 103.9 FM, WZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WZO Radio. 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, October 25th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Dowder 5. And I guess today are the good pirate ache. Well, he's not with us today. We've got Doc Fire, we've got Red Leader, and our usual co-host, Wombat. Hey! What's up, everybody? What's up, everybody? Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we also talk about religion, religious faith, God's holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville, well, you're just not. There are several atheists, free thinking, and rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville. And we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. Also, did you know that there is a streaming atheist called in video slash TV show broadcasting here in Knoxville and has been for over 10 years? Did you know that Wombat? Yeah. And my favorite part is when the guy sitting at the bar and Chris Hanson's like, and I'm Chris Hanson, and this is an investigation on Dateline NBC where we're doing a show on adults who try to have solicit conversations with the underage children and the cameras come out and the guy's like, no, I was just hanging out. And then he goes out and gets arrested by the cops. Have you ever thought about buying a TV guide? It's so good. That's not our show. But our show used to be on TV. It's not anymore. It's now streaming on YouTube. And we'll tell you more about how you can watch it after the mid-show break as well. If you'd like to interact with us during the show, go to Facebook and search for Digital Freethought Radio, our page, and use the messaging function to send us any questions or comments. Okay, I think Dr. Five is bringing the topic today. You want to take us into the topic? Yeah, sure. So the topic is screw-pulosity, which is a medical term for kind of OCD. OCDs are oftentimes referred to as religious OCD. So it's people who really have anxiety about maybe bad thoughts or just really small things that may offend God because they're afraid of being separated from God or going to hell or not being approved by their congregation or church. And I, in fact, in my religious days, were being one of those people that's really worried about so many things, you know, what I was thinking about at any point in time. And it could really be distracting and causes a lot of mental anxiety. So it's a serious issue, but there is treatment. That's good. I want to go over all these different facets in the show. But how about we do a quick introduction of everybody first for any first-time washers and stuff like that? Daughter 5, how you been doing? Who are you? What's going on with you? What are you all about? Doing well. It's been kind of a rainy, nice couple of days. It's been kind of a depressing couple of days. Playing computer games and just taking care of business. Staying on Facebook more than anything else. Here's the main question. Did you get a chance to vote? I did vote. I voted within a few days of the very first opening. Very well done. So thanks. Yes, definitely. Dale, how you been? Have you had a chance to vote? Yes, I have. Fantastic. Doing a great job. Doubt or fire? Oh, man. It's confusing. Scott, Scott, Scott. How you been? I would like to just check up on you and see how you're doing. Oh, man. You had a chance to vote. I'm doing well, man. I haven't. No, I went out and voted yet, but I didn't. Oh, get out there. Yeah, I'm going to do it, man. Do you know how long the line was for early voting for me? It was an hour and a half long just to vote. Oh, my goodness. If you don't believe me. I went to the city county building around 515, like right after work. I kind of expected people to be hanging around after work and using, but there were like five people there. There was no line at all. I don't know what it is. Well, not so I think runs itself a lot better than the town that I'm in right now. But also you don't know what you're going to get until you have it. So if you have the chance, do it early. And that way you're not going to be discounted when the ballots or the polling place. I went the first day and I went downtown West and they had a line that was like through, I mean the entire building and then onward. It was a good, I don't know, 50 people in line. So I just passed. It was the first day. So I passed and came back a few days later to the city county building. Okay. Okay. Don't sleep on it, Scott. Also, hey, how about we just do a quick invocation in the honor of Dread Pirate who couldn't make it for today's show. This is our weekly invocation real quick. Everyone ready to go? There once was a guy named Dread Pirate. Who's a really cool dude. I know, right? He couldn't make the show, but wouldn't you know, he'll be back and things will be all right. Rah, man. Nice. Okay. So we're talking about screw velocity today. And I just want to dig really into this. I really love this topic, Scott. And I felt like the same way too, but you might help me out. If we were to look up in a dictionary, what would screw velocity say? Like that seems like already a really interesting word. What's like a quick way to wrap our head around this title? Religious OCD. The quickest way to say it. Just obsessing over religious matters. And that's really what it is. In a nutshell, like I said, I suffered with it. A lot of people do. Especially the more serious you take the Bible and stuff, which, you know, I think in a weird way, street epistemology ties into that. Really does. Well, if you know the whole thing about what makes the religious OCD so bad is because they really believe they're really certain that, you know, God exists. You know, their religious teachings is real and they take this stuff really, really serious. So if you can lower people's certainty about those ideas, you know, that can be really healthy. You can get them to think about it and be aware of what they're feeling and then question it. And this kind of ties into the, and the reason I say that is because it ties into the treatment that the health professionals give you about it. Can I throw out two quick things? We had mentioned street epistemology or socratic examination, which is just a really good way to have people think critically about their beliefs. It is not a tool to lower people's confidence. In my opinion, it's just a conversational tool to help people think for themselves. And you may not have someone lower their confidence when you do a session with them about their God topic. They may actually end up with even stronger beliefs. Not to mind as long as you get them to think critically. Or