 It doesn't hurt at all. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. I'm W.O.Z.O. Radio 103.9 L.P.F.M. here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, except October 1st, actually. I'm Larry Rhodes, our DJ, Dowder 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat, on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. What's up, flu shot injected, still here. All right. Very good. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, freethought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faith, God's holy books, and superstition, and posthumism. That's right. Welcome to our pirate Higgs. Thank you. If you think you're the only nonbeliever in your town, well, you're just not. Even here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over 1,000 of us, 1,100 now, actually. We're the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK. And we'll tell you more about us after the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? I want to talk about good leaders and good management skills and whether or not we see them in holy books of your. The current forms of religion today. Everyone is on the chopping board. We're looking at Mohammed. We're looking at Jesus. We're looking at the flying spaghetti monster, maybe even Dread Pirate Higgs himself. Speaking of the man. Welcome to the show. Wonderful, Gail. Would you mind leading us through a passing of noodles and sauces? Sure. I can do that. Our noodley Lord, who art in a colander, El Donte be thy noodles, thy blood be rum, thy sauce be yum with meat, as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our cussing, as we forgive those who cuss against us. And lead us not into key to ism, but deliver us some carbs for thine other noodles and the sauces and the meatballs, whenever and ever. Guys, I'm feeling very pumped today. I just came back from a week long sort of business trip slash vacation outside of my home state of Tennessee to Ohio. And had a great training experience for my company in leadership and management. And I'd love to frame the discussion on that today. But before we get into that, we'll have to touch bases on everyone. Dread Pirate, how you been since last week? Not bad. This is my, I'm going into my final week of time off, which means I'll be heading up to Fort St. John next Sunday. For probably three months until the Christmas break and then back down here for a couple and then back up there again for another three months. So my, my participation will be potentially sporadic and intermittent. What's the nature? Time off is better than time out. Yeah, for sure. Well, I've had, you know, it's been four weeks. The training I had hoped to partake in, in both instances from both institutions, one was canceled and the other one was delayed a month. So I ended up having a whole month of time off, but it means I'm spending money and not making it. Sure. There's a plus side. I get to walk my dog every day, but at the same time, you know, I now I have to get back to work to make some more money. Now, what is the nature of this work this time? Cause I know you've been a private eye, a fireman security detail. Yeah. Even suing the government. Mal content in general. I'm sure there's a lot. I'm doing, I'm actually an industrial medic in the oil and gas industry. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. Well, I also wanted to mention too that in my ongoing plate with ICBC, the insurance corporation BC that gives us our, our government issued ID. I have a pro bono lawyer who drafted a letter and sent it out. To the manager of driver's licensing integrity and oversight. And we are waiting to hear back on the, the shot that has been passed across their bow. We're going to take them to court if they were for a judicial review, if they don't relent. Right. So yeah, I'm just preparing my judicial review now. Even on a lot. I'm glad to see that you're still making the regular posts on the zoom channel that, that on your YouTube channel, feel free to continue to do so. Like it's good to get weird notifications at work. And I'm in the laboratory and it says there's a pirate using your zoom thing. I'm like, I know what's going on. I accept this. This is a good, appropriate resources. I support it. Larry, how is that serial, by the way? And how are you in general? Oh, it's very good. It's wheat squares. So I'm getting some, some carbs, I guess that way. Otherwise I'm doing fine. Not riding my, my motorcycle pretty weather because of my trouble with my knee, but even it's getting better. So I feel good. Wonderful. Speaking of motorcycles, I went to the rock and roll Hall of Fame, which is in Cleveland, Ohio as part of some of the after class fun stuff that we did with our friends that I made at the training session from last week. And I got to see Elvis Presley's motorcycle. You know, I got to see a lot of other cool things too. I think the main, my favorite thing about the framing of the rock and roll museum is how much effort was made to get the, the political impact of rock and roll, roll accurate, like the, the cultural significance of it. By showing like documents of people, politicians, parents, recorded officials saying this is music that shouldn't be in America. This is against our virtues. This is going to corrupt our children. This is the propaganda of these new rock and roll elitists. And I'm looking back and I'm sitting this and I'm watching it and I'm so glad it was documented one. And I'm so glad that the archives were kept and displayed in a museum, because now rock and roll is ubiquitous. I would be hard pressed to imagine a genre that doesn't in some way call themselves rock, or influenced by rock, right. And it reminded me a lot of how people reacted or and still do react to secular activities or, you know, just forms of entertainment that atheists can enjoy without necessarily having religion forced on them. A good example of which I'll throw out again. There's a game called Baldur's Gate. I don't know if you heard about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. One, one, that's a D&D game or game influenced by D&D, which was also ostracized by religious right as a game meant to corrupt our children. Not only that, but like one of the main characters in Baldur's Gates is a tiefling, which is a red skinned, horned