 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, May 1st, 2022. I'm Larry Rhodes or Doubter 5. And as usually we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Hey, that sounds like me. That's right. Other guests today are Dred Pirate Higgs. Hello. How are you there? Western Canada. John Richards from London, I believe, England. And George Brown, the second and a half from East Tennessee. Welcome all. Good morning. Digital Freethought Radio Hours, a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, God's holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in town, you're just not. In Knoxville, a town in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us. Tell you more about that group after the mid-show break. Wombat, what's on her plate today? We're going to be talking about two things. One, how do atheists deal with temptation? And the second one is, how good am I at disc golf? Can you guys believe it? I just totally crushed yesterday. I felt so happy. And modest. So modest. And then I think for a short period of time, we can also talk about why there's no pandas in the Bible, which I think it could be a funny topic. Yeah, exactly. Well, before we jump into it, or noodley lords, right? We'll throw it up to Rowan Dredpire Higgs for our weekly invitation. Perfect. I've got my Princess Leia look. Nice. Bob be me captain I shall not want. He maketh me to float in salt waters. He steereth me through glassy seas. He filleth me bowl. He steereth me through the straits of noodliness for goodness sake. I though I sail through the heaving of tempestuous waters, I will fear not sinking. For thou art with me, thy master and thy rudder, they comfort me. Thou preparest a feast before me in the presence of me mates. Thou quenches my thirst with grog, my goblet runneth over. Truly, pasta and grog shall abide with me all the days of me life. And I shall dwell in the galley of our quab forever. Dredp, let's do a quick recap how you've been since last week, my friend. Oh, it's been a slow week. I think I might have mentioned at some point that I started with turning. So I'm getting accustomed to using wood turning tools and the lathe and making stuff and it's been great. I've transformed my greenhouse, which I never grew anything into a wood shop. So very cool busy doing that. Let me throw this out at you. When have you gone into dovetails yet? No, strictly wood turning at this point. I haven't gone into cabinetry yet. Okay, okay. Very, very cool. I can't wait to see your handles or knobs. They're well turned knobs. I appreciate it. Yeah. I want to see the highest quality wood knobs possible. Do you know where to spark all this? No, I know. Talk to me. I think the oven riches may be familiar with what the spotter is. And it's a stick that has different, you know, designs on it. And it's used for mixing and stirring porridge. Very cool. Very cool. Nice. Very popular George Brown saying the half. I always want to catch up with you how you've been. I've been good. I've been engaging sometimes when I feel like the world is going out of control. I engage in some therapy, which I call repair therapy, and that means I fix something, you know, and then I feel I've overcome the adversaries in my life. So what I repaired was this microphone. The boom on the microphone was flopping, and I didn't allow that that was acceptable. So I've repaired the microphone, the ball joint with little pieces of press-apply labels. The perfect repair. And right now, I'm listening to you on these earphones that were given to me by somebody who stole them from an airline. And I've been comparing airline headphones. Okay, not bad. You look fashionable. Listen, I'll tell you something. My job, we have a belief that if you fixed it and it looks silly and it works, it's not silly and you're good to go. That's it. Glad to hear you have a stiff boom. Yeah. I was going to say, if you asked me about your floppy boom, I would have suggested my aggra. All right. Well, at this, at this, at my age, the boom does, you know, get a little floppy. I'm sorry. Or John Richard, Ty, have you been? Oh, right. Okay. Well, I've been up to my usual scheming tricks. In fact, earlier this week, they let Kent Hovind out of jail long enough to speak to me. And that was fun. And then I ripped it and chopped it and reassembled it with my actual comments in, because of course he doesn't let you speak. He actually knew Dwayne Gish and learned a lot from him about the Gish Gallup. So I did that. And I've been on another apologist website and YouTube channel. A chap called Brett Keane, who you may have heard of. He doesn't show himself on screen. He has this threatening image that he likes. Because I think he's trying to be a sort of shock jock for Christianity. Anyway, take a look. If they need more. You know, my thought process on Kevin Hovind or truly a lot of like these guys are, I used to be a fan of like Animorse or like take it for a Bujo Star Wars. And you know, a movie pretty well. But like that was like in my head, like back in 20 or 2007, when I read my last Animorse book or Harry Potter book, like there have been other books that have come out and who have colored my impression of like the older books that I've read. But could you imagine from a child up to the point where an adult to like from 2007 all the way up to 2020, you're still arguing about the same book, the same stories still genuinely believing it still knowing every note. It's like, haven't you have the opportunity to like flower or bloom in any other areas of expertise? Like, is this still the same thing that you're doing? It's crazy. Well, you see, there's two reasons why he hasn't. One is that he'd never listens to anything anybody else says. And the other is he's got a very vested interest in, in proposing constantly making his same proposition go out there because he earns his money by attracting an audience to his steampark Dr. Dino and other stuff that he manages to flog on the Internet. Yeah, it's how he feeds his kids. But like it's also a really terrible way to figure out if something's true or not, you know, when you put that much pressure on it. So he's committed those four things. He's got too