they may convince you. And so it's worth looking up the nature of it because it's all about a genuine approach to try and understand how people come to their conclusions. But I do have this thing about religious OCD. It seems like there's an uncontrollable aspect to OCD, like I'm doing this as a non-willing participant, right? Like I'm being forced to do this. Is there a line between just being a fervent follower of a particular faith and like praying 16 times a day versus not being able to not pray, like being able not to do it controlably? Here's the question in a nutshell. Does scrupulosity envelop everything, whether it's voluntary or involuntary, or is it just the compulsion of doing things involuntary and voluntarily? I would say it's a little bit of both because obviously, you know, if you're obsessing over stuff and you're thinking about stuff, I mean, the feeling that you have is that these are thoughts that I'm generating and I'm worried about and I'm trying to take control of it and I'm trying to make it better. So in the mind of the person going through that, it's all voluntary. But the way that the mind works is that, you know, our fears and emotions really kind of, or our thoughts kind of emerge out of our emotions and things like that that are there first. And then our thoughts can trigger emotions. So it works two ways. It works both ways. So that's where the treatment comes in, is where you're able to actually understand that process. It sounds like an addiction and that some people can't see through the addiction. Correct. And so like they need treatment to get through it. That's right. Well, they can't see the way out of it. It's circular. You know, every time they think that they may see, you know, light at the end of the tunnel, these other things kick in and keep them in the, keep them in the thought pattern as it were. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And it can be scary to look outside of religion. Like there's not a lot of how to put it, safety nets outside of a God belief. And it's a lot more comfortable. Especially if you come to depend on that kind of thinking all of your life, you can't even conceive that there's an outside, outside of it. Right. Anything exists out there. And I believe a lot of times that's why believers think or at least say that atheism is a religion. They can't conceive of a life without some kind of religion in it. Yeah. It's like you have these sunglasses on. Everything's going to look slightly tinted. Even if you're looking at other things. The God glasses. Yeah. So if you're a kid, to put this in context, if you're a kid and you have the potential to be a person who can understand, hey, maybe I don't need an afterlife concept to be good to people or a God belief to be kind and contribute time to charity and not be concerned with all that happened to me after I died because I'll be dead. Who cares at that point? I can just work on making sure I have a positive legacy and leave behind good things. If you never have the opportunity to build that and deal with death as an actual thing that will happen to you in your life, 100% guaranteed. You become an adult and you realize, oh my gosh, I don't really have good reason to believe in this God belief anymore. And I have no emotional capability of dealing with the concept of death. I'm too scared to drop this religion, but I don't believe it either. And now I'm just in this really uncomfortable equilibrium of discomfort where it's like I'm not compelled to believe this, but I have to be. I have to be. I have to be. I have to be. I have to be. I have to be. I have to be. I have to be. I have to repeat it even if I don't have control over my normal thoughts. I have to compel myself to believe this even though I don't. And we realize like this is a trap that a lot of people have that OCD component of like having to constantly refresh your faith or reaffirm something that you know is not true, but you have to believe it. You have to believe it is really disheartening and real thing that a lot of people go through. I know I went through it when I was transitioning out of my faith. So that fire. Did you have a similar experience? Yeah. And and I would add to that and say that, um, you know, just from my personal experience going, you You know, with Joe's witnesses, you go to like maybe five meetings a week. So you're constantly being inculcated with the message, you know, and always being told, you know, you have to be out there witnessing. You have to be a good example to the world. You have to be behaving a certain way, you know, you can't, you know, how to get rid of bad thoughts. There's all kinds of Bible studies on that. You know, watch Tower Studies on Saturday about those type of issues. So it's all about monitoring yourself and it's kind of like the, the micromanage manager God is Jehovah and he's really watching you at all times. And so it's all about pleasing Jehovah, pleasing God, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What is thought control? Yeah. It's thought control. And if you get that stuff enough every day all the time and it's always on your mind and that's all you live, breathe, and understand is this kind of stuff, then that OCD is just going to get worse and worse. It's not going to help. You know, you're going to constantly be on guard about what you're thinking, what music might that be. Oh yeah, there's a paranoia as part of that, where you've got an all-powerful judgmental God of right and wrong watching your every thought. Yeah. How is that not, can that not lead to a paranoia on some level? Right. It's like Santa, but way more invasive, right? Right. Like Santa, but way more invasive. Well, what's the question that I have and I think that the literature will bear this out is that it's not really a religious problem is what they tell you that they're like saying that this isn't caused by religion. This is caused by you. You're a person asking that. Yeah. Religious OCD would be some other form of OCD suffering from it's just that this, but I guess my point before was that it doesn't help when you're part of some kind of culture type of religion that's constantly bombarding you. And like I said, I would go to the elders for help about this. And then they would be like, well, that's not really a problem. That sounds like you're just doing the right thing here. You're just trying to apply what you're learning. Sorry, not to interrupt this may, this may not even need the definition, but elders and Jehovah Witness concepts are sort of like if you're a Christian church leadership, but in Jehovah Witness, they don't call their church, church, it's