 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, digital free thought radio. Hello and welcome to the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO Radio, 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, December 26th, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Daughter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. I got the toasty hands for Christmas break. Toasty hands for Christmas break is my new Christmas song. I'm working on it. It's going to be indicated. It's going to make a lot of noise. And warmers. Okay. Our guest today is George Brown, two and a half from Brooklyn or formerly from Brooklyn now in Tennessee. A digital free thought 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 faiths, God's holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in town where you're probably not. And here in Knoxville and in Southern Bible Belt town, we have a group of over a thousand of us though. And it's probably more than just you and your town. We'll tell you more about that group though, however, after the mid-show break. Wombat, what's our topic for today? Teach me right the first time. The reason why I want to talk about that is many fold, but we'll get into the mean of potatoes after we check in on everybody. George Brown, how you been since last week? Oh, pretty good. I confess being opposed personally to YouTube, I mean to Google and Facebook, which makes my life a real challenge. Oh, no. How so? That's such a weird thing because everybody, I mean, everyone would say they're without them, their lives would be so much more inconvenient. That's true. You were born. Yeah. If you like arguing on the internet for sure, Larry does like his problems. I mean, I am deadly opposed to being surveilled and these are surveillance businesses. They're business to surveil me and I really resent that. So, however, I am a hypocrite and I confess, Lord, I am a hypocrite because I cannot live without YouTube. And I have found that Google Street View is essential for me when I drive to Knoxville. I mean, I rehearse the trip before I go. Let me throw you something out that will blow your mind too. You get an Oculus Rift that has Google Earth, which has all the street view camera angles in it. And you now have virtual reality access to any part of the planet. I did a virtual walkthrough of the Grand Canyon. I was just like, it's just like almost being here. They play the sounds. They have like soundscapes of people walking through the Grand Canyon there with you. And you're just like, this is bizarre. You can go to museums. But you know what? Google Earth, but for Oculus Rift, you can check out any museum you want. And I think the museum experience makes way more sense. But guess what? Yo, what's up? My street is not on Google Street View. What? Wow. Yeah. It's not new, or it's just the drivers are like, I'm not driving down there. It's more like that. It's more like that. But you asked me what I'm up to. I have been connecting, setting up stereo components to use with one of my computers so that I can understand people better on YouTube. Because a lot of people record themselves so badly on YouTube. Right. You can't understand them. I'll throw this out. Final tip from George Brown. We will suffer bad audio, but no one's going to sit through a video with bad. I'm sorry. We'll suffer bad video, but no one will sit through a video with bad audio. Audio is the number one. A lot of it is really bad. Really bad. And at my age, I am losing some of my hearing. Exactly. Not only that, but just like quality of hearing. People have schizophrenia. Buffalo. Yeah, we got Buffalo. Another guest. Hello. Yeah. How you been? Christmas. It was great. Not bad. Not bad. Hey, it's radio. George, how would you do for your Christmas? What was your what was your sneak present for the kids? I heard you got socks from sneak present for the kids. Yeah, I said, I set up my old Lionel train set. Oh, very cool. I haven't played with for years. And really, I'm preparing to sell it. So I'm going to get it set up. I'll take some of these and some pictures and see if somebody is willing to buy it. But the kids were into it for a short time and then they had to do it. Yeah. And that doesn't bother me because it's kind of product of the age, I guess. Sure. And it's not computerized. So, but okay, that's it work well. It's more for you. What I love about it is the fact that you can have another chance to fall in love with it before you actually sell it. And you might be like, you know what? I'm taking this one. I'm keeping this one. But the problem is, but I'm not falling in love with it because I can't crawl under a table and pull the wires through and do that stuff like I used to be able to do. Who says you can't? My dad says I can't. Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. You can just buy a bigger table. Can I tell Mike, can I tell a little tiny Lionel train story? Go for it. Go for it. Go for it, George. When I was a child, I was given two sets of Lionel trains, which were already were antiques. And my mother made me give them away when I was a teenager. So I gave them to the caretaker of the Brooklyn Music School. He was a Hungarian refugee. He was a refugee for his kid. And what he did instead was he sent my trains off to Hungary when they probably got burned out on 220-volt power. Oh, no. Wait a second. So let me back up. Are these trains electrified? You have to plug them into the wall? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, that shows my age. I thought they're a battery operated. Well, that's dangerous as hell. Get rid of them. That's a fire hazard. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. Larry, how you been? It's good to see you in a Hawaiian t-shirt again. Yeah. Well, it's red and red and white. I don't have green mixed in. You got some green in there. Holiday. Kind of a holiday shirt yesterday of his Christmas. But yeah, I had a good Christmas. I had good food and good family around me. And it was great to have. I also got an Oculus Quest. Let's go. We got to talk. We got to talk. I'll tell you some really great apps. Google Earth is a good one for you to try. Google Earth VR. I have been playing Resident Evil 4. So that's fun. You're very impressive. You're very impressive. That's a terrifying game. Yeah. It's a terrifying game, especially in VR. Jeez. Well, fun. If you want some real scary games in VR, you should play Half-Life Alyx. Now that you said that, I can pull off this whole other shelf of games. That's the one I want. Yeah. I understand you have to put it on the computer and then get a cable and play it between the two or something. Yeah. Yeah. It's really high-powered, but it's still worth it. And you just need a really long USB-C cable where you can make it work. There's some other good ones I can recommend for you. But guys, I want to talk about teaching me right the first time. Buffalo, here's the concept. A lot of times when you're in school, you're taught things as sort of like a shortcut or as a way to quickly understand more complex topics, but you never revisit those simplified models that you have for reality. And people will take them out into their adulthood with the same level of confidence they'll have as what their name is or what the alphabet is, what number comes after what number, despite the fact that that model is not a true representation of how reality works. And I think a really great example, this is a bit heady, but we got it. We're a science show, right? I have, I love this. I love disc golf and I was talking about disc golf like almost every day for like a long while now. And it's been like six months that I've been into it. And one of the cool things about disc golf is the numbers system that is on the disc, that numbers will detail how the disc flies through space. And one of the numbers represents glide, glide referring to how long it stays up in the air. And I'm like, oh, glide. So this number has higher, so glide because the number is higher. And I know what glide is because glide is like how a plane wing works. Like you have faster air on the top, slower air on the bottom, the higher. Less pressure. The faster air means less pressure, which pushes the air, which pushes the disc up. And that's how planes stay up in the air. No, completely wrong. Completely wrong. And I'm like, no, that's Bernoulli's principle. Like that is a thing I was taught in high school. That's the model of how things work. I know this for a fact. It's like, no, that doesn't make any sense. Why I'm like, why doesn't that make any sense? And I'm saying that as if I was telling myself that. In fact, I was actually in a very vicious discord argument of like, this is how it works. And people explain to me like, no, this is not how it works. Because there's no rule that says that a molecule has to automatically speed up over the top of a curved surface to meet the air molecule on the bottom. In fact, they more or less move at the same speed. And there is a discrepancy in this or a disparity in terms of like the molecules ever meeting each other. They don't meet each other at the end, which means they don't necessarily travel as fast in the end. The only reason why a disc or a curved foil is what you would call it pushes upwards is because when the air travels over the surface and it curves its way back down again, it's essentially pushing air down at the back end of the wing. And by pushing air down, there's an equal and opposite force that pushes the wing up. So if I'm pushing air down, air is pushing me up. And that's where my lift's coming from. It's not this, this license of air pressure. Larry, you're giving me that weird look in your face. What's up? Go for it. You're on mute, my friend. You just had equal and opposite for the force on the back of the wing. Well, if they're equal and then the downward pressure and the upward pressure would equal out and it wouldn't have any effect up or down. So here's the weird thing. Here's the weird thing that Bernoulli's principle is based on the idea that air has to travel faster over the top of the wing so that it can. Well, I think we're taking it. We're not really talking about air traveling. If the disc is moving through stationary air, then it's the air that hits the front of it in the air that that leaves the back of it is because the disc is moving through it there and it moves through it and top and bottom at the same speed. But there's more curvature on the top. Therefore, the molecules have to go over distance on the top which would lower the pressure, which makes it work. Now I don't understand. So let me touch on that real quick. Let me just touch on that real quick. You are right. There is lower pressure on the top of the wing. But that's not the major force that's causing glide. So there are actually a lot of forces on this disc as it's going through space. There's a little bit of a downward force over the curved surface which creates a torque. There's an angular momentum that's going on as it's spinning through space. This disc is experiencing a multitude of very different kinds of forces. But the major one, the major one that's causing lift is that equal and opposite force that's going on the back of the disc. It's not that Bernoulli principle pressure lift. If anything, think of it as like 1% that, but 99% that downward force and pushing up. Don't give me that weird looking face. Dude, I have to have that exact same face. I was like, you couldn't believe. You couldn't believe how upset I was when I realized that something that I was very confident was true, was not true. And actually, there are more sophisticated models. If you think about it like Trump, go ahead, George. I want to return us to the basic question. That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going. I'm going there. Here's the point. Here's the point. We had a model that was explained to me in school that I believed very strongly. But it wasn't a comprehensive model to explain