 Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, March 19th. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ Doubter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat with us. Hello Wombat. Hey, I'm the Wombat. Our guests today are John Richards from England, South of London. Welcome. Hello. And Judd Pirat Hicks from the western side of Canada. Welcome. The northern side of Canada. There you go. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, Satanism, Pustifarianism and Sciences. Conversely, we're also talking about religion, religious faith, God's holy books and superstition. If you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us. So if you're here in Knoxville, come out and meet with us. We're the Atheist Society of Knoxville or ASK. And we'll tell you more about it after the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's your topic today? We're going to be talking about Greta Kristina's book called 99 Reasons. Oh, I'm sorry. Let's find out. I'm going to get the actual. Here we go. Why are atheists so angry? 99 things that make you so angry about the godless. So some choice of vocabulary. We're going to get into it in more detail and do some highlights from her book. But before we get into that main course, we're going to throw it up to our own Dredd Power Higgs for our daily dose of noodles. Of pasta and sauce, my heart doth sing, as I need and roll the dough with glee. And in the pot, the noodles doth cling, and the sauce simmers merrily. Oh flying spaghetti monster, bless this dish with your noodley appendages divine. And let the meatballs bring us bliss as we feast upon this meal of thine. For thou art the saucy deity whose love for us never weans. And in our hearts, we feel thy charity as we twirl our force with zeal and refrain. So let us raise our glasses high to the flying spaghetti monster in the sky. Dredd, have you ever considered asking chat GPT to make you a bunch more shanties for your journalism? That's who's producing these puppies. Nice. Good job. Good job. Good job. I just put it, I just say compose. So I just, this last one here, I just said chat GPT, compose me a Pastafarian themed sonnet in the style of William Shakespeare. Nice. And that's what it did in less than 60 seconds. What I do like about chat GPT is how people are still interacting with it as if it is an actual thinking person. Hey, hey, hey, sir, could you please do something like this for me? And the computer is just like, get rid of all the extra little spits and where's the directive? But I like that we're still interacting with it in a human thing. It's, if anything improves, I guess our empathy, not just towards people, but like towards inanimate things too. Maybe we can take how we treat AI and apply it to how we treat the earth too. And like maybe become. Oh, I spent a lot of time cussing Siri. I don't treat Siri nicely at all. No, no, no. I let the expletives fly. Okay. In fact, I've selected a female voice for my sat nav so that I feel better about arguing with her. Wow. Interesting. Hey, John Richards. How you been? I've been fine. Thank you very much. And it's all happening here. It's all happening here. What does that mean? Not here. Not here because that's. I've lost my, I've lost my parliamentary background. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't look, it looks way more free to me than, than that. So that's good. I can probably see some guys with guns on that road. So it's not that bad. So what's happening here is I may have told you last week that I'm organizing an event in London. And it's, it's coming together. We've now got Richard Dawkins is going to be our, our guest of honor at this event. And in addition to that, I delivered a presentation at a, an independent school. I think I told you that was going to happen last week. So that's, that is now in the past and it's been videoed. And one day when they finished playing with it, we'll be able to upload it. Well, that's so wonderful. That's cool. Speaking of like filming stuff. My job is filming another commercial at our site. And they picked me to be the spokesperson for the show. They said Tyrone is the most engaging person that you can talk to. And I'm like, yeah, I know it. Thank, thank, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So we're actually going to do is a three day shoot. We're going to do some walkthroughs and B roles. And then I got to go to Nashville to do some interviews. And they're going to have like a person and everything like that. And then the last thing we'll do, this is the fun new thing. They're actually going to follow me around town, go to some of my favorite spots and like get film of me doing like disc golf throws, which I like films of me, like volunteering at like the local schools. And I'm like super happy about that. But like, like a nice. Atheists having an impact in a local society and, and just having like a good time outside and applying that to the work life that I have. It's like it's nice full circle sort of. Testament of how much fun I've had since I started working here. It's just a really. Whoa. Yeah. Just being normal. It's like, oh, this is really cool. This is a really nice environment. This is really nice. Dred, why on check in with you? How you been. north here in Fort St. John. So I can tell that the aurora borealis is right behind you. It's really great. Yeah. And the northern lights. Pretty soon they'll have what's called break up because as the frost leaves the ground, it'll be money and mucky so they don't want a big big heavy trucks and big machinery driving through the forest service roads. So they call that break up. So we'll be out of work here for about a month I guess so. Okay. Let