called the kingdom. So they have different terminology. So, right. Elders are the leadership positions of their establishment. The shepherd. What a terrible name that is. Oh, man, you completely wiped out the thing I was going to say. I would throw this. Yeah, you're enabling bad human behavior. There's good human behavior. There's bad human behavior, right? And we naturally want to do everything in our mutual interests. But if I have a compulsion, if I have a tendency to be obsessive, compulsive about things in order to drive comfort from this repetition and action, being in a church mindset or a cult mindset, whatever have you, can very, very, very in a real way exacerbate my very poor tendencies or my worst behaviors to the point where I can't control them anymore. Because my support group is the one that's reinforcing these really bad behaviors in me. And it's such a lack. It's such a, man, it's a failure of true support when your support group is the one that's causing an exacerbation of your problems. And I do think there is. I think what you said before, like, hey, it's not a religious problem. It's a human problem. It's like, true, but I would have been able to treat this problem if it had not been for the religion, if it had not been for this group that you had set up. Exactly. It's, it's weird. It's, you know, you try to read the literature, but you also, for someone who's been in it, you're kind of like, I see what you're saying, but you kind of don't understand how it really goes. Yeah. Not only that, but there's a dress code. There's a dress code in when you're, when you're in the truth, there's a dress code, a certain music you can't listen to, holidays you can't do, which affects, you know, if people who are outside of the truth or outside of Jehovah Witness can't call you up for your birthday because they have to be awkward about it because they don't want to offend you, which only reinforces the fact that no one's calling you on your birthday, which only makes you more reliant on your support group, which is reinforcing your OCD capabilities. It's one big vicious circle. And it's such a terrible system. And you can't, even if you can see it, you choose to placate yourself with it if you're part of the system because you don't have any faculties to deal with being out of it because you've never been ingrained with them. You never had a chance to think for yourself. It's kind of a scary ordeal. And you got to watch out because, you know, and I did speak to some elders or some other, maybe they weren't even elders when I spoke to, they were actually trying to be helpful. And they're like, yeah, go through that too, man. And, um, but you know, what helps me is understand that, you know, we're covered under Jesus. You know, he, the blood of Jesus, he died for us. So it's not about works. It's about faith. So don't worry about if you're doing this or thinking that, remember, we're all imperfect. We all have fall short, but just don't take, just don't take it for granted. And so then they just plant in another seed. Well, by letting it go, am I just taking advantage of God's grace? Or do I really need to be more serious about this and not trying to take advantage of his grace? Because, you know, there's, you know, the Bible is like a multiple choice of. Oh yeah, definitely. It's a Rorschach test, to an extent. I would say outside of religion, I've wanted to become like a better artist. And I did some animation in college and now I just hand-freeing doodling stuff. It's really fun. But when I see really, really good work by professionals, I always ask myself, how can I make my lines look like this? How can I get better at coloring like this? And I look up on the internet and the one thing I hear over and over again is just practice more. You hear it so many times that you're like, I don't want it. I don't want that excuse. I want something better. Like sometimes it's possible to hear an excuse so many times that unless there's some elaboration or an explanation behind it, it doesn't mean anything. And I feel like the whole Jesus' blood, he died for you, is sort of like the answer that's given, which works in the religious context. It's like, hey, that helps you. You're absolved. But there's no explanation behind it. There's no meaningful set of morals or steps or ethics or codes or means to improve specific natures of what I need to work on specifically. No critical feedback, no conversation. It's just Jesus died for you. He had the blood. Keep doing what you've got to do. And that could be really unfulfilling for a lot of people. Larry, have you ever gone, have you ever tried to get better at something and gotten really terrible advice at how to do it? And I'm like, what's the kind of advice that you really appreciate the most? Larry, I can't hear you if you're talking. Muted. Yeah, he's muted. There you go. The point that I was trying to make earlier was that you can practice mistakes and get mistakes perfected. You have to have a very good practice routine and you have to have one that's positive for the goals you're trying to reach. You can have, like you said, bad advice and then practice the bad advice and get better at it. So you have to be careful. I don't have any specific examples. That was beautiful. No, if you're lifting in the gym and someone just gives you terrible lifting advice and you keep doing that, you're going to still injure yourself. You need someone to critical feedback the advice you're getting. Yeah, I did hear one person say that there was a woman and she heard all her life, her mother kept saying, hold your shoulders up because she was slouching and somebody finally got around to telling her that it was back. Hold your shoulders back. In all her life, she'd been trying to hold them up for a good posture. It's bad advice, but it was from a good place. They were trying to help her. Yeah, so what I'd say is the Bible is very good at giving answers but not explanations. And the explanations it gives cannot be critically assessed. You just have to take them and that's not the best way to learn new things. You have to be able to poke at stuff and figure out what works and what doesn't work. And it might be different for you compared to someone else, but that's how science gets better at things. Like we make mistakes, we learn from them, and we try to improve the process. Del, I'm going to try to throw something out at you if you're available. Have you ever gotten really bad feedback towards improving at something? And what did you do about it? Fair enough? I don't know. Bad feedback? How does that relate? I had something else. Okay. I was going