how reality was working. And I realized that it took me more effort to unlearn the bad model than it took me to just learn the correct model from the very beginning. The first time. And I'm thinking, why didn't someone just explain this to me the way how it was from the very get-go? Because I would be receptive to it. And it would cause me much less stress in my future from having to unlearn it. And I thought, that's not just applicable to this flying through space. What about Santa Claus? Right? What about death? What about a lot of concepts that are taught to us? What would happen if we could talk? Ghosts and supernatural stuff. Exactly. Whatever comes up comes down. Other simplifications in science. Evolution. Like how it's mis-taught. Or like how germs work. Or electron theories. So I want to talk about that. George, come back in. Yeah, a couple of issues here. One is I just wanted to confirm something that you just said. I've had more than one guitar player tell me how they wish that they'd never learned to play folk guitar because they had to unlearn it in order to be able to play classical guitar or anything else, frankly. And the other thing is I was wondering, what is the motivation of the people who taught you wrong? Yeah. Why did they teach you improperly? And, you know, there probably are different reasons. I'm throwing one that's controversial. Buffalo, since you were a teacher, I'd like to have your impact. Typically, when you teach, you teach to the classroom, not to the most interested kids, not to the least interested kids, but the general population. And so if there are kids that desperately want to know this because they're intending to use it in their future careers, you can't necessarily satisfy their interests when you're teaching to the entire class as a public. But what you hope to do is give out a basic understanding that everyone can latch on to. And so that way they can, like, functionally move forward with the class and the people who want to stay in the field can continue to learn. Would you say that's fair or am I off? Yeah, that I think is true. But in the case of science, you're better off because you can, if you're sufficiently studied, and I would say this applies to your example, that whoever you learn that from was not as knowledgeable about physics as they might have been. And so my habit was always if I didn't really understand something from a student myself, I wouldn't try to get by it. I'd just say, well, let's talk about this later. And then be able to study up on it myself to be sure that I'm teaching them the best information that's available from science on that particular day. But I think there are oodles of people that don't know anything about physics. So in the case of your example, it's clearly understandable. And in fact, aeronautical engineers, there was a thing I read about how they've had to reverse themselves. But in science, it's easy because you just assume that the truth that is closest you can get to the truth is the best available information from the best experts. Right. And you can seek that out. You can't seek it out in religion and you can't seek it out in so many other things because so many other things are too subjective and opinionated. I also think we fall into the issue where we tend to stop asking questions as soon as it starts making sense to us, even if the model that's given to us doesn't make truly any objective sense. If it makes sense to us, we stop asking questions. Or have any relation to reality. Yes. Yeah. And so you'll hear yogis in India, like meditation gurus, be like, the universe is all pizza. Everything's pizza. You're pizza. I'm pizza. And I'm like, I'm hungry. I like that idea. I like to go for some pizza right now. And next, you know, that's when you stop asking questions and you gave your credit card to some guy in a pizza hat and it's all downhill pizzas from there. Larry, do you have any examples that you'd like to share of things that maybe we would be better off if we were taught it correctly the first time? Well, simply how nature works and how physics works. If we were taught that cause and effect don't rely on anything supernatural, then I think we'd be better prepared to deal with reality around us. You know, when you say that if you want something to happen, you need to pray for it. That's a little strange when it's never been demonstrated to actually to work. There's a group. Matter of fact, right now it's called RecoveringFromReligion.org. It's for people who are having a really hard time dealing with reality because their entire life up till now has been trying to deal with the world through the lens of supernatural belief and religion and they're having a really hard time getting through that barrier and returning to reality. With a good point. And the thing is that service is still available to them if you are a person in an authority figure trying to struggle or struggling as you get out of your indoctrination. How can we get access to RecoveringFromReligion? Well, they have a website just RecoveringFromReligion.org and if you happen to be a clergy member who no longer subscribes to supernatural belief, you've lost your faith. There's hope for you to and help for you to be able to retrain for a secular job. They're more than happy to help you. That group is called the clergy project and you can find it at clergyproject.org. George Brown, I got a question for you. I was formally trained my very first instrument on the violin and then my mom got a piano and my head was like, screw the violin. I don't understand how a fretless thing that's just based on positions work to find notes. All the notes are right here. I'm just gonna hit the notes that I need to. Piano made so much more sense to me and I played that for like seven years till someone gave me a guitar and I was like, gosh, this is so much more easier to understand than the piano. I don't feel like I have to unlearn things on the piano but I do feel like I have to completely