 Hello and welcome to digital free thought radio hour and W.O.Z.L radio 103.9 LP FM live right here in Knoxville, Tennessee on Sunday morning, June 14th, 2020. I'm Larry Rhodes at 4.5. And as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the phone with us. Hello Wombat. Okay, today's verse is going to come from 463 of your books. Please pull about. Please stand. No, thanks. Please stand for the verse. This is very important. No. Well, if you're not going to do it, screw it. There is no God. We had no doubt. And our guests today are J.W. Kennedy. Hello. You had Pirate Higgs and your guest Dale or Novid Gale. Dale because he's got Novid going. Say hello, Dale. Hi. How are you doing? I'm doing good. And digital free thought radio hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we also talk about religion, religious faith, God's holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in Knoxville, why are you just not? There are several atheists, free thinking and rationalist groups that exist right here in Knoxville and we'll be telling you how you can connect with them right after the mid-show break. Also, did you know that there's been a streaming atheists call in video show? Yes. Casting here in Knoxville. Actually, it was TV show for like 10 years. Yes. That's video. You know about that? Yeah, it's been around for a while. The character Harley Quinn came around from the Batman the animated series. Now this is the first time they gave her a cartoon and it's very, very good cartoon. It's like a combination of the Batman the animated series plus venture brothers. The comedy is really very gritty. It is and comically violent, but also very smartly written. It's very I highly recommend the show. So Harley Quinn, check it out. It's on DC animated. It may be good, maybe violent, but it's not our show. Our show is called Free Thinkers United Coalition. Have you ever messed that up? Are you sure? I'm sure. It was on the tie. Like I say, it was on TV for 10 years, but now it's streaming online. You can find it by going to YouTube and look for either Free Thought Forum Knoxville or Free Thinkers United Coalition of Knoxville. Check it out. If you'd like to interact with us during the show, you can go to Facebook and search for digital free thought radio hour and use the messaging function to send us questions to endure comments. Wombat, what do you have for us today? First, I'd like to mention that there's like a haunted roll of toilet paper behind your left shoulder that appears and disappears randomly. It sounds like I'm being random, but it's really Larry. People can go through this video. If you look over just your left shoulder. There it is. It's popped up again. I don't know what's going on. I don't believe in haunted toilet paper roll. Oh, geez, geez, geez. We're going to have people coming out. The spirit of TV. The spirit of TV. I think it's a roll of paper towels. You know, I like to start off the way how we always like to start off when we have a new guest. New guest, Novid Dale. Who are you? What are you about? Tell us your whole life story in 30 seconds. Go. No, Larry, for quite a while. I'm not exactly an atheist. I like to call myself a deist. I've been that way for quite a while. It seems like it's a comfortable place for me because I appear to be reviled by the theists and the atheists alike. You're not reviled by the atheists. We know you. We like you. Most of you are really pretty friendly. Yeah. I went on the atheist experience once and they said, oh, this is just a bunch of woo and made me feel really bad. No, I don't think so. Beyond deism because I mean, really, that is just an absence of something. What's what's something positive about you? Like give us a give us a contrast of like what what could we fill into the Dale bucket? Right now you're literally just text on a screen. What can we like? What can we fill ourselves in with? I am at a loss. May I? He's unbelievable. Okay, you're cool, man. He's an artist. Okay, cool. Very good logistic. What do you write? What's your art, Panache? Well, the main thing I was writing for quite a few years and hasn't gotten where is how Jesus did his miracles. Oh, I believe in Jesus. And anyway, how he did his miracle as a wandering rabbi but not a miracle worker. Not real miracles, but more like tricks. If you read, when I read the Bible, I thought I was very much into magic at the time. I thought, well, how would someone do this? And each and every one of Jesus's magic tricks, I think I figured out how he did it. As a matter of fact, it would not be that hard for a contemporary person of their day to to to accomplish the same thing. With the same technology that they had back in the Bronze Age? Exactly. That's one of the things that I've read. What do I mean? Oh, go ahead, Rilarium. Sorry. I read his book and he goes into how it not only could have happened and how Jesus could have done it, but also about He conjectures on the missing, what, 30 years of his life, 28 years of his life that he may have gone to the Middle, I mean, to