 Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOCO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 8th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ Doubter 5. And as usual, we have a co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. It's the Wombat now in Technicolor. Now and always. At least since we went to video. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faith, gods, holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in your town, why are you just not? Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have 1100 of us in the atheist society of Knoxville. And we'll tell you more about them after the mid-show break. So you should be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's your topic or topics today? Hey, we're doing a grab bag of topics today. Let's see what we can get through. We're going to start with five arguments for atheism. And maybe we'll even talk about rainbows and the Bible as an instruction manual. But first, love to catch up with you, Larry. And how have you been since last week? Oh, I'm okay. I'm writing my Bible because my knee is bum. Got a bum knee. But it's, I've got some appointments set up to see if we can't take care of it. Good doing MRI and surgery, whatever it takes. I love it. I love it. I love it. And remember what I was telling you before the show, it's always a good option. Remember what I was telling you before the show, always a good option. The other thing I would say is I like that when I have a problem, I can get really wrapped up in it, right? Without realizing that when it's solved, I'm just going to have another problem that like will supersede and hit that same pedestal. So it's always good. And I mean this genuinely, but without necessarily understanding the pain that you're going through, but at least recognizing that you're in a hard spot. If you took like more steps back, you'd realize, oh, shoot. The only thing wrong with me right now is just this leg. Oh yeah. I'm in school. I'm awesome. Like I got all my wits about me. This is pretty good. You got a good, you got my suspenders nice and sparkly. Like everything's good. You got friends. You got family. Yeah. No, other than that, my health is good. You know, everything's cool. And we're having pretty weather right now. So we are. It's getting a lot more chilly in the Tennessee area. It is. Yeah. I can, I got my first cold snap yesterday. I walked out in my gym tanks and I walked right back in my home. I said, let me go for a round of disc golf and then I walked back in. I was like, you know what? I'm just going to clean my house today. It's not. Yeah. You have to get back in the habit of grabbing that jacket as you walk out. Yeah, it's jacket weather now. So I am doing some spring cleaning of my room, my home. And what I do is I'll have a bunch of clothes on hangers. And I will take the hanger and I'll flip it so that the hook, instead of facing outwards from me goes towards me and I'll leave it in the closet. And if by the end of the year, I've never swapped that hanger back, then I know that's something I'm not wearing anymore. Not only that, but more than likely don't fit in it anymore. Good plan. Good plan. I just give it out to Goodwill and I try to reduce the amount of stuff I got. Yeah, I need to do that. Speaking of things you need to do, I'd love for you to tell me some reasons why I should be an atheist. Do you have any arguments for that Larry? Well, matter of fact, I've got five. There are five good arguments for atheism. Five good ones. Five good ones such that if I hear them, I'm going to be an atheist. Is that what you're going to say? If you think about them for a while and you consider them, honestly consider them and don't and give yourself the test of the outside test for religion. I believe you would be moved in that direction anyway. All right. The first one is lack of evidence. I mean, when I talk to believers, I say, well, look around the trees and the sky and all that's evidence for God. But the problem is that you were raised and told all your life that the trees in the sky and all that were created by God, therefore you consider it evidence for God. But is it really or is it just evidence for our chemical processes and the biological evolution that we've experienced on this planet, we know is a fact. The second problem. Are you afraid? Let me put you back on that, though. What if you had what if you had an experience such as like love and like, yes, I know Iraq is a rock and I know a squirrel is a squirrel. And maybe there's different kinds of scroll through a macro evolution and my micro evolution. But like that doesn't explain necessarily people. Right. And what about the difference between a chemical process? Are we just chemicals in bags? Is that what you're saying? Well, apparently, love has been love like many different human emotions and don't forget animal motions. You know, there are animals that have the same emotions we do. Do they have souls? You would say not, but they have the same emotions. And psychologists and neurologists will tell you that a lot of your emotions can be handled through the proper use of drugs. Let's say you're bipolar. You constantly swing emotions. But we've worked out that we can give you certain chemicals in a pill that will help you stabilize those emotions. So is it really a supernatural gift or is it something that we've studied and understand and can and treat with worldly medicine? Right. I throw this out to in the event that you have any doubts on evolution. This is not a topic for you to have to be persuaded by on a podcast, you know, like just listening to the two of us. More than likely, if you have an active doubt on the concept of what evolution is, it might have been that it was framed or defined to you by people who were not scientists. And so what your understanding of what evolution is when I say evolution could be something that is entirely not what science is purporting it to be. What I mean by this is oftentimes I will say evolution and people will hear. Oh, people come from monkeys. Scientists saying that people come from monkeys, but they're still monkeys. So I don't understand that. It doesn't make any sense to me. Therefore, I will have illusions wrong. Evolution has never been or described by those in authority of people who understand what they're talking about people who like understand the science as as people coming from monkeys. It's the change of life over time. Right. And when you understand that it makes perfect sense. It's the reason why you don't look like your kids and your kids don't look like your grandparents. You kind of look a little similar, but there's the little changes generation. What would you know about it? We've got a PhD in biochemistry. There we go. Yeah. So I'm happily I'll happily, you know, point you to the right directions. But honestly, most of the time when people have an issue with evolution is just because it was handed to them using the same propaganda that people who had an interest against evolution were given or handed down to their next generation. They said, I don't like this science concept. It interferes with my worldview. So I'll make a flander eyes, you know, strong man of it and present that as if that's what the scientists are talking about. And of course we don't purport that a big bang is the start of the universe. We