to ask Doubtfire, were you treated and if you said you were treated by whom? What professionals did you see for treatment? I've got more. Yes. So I just as an update, we'll get into, you can answer now, but we'll definitely get into this more when we come back from the second half of the show, which is only worth a couple of minutes. We'll go for it. Sure. I'll just say really quick. I didn't get, I didn't go to professional help at that time because it was kind of looked down upon in my congregation to go seek that secular help. And so it was only after I left that I did seek out help, but I mainly started by reading books on it and reading a little bit. You said you got treatment. Yeah. Well, yeah. I went to a therapist at one point in time and they kind of referred me to books and stuff like that to read along with practices that they gave me and I applied those and just reading that material all the time and going over the steps to get better whenever I had these type of issues. That's what I did. So no medications to control the OCD or anything like that. Actual professional, like a psychologist or a psychiatrist. No psychiatrist. I didn't need it. It wasn't that. Well, what he's talking about, what you all are talking about in other psychological terms, I've never heard of this one, is that when you have something that is repeated over and over again, the people in Madison Avenue know this, that it slips into your brain easier and easier the more you see it. Now, example, you watch Alex Jones or Fox News, they get your endorphin, you're adrenaline and all up and you tend to want to get that charge again. And each time you watch it, you feel more and more familiar. Other ways that you can see this manifesting in religion would be I had a friend that worked in Saudi Arabia and he was a respiratory therapist. And whenever you give treatments and all every other sentence had to be praise Allah, because that's what they do. In their case, you would probably think that that is a virtual display where you want people to know that you've got the religion there for so they won't cut your head off or whatever they're doing. But OCD as far as religion goes, there's a good Saturday night, live skit on it where the woman is in the kitchen. She's preparing breakfast or something. And every minute or so, she prays to Jesus to watch out for her husband because he might be passing the stop sign now. Watch out for her daughter because she's going to be going in the door. We don't want her to trip on the steps. And then Jesus appears and says, you know, could you like slack off on it a little bit? But going to church four and five times a week is another way of reinforcing that from time to time. Absolutely. Let's go. Amen, brother. That's exactly what happened to me, I think, is because I was never suffered for anything like that till I started going to these things all the time and getting this information for years and years and years. And it got worse and worse and worse. And so, yeah, I agree with you 100%. Well, you also have Pat Robertson on his show. He was telling his viewers that the devil can read your mind. And he actually had some scientific evidence for that. He says that the mind or the brain works on electrochemical impulses and these impulses create a magnetic field and that magnetic field drifts out into the universe. That is absolutely true. The part that he interjected was that Satan can read these thoughts and can put things into your mind. And of course, if you're not trusting your own mind, I guess the elders in the church is who you are going to trust. Yeah, the scriptures like man should not trust his own steps, you know. Relying on your own understanding. There it is. I was trying to think about that. Sure, but what are you going to rely on? If you don't rely on your own understanding, you have to rely on somebody else's, which is better. Yeah, you should be OCD about that. That's the good thing about being a deist. We're supposed to get our lessons from nature. Yeah, it's thing. Perfect, perfect. There you go. Okay. So we are nearing the half of this episode. Larry, why don't you take us out? Sure. This is Digital Freethought Radio, our NWOZO radio, 103.9 LP FM. Right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Hello and welcome to the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. I'm Douter 5 and we're on WOZO Radio. That's WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today's October 25th, 2020. And let's talk about the atheists and freethought groups that you can join right here in Knoxville. First there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. Have over a thousand members now and you can find us online by searching for Knoxville Atheists. Or you can go to meetup.com and search for Knoxville Atheists there. It's that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. Start one. Start one. Another large freethinking group here in Knoxville, the rationalists of East Tennessee. Just go to rationalist.org and click on their upcoming events to find out what they're up to. Earlier in the show, we said we'd talk about the Atheist Calling TV show. Well, it's called the Freethinkers United. Wait, we have an Atheist Calling TV show? That's awesome. We do. We gotta tell people about it. It is brand new. Oh, I can't wait. I'm so excited. I'm there on the ground floor. It's called Freethinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. It's online. It's on YouTube streaming. And you can go to YouTube and search for those four words to find out more about it. Or you can search for three words to find out how we did on TV for 10 years. Those words are freethinkers. No, free thought forum in Knoxville. That's it. I get it right. Remember, you can find archives of the show on YouTube where a fan has been posting them. Also, if you're interested in getting involved with the TV or the radio show just come to an Ask Meetup or RET meeting or Facebook pages we have those two. Tell us if you're interested in joining us so you can be our next co-host or guest. Today on the show with us we have a regular very cool Doc Byer and Red Leader Hello, all. Where do you want to pick up their wombat? So we are back from our half break and today's challenge is Larry. You're up to bat. Guess what, Larry? Here is your letters. You got two gaps left and 30 seconds left. What's on the clock, Larry? What's on the clock? You got to figure this out. What is it? He says, we is the over. Oh, no. We're so close. So, no, someone else is going to get the weird. I got it. I got it. He's wearing the love card. Oh, no. Oh, he got it. He got it. Where is