Eastern, like, gone to the East, like China, learned magicians tricks there. And then come back with all that knowledge of how they... I've heard of that before, yes. Yeah. Yeah, actually, you'll notice that John the Baptist and Jesus both disappeared for the same period of time. And it's appearing to me that John the Baptist was actually highly educated, whereas someone going up in Jesus's town would have been a little bit more on the ignorant side. So, had the possibility that they probably switched places with each other, which is, which may be why when Jesus went to his home town, they tried to kill him. Hello. We can still hear it. Yeah, we can hear it. Well, anyway, it did postulate a number of things like that. And Larry, when Larry said it and I hear it, it sounds a little bit, you know, tin hat type of thing, you know, that he went to the East and he studied with makers and stuff like that. That is the possibility. But if you read the Bible and read the little clues that it's in there, which amazes me that no one else has seen it, you can tell how he cut off the ear and put it back on. And then found the quarter behind it. And then was just like, is this your point? Yeah. And the clues are all right there. Larry, he read, there's 600 and something footnotes and it says, here's where it says this, here's where it says that. And it's simple. And a lot of it is that in the reading and retellings of Jesus's story, a lot of it has been exaggerated. And it's not what the Bible says. For example, the Bible says that in three places that the guy got his ear cut off. Never once did it say he put the ear back on or the guy grew an ear or anything like that. That's the people reading in to what's actually there. J.W., what do you think about all this? Well, when it comes to the credibility of historical events, I was just going to ask you how many of these miracles had extra Biblical sources outside of the Gospels? How do we know even those events happened at all? How can we discern what's legend from what's event? When we only have four documents and they're all, as they are translated, they're gradually changed. It's hard to even establish what really happened. Just to clarify, the reason why I went to J.W. is because he was actually studying to be a pastor. So I wonder how he reconciled these ideas as he was reading the Bible now that he's an atheist. Dale, what do you think? Are there extra Biblical sources outside of the Bible that support these miracle claims? Are you there? I can't hear you, Dale. Dale, we're having some trouble hearing you. I'll throw it up to Larry while he gets closer to the phone. Larry, what do you think? Are there extra? I know where he's coming from in the book. In the beginning of the book, he says, I'm going to take the Bible as it's written, as truth. And I will take all of the information that's in the Bible and use it as facts to debunk the miracles that are in the book. In other words, he doesn't go to extra Biblical information to try to debunk them. All the stuff that he needs to debunk them are right there in the Bible. That's what we were saying about the clues that nobody seems to pick up on. Yeah, and I think that's a really good approach, especially for people who are believers. They can open up and say, oh, he believes the Bible is true. Or he's reading it as if it's truth. Even if you believe it's true. He's reading and then they find out all this stuff and they have to decide what to do with the information. Dred, what do you think about that? Is that a good way to figure out if something's true or not? No, I think it's a little bit lacking. I think it's kind of rough. I think when you start with that many assumptions, you're already in the cuckoo's nest. Well, I picked up quite a few things from the Bible that I never saw before and never thought about. It's like what he was saying. When Jesus came back and presented himself to the disciples, nobody recognized him. I mean, that right there is a huge clue. Maybe it was somebody else coming back as him or maybe a brother or something. And you have to think the genetic pool wasn't that big back then. So like, oh yeah, we know, you look like everybody else here. What I mean by that is it sounds like a book that can meet somebody where they are and take them to a new place. You start out the book that way. I was just thinking about from the mindset of a believer, not from the mindset of a person who's already trying to slide back on, step out. I was that with a number of books. When I saw on somebody's coffee table recently, it was titled The Problem of God. Of course, the idea of writing a book that has that as a title is that you've got the solution. Yeah. While I can see the the advantage from an atheist perspective of saying like, hey, this book is at least meeting the believer at their level. What I want from a book is to engage critical thinking because I think once you engage that, it doesn't matter where they go. They're using the right method to get to conclusions. So even if they get to critical thinking and