don't purport that evolution is people coming from monkeys. All these models that we've tried to make into simple analogies and give have been contorted. But when you look at what the original model is, what the actual concept is big bang being one of the earliest events, one of the earliest events and just a model of how we can explain how things came into motion as we see them today. And we are happy to dismiss the model if we had a better model, but it's just a scientific model to explain and one of the earliest events to happen in the universe and then evolution just being the change of life over time. And we know life changes over time. We have dog breeds. We have squirrels that are black in Kentucky, but gray in Tennessee and have white chess in California and are red in Nebraska, but they're all the same kind of squirrel, but they have, you know, due to their environment, have pressure changes on them just based on what they can hide behind clay, cement, woods, trees, et cetera. So like we understand that life changes over time. That's all evolution is it can happen over a short period of time and long periods of time. And given a long enough period of time, if those species were separated, continued to be separated over that long period of time, they would become new species and would not be able to breed. Exactly. When you get to the point when you have two species that become too different from each other, they no longer can make babies. Think of it as like or have babies that are capable of having babies. So I can take a donkey and I can take a horse. I live in the capital of mules, by the way, right now. The first mule ever made was made in this town and you can make a mule from a donkey and a horse, but that mule can't make more babies. You can't take two mules and have more babies from mules. So that's how we know that a donkey and a horse, even though they can make babies, are different enough of a species that they can't make fertile offspring. That's the definition of different species. And sometimes you can't even take two animals and make them have babies. Like that's even more desperately different from each other. But like when you realize that if you take animals and you separate them long enough and have them make changes, they might even get to the point where they can still have babies. But even those babies can't make offspring. Now you have a different species, baby. And that's the beautiful new thing about evolution is that you just made two new things. Like you just have two new things. It wasn't a flagpole that says officially donkeys and horses are too. It's just naturally happened and it naturally bifurcated. And if you give it enough time, mules won't even be feasible anymore. If you give it, if you, if you no longer domesticate horses and donkeys, you will get to the point where they're just there, you, they can't even make offspring anymore. Yeah. Evolution constantly changing. I mean, there's not one state where you, like right now, if you look around, this is 2023. And you look around and say, this is the species. Well, you know, a hundred years ago was slightly different 200 years ago, slightly different 2000 years ago, maybe a lot different. And going back and back and back, it's just one long continuous chain. You know, there isn't a place markers for each one, but if we find something in the fossil record, it's a frozen species in time and we can put a label to it. But even then it was a species under change. And it always has been. And there's no plan behind it either. So the way how things are now is not the goal of evolution. Like evolution is just a constant changing over time. So even as we are today, we have a bunch of leftover body parts that aren't necessary, aren't functional. Maybe you do that. I've got two nipples. I don't need nipples. I have a weird. I got a weird appendix. I got extra teeth that I don't need it necessarily. I've got bones in my ear that like only show up when I'm in cold water. There's a lot of weird stuff about my body that isn't necessarily optimal or well designed. They're just actually parts. It's simplicity. We use the same tube to breathe through as we eat through. Yeah, that's not good. That's not a good design. Dolphins and porpoises have solved that problem evolutionarily, but we still suffer from it. And sometimes we die from it, but it's a beautiful sequence of trial and error. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean it in a beautiful way because when you realize that we're in a system that is simply trying to adapt to the circumstances that we're experiencing. That in my mind is a far more fantastic and narrative than some guy making this process where we are right now. And I'm like, Hey, God, did you make me exactly in your image? Yeah. Why do I got all these extra little weird body parts? What's going on here? Yeah, you don't want to say that it's trying to adapt because there's really no trying to it. It's just the world. The universe. Nature punishing those that are not well designed for it. Or it's current environment. Right. If you're not well designed for it, you're not going to make it very far in there in your environment. If you are well designed for it, you will, you will live long enough to have offspring and they will be better designed for it. Define forth than you are. And that's the blanket. I would say that's a dark blanket because I would say Christianity is like, Hey, or religions are this world was made for you. This is how you're supposed to be. You're great. Or there is not. There's no supposed. And then when science comes in and says, actually, we're just the successes. And if you pull this blanket over or this carpet, there's a bunch of non successes. Children born with malformed hearts. People that can't sequence enough sugars in order to stay alive. Like those are. Billions and billions of failures or. Of defects or offsets or people who can never get to the point where they could be where we're at right now. We're very fortunate and very in this very delicate balance of being alive and being able to communicate with each other because a lot of things have not been able to get this far. Think about the mass extinctions that we've had. What five, at least five mass extinctions. 99% of the life on earth that has ever lived is extinct. Right. So there is no divine plan unless. You know, he started it really late. You know, 14 billion years into the existence of the university is, oh, I probably need to develop people. And it's an uncomfortable truth, but it's also one where it makes us should should make us realize that we are alive. We have a capability of extending our lives. We have a capability of enhancing the quality of our lives. And we can only do so if we work together and we try to maintain our environment in such a way that it's still conducive to healthy lives on this planet. Because if we continue to pollute, if we continue to harm each other, if we continue to make life just unreasonably difficult for each other. We're just suffering for no end. We have the capability of changing things for good. If evolution can change life, humanity can change culture. So let's go and change culture for good. Right. And the next, the next argument for atheism is, and everybody knows it is the problem of evil. Why bad things happen to good people. Why do good people die and bad