But the moral of the story could just be that God's crazy. And if that's the case, a lot of these things track a lot of the things with like eight are our are sadistic. That would work. A sadistic, crazy individual, psychopath, just a complete inept, well, there's there's a lot of other kind of gods. I mean, there's theistic God who just said everything in motion and just sat back and see how it would work out, who didn't know the future and was just watching it to see how it worked. He could be, you know, multiple gods. He could be like the Roman pantheon or Greek pantheon of different gods who work against each other and work with certain humans to get things going. None of them are omniscient or omnipotent. That's it. Or I'm the present. There's so many different types of gods that we know of and how many that we don't know of. Right. I mean, it could be a God from the third galaxy over. We don't know. But we do have an explicit holy text that describes the nature of the God. And if you're to go use that as book or face value and say, OK, we have 30,000 different ones or at least 10,000. No doubt. But here's the thing. If we have to figure out a cohesive narrative that makes all these 30,000 gods and books make sense, at least within the realm of Christianity, even like the variations of the Bible isn't just one. There's a lot of different versions of the Bible. Right. But if we have to take like, what's the overarching narrative that we can place on this? If this God character is in fact the consistent or the same name character through all this. It's what if this God is just crazy and just potentially evil, not in our best interest and a terrible person to worship. Now if you go by the evidence, that's what you come up with. Now it completely starts tracking. He likes doing parties. He kills people. He doesn't fulfill people. He sets up traps for people in paradise, sacrifices human beings left and right. Like this is a terrible person. Like, oh, if it's a terrible person that can lie to us and constantly does so, then all of this and even reality sort of kind of makes a little bit more clarity. It's a lot more extra steps and a lot of assumptions. In fact, it's a lot easier without those extra steps and assumptions just to say like, hey, we live in a world where we can take better care of each other rather than following a narrative from a, you know, a bronze aged book, you know. Right. Well, even in the first book of the Bible, God lied to Adam and Eve telling them that if they ate the fruit, they would die. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn't die. Yeah. God can lie to people. Even Jesus did. So it's like, hey, I'm going to come back before you guys. Yeah, we're still waiting for you God. I've been in the P generations since then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that prophecy didn't work out so well. No, but I have this other thing that I'd like to bring up. This is the idea that God loves theatrics. Loves theatrics loves parties. And what I mean by parties and theatrics is parties will do that one easy. So Jesus walks into a room and he's like, man, this place can use some spicing up. Let me touch some of these water bottles and turn them into wine. Meanwhile, just want to throw some heads up. Water in the desert is much more useful. If you're like a guy who's like, hey, I got water to sell like this. This took heart. This took effort to get and bring over here. Convert to like wine, right? It was like, no, we're just going to take this water wine. We're going to have a great party, everybody. And they had a good time. So he can touch things, turn water wine. Here's the other thing God. And here's what I made theatrics. This is the moral of the story. This is almost it. This is getting close to it. But the moral of the story is theatrics and parting. But like that's the party with Jesus to water and to wine is the party. Here's the theatrics flooding the earth. He says, I don't like other people except for this one group of people and these select pairs of animals. I'm going to put them all everybody. Man, woman, child and baby is evil. And babies, children, all that stuff. Even fish that somehow will have to be drowned. I don't know. We'll figure it out. I want to drown literally everything. I'm going to cover this entire earth and water. Flood everything. And then somehow take all the water off because it will make sense. It will make sense. Trust me, guys. So I'm going to make a bunch more water. And then I'm going to take the water all the way away from the earth. And it will flood everything and I'll leave that for 40 days. And then immediately afterwards in the same part or the same half of the book. And I say half is like the New Testament. In the same Testament, I'm going to find another town that I don't like, even though I promised I wouldn't destroy the Grand Place. Like that again. But instead, I'm just going to be like pinpoint strike a person and turn them into salt immediately. And in my mind, I think to myself, God, wait a second. Hold on. You could just point and turn people into pillars of salt. But you'll went through all that trouble with the waterworks and the boats and the two people. Like a guy, an old man had to build a giant boat. We saw it in Kentucky. Two of the beasts are all of the animals together. Yeah. It's like, God, hold on. Wait a second. You could just turn people into salt. That would have been way easier. You could have washed it away with the water. There's so many things you could have done. Then you'd have a just so story about why the seas are all salty. You would. That's so good. Larry, we should start. That's actually