individual that has flames erupting from her body. And it's not only just a character, but an actual love interest, potentially same sex love interest. And the game is currently being lauded as like this wonderful experience for role playing. And the Christians are very quiet as far as I'm aware. The Christians have been very quiet or religious white has been very quiet. It is almost like the same way how rock and roll has become ubiquitous gaming has become ubiquitous too. And I wonder what the leaders are saying. And are they biting their time? Or are they recognizing that what they say can be recorded and they're only speaking to the people who are listening to them without cameras and microphones? That would be one of the things I'd love to know. But the leadership is really what I want to focus on because my training was in leadership. And I wanted to course correct on the way how I've been managing, but also better critique leaders that I see in media and around me and who affect my life or who don't altogether. And that's not just the gods. It's also their profits. It's their, it's their followers is the church administrators. How are their leadership styles long term affecting the messes that they, you know, purport and are they doing in the best way possible is running away from course correct. So how about this? I want to throw out an example of good leadership skill that I learned during this week and we apply to God because we like picking Christian God. And then eventually I want to try on some of the profits and mega church leaders and even Dread Pirate Hicks to see if you're applying them in the same way too. One of the things I learned from my leadership training is feedback is important and that there's a why feedback is important is because communications inherently important in a group activity. And you can't just expect to give out a message or goal and expect everything to be followed along, because if it is, that's just a good worker. But in order to make sure that worker feels that their competencies recognize that they feel like they're related to their work and that they have a level autonomy. It's good to get feedback from them understand what they like what challenges they're having and have a play in the in the actions that they're going through in order to get their tasks on that from a leadership perspective, even if there's nothing that you need to do is a really good system just getting the feedback because sometimes people need help and they need to express it. So if you're God, can you say these are my commandments? Have at it. It'd be nice to just have some check in after a while instead of just me praying to you saying, Hey, I'm struggling. I need some help. Maybe have the God come in and say, Hey, just checking in. How are you doing so far? How is that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife going? Is everything going pretty well? Is there any issues here? No. Okay. Do you need anything for me? Okay. Well, continue. I just want to say that I recognize that you're doing you take a lot of pride in what your afterlife will be and that you very much value your soul. I just want to give you the feedback that I think you're doing a good job so far and out God out. Wonderful would be a wonderful sign, though. I don't see a lot of feedback in the God of the Christian God today. And what's unfortunate is in the Bible, there's a lot of feedback. There's a God that's very interventionist willing to come down, talk to people, smite people who are doing wrong. But in the last 2000 years, you know, like what we have now, we have a very much hands off God that only allows his followers to speak up for him. Larry, what do you think? Well, not if you listen to certain preachers like the flood that happened in New Orleans. That was God. Tornadoes that hit people. That's God, you know, et cetera, et cetera. He still smites people depending on who you talk to. Okay, lead sub-leader that you're talking to. According to them, he's still responsible for a lot for a lot of deaths. Now, the only problem with a hurricane or flood is it's sense that you be uniformly damaging to a lot of different kinds of people. I'm not sure if every single person who was damaged wasn't a follower and God though. What do you think Larry? Is that fair to say? Well, I mean, it's been going on even in the Bible days that when David took the census and he wasn't supposed to, God didn't punish him. He gave a plague to like 40,000 people. That wasn't their fault. I mean, they were, quote, innocent. But because God didn't like it and David didn't obey him, you know, there had to be somebody punished. Right. It was indiscriminate. Dred, I'd love to get your feedback on the idea. Well, the thing with God's and the people that, you know, send his message down is that, you know, I mean, it goes back to the Bible that we're the flock of a shepherd. So we're not even in the same species. We're just animals to a God, right? So there's no, just like sheep don't, you know, give feedback to God. We don't give feedback or sheep don't give feedback to the shepherd. People don't give feedback to God, you know, it's a really passive sort of thing where you pray and hope that your God is going to pay attention to you. But as far as, you know, negotiating terms or asking for better working conditions, it's not going to happen. Dred, you bring up a really good catch 22 compared to a God to where a mortal would be. If you were to take that text literally, I'm so much below even just livestock. I'm like pixels on a screen of a high intensity video game. I'm just a couple of dead pixels. Why do I need to address those pixels? From my perspective of the producer or the director of a video game, I'm just going to tell people to get a different monitor and chuck the bad pixels out. There's such a lower level than where I'm at that it's not worth my time to be deliberately interventionist and one. However, we are talking about an all powerful God who one should have the capability of doing that. And two, what does it say about a God that lords over dead pixels or lords over sheep? I'll be far more impressed by being that can at least have peers respect him rather than just always have a like if a God comes in is like I'm a God of thimbles and he jumps a bag full of