people live? Why is there evil in the world? Oh, I have an answer for this because God has a plan. And Jesus loves us all. And that is a real thing. It's just a change of address. Yeah. Well, according to the book of Isaiah, God created evil. But a thing about it is how can you, you've got a God that you, the Christianity says it's all loving and omnipotent. And I'm, I'm the powerful. You know, he, he knows everything. He knows if a tiny infant is suffering. He knows if somebody's going to be kidnapped or whatever. And he, and he has the power to stop it. And he loves us, but he doesn't do it. So one would wonder, and one does wonder, why would he allow bad things like that to happen? I mean, all it takes is to walk through its children's cancer ward to, to bring that to the surface. So I had this explained to me by a youth pastor once where he told me that the glory of heaven is infinite. And so an infinite good can drown out any sort of terrible temporary evil, you know, but the, the, the next lesson that we had almost immediately was that hell exists. Wait a second. So not everybody's going to heaven. It's like, no, Ty, not everyone's going to heaven. Then why do we still have bad things? Cause if, if it's temporary bad, then why would we punish it? And if God is, is so loving, why would he even create a hell? Yeah. And he tells us to forgive our enemies, but he torches them forever. Right. Or why? Why even have to begin with the problem of evil is one of the biggest arguments for atheism. Right. I would say that one of the biggest problems of evil is just the problem of selection as well. It's, it's an evil way to, to influence a mass. If you love everybody, but you only talk to a very select few people and those people are responsible for talking to everybody else, you've already established a picking order. And if you know anything about the human ego, it's not going to be conducive for peace. If you just say, these are my people and I'm not going to give any proof that I talked to them. They're just going to tell you that they talked to me. Well, then anybody can say that they talked to you and now I'm up to, I'm genuinely trying to follow a God who's not working with me and my limitations to be able to work with him. And you get 30,000 different religions in the world. Yeah. Anyone can be a false prophet. Anyone can make up a book. Anyone can make a translation of the Bible like you need to be able to be more clear. And if you talk to one person, you should be able to talk to everybody. And if you've made a better manual for how to be a Christian, maybe things could be better, but maybe that's the topic for later on in the show. Anyway, I already got one. Okay. The next one is the argument from inconsistent revelation. Oh, hey, that's exactly what I was talking about. Go for it. Well, I mean, you have 30,000 different religions and they're all theoretically started by people who talked to God, but they have these contradictory revelations and rules and things that they have. They tell you about the world that ain't so. So, you know, it's a huge problem for religion. Now, even in a single religion, you got some prophets saying this and some prophets saying that. Well, I mean, even the ones in the Bible didn't all come true. You know, sometimes in science, you get disagreements, right? Like sometimes you'll have people say, hey, it's going to be 40% chance of rain today. And then another news source will be 50% chance of rain today. Another one might say 60% chance. But they don't claim to be infallible. Matter of fact, they're the first to claim they aren't. Okay. Okay. What about supernatural being did not give them that information? Okay. What about semi recently in a big fiasco where was there any, I imagine there was some, some scientific report saying you actually, you don't need vaccines to be good from COVID. You just need to wash your hands and that's it. Or don't trust the government or wash your hands. But take these, take this in the morning and you should be okay. Like there are a lot of people will disagree with each other. Like there's a lot of people disagreeing. Why isn't that the same thing? Why don't we hold science into the same scrutiny? Why does science get a fair pass? It says, Oh, Pluto is not a planet. It was like, okay, then when you guys are just as good as religion. Oh, a lot of that. That is an opinion. And they say it right in front, you know, we're going to say that certain planet of certain size, a certain object is a planet and some art. And then they, in the future, they say, well, we made a mistake earlier. We don't, we don't really want to class that particular object in the end with the planets that are obviously much larger than it is. And there are other objects that are larger than it is that are not planets. Okay. Considered planets. So we're going to reclassify. They give you the solid scientific reasons for what they do. Now they're people like everybody else that can change your mind later on, reclassify things. Now classification is not something that's, that you can go out and just find a nature. It's something we make. It's a designation that a human makes about something. Those change all the time. Okay. That's a good point. So you're hitting on two or actually hitting on three good things. So like humans will come up with models including classifications for things and we will optimize the model over time as we become more informed of what the universe has to offer for us. And so if we say all these things are planets, but then we realize, wait a second, if we call these things planets and we thought those were planets, but now we have better telescopes and we can see a thousand more of those in the future in the past, we're not going to say we have a thousand planets. That's just too much work. Why don't we just say that these based on size are planets and then the really, really small ones, including the one of the nine that we were talking about or are a different classification. That way we can be more precise with the words that we're using because we're a verbal creature. We are, we are a verbal society. We communicate verbally as well as nonverbally too. If I make words with my mouth, I'm relying on you to understand what I'm talking about. And if I don't, if I'm not clear with how I define things, then there's going to be miscommunications. So I have to clear that up and I have to go to the public and say, listen, we have to change our model. It's not necessarily that we were wrong. It's just that we're updating our framework of understanding. And so when we used to say that this was a planet before, maybe it was accurate back then because that's what that word meant, but we're changing the model and optimizing it. So it's no longer a description. And if people have an emotional attachment to that, that's not science anymore. That's just politics and you're just confusing the waters. We're trying to come to an agreement to how to explain the universe to people. The other thing I liked is that you had mentioned that science is not afraid to admit that it's wrong on certain things. When it says, listen, there's no such things as germs. That guy's crazy. Oh wait, there is germs. Oh man, there's, we have to wash our hands. No, there's germs, but there's different kinds of germs. We got germs inside our bodies. We need to make a whole