 Thank you. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 OPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 15th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes, or DJ Douter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Now with 20% more soap for families. All right. Have any idea what he's talking about? And our guest today is Jed Pirat Higgs. Welcome from Western Canada. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faith, Astropharianism, God's holy books, and superstition. And if you think you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. Here in Knoxville in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over 1,100 of us. 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? God, free zones. And where are they? And what would they look like? Why is it valuable? We'll get it. We will. But guys, let's slow down a little bit. There's still the matter of a bit of round of pasta that we need to dish out before we get into the potatoes. How will we light it up to our own joy at Power Higgs for serving noodles? All right. Our noodley Lord, who art in a colander. Oh, don't take me thy noodles. Thy blood be run, 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 ketoism, but deliver us some carbs. For thine are the meatballs, and the sauces, and the grog, whenever and ever. Raw. Raw, man. Give us the holy hand grenade. I know it's not the same thing as pasta, but recently I discovered granola that you can put into yogurt and have a really amazing breakfast parfait. And I think the for me is just the carb explosion. Since I haven't eaten a lot of carbs, eating something that's like very starchy has made my brain go like, Whoa, I love this so much. It's the best thing ever. So if I ever jump into pasta, I'm going to probably have to do like some protein meal first or some chickpea thing. But yeah, I can definitely recommend if you have the opportunity to get some get some carbs in you. It's wonderful. Speaking of which, Dred Pirate Higgs, how have you been since last? Not too bad. I'm actually on site right now at work. I'm sitting in a oil or natural gas plant. Oh, outside they're doing some construction. So I'm there on site medic for the next month. I'm up here. Very cool. Very cool. So you at this particular site. So you're not in the middle of the ocean, right? No, no, no, it's on land. Yeah, north. Okay, Fort St. John. So yeah, seven days a week, 12 hours a day. That's my job. Nice. Well, I'm, I couldn't imagine anyone better to have up there than you. So I continue doing that. There you go. I'd also say like my first job was almost at an Exxon oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Really? Oh, and I'm glad I'm glad I didn't take it. But it was sort of like that bright eye college. I'll take anything I can just to get in the industry sort of thing and I'm glad. Right. I was not selected for an opportunity like that. Anyway, Larry, how you been? Oh, well, I should I should mention too, though, that that I have been accepted for my degree program. So very cool. I will be I'm just waiting for the advisor to come back with you know, the specific course direction that I need to take in order to finish it. And you know, hopefully next week I'll be enrolling in a couple of courses to get that started. So yeah, and this is for your teaching, right? You're going to be teaching it, right? No, no, that's completely separate. This is actual like university degree because I didn't graduate from university with a graduate degree. Yeah. So anyway, that's what I'm doing. Sure. Yeah. That's a long that's alongside all the other stuff. Yeah, you got a lot of hobbies. That's cool. Sorry. Well, congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wait until you I've always loved to forestall the nightmares I have where I don't complete my math classes or homework. Maybe I maybe I did my school all wrong. I did mine all up front to the point where now I'm kind of traumatized and I'll wake up and like, oh, I'm done with school. I should have done it. Yeah, me too. Larry, how are you? Doing well. Loving the fall weather. Cool. Larry, you jump into a game called Starfield, right? I did. I've been playing it quite a bit lately. What was your thoughts on it? Because I'm seeing it get ragdolled on the internet with regard to like reviews and stuff like that. No, I like it. It's a space version of what he called fall out or skyrim, you know, by the same company. It's really well done. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You can get lost in Starfield. Okay, so that's not the that's not the one you were playing before. No, we were playing there together. No. Yeah, I haven't played that in quite a while now. But Starfield, long, big, huge area to play in, always something to discover. And it's a single player game, so it's not multiplayer. I wonder, did you finish the game? Me? Yeah. That would be kind of giving away the ending. But I guess it's common knowledge now. They have an end game plus. Yes. And what it is is once you get to the end of the game, you can then either continue exploring the universe because you can't discover it all at, you know, the hours that it takes you to complete it. Or you can jump to a parallel universe and start over. Right. Carrying forward all the skills that you have, but nothing else. I was wondering, through your vast expanse exploration of space, did you find any gaps? You know, Godfrey zones, have you found, did you find anything like that? Well, if you're talking about secular zones, yeah, lots of them. Oh, you did? Really? That's okay. Okay. Okay. I know in the game, there's like a religion in fact, like one that's specific for space. And then there's other snake, God. Okay. Okay. Okay. They're surfing God. The reason why I brought up gaps and Godfrey zones is I was thinking today about how useful it would be to know where God is not. And the reason why I bring that up is we put a lot of focus on where's your proof for God? Where's your proof for this omnipotent on the present being? Where's your proof? I want to see evidence of them existing. I want to see them here. I want to be able to test them. How about the inverse, right? Give me a Godfrey zone. Because if we have God everywhere, I don't really have a frame of reference to know what an area that doesn't have God looks like. So when people tell me very confidently that, I know God is here and there and there, I'm like, how do you know that? How do you, how do you reference that? So I know one. Oh, go for it. Children's hospitals. He doesn't seem to be there. Nice. We can say that. But you know, a Christian would just say like, well, it's a test and there's nothing better than the glory of God. Terminal cancer is a test. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I know it sounds evil, but wait until like, we know the spills. We know the spills. What we want, though, is a Godfrey zone, particularly in areas of sports. I know you brought up childhood hospitals, but what about if I'm playing a game with darts with friends and they win. And I see them pray to their God for the win. And I'm here like, man, I'm just a poor little atheist with some sharp needles. You had a literal superpower being that created the universe helping you win a game of darts against me. That's not fair. That's not fair. What kind of situation is that? A Godfrey zone would give me the ability to be able to test an area that has no God present or no influence present. And I can use that as a frame of reference to look at everywhere else and be like, oh, if this is what it's like to have a Godfrey zone, then this is what a God zone looks like. And that at least gives me some much more objective reference to understand that maybe there is a fact of God. And the questions can be better more informed past that point. That's my value for a Godfrey zone. You can't test God. I'm trying to hear that. Hey, listen, I don't have to test God. I just have to test the absence of God. You see? It works. It works. I'm just looking for it. What test would that be? That's the problem. I just want to know what parameters what a non-Godfrey zone looks like. How does that work? When I flip a coin, if I pray in that area, is it just as effective as praying in an area where there is a God zone? We can come up with pretty good tests if someone said, hey, this five, 10 meter by 10 meter square on this part of the world is a Godfrey zone. Or basketball is a Godfrey zone. And all the people who keep praying was like, oh, God help me with that was like, no, he didn't basketball is Godfrey. You just are very tall and practiced a lot. Gary, do you see any value? Yeah, you'd be interesting to see what, you know, if physics and chemistry and biology all work differently in a Godfrey zone. Yes. That's what I'm saying. Listen, can we still see evolution in a Godfrey zone? Can we still see medicine working? Does it work better? Does it work not at all? And now we have an ability to be like, hey, I'll pray for you to make you feel better. Like do that in the Godfrey zone. Pray for me to help this disease go away in the Godfrey zone. And we'll see if it's just as effective as you doing it in a God zone. And if it's just as effective, don't do it because it's a waste of time, right? It doesn't matter whether God's there or not there. I'm going to get better or I'll keep getting worse sick after the point. So you can save yourself time. I can save myself time. And I'm not saying that a God doesn't exist. This is the brilliant thing behind this. I'm not saying, hey, I want to prove to you or God does exist. I just want an area that we can test that doesn't have the God there. That way we can at least say, hey, that's all I need. I just need the Godfrey zone to test. What do you think, Larry? Yeah, I'd say just sports. Just roll an area off. Larry, what do you go first and then we'll have Dredd. Larry, what do you think? As sports would probably be, is either a Godfrey zone or God is the fenneciest person in the universe because the next day it's that team. Sure. It seems like God always loves the team that has the most money. Isn't that weird? Or the best training or the best coach, which you can get with the most money. It just seems so bizarre. Dredd, what do you think? Yeah, I totally agree. There's got to be areas you can just rope off, right? And I don't think it would be necessarily, how do I put this? Blasphemous? You let me know. You guys let me know. All I'm saying is it would be nice to have a privacy room. Maybe not big enough for us to cause any harm. I'm not talking about an entire city where it's just like, this is the godless city and whatever happens here stays here. I'm not asking for that. I'm just saying a tiny foot by foot square volume straight up into the universe, just a very, very, very small volume compared to the vastness of the outer space, or at least just an area that if you stand in it, God's not paying attention. You can be right here. You can think whatever thoughts you want. Test it out. Here's your frame of reference, right? And now when you step out, do you feel bad? Do you feel terrible? Do you feel scared? Now step out of the square. Oh, do you feel love? Do you feel like the Holy Spirit sees you, recognizes you and recognizes your love as a part of a holy trinity? No, perfect. Now you know. Now you know by stepping here and stepping out what it feels like to have God in your life. And I think what could be a better way to get all the atheists on board with at least understanding that a God exists without having a show that you exist. You could just show an area where you don't exist. I think it's the perfect system. What do you think, Larry? Well, since he never shows up and tells us and we only have to go with what the God believers tell us, one of the most concentrated zones where God would be all the time, every day, all, you know, concerned with everything would be the bedroom. That's the perfect, the God headquarters, you know, where he's the strongest. Yeah. Yeah. It seems weird. It seems like he has a lot of interest in bedrooms and what's inside your brain, but not so much like just giving us an ability to be able to demonstrate a frame or reference of what it looks like when he's not present. And if I had that, I'd be way more confident for when I get a feeling in my heart or if a team wins or if I get miraculously cured that it was God that was helping me out if I knew what it was like without God's influence. And I think some Christians might be listening to this and thinking like that makes no sense whatsoever. I always have this analogy where it's, if I don't know what something that's not a spoon is, right? If I don't know what a reference of something that's not a spoon, but I'm very confident that every utensil in my kitchen drawer is a spoon, I could pull out a spoon and be like, this is a spoon. Pull out another spoon and be like, this is a spoon. Pull out a knife and be like, this is also a spoon. Very confident. This is also a spoon. Pull out a fork. This is also a spoon because I don't know my frame or reference. I'm just confident that everything is spoons. And in the same way, a Christian is confident that everything around them is a creation from God. And they're pointing at the rocks. They're pointing at my watch. They're pointing at Pakistan. They're pointing at the trees. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, what's your frame or reference? Do you know what something that's not made by God looks like? Do you have any frame or reference? Because that's how we recognize things by comparing them to things that they aren't and making that comparison. If we don't have a comparison of what something that's not created by God looks like, how are we justified to make the claim that everything is created by God in the same way that I can say everything is a spoon in my kitchen drawer? It's a claim, but I can't demonstrate that with any sense of reference. So give me a no God zone. Give me a God free zone. Give me a little square on the ground. Put it in Scotland. I don't care where you put it in. I'll drive. I will travel to wherever the God free zone is. I'll stand in there and I'll be like, oh, I get it. I get it. Okay. And then I step out of the square and you could just have a line of atheists. Larry would be right behind me. He'd be like, I want to check this out. I just want to see what this big fuss about souls is. And then you step in the square and you're like, Oh, souls. I get it. And then you're shaking your head, but you'd be, you totally would be on board. And then you probably go like, Oh, definitely. If there was some way to test for God, hell yeah, go check it out. Oh man, I have to make so many apologies. You'd have to make 10 years worth of apologies right now. That'd be the crazy. All right. So final thoughts on God free zones. Guys, Larry, I'll throw it up to you. What do you think? Value, good idea, bad idea? Should we start praying for it? Well, no, any kind of test, I think for God would be good. But even if you had a test for God and it tested positive instead of false, true and false, we still don't know which God. I mean, there are 30,000 religions on this planet. And who knows, maybe a God that doesn't have a representative religion on this planet. You know, we don't know, but everybody's just going to jump to the fact that, you know, there's a God. Yeah, it's our God. And we're right back where we started. Okay. Okay. How about this though? My setup would be, there wouldn't... Sorry, it just occurred to me. And that still doesn't answer the question about whether there's an afterlife. I hear that. I also hear that too. That's for sure. My main concern would be, if we had a God-free zone and a non-God-free zone, maybe we could set it up in a way where we could explain which God we're talking about. Even if it was to one God, that could be a good test to just verify if that one God exists or not. And then maybe it's some other guys that we're talking about. But maybe a specific no-go zone, no God zone for one particular God. And we put up the headquarters of each of the, like, Allah could be in Islamabad. And the Pope, Vatican, could be the Catholic God. And somewhere in Utah could be the Mormon version, et cetera. You could just have the no-God zones there. And a person could visit all of them and figure out through some very cute analytical testing which one was the most valued or viable experience or not. But what I'm really more concerned about is worship. Because let's say we nailed it down to one God. And we actually were able to confirm that the no-go zone or the God-free zone versus the God zone was impacted by the presence of a supernatural being that we can test at this square and we know for a fact that that God does exist. It does not mean that I would worship that God. It just means that I know that that God exists. And I think that's the big distinction. I don't think we should worship anything. Worship is a horrible concept. Right. I, as an atheist, would no longer be an atheist, but I would not be a follower automatically of a God that commands me to worship Him. Right? Unless if you were like, I wish you rather shouldn't and maybe offer some, you know, pasta on the weekends, I'd be like, okay, maybe there's something better here, but I'm still not worshiping even that God. But I would at least like say, hey, this is a better... You could follow them as long as they prove worthy. No. I'd follow the Twitter account. Yeah. Like, are you a follower of this guy? I was like, oh, I'm on Twitter, but that's basically it. Like, for the most part, yeah, he or she has my ear and that's basically it. Dred, do you think that's fair? Would you say that you would be prone to worship, say, for example, the Flying Spaghetti Monster if you knew for a fact that that God was able to be tested in terms of its presence? No, and I agree with Larry. I wouldn't be inclined to worship any God, but to celebrate the God, I'd be up for that, which I do. Okay. Yes. And which is, you know, the past, the very thing. We celebrate. We celebrate it. We don't worship it. And it doesn't require worship. It doesn't require sacrifice. It doesn't require, you know, you know, stretching out and praying and five daily prayers or any other kind of silly thing. Yeah. And just finding out that there's a God or not doesn't answer any of the questions. You know, why does, why would he allow our children's cancer? And why does he allow volcanoes to create in the first place? Or COVID. You guys are running into another topic that I'd love to talk about that. How about this? The idea that you have so many questions from your creations, right? I make pipe cleaner animals. I do it as a way to like keep my hands busy. If I'm in a long meeting at work, I got a bunch of pipe cleaners. What is that, a snail? It's a snail. Yeah. I got platypuses. I have herbirds. I make a little random stuff. It's fun to create while you're stuck in a meeting. I can do it even when I'm in class. We have some training classes and stuff like that. But when you're done, you end up with all these cute little toys. And when I'm done, the weirdest thing. I never subject any of these cute toys to internal damnation and help. Do you let your cat play with them? I don't let my cat play