much to lose. He didn't change. Yeah. But the thing is, even Jeff Foxworthy picked up some different sets and shows and stuff like that. He didn't just do radic jokes his entire life. He's like, I'm not the redneck guy, guys. I did on smarter than an eighth grader. I did the Jax Foxworthy show. I've diversified. How do I say it? Anyway, Larry Rhodes. Love to hear from you. How you been? Oh, I've been fine. Not doing a whole lot other than working and playing games and watching TV and sleeping. You sound just like me. Welcome to being in your early 30s. You do play. You do go outside and play. I did ride my motorcycle yesterday for about an hour. It was, it was nice. It was nice. It was nice. It was nice. Another thing about Dr. Dino. You know, he, he, he claims that he has a doctorate, but he got it from an internet diploma mill. And, and his thesis is literally online. You can go and read it, but it's a real nightmare. Just look for, you know, Ken Hovind's thesis and then it'll come up. And one other thing that he did is, you know why he went to the local government and they couldn't pay taxes. They don't pay taxes and telling people that they can't pay. They don't need to pay taxes because. They're being represented without, I mean, they're being taxed without representation and all that. And then his defense went when the, when the IRS actually got them in front of him, his defense was, no, it didn't. Even though you could go online and find his material, though he's selling a course and how you could do it. This is him. This is his mentality that he can just deny anything or say feels that it's covered the the topic. Right. It's a very scary mentality to be like, I could deny reality on my terms whenever I want to, because I have the cheat code because I know the programmer, you know, very bizarre. Yes. It's anyway, it was it was fun. And it's had a lot of views in the last half of the day. I can tell you. OK, guys, we listen to all of your stories. Let me tell you about the greatest competitive match disc golf of all time. Let me tell you, I've been in the disc golf league for the last six weeks. Last yesterday was the last week of the league that my first league being in there, and I had been consistently under par for the last five events, the sixth event. I'm nervous as hell because I want to do better. I want to have the best match. I'm out after work practicing every day and I'm there the day before the event and I'm just stressing out. I'm just figuring out like none of my putts are lining up. None of my drives are coming off the right way. My forehands don't feel like they're connecting. I just need to really chill and calm down. So I went home. I pulled out all my holy books and I looked at them and I threw them away because I don't need that stuff. And I was like, I'm going to win without God. I'm going to do this with me. I'm just going to do it. Me, I want to work my hardest. And I'm just going to figure this out and chill myself out. And I came with three simple rules. One, before I throw anything, I'm just going to do a couple of practice throws. Just make sure my body stays in line. I think that's a practical way to I'm always going to stay positive. And three, if I mess up, I'm going to laugh at it because I don't want to put myself in a bad funk for the rest of the match. So I go up on the very first tee on the very first round. I'm in the chase card, which is like there's a leader card, which is the top four. And then the chase card, which is, hey, you're still playing today. You're still in the running. You might win. I'm like, chase card. I've never been the case card before. That's awesome. So I'm at least top four if I can finish really well. First throw I do perfect, perfect drive line with a zone, which for disc golfers, it's a very overstable putter goes right into the basket, hole in one first shot on the last day of the league. That's my very first shot. I start the round two under and I ride it all the way to win the card eventually. I won rate the the the the chase card. I got four. I got on the Dalian. And I'm freaking out. I had that was some of the best performance I did three times better than I did any other day on any of those competitive leagues all together. I was just really, really happy with the performance. Good thing is I didn't have to. Exactly. I was like, thank God, I didn't thank God. I did it one for the atheist. And let me tell you, there's a lot of Christians in this golf, everyone's name like shows Joseph or Isaac or Ziya. And you're just like, I got you all Tyrone, got you all. Yay. All right. So that was my weekend. Listen, I also got a really good email yesterday, too. And I want to share it with you guys and probably bring it up as a topic of conversation for today. The email comes from a guy named Chucky Ellison. He says, hi, Tyrone. I'm Chucky. I hope this email still works. It does. I've been work. I've been watching your videos since 2018 and always enjoyed your style. I've been a big fan of SE since 2017 and I recently became involved in the SE community myself. He goes on to talk about his experience where as being Christian and and how he thinks it's a good way to just facilitate conversations. And he invites me on the show that he that he's planning on having. I find it more encouraging that there's different kinds of people who are trying to have conversations with people who don't necessarily believe the same way they do or use different methodologies. I think that's the best way for us to get over that ket hoben closed mindedness. But Chucky does present an interesting question in his email and he asks, how do atheists deal with temptation? And it's not just by the fact that they don't do things. It's the fact that even if they don't do something, they still have to attempt temptation there. It's still present, even if their actions show that they're capable of overcoming it. But how do atheists as a whole deal with temptation and what kind of mechanics do we have to resolve that if we don't rely on prayer or God or faith or things like that? So I know everyone's raising their hands. We'll do a round table. We'll start with Larry. What do you think? How do