branch of science to understand what this is all about. And maybe some of the first papers because of the lack of microbiology tools weren't as clear or as well demonstrated with their, with their scientific rigor. When papers come out in particularly in new fields of science, you should read them because it's mostly just people arguing with each other in publication saying that guy got it wrong. It's actually like this. Oh, well, these guys almost got it right, but it's actually more like this. Oh, these guys are completely wrong because now we have this new understanding is like, oh, we have to redo everything. Science is constantly a refolding and a mixture of ideas to let the best method get to the top, right? That's how we end up with the best method to understand things is through that collusion of different ideas and figuring out which one is the best demonstrable, repeatable, falsifiable way to get to a truth. And if a scientist is wrong, he wants to know it. Yes. His main thing is to find out what the truth is. Yes. Yes. That's why they call him hypothesis. It's not assumptions. I want you to test my hypothesis. I came to this with an understanding of I think this might be right. I'm going to test it and I within the realm of my tests, I got it. But if you repeat your tests in Brazil or Iceland or different environmental conditions, maybe we'll come up with a different conclusion and get us to a better understanding of what this true nature of our test is. That's all science is. It's that loving, jockeying competition of intellectual rigor that gets you to the top. The last thing I want to say is that scientific process is not prone to the opinions of a scientist. So if different scientists disagree on like what the best way to get rid of a disease is or a pandemic, the science is going to have a singular answer, but scientists might have different realms of different opinions. I just want to make it clear that scientists are people and they are prone to just as many misconceptions, use of poorer epistemologies, bad methodologies, bias, prejudices, just as much as anyone else. But the science is the way that we get to the truth. And we sometimes rely on scientists, but the cool thing is anyone can be a scientist. So like when they had Tuskegee Airmen or if they were doing poor testing on Native Americans, the prejudices that they had with those where they were saying, oh, people with dark skin don't feel as much pain or, you know, it's it's okay because they're savages and they're not part of the true human line. And we are an evolved species. Like these were scientists with very poor prejudices and due to their upbringing environment, right? But the science was still staying true to getting us to the true truth, which is, hey, people are generally the same. They have some genetic and phenotypical differences that are unique. Those differences can be okay. It doesn't make you less of a person. But for the most part, these medicines will work best here. These practices will work best here because we can demonstrate that to be the case. We can look at it and we can objectively test it. And there's no further bias or prejudices on it. It's just, here's the data and that rigor of data and how we can establish that. That's the scientific method. And I think we should just separate that from the opinions of how scientists can approach it. So scientists believe things and science can demonstrate things. That would be my case. And I'd like to just say that no religion has ever overturned the scientific discovery. No religious claim or discovery has overturned the scientific discovery. If science is found to be wrong, it will be science that discovers that it's wrong. It'll just be more science. We're getting close to the bottom of the hour. You think we should take a break before we go on? Let's see. We got like maybe four minutes. You want to at least introduce the last one before. All right. Well, I've got two more. Okay. The rejection of concepts that cannot be falsified. Right. So that's a scientific concept. And it's used to determine what we can test and what we can't. And if we can't test it, if there is no test for it, like there's no test for the existence of a God or a soul or fairies or leprechauns, you know, then why believe it? If you start believe going down that road, what are you not going to believe? You would just overturn the gullibility bucket. You know, well, we'll just believe in everything. Yes. If I don't have a frame of reference, I'm not justified in having a high confidence in that thing. So if I believe the entire universe was created, but I don't know what's something that's not created, looks like, then I don't have a frame of reference for what something that's not created looked like. So how can I look at anything and say, oh, but that's a creation. I recognize things by contrasting them by things that aren't those things. So if I know what a spoon looks like, but I don't know what a spoon doesn't look like, guess what? I don't know what a spoon looks like. I'd be holding up a fork and being like, this is also a spoon. It's like, you don't know what something that's not a spoon looks like. You just think everything's a spoon. No, but this is a spoon. This is a spoon. This is like, you have to realize that a frame of reference, a sense of falsifiability is very important to be able to establish any sort of confidence and a conclusion. To me, it's like ghost hunters. Everybody assumes that souls are ghosts, right? And then they go in and they go in with all these equipment and try to measure electromagnetics and light and sound. And we've never had a soul to examine. We do not know if they produce light or sound. Exactly. Yes. Nothing about them. We cannot test the proposition. So therefore, how are we going to go out trying to find one? No, you're right. And every single hit, I was like, oh, but that's a ghost. It's beeping. It's beeping. It's like, how did you calibrate this machine? Or how do you know that it's a ghost that's making it beep? Yeah. Give me something that's not a ghost and let's test it real quick because that's the way how you would calibrate that. You would have it get a false positive or a false negative and a false positive. That's the best way to test it. We never did that. It could have been a satellite going over, throwing off electronic signals of making your thing go off. Jumping to the conclusion that it's a ghost when you have nothing to validate it is a problem. Yeah. And that goes to the same thing for God's too. Like if you get that little special feeling in your soul when you go to church, what did that come from? How would you test that? What is something that like, does that prove that it was your God? Again, it's a holy ghost. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we need to be able to calibrate these sensations that we're having to determine how reliable they are. And if we don't know that, let's not have a lot of confidence in their output. Right. Okay. This is the digital free thought radio hour and WOZ radio. 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Okay. I guess we're ready to jump back in it. Let's go. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WOZ radio 103.9 LPFM 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 now and have 1100 members. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening at Knoxville's old city at Barley's tap room in Pizzeria. We've talked to a lot of people on our website. We're at the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top. Look for us inside the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. Just go out on that and turn left and follow your nose. Look for the happy people there. That's right. You can find this online at Facebook, meetup.com, or at our website at Knoxville atheist.org. You can just Google Knoxville, atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, Don't find one. Start one. Where do we need to pick up? Hey, you got a list of five reasons why I should be an atheist. I'm almost sold, but I could use one more. How about that? What do you got? Oh, I have one more. It's the argument from disbelief or non-belief. And I looked at that one up because it didn't seem very straightforward. And it's a philosophical argument that asserts an inconsistency between the existence of God and the world in which people fail to recognize him. In other words, if there was an actual God and he interacted with us, we should be able to tell there should be no non-believers. But since there are a whole bunch of us and it's growing every day and there are 30,000 different religions that say different things about that God, then we have inconsistencies and we have an inability to see him in our environment when he should be there. Let me throw out a quick point. Like the devil, if you believe everything that the Bible says, then you have to agree that a devil exists. The devil does not worship God, but the devil knows for a fact that God exists, right? So if the question was, why doesn't God reveal himself to us? Because we have to use faith. We have to just believe in the absence of evidence that demonstrates how strong our faith is. Even if we saw God on a weekly basis, and he was just doing a checkup routine on everybody and just saying, oh, I'm just making sure it was good, listen, it wouldn't make us automatically worship God because we already have characters in the Bible that know God exists that don't worship him. So it's just a question of, listen, God, just make this easier so we know that we're praying to the right God and worshiping the right God and reveal yourself so that we all know that we'll immediately get rid of all atheists, right? Because now we, and it'll get all variations of Christianity, the desperate bifurcations of Christianity that has happened, 30,000 denominations so far and counting and get us on the same track. That's the God. That's the Christian God. We're on the same page and now it's still up to us whether or not we abide by the rules that you set forth, whether or not you are worthy of the worship that we can offer. And that's up to us to determine. It's still up to us. We can still have the same judgment, you know, like, but now we can at least be on the same program. The fact that we don't have that is very telling to me. Yeah, what kills me is the holy book itself. The Bible tells us to lean not on our own understanding. In other words, it's telling us, don't think. Well, believe what we tell you. Use faith. But if faith worked, then there wouldn't be 30,000 different religions on the planet because each one of those religious leaders are telling its followers to use faith to believe what he tells them is true. Which is the worst system to figure out if something's true or not. Really honest. Well, think of it. Is there anything that you can believe? I mean that you can't believe on faith alone? I can believe anything on faith and I can disbelieve anything on faith. It's just that compatible. Which means to me that it's not a reliable way to reach any conclusion that I need to have something else to support it. You know, this is a bit of a tangent, but I am just trying to desperately come to reconcile. I'm trying to reconcile this idea that people who in our state are oftentimes viciously independent and anti-government in the sense that if it's not my ideals, I don't trust the government. Even when it is, I don't automatically trust the government. Why do they want my money? Why do I want my taxes? What's going on here? Don't tell me what to do. Don't tread on me. I'm wearing these flags. I'm independent. I'm keeping my guns. Like that's we live in a state that's very much in that mindset. However, there's also the supporting mindset of, but I worship a God that tells me not to think to be a sheep, to trust him over my own family, to worship him with my soul, that I'm worthless, that I can't be a good person unless if I have him, you can have morals. How did you get these two people together? And is it just by virtue of they're so deep in the Christian pot that they have to balance it out by being in the extremist, leave me alone pot? Like how did we get these two different cultures? So to me, it's authoritarianism. Religion teaches you to accept what you're told and, you know, on faith and without requiring evidence. And they're, you know, they're being told in church and in many churches, I won't say all some of them, they're good churches with good messages, but they're being told these particular ones that we have a Christ return. We have a, what is it, a antichrist or a person whose looms large in the annals of biblical archives. And we should follow him unquestioningly. And there, there we are. But you'll have, you got to admit that one of the largest constituencies and most loyal constituencies that this particular religious, I mean, political leader has are evangelical Christians. And you got to wonder why the Christians who theoretically are supposed to love their neighbor, accept their neighbor, help their neighbor, I accept them and forgive them, earn their back so frequently on the needy, homosexuals, anybody who differs from them religiously. And it's, it's an, it's a problem. I got my thought process where I call it the Canadian girlfriend argument, where is someone, you probably heard about this, but like, if someone says I have a girlfriend in Canada and I was like, Oh, that's cool. Like that's not a problem for me. It's like, you have to believe, you have to believe her. It's like, I, I mean, I'm fine. Like it's, it's reasonable to have girlfriends that live in Canada. Okay, good. Her name, she has green hair and it's naturally green and she's from Japan. It's like, no, I stopped believing as a pet dragon. I don't believe that girlfriend exists. Like, I'm so personally offended that you don't believe my green hair in Japanese Canadian girlfriend's like, why do you care? I'm not even talking about you. I'm talking about that weird concept that you came up with. Like, I'm personally offended that you don't believe her. It's like the, the onus when someone is offended when you don't believe in their God, it's really just because it's they've somehow through their upbringing conceptualize this God as just a part of themselves. And I see this no better demonstrated when you see people who like are staunchly Christian, but are willing to break every rule in the Bible if it's convenient to them, because they understand that they have a personal relationship with their God. So God approves of the music that they listen to, the clothes that they wear, the people they're attracted to, the, the, the paraphernalia that they smoke, the lack of exercise that they put in, even though it's