thimbles on a table. These are all mine and they all worship me. It's like those are such lower objects compared to you as a person who cares like why should that be an impressive point. If we're so insignificant, what does that reflect on the authority of a God that lords over such insignificant mortals? I would love to rather see a God say, listen, I care about you just as much as not my cheap but my children or a family member. And I care about you and I want to have this interaction with you because I want to spend eternity with you. This is the levels of respect that we need to show each other. We'll establish that first. And then here are the rules and conducts that I'm setting up and I'm going to check in with you every now and then because I want to make sure that we have a built up relationship. We don't have anything like that. In fact, we're just subject to laws of nature. Dred, do you do you feel like there's something missing with this relationship with at least Christian God? Yeah. Okay. A whole bunch of stuff. Again, I mean, it's, you know, a shepherd keeps a flock for meat and for wool. Right. So there's something that the shepherd and the, you know, the other owners of the flock are getting from keeping sheep around. And so the question would be for me is what's God keeping us around for? Like, what is he, is it just so that we worship him and, you know, and, and, you know, just, you know, buy into his narcissism? You know, if that's it, well, I didn't sign up for that. So I mean, he can't be keeping us around just to test us because he knows, he knows all. Yeah. He would know how we all get tested before we test us. And the thing is, and the thing is it makes us disposable, right? Uh-huh. I mean, you know, like when he got pissed off and said, well, you guys are all sinners. I'm going to send a flood, kill you all except six people and a couple of animals, you know, and I just do this on a whim sort of thing, right? Very capricious. Right. And if you look at, if you look at the Bible, there's quite a difference between God and Jesus's management styles. They're apparently supposedly the same person. It's like good cop, bad cop. They're clearly not talking about the same God. I want to highlight this. There's a difference between the biblical version of Jesus and the today's interpretation of Jesus because there's good cop or bad cop, good cop. I super love you very much and I accept you all equally cop or whatever is popular at the moment cop, right? Like popular cop. Larry, you had made some allusions to floods and earthquakes going on. Now, leadership training, they referred to that as the stick as part of like a caring stick means motivating people. They say this is an outdated format for making sure that people are long term motivated to do quality work at any sort of organization. You can't just promise a carrot or stick based on actions or as a consequence for good work. You can't just say, hey, if you do this, I'll give you a bonus. And if you do that, I'm going to penalize you and write you up to HR. That's not motivating for a person to follow conduct or policies or even perform good work, even to be motivated to come in. Instead, what needs to be done as from a manager point of view is to find a way to recognize three things. What are called the essential needs of a person, which is one recognize their competencies land that could just be their skill set their experience, the values that they have. Also, give them a sense of relatedness, allow them to collaborate, allow them to work with people, allow them to have a relationship where they can feel that it's not just them and that they are in a team environment. And then the last one is to give them a sense of autonomy, which is allowing them to have one primarily room to fail. If they're working as your team, and also room to have accountability and ownership of the successes that they come up with. So room to fail, but also ownership of the successes. If you can give them those three things, you will satisfy their three basic needs and note that in each of those things I did not say stick. I did not say flood their homes. I didn't say, send them an earthquake or plague. These are all means to support the people or the workforce that you have, or the members on your team, recognizing their competencies, giving them a sense of relatedness and giving them autonomy in order to get their work done effectively. And startlingly, startlingly, I did not see any of that from either God, Jesus, or even the new interpretation of Jesus. God is hands on to a meticulous detail and now completely hands off for the most part, unless if he's sending you an earthquake or a tornado based on what your pastor is telling you. I don't have a sense of relatedness. I only know God. I don't know any like, he's not giving me any sense of ability to collaborate with anyone else in the supernatural being. In fact, God tells you explicitly don't worship any other gods, just me. And I'm thinking, what are the gods? And then I've never had God recognize my sense of competencies, my skills, my free thought, my intellectual pursuits. It's always just been worship me. Great. But when do I get a compliment? It'd be nice if it was at least a pat on the back for some of the good stuff that I've done. Can you recognize that? It would make me feel a lot better and more motivated to follow you. You know, it's interesting. I just participated in, I've spoken of Bart Ehrman before, he's a New Testament scholar, very well respected and well known. And I just participated in a two day conference online. It's called New Insights into the New Testament. And it actually talks about leadership styles throughout the Gospels and also through the contributions of Paul. And just how things changed over time in the space of, you know, the 100 years or so Jesus's supposed ministry and the writing of the Gospel of John about 70 to 100 years later. And you can see definitely how the interpretation leads to management styles, right, or shapes management styles, as far as how people are directed to believe. So I thought that was very interesting. I agree. I think that'd be very interesting. In fact, I would love to see a management style that would recognize that it's okay to give affirmations and compliments on a more on