the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? The love. Where is the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? So we had a really nice comment from our last episode. By the way, our last episode was all about, can a contradictory God logically exist? It's sort of a mind-bending topic because we were thinking about like, so yeah, science can't prove that a God doesn't exist, but science is also really good at turning things are logical and things that aren't logical or contradictory often can't exist in a reality, right? So what kind of contradictions are there about God? And it was just a really interesting topic. I think we had a good conversation overall. Goddess Trading Room said, Hello, brothers and pasta. Where is the love? Love is in the air. Now let's think about what would be the thing only a creator God could show us. Like what's something that a creator God can only do? And he lists out some points that basically a God could create the universe as well as everything in the universe, which includes illusions and trickery. So basically a God could basically make the entire universe and delete it every second, but make it such that we wouldn't have any sort of recollection of the fact that the universe had been created or disappeared because it could be built with a parent age. And so we could be basically living through second through second with just non-continuous points in time. And I'm like, oh, that is a, that is a wild, wild, lovable theory. Larry, what do you think? Well, I was watching a video the other day on AI and living as if we're living in a simulation or something. And as a scientist, how you know that you, when you're in the lab and you create a simulation, you run it and then you stop at a certain point and you tweak it and you change some things and then you run it again. And a lot of times you'll pick it up where you left off. In other words, you may change your parameter and then tell it to continue. That could be happening to us, according to the people who put up the simulation theory, is that they could be tweaking it all the time. They could be putting in memories. They could be putting in past events or future events and letting the timeline flow. And we would never know it because it's part of the world, even though it's constantly changing. It would be part of the environment that we live in. And that can't be true because that's just crazy. Boy, that's why we know we do it. Yeah, exactly. It's moaning from Dale. I want to say this, though. The weird thing about a simulation theory, my classic response to that, counter apologetics wise, is that if we are agreeing that the world is fake and made up, then all the evidence that we're accumulating to prove that the world's fake and made up is likewise fake and made up. And why are we coming to any sort of conclusion with fake and made up proof? Like that should, in our own right, disavow any kind of substantial conclusions that we cannot live. Until we can get out of the system and come up with some objective truths, we're stuck with the reality that we have. And it seems to be the case, and while I said I can't prove that we're all in the same reality, I'm still stuck with the reality that it seems to be that I am interacting with you. And that I shouldn't be cognizant of that. Just like understanding, we have to trust our own senses because we have no other choice. I can't trust your senses because I don't experience your senses. Oh, we don't want you to. So we have to trust our own senses and our own understanding to make sense of the world. Unless the simulate tours wanted us to figure out it's a simulation. Maybe they didn't want to... Our senses would still leave us to it. They want, right, maybe they want to monitor how we actually figure it out. They're doing a bad job of doing it then. Terrible job. Billions of years later. And it's like... Still unfossible. I think we should give them some more clues. What do you think? What do you think? I'll also say this, all rationale from my point of view seems to stem from nature. We like to rely on supernatural things, but there's no proof of anything supernatural. I think even though someone claims that, hey, I believe in a supernatural God, that's just a guy with what seems to be or at least can be tested. I'm going to use this term. I'm going to use the term, why not? A delusion that seems to be based in a reality because people can't delude themselves. People have been making mistakes. And so even when someone says, hey, my rationale and my willing of trust comes from these pink fairies in my backyard, that could just be a guy hallucinating. And so whether you're a deist or an atheist or if you're someone that's just purely logical or someone who's making a claim that's just absolutely extraordinary, we're stuck with the reality that we have. And this reality that we have is not supernatural. Like we can measure it. We know what laws it's fixed to and it can't defy laws of logic. Like it's still subject to being non-contradictory and still having like basic foundations of logic. So everyone's coming from nature. And if that's the case, what's the best system that we have to understand nature? And it seems to be science. So let's work with the best system that we have to move forward with the best way to interact with people. It's that simple. George is back. He's recording. George is messed up. Can you hear me? I can hear you. I can hear you. How's the video? My video is messed up. Everything is messed up. So I think I will exit and try to come back in and make it work. Dada, thank you very much for that comment. We have one more comment that's from our street epistemology group at rslashstreetepistemology on reddit.com. This one's directed for Doubtfire. Can SEB be automated and is AI future applications for SEB? SEB being Socratic Examination or Street Epistemology? Ways to talk to people and conclusions. What do you think? I think it could. In theory, I don't see why not. If you think about, I think you even broke it down to three really brilliant questions to ask. Sure. Really simple. Yeah. My three questions for SEB are, what do you mean by that? Which is just like, could you please clarify this in your own words? And so that way we make sure that, even though we're using the same words, I understand what you mean behind them. Second is, how can we test that? Make it a group project and try to ask questions about how to test the claim that they made. You don't need to question the claim, you don't need to question them. Talk about that test. That's what you really want to know about. And the third question is, how reliable is that