me go back home and catch up on my pass dots and on my taxes and all that kind of stuff I got to do. Yeah. Dred, you've never strike me as a person who didn't have something to do. No, you're absolutely right. Even on my days off I spent hours, well I guess the last person who used my truck or was assigned the unit I have which is a medical treatment mobile medical treatment center. They didn't clean it after leaving the company so I spent six hours to do that to get it patient ready. Wow. Reach docking supplies and all that kind of stuff. Sure. I've flown in to join you, Dred. It's nice up here. I agree. Very cool. Larry, checking in with you. How you been? I'm doing fine. Working and playing computer games, nothing new really. Have you read any good books lately? I do a lot of reading online but I haven't read any books lately. The last one I think I read was about Trump. I read two or three on him from his family and his lawyers and stuff. Gee whiz. Have you read any books about atheism lately? Maybe a lady named Greta? I don't know. Anything you'd like to talk about and introduce? Yeah, I've read a book. I read her articles and listened to a podcast. She's an author and a podcast person writer. She wrote an article back in 2011 that sparked a lot of discussion and a lot of approval from atheists because she really hit the coin on the head or the nail. She wrote an article called 50 Reasons Why Atheists Are Angry and Have Every Right to Be. I've talked to a lot of people that ask in atheist tables, you know, believers, nonbelievers, and people in between. And a lot of them seem to have the impression that atheists are angry. And sometimes we do get angry, especially when we're talking about the subject, religion, because of the problems that it's caused to the society. And that's all. I mean, she's written another book since the article. She wrote a book called 99 Reasons So She's Expanded on the Reasons Why Atheists Are Angry. Anyway, I believe you've done some research on her as well. Yeah, I have. So I got in a copy of the digital book that she has, which is available on Amazon. I would say to anyone who's interested in check out why are atheists so angry? There is a paperback version you can get, but there's also a free version you can get that's also offered through the same link. So if you're interested in it, you can check that out too. I imagine a lot of this is also posted on her blog. She's making an attempt to make the information available to everybody. But the idea is 99 reasons why it can be so irksome to have to deal with religious people. And some highlights from that list. One is that she says that the framework of religion is such that it seems like it does significantly more good than harm, or at least that's how it frames itself to be. So even when atheists say, well, it's doing XYZ, believers can say, but look at all the good it's doing. I mean, just look at the fact that it helps people know how to treat other people. It gives people morals. It teaches them to be nice. It shows them even if they can't think about no morality or ethics, there's a God that's watching them. That makes them behave good. And therefore it's overall better than to take that all away and suddenly have complete anarchy. And the analogy that she brings up is the Santa delusion, which I think was really, really good in the sense that, okay, so you have this idea of Santa Claus, right? Are you guys familiar with Santa in UK and Canada? Or is it like, how do you say Santa Claus with a Canadian accent? That's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to think about it. Oh, Santa Claus. St. Nicholas, right? So he watches you when you're sleeping. He knows if you've been bad or good. He gives you coal if you've been bad. He gives you presents if you've been good. So there's a whole carrot and a stick situation. And people can use that as a way to try to control their behavior. But I find that to be such a lacking ethic, because it's not really controlling the intention of a move aside from just trying to reward good behavior and punished bad behavior. It's so superficial. Dred, you like philosophy. What do you think of the idea of like, hey, listen, if you're good, I'll give you candy. If you're bad, I'll give you coal. That's all the morality you need. Have fun. Go outside and have a good day. Yeah, yeah, let's do it. That's not morality, though. It's obedience. It's authoritarianism. You know, certainly Kant and Hume both argue from different sides that morality needs to be authentic. You know, it has to guide your behavior authentically and not just arbitrarily, which is what the kind of morality is offered from the Bible. I mean, we've said this a number of times that there's nowhere in the commandments that says, you know, do not have sex with children or do not take your, you know, like, yeah. And, you know, so, and of course, there's so many examples in the Bible, you know, like do not hold slaves. Well, was it moral then to hold slaves because God said, well, this is how you treat them. Yeah. My all means, you know, just as long as they're not your fellow Hebrews, yeah, go ahead and take your pick from that. Any other people who know about, you know, Larry, what do you think? Well, you were saying earlier that the Bible teaches us how to treat people. Well, that sounds good. But does it teach us how to, how does it teach us how to treat well, homosexuality or homosexuals or in some cases, even Jews. The Bible says that the death of Jesus was on our head, meaning the Jews had and they've been persecuted for that particular line for, you know, for thousands of years. How do you treat a woman who's not a virgin on their wedding night? You