come to the conclusion that there is a God, I want to know that method that they're using because they use the right method to get there. So if I was reading a book, it would be great if it was just, listen, I'm not going to make assumptions here. We're going to start from the very basal level. Like what can we establish is true? What's a good way to know it's true? What's a good thing to know that's false? All right. Here's this book. It starts with a talking snake. That's an extraordinary claim. Do we have anything to support that? No. Okay. Then everything else? Down. It's all up for that. Basically, since that's the foundation of Christianity, the first sin, basically, that's handed down from man to man. Yeah. If chapter one is a dietary advice, giving snake, you know, like everything else is in question. Everything else is in question. Well, yes. And I mean, I completely agree with you. I mean, I'm in that mindset now. All I was saying was I was just thinking about if someone was in the old mindset that I had, what would be a good book that would meet them where they are and actually kind of expand their thinking a little bit at a time. Sure. Yeah. Well, because it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, my conversion process, it was just years. And so sometimes books that are kind of safe for this bias that we want, but test us a little bit are just what we need right there in that season. And maybe later on, that book was a part of a process that led us down to being on a digital free talk radio show. Drew, what do you feel? You feel like if I was, if I were to take the devil's advocate side and say, no, you got to stay with logic every single time. If you want to try to learn things versus the empathetic approach of like, hey, I'm willing to make these assumptions to show you that even with this point of view, it can still be valuable. Dred, what do you think? What's valuable one or the other? What would have worked for you? What might work for the general public? Well, I think at the end of the day, you know, it is really about coming up with a reliable method to arrive at truth. So dressing things up in order to be empathetic to somebody's current beliefs has, I think, limited utility. You always have to really push the critical thinking agenda in order to have a conversation that's meaningful. Otherwise, it's just fluff. I do think it can reach like that 10% that wouldn't be reached if you had critical thinking. So like, why not both, right? But I feel like what got me out of the well personally? One or the other. I'm just saying that it could have been a good book for me to read that might have led me down the slow process of walking out. I mean, I could just see that book being one of those first steps because sometimes when you're in that mindset, it's very hard to describe. Yeah, it is. When I was a legalist and it was a mixture of a lot of things. I had a circle with PTSD. I had a lot of things that happened in my childhood. I had trust issues. So it went much deeper than just what I decided to believe or what I wanted to believe. And so, I don't know. And I'm just processing this thought out loud. He's speaking his beautiful mind right now. Yeah, I would say this. I don't know if I shared this story before, but the way the first major crack for me as far as leaving my religion is when I took an ethics class in college and I learned that morality is not a list of rules that you're given. It's a system that you keep working on. That's in the interest of the people that follow that social contract and you can like, you can clearly see that if you just have a list of 10 rules or even like 316 or wherever many there are in the Bible, that's not enough to keep a society being moral for an extended duration of time because there's always going to be new things that come out, new permutations, things you have to decide. As culture evolves, you need to have a system that evolves with it. And you also need to be accountable, not just to the rules or the authoritarian that gave you the rules, but to each other because that's what makes sure that system works because we're all benefiting because we're all working with each other. And when I was like, oh, in the class, it was complete cognitive dissonance in my head. I was like, oh, of course you just can't give me a list of rules and you need to have a system for morality to work. And then in my head, I was like, oh, no, I let that sink in. I didn't want that in because I still want to be a Christian. And now when I look at the Bible, I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this? This doesn't make sense. So I just said, hey, you know what? I'm just not going to read those parts of Bible. I'll just stick with Proverbs. Proverbs has a lot of good things. And then I eventually got tired of Proverbs because it was just telling me things I already knew. It's just like the wet water is always wet when it's wet. I'm like, oh gosh, this is lame. This is lame. And so eventually I just stopped reading the Bible and that's when