really good. Dang. That's so smart. You could just basically be like, hey, why salt water salty? Because this is the world where bad people went. People would understand that. Why can atheists make better stories? Man, that's so good. That's really good. That's really clever. Anyway, the main thing though is God loves theatrics. He loves partying. My takeaway is he always tends to take with the theatrics. He always tends to take the most complicated route to get to a solution when there's always a much more optimal path to get there. Like almost every interaction that God has with people, every challenge he sets up, every trial he sets up could have just been, listen, just do this. But instead it's, OK, well, let me catch these Egyptian slaves, have one of them be floated in the water through a river, and then I'm going to present myself to him with a burning bush, and then that person's going to go and do some magic tricks in front of the pharaoh. And then he's going to get a bunch of those people, and then they're going to walk up to an ocean, and I'm going to split the ocean, they're going to walk through it, and then I'm going to crash the ocean down on top of people. He can make sure he chases after the people, even though he doesn't want to anymore. And I think we're OK. Oh, well, after that, they're going to have to keep traveling through the desert until they find their power plant. You can walk in a week. It's like, God, what was your goal? It's like, well, I just want to have a chosen people that live somewhere. It's like, you could have just picked them up and put them there, right? It's like, oh. That's pretty good. I like that. Yeah. OK. Yeah. But one of the things there is one of the big things is that slavery. He told no. He told Moses that he wouldn't live to see the promise. Hmm. So he had to march him around in the desert, you know, 40 years until he died before it actually let the people into the promise land. Right. Right. I mean, that was for his great servant. Right. It was his reward. Yeah. What a guy. It was for the cost of theatrics. Like, even if you were to take the idea of Moses going up and getting the 10 commandments, right? It's like, yeah, God, Moses is talking to God all the time, right? Like, they're praying and they're there, right? They're like, hey, gotta have a question. Sure. Keep going left. God, we need food. OK. Yeah. I'm going to rain some food down. God, can you give me like 10 instructions for what to do since you've been helping me out with all these really grand things like moving the ocean, splitting it on command and all that stuff? Yeah. Climb up to the top of this mountain for me. It's like, wait, can't you just tell me the rules? I got a pen and paper here. No, you got to come up with two giant rocks. And make sure you come alone so you don't have to come alone. Yeah, yeah. Come alone. You're like, God, are you sure about like how big are these rules? They're like, they're so long. They're such long rules. They're like the first rule is like, don't have any God before me. It's like, I have some questions about that God, but like I feel I still feel like I could put that down on one line. It's like, no, you got to drag these rocks up, boy. It's like, OK, drags all the rocks up and like one by one, he's chiseling them all in. It's like, God, what's the next letter? It's like the T. And he's like, God, what in the world? What's going on? I don't get it. And then he comes. All the rocks down. He drags them back down. And people are like, you're gone for so long. We just decided to start worshiping this like this this awesome golden cat. Statues. And he's not telling us to own slaves and he's not telling us how to live like how to live and how to kill. He's just like a nice little representation of what we can do as a society as far as like maintaining ourselves and demonstrating the fact that we can find supernatural beings on our own accord. Like we don't really need to listen to like other people and we're doing like we're all happy. We're having a party. It's like unacceptable. I'm so angry. I'm going to destroy the rocks I carried down here. Not only that, but he he commanded app of them to kill the other half. Yeah. At that point, like 20,000 dead or something like that. Dang, dang, dang. And God's like, that was pretty good. That's pretty good. Anyway, did you remember those rules? Like I wrote them down. I can write them down and it's like, no, God, you got to come back up here and write them down. It's like the same rules. Different rules. Different rules. Different rules. Yeah. There are three sets of Ten Commandments in the Bible and none of them match up. Exactly. Okay. You would think God would have ten rules. Right. You know, that he would repeat instead of giving them new ones. It would be so good if we just have them like printed in the sky and clouds like once a week or something like that. It would be easier to believe too. There wouldn't be any atheists if you could do that. There wouldn't be any atheists. Or use rainbows to spell them out. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Instead of having stripes, just blank stripes, just be like, here are the instructions that I want you to have or like a quote to just be like, I love you. Be kind to other people. Don't be a jerk. Yeah. And it would be entirely in his power if he was omnipotent to have every person on earth have a book, you know, the Bible in their own language that he constantly updated as he needed to. Yeah. Or as the understanding level of the person who's holding the book would accept it or understand it. Sure. That happens. We're looking at ancient Greek and Hebrew that haven't changed in thousands of years. If there were and I'm going to, I'm going to go back to your rainbow analogy. If there was a rainbow that instead of just being straight lines because it's part of the visible spectrum actually had in rainbow colors the instructions for how to behave and those scrolling like ticker tape on a newsfeed just on every rainbow had the same set of instructions of like, this is what you need to do to be alive. I'm not telling you these are the rules that I came up with and gave to Moses. Like from a scientific point of view, like there would be immediately two realms of science. There'd be two appreciated realms of science, the natural things that we can test and whatever the hell heck that thing is because we can't figure out how that thing's working. Is it technology that we can for refracted light scroll words across the sky. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And until we figure that out, I don't think we'd have a bridge inhibiting scientific progress or dictating how people should live their lives or anything like that. If that thing was still existing every single time there's refracted light in the sky, like that would be the thing that make most people stop and be like, all right, maybe Christians have a point or maybe whoever's the holy text that is, they have a point. We will, we will, we will not tell them that we'll still like figure out evolution would still figure out this stuff, but like, there'll still be so for belief in this particular God in the meanwhile. And maybe that just helps make our lives less confusing with so many different competing narratives. Now we just know, oh, it's that God, fantastic. Now we can be much more peaceful to each other, maybe even use science to help us all approach whatever that being talking about, you know. Did you see the day the world stood still? No. I'm talking about the one that they did in the 50s, I think, or 60s, it was black and white. I think the whole, the moral of that story was that they created an AI, these aliens who came to Earth, they didn't look like anything, but they came looking like us. They created a master race of, of robots and gave them the power of life and death over humans turned out, turned it over to them with instructions to destroy any aggressor. In other words, if they come across something where one person's obviously aggressing against the other one, boom, they're gone, they're dead. That way, peace did reign on their systems. Oh, and when all the humans are dead? No, no. Humans learned not to be aggressive, but especially to each other. But I mean, why couldn't a God be like that? Oh. God looking down and he's omniscient. I'm the president. You know, he's all over the place. He's theoretically all good. You know, if he, he doesn't have to kill him, but I mean, he could he could warn them or delay them or punish them and any aggressor that would, you would have peace on it. Right. It wouldn't even have to be like Bible verses. It could just be like get vaccinated. You know, like it could be like any useful thing. Right. There's like buy an electric car or like support hydrogen technology. Nuclear was still a really good option, guys. I'm just like, if you ever want to like feedback from a guy, just look at a rainbow and like read the ticket. Everybody could be. They're working up a nuclear battery now. Have you heard about that? No. The Chinese are working up. Have one in production right now. It doesn't put out quite as much voltage and amperage as a regular double A, but they're working on it. Little. I mean, the radiation is negligible. You know, for people outside of it. Yeah. But you wouldn't have to replace it. Period. Because it lasts for a thousand years. Oh, wow, wow, wow. Gee, that's awesome. I love that. Look it up. Um, yeah, that'd be cool. So I know why I talk about rainbows is because I do feel like in the future, capitalism will get to the point and technology will get to the point where we'll have rainbow ads. Like someone's going to figure out that science technology and be like, you can put headers and rainbows. Okay, Comcast is going to be like, I have an idea and I'm willing to pay for it and the science is like fine. If they're willing to fund the research, we'll blow your advertisements. And we'll put like your color ads on them. Yeah, maybe satellites could do it with colored lasers. So much for technology. It's okay. Yeah. All right. Next one for me before we're done. How much time do we got? I think we got some time. Yeah, we got 15 minutes. Moral of this story is going to Joseph from the Bible. Who's Joseph? Jesus is stepdad, the unsung hero of the New Testament. A lot of times we overlook the story of Jesus. I'm sorry, not the story of Joseph. Because Jesus is number one. His disciples are number two. And then maybe Mary is like a distant fourth or fifth in terms of like all the other characters that come up in the Bible. Lazarus, John the Baptist, etc. Like, what about Joseph? No one talks about Joseph except for the Mormons who have the Book of Joseph, right? But the idea is, and I want, is it the same Joseph or is it a completely different Joseph? Just as a heads up Larry, the Mormon Book of Joseph. Is that Jesus is stepdad Joseph? I'm not familiar with it, but I would say, no, no, the Mormon, I would think would be a Joseph Smith Book. Yeah, that's Joseph Smith. He was the founder of Mormonism. Man, so even Joseph Smith takes up more credit. It's a stepdad. But here's the thing, you have a, if you look at like, if you look at the culture, even today of honor killings and the women's rights for people in that area, you have a story of a woman