know, it goes on and on and on. It's all obedience. Do this. Don't do that on pain of punishment. But I think obedience is not a morality. But you're overlooking something. It makes people comfortable and it's also useful to control people. Isn't that? Well, sure, it's useful to control people. But is that a good thing? It's good to dictators. It's good to cult leaders. It's not good to people per se. John, it makes people comfortable to believe in God. Isn't that in its own right more good than any harm that can come about from it? So does a teddy bear. I've got nothing against that, you know, people want a bit of comfort. Get yourself a dummy. Or you don't call them. What do you call them? A comfort? I don't know. A pillow? What? These things that babies have in their mouths. Pacifiers. Yes, we would call them a dummy. So if you think about the word, it keeps them pacified with religion. Yes. Well, if you think about the word dummy, it's a dummy for a nipple. I like it. I like it. I like it. That is a lot shorter than pacifier. Weird question. So weird question then. Do you still call people who are ignorant dummies? Yes. Yes. Okay. We've picked that up from you. That came across the Atlantic. Wow. Okay. Cool. That's great. All right. I'm sorry. Continue with your manifesto. Well, okay. What I wanted to do is start out with a disagreeing with the premise of the question because I've noticed in my interacting with a lot of lovely Americans like yourselves and Canadians guys that you have a lot of angry atheists, militant atheists, atheists which have a grievance and want to strike back because they've been hurt in the past. We don't have so many of them here because since very few of us were inducted into a religion and indoctrinated and didn't have to waste our lives going to church every Sunday and behaving as though there was a God up there and minding our various peace and queues. We didn't have any of that. So we don't have the grievance. So we're not angry. I'm quite a cuddly bunny. Well, there are still things that if you think about them can make you angry. Like, well, you don't have to deal with the religion that we do here ingrained in our society. I mean, 90% of our Congress and the President, the Vice President and all the leaders of each state are professed Christians. And it's really hard to even get elected unless you are a professing Christian. And they tend to pass laws that support Christianity over secular values. And that alone is one main reason to get angry. And they exist in a level where they're not affected by it. Dredd, what do you think? I was going to say one thing I hear in that shouldn't be confused is we're not angry or atheists aren't angry at God. When I first had that conversation with a fellow Mason to say that I could no longer be a Mason because I couldn't support the belief in that particular deity, he says, oh, well, you're one of those people that are angry at God. It's like, well, no, that's, that's, you're missing the point. And atheists doesn't, it's not about anger at something that doesn't exist. You know, it's, it's just a lack of evidence for supporting a justified true belief in that kind of thing, right? Right. It's one thing to be angry. But, you know, to be specific that we're not angry at God. I always like to ask them when they pose that question to me, why are you angry at Santa Claus? And the first thing out of their mouth is, you know, I'm not angry at Santa Claus. He doesn't, he's not real. Right. And then I just look at him. You know, how can you be mad at something that is real? I want to make a point to that while we're talking about like who you're angry at. When I say, when I came into atheism, I came into it with a lot of anger, but not just for myself, but for myself as a believer. And the anger that I have towards or the feelings that I have towards religion are really more of like what it does to other believers from the position of I used to be a believer and you're still doing the things that I found to be vile and toxic against me to other people. And so I'm angry not for the sake of other believers, but just for the sake of compassion that I have for people in my in my culture, people in my, you know, you know, social biosphere, like there's there's people who I can see actively suffering, or at least being treated against their best interests by a dogma that's controlling how they think, how they appreciate other people in their lives, families being torn apart, groups being marginalized, science being inhibited for the sake of what, a couple of stories in a book, like this is such a terrible situation. Like we just went through this whole vaccination crisis. And a lot of the inhibition that came from it was fears that were stoked by religious people, churches that we've had in this state who say, you don't need to take a vaccine. You can't trust it. Instead, here's a here's a cup of water that has a red string dipped in it. You just drink from this water and you're good to go or you tie this around or don't trust you what your doctors say, trust what I say, or we can pray this, you know, virus away, stop, don't never come to church, keep coming to church and, and continue to keep spreading it around. We've had active sources where we can see it harm everybody in our community. And I'd like to just move us away from that sort of mindset. And when I try to figure out where's the foundational person to argue against, it's not any particular pastor. It's not me or it's not any particular believer. It's the religion. It's the framework of this, you know, institution that tries to misinform people for its way to get money. And I just find that to be such a vile thing. Yeah. Well, again, this, what you've done there is you've talked about culture and dogma. And it's so very different from where I am. Because over here, if you're a politician, you want to keep your faith secret, because it's nobody will vote for you if you come out strongly as one faith or another. And we have a mixture of faith believers in our parliament. We have a sync, we have a Muslim, you know, we have Christians, but they, it's low key because it's not an it's not a vote winner. I'm afraid in this country. Well, I'm not afraid. I'm pleased. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The less they still have 26 bishops in there, right? Well, yeah. Now, we're working on that because that is an anachronism. And I could tell you more about the campaigns that we're doing to get rid of that horrible leftover from King Henry VIII. But you mentioned red string. I don't know where that came to be a thing. But I do know that a pastor in South London was sentenced to two years in prison for selling red oil with a bit of string in it as a covid cure and charging 91 pounds, I think, for it and telling his congregation that they could die if they didn't buy it. We've had we've had people in the state so sawdust. We've had people obviously pray to try to get it away. We've had, oh my gosh, any number of crackpot theories to try to get rid of covid. We've had the president of the United States say you should drink the looted bleach. We've had so many bet we've had that one random there was a run on cough syrup that we've had just because people thought that you could do something in cough syrup to make it like go away. We've had that weird new theoretical medicine that didn't pass the FDA or FDA that the president said he took and then turned out he was being slightly sponsored by them. Vaccinations are good and they're useful and they're just very straightforward when you understand how they work. They take a marginal a marginal level of scientific understanding to say you expose yourself to a small amount that can't that can't make you sick but can at least teach your body what that virus looks like. Then you'll know how to treat it in the future. It's it's that straightforward and simple but we don't live in a universe where or we don't live in a society in America where we we support that kind of education uniformly across the states and I feel like it's the conservativeness that we have in this country that's keeping that away from against that. But I want to continue with this in a minute so let's have a look there we go. Okay no I'm we're talking about reasons to be angry. Religion is used to divide people. I mean right now America is divided worse than I've ever seen it and I'm 70 years old and why? Because the the right have gotten in bed with fundamental religion, the evangelical right and they are pushing all kinds of agendas including abortion, hate for gays, etc etc and even George H. W. Bush said of atheists he says I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens. I mean that's that kind of thing that religion does that makes us angry that is one of the 99 things. Before we do before we do go out to break I do want to say like I I've not been along as live as Larry but I can throw this out and say I don't think things are getting more separated. If anything the tools to keep us together are more available to us now more than ever have been before and our access to information and media and culture outside of this information and disinformation along with that but also knowledge and and an awareness or instruction set to how to get better information with even shows like this are available to us more so now than they ever had been before and I feel like today more than any other day I feel more capable of being an outspoken atheist than I had any time my past. I think we're doing we're doing that because we're doing this work now and I'm saying as long as we can continue that we're going towards a good trajectory and while things aren't good now we are still a lot of work to be done we we are pioneers in the idea of free thought and I want us to continue down that path. We're heading towards the end of the half hour. Larry do you want to take us out? Sure you're listening to the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm DJ Douter 5 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 our 21st year and we have over a thousand members coming up on 1100 here shortly. We have weekly in-person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high-top tables or if it's pretty outside on the day. We also have Tuesday evening Zoom ASK meeting. If you'd like to join us there no matter where you live email us for details at AskAnAtheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or let's chat s-e at gmail.com. You can find us on facebook meetup.com or our website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. By the way if you don't live in Knoxville you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Right where do you want to pick up one but? Yo I want to talk a little bit before we move on to the next Christina or Greta Christina topic the argument of utility because I didn't really I don't know if I got a chance to highlight my problems with that so the idea behind the Santa delusion is that hey if it makes people comfortable and it has some uses it's therefore good you know and it's it's therefore useful and Dredd I'm sure you're familiar with Bentham as a as a moral philosopher he's very strong in the argumentation that the more useful something is the more moral it can be and and that's I know that's that's a truncated version of it but the argument of utility has never been a very logical one it yeah yeah yeah has a