the momentum built. But I nearly needed that class and ethics to be like, no, morality works like this. It's like, oh, no assumptions, no nothing, no bargaining with myself. I just have to honestly learn something without the context of looking it through my Christian filter for me to be like, ah, reality is not compatible with my religion anymore. I just have to deal with it. There's a YouTuber named evidence three who put out a series of videos. I highly recommend it. It's why I'm no longer a Christian is the name of it. Video series. And he said that the thing that really got him questioning was he was a college and he was taking a morals class. And you're telling my story again, Larry. What are you doing? I just told the story. It's not just your story. All right. And he said, well, I know how to be good, you know, and then finally the teacher said, you know, this is the teacher how to do the right decision when the right decision is not clear. Right. Right. The moral decision. Right. And he said it really opened his eyes and it made him question the dictates of the Bible because there's some really bad stuff in there. Yeah, I love it. I just feel like, so there is a path for the empathetic approach. I think Dale's book definitely has a place. I also think like that critical thinking approach is so, so good because once you have that, everything makes sense or not everything, but like you have the tools to make anything a pursuit to try to understand better in like a reasonable way. You may not figure out the answer, but at least you'll know when to say I don't know. And that's so much better than just being like, well, just God did it. I don't know how the universe was made. Probably a God. Not just working on you and Dale. Sorry about that. Are you back? Okay. It looks like he's still setting up. That's fair. So I want to get into Joey's topic. Joey, what did you want to talk about today? Well, I just real quick, I think when it comes to deism, deism I think can take many forms. And, you know, there's a lot of different theories about what I mean, sometimes they say aliens and another universe or anything. I mean, I think you can be agnostic and deist, but anyway, I was just my thought on that. But the main thing I was wondering, I'd like to talk about, get y'all's thoughts on is, do atheists have faith in anything? We'd have to first define faith, what is an acceptable definition of faith that we have? Why don't you do us a quick favor and define atheists to just for new people who might be watching the show. Oh, atheism is what we like to call at Digital Freethought Radio, one answer to one question. It is, I do not believe. And in the words of Matt Della Hunty, I do not believe because I have yet to be given good reasons to believe. Therefore, I don't believe. I believe there is no God. It is, I do not believe that gods or gods exist. There's a significant difference between that because when you say, I believe there is no God, you're getting down the road of asserting something is true. So just real quick. I have a problem with that. Yeah, just too real quick. Like discern, we are not, an atheist should never say, at least I don't think they should, should never say, I know there is no God. I know and assert it as truth because then when you say that kind of statement, the burden of proof falls upon you. Now you're doing the work. What's that? And now you're doing the work. It's just like, why'd you do that? Work should be on the person who says, there is a guy that's like, oh, convince me. Simply we do not believe because we have yet to be seen good reasons to believe. And so faith. Am I back yet? Yeah, I hear you. I hear Adele. Welcome back. Your voice is low, but it's there. Yeah. The what's low? Your voice. That's much better. Okay. Good. Hey, I'm like, sorry, why don't you wrap up real quick? So, faith by definition is believing in something for not any, not any good reason or what seems like good reasons, but it's not or no, believe in something without evidence. So when you say, like a friend tells you, I did that. I did such and such. You weren't present for that. So you just believe him. No, we all more or less on the same page for his definition of faith and AC. The belief in the absence of belief is, or faith is the, is belief in the absence of evidence. Perfect. I like that. That's mine. And so the question is, do atheists have faith in anything ever? Yeah. I want to know that dread. Why don't you start us off with. I'd like to sort of disagree with that just a little bit. I know you're going to be the juiciest person to talk to. Let's just go around the circle. We're going to start off with a dread and we'll, we'll get. Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely. And I'll go last is, or Del can go whenever you want, but dread, why are you, why are you chime in? It's been a while. I imagine, you know, there's plenty of people who identify as atheists who have, you know, faith in other perhaps strange and unevidence notions about the universe and the world. That's fair. So again, you know, as JW points out, atheist is one answer to one question. It doesn't, it's not a blanket statement. I mean, if you, if you called yourself a critical thinker, then you were more apt to be a person who doesn't have faith because you rely on evidence to support the convictions you hold. That's what I'm going to say. Nice. Larry, what do you got for us? Oh, I just like to continue where dread was going. There's a whole section of the world that are atheists, atheistic that have plenty of faith, Buddhists, Confucius, Tao Taoists, Shintoists, Janists don't believe in God. They don't have a God in their religion. So technically they are atheists, but they still believe in the souls and reincarnation and Osteference. Yeah, all of that stuff. They have, they believe in that stuff without evidence. Therefore they're using faith to believe that, but they're also atheists. Well, let me make it a little more personal then. Hold on. Does anybody here have faith? Would it be cool if we just got a Boudreaux and Dales before we modify the question? Boudreaux, what do you think? I think it's a fascinating question because this has come up a lot in summits and it especially comes up when talking about science and truths and things like that. I think one of the aspects where I see, well, your example of your friend told you something and you weren't there. I wouldn't call that faith as much trust. I trust them. My evidence for believing what they're saying is based on history. Well, they said it before. I mean, if they're going to tell me a hundred times they've done this and I saw that they did it. The one time they did it without me being there, I trust them. So is that faith? If it's faith by your definition? Well, if you're just interesting, if I may, we have a viewer watching our live stream who makes statements. I can have faith in my son, for example. And I think that goes to what Boudreaux is saying. But that is somewhat evidentiary. True. The thing about it is they're, what do you call it when you're equating it? They're equation fallacy. If you look up faith on the dictionary, yeah, right. It has several definitions. And we're talking about religious faith here. We're not just talking about everyday belief in things because of prior experience, which is what that person is saying. I'd really like to see what Dale has to weigh in on this before we keep going. Dale, what do you think? Just simply talking about faith, just faith with that evidence overall. But yeah, I got you. Go ahead, Dale. Well, as a deist, I choose to believe that there's some kind of God. And somebody may say an origin. And from the deist point of view, instead of proving that God exists or proving that these religions are correct, I'm of the mind to just prove that they're incorrect. For example, the Odin and Thor and all of that has been knocked down. Egypt, Egyptian religions have pretty much been knocked down. In other words, it almost seems like we have almost a genetic predisposition to believe in perhaps in something out there. But as a deist, I just choose to believe that there's a God. It's just yours is not the correct one. And when the deist God is not so much a guy and a beard, it could be just an origin or it could be that the spark from another dimension or something like that perhaps created our universe. But it leaves me with a sense of wonder to think about it. But when it comes down to other people's religions who try to sell me the snakes and all of that, it's fairly easy to just say this is kind of ridiculous. The only reason you believe this is because it's written in that book. And just like me, they choose to believe what they believe. Well, I think that's true to some point. There are a lot of people that don't choose it. They were raised from the earliest childhood to believe it and told not to question it. They have to believe it as far as acceptance and their community, the family, and their work a lot of times. But there are people, I'm sure Diaz particularly, choose to believe it. But most of the time, I believe it's not a choice. It's what has been brainwashed into you. Or what you're convinced of. If I'm convinced of it, then I believe it. There's no choice in the matter. Am I convinced or am I not convinced? And I can't choose to be convinced of something. You have to convince me. I'll say that he's convinced. I would love to talk about that more, but we don't have enough time in this show. In fact, we're at the bottom of the half hour. Already. Why don't you take us out, Larry? Okay, this is WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM. Right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be back after this short break. Oh, we're back at the short break. Let's see if this works. I'm going to play. Radio makes a noise. I'm not sure if that's making noise or not, but 103.9 digital free thought radio hour. Hey, we're coming right back and let's get some local news down. Okay. Welcome back. I'm Dr. Five and this is the digital free thought radio hour on WZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today, Sunday, June 14th, 2020. And welcome to the second half of the show. Let's talk about free thought groups that you can join right here in Knoxville. First, there's the Atheist Society of Knoxville. Founded in 2002. We're in our 18th year. We have over a thousand members and you can find us online at Knoxvillelaketheist.org. Or you can go directly to Meetup or Google and just look for Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville and you can still go to Meetup and search for an Atheist group in your town. If you don't find one, start with one. That's right. Also, there's a large free thinking group in Knoxville in Oak Ridge called the Rationalists of East Tennessee. If you want to find more information about them, go to rationalist.org and then click on upcoming events. We also have a local chapter of Freedom from Religion Foundation that you can attend their meetings once a month. If you'd like to, more information, go to rationalist.org. Earlier in the show, we said we'd talk about the Atheist Call in TV show. There's an Atheist Call in TV show. Yeah, how about that? Yeah, we should start telling people about that. That's great. Yeah, it's called Free Thinkers United Coalition because it unites ASK, RET, and several other free thinking groups here in Knoxville. Let me put on an online streaming show. Right now, because of the coronavirus, it's kind of in a lapsed period but we're planning to get back up and run it for too long. They may even decide to use our video for their shows, which will be okay with me, no problem. If you're interested in getting involved in the TV or radio show, just come to an ASK meetup, RET meeting, and talk to us about it. You can be our next co-host or guest or you can go to digitalfreethought.com or sorry, the Digital Freethought Radio, our Facebook chat, and leave us a message about how you'd like to become involved. That's about it. Where are we on our topic? There one bit. Oh, hold on. I think we need to find something. I can't... Guys, I can't find it. I can't find it. Are there questions? No, where the love? Where is the love? Where is the love? The love, the love. Where is the love? Hey, guys, we have some really great feedback from our last episode. I did? Yeah. We had over 1,000 views on our last... Over 1,300 views in our last podcast. I've been networking. Thank you so much for all the support. I've been advertising this everywhere on Facebook, so... Yeah, so thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for the self-promotion on our parts, but also for the people who spent time watching it. The analytics on this are really good. The average views are like about 40 minutes through, which is, for as YouTube is concerned, that's extremely crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Normally, you only get like two or four of you for like, what's the next video on this thumbnail? Where'd my afternoon go? Where'd my weekend go? Potential span. Exactly. So we have a good crowd. This one is... This comment is by Comparative Reasoning. He's referring to my talk with the Ask and Wonder representative or the pastor that was talking to me about atheism. Invited me to a show about atheism, and he preached at me at the last second. And I thought his comment was one of the best ones. I remember. I just want to tell you. I just want to talk about faith. I'm not preaching. A job. Yeah, yeah. So he said Comparative Reasoning says, I'm glad I waited for this one. I wanted to be able to fully try to understand all I hear. It sucks though. You had such a long written understanding on how to do this, this talk with him, and he simply bailed on the agreement. He's not only being former religious, sir, and yet to defend the sky in one aspect, he's basically doing what he's been taught to do. He's been preached at his entire life. For him, he's doing what you asked. Not preaching, but he's still preaching, but in the manner that he's only known of. Like he's only communicating with me in the manner that he knows of since he's been, you know, born. I could hear him struggling to try to understand your objective. In real time, you explained to him what you needed from him. And then went right back to the same spill. He has no other education and conversing about the topic. That's not your fault or his. That rests on the people that programmed him into this state. Before I go, I just wanted to know is there a way to inform people of that without feeling offended or them getting defensive? I believe that belief is an emotion and that sees about critical thinking. Those are direct mortal enemies. What do you think about that? So do you think like, here's the question, here's the main question I was asking. Do you think like emotions and critical thought are incompatible with each other? Larry, I'll throw this out at you first. I think so. Emotions can, I mean, beliefs can engender a lot of emotional reactions. And that gets in the way of the critical thought. You basically want to defend your beliefs, especially if they're