atheists deal with temptation? OK, before I get into it, you've got a little bit of static going on. I'm hearing now maybe you can adjust while I'm talking. Well, first of all, we don't have nearly the temptations to worry about as the people do who are, you know, religious people. We don't have a celestial body telling us not to do half the things we want to do. The other half is you learn to rely on yourself and you. I mean, we have laws in place that punish people who give in to do many temptations that are against what other people would call their freedoms. And we learn to live within those limitations. And plus, we set up our own limitations and we live by them. Once you once you realize that you can't rely on something supernatural, you learn to rely on yourself. Once you realize you can't rely on the supernatural, you learn to rely rely on yourself. Interesting. OK. John Richards looks like you're raising a hand or finger. Yeah, sure. Well, the Larry's right. We have fewer taboos. You know, if you're allowed to do pretty much everything, then you don't feel guilty and you you don't consider them to have been temptations. So it's only those people who are uptight about things that think they they ought to do because he's naughty that really have a problem. I have a can I put a question on that? So is the crux of the argument that we have fewer temptations or that we have more freedom that inherently just makes whatever temptations do exist, not so taboo? You see what I'm saying? It's two very nuanced points that you're making right now. Are you saying both or what? It's fewer temptations. There's in the in the Christian column of temptations, there's a whole lot of things. And in the in the nonbelievers column, there's not much. Right, right, right. So the list of temptations is very small for us. But the other thing is we accept a responsibility for them, you know? So unlike thinking that God is the one who's directing our actions and that his morals are the ones we should abide by, we actually accept responsibility for our own actions. And therefore we consider whether we should do this whatever it is or whether we shouldn't. So if if what you might consider to be a temptation comes before you, you think about it and decide, no, I'm not going to do that. You know, and this happens to us every day. For example, I remember to this day, biting my tongue about some nasty remark that I could have said to my father. He's dead now, long ago. But at that time, I realized that if I said that thing, it would ruin our relationship for the rest of our lives. Right. What did I do? I bit my tongue. Interesting, interesting. You know, I once went to KFC last weekend, actually. And I asked, could I have a five piece chicken? And they're like, we don't sell five pieces of chicken. We sell them in two, three, four or six. And I was like, so you sell two and three pieces of chicken, right? Yes. And I there was a moment where nothing was connecting. And I was like, I'm also going to bite my tongue. And I'm just going to I'll just get the six feet, whatever, whatever. It's all good. Anyway, dread, that's a true story. That's an awesome story. So so right off the bat, I have a problem with the word temptation, because in my mind, temptation is an externalization of an interior impulse. You know, David Hume said that reason is the slave to passion. But that's why we must exercise reason in order to overcome and challenge our own impulses, right? The temptation, of course, is the idea, you know, which is worn out by the Bible, that there's a Satan or some evil being that's manipulating humans for which salvation is the only way around that. So recognizing that temptations are nothing but in interior impulses is probably the most important step because people's, you know, often say, well, I couldn't I couldn't, you know, I couldn't avoid the temptation. Yes, you can, because it's an it's an impulse. Yes, it's all happening in here, not out there. Dred, I love that because that was going to be my thing. I was going to say, once you recognize the source of temptation, it becomes a lot easier to control. And that's how we manage it, because we don't subscribe it to a supernatural entity. We don't think it's demons. We don't think it's Satan, you know, trying to communicate or pull our strings in any way. We know it comes from us, right? And because and once you kind of discipline that voice in your head, or once you once you take control of that part of you and you manage your impulses or you try to, you know, strengthen your inhibitions so that you don't think about the things that tempt you. And then you realize the the greater benefits of like long term benefits. For example, there is a really great test that's given to kids who are like three to seven years old. I don't know if they do this in England. It's called the pageant test, but it's they'll give kids like one marshmallow. And they say, hey, you can eat this marshmallow right now or five minutes from now. I'll give you five marshmallows. Right. And at three years old, they will eat that marshmallow right there. It's gone. And then they walk out the room because they don't think long term. But as they get to like seven years old or like second grade, third grade, they're like, oh, five minutes, I get five marshmallows. That's way more than I'll wait five minutes. And they'll sit there in front of that one marshmallow. They'll wait out the time. And then afterwards they get five marshmallows and they're so happy because they were able to pace out. They were able to exercise because they were rationalizing the long term benefits of waiting with temptation. It's the similar thing. I want to go out and eat candy right now, but I know that's not good for my heart. So I get grapes instead because I know that's just as sweet, but it will help me long term as well. And I found that to be a better median instead of getting a bunch of jelly beans. I can get grapes instead, has the same texture, has the same feel, but far more healthy and I can eat them and better in moderation. I get fuller, faster from my diet to the way how I treat people to how I order chicken at KFC. I'm just making sure I'm not