lot of limitations in fact could be really problematic but a lot of the early philosophers are very religious right and so they would often come they would often color their philosophies with what makes the best sense in a religious context and so Bentham had an argument for utility the Santa delusion is very much an argument of utilities listen I have this philosophy that helps make your kids behave better it makes it makes people comfortable it makes them happy everybody wants to be happy comfortable and have well behaving kids therefore we don't have to think about this anymore let's just do it I have a lot of problems with that I like the idea of morality as a system to assess the consequences of my actions and try to use that as a framework to make the best action and it's not so much a a measurement of okay I want to do one action is it going to get me the most cake or is it going to get me the most whips at the end it's like no I want an action that everybody can follow I want to use my morality as a framework to come up with rules that society can follow that will be in their best interest and increase the maximum well-being of a particular population or at least for what we're doing right now and and and the better I can codify those rules and the better I can understand the exceptions the more I can come up with a valid and ethical punitive measures in the event that things get broken that we can all come up with like a some sort of social contract and agree upon and we have essentially this living document the system that we can constantly keep improving I want it to be like a science where we don't have like these definitive you know black and white statements that never change but rather a system that we can keep cross-checking with each other and with the Santa delusion you never have that you never have any way to fact check or ask Santa anything or come up with different sort of rewards or punishments that have been cold and I guess Xboxes or whatever whatever Santa makes you it's it's very much a one-sided system that's given to you by an authoritarian to to elicit some sort of behavior from you and and it's only for the use of trying to make use be a bit more obedient but not really a more moral person where you think critically about the actions that you perform a society and when you're introduced to a novel new situation or problem the gods the Santa and the God stories don't offer you anything useful whereas a more morality system that you could work with can and that's why I like the general moralities that we work with or the more modern ones that we have now because they've been worked on so much Larry what do you think well I'm sure I agree one thing you should ask yourself an authoritarian figure it tells you that you need to do something is how will that thing benefit the authoritarian figure no because it usually does and you question that it's true it's true and the weird sad thing is the more the modern moralities that we have also benefit authoritarian figures too because it benefits everybody but the the Santa delusions and the God delusions that we have right now is so lopsided in who they benefit the followers get to feel comfortable whereas the the the leaders get to feel comfortable and get paychecks and get you know control and oftentimes abuse it but with no punitive measure or or fact checking or systems of correction on their part they exist in their own stratosphere of of existence where they can't be questioned or or treated or lose their job and and that is just prone to corruption we just know the human system too well um okay guys if you're oh go ahead John well you said a lot of stuff there sorry I want to respond to that because you used an expression the idea of morality like the idea of morality and then later on you said we can come up with rules so what you have illustrated to my way of thinking is that this is all thought morality is thought it's in the conceptual realm it's inside heads and inside heads of course we can there's no limit we can have any sort of thoughts we like we can even have absoluteness but and then you went on to say about um it's difficult to check these things and of course the only way we can check concepts is by investigating for congruence with observations in the natural realm this is how science works tie you know all about that and of course if you do that you find that there is no absoluteness it's not always bad bad in quotes yeah that's a value judgment which a person has to come to it's not always bad to kill there's such a thing as mercy killing and there's such a there's such a thing as killing somebody who would be exterminating somebody more vulnerable in which case the you could you could argue the on balance is better to kill the killer so what what i'm coming around to here is that morality is a system of ideas yes it doesn't really have any match with with reality so morality equation mark crossed out reality as in reality what we have is acceptable social behavior and we've evolved pretty much a system to do that in fact if you look further back in our ancestry you'll find that some you can even go back to insects and find that they have some relationship with each other they can teach each other where to go for the for the best honey and so on and so forth so what i'm saying is that we have in our subconscious a system of rules i won't not going to call them morality they're generalized ideas but then in our conscious mind we can impose tweaks we can say i'm going to follow my subconscious or not i'm going to review every incident as an individual case by case study that was no and we model reality all the time and what the beauty of morality is is we can