with them, but he does play with them. He does. So like, I'll come into the room and they'll all be strung across the floor. But you can see they're relatively intact. So like, hey, mind. Yeah, he plays with them. He knocks them around, but then I just pick them up and I put them back on the shelf again. And then he comes back and that's our game. But the fun thing is, because I don't torture them or damn them to internal fires of hell, I always think of myself as a better arts and crafts guy than God. And there's a whole list of things that I do feel like I'm better at than God. Don't mean that in a bad way. But I would definitely say my arts and crafts capability is one of them, because I don't punish my creations after I make them. And when I or give them cancer when they're kids, or make a board with misshaped hearts and have to like deal with pain or or leave them to be prone to abuse, you know, whether mentally or we could go on and on. Yeah, it's a long list. Why can't God be a better? What is the deal? What could God learn from arts and crafts? Dred, I know you enjoy the occasional crafting project. I've seen some pictures of your floats and stuff like that. What could God learn from a good hands at craftsman? Well, are you there? What's this? I want you to tell me like some tips that God could learn from a good craftsman. Oh, no, we're getting a little bit of communication issues. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Well, yeah, no, your stuff, right? No, you're right. Yeah, you're fine now. You're fine now. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, you're fine now. Yeah, well, certainly, I mean, you think about you think about the giraffe and the main artery that goes up its neck and just how poorly designed that is, you know, if God designed all this stuff, he is a rookie. He's a rookie. And, you know, if he was designing all these different creatures and beings and whatnot, yeah, you think well, all that practice, you get it right. Yeah, but no. Who was it that cosmologist, the guy, the doctor of the planetarium? I can't think of his name, but he says, yeah, my title, Neil deGrasse. I'm a Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson. He said, why would a God create a person whose playground is right next to the waste facility? Sure, sure. I'm also thinking like as a craftsman, one of the best things you can do is plot out your design before you begin, right? It's not like jazz. If you're making something that other people are going to have to use, you like plot it out. And the common word we hear even in engineering is measure twice, cut once, right? Yes. So like you'll you'll get the measurement and you're confident, do it again, right? It's just the you may not literally do that. But the idea is make sure everything's your plan works first, then execute the plan, right? Look it over first. That's right. A design review. And so if I'm there at the perfect, perfect example is a perfect example to sign these twins, right? Yeah, sure. Measure twice, cut once. Right, right. Don't leave it to humans to like have to figure that out on the on the back. But if I'm there design review table for giraffe and some or for a dolphin and I'm thinking, you know, the hole for the hole for breathing is right next to the hole for drinking and eating. And if that gets clogged, the kind of person not breathe anymore. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a really good design. I'm like, just you already made these other animals. Just make a breathing. I like Larry. You just make them breathe out of our ears. Yeah, you're breaking up something terribly there. My my thing is we have three holes that we can breathe out of, but they all bottleneck down to the one place where we swallow and eat food through. It seems very, it seems like, hey, come on, like we could have, you could have figured this out. Like there's a, we could have had these be, we have two breathing holes, right? For smelling and then we have the eating and drinking hole that goes down the same breathing hole. Like, come on, like we could figure that out. Design review. We could have optimized that ahead of time and caught it. We could have measured that twice and made one cut and then fixed a lot of problems. How many people have died from choking or think about that? That's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's along with that. I always think of like whenever someone brings up the humans are this is all part of the design. This is all part of the plan and the reason why it looks bizarre to use is because you're just not as awesome as a God, you know, you don't understand his complex nature. Lay not on your, your understanding. Right. In other words, don't think. Right. The thing about designing though is it's not about making the thing super complicated. It's about making something as simple as possible, which means me and my simple primitive mortal brain should be able to understand the creation if it was, or the design, but if it was design or creation by design, because design, the hallmark of it is simplicity. It's why it's why cars have one engine or one gas tank. I could put 40 in them, but if it doesn't make the car operate any better, then why do I have all these extra moving parts? I want to be able to have a simple design as possible with a few moving parts as possible, which gives me fewer failure modes as possible. And that overall leads to a better design contraption. But when I look at the world, especially even human bodies, I got two nipples. I don't need nipples. What's going on with that? Yeah. There's just it's a redundant. It's redundancy. It's like, I didn't need one. I got two. What's going on? It was like, you can give him to someone else. He doesn't want them either. We all got too many. All right. I think we're nearing the bottom half of the half hour. Larry, why don't you take us out? Sure. This is the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the Atheist Society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year and have over 1100 members now. We have weekly in-person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville City. I'm sorry, Knoxville's old city at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables for if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. You can find us online also in Facebook, meetup.com or go to our website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org. Or you can just Google Knoxville Atheist. It'll take you there. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you can still go to meetup and do a search for an Atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. That's right. Wombat, where do you want to pick up? I had a really good comment from YouTube. This was on our show called Give Me Reason and I'm keeping the name since it's the actual person's name. I'm going to keep it anonymous for the show. But he says I've been turning into this podcast for a while and I must say this topic. There's a topic of religious accents that I find quite intriguing. As an atheist, I've always been fascinated by the way people from different religious backgrounds often carry their beliefs in their speech and actions. It's interesting to know how our upbringing and surroundings can shape not only our religious beliefs, but also our manner of speaking. And when you grow up in a religious community, it's not just about the doctrines, it's the entire culture and the way of expressing those beliefs. It's a very good point. So I think we made the mention on previous shows that people still say bless you, whether they're atheists or not. We may say words like... I know. I know some people don't... I'll never say it. I say it sometimes because I don't feel like Christians own the word. And that's just my... And it's a... I will say... I'll say it sometimes. I'll say wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It means good health. Yeah, I'll wish people... My family is religiously really diverse. And so when my sister who's Muslim, she celebrates Eid, I'll wish her Eid Mubarak because she's Muslim. My mom's a Jehovah Witness. They don't celebrate holidays, but she has a gathering and it's a good meeting that she has. I'll wish her a good meeting. My sister's Christian. And for the most part, I don't have a problem letting them know that I'm an atheist and that I'm wishing them good will in terms that they can appreciate because I don't want them to assume that the only people who tell them bless you are the only people who tell them like, hey, Lord, chariot, all these other words that are co-opted Christian music. I was like, oh, yeah, I love mercy, me too. I want them to know that there are atheists that also like those two, that there are atheists that show up at the Charity Drives, at the Food Center Bank Packing. Like I want them to know, hey, when you look around and you make the assumption that everybody who's with you right now is the same God wavelength as you, that's not the case. And I also want you to know what atheism looks like firsthand and not from what your pastor tells you what they look like, but from me. And so like after I let you know I'm an atheist and you sneeze and I say bless you, I want you to know that like, hey, atheists do that too. And so like the next person who tells you it on the street, second guess whether that's automatically a Christian too. I feel like there's value in that. And whether that's my, and the reason why I do that is it's not so much a religious accent for me, but it is something that I was brought up in. That was my culture when I was graced. I was raised in Christianity. And when I left it, I understand the still good will behind it. And if I let, if I get people opportunity to know that I'm an atheist, I want them to continue to see that good will. That's the nuts and bolts of it. What do you guys think? Is that fair? Larry? Oh, definitely. We need to be able to come out of the closet. I mean, there's so many of us who still live closeted atheist lives. And if there's a meme going around the internet, it says if we could all come out of the atheist closet, we could stop living under fairy tales. Right. And it's so true. And the only people that are really talking about atheism are the people who don't know anything about it. The preachers, you know, are talking to their flock about telling them how bad atheists are and that we eat babies and sin all the time and that we're atheists basically because religion hurt us. You mean you don't? We lost our father or somewhere mad at God. If we were mad at God, we would believe in God. You can't be mad at something you don't believe in. That's very true. Dred, do you think there's value in the message that I bring out? Or do you think I should curve it back a little bit with regard to saying bless you, et cetera? Well, it's about training yourself and training those around you to be more aware of these habits that they've become accustomed to. There's a lot of people and you hear it in movies and TV shows, even amongst atheists, like, oh my God, or these phraseologies that just are just a matter of habit I try to be much more purposeful in considering what I'm saying when I make exclamations like that, like I'll say for Pete's sake or something a little less onerous or indicative of a deity. It's just being purposeful and mindful of what you're saying when you're saying those things. I've had conversations with atheists who repeatedly in the conversation will say things like, oh my God, or listen to what yourself. Just listen to what you're saying and just be mindful of it and extract it from your vocabulary and that will become a habit. Just make it a habit. A mindfulness of it. I remember I was at a job where I was helping a lab set up for some testing and I was eating lunch with two of my co-workers and they were talking pretty dismissively about atheists in front of me. They didn't know I was an atheist at the time and they're like, yeah, I can't even believe, you know, atheists get angry when you tell them bless you after they sneeze. It's like, man, I'm just saying bless you, like you don't have to take it a big deal. It's like, yeah, atheists get so ornery over stuff and I said, I'm an atheist and I don't mind if someone says bless you to me and that shut down the conversation completely. Yeah, the conversation was no longer about the saying, was it? Yeah, at that point, it's like, oh, okay. Well, I never, one, I got the impression like none of those people actually had a conversation with someone who was out as an atheist and two, those people knew me well enough that they, like that, that stopped the whole dissection on atheism when the most part. But it also gave them an idea of what one looks like. And so even if I don't say the words, it'd be said to me. And I think as you would be mindful of the words you choose, also be mindful of your reactions to them, because if you are wearing a flag that says I'm a post-affarian or I'm an atheist, people are gonna take your reactions and also generalize on top of that as well to feed their confirmation bias. So be mindful of your actions, be mindful of your reactions. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say one thing that brought this much more closely to my attention was why we say, why people say bless you when someone sneezes. Sure. And it was because it was thought that it was when the devil could come in and possess your soul. And that's why people said bless you. Yeah, it goes even before that. It goes even before that, believe it or not. When I put it, yeah, so when I started pointing this out it was like, what are you blessing me for? Like what's going on that I need to be blessed because when I sneeze? And well, I don't know, it's just what I was taught to do. And I said, well, this is the background of why we say bless you and just sort of to educate a little bit, right? And just to point out, well, maybe you should think about the background for some of the things that you say and do because, you know, like lots of people excuse behaviors by saying, well, that was the way I was raised. And that becomes an excuse for sometimes behaving badly. And, you know, if we're to be self-actualized, we should be much more mindful of the things we do and why we do them and not just blame it on our past or on our family history or on our culture or on our ethnicity or on our religious background or any of that stuff. Be mindful, be self-actualized, you can think for your... Yeah, and even when you are, and one, you should be mindful on everything that you do. And two, even if you are mindful, you might maintain the same set of actions, but you just have a more informed intentionality behind it. So if I say bless you to a person... Yes, exactly. ...who's like, hey, Ty, can I explain to you the history of this? I'd be like, actually, I'd love to have a conversation about it because I already know some parts of the history on this and we could just have a mindful conversation that's fun and we just move on with the rest of our day. But like, the idea is, I just want to make sure that you're thinking about the things that you do because it's good to think about the things that you do. It's one of the rare qualities that humans have with this weird outer layer brain that we've got that allows us to be reflective on how we conduct ourselves. Yeah. We can do that towards the betterment of society. Right. I also want to throw out like, every culture has a variation of the bless you phrase. Like, I know Greece, Rome, and Spanish culture have like a variation of salute, a salute, which means like to your health, which used to be a concept for wishing someone health when they showed signs of sickness. And then in plague times, they would say bless you as a way to like, immediately start finding back the plague because you didn't really understand germ theory well enough back then. And then of course, you know, Christianity comes and co-ops a lot of stuff. And now it's become, well, when you say bless you, you're specifically referring to our God. And that's our brand. And we put a trademark on it. And along with words like Lord, even though that was a job description before Christianity exists, chariots, salvation, shepherding. I was like, you can't take shepherds. Like, no, we're going to take rainbows. Okay, well, we lost rainbows, but we're going to take everything. Take anything that's cool in culture. Put our logo on it. And so I say, we're going to take bunny rabbits. Yeah, bunny rabbits and everything. Pine trees. It's all ours. It's all ours. Christmas trees. Yeah, a lot of these things existed before in what would be considered heathen or paganistic processes. But my main thing is you can take them back. And they call that, yeah, they call it exacting. Ah, I would have called it like manifest destiny of religion. Anyway, so yeah, thank you for that comment. We really appreciate it. That was a really cool discussion. I wanted to touch a little bit on the flip side of religious accents, where the idea for me, when I was before I like thoroughly read this comment was, I thought it would be about how people have accents, but they don't think about them because in their mind, that's just the way how they think. No one ever really thinks about the particular way, how they pronounce words, but they don't recognize that that was influenced by their location that they're born in. And everyone in as far as who loved them and their authority figures and their entertainment, how they spoke to them and they simply adopted it without recognizing it. Like humans are a sponge when we're brought up and we'll just pick up the mannerisms of people who are around us. And we consider them as truth because they're foundational to our up being and our upbringing. And we do the exact same thing with religion. It's not a coincidence that I'm, that I used to be a Christian because my parents were Christian and I grew up in a largely Christian nation. And it's not a coincidence that people who are Muslim oftentimes grow up with Muslim parents in Muslim dominated areas. Yeah. It's a matter of geography more than anything else. It's a matter of geography, a matter of who your parents are and why do we not consider that? I've had conversations with people who are like, well, I've done my personal research and I just came to the conclusion that this is true. It's like, dude, your name is Matt. Your name came from the Bible. Have you not considered that you are in the effect very much steeped in a culture since birth in the particular region that you have, you know, consequently retroactively determined it was true with very little information about any other religion around you? And if I thought a little bit further, they'd realize that there're not that many Matthews in the Middle East where the name is theoretically originated. Yeah. Like if your name is Jesus, his name is Matt, if your name is Joel, if your name is James, Chris, like you're going to have to consider like the deck was stacked against you when it came to trying to figure out what is true and what isn't true and in a fairly clear way. And if you are very, very confident that your God's true and you don't want to consider that, then you need to come up with a better argumentation platform