burning any bridges and I'm biting my tongue or I'm managing my indulgences and I'm making sure that, you know, I understand where the 10 patients coming from. It's me. I need to change my behavior. I'm taking accountability for it. And I'm hopefully moving forward with the best options or the best methods to to reduce temptations here and in the future. That's my thought. Exactly. It's all about responsibility. It's all about looking at your body and thinking, who made it this fat? Hang on a minute. Who was it was forcing food into this mouth? That was me. Yeah, that was me a long time ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, along with that and and I'll go ahead and dread. I talked enough. I was just going to say that. What's his name? Daniel Kahneman is his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, again, relates to the impulse mind and the reasoned mind. It's a great it's a great read. He won a Nobel Prize for Economics in in essentially what was a psychology book. So definitely a good read, but it really points out in the the two forms, main forms of thought that we have. And that's the impulse thought and the reasoned thought. I also think John Richards was in a really interesting line of thought when he was talking about the freedom, the freedom of realizing you can do whatever you want, because sort of the the care and stick that comes with religion is that if you do this, you're going to get punished for it by a supernatural being that'll see every thought that you have control and get you back with karma or some sort of cosmic justice in some form. It's fear. Exactly. And fear is always never a good motivator for moral behavior. It's essentially the same analogy I threw out where if you shine a line on a cockroach, it'll run away from the light, but it's not doing a moral action. So like when it's not a test of its character to run away from the light, it's trying to survive. So once that stimulus is gone, how is it going to behave after that fact? And that's temptation. It's like, what are you going to do when people aren't watching you? And when your only motivator to do good things is fear, what do you do when you know you aren't being watched anymore? Oh, what's up, John Richards? Go for it. Well, I've got a theory that goes a little bit further than that. It says that if you've been taught that a lot of things are naughty. You might actually want to do them more. And and and I've got it would explain, for example, why in the Muslim world, because they are deprived of you know, normal sexual relations or even, you know, women that look attractive and because they are deprived of alcohol, what does paradise promise them? Seventy two virgins and rivers of wine. Yeah. So as a sobering sexual, there's not a lot of stuff in the afterlife for me, both in Muslims or in the Pasifarian universe. That said, the Pasifarian universe just seems like way more fun, because I don't want to be outnumbered by seventy two. But I'm sure there's probably some good distal courses in Pasifarian heaven. Like if I was going to subscribe, I'd probably get one. Hey, George, what's up? Well, nobody ever described anything what these virgins really look like. You know, just picture this, they're all like eighty five years old. Start there. So my my my other thought process with that, I know this is marginalizing because we don't really have a lot of Muslims on the show. But like the idea is the virgin status is a is a is inherently a temporary one, particularly if you're going to live with someone for forever. And if it was consent involved, like you're going to run out of virgins eventually, and then you're just going to have seventy two. Women around you, like all the time was like, what's going on here? It's a it's a category that will in itself be a non sustainable resource. That's why we have a stripper factory. You just keep making them. Yes, I like the idea of the virgin status being temporary, because, of course, if you've got a floppy boom. Never very transient for a lot of people, for a lot of people, only last three minutes anyway. There's there's the great callback. I love it. Larry, what do you got? Well, I, you know, I have conversations on the Internet all the time with believers and the ones from Islam have been told have told me that they were renewing virgins. They were renewing. There are born again versions. No, well, they just renewing. I mean, they they don't go away after you says it were. Why do you get their hymens back? No, I wish. So here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm just going to throw this up. I have read the Quran twice. That is not that is not a passage in that book. But it's well, there are a lot of ideas and there are an awful lot of I know, so you just make up their own stuff. But it's just the sad part where it's like when people say, well, God knew how long the universe was. It was 14 billion years. He knew it wasn't seven days. It's like that's not in the Bible, though. The Bible literally in black and white says seven days. Like, well, my pastor is like, you're just adding stuff. You're post hoc, rationalizing and updated textbook. And we can probably go into more in that, too, because there's a lot of stuff missing from the holy books, including kangaroos. And I want to talk about that more in the second half of the show. Larry, would you mind taking us out? Not at all. Segway. Yep. Stay tuned right here for the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. We're on W OZO 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 daughter five. We're on W OZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's talk a moment about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 20th year. ASK have has over a thousand members. And we have weekly in person meetings in Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Taproom, Pizzeria. We meet every Tuesday evening after work around five thirty or so. Go to about eight. Look for us inside at the high top table or on the deck, if it's a pretty day. You were usually the loudest and happiest group there. We also have Tuesday evening Zoom meetings. If you're out of town or don't want to get out of