supposed to worship their body, the mixed clothing that they wear, the shellfish that they eat, the list goes on and on. Because in their mind, they are, they are part of a holy thing. And that they're using their not only that, but many of them believe that God resides in their mind and actually tells them what to do. Yes. And it's constantly fact checking on a day to day basis. You know, God has moved me or God has told me to do this, right. It's generally not something good. The religion isn't being used as a way to guide them. It's being used as a way to empower them and justify their actions. And when they were in a church, you will note like in Tennessee, they'll have even in Tennessee, they have black churches and they have white churches because it's easier to fit into a tribe or of like minded individuals when you all kind of look the same. So even without much fuss, there's sort of like an imposed dress code. There's an imposed sort of music code. There's an imposed sort of like what food we cater here, what cars we drive, the cultures that we have have barricaded to a God that can tell a group of people a similar message and everyone interprets that as oh, that's me. That's me. And I can look around and see such little diversity that I can interpret that as yeah, but he's talking to everybody and they all kind of look the same, but I'm the one that he's really talking to. I'm the one that's real here. And when I walk out of here, God's talking to me. That's and when as soon as I see someone that's culturally outside of me or like even if they worship the same God, maybe it's not exactly the same. Maybe you just are wrong and I'm right. Something you happen to encounter that goes against what you were told in church and it contradicts the message that you received in church which theoretically is directly from God. Right. Then it's automatically wrong. I think that's how you get to the people who are very just viciously anti-government or independent. You just empower them with God and in my mind that just shows how evasive religion can be where it can actually get the people who generally want to help, get the people who generally want to be part of communities and also get the people who generally want to be independent. If you get them at the right age and you indoctrinate them effectively, you can get any sort of person on board because the methods that they're using are catered to a person who's not utilizing the best methodology to understand the universe. So like you can get anybody there like that because every kid starts off with no manual for understanding the universe. So you can get anybody and that's how you can have like Asian Christians, a whole diversity of different kinds of people. I wanted to talk about rainbows if that's cool and we had some listener comments. So before I go into that, let me dump it to two quick questions. Larry, I'm going to throw this one out at you. This is for a viewer named Scott, 123180. Very well thought out arguments from our last couple last shows ago called Responsibility and Accountability. He asked this question with a little bit of a prefacing. I did a quick search on most of your YouTube channels and it seems to be pretty intelligent arguments against Christianity. Do you have any podcasts or topics on other religions or practices? I think many religions are opposed to atheism, but there's an interesting mix of Buddhism and science that's been happening in the US since it was brought over from Japan and other places in the last hundred or so years. So Larry? Well, I'd say we occasionally and only occasionally touch on those other religions in this podcast. We generally, when we're talking about God, we're talking about all gods or the concept of gods, but we address Christianity because that's the country we live on is predominantly Christian and for most of us it's what we were raised in. It's what we know. So it would be kind of hypocritical of us to go off on religions that we don't really have much information about and go into what's wrong about them. So we pretty much stay with the overarching concepts of God and souls and things like that. Now we will, since we were, Ty and I were both raised in Christianity, we have a lot of inside information about how it works and we'll often delve into that. It's a good point. And maybe if we had more Buddhists on the show, we could talk about it. So hey, if you're a Buddhist and we're going to welcome to join in. We've had Satanists on the show that we've invited in to talk about Satanism. We've had Buddhists on the show from like our old radio hosting days. So and we have some show topics also called Buddhism or Satanism and you're free to check those out in the description search for them. You can find them. As an atheist, we generally do study other religions. But of course, we wouldn't have nearly the information about those religions as we do Christianity. I find that most of the Eastern religions don't have worship of God. Buddha was not a God. Confucius doesn't worship of God. It basically ancestor worship or philosophical religions. So I wanted to talk a little bit about rainbows. I had this weird idea that you're going to sing the rainbow song. Is there a rainbow song? Yeah, Kermit sang it. Carmen sang it. I know the reading Kermit Kermit. The green frog from Muppets. Oh, that one. Why are there so many songs about rainbows? I know that one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You did sing the rainbows. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. I was pretty good Kermit voice too. I'm surprised I came out of my body when I was a kid. I used to not be able to make cartoon impressions. And then as I had the adult voice, I was and then I realized that all the all the cartoons and puppets I've seen growing up were just adults making voices. And then I realized, oh, that's why I couldn't make the voices. Wait a second, cartoons aren't real puppets aren't real. My life, my childhood was alive. So here's the thought that I had. Rainbows are interesting because they're an example of a nuanced thing that I'm trying to explain, which is different people experiencing the same thing. But that thing itself not actually existing. And I'm not saying rainbows don't exist. I'm just saying they don't exist in the format that we perceive them to be. When we look at a rainbow, we might look at a hill and see a cresting band of colors. And it's beautiful. Like maybe the band is going over one side of the hill and coming into a valley. But Larry, if you were to look at that same rainbow, you might see a rainbow and I'll have the same colors. However, the position of it might be different. It might be wholly inside that valley. And another person, maybe 40 feet further away from us might see entirely in the hill. And maybe someone like a mile away might see it completely in the sky. We're all experiencing a rainbow. Somebody in an airplane could actually see a full circle. Yeah. Not just the bow, the whole thing. We can all point and say, look at that rainbow. And we're all experiencing different shapes of rainbows, maybe even different color bands if we're color blind, different positions of the same thing. How is it that you can have this similar experience yet so desperately personalized to each of our perspectives? And the thing is, because even though we can experience what we