relearn music again on the guitar and what you were saying before or you're like, hey, I wish I didn't learn folk because I had to relearn classical made complete sense to me because you can fall yourself into a hole if you only learn like one instrument and realize that there's a completely different system of understanding how musical notation and notes and composition works on a completely different instrument. Did you have a similar problem? But you told me you worked on like pianos and then moved to clarinet. What's going on? Oh, it's a very complex story for me about that. I won't get into it now. But one thing that I do want to point out is that I had the good fortune to study music psychology at the University of Connecticut. Music psychology, okay. Yes. And it just made so much sense to me especially considering my previous experience working on musical instruments that because I'm not only a performer but I also have experience in maintaining and repairing acoustical musical instruments. And it all came together for me. So in addressing your issue Tyrone from the standpoint of the fellow who I think was the first music psychologist a fellow named Carl Seashore down around the beginning of the 20th century he developed a series of tests for children to help teachers select the appropriate instrument for that child to play. And he came up with like a test to determine what instrument the kid was going to play so they didn't ask the kid what instrument you want to play they did like a test. You can ask the kid what instrument the kid wants to play. But you have to understand that for me as a person who's taught music is sometimes the child wants to play the oboe let's say because his uncle plays the oboe and he likes his uncle. I like the trumpet because it's shiny that's not going to hold up you see over time so that the child will have certain musical abilities of cognition and gradations of finesse for certain aspects of musical perception and not for others. So you can use those perception abilities and that's what Seashore did he issued a set of phonograph records which tested the child's acuity in these different specialized areas of musical perception and I thought wow this is so wonderful because I mean you got all these kids who are assigned like the clarinet because the band director needed another clarinet player. I see that as like the silver lining to why it's not always good to teach someone right the first time through because sometimes you may need to just show them what makes not make sense to them but what speaks to them first and then stimulate a love for the subject there's a love there then they have the room to explore the other answers and more complex models for how works for other realities that's totally fine with me I can understand that. I just wish in some cases I didn't have to go through the trouble of unlearning deliberately incorrect information to learn the mature models and even with the example I brought up with Bernoulli's principle like yeah that effect is true but I mean I can blow on top of this as much as I want to fly 40 feet into the air and I thought I'm so embarrassed that I was exclaiming that at the top of my lungs over the discord what's that George? I'd like to interrupt because you guys have been talking about science and I brought up psychology but the one place where my mind jumped to was history okay you know and I mean it was in my own cases the history of New York City which where I grew up and I mean the history is just fascinating but the way it got taught to us in school what did I take with me all these years later Peter Stuyvesant the governor of New Amsterdam stomped around Manhattan on his wooden leg and then nothing you know why was he stomping around New York well that's the interesting part we never got taught that there's a whole context of history and information it's rich and it's interesting wonderful to know so world history for me growing up started at 1492 that should give you an impression of it Larry what's up with it? oh it's just the bottom of the hour we need to take a break real quick and then come back to station identification George this is the digital 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville Tennessee we'll be right back after this short break 103.9 FM WOZO Radio Hello welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour I'm doubter 5 and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville Tennessee let's take a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville ASK was founded in 2002 coming up under 20th year next year not too long now ASK has over a thousand members and we have a weekly in person meeting in Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Tap Room in Pizzeria look for us inside at the high top table we're usually the loudest and happiest group and if you would like to join our Tuesday evening virtual zoom meeting email us at askanatheistatknocksvilleatheist.org or let the chat s-e at gmail.com and we'll add you to our list for that group you can find us online in facebook meetup.com or just go to KnoxvilleAtheist.org or google KnoxvilleAtheist for that matter just that simple by the way if you don't live in Knoxville you should still go to meet up and look for an atheist group in your town don't find one start one that's right one that where you want to pick up Buffalo George is making a good point over the break in that it's not necessarily always a deliberate thing when you're not taught the right way the first time and made an analogy to elementary school George would you mind pontificating on that on what Buffalo would you mind pontificating or elaborate it just makes sense to me that you know having spent a lot of time teaching even in my particular subject that I don't know nearly everything about it and if you spill over a topic of biology into physics and chemistry then it just gets worse and so again it's not surprising to me that elementary teachers or high school teachers teach things