test? Because the reliability of that test should dictate how confident they are. As long as you focus on, what do you mean by that? How can we test that? How reliable is that test? You're already doing SEB and that's a great way to build a foundation of questions to talk to people about what they strongly believe to be true. Go for it down fire. Yeah, I could imagine a Siri type of application just responding to your, you know, just like that. Just saying, hey, you know, the same question that you laid out and then go from there. I don't see it that complicated. Didn't there used to be some series of, like virtual psychiatric sessions that would ask you questions and make you type in the answers? That seems to me like it would just be a continuation or something like that. Yeah, I'd actually like to see that, to be honest with you. I started this conversation, this one right now, really skeptical on whether or not a computer could do it. But now that we're talking about it like this, it does seem that could be really helpful for a lot of people who may not necessarily want the face-to-face or to expose what they really truly believe, but need like a more impersonal, you know, first step to start thinking about what they strongly believe to be true. I think that would be really good. Okay, good questions around everybody. That was Dottus Trading Room on YouTube and Aquarium on Reddit. Thank you very much. And if you have more questions, feel free to post them on our YouTube channel or on r slash street epistemology. We're going back to our main topics, group realosity and the treatment of such. Because we're talking about, like you'd be trapped in this loop where you feel like you have to believe something and you're compelled to do rights of that belief. And for whatever reason, you can't stop. Maybe it's because you're just trying to reconvince yourself that it's true. Maybe you can't get out of a social group. Maybe because you've never been trained to think outside this group. But how do you treat that compulsion to do those religious rights even when you're out of the religion? And Dottfire was talking about like, you had seen therapy or a therapist? So the advice that I was given in the practice sessions was to practice awareness and what they call metacognition. And metacognition is when you can try to step out of your thinking and observe your thinking from the outside. If that makes sense, it sounds crazy, but you can actually do this. You can actually think about your thinking. And when you think about your thinking, you can be like this this third person in the background that's like, now is that rational? Or what are we thinking about? And just focus on it. Just embrace it. It's almost like just like it took a lot of training to get you to be worried about all this religious stuff. You can also train your brain to get out of it too. Just by the same method, just by thinking about... Like if I'm looking at somebody and some girl or something and I have these evil, evil thoughts, right? Instead of just, you know, getting anxious about it and going in my room and crying or something, you can actually just say, yeah, I'm thinking about this and let me just think about that and just focus on it. Just get into it. Just think about it. Embrace it. And it might seem kind of creepy and it might seem kind of weird to a person that's suffering from OCD like, wait, I'm not supposed to do this. This is wrong. No. But just remember, you're not really acting on it. You're just observing what you're feeling. You're kind of letting it sink in, so to speak. You're kind of being aware. And then once that happens, it dissolves itself away. It goes away on its own if you just try that. Now, the funny thing is, this is almost like a meditation in a way. It's like you're focusing on the things that bother you and you're letting it dissolve away just by letting it take its course. It sounds like you're outlining, with my opinion, what the foundation of morality is, which is thought. I remember my pastor once when I was in Baptist, when I was a Baptist, and he told me two stories. One of a guy who had the opportunity to steal some guy's wallet, like he saw it on the ground and he was like, hey, this guy just dropped his wallet. I'm just going to, I'm going to, maybe I can take it right now. No, he might see me. He might call the cops. I wouldn't want someone to take my wallet. Oh, that'd be bad. I wouldn't want to live in a town where people just take each other's wallets. I'm not going to do that. Or the other guy who decided not to take the wallet because God doesn't like that. And in his view, the guy who didn't think about it that much and just said, God wouldn't like me to do this, was the correct guy. But me and the pew, I was like, wait a second, that other guy came up with some really good reasons for why he shouldn't be a bad person in public. And he was thinking about it and weighing the consequences of his actions. And yeah, he was getting in the knit and gritty of it, but he came out on the right side with some really good reasoning. And who was to say that the other guy might kill his neighbor because God ordered it to him in a prayer or something like that or says so in a book? Well, like my therapist told me one thing about that. And it says, you're really worried about authority. You're really worried about God as an authority disapproving of you. And so you're going to act right because of that. And think about this. Is that really what God wants? You know, like let me ask you, like she, you know, it's like, what does that mean? And she says, well, let's put it this way. Suppose you're in a bank and you're in a line and you have cameras and one guy sees another guy drop his wallet and he picks the wallet up because he knows the cameras watching him. He gives the wallet to the guy because he doesn't want to take it in front of a camera. Right. Well, let's suppose there's person B who's in the bank. There is no camera. He knows there's no camera. He sees the guy drop a wallet and he takes the wallet and gives it back to the guy because it's just the right thing to do. He doesn't want it to happen to them. Who is the more moral person in that story? I would say the person A. Person A. The person who did it because it was being watched. Person A was being watched. Person B was not being watched and he gave back the wallet. Even though he wasn't watched. He did a nice thing, but the person A was the only one who put thought into his actions. And so if person B is just following rules, he's not being moral. He's just following orders. Yeah, I'm explaining it a little wrong. So person A, the