model not just actions but behavior or the intentions of our behavior when and and model out potential consequences that aren't just based on physics but how other people react to that in a in a society where people's actions influence and have consequences on each other we can think about how that would impact each other and try to come up with the best system that makes everybody you know uh exists and hopefully a better state of well-being that is a valuable tool and you can't just make a codified list of rules to be like just don't steal just don't think about your neighbor's wife and don't don't don't love anyone's we've evolved we've evolved that tool we've evolved the we wouldn't be able to succeed as much as we have as a species if we hadn't learned to cooperate which requires us to have to put ourselves in another person's shoes right because otherwise if we treat them badly we're going to lose their cooperation and that could spell the end of the human race. Larry what do you think? Well yeah I was going to just say that one of the things we're kind of talking around but not talking about is that we need to base the morality or the rules on empathy and compassion not on not on authoritarianism also we need to keep in mind equality the founding fathers were very big on equality even though they overlooked um you know a large portion of the uh the population when they did we need to do better than that yeah uh so authoritarian is not a good basis for uh empathy I mean or morality empathy compassion equality but here's the thing it's really complicated to do that because there's a lot of different kinds of people so wouldn't it be better if we could just put people into groups where it's easier to just say well those are the those and we are the we're the us's they aren't really people and short answer no that's what religions do but we're the chosen people and now we only have to worry about people in this room according to the book we wrote and everybody else is different if we don't have to devil's advocate devil's advocate so what Larry was doing when he was saying that authority is bad is he's pointing to religions because religions are all up to their necks in authoritarianism right we don't want that sort of stuff we want democracy right and I want to tell you about a show I watched this morning on our local TV it's called Sylleh pilgrimage and it was a collection of famous UK stars that have been on our on our small screens you know and they were sent to walk hundreds of miles to some pilgrimage site and they dissembled a young influencer a woman who has a channel on YouTube and and they had a Sikh who used to be a cricketer they had a ex-Roman Catholic they had you know a selection of different faith-based people including some who profess to have no faith and they sent them on this walk and they were all conversing about what their upbringing had meant for them and the the influencer the youngest lady there said when I tell people that I'm a Christian they laugh at me that's the situation in the UK if you admit that you are a believer you're ridiculed good well you want you want some of that thank you you you want some tongue-in-cheek with that you want that to be in the same scope as someone who says well I read horoscopes you want it to be like ah that's that's that's a little silly but you don't want it to be like oh I'm better than you because you have this this system of operation and I also don't want that system of operation dictate how my life is run but like at least in America's concern you can have you are free to have a religion but you should also be free of that religion without any sort of degree of prejudice and if we can just get to there it's nuanced but if we can get to there I'd be so happy because again we have a president right now Joe Biden Catholic Stunch Catholic absolutely does believe in God goes to church before he even gets in enrolled in his does a swearing on the bible and becomes a president but is willing to go against his religion in terms of policy for the better interest of the people that he is governing and I feel like that's what we want from our leaders like hey if you got a religion that's fine but you're the president so be the president and then on your own free time pray to whoever you want to believe in I I'd love to have that we had the flip on the last president we had a president who didn't know how to hold a bible the right side way and and was just terrible from front to back I would rather have a president that's religious and can separate his religion from his policy than one who who has no scruples whatsoever like I there's there's clearly an in-between there that we can get okay good good good yeah we can learn a lot of things from you guaranteed dread pirate got a question from you it's coming directly from the book I would like to get your feedback on the nuanced nature of why atheists might be angry and I'm gonna ask this to a pacifarian so Greta christensen writes in her book you might have noticed based on when you read this book that much of what makes atheists angry isn't the bad things religious believe or that not is isn't the bad thing that religions do to believers as atheists a huge amount of our anger is about the bad things believers do to other believers that's the gist of this book atheist anger doesn't prove that we're selfish or joyless or miserable it shows that we have compassion and a sense of justice for our fellow people we're angry because we see terrible harm all around us and we feel desperately motivated to stop it dread what do you think about that well you know I said this before how interesting I find it that you know Christians Jews Muslims Buddhists they