 for a group of friends. So I'll say like trying to lead atheists is like hurting cats. Everybody wants to take off in their own direction but we only agree on one question. All right so thank you so much. So unbeknownst to the people who are watching this you and I are pretty good friends. We are. We've known each other for a few long while and it's actually been a really interesting pattern going from an atheist or a person who realized he didn't have a good reason to believe in a god in Georgia to realizing I don't have a community that I can like come to and I'm moving to a new city so I'm literally really by myself. I just came out to my parents as like an atheist. They were like fine but we don't really uh it was literally the year I came back from Sweden so like the year just before I graduated so like this is like a whole year term like graduating everything changing new city no one I can talk to and I remember at my house I don't know how I found it I really don't but it was like I saw you it was either the YouTube page or it was the meetup group but there was like I wasn't a member yet so I couldn't see inside of it. You didn't do a search? I did a search on meetup for like atheists to see like maybe there are some. That's the reason I named them like Morbathias because I was a member of the Rational Speech Tennessee and they wouldn't use the A-word so they weren't getting people that were searching for the A-word. Right because I knew I was an atheist but I didn't know what were atheist groups or if there even was one and I saw literally just a picture of you and like I think four is in front of a book and I was like well it's only two guys it may not even be a group anymore so I was like let me just let me just copy and paste in the email and I'll be like are you guys even still a group and you're like yeah sure come down this time this place and I came back and I think my world's completely changing after that and I can't tell you how amazing it was. So glad to hear that. And the group that you saw was like 25-30 people wasn't it? Yeah it was huge yeah good food great conversations and a diverse group too that made me feel immediately comfortable. Yeah one thing I like to tell people is come on down with guaranteeing good conversation because I mean I was single for a long time and sitting at the house you didn't get any conversation. Right. I mean we tend to talk about religious stuff but then again we all agree on that. Yeah. So we tend to talk about other things as well. Right. And we're generally pretty sharp individuals. We tend to go off on pretty much any conversation and we pretty much guarantee it. And something I think I've really appreciated more than anything else was that all the atheists were only in agreement that they didn't believe in a god but they had at different levels. Right. They had different political views. They had you know different outlooks on family laws, politicals anything everything was different and it was just nice to have a really diverse group of friends. So I would say like trying to lead atheists is like hurting cats. Everybody wants to take their own direction but we only agree on one question. Okay. But we also have pretty much agreement on science and supernatural stuff. Sure. Let me flip this over sorry about that. Sure. But we do agree on the god question and that's what makes us atheists. Okay. It really was disheartening to hear about the group that you found in Kentucky that they're authoritarian that they have a harsh stance right on a particular belief that if you don't match that particular belief or have an even more open mind about it then they don't want you. Right. That really hurt. What I'm hoping though is that through the effort of like what I'm doing with this project I can hopefully start like my own subgroups that are a little bit more open and willing to like question even their own positions. But I wouldn't have gone that courage if I had not have met you and I probably would have gone this far if I had to met you either. I just want to say really thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Cool. So we got three minutes. Let me see if I can destroy a belief of yours with like my Jedi mind tricks. I'm just amazing. My atheists. You got a lot of cameras. They're amazing. So let's pull something fun. Normally I bring up a topic or normally the person brings up whatever they want to believe. But I like these. I exist as a soul. Okay. So you don't think that souls exist as aggregate and you're really confident on that. Pretty confident. Pretty confident. How confident are you? Would you say you want to use a scale? You don't have to use a scale if you want it. Well I'd say 90 percent. 90 percent. Okay. Why are you so confident? I'd like to keep an open mind. If I get evidence, you know I would believe it. I just have not seen any evidence for any kind of afterlife. Humans, Germans, dogs, cats, you know whatever. Why would I believe something on insufficient evidence? There's no evidence. Would you say if you had evidence you would increase your confidence that a soul does? So it's really... If it was credible evidence. There's all kinds of evidence. Yeah I was about to say. There's a whole scale of evidence. Yeah I can show you some Christian science journals that tell you multiple authors of. As a Christian what his evidence he's gonna plop down the bible and so that's it. Well you say well yeah that's evidence but it's incredible. It's just a book of 2,000 year old stories based on what people, very superstitious people would tell each other a long time ago. Is that credible? What makes something credible? Well scientific evidence. Testable, repeatable. Being able to pass your peer review. That's important. That would make a good difference. But where in I mean Christians and Muslims and a lot of different religions even Buddhism where they're talking about reincarnation have a belief in a soul and that's been going on for 2,000, 3,000 years even in ancient Egyptians. They believed that the barrow soul was going to go to the stars through a passage that they put in the pyramid. Sure. And even the people of the ancient Egyptians believed in soul. Overall that time there's not been any credible evidence put forward for the existence of a soul. And once you do that doesn't that just knock all these religions that are based on the existence of a soul window? Can I throw something at you? Is it possible for something to factually exist but have no credible evidence for it yet? Can you give me the question again? Is it possible for something to actually do exist in reality but not have any credible evidence for its existence yet? Could that not be the case for souls? Could. Okay. Then can I throw something at you? That's worth a 10%. Is really the belief not so much that you don't believe that a soul exists because it could exist but you know for a fact that there's no credible evidence for souls. You're conflating knowledge with belief. Oh. I don't have any knowledge of souls. Okay. I don't believe in any souls. It's the same as God. So your function of... I can't say that I have knowledge that God doesn't exist or exists. I have no knowledge so I'm an agnostic when it comes to the question of God. And I'm pretty much in the same boat with the belief in souls. I don't have... I'm an agnostic where it comes to souls exist or not but I don't believe in it. I just... I don't believe it. I will rephrase my question to make it more clear. Sure. I'm not asking about knowledge, not asking about belief. Just about confidence. And as far as confidence goes you're at least more confident that there's no good evidence or credible evidence that a soul exists than you are that souls don't exist. At this point you were saying earlier that if evidence were presented or if even if souls existed but have no evidence that we know about currently, if that evidence came to common knowledge or was able to be demonstrated in a scientific lab or repeatable or peer reviewed then I would change my mind and I would believe in them. Do I think that that evidence is out there? No I don't but it can be. Okay. You know it can be. Yeah. Once it comes to life it is a good time to start believing. That's right. The time to believe is when the evidence presents itself and to say I don't know it's good but that's talking knowledge. I normally say and I so my way of doing SE is if someone says something that meets a standard of evidence for me I'm fine with saying I agree and if you say I don't know because I don't have enough evidence that is very mundane but reasonable claim compared to someone who says I believe this but I don't have enough evidence. Now you've triggered my standard of evidence now I'm going to ask more questions but I think at this point I'm fine with that. And remember the knowledge, belief is different and a lot of people can play with those. Yeah and not only that but I noticed that when I bring up questions about confidence it tends to be dragged into a knowledge or belief arena where I'm not talking about either one of those. I think it's its own separate scale. That's kind of like why I like to make the scale more explicit but yeah I think you can say it's a combination of two or maybe where they overlap. Maybe? Yeah that's interesting I never thought about that. Oh there's something else. Thank you Larry. Thank you for everything Larry. I appreciate it. Would you have an issue if I put this on the internet? May I get your consent? I would not have an issue.