because we're still waiting to hear a good argument for why this God exists. And when we're presented again and again with people whose names just come from the Bible saying, well, here are these same things that my pastor told me. It's like we've already heard those arguments. We already know them when we know it's not justified enough to believe in a supernatural being. And we just see it yet again, another person brought up in a religion with a religious accent trying to be like it's trying to be like my religion is the one true religion. It's the same way as someone with like very thick country accent being like, I don't think country music is the best country music. I just think it's the best music of the platform of all time. I don't think it's the best music. Like really, really, you think that? That's why do you think that? That's so entertaining. I imagine you have a lot of argumentation to present that. It's just a religious accent at the end of the day. I love that accent, man. You did a great job. Thanks, thanks, thanks. I've been living here for a while. I've been living here. Yeah, it's like you grew up here or something. I didn't mean to start a fight, you guys. I wanted to talk about conflict real quick too before we wrapped up. I did some training in Ohio recently about how to resolve conflict across team members at a site that's part of like a leadership development program. And the idea of resolving conflict, unlike SE where it's sort of like you're trying to avoid conflict and you have like a good conversation by avoiding conflicting minefields of ego, right? What do you do when a conflict already has occurred and you need to resolve it, right? What are those tools and what do they look like? And I found a very good set of conversational tools in order to do it. And it's startling how effective it is because I've already gone back to work and started implementing these tools and resolving some conflicts with both of my team and with other team members at our site. And it's been a really, really good practice. One thing that I recognize when I look in the Bible is that there's very little effort on God's part to resolve conflict or conflict mediation. In fact, if I were to be as objectively frank, he instigates conflict at almost every opportunity. He's always there being very ambiguous, picking favorites, setting up people for failure. And I don't understand the premise of why someone could look at a God who is willing to go through all these efforts to set people up for failure and cause harm for his own crafts and creations and things that he apparently loves and yet still call this God a good God. It blows my mind. And so maybe I can get some resolution here. Larry, do you think God is a good conflict resolver? Aside from killing everybody? We don't have any examples of God, so it's really hard to say. All we have is holy books. And we know from research and scholarly research that those are written by humans. So I'd say there's no way that we could know if a God is a good conflict resolution. And if you look at the history of religious conflict, I'd say there's not a chance in hell. Conflict resolution resolver. Well, look at the Spanish Inquisition. Theoretically, God was in the middle of that. How much conflict was there? 400 years. Not only that, but the profiteering of things like the Crusades, for example, just really, really terrible. Because what people are uniformly afraid of if they don't have a means of coming to terms with it is death. And what religion offers is a you don't die button that they can press for you. Death will just be a change of address, right, as Larry has put it. And so that could be really captivating for people who have a matter of fact existential crisis and maybe even shorter lifespans, particularly if you were like planning on dying before even 40, like you'd think to yourself, I need to get on the program to where these very confident people can tell me that my soul will live on or that I will live on and I'll have this paradise. How can I do that? I'm coming to you from a place of ignorance and whether you believe it or not, you are selling a false hope to people because you have something that you cannot demonstrate to be true and yet you are using it to harm other people. You're saying, well, I needed to go over to this land and reclaim it for our team and give me 10% of your resources and indoctrinate your children to continue to reinforce my teachings. It's so harmful. And I can't think of anything more what's the right word, toxic, than encouraging people to harm each other for false hope. And that has been religion's modest operandi since the beginning. What do you think? But even turning to religion at the end of your life isn't conflict-free. Voltaire said on his death that when the priest was after him to accept God, he says, well, and right now, the devil, excuse me, he said, this is no time to me making new enemies. You still have that good-bad conflict even in the supernatural theology. True, true. You know, the conflict resolution could have been resolved with Satan a long time ago if God was just like, hey, you know what? You are kind of pretty. You're pretty good-looking. I made a pretty good-looking angel. Okay, you know what? I've overreacted. I'm sorry, Satan. You're a pretty good-looking guy. I'm just going to move on with the rest of my day. You know how you're good. You're good. Everyone's good. I'm going to remove your nose, though, but you're pretty good. Oh, that's pretty messed up. That's pretty messed up. God, I need my nose. Okay, we'll keep the horns, though. The ITR, the entire premise of evil, which was Satan, is just, you know, God's plan to further torment people in interest to drive more people to worship him or to test them because he had some grand plan where people would have to go through an insurmountable amount of suffering just before they can sit at his right-hand side and have him worship him, just so they can pat him on his back for the punishment that he gave them and for sins that are essentially rules of engagement that he wrote. To just turn that all around and be like, yeah, but God is good. Getting that from a Christian just really blows my mind because when you see the system for what it is, so startlingly, such a fraud, and I just wish that, you know, when you see the magic trick, you can't unsee it anymore, right? It's like, does that hand trick in this day? This