the house, you can join us by emailing us, first of all, at askanatheistatnoxfilatheist.org or let's chat s e at me, I'm sorry, gmail.com. And we'll give you the link on how to join us. You can also find ASK on Facebook, meetup.com or go to their website at Knoxvilleatheist.org. You can also Google Knoxville Atheist and find us. That's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you can still go to meet up or do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one, but where do we want to pick up? I did want to send out a thanks to Checkie Ellison for helping to stimulate conversation. That was a really good question that you sent in. And now I want to switch gears just a little bit. How to funny thought. And I want to run by everybody. So at work and I'm realizing that there is this cool picture of a panda that I saw in someone's background for Zoom conference that we're having at work. And I was like, those are cool animals. And I bet you there's probably bears in every part of the world. Isn't it cool how it diversified such that the bears that are in this place are brown, the ones that are here are white. And the ones that are here are like black and white with these very distinct patterns. And then I thought, you know, I know that and I could I probably have a hard time explaining that to somebody who's only ever lived in one place. But I could at least say, hey, do you see that animal there? That's just brown. Well, the bears that live way over there that you can't get to are basically the same, but they're they're black on their feet and black on their eyes and they're white everywhere else. And I'm like, oh, I understand what you're talking about now. The weird thing is that would only make sense to someone who's actually gone outside of a geolock location and was able to explain it. Or if that animal came over to their area, they would be able to see it. But it's a distinct enough thing where it's exotic enough that it'd be an easy thing to explain what it is. And and and basically say, hey, this is abnormal. This is kind of interesting. But I never see sort of recognition of that in the Bible and truly any other holy book or holy scripture. It seems to be the case that people who write those textbooks only write about what they're aware of in their geoland lock location. And so when you write in Mesopotamia Bronze Age, you don't talk about kangaroos, even though you could describe them as like really big rabbits with like with giant feet as big as a person and pouching gloves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And pouches and pouches. It's like that's so bizarre. You never you never like when you said all the animals lined up in front of Noah's Ark, you didn't say, oh, and by the way, there was this one extra crazy animal that had like this was jumping around and had like a a striped tail and it looked like a monkey, but it wasn't a monkey. There was just so many crazy animals. The fact that we just take it for granted that I think one of the things that we take for granted for Noah's Ark story is that, you know, all the animals lined up and there are two by two. It's like, yeah, but you're seeing every animal. Don't any of them stand out to you? Like, isn't that even more incredible? Like the diversification of life and how do you if you had made a mention, a single mention of one exotic animal in that list, something that wasn't in your geoland lock location. Couldn't I as an atheist be persuaded by the fact that you're able to recognize something that you wouldn't have access to and say that is definitive proof that something abnormal happened other than just you stating something with such normalcy that I actually now am more unlikely to believe that you're actually seeing all the diversification of life. I feel like I am talking a lot about this. I can run on this for days. Dred, do you have any similar ideas of like why pandas or kangaroos aren't talked about in the Bible or any other holy book? Well, it's clearly just as you say, just in a lack of exposure to those different animals. I take, for example, aphids, which for the great part of their lives go through a process called parthenogenesis, which they just make female and they're all females. They're clones of the females and they produce them off the cornicles at the end of their their bodies and and are able to change into male at a point where a sexual reproduction is necessary. But, you know, Noah would have no idea whether he was looking at a male aphid or a female aphid. It just wouldn't that wouldn't make any sense. Right. Right. John, you got thoughts on this diversification of life as a biologist. It seems to be overlooked. What you're absolutely right. This is an indication of the geocentricity. Of a religion. Religions started in an inner place and spread like a bacterial culture. And so they bring with them the knowledge of that location. If you look at a map, there's a lovely map that shows a circle over part of Israel, which the idea is that all of the major Abrahamic religions originated within that 50 mile radius location. So there they had very narrow horizons. They knew very little about what went on anywhere else. And this is true of a lot of religions. I mean, if you think of the early Egyptian religions, they had a god called Anubis with a head of a dog. And they had another one with a head of an eagle. I can't remember the name of the crane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the hippopotamus god. That's right, because they were they were known about in that part of the world. Right. And if you go to India, of course, they've got an elephant headed god, Ganesh. They've got it because it existed there. The Christians don't have it because there were no elephants in Jerusalem or wherever they began. And the fantastic point is just to add to this, because I love it, because in Africa or in Egypt, there's the African elephant. And in India, there's the Indian elephant. And they both have elephants, but no one else has elephants. No one else talks about elephants in their religious. That's right. It's the same reason why the only name for the giraffe was the camel leopard, you know, because if