who is pregnant. Doesn't know who the dad is. Well, technically does, but it's like a very hard thing to convince people of because when you tell them, hey, I have the son of God in here. It's like, who's he? Who are you talking about? Like, okay. Wait a minute. You're single and pregnant and God did it? Yeah, a little bit. Oh, that's a problem. You can't say that. Get out of here. Yeah, not only skeptical, but it could be blasphemous. It could be, you know, like counter-cultural to the current society. Well, I mean, pregnant before marriage was punishable by death, I believe at the time. But default didn't matter, even if it was a human being that you can point to, right? So, like, this is a lot. This is the pariah, pariahs, right? Because not only is she saying, like, I'm pregnant and I just solely to myself or whatever because that was the cultural view that's still wrong even to today, that's still used today. But the idea that, like, I'm a pariah and my baby was given to me by God, which is also a problem for, like, the current understanding of, like, how God's interactive people. So, now you have Joseph who's like, you know what? You're talking a lot of, I'm not saying I understand you, but I am willing to say that I'm willing to believe in you as a person and make sure that you're okay. And we're going to go to a place and we're going to make sure that you can give birth healthily or as well as I possibly can afford. And I'm going to stick with you and we're going to raise this kid together. Like, if that is the story that you're presenting, Joseph, Bible, that Joseph was not, in fact, the father, but was just some nice person that Mary knew and they went out together and they raised Jesus together. And Joseph, the entire time, was like, Jesus, let me show you how to be a carpenter. And Jesus was like, I know things. You don't have to tell me things. My dad's God. He's better than you. He's like, who's putting food on your table, Jesus? And what do you think's putting the food on your table? It's this. It's the hammers and the nails. We're going to learn how to do this together. It's like, oh, I hate you. You're such a terrible dad. My dad is awesome. It's like, your dad's probably going to kill you one day. Like, how I'm going to, if you don't pick up that hammer, like, Jesus is like, I hate this. I hate this job. No, there's no one. I feel like I was a fly on the wall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's no one like, there's no accolades of how well Joseph did to step up in a situation like that. And I feel like my moral of the story is stepdads are cool. And anyone who's willing to go through that much responsibility uptake has a lot of respect in my book. More so than even Jesus or God. Like, I feel like the main takeaway hero for that whole New Testament is just, here's a good nice guy doing a nice thing trying to do his best. And Jesus didn't make life his life any easier. God didn't make his life any easier, but he showed up for Mary. And I'm like, you know what? Good job. Good job, guy. You don't even know what happened to him at the end of the story. But like, I'm happy that he was, he did what he had to do. Or what he... Kudos, Joseph. Kudos to Joseph. Yeah. And what gets me is that, you know, the Old Testament says that Jesus would be descended of some, you know, the New Testament prophet or the savior would be descended from these line of people. And then when you get to the New Testament, they try to do his lineage so that it will pass through Joseph. But Joseph wasn't his father. Right. And there were actually two different lineages in the book that led to Joseph. They didn't agree. I mean, it's in the Bible, but they don't agree, those two lineages. And neither one of them point to Jesus because he wasn't his father. Right, right, right. It's so messed up. The other weird thing, though, is from a biochemistry point of view, that's where my PhD is in, right? Like, you need two sets of genes to make a person, right? And if God had a spare set of genes on hand, right, to infuse with Mary's genes, then that has to give some... That brings up a lot of questions in the back of my head. Maybe more in the lines of these numbers, but you would have to have a phenotype. You would have to have a racial disposition. You would have to have potentially a health record. You don't just get genes somewhere. Sometimes you get genes that make you more prone to diabetes or... Male or female, too. Yeah, or alopecia, or malpine and baldness. There's so many things that set of genes could be really useful for that God just has in his backlog. I'm like, God, let me see your karyotype. I want to see your genes, because you can put those on a table. You can put those on a petri dish, and we can examine them and actually understand their sequence and figure out, okay, what did you look like? What's your problem? What's going on here? Where's the God gene? The God gene, yeah. The God genes, if you will. But anyway. Yeah. A lot of questions. A lot of morals that are overlooked. My main takeaways here are slingshots are better than swords. God was the snake. God loves to party and is so theatrical that he overlooks very simple solutions that he's already capable of doing. Stepdads are cool. And if you were to take it all as true, the only conclusion that you come up with is God is just plum crazy. Those are my morals. Well, if you look at the evidence, like in today's world, he's also sadistic. Yeah. But he's always been. He's always been. He's just he's a much more sadistic time back then. And that's probably his part. That's why he appears so in the Bible because he was a product of sadistic