incorrectly or that the people who prescribe or design the teaching plans do incorrect things and so I don't think it's intentional I think just it's a lack of lack of information and lack of expertise right so the best teachers that are frustrated with having to teach superficial stuff probably move on to the better schools where they could teach things in greater depth and that leaves all the students behind that were in the lesser schools to to suffer even more down the line George I think that you know when I think about the way music is taught in many states and rural areas the one thing that comes to my mind and it's very frustrating to me is a person who learned music in an urban environment is that people in rural areas know so little about other kinds of music than what they were brought up with which case is mostly marching band into public schools because that's all they know so the teachers themselves that's their background they've never heard classical music hardly at all and they never heard jazz they've never heard African music they have never heard Asian music there is so much more to know so I think it's you know the motivation the lack of the knowledge is the lack of knowledge of the teacher himself so how do we enlarge the world of knowledge of all the teachers how do we be an advocate of knowledge in my head it's like be an advocate of I don't know because I think Buffalo as you had said I would love to have you as a science teacher a physics teacher I would love to have you as a science teacher and be an advocate of knowledge of where your limits in your learning are and if I came up and asked you a weird physics question you would be like that might have to ask a physics teacher but the idea the authority figures in my life can admit they don't know something and recommend a reasonable path for me to figure that out on my own or at least have a process where I can get access to that. And I feel like a lot of people don't get that opportunity. Now once you write something down, then you have an opportunity to do it more slowly than if you were speaking to somebody about it. And that's one thing I love about science is you can introduce then some of the lesser considered aspects and then really introduce some new thinking to the reader that might read that material. And that works in science. Again, with subjective subjects, I can see it would be much more difficult to do that. Yeah, with subjectivity, it always colors more, but I think I don't know becomes more powerful even in those conditions. George Brown, what's up? Well, we're in a period now when willful ignorance is on the ascendancy. And the tip of the iceberg on this is the quote, critical race theory fighting that's going on. Yeah, so I'll throw out one quick thing and maybe this is my own irksome moments, but we tend to, we tend to as a society rebrand racism as if it's a brand new thing every five or so years. And it's just like, it's the exact same thing, guys. We call it bigotry, we call it separation, we call it equal, we call it civil rights, we call it being political, we call it like you just come up with a new phrase for it, but it's the exact same crux of the problem. In regards to whatever we're calling it, it's still the head that rears its head every all the time for some people. And I think it plays into the idea of how we teach history and why it's a surprising concept that we can relabel it. And people are like, oh, it's just, no, it's this brand new thing. Whereas other people be like, no, it's the exact same thing that we've been dealing with, right? Police brutality, all that stuff. And so what I'm saying is like in schools, in a more deliberate sense, there have been cases that are very explicit, particularly after the Civil War, where Confederates or separatists, insurrectionists had told the school system how to teach kids and restructure narratives about America to put certain things in focus and to avoid demonizing those who went against the United States of America. And what that's typically done has fostered this idea of supremacy and unfortunate mitigation of people of color because they're not fitting the narrative. So they become the outsiders, they become the blank Americans, whereas we become the default Americans. And unfortunately, as explicit as that is, I feel like it has repercussions because if they just taught how America came about in the first, correctly the first way, what that's true was is the treatment against the natives that were here and how we are truly a bunch of immigrants that came in or people stolen from other countries and brought here. If you told the harsh, uncomfortable truth from the very beginning, I think it'd make people treat people more nicely today or at least respect the fact that, yeah, you're here, but it's such a multicultural place. And some are more unfortunate than the others. And that has fostered a deep level of empathy in me because now I realized how we all came to be. I'm here to treat you with a bit more respect. I don't know, I feel like if we got that story from the beginning, it would be a lot better then. Literally, as I was saying at the first half, world history in my school, Ever Alvarez High School, California, started in, the first chapter was 1492, Columbus coming over here. And I'm like, that is bizarre, it's so bizarre. George, what's up? Well, that's one I think that maybe most of us got that same story about the 1492. Now it's so bizarre. Yeah, but I was gonna say something else that a tangential thought, which is, there is something that makes America great. And that is the diversity of all of us. And as a society, we're ignorant of this great truth that we're a polyglot mixture of all this stuff, all these people with all these wonderful, interesting backgrounds. So I really feel that that shutting off knowledge is a disservice to everybody because the truth is so much more interesting. But you have to have the time to stuff in all this information, or all of