a more frequent basis. It's I find that some people are very motivated when they are given positive feedback on accomplishments that they have. I think that's the natural part of human condition. And I'm hard pressed to think of what the best compliment given from either Jesus or God is in the Bible to a follower. I think the only thing I can think of is God saying, and you're my favorite or God saying you're my chosen ones. But I've never heard God say, because I happen to actually like, you know, your, your motivation, your, your blah, blah, blah, it's always focused on me. You know, the way how you worship me and follow my rules and like me above all other gods, that's why I picked you. It's never a, I actually kind of think that, you know, you'd be a good template for other people to follow. I really like your family values. I think they stand up very well. And I just want to give you some specific feedback on maybe where you can course correct, but also why I support everything that you're doing at the moment right now. I never really get anything like that. In Pastafarianism, like the flying spaghetti monster is more like a chum than he is a heavy handed top down God. He just hangs out, you know, we have fun together, you know, and sort of, I mean, the fact that he created the universe in a drunken stupor just speaks to the fact that he doesn't take himself so seriously either. And neither do we. You know, it's just a matter of, you know, accepting that life is absurd at the base of it and you might as well get used to it and just, you know, let a lot more stuff roll off your back than a lot of these hard line religious people do. I have a question. If we, I think the world would change dramatically if we had God come down and just say, oh, you guys are doing pretty good. Just checking up on you. Anyone need anything from okay, fantastic and then flies right back up again. Like if that happened once or twice a year, could you imagine how many people will be Christians today and how so we showed up in even once a year and just gave a speech and went away. I mean, then at least you couldn't deny that he just did. I don't think there'd be a single atheist on the planet. Yeah, like somebody not believing the Empire State Building is there. Right. I think we would be uniformly one religion. However, whether or not we still worship the God could still be up to us to determine just the action if his actions were worthy of worship. Right, right, right. Like, if God does not like atheism, there's a very simple thing that God could do to fix that. Now, here's the question for FSM. In a similar manner, does FSM provide any meaningful feedback for for actions or is it literally just a laid back sort of, I wish you wouldn't rather do this and. Yeah, well that's, you know, it's the eight I'd rather you didn't it's not, you know, the commandments. It's just, you know, it's about people interacting with people. That's what it comes down to. It's not about, you know, don't worship other God before me or, you know, build big multi-million dollar temples in, you know, support of mind, holy name or whatever. It's about treating people with respect and dignity and kindness and humor and love and all that good stuff. It's about people. Our religion is about people. It's not really about God. It's not about the FSM so much as it is about people treating each other well. I see. So would you sense, would you, was it fair to say then that in order to fact check or to test the criteria of whether or not you're being a good FSM follower, isn't so much looking at the book or what the flying spaghetti monster tells you, but to ask other people, hey, based on this list, how well am I doing? Like, am I not being a jerk? Am I celebrating life in general? Like, give me your feedback. Yeah, exactly. I kind of like. Yes, it is. It is totally that. And again, like I said, it's about not taking yourself so seriously. I'm understanding that there are things and, you know, answers to questions about the universe about our existence that we will never ever know for sure. And to, you know, take that on the chin and say, well, you know, I don't necessarily need to know. But I can be happy about my life and the way I interact with people and the universe I live in. I can have fun with it while I'm here and just leave it at that. I can also say if there's a beer, if there's a beer volcano in a stripper factory at the end, all the better. If that if there is all the better. So I had a follow up in that. If from a scientific or a lack of God point of view, do we have solutions for any of these problems that I talked about. And I would say it's just the basic leadership training that I had today but also like the general leadership and the skills you can find on YouTube, they are backed by inferencing how well you're doing from the people who are around you and not from looking at a holy text or asking feedback from a supernatural God. You can just talk to the people that you're managing and get feedback from them. And so I would love to see God request feedback from us. That way we can improve our policies moving forward. Larry, I think we're getting close to a break. We are. This is the digital free thought radio hour on WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Recording. Okay, we're ready. Yep. Okay. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's just take a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. The ASK was founded in 2002, when our 21st year have over 1000 members actually 1100 now have to edit that. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's taproom in Pete's area that's every Tuesday evening is come after work. We're inside at the high top tables. If it's pretty weather outside on the deck, you can find us online, Facebook, meetup.com or at our website, KnoxvilleAtheist.org. You can also just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. All right. One, but where do you want to pick up? I want to touch on some extra leadership management skills, particularly these two deescalation and resolving conflict among your team members. Right. Because we know we live in a world where there's different kinds of ideas, different ideas, different method of ideologies and people and ego. And for the myriad of reasons why people may come into conflict, it can occur even on the same team as a leader and manager. It's your job to make sure your team can stay focused on the bigger picture, the main tasks that's ahead of them, whatever project there is, and can collaboratively work together. Now, here's the thing. Earth has a lot of different people on it. Earth has a lot of different people who may disagree with each other. And certainly we have a history of conflict, even among our species. When I look back at variations of the Bible, I can see that in almost every circumstance, God will come into the situation and say, oh, there's conflict. You guys are my chosen people. I picked this side. I picked this side. What about each sports game? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I picked both sides. Or both of you guys worship me and one of you guys are going to win and the ones who wins, that's the one God chose. Right. And what's unfortunate by that is it doesn't help to resolve the conflict until there's only one side left, right? And even when there's one side left, that side is going to bifurcate just due to how culture bifurcates. And there's going to be more conflict and animosity after the fact. So the better ways of resolving conflict that I found, or at least through the meaning was by getting your followers in a room or talking it out, getting the feedback in, and helping them address through dialogue exchanges. Some of the even the SC stuff that we've learned, Dred, is to make sure we're talking about our methodologies. Make sure that we understand what the issue is and try to help provide the tools that they need to resolve their situation and that you're just basically the coach allowing them to work together more effectively. You're not doing it for them. You're not picking a side. You're giving them the tools. Dred, what do you think? Well, I just actually had a comment here on because I'm live streaming. Good morning. This is resonating with me so much in how the street epistemology community is not led. The freedom and autonomy are nice, but there's some sense that I could ask for what I needed. And I've actually been working with Anthony Magnobosco and read what's a nice wonder on developing the street epistemology course that's going to be put out to the public here at some point. But I like her point. You can't ask and get a certain answer from God or be certain of the answer you get. Because, of course, it's just coming out of your own head or it's coming out of the pastor's mouth. Larry, do you have anything? And different pastors will give you different answers and different viewpoints on pretty much any question. Because fundamentally it is just it's a practice of interpreting, right? So yeah, it is a matter of interpretation and I think the main thing is giving the people who are subject to your guidance, the tools necessary for them to come up with their own conflict resolution, and not to exacerbate it the issue by picking a side overwhelmingly, or even like to the point where it's obvious that you've established a favorite or chosen group. And if there is conflict that you do make some steps to resolve it before it becomes violent or starts to have a very poor effect on the culture, the work or the planet. And I find if there's one thing that God's in history have not done well is to help resolve in a peaceful format the conflict that their followers are having by giving them the tools necessary to speak to people who have different mindsets. And so I'm going to throw up the fire and spaghetti monster. Listen, there's still wars. There's still people, you know, at each other's throats, there's still ideologies that are not compatible. What has FSM done to resolve any of that or any of the, I would say, leaders of FSM? Well, I think, you know, Pasifarians are just trying to be better people. So, again, it's about people. It's not about what the God is doing for us. It's what we are doing for each other. And, you know, that's a tough question. I'd have to give that more thought. Okay, then personally, what are you doing? Really, for me, my connection to the FSM is my connection to that, to those unknown aspects of my existence that I'll never have an answer for, but which give me awe and wonder and a sense of joy. And, you know, helps me feel better about other people, despite our mutual flaws and the other vicissitudes of life. That's how my belief in the FSM helps me. Okay. Okay. I'll go ahead Larry. Oh, you're a question for Adam. Sorry to get Adam. You don't have a problem with people who are not FSM's doing what they want, right? It's not like it's Christianity where a non-Christian has to obey the rules of Christianity. Like, you see them all the time, you know, homosexuality is bad. You better not do homosexuality. But I'm not a Christian. It doesn't matter. He's the God of all of us. Blind spaghetti monster does not protect that type of attitude, does it? No. And like I've said before, there's the God-back guarantee. You know, you try out the FSM for 30 days. You don't like it. Your old God will likely take you back. So, yeah, it's pretty relaxed. Dredd, though, let me ask this question. If it is about the people and it is about being a good person and there is no true feedback mechanism from FSM, why do you need FSM to begin with? And why not just be a good person without them? Because it again reflects the unknown aspects of the universe and of my existence. It's like a placeholder. If we find out that for sure there's no spiritual aspect or there's no other kind of aspect to our existence other than a completely materialistic one, then fine. We can live with that. But until that day, which will not be in my lifetime, there's always room. I'm agnostic to whether or not there's something beyond the physical reality of our existence. And so that I call the FSM. And because of its, you know, the sort of lighthearted aspect of it and, you know, the infusion of humor and satire and parody and all the rest. It allows me to laugh at myself so it makes me just be humble. That's, there it is, right there. I'm humble about my own understanding and how far I will ever understand. So again, it's a way to, you know, keep the attention off my own head. So if I could pull this out, it sounds like you found a good way to express humility and a healthy