will you know gather together and fight against atheists as though you know like you were saying about elected officials in America you know as long as they're religious you know they stick together until until all the atheists are gone and then and then they squabble amongst themselves so it's very much you know the in-group mindset you know it's an in-group as long as you're religious in some way until you end up having to you know it's like musical chairs right right you know and everyone wants the atheists to be the first one off off a chair you know it kind of reminds me so I think I can give credit to this to Europe but there was a period of time where people did not believe in germs that was a conflict called germ theory and so they realized like hey if we wash our hands before we deliver babies the chances of the babies living is substantially higher than us just being macho men and just walking into the lady and being like I'll take that baby out of you it's like do you want to wash your hands first like no I know I don't believe in germs you can't trust these like a cigarette yeah let me a cigarette blowing in the baby's face she's totally fine the so there's the idea of like there was once a group there was one time where no one believed that germs existed or a problem but then there was a group that was like I am anti germ and I'm going to wash my hands and that's a change or at least a group that might have been different from the prevailing misconception at the time and it took a lot of effort it wasn't overnight to get people to adopt the practice to wash their hands to see the benefit of it to understand the science behind it to appreciate that as a culture and to build infrastructure to allow people to wash their hands more regularly right now we're very much in that same analogous scope where there is a group of people who at least in America are not popular just due to the fact that they agree not to wash their brains with dogma or doctrine or something like that I know I kind of reverse the analogy but like there's a there's a god contaminated society and there are people who have washed their brains from it and they're taught and they're looking at all the other people and saying listen you don't have to do these things and in fact it's kind of harmful if you maintain this current practice that you're doing it's good for you to wash out your your philosophies and ideas and see which ones are the best afterwards because there's a lot of grime and and and dirt with the current practice that you're following and there are people like I don't believe in critical thinking I don't believe in modern medicine I don't believe in evolution I don't believe in science I don't believe in people who education for for for for many people because that's just going to affect me in some way and my only response to that is it's only going to make your life better guaranteed and not only will it make it better but it'll make your the life of your kids and our culture and everything else substantially better in your interest whereas the current life practice that we have where you maintain this grime and grit puts you at a lower standard of life that you could be able to get out of if you're only willing to ask yourself some questions and shed some of these updated ideas and misconceptions that you have so what I see what I what I hear from Greta is this argument that I'm not angry what religion did to me in fact I'm happy that I went through the experience that I did and got out of it as a better critical thinking person I I I envy it more so than even people who've never had the chance to be indoctrinated and get out of it so John I'm happy you've never been indoctrinated but I am also happy that I've gone through that practice because I'm substantially more well guarded against stuff like that moving forward in the future but I'm also angry that we live in a world where we allow believers to still do that to other believers and I am motivated to try to stop that for their sake because I'm not fundamentally a different person than I was when I was a believer myself but I'm a much better person as a result of being able to now think critically for myself and I just want other people to have that opportunity for them to take that point and the only difference between us is that I don't have the grievance because I was never indoctrinated but I'm still keen to stop people from influencing from forcing their belief system to others because I see the harm that it does and I worry I worry and I wouldn't say everyone should go through an indoctrination phase but I've lived in Sweden for a bit so like there's America which is very you know you know how America is and then there's Britain who is in the process of like egalitarianism but also it's still it's still nested in there somewhere you still got the the the priests in in the parliament but then you have Sweden which is like that is such a non conceptual thing here and the churches we have are like just where we play volleyball like we don't take any of this seriously but you get people who never get the chance to think critically and and or at least have their suspicion radar you know well calibrated for when the Christians start moving in because there are a lot of people who are targeting Norway and Europe for the next wave of religion and and there's already books and and people doing missions there and Mormons learning Swedish because it's a very captivating demographic to get and there's a lot of money in those areas and they're ripe for plucking until those people are willing to question just as aggressively as a former religious person would be or or or someone who is you know in England right