this entertainment that's constantly barraging was, you know. Yeah. And I think rather than what's individual study and thought is being displaced with is more and more and more entertainment that's being sold in every way, shape and form. Yeah, yeah. I feel, I think of it as like a dietary information that's sort of like a diet. You can get the simple carbs all day long if you just listen to like the 24 news cycles or whatever's on your Twitter feed. Or if you're willing to take the time to feed yourself properly, get some like roughage, get some protein in there and actually investigate. But I think all things are good and balanced. As long as you know it's entertainment, here's my thing. If you know it's entertainment to begin with and you treat it like entertainment, enjoy your entertainment. If you know it's a simplified model to begin with just to help you not have to deal with the more complex proofs, understand it and tight teach it as a, here's a simple analogy to explain how this much more complex system works. And you can give me like the whole rain cycle, draw a little circle and be like, this is how rain goes around and how it becomes drinking water and river water and then the ocean. It's like, oh, that's a very simplified model. It's like, yes. And this is a model to explain simply how water circulates through earth. But it's not how it actually happens. It's much more complex than that. But I'm simplifying it for you. If people just, they were more explicit with the, here's an analogy. I will treat it as an analogy. And if I'm more interested, I'll go into the more depth of the subject. But if I don't know that from the beginning, and I believe that's how the system actually works. If I believe Santa Claus actually drops presents underneath my Christmas tree every year until my adulthood, and I have to realize, it was my mom the whole time she was lying to me. Think about the trauma. Think about the trauma where I have to do a little like that. And imagine people who are religious who think, wait a second, you mean God didn't make an Adam and an Eve in their own paradise? Like, imagine how much they have to unload just to learn that snakes don't talk and give dietary advice. It's not just a story. It's a story about sin and guilt and redemption and all that too that you have to carry with you. It's not just the facts of creation. How do I become a good person then if this story isn't true? Like how do you get people to separate those concepts? You have to explain to them at the head of time. This was just a thing that people came up with to explain things, but it's not the way how things actually are. But it's a good story. You might pull some things from it. It's not even that good of a story to be honest with you. Check out Star Wars. That's a better story. Hey, George Brown, what's up? Well, not having been brought up religious or Christian, I have to ask the rest of you, what was the mis-programming that you got in Sunday school, let's say? Ah, yeah. As children, as children. For me. It's your basic question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For me, when I went into Sunday school, I was literally taken away from my mom, brought to a different classroom for other kids who were my peers and was told, wow, morality works in a very simple way. Morality is whatever God says. If God says it, it's right. And I would write that down in crayon with like little pictures of things that God was doing, like making doves or whatever. And I would just believe it because that's what I was thinking. It's basically false too. Exactly. And I believed that all the way until I was in college, until I had an ethics class and the teacher asked the classroom, what makes things right and wrong? And thank goodness, thank God, I had a great ethics teacher because when I wrote down with my belief of, well, it's whatever God says is true, he told me that was wrong and I was very insulted because I was very Christian back then. And then he started breaking down how morality works. And I'm like, well, I'm gonna have to reread the Bible because what you're telling me makes more sense than the answer I got. When I went through the Bible, I was like, whoa, that's immoral. That's immoral. That's not fitting. And I'm like, I'm uncomfortable, but I'm just not gonna read those parts of the Bible. At the basic level, obedience is not morality. Morality is knowing what is right and wrong to do in a particular situation that would cause the least harm and the most benefit to the people there. And obedience is something totally different. It's not a list of rules that you follow. It's a system that you use in way you're right and ought. Hey, what's up, George Buffalo? I was gonna say my answer to George Brown would be, leave it to God. I mean, that's what I was taught. Don't think about, don't get all tense over something that's problematic. Just relax and leave it to God because God's gonna take care of it. I know. Akarma, we were taught that too. It's crazy. So it's okay to execute the wrong prisoner because God will stand there. Yeah, God will sort it out in the end. Absolutely. You can carry that argument as far as you wanna carry it. Yeah, absolutely you could. Look at the Crusades, right? Yeah, oh my gosh. They don't teach the Crusades in high school either. Another fun thing, like all the crazy, I almost- Look too gory. It would raise too many questions. All the gory questionable things that Christians did in the past are completely glossed over in a lot of history classes. And I didn't learn about the Crusades until four years ago. And I'm like, why aren't we teaching kids this? Why aren't we teaching kids- By the way, if somebody's interested, if you can see that. How emotions are made, the secret life of the brain, I love it, I love it. But yeah, people understood the actual history of Christianity on this planet is a bloody, gory, horrible, horrible one. And yet, if you talk to a Christian who's wearing like a sweater right now who