expression of ignorance about the fate of the universe. I can make it comfortable for other people so they can collaborate and have a sense of community so you don't just feel like the only person in a pirate hat. Like there's a bunch of other people too that you can join in with and have like really good camaraderie with. And then along with that, because there's no explicit commandments, you have the autonomy to be able to express yourself on your own time in your own manner and simply wish for people to respect that in the same way that they can express themselves. And when you say those things, I hear the same three basic needs that a leader should recognize, which is your competency, which is, hey, you can be humble, you can express yourself with humility. And you're looking for proper venues to improve yourself as a person relatedness where you do look for that sense of camaraderie or other people in community with other people. And then autonomy, which is I need to have the control to do so be an FSM and have you what it means to me in my own terms, right? And a good leader, we would recognize those three things and allow those to continue to bloom. Though when I look at, you know, the more popular religions, I find that competency is either completely ignored or used as a means to pat the God on the back. I have good followers because I'm a good person, right? And the people who don't follow me are bad. But what makes what makes an action good apart from the God? Like can a person be good without God? And can we highlight those good attributes without it relating to God or a higher power to begin with? And a lot of Christianity know that's not possible. In fact, my devout Christian friends here and even in Tennessee would even admit that they don't see themselves as a good person because they can't. Because to do so would be some sort of description of what's the right word I'm looking for. It's the same pride and pride itself is a connotized virtue that's not allowed to have. What do you think, Larry? Well, it would directly contradict the Bible itself, who says that all of us are sinners. Right, right. If you have pride in yourself, you know, and you're a sinner that's contradiction. Anyway, how can you think good of yourself if you're born a dirty sinner and seek the rest of your life just to please God so you can get into his fantasy at the end. And think about that as a system like you can't even think of yourself as a good person. Right. You worship God and recognize a good person, but you can't even do that in yourself. You lack that competency. You can't even give yourself the ability to go. It's an abusive system. Yes. I mean, if you had another person who told you you were worthless without him, you know, that would be classed as abuse. Right. You could never be good enough for him. It'd be a degenerate, if anything. And it's, it's one of those cognitive dissonance things where you're born a dirty sinner, you can never be good enough and all the stuff. But you're the special creation or the creator of the universe who loves you so much that, you know, more than any parent ever loved a child. It's too decotomy of things that you got to believe that are contradictory. Yeah, I think of it as like a drug dealer saying, Hey, you're nothing good without me and and and still gives you the drug response free. Or even a boyfriend or girlfriend. Absolutely. Well, you know, and another thing that's kind of built into that is the idea of karma. You know that, you know, we, you know, in victimhood that, you know, you're poor or you're destitute or you're down and out or something bad has happened to you. And it's somehow your fault that blame the victim. And that is essentially what Christianity is. Well, all the Abrahamic religions, essentially. Yeah, you're the one victim blaming, right? Right. It's like you're the one who survives, survives the car crash and all everybody else dies. Well, you must be living right. That assumes and projects that everybody else in the car was not living right. Right. They're dirty seniors that they got punished. Or even worse, like a plane crash, you know, the. Oh, God has a special purpose for me and all these other people died. Well, they must add it coming. Right. Exactly. Well, look, the second pillar of human needs. We talked about competency, recognizing that people can be good. Recognizing that they can be humble. I don't see that from a Christian God. I don't see any recognition. If anything, I see God holding back deliberately that recognition of good people. So that they continue to follow a supposedly good God. The second tier of that, though, is relatedness, the sense of collaboration, the camaraderie dread you're referring to. I like being around other people who also try to improve themselves as people. Have a sense of community, have that humor and also don't take themselves seriously and finding people like that enriches my life. Gives me more ability to get feedback on the list of bow shout. I'd rather you shouldn't and get the feedback on whether or not I'm improving myself as a person. In Christianity, you tend to lock yourself in an echo chamber with just other Christians who believe in the exact same version of the Holy text as you do. We know that for a fact that there's a lot of different denominations of Christianity at my state, there might be two Christian temples on the same block. And the people in block on one side of the block would say, don't go to that church. We have this, this, that, but the pastor over there is pretty bad. And you go to the other ones like, hey, that pastor, they might say this thing about us, but we don't, we don't believe or subscribe to their points of view. And we don't talk to each other, we don't agree to each other, even though their parking lots are in the same place. I've seen that happen. What's up, Jed? Well, I was going to say that, you know, in most religions I've been exposed to. You know, if you compare it to the Navy, say of a large country, like Britain or whatever, you have the officer class and there's a hierarchy, right? And that works everywhere in all these naval, naval situations. And in piracy, which is what Pasadena fashion themselves after, there was a charter you signed on to where everyone did had, you know, equal responsibilities