think is the same thing in different ways, the truth of it is that that rainbow is an experience that's going on more or less through how we're perceiving light. And it takes an understanding of how light is being refracted through water molecules and turning and being turned into tiny little those water molecules acts as tiny little prisms. And we were perceiving it based on our angle in a very specific location, which means that if you were to change our position or change our angle, we were seeing a different rainbow, but it's generally in the same area. And I can even take a picture of it. But even that picture camera versus what I would see with my own eyes would be a different kind of rainbow. And the only reason why it's localized to that particular area is because that's where all the water droplets are. So we have a better scientific understanding of why we're all experiencing the same thing in slightly different ways. But if we didn't have that scientific understanding, what we would come up with is folklore or methodologies around rainbows and say, hey, you see that rainbow over there? Yeah, there's a pot of gold underneath it. Or hey, you see that rainbow over there? There's a leprechaun by there. You just have to walk towards it. And people walk towards rainbows and the rainbows keep moving and they don't understand what's going on. And no one can find the end of a rainbow because no one can tangibly approach a rainbow because by the time they get close to it, that that refraction effect becomes, it dissipates because you just don't get the angles right. And I continue to move away from them. Exactly. So I have this like opinion of like, maybe isn't that so much like God, in a sense, from like an atheist point of view, when you look at how people perceive rainbows and they all are looking at something that they know is a rainbow. Yet when they talk to other people, they're explaining things maybe slightly different, but close enough to where they can say, hey, we can make a we can make a religion out of us seeing this rainbow. It's like, you want to make a double rainbow religion? You want to make a circular rainbow religion? You want to make a single ban religion rainbow? And anyone who says it's a circle is wrong and is against us. And you can all try to desperately walk towards that rainbow, but you'll never get in touch with it until you listen to a scientist say, actually, no one can ever touch a rainbow because it doesn't it doesn't work that way. In fact, here, I can make a rainbow right now. And you can either accept that as blasphemy or understand that there's just more nuance to the universe than what your original assumption was or what someone told you. And and while it made you feel special that a rainbow existed for you and was for you, right? And it could be experienced just by you. Maybe you could realize that this is actually a phenomenon that I can take control of, that I can experience anytime I want, that I can make it my own. And that's far more beautiful for me than only having that one random experience that I that I had. And I'm saying like, for what we know about morality, what we know about ethics, what we know about how to treat people, we don't need a God to tell us any of that. We don't need a God to tell us to be moral or good. We can be good. We can make a heaven here on earth. We can make our lives at the highest quality possible. If we're willing to, you know, but how can you have morals without a moral giver? You don't need a moral giver. How about that? Let me blow your mind. You don't need a moral giver. No, but that didn't answer my question. How can you how? Okay. So in my opinion, let's come to an understanding of what we value the most, which and what we want to avoid the most. And I can say what we value the most is our well-being and we love our well-being. What do we want to avoid the most needless harm? It's by definition harmful needlessly. So let's try to come up with some rules as a society where we can uplift as much well-being as possible and avoid as much needless harm as possible. And I can guarantee you we can easily come up with that. Even between you and me, Larry, like when we start the show, we're like, hey, make sure you don't punch me in the face, right? It's like, yeah, I won't punch you in the face. Make sure you pat me on the back. There's an additional facet there. Basically what you were talking about is self-preservation, non-harm, self-healthy healthness, helpfulness. There you go. But you need one other facet to that and you have to worry about the other person's wellness and healthfulness. And that comes from compassion and empathy of the other person. So all you need is our desire not to be harmed, not to harm other people, and a wish that we could all experience each other's wellness in a society. And that's based on compassion and empathy. We need to look out for each other. I hear what you're saying. And listen, this is a scientific model. So we can always redefine what we mean when we say certain words. And I can say, I would rather be in a society that cares about my well-being collectively than one that doesn't, right? So let's just adopt that concept into the concept of well-being and we will make our framework a bit more clear when we express it next time. I am willing to work on an evolving method or evolving process that's not codified or dogma, but one that's ever-evolving to the interests of the people who are affected by it. And if someone says, hey, listen, I have this extra concern or this extra point that I'd like to have, I'd like to have respect. Maybe we can have respect like, let's throw respect into well-being because I'd rather be in a society that respects me than one that doesn't. And we can throw that into well-being. And if someone says, sometimes I want to die when I'm so sick that I don't want to stay alive anymore, it's like, okay, we can wrap that into our codified list of that fix as well. What I'm saying is, we don't have to rely on a moral giver to give us one book of rules. We can wrap our rules on our own. We're quite capable of doing it ourselves. Right. And we can do it as easily as we just did in the show in this one minute example. That's the power that we have and it's the power that we give up when we rely on Christianity or any sort of act that follows what to do. And that may be very well why the evangelical Christians are giving it up because they've been told repeatedly by some authoritarian figure that it's in opposition to what the way really want. Right. And I think the benefit of what we're getting, so like, again, I'm feeling my age already. Like, I don't understand, I'm probably behind six different social platforms by now. Like I didn't follow Snap. I never had an Instagram. I don't know what TikTok is anymore. Oh, never like a new thing comes out. I just block it on my browser because I just don't have the time for it. YouTube shorts came out. I'm like, oh, this is addicting. I don't like it. So I have it. Oh, it is. I have an app that just blocks YouTube shorts just so I can get through my day. I didn't need more distractions in my life. Yeah. I used to go to Facebook and just scroll and scroll and look at the different things. But now I scroll a little bit. I come to the shorts and I stop there. And they were getting farther past the short videos. You got to watch