you haven't seen a giraffe before, you compare it to what you knew. Right. And it's spotty like a leopard and shaped like a camel a bit. So this is all about discovering the diversity of life after you've invented the your story for the origin of it, which is God done it, you know. But what interests me is that in Latter Day, Christian America, their book, which was forced on to a lot of secondary schools to teach creationism, was called Of Pandas and People. Yeah. Isn't that bizarre? At the end of the day, it all circles back at each other. I just speaking of describing things, you know, we I just I want to get everyone's opinion on this, but I have this weird little tangent. The etymology of the word orange comes after the fruit. The fruit came first, the color came second. But orange from unanclinized versions was originally yellow, red or yellow, red because we didn't have a word for the color in between. We just had yellow and red. We combine them and then eventually got something that sounded like orange. And we named the fruit after that. And then we had the color and we're like, let's just call it the fruit. There's a history to everything that we take for granted. And it's it's so it's such a process of seeing humanity just desperately cling to things that they know about and make new concepts. And those become the new words that we use for things. And if you don't have those, if you take these blocks that we we take for granted, you see that they're actually components of, you know, very fundamental building blocks. And when you look at religion, it's the exact same thing. You can trace it back to how you have a question, if I may enter up to you. Were there any mosquitoes on the arc? Please. Flies. Yeah, good. They would just come along with it, I'm sure. Take worms. Kevin, Kevin, my venereal disease. Viruses, viruses. I wanted to say. I wanted to say that what this does is it illustrates the very fact that religions are all. What's the word parochial and not and not global, let alone universal. And having, you know, having a big god that can explain everything. What it means is they're all villages. Yeah. And the weird thing is, is if that does make a lot more sense in the idea of, well, how do you fit all the animals on one boat? Well, I only know 20 different animals because there's only 20 different animals in my neighborhood. What do you mean the whole world got flooded? Well, I only am aware of this village. So like if there's a really bad storm here, I can make up that as a story rather than, you know, explain to someone the complexities of the earth and how much water would actually take in order to increase that diameter based on the surface area of the earth itself. It's like, no, it's just a couple of towns. That's that's pretty bad rainstorm right there. The other thing that calls out is when you have people in China write about dragons and dragons existing, but no one else talking about dragons. You think if it existed, other people would talk about dragons or at the end of the Bible, when you have the seven headed, seven legged beings. No one else saw that. It's only that one dude who wrote that in the revelations that saw it. And no one else. There's no collaborative effort to like get these claims. And verified. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, verified. If you're just reading, you're reading the rantings of a schizophrenic. And that's the description of the end of the world for which we all ought to fear. Some respect was just it would be great if it was collaborated by another person who had no access to that person far away enough to where isn't just something that could come about through a convention in Guinea, for say, for example, but rather a Geneva, my bad, or whatever that place is called, who knows who cares at this point. But I'm saying like it'd be nice to have collaboration from desperate groups. Whereas in science, that is how science moves forward. It's how it works. John Richards, you want to elaborate a little bit more because. Yeah, well, I was going to say you talked about kangaroos and I don't know much about the Aborigines religions. But I'm wondering if they had koalas and kangaroos because they were isolated on what had by then become the largest island continent, which certainly the Maori were that way, right? Yeah, and their religions circled around what was local and common to them. And Aztecs had Jaguar based gods. They had human bodies in Jaguar's head. Native Americans had ancestor worship, of course, but they had totem holes that had eagles on it, grizzly bears on it, frogs, beavers, there's just like we picked what's around us. Buffalo. And I want to ask you this. What's the difference between a bison and a buffalo? Go for it. Just tell us. You can't wash your hands in the buffalo. Whoa. All right, just give me just give me some time. I'll catch up. I'll catch up. I'm trying to find out what that means. I'm mispronouncing. Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. Our friends in Canada and England are really enjoying the cultural. Look at the silly Americans. So, you know, the weird thing is, as a atheist, I'd actually find that as pretty compelling information that these guys were writing to something that was beyond them, at least, because that would be a hard thing to describe as someone's like, hey, all the animals lined up. And by the way, let me just describe some of these animals, because they're really amazing. I have to I have to take a moment to just describe some of you. There was a bear that had blah, blah, blah. And me as an atheist would have to be like, well, then, how did Noah know about pandas or kangaroos or Komodo dragons? Like, how did he know that viruses were these weird things that live inside of people that aren't technically alive, but can replicate DNA? Like, how did he know about these atheists things? If that was in the Bible and I was reading that, I'd be like, oh, man, I might just stick as a Christian, because this seems to be very compelling evidence of something. Larry, what's up? Yeah, that's true. But there are other things that they bring up in the Bible that nobody seems to care about. Like Jesus raised