in the work share and received an equal share of the bounty whenever they got some. And it wasn't, you know, the top down thing. It was everyone knew their position and it was actually very, very free and a lot of mutual respect. So, you know, just to the governance systems, since this is what we're talking about, is really that difference. And a lot of people who worked, you know, as crew and navies, what not, would once escape, they would join in with a pirate crew where they were actually granted freedom and respect and were allowed to make their own fortunes. Nice. Wonderful. And, and the highlights I'd say that is a crew, right? It wasn't just a band of individuals, it was a bunch of people coming. It was a crew, yeah. Relatedness. Relatedness is important. They had like a constitution and charter and all that kind of stuff and they had to sign on to it. Yep. And, you know, captains were voted in or voted out. You know, it's much more democratic than anything that was ever available in any of the military. And the main point that I'm bringing for leadership is not that they give teams competence, it's that they recognize competence, it's that they recognize relatedness and that they allow those to foster among their team. But in Christianity, I don't see recognition of competence in terms like being good or moral or ethical person. And I don't see what can foster good relatedness or community. Because if anything, it's just a community that's looking among themselves. There's no intranet work of support with people with different ideas, different ideologies. And when you have a culture that doesn't change, you have a dying culture because culture is meant to evolve with time. It's meant to change. It's meant to become bigger and learn from other cultures. That's the that's a rich culture. And it's one of the reasons why I love America, because there's just a bunch of different people coming together and learning from each other. And without that, you have a culture that is stired, potentially too conservative, and ultimately one that can't last forever. And we see it in Christianity, it's continuously trying to adopt popular trends to pull more people in, which leads to the people who are in that community being very resistant about these number of changes. What you're letting females be pastors, or priests, what you're saying we can accept gay people what you're saying women should have rights. I don't. This isn't this isn't the program that you sold us under. Yeah, it's like the Taliban and Iran right. Yes, yes, yes conflict with being shooken up into a modern culture. Larry actually had it. He said a while back ago that the more egalitarian or the more worldly a religion becomes the more they pull away from their dogma, the better. Larry, would you mind rephrasing that again. If you remember, I have to look it up. I created a meme a long time ago and floated it out there but let me find it real quick. I'd like to be quoted exactly the exact nature of it was essentially when you have a dogma unless you follow it the more tends to be that you become more compassionate, more capable of interacting with people from all around the world. And it's not a it's not a coincidence. It's by fact that you just recognize that there's different people, and they can also be good at at the same time to and that being different doesn't mean that our hearts don't speak the same language. Right. And, you know, to be honest, I think that's where a past the farion ism is a good example of the moving away from strict dogma orthodoxy and into a more responsive belief system. Right. Okay, Larry, he's got me on it. It says, I believe that Christians and Muslims are peaceful moral and productive members of modern society and direct proportion to how much they leave the literal teachings of their scriptures behind. Right. Right. Nice. And again, it's not I think it's a both a causation and a correlation there like I do see, well as soon as you drop the instructions. Us versus them and start realizing, hey, well, yeah. Many nice, progressive Christians and Muslims, do you know of who are also strict Christians and Muslims. Very few. Yeah, yeah. I'm also going to throw out one last pillar of the human needs which is autonomy. It's recognizing that people like to have. They like to have a proper pirate metaphor, control of their own ship. Is that the right way they like to be today like this. Yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're on the wheel. Right. What's the point of being a good person if you have a God who's literally control of every component of physics, guiding you from one point to next interaction, knowing what your actions are going to be and essentially governing every single component of how fast your speech, what thoughts in your head and how fast you drive down the street. Like that more morality is not obedience as Larry would say it's it's being able to conduct yourself with the knowledge of the consequences of your own action. And doing so, whether it's in a model in your head or through actual demonstrable actions. It's actually the platinum rule. Platinum rule. Give it to me. Give it to me. Yeah. So, you know, there's the golden rule do unto others is, you know, others would do unto you do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Treat people how they want to be treated. Treat people how they want to be treated. That builds empathy. It builds sympathy. It builds respect for other people's viewpoints. Right. I don't know if this counts as the wooden rule, but it's mine, which is as simple as this. Don't be a jerk. It's the foundational rule. Listen, you don't have to be a good person. You're in fact, if you are a good person, fantastic. But if you are obligated to be good, then what's the point of being good is you're just doing what you're supposed to do. You're just doing what you ought to do. But if you are, if you if you follow the mandate of I ought to not be a jerk, at least you're not holding people back. Right. At least you're not hurting people or going out of your way to cause unnecessary harm, which is the one thing we can all agree we don't need unnecessary harm. And if you're a good person on top of that, fantastic. That's even better. That's icing on top of the cake. But don't be a jerk. And Bill