just came back from his one day of year going to church, and he's got like a, I don't know, a weird dog that doesn't shed and a wife named Aaron or April, because it was only two. They'll be like, you know, Christianity has always been good. It's been really great. Here's my Starbucks. We're going to Starbucks. That's natural selection. Natural selection is bloody and gory. Natural selection is bloody and gory. And the discussion. And we are still products of natural selection. And the weird thing is, it's not the fact that it's gory that makes it untrue. It's that we aren't teaching the true version of it. And if you teach us the true version of it, we can come to our own conclusions, right? But if you teach us a makeup version of history or of the religion or of a scientific process, we're not learning the true nature of it. And so what I'd say for like evolution, which is also very gory, very bloody, but true, let me get the true story of it and let me realize what its limitations are up front. That way I won't have to go 14 years of my life or whenever people typically learn about how evolution actually is. And then have to unload all this baggage. What's up? There's another aspect of this that goes back to the elementary school. And when my kids were, my grandkids were recently on elementary school and I had more time, I volunteered to join in some science classes and teach some aspects of science. And boy did I get resistance from two quarters, really. One, the lady who happened to be the most prominent person in the PTA didn't like me because I wanted to teach some things in a way which were different than what she wanted. And then the other aspect was that as soon as I made some correction to the science teacher, she put up a brick wall. She didn't want to have me interact anymore because she didn't know, quite frankly. She had pulled this experiment off of the internet of putting different concentrations of sugar water with dyeing them on top of one another to demonstrate diffusion. And she didn't understand diffusion. And when I made a suggestion to correct her experiment so that the dyes didn't all mix when the kids put them in the tube, she resisted. And I even gave her the little homemade apparatus that I would use to introduce one layer, the less dense layer on top of the more dense layer so they wouldn't mix to start with. She wouldn't even accept that little handmade device because she was embarrassed. So she's got a lesson plan. She's got a limited amount of knowledge. It's in the lesson plan that she should teach diffusion but she doesn't know how to teach diffusion. So I think this is a big component of elementary school teaching and it's probably based by the fact that the teachers are not sufficiently prepared and maybe they're not sufficiently prepared because they're not really expert in every subject. And that's understandable. Yes. Nothing bad against elementary teachers but also ego is a big factor in what you're able to do in the classroom. Actually, I had to quit because I was sort of banned from consideration when I would volunteer to help judge science projects. I don't think I was being extreme. Wow. But I was sort of pushed aside. So I'm doing. Hey, they did the same thing to Galileo. You're in good company. George Brown. I want to mention, I want to address George Buffalo, what you just brought up because it brought up something for me. I was raised to believe that I had to know the answers that it was very deficient to not know the answers and it was very deficient to admit that you didn't know something. And I had to get well onto, well on into my life before it became okay for me to admit to other people that I didn't know something. And then that in itself became quite liberating. I wasn't blasted. I wasn't executed by a bunch of machine guns because I didn't know something. Admitting a lack of knowledge is the first step to gaining knowledge. Absolutely. Raised to believe I have to know. I feel like that's the biggest thing that we need to overcome. And that's the fastest way we can get kids to want to learn more. Cause when they realized that it's not so much knowing it but having a good means of knowing things. Well, I think that's the reason why education is now pushing problem solving as opposed to fact, road learning. And that's good. It's not very easy to do. No. And we have to have a, there's a growing body of facts that seems like we all need to know. I wonder if it's earlier specialization isn't part of this because how can one expect to know everything about everything that's sufficiently based upon a body of facts produced by the best experts? It's overwhelming. Yeah, believe it or not, when I was in elementary school, I was actually picked as an experimental kid to do this strictly critical thinking class. Me and like 14 other kids would leave our main classroom. And once a week, where I think it was two times a week, we'd go to this other room where it was another class where we weren't taught things but we were taught how to figure out stuff. And it was one of the funnest classes ever. And I remember this thing that they would do, they would get like a piece of a machinery from like a pasta maker or something like that. And they put on a table and they'd be like, what is this? And you would spend like 20 minutes just trying to figure out what it's used for, where it came from. And you're like, moving around, you've never seen this weird thing before and you're talking with other kids and you write down, and they don't tell you if you're right or wrong. They just try to make you think out of the box for how could you use this? And we may take like a spiralizer from like a pasta maker and figure out, oh, it's a doll for like, maybe digging into the dirt faster because if you spin it, maybe the dirt comes up and they're like, oh, that's very interesting. Well, it's really cool that you thought about that. And I'm like, how fun was that? And then you end up going back to your regular class