people at the time, right? Yeah. And yeah, if you were to take that, even people were crazy back then. And they can still be now. And but we know better now. And so that's why. I think that saying that God is just crazy. Is a scapegoat. I mean, is an excuse because he does so well. I mean, is an excuse because he does so much terrible stuff in the world. I mean, there's good crazy. Bad crazy. That's true. And he seems to do so with a vengeance. There are a lot of words that I want to use, but we're on the radio when I can't use them. So I'm trying to. God is blank. And yeah, in the gap there, right? Yeah. Okay. Do you have any listener comments? I've not checked up on the shows. Well, while you check up, I'll offer one that I got. Okay. I have a video out there that's about Pascal's ways. Wager is invalid. It has 234,000 views now. But I keep getting, I mean, it becomes popular and then goes away and then becomes popular again. I'm got one that says. My one of my arguments in Pascal's wager is that. Every Christian sec thinks every other Christian sex is wrong. Sex is wrong. And a guy came back and says, well, most Christian sex agree that almost all other Christian sex are correct, but just incorrect in the particular observance of the sacraments like the specifics of baptism. Well, my question is, yeah, but are they going to hell? You know, are they so wrong that they're going to hell? And if they're not going to hell, what difference does it make that they believe it a little differently? And, you know, if that's true, then does it matter if the major differences between the religions are true like Catholics and Protestants or Christians versus Muslims? Right. You know, I mean, they all worship the same God theoretically, but do they do it the same? I just more questions than answers, I guess. A lot of questions and answers. Actually, some of the comments that I've been getting. So let's see. And then Jelico Carroll 5336 responded to our last show, which was on snowflakes and how is it like you can look at a snowflake and be satisfied with the answer of God made it versus the explanation of knowing how snowflakes are made, which will actually give you some credence of figuring out. Oh, wait a second. There's fake snow. It's like, yeah, because we can we know how to make snow. We know how to make snowflakes. And once you know how it's once you know people know how to make snowflakes and even read about like how they're actually made and realize that all these things that you think some guys designing are just an effect of how things crystallize and it's a natural process. Which we can duplicate. Exactly. It's just temperature and pressure and some little bits of particles in the air. You can look at snow that falls in your window and be like, oh, wait a second. That's the exact same phenomena that we're just manufacturing elsewhere and it doesn't need a God in order to make this. So and then Jelico Carroll said on the concept of that show, there's a difference between an answer and an explanation. Oh, I am writing this one down. Smiley face on a heart on the same show. Snowflake status trading room has sent a reply saying Santa is a magical being. He creates a temporary chimney whenever there isn't an appropriate one and God has no obligation. Let me vary this again. God has no obligation to make sense to us. That's there's a good point. God doesn't have to mix. It's just if you start believing things with no good explanation, where are you going to stop? That's my point. If you start believing in things that aren't obligated to make sense to you, then where's the line for you to believe in? I mean, you're going to believe in Bigfoot and Sasquatch and Pixies and leprechauns. There's a lot of things that aren't obligated to make sense to you, but it doesn't mean I have to believe in them, right? This name is confusing. Jaden Jordan Johnson said hi. Love the show. Hi from the classic Tetris channel. Oh, and that was from the episode. Let's see growing pains. And as you get older, you grow to new things. I guess we were talking about video games on the show. And yeah, that's cool. Thank you, Jordan. Jaden Jordan Johnson version two. We appreciate the comments. Those are all our comments from last couple of weeks. If you feel like you need to add more to our own history, we'll go over them on the show right here. Just feel free to leave them on either Doubter Fives YouTube channel or my own channel. We'll go over them on the next week's show. Thank you so much. Yeah. And we're getting close to the end. Do you have any final words or links you want to share? My moral of the story is spring fever is a real thing. And some of the best things they can do is just reach out to good friends and have a good conversation. Even if it's an hour, even if it's once a week, we'll find good people to reach out to and have fun with. When you get as old as I am, you have a lot of old friends that you've lost contact with. Reignite the contact. I'm with their communications over at internet. There's hardly any excuse not to do that. Nice. Go for it. Cool. And my own website is digital free thought dot com. You can, when you go there, click on the blog buttons for our radio show archives. Articles on, on atheism and articles. I mean, songs on atheism. You can also find this video as a podcast. You search for digital, digital free thought radio hour. And if you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. You can find my book atheism. What's it all about on Amazon? And 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 here on W O Z O radio. 103.9 LP FM. 7 o'clock. So bye everybody. Bye everybody. Bye bye. And very good.