is how I made a Two of Hearts show up. It's like, oh, we'll do the trick again. It's like, I could, but you're not going to enjoy it anymore. It's like, I wish we could do that for Christians. Just show like, hey, look, it's this. It's false hope. It's like, oh. Yeah, it's ripping open the screen and showing Oz the man working the controls behind the curtain, right? Right, yeah. Well, you can tell them, but they just won't believe it because they're so scared that their soul will go to hell. They'll be punished in this lifetime for leaving the church or that type of thing. Yeah, and I was in the same boat. I was in the exact same boat too. If you told me back maybe 20 years ago, I would reject everything that you were telling me. However, what happened on my end was I had a better appreciation for what was true or not. Like I had a better system as I was learning my stuff in science and actually paying attention, not just acing everything. Like I failed a lot of things and I had to realize I had to reassess how I understood and learn things. Then that, and that breakdown of my ego and understanding how the scientific method work, I realized better explanations rather than having answers. I realized how to get explanations and how to work. So many people lose their faith in college. If it's a good college, it'll wreck it out of you. If it's a bad college, they'll just give you the degree at the end of the day. Yeah, unless it's Trinity Western, right? Yeah. Right. There's some religious college. Right. Where they reinforce the message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my idea was through that process, I developed a better standard for wanting to know true things. And then when I looked back at the Bible, because I had an ethics class and I had to actually go back to the Bible and be like, wait a second, is any of these following the, I just aced my ethics test, but nothing in this Bible would make sense if I know ethics. Right. And I had a struggle because I wanted to believe the Bible. But the struggle came internally because now I realized that this was not satisfying a model that I knew was accurate. A model of understanding for what I knew was accurate and how to actually be a better person. In fact, I was coming up with better ones than not what I had with the Bible. I was like, oh, Peter shouldn't have done that. Jesus sort of said this. Oh, no, it came from inside of me. And I think truly what stimulates that is an appreciation for what's true and knowing what's false. And until you have that methodology that you care about, you won't matter if someone just comes up to you and says it's false because you don't have a way to verify what they say is true because you're also operating under false. Reliable. Yeah, you don't have a way to reliably verify. You need a criteria and you need to have appreciation for a good criteria because even if you have a good criteria you don't appreciate it if it doesn't tell you the answers that you want. So you need to have the appreciation for a good way to tell true things from falsehoods. And once you have that and you appreciate it, you're not going to give it up because you understand its value because you understand that it's a useful way to move through your life. And that's what you need to instill in people through education, through conversation. It could be done in a short period of time. It could be done over a lifelong journey but that's how you get people to see the screen door at Oz or the magic trick. The screen door. You get to appreciate that criteria for understanding true things and false things. That's how you do it. True things. Larry, we're nearing the end of the show so how about we wrap up? Is that cool? Yeah, we need to go through dread location of his works. What do you got? What's your work? What's my what, what? Current quest, chaos. What's your what's your what's your works going on? What would you love to plug before next week? Oh, well, I'm still doing my weekly sermons on my YouTube channel, MinePirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. They're short little sermons, like not even five minutes long so they're little snippets there that I like to have some fun with. For the FSM, for the FSM Church? Yeah, yes, that's correct. Yeah, for Flying Spaghetti Monster and of course they're just they're not specific to Flying Spaghetti Monster just, you know, sort of general every every day kind of good ways to look at life. Maybe the last one there I did was on the Platinum Rule. Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. And that was a nice little segment I thought that applies to everybody. It's not specific to post-afference, but yeah, yeah. And if you like it, subscribe. Nice. And I'll plug, I'll probably coin the term here. I probably did in the last week's show, but you got the Platinum Rule. Treat other people how they want to be treated. You have the Golden Rule. Treat people how you want to be treated. Has its limitations. And it may be a good understanding of when to do both. Like it's good to have one versus the other. I don't like dogma either way. Like sometimes it might be good to do Golden versus Platinum, just depending on the situation. But the true way how you figure out which one's which is, in my opinion, the Wooden Rule. The Wooden Rule is, don't be a jerk. Do that as a guide for how you fall all over the rules before that. All right. Right, be excellent to everyone. You don't have to be. Yeah, be excellent to each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's from Bill and Ted, isn't it? Yeah, uh-huh. There you go. Just a reminder, you can find this show and podcasts everywhere. Just search for Digital Freethought Radio Hour. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. If you're having trouble leaving religious beliefs behind, and many people do, you can get help from recoveringfromreligion.org. My content can be found at digitalfreethought.com where we keep all these archives of these shows, atheist songs, and many, many articles on the subject of atheism. My YouTube channel is at doubter5 and you can find my book, Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. Remember, everybody is going to some other religions, hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Don't sweat it until then and enjoy your life. And we'll see you next week, next Wednesday night at 7 p.m. Say bye, everybody. Bye-bye, everybody. Good-bye.