and they're like, here's the next fact. Here's the next fact. Here's a multiplication table. You're like, I like the other class. Oh, there was so much sugar. I think shops, metal shops, wood shops used to do some of this because they were teaching mechanical aptitude. Absolutely. And it's gone now because there aren't many people that are capable of teaching it. And so the shop has been excluded, the machines have been excluded. They're being brought back to some extent, but not for the entire body of students. One of my granddaughters is sent to a different school to do what is part of the engineering program. And for this Christmas, she made a cheese cutting board for her mother for a gift. And she used about five different sophisticated woodworking pieces of equipment in that shop. But somehow she was selected to do this or she showed an interest. And the rest of the kids that are sitting back in school that are learning more facts don't have that possibility. So there is some stuff available for a select number, but who gets selected and what does it take to get selected is a difficult question. I will throw this. Yeah, it sucked that I was selected and other ones weren't. I can't imagine what happened if the school was. But also, we were literally just a classroom that had a half hour break where we would look at a random object and try to figure out what it is. I feel like that's such a low budget. I feel like if we were just implement that easily, I think any school can do it if they're willing to spend. I'd rather learn that than cursive. How about that? I spent two years learning cursive. I never use it anymore. Let me do more of that critical thinking thing instead. We're almost at the bottom half hour. We're going to go to George. What's up, George? Well, I just wanted to know, Tyrone, where were you learning this in school? Which state? Or like what city? Yeah, I was in California. I was in California, California. And what city? Salinas? Salinas. It's a John Steinbeck country. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I know. What do you think was the, let's say, the social or political environment that made it possible for this concept to be available to you? I don't know, but we know California generally tends to be more liberal and experimental. In fact, now it's not the case. Now they are strictly teach to the test school because no child left behind, implemented by George Bush. And all that funding has gone. And now they strictly only teach the things that are on SATs. And so that's why when I moved from California to Georgia, I had no social studies. I didn't take a single history class because they weren't taught on the test. And when I was here, I was learning history for the very first time in my very early adulthood, like 17, 18. And I was like, I didn't know about the zoosuit riots. I didn't know what the Civil War really was. I didn't understand what World War I was and when it happened. But I can tell you everything on the periodic table, my reading level was really high. I just needed to be taught right the first time. Just teach me. Teach me, and I'll be happy to learn. I'm receptive. And I do agree with you, George. It's not that I have, don't teach me that I have to know. Just teach me that there are good ways to know these things. And I think I can be very satisfied with that. Larry, what's up? I was just going to say, if you take that experimental room that you were talking about where they put like a piece of equipment down and change the theme of it to maybe put a pig bladder down, or a heart, or intestines, and then say, well, what's this organ used for? Just by looking at it. Can you try to figure out what this would be for pre-med, of course. But just put your hands on it. And one of my colleagues does that. He goes from school with a human brain in a sort of a rubber sack. And the kids put their hands on it, and they get all excited about going into the medical school. You know, the concept of teaching to the test, I think George Buffalo, you will resonate with what I'm about to say. Because in New York State, they have a very rigid system of teaching to the test, which is called the Regents exam. And it's brutal. And by the way, I've seen the same materials used in California to the New York State Regents cheating books that are this whole industry of books, selling books with previous exams and Regents exams that children study in New York State just to pass these bloody tests. But it's the homogenization of instruction toward this standardized test, which is so mind-boggling. The homogenization of education for standardized. That's a great final word, George Brown. Mine would also be on top of that. No child left behind. I actually left a lot of kids behind because it forced kids to only learn what's being taught on federal tests. And not creativity or critical thinking. I wish more people would find enthusiasm for the I don't knows and reasonable ways to get information. Well, that's because by politicians who wanted to get reelected. Yeah, yeah, teach kids. George Brown, Buffalo, that was a great final word, actually. Larry, we're at the end of the show. You got any final words? Well, if you like this show, be sure to visit the website, digitalfreethought.com, and click on the blog button for a radio show archives, atheist songs, and many articles on the subject of atheism and religion. You can find my YouTube channel by searching for Douter 5 or Larry Rhodes. I have a book that's available on Amazon called Atheism, What's It All About? Thank you for joining us on the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Remember, you can find this show on Apple iTunes, Pocket Cast, Amazon, and Podcasts everywhere. Just search for Digital Freethought Radio Hour. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. 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, and we just see you next week here on Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Shout out to Black Cat. Bye.