rule is, so the guy, person A, because I'm trying to get you to say person A is not the moral guy. Okay. I can come up with some good ones for that too. Larry wants to chip in a bit. Okay. Larry, what do you think? Well, I was just going to say that none of this addresses the problem of whether or not God is real or not. It's a pragmatic approach to morality and belief saying that you should believe in God because it's useful. It's a good tool for a society. It doesn't address whether or not there's actually God or if it's just a thought experiment that leads to better results. I just want to throw that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think the point that the therapist was trying to make was, and she probably explained it a lot better than I am right here, but basically she's saying if somebody is doing something only because they're being watched by an authority and they're doing good because they don't want to get killed or they don't want to pay the consequences for doing a bad thing, like that's good. That's fine. You're doing that, but you're always worried about because you're being watched. Sure. But there's another guy, person B, who has a sense of right and wrong internally and knows he's not being watched, right, except by himself and he's deciding to do something right just because for right's sake. In other words, Now we might get on a little tangent here because we're saying a lot of words that I love to get some ideas by. Got you. Like an internal sense of right and wrong or just knows it's the right thing to do or knows in his heart right or wrong. Like what does that mean? Yeah, like it's intention. So if people with OCD, like especially religious OCD, the reason they worry is because they worry about disapproval from someone else. They're not worried about their own disapproval. They're worried about does the people at my congregation approve of me? Does my God approve of me? Blah, blah, blah. But they never really worry about am I doing what I want to do? That's the whole point. They're not doing what they want to do. They're doing what other people want them to do. And they're stressing about it. They're anxious about it. But if you had your own, if you trusted your own understanding and trusted your own moral compass and did things because of that, instead of worried about other people, maybe that is a way to look at God's approval. Maybe. Okay, I see that. That was what she was trying to say. And I was just saying that that kind of helped me a little bit. Just to clarify where I was coming from on your example, like it sounds like if someone's just doing something because they know it's the right thing to do, you could have two people do opposite things who both believe they're doing the right thing. Right? So it may not just be a matter of he's doing it because he believes it's the right thing to do that actually leads to a morally correct answer. That's why I say like someone who's just doing something because of an internal sense of good may not necessarily be doing something very moral. And a guy who says, I see you all on the floor. I know I'm in an environment where I'm being watched. I care about my well-being. I don't want to go to prison, but I also care about the well-being of someone else. I will go out of my way to get this wallet and give it back to him. I could have just walked away, but I actually want to live in a society where people gather things that I might drop and give them back to me. And that benefits everybody. There's a mutual benefit there. I'm going to go through the process of doing this because it benefits me to do so. It benefits everybody else to do the same thing too. That is the mechanics of a moral system, in my opinion. Go for it, Larry. Yeah, one thing that we really need to address what morality is. Okay, go for it. A lot of believers seem to think that morality is obedience. God is the moral giver, the law giver, and just obeying what he says is morality. That is not morality. Morality is knowing what to do in a given situation that gives the best output or outcome to those involved or for society in general. Yeah, it's a process. It's a process, and it's not obedience. Yeah, right, right, exactly. So in my head, I thought the guy who's thinking about it, he's going through a process, he's doing it. Sort of like if I was drowning, I could think about whether I need to save someone or I could be a dog who just automatically goes in because that's how the dog's trained. Is the dog doing something moral? Is a rope that's dangling that I grab onto doing something moral? If that saves me? It's like it's the rope or the dog or a person who's actually saving someone. You go through those three tiers. It's the person who's going through the mental functions, and that's where morality is. It's like the process of thinking, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but that's what I mean when I say morality. Yeah. Though I love your example. It's like you just feel like you're being watched. You don't want to have disapproval. You're doing these steps to circumvent that or avoid disapproval even if it comes from yourself. And George and Dale, we are talking about the nature of living with obsessive-compulsive need to appease what you believe is someone watching you, like even supernatural, from doing bad things. I know, George, you probably never felt that before. You were raised atheist, but have you ever felt guilty and how did you deal with it as a person who's raised as an atheist and never had to think about religious context? This is a really big topic for me. Because certainly I have felt guilty in my life. And I feel that I have a well-developed ethical compass. I think maybe I was given that. You know, my parents were decent, I'm going to say, ethically abiding citizens of the world and of America. I don't know what else to say about it. I mean, the whole concept of having a bearded evaluator in the sky watching me is so offensive. It's hard for me to talk about it. I mean, you know. Yeah, that gets back to the analogy because I guess it's not a question of who's moral, who's not moral, but who's really practicing morality. Are you really doing the moral thing because someone's watching you, like Mike makes right? Is that really... Were the Nazis moral because they followed Hitler through the T for... You know what I mean? It's one of those type of situations, but in thinking about it that way, it makes you more conscious of what you're doing and you have to come up with reasons on your own for doing right and wrong things. And then you're not obsessing over it so much in the same way out of