like three people from the dead. And they the Bible only names one of them, but nobody bothered to ask them what it was like being dead. Not a single one of them. Right. Yeah, I mean, you would think that would be a whole chapter, you know, them describing, you know, the afterlife. Nope. Never mentioned. You know, like, hey, hey, Brandon, could you tell us about that time when you were dead for like a couple of days? You know, I'm busy. I'm still I'm still, you know, feeding goats. I got way more important things to do. I just came back from the dead. Sorry, I got to catch you up to do. I got that, Brandon. I'll catch up with you later. We'll come up with a writing system and record this down, because this is an important story. It's like, yeah, I'll come back after I'm done with the goats. I'll tell you all about the afterlife. Yeah, that's not even counting all the people that came out of the graves during the resurrection in the town in Mass. Yeah, so considering that Jesus was only briefly dead, maybe he only had a near death experience. Yeah, though, it's not so much their stories I'm interested in. It's more of like if something happened, it was on a global scale. I want to hear other parts of the world talk about it. Or I want the person who responds to it to impart some sort of insight that's worthwhile that makes me understand that it's not just their limited experience and understanding that's at play here. They're describing things that's clearly outside of their capability of understanding. But the best things that we have is like a bush that's on fire. It looks like it's a fire. It's a bush that's on fire. It's like that's such an easy thing to replicate. Give me something tangible that can be collaborated with something else that I know you want to have access to, because anyone can light a bush on fire. Anyone can take a pole and make it look like a snake. There's poles that already look like snakes. Mangrove science is like you don't have to like come up with these very, very insular, very modest miracles. Just give me something very, very interesting that other people can collaborate. The Red Sea Split. OK. Is anybody else talking about that? Or is it literally just Moses? Oh, that's just a shame. Anyway, Dredd, what do you got? Yeah, I was just going to say, Joseph Smith, isn't that the his attempt to corroborate the story of Jesus as happening with Native American peoples and, you know, having been present here in North America. Very true. But the only problem with the Justice System or is it falls into the same conceits that the only problem. It is basically a guy being like, OK, let's do the American version where now all the Eagles and now there's tree fogs and there's toads. And he's Jesus 2.0. Yeah. And there's Americana in it. But the and which makes it a lot more palatable to Americans. But the problem is, is you're not talking about the things that are outside of America impacting America, like you're not talking about trade or viruses that are coming in or or anything that's going on outside of the purview of just one man who with limited technology who's right in this Bible, you know, just like that's right. It's it's like when the pure story of Winnie the Pooh became Disney fight. Right. Right. Right. Right. It's for me, it's like, man, this is going to be a pool. But it's sort of like when I saw a ready player one, the movie. And I saw the Millennium Falcon and Iron Man in the same scene. And for me, it was like these are both Disney owned properties, but they're in the same movie and it's kind of blowing my mind. Like this is a guy who is now understanding pop culture at a metal level and combining sources that no other character in that universe would be able to put together. I don't see that in the Bible. Whenever I'm seeing the Bible, it's like I am watching an insular movie where only Iron Man exists or only Batman exists and they only know Joker and the Riddler and they don't know what about super fan across the street in another town far away. It's so contained to the understanding and the knowledge of that writer that it's disappointing when they're talking about things on such a grand scale. Yet they have such a limited scope and understanding of the things that they're obviously trying to portray or correlate to a higher power. It's a shame. And I would find it really convincing information if they were able to do it otherwise. Any other final thoughts on that, Dred? Yeah, it actually reminds me of, you know, some of the tenets of screenwriting is that your world must be self-contained, it must be self-consistent. So you it's impossible to speak of things that you don't know of. Even if it's superheroes or magic beings, the universe you create is has to be internally consistent in order to make sense to people. For me, I find it as the Colombo Paradox, where the more perfect the story is from beginning, middle to end, the more it's most likely a lie. Like when Colombo, who's a detective, he will go up to a personal ask, what were you doing last night when this body was found? And they'll be like, I was here. This guy saw me. I dropped off my gloves here. I was there at nine o'clock. I came home, I ate four peas, and then I went to bed. And he's just like, huh, that's a very interesting story because no one I ever talked to knows exactly what they're doing from beginning to end at the hour and stuff like that. That's very interesting. Yeah. And as he's walking to the car, he turns around and he says, one more thing. Right, right, right. Yeah. I want to interject. Almost almost almost short term. What I'm saying is the idea that self-containing stories are so beginning, middle and compact versus what science has. As far as like narrative, the universe was just nothing but unknowns. And we're still figuring out how things are going. Makes me more inclined to believe that one still a process that's trying to discover truth and the other one is a narrative that's being offered to us to keep us from getting to the truth. Go ahead, George. Well, listening to you talk about Disney's ownership of characters that originally appeared in independent children's publications made me realize that