out for it. So I've blocked a lot of stuff now. As a result, though, I do think I do think kids are becoming more connected, but I want them to just be concerned with like the manner and how they're doing it. Like the superficial level of connection is only so good, but it's better than what I had when I was a kid. Like when I was a kid, I only had my block and my TV to expose me to the world. And there was, you know, ads on the TV and that became my world. Like the toys that are on that TV became the toys that I had in my home. But for kids that have access to the internet and all these social platforms, they're understanding new ideas. They're changing words. They're changing frameworks of understanding. They're getting exposed to new ideas, new people. And when their pastor tells them that one thing from that one book, it doesn't feel as applicable anymore. And I feel like it's a generation of kids being willing to understand that there's more nuance and differences in life than what I'm being offered. And now it's up to the church to recognize that and either reformat themselves away from the dogma that they've been given or suffer the consequences of a desperately disconnected Congress that they're speaking to. Yeah. The problem with the kids and connectivity is they don't recognize the anonymity that's involved with the connection that they're having. They may be talking to somebody at school. They may not. They don't know. It's a problem. And the parents need to be very concerned about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a new platform of dangers. New platform of dangers. Absolutely. For sure. All right. How do we feel? We've only got maybe seven minutes left. All right. I got one more topic to go through. I got one more topic to go through. So I have completed something called, what's the best way to describe it? It's called RECRA, which is a resource conservation and recovery act, I believe it stands for. It's basically, hey, if I'm operating a laboratory. So I work as a laboratory manager. I have like multiple laboratories that function and staff that work underneath me. I'm trying to figure out how to keep them safe and how to keep our lab spaces clean for audits and people coming through customer visits, etc. What's the best way I can handle and dispose of chemical waste? What's the best way to order chemicals? What's the best way to transport them if need be? And the training that goes along with that is once every three years and it's like a 36 hour course. It's an online series of tests that you take each take about a half hour and you just get so many that you're basically stuck in a chair for at least a day and a half, a literal day and a half. It's not fun. I was doing it over the weekend, but it is what it is, you know, it is what it is. But anyway, I got it complete and I can tell you, I feel good with my understanding of RECRA laws, but that's for such a small, that's just so I can do my job well. And I think myself, what's more important to me, particularly if I was religiously minded, right? Is it doing my one aspect of my job well or living in a way such that I can experience eternity with my family and live next to the right hand of God for all of eternity afterwards? Like I would imagine that the religion thing would be more important, yet the training manual to be a good atheist is essentially just a book that's just one long form word problem that takes you from one story to the next story to the next story without any answers or quizzes in between to make sure you're staying up to date and like are following along with what's being given to you or answers about the Bible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Bible. Okay, it wasn't clear. There's no there's no inner breaking quiz of like, okay, so by the way, if you're coveting your wife, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Can you give me a thumbs up or thumbs down? Push this button or at least like put T and F and then check the answers in the back to make sure that you're you're following along. It's like there's nothing like that. It's just one story that's open to interpretation followed by a series of 320 ish commandments that are varying levels of priorities that you don't know which are the most important. More stories than a guy came he died and like, okay, there's a he said a lot of things, but some of them are contradictory. What's the most important takeaway stories here? And then it ends on a big fever dream at the end. I thought it would be nice if the Bible was more set up like a instructional manual and it made me realize that the people that constructed the Bible, one didn't have an awareness of the better way of teaching people how to live. They just want to, you know, extend a mythology at the end of the day because that's how other mythologies were being given, which is very coloring how the Bible was made. But two, you would think of God would be more clear with the instructions that are offered so that way you can follow them because you can give me a Bible. But if I had to say, okay, now that I give you the Bible, give me 10 rules to follow. And I put down the 10 commandments like four of those commandments are the same commandant. God's number one. And I have so many other weird problems coming up towards me that I can't use the Bible to resolve that. Whereas with my record training, I can handle almost any chemical that you can provide to me because I have the broad framework of understanding given to me, but I have no broad framework of understanding provided by the Bible. And I just thought, oh, go ahead, you're on mute. You're on mute. What always bothered me about the Bible was if he's the God of all of us, why did he just pick a single tribe and make them the center of all of his works and stories and stuff and ignore everybody else until God too came along, of course. It's still to one group of people, right? Right. Now, I'm talking about Jesus, when he came along, he seemed to talk about the other people of the world, your friend, your neighbor, you know, all that, but he was still Jewish. And when he talked about your neighbor, he was really talking about your Jewish neighbor. But it's interpreted now as any other man. It's just an interpretation, though. Right, right, right. And when he came, it's like it's still just to one group of people. So I would wish that there was a better training manual. If God didn't want to come down every day, I'm saying that's fine, but at least give us a training module so that way we can make sure that we're good Christians if we want to be good Christians. It's about time to wrap up. Do you have any last words? Overall, rainbows are beautiful. You can also make your own rainbows. You don't have to rely on other people to tell you what rainbows look like to experience rainbows yourself. How about that? Pick the analogy where it goes from there. Pick up a prism. Make it any time you want. Where can we find your content? You can find me on YouTube. And you know what? Have a good day. What else can I say? Okay, my content can be found at YouTube at doubter five and digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button. 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. We'll see you next Wednesday night at 7 o'clock on WOZO radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye-bye, everybody.