fear. And it kind of leaves the anxiety because you're thinking through it. When something... I really worry about whether I'm treating my family right all the time, but I'm not OCD about it because I really feel that way. I really feel like I want to do the right thing for my family. Whereas when I was a God believer and doing the right thing for God, it was done out of a fear, out of being scared of destruction and stuff like that. So there's a different... I don't know, there's a different mechanism at work. Cool. Doubtfire, I'm going to go over to George real quick who raised his hand and then Dale afterwards. George, what was it? Did you have a thought? Well, I just wanted to mention that I chose to use the word ethics rather than morals because ethics has a better definition for me, a cleaner definition. Moral, to me, has the patina of religion to it. Of a, maybe, the great evaluator in the sky. Great use of words. You know, maybe I'm picking a straws, I don't know, but that's how I felt. Yeah. Dale, what do you have? That's a good point. Well, a lot of times psychological conditions or behaviors can begin very early. We are actually, our brains are actually hardwired when you are young and their brain is being molded. This is why a child or a 10-year-old that learns another language will have no trace of an accent because they're hardwired into the language. If you're wanting to make a dent on the people that suffer from this disease, then you might want to consider, well, we can't advertise to children. There's some frosted flakes or something you might do, but the advertising to children is getting, it's very tight. But you can advertise this sort of religious behavior to children through veggie tails or any of this other sort of stuff and you can actually hardwire them to develop some kind of psychological problem that they may suffer from in the future. So you may want to start looking at this OCD thing from even a younger age. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's always the case because like I said, it's not a religious cause problem. It's a problem that comes from people and usually people have these sort of problems because of how they were raised, like what sort of environment they come up in and it's like authoritarian type people. Maybe they had fathers or mothers that were very authoritarian when they came up and that's what they understand and what they're kind of used to. And so they kind of gravitate towards that sort of politician or that sort of religious belief or what have you. Yeah, they really resonate with that kind of thing. It's sort of like a bad cop, good cop sort of situation. Larry, would you agree, like Old Testament, New Testament, like, hey, I'm the authority for the year and then all of a sudden this new guy comes and is like, hey, listen, I'll help you out with that. Yeah, two totally separate gods there. They try to reconcile them by saying they're the same god but they're not. Well, you know, there's a new Christian theology that's taken hold now which says that Jesus is God but Yahweh was the devil and they're Christians. No, I never heard that. I've never heard that. I've never heard that. Getting awfully close to the end of the night. We are actually. We need to close. Great catch, Larry. How about, Doubtfire, would you like to close on? You guys got to change your names. Doubtfire, would you like to change and have some closing comments? We've got the floor. Yeah, I would just say, you know, if you're someone out there that's suffering with scrupulosity, you know, you're really obsessing about stuff like that. Go on YouTube, go on Google. There's a lot of good information that you can read up on and practices that she can put in play. You may need medication, depending on how severe that thing is. I don't know. I can't really. I'm not a medical professional at all, but definitely consult information. Go look at information. Get out of your bubble. You know, that's the only way you're going to get better. And I would say this, if you do go to the medication route, there's no one surefire wonder drug. It's going to be a process to figure out what works best for you and please be patient and be willing to work with professionals to figure out like the right dosages and when you need to change and be honest with them if it's not working for you. Yeah. All right. That's my side. I'm, let's chat. You can find myself on YouTube. And I'll say this too. No, I don't want to say this because everyone's going to start thinking I'm a terrible person, but I would say this. I'm working really hard on face mask technology and this whole COVID thing has really improved many people's efforts in science in order to make better PPE for people who are taking like, for example, medical great stuff and wearing them in pedestrian environments. And the technology behind that is getting substantially improved. So keep on the lookout. Larry, if you'd like to close out, go ahead. Well, George and Dale haven't had anything to say. No, I've had plenty to say. No, I mean toward the close of the program. Don't have anything to say now. Okay. Nothing to say. George, I know you're not going to probably anything, but is there anything you'd like to say before we head out? Well, the number of dead people in my county from COVID being reported on Johns Hopkins website has shot up. We've had 10 people die from COVID in the last two weeks. And I see people still not wearing face masks in stores. And I just I'm scratching my head. How do I talk to these people and ask them not to kill me when I go to the supermarket? Just put your hand out like this if they get too close. That unmistakable sign. Don't stay away. Anyway, this has been the digital free thought radio hour. Be sure to visit digital free thought.com for our radio show archives, a atheist songs and articles on the subject. My book is called Atheism. What's it all about? It's available on Amazon. And if you're having trouble with screw velocity, i.e. leaving the religious beliefs behind, go to recoveringfromreligion.org. They have help for you. If you have any questions for the show, you can send them to askanatheistatknotsvilleatheist.org. And we'll try to get to them in future shows. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe to be notified for new episodes. And remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. This has been prerecorded as broadcast on Sunday, October 25th. It will air on Wozo Radio, WOZO Radio at 7 o'clock on Wednesdays. And if you're listening to us there, we'll see you next Wednesday. So say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Good bye. Bye. Bye-bye.