Disney is free to take all these characters, these disparate characters that they own and combine them into new stories in which they interrelate with each other. Well, it makes a lot of money. Wait, wait, it begins to sound like Disney has the ability to create their own religion out of all these characters, which they would own and have a patent on. You know, and it reminds me of a certain religion that I've heard about. Yeah. In my head, the MCU already is a religion. I just find it more entertaining by the fact that it's admittedly fiction. And I think that's the crux of it. So, like, I'm totally fine if people are Thor fans, as long as it's the fictional Thor, you know? John Richards, you got any final thoughts on this topic? We're going to last words. Well, you're right. In that respect, there's a near religion of Star Trek, isn't there? They have conventions, dress up, yeah. Cool, Larry Rhodes, final thoughts on this idea. And as in the Bible. Well, no, it's obvious why they just didn't have an omniscient source of information, feeding them information about the rest of the world. All they had was their eyes and ears and what they can see here in their locality. That's all they could report on. They had some imagination, i.e. revelations. But a lot of people I've talked to say that revelations are really just a lot of code for when they couldn't reveal what they were actually talking about or the Romans would get them. Oh, man, whether it's schizophrenia or code, it's not miracle prophecy. Right. So, you know, whichever one you decide, then you're deciding that the chapter of revelations is not supposed to carry that kind of weight. So I've also thought about this is like, what is the reluctance of a powerful, all powerful God that wants to have a relationship with us with just giving us the objective, you know, evidence that exists because the devil knows God exists, yet does not worship God. So like it's not a question of whether or not, you know, God exists or not, that will incline you to worship or a free will issue. It's just make yourself known and then based on our free will or whatever you want to have it will determine whether or not we're worth worship will determine whether we worship you or not, but give us the opportunity to at least know definitively whether or not you exist. And I thought a good way to do that would just at least have a mention of a panda in the Bible or kangaroo or kangaroo. At least then I'd be like, oh, this guy knows things that shouldn't be there at that time. Very interesting. And then, yeah, it's just it's a very bizarre thing. Guys, we're at the end of the show. We're going to do some final plugs. Jared Pirat, anything you like to plug? Yeah, I'm live streaming the show right now. But I start at 7 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. We've got a couple of folks on right now, Loma. Hi. And that is Trading Room. Hey, so thanks for coming and joining us. So you can find me at Mind Pirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. And I also have joined John Richards on the Global Atheist Network Review Show, which will be live streamed at 11 a.m. today. This is Sunday Pacific Daylight Time. So look forward to seeing you there, too. Like and subscribe. I'll see you there, too. Yeah, and please subscribe to Mind Pirate, great show. John Richards, you got so much stuff to plug, so I'm just going to throw this in. I'm expecting my trophy in the mail for disc golf. But in the meanwhile, I might even dedicate it to God and put the best hide and seek champion on it. The only problem is we still haven't found God yet. So God, whenever you have a chance, please send us your address. We'll be happy to send you that trophy. Anyway, John Richards, what would you like to plug? Well, it's nice to see you giving in to the temptation to brag about your trophy time. Well, yeah, I want to plug the Global Atheist News, which you guys actually stream it live. I don't. I record it. And I put it out later in the week when I think I need some more content, you know, because I spread it out, make it look as though there's more happening continuously than a bunch of stuff and then nothing. Hmm. So, yeah, Free Thought Productions, that's the place to go. It's a growing channel with more and more interesting stuff on it. And we're just about to have a makeover because Steve, Swedish Steve, has come up with all sorts of better backgrounds and intros and outros and music. And oh, it's going to be fantastic. Nice. What a great guy. I'm hoping to be in my studio for today's show. Oh, great. Yeah, I'm going to finish set in that. So and then also, are you going to be uploading or have you already uploaded your Hoven conversation? Hoven stuff is already uploaded. Yes. Nice. Nice. Wonderful. Larry Rhodes. Listen, we've talked about atheism now between you and I. Feels like for 12 years now. I know it's been a long time. Long time. You know, I still don't understand what atheism is and all it's all about. You got to get to the point. Can you just like, I don't know, figure out some way to put it in a book or something? Well, maybe I could put it in a book. Matter of fact, I have put it in a book and you can find it on Amazon. It's called atheism. What's it all about? And there is an image of it if you're looking at it just in YouTube. My other content. And matter of fact, most of the content in that book can be found at digital free thought dot com. Be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show archives, atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. My YouTube channel can be found by searching for doubter five or Larry Rhodes. You can find my book on Amazon, as we mentioned. You look if you're having trouble leaving religious beliefs behind, you can get help at recovering from religion dot org. You can find this show on Apple iTunes, Pocketcasts, Amazons and on podcasts everywhere. Just search for digital free thought radio hour. Thank you for joining us. Remember, if you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. 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 week. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Running. Bye, everyone. Hey, cheers.