now too so I just say it's there's no excuse not to know how to think critically and it's not like something that you just get intuitively it's something you need to practice you got to work on it and it's a skill that you have to develop and it needs to be trained and you have to maintain it and it's as a result I want everybody not just you know people who are religious to learn how to think critically I want even people who've never been exposed to religion to go through the same practices as well that's how we get everybody out of it at once yeah a big part of this thing too is is that we have to guard each other I mean the idea you know if you check out the Wikipedia entry for fallacies you'll find you know about 200 of them and and that's what we need to guard each other against is you know as a critical thinker it's not just enough to know what those 200 are and try to figure out which ones you're employing at any given time right it's we have to watch each other's backs with respect to what other people say to us about different things and say are you sure that isn't some kind of a cognitive bias that you're trying to sneak in there yeah not intentionally but sometimes these things slip past us we're not perfect and and as you indicate reason doesn't come natural to humans it's a it's a muscle like intellectual muscle we have to continually practice and work on it but like I say you know it's it's something we have to you know be mindful to keep an eye open on our fellow critical thinking beings dread you make a great point because you could also you can think of like ideas and theories and hypotheses are sort of like a pot of cake batter right and logical fallacies are flies right and you don't want them in your cake batter and if you see one like sitting on the side of the bowl but not in the batter you're like you want to tell the guy the baker your friend hey there's a there's a fly on your bowl and you don't want you don't want the reaction to be like oh it's it's fine it's just and it's it's okay like it's not that big of a deal it's like yes it is or I'm not going to take your cake I'm not saying it ruins the entire cake it probably adds some good protein but like you can make that same cake without that fly there and I'm only letting you know that for your own best interest and so like the greatest thing that another critical thinker can do for another critical thinker is to think critically about the things that they're they're saying and be critical that's always in the interest of everybody right we don't want to eat cakes with flies John Richards what do you think what do you do have Garibaldi biscuits in the States I don't know uh Larry I don't know you might be talking about cookies are you talking about cookies I don't know I'm talking about biscuits Garibaldi biscuits he was an Italian chef I think but we used to call them fly biscuits because they're two slices of biscuit with a load of currents in between and it that's great guys I think we're near the end of the show there was a lot more that we'd want to cover but maybe we can move it to another show we still have a few minutes though okay so Dredd where can we find your stuff at I'm at mine pirate on YouTube and when I'm on I livestream this at 7 a.m. Pacific daylight time now nice and then when I'm on for global atheist news views of the news that's at 11 is it 11 or 12 now well what we've done Dredd is we've kept it at your time and altered the English time to suit and now how kind is that so what time is it what time is it English time or Greenwich standard time well tonight it's 6 p.m. 6 p.m. so that makes that's 11 a.m. for me your where you are okay okay hopefully I'll be there I've got some training to do at 9 a.m. so I'm hoping it's less than two hours and my where I train is just a couple minutes away so yeah check me out on mine pirates and I do I've now been doing weekly benedictions on there as well so I'm gonna sit here and go there yeah I wonder if god wanted everyone to be able to pray to him at the same time why don't you just make the earth flat you know and just like just flat and like it's on one side and put it on a turtle it'll be good well uh John Richards where can we find your stuff at free thought channel that's where everything is put and last night I wanted to tell you about a guest on free thought hour last night it was a South African guy called W Vendon even and he was fantastic he he's um oh what he isn't into it's all about a neuro uh engineering neural engineering media mechatronics uh free thought uh free will honestly if you can get to watch that now you won't be sorry go up very cool very cool you can find my stuff on youtube let's chat um your and uh I'll fill it up to Larry to close out the show thank you guys so much okay sure um my content can be found at digitalfreethought.com be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show archives atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism I have a book atheism what's it all about on amazon my youtube channel is at touter five if you're having trouble really leaving religious beliefs behind you can get help from recovering from religion.org check that out and by the way if you're a member of clergy but haven't come to see that the claims of religion are not justified but you're stuck in the pulpit there's help for you at theclergyproject.org actually just dropped the the it's clergyproject.org remember everybody is going to somebody else's hell the time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real until then don't sweat it enjoy your life and we'll see you next wednesday night at seven o'clock on w o zio radio here in Knoxville say bye everybody bye everybody