and Ted would say be excellent to each other. Excellent to one another. Right. But along with that, regardless of whatever rules you follow, make up those rules that you need to conduct yourself on society. Have the autonomy to understand what your consequences of actions are. And give me, if you're, if I'm a leader. Get or if I have a leader, give me room to make mistakes and learn from them. In the same way that I can own the successes and the accomplishments that I do make. If my team wins a football game because I trained and I put the marker on my face is like, why'd you win? Because my team practiced a lot. We had really good coaches and they all trained us really hard and we worked really hard for it. You just say, nope, it was God, the most powerful being in the universe dictated that we would win today. And that's why we won today. It's such an offering of the lack of personal responsibility. And likewise, when someone loses this, like, why'd you lose? Well, no one ever blames God. I saw, I saw recently a great, great meme on Facebook where, you know, you see a guy out in the sports field, you know, pointing to heaven because he just scored and says something to the effect that so God just helped you score. Let me go tell all the cancer patients in the hospital. That's a shame. That's a shame, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you don't want to close yourself from that relatedness and you do want to be more, you want to have a better display of your humility, I would say for one. And then the third one is just you want to be autonomous. You want to be able to own your accomplishments, but also own your failures to and learn from both. I feel like if you had a leader that can embody all those three things, you could have a fantastic leader worth worshiping. That's a completely different question, but at least worth being your leader or your manager in a spiritual or a non spiritual sense, even the better. That's that's my takeaways. Larry, what do you want? For what it's worth. I don't believe the concept of worshiping. I don't think we should worship anything or anyone. Yeah, I think worship puts you puts your followers at such a lower level below you that you can't respect their competency autonomy, and you put them on such a distant level that you can't relate with them. You lose all three basic needs. And again, it's the difference between a shepherd and a flock, right? Yeah, they're not they're not even in the same, you know, they're not even the same. You know, like, it's just yeah worship is just going to worthy of it. One should keep in mind what the why the shepherd keeps the flock. Yes, he wants to share on and eventually eat them. Right. Exactly. My overall takeaway just to summarize some of the points is it's not a carrot and stick situation to be a good leader. You don't just punish and then reward. And it's in the very similar way how God does with heaven and hell. It is very much a recognition, a personable genuine recognition of your followers or your employees or your your team members competency. There's sense of relatedness and their autonomy. If you can recognize those three things, you can actually better be or you can become a better leader. And we should demand that from our gods as much as our current managers. It's our three basic needs. We want to feel competent. We want to have a sense of relationships with people and we want to be autonomous. Recognize those and you do a much better job as a leader, otherwise than otherwise. Final words, Dreadpire Higgs, what do you got? Lead from behind. I like it. Don't always be out at front trying to get everyone to follow you. Leave from behind. Do good things, show people good things and be inclined to participate as opposed to be led. So, yeah. Thanks. Larry. Oh, what about you, Ty? I just give, I give him a final words unless you want more final words, but Larry, go ahead. Yeah, give us more. All right. My favorite takeaway from the rock and roll museum in Cleveland is how much effort they made to get the messaging right of how much black culture was involved in the creation of rock and roll R&B blues. Just like all jazz, a number of genres that infuse and was able to join in this beautiful intermix of culture that like everybody could enjoy. I just love the fact that those are different people coming together to make something beautiful that we can all enjoy. That's culture, baby. Right. And try to keep in mind how much the religious right or just the religious wanted to keep rock and roll out of their society when it was an inception. Right. What are they trying to keep out of our society right now? Right. Right. And I can see how scared they were in that there's a lot of different people coming together, young people, very popular, different kinds of people. This could be an enjoying themselves. Exactly. Sharing culture like this is not good for us. This is why it's distracting from them. And you want to tell us about your website and your YouTube channel? Me? Yes. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. So you can find my stuff on YouTube at mine pirate. M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. I live stream this when I'm when I'm on. Sunday mornings, a Pacific standard time or daylight time. At seven o'clock in the morning. And then I do. We appreciate you getting up early for it. I even have, I haven't had my cereal yet. Oh, wow. Get some cocoa pops or something. Yeah. But yeah, so come check it out. I've got 173 subscribers. That's, I'm, I'm doing, I'm rocking. So if you like it every week also, I, on Fridays, I try to get on to do a, a short and dirty sermon for the Pastafarians. If you want to have a three and a half minute to five minute snippet of, you know, pastafarian wisdom, come check it out. Sounds good. My content can be found at digital free thought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives. And you can find my book, atheism, what's it all about? I'm Amazon. There it is. Thanks, Derek. 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 seven o'clock in the morning. We'll see you next Wednesday night at seven o'clock here on W O Zio radio. Say bye everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. Good show, everybody. Thanks. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.