attacked and you defend them as if they are part of you. So it's self-defense mechanism kicks in and you get very emotional about that. J.W., what do you got? Why do we care about critical thinking? Ooh, very good. It gets us to the truth. It's one of the tools. But why do you care about the truth? Is there not some involved and there's not some hunger deep within you? It directly benefits us. It is the selfish concern. It's utterly selfish. It ultimately benefits me. So I can see that prospect there. There's nothing magical about the virtue of critical thought. I wasn't saying magical. I was just saying emotional. Emotions aren't magic. True, true, true. I would say there's nothing more sentimental. It's more of like, yes, my emotion is I want to have the best life possible. Critical thinking appears to be the vehicle to establish that. So yeah, maybe there is that one basic emotion of like self-preservation, self-worth that benefits and goes kind of in hand with critical thinking. And like Dale Scott earlier, the desire to be in wonder and awe. Nah, I don't care about that. J.W., what do you think? Again, I wouldn't consider a tool in the critical thinking toolkit. No, I would also agree. You can feel emotionally about things. You can feel wonder and awe. You can feel pride and joy and disgust and all the rest of it. But as far as using those as means by which to get to the truth. I mean, can I have fun with it? I can't have fun. Yeah, you can. Sure. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. Boudreau, what do you think? Does emotions and critical thought not mixed well with each other? I think orange juice and pizza of thought. I think it's interesting because I think each one has an advantage in decision making and I think you can test this pretty easily. I listened to a podcast recently where they went with the trolley problem, which you have five people on a track that are about to die. You don't have to pull a lever. Right. Well, okay. And if you do pull a lever, you can kill the one person. Yeah, now you killed somebody. Now you did kill someone. Yeah, by pulling that lever, you just killed somebody. Like congrats. You didn't have to pull anything. That wasn't your fault. Right. Okay. But so we can tweak the trolley problem to eliminate that issue where, okay, you don't pull the lever, but the train is either going to kill all the people or you can pull the lever. Negative responsibility. I don't have to take anything. I didn't put my, I didn't set this up. Arrest that guy. I just walked past this and saw I was like, whoa. You know, as well as I can tie, we can keep doing this until it gets to the point. I can't breathe. Don't try to nail something on me. You set this straight thing up. I'm just a black guy standing here. That's screwed up. You can't do that. That's not fair. We live in a different world now. I'm not going to get away with that. You actually set this up and you went back in time and put it on. It doesn't matter. The point being though. Sure, sure, sure. Or you can do a Captain Kirk workaround and you just cheat the program. Sure, sure, sure. But the point is, let's say, let's say it's five people versus one and normal, normal utilitarians would say, okay, I'd pull the lever, kill the one person. Yeah. That's rational. That's critical thinking. That's logic. What if it's your loved one on the other side? It's one person you love and five people you don't know. Now emotion kicks in and now it's like, well, now what do I do? Yeah. And it's like, logically, you know what you should do, but emotionally you can't. And they carry a lot of different directions on that trolley problem. It's like they originally set it up so that it's that switch is in the position of going to five people. So you literally have to throw it. They don't set it up where it's going to one person and all you have to do is stand there and look at it. Interesting. There's also another one where you're on a bridge and you're with a person. You're going to push a fat guy. Yeah, you have to push a person off the bridge to not train. You say fat guy? Yeah, well, I set it up as a fat guy. But I'm just saying you have to, if you pushed the guy in front of the train, it would be real. Oh, wow. It would switch it to another track. And people, a lot of people would back off at that point and say, I'm not pushing anybody on the tracks, even though before they pulled the lever. There are lots of different gradients to this trolley problem. I would love it if I can interject. Isn't this sort of the same thing that a general does all the time at war? I'm going to send these guys over there. They're going to die. I know it's my fault or it's my responsibility, but these other battalions are going to live. Mm-hmm. I would think that they would have sent the general through the trolley problem before they made him a general. So he could have seen where he stood on it. Del, I'm interested in what's your idea of the compatibility of emotions and critical thought. It sounds like you had something you wanted to say earlier. It just really irritates me if I'm talking to someone and the conversation goes on and goes on and goes on. And finally they say, well, I know it in my heart. So that's obviously some kind of emotional. And then you probably had no business being in the conversation with them in the first place. Well, it's an escape hatch, right? That's interesting. Yeah. I would say for me, there is the field of triage, which is like if you agree to the Hippocratic Oath, which is I'm trying to help people as a doctor, and I'll do whatever I can to help people. But now I'm in a situation where I don't have enough resources to help as many people as I can, I have to decide who gets help and who I can't help, basically. And there's actual courses that dictate the standards for triage. Like do I help the person that can go on to do surgery on other people or do I help this like a school child, you know, like who still needs to be prenatal care or whatever. Like you have to understand that doctors have hard rules and limits that they have to follow where they need to, at a certain point, work in Congress with other people to come out with an informed, empathetic approach that has logical steps, like a decision tree. Right. That way, when they're in that moment, they're not like, oh my gosh, I need to save my wife and not this school bus full of kids. What are, what does my training tell me to do? Despite the fact that. So there is like. As a first responder, the same thing applies, you know, when you come upon a scene, it's about, you know, saving the most likely to survive. Right. Yeah. You don't go start, you don't start doing CPR on, on a guy that's cutting the half and, and attended the person who's got a little highway on his leg or something, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In Canada, they say always that means injuries. I'm sorry for that. I wouldn't say this. I value emotional thinking, but not as a decision making process. Right. I feel like critical thought is my go-to as far as like critically assessing what I should do, but I can always inform my conclusions with some empathy after the fact, but I would really like to rely mostly on my critical thought because that's what ultimately not only just benefits me, but everyone else around me and my, my emotions tend to betray me. Even in the best case, this may be a stretch, but you don't want to trust your, your critical thought when you put your hand on a metal surface to decide if it's hot or not. Yeah. You want to go with instinct there. That's more emotional, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. But that was informed by some kind of prior evidence. True. Yeah. Yeah. We just don't wake up. A baby isn't born knowing that the stove is hot. Right. Yeah. The point was that the pursuit of truth doesn't have to be completely emotionless. No, of course not. That's just what I was saying. No. But yeah, okay. It's more of like, if I'm starving on a beach and I'm underneath a banana tree, I could eat worms or I could just climb up the tree and get the bananas. So there's standards of nutrition that I can go for. Yeah. And do I, do I dig down for emotions or do I climb up and get some critical thought? I could do both, but hopefully, you know, the better stuff is, is worth the extra. Yeah. So. Yeah. So we're talking about, you know, how emotions are worse in this example. Hey, you get protein. I like that comparison because, because critical thinking isn't the natural state. Of humans. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, if, if you take a say Daniel, you know, for, for some of the research he's done about thinking fast and slow, that critical thinking is something that. We work at it's not something that we just wake up one morning and go, Oh, here's a great methodology for discerning. That is true. It's true. It's very true. And it's not like a bike either. If you don't do it in a while, you can totally fall off and never know how to get back on again, which is why it's important to always think critically. Exercise. Dale, what do you think you want to wrap up this? The question from comparative reason, do you have any final words? I was, I had one thought, one of our Colorado governors is doing something was made a comment that was something kind of brave. He was pointing out that the old people deserve, no, it's the responsibility of the old people to die. And the context he was putting that in was. I object. I, I, I know I, but the context he was putting it in was the fact that like 90% of a person's healthcare is spent in the last two years of their life. Wow. That is a really cold way of looking at it. Anybody in the, in the nursing home with this COVID virus going on it would probably not have the same point of view. But it's, it's, I never figured out why throwing the fat man on the tracks was going to stop the train. Yeah. What is slippery? No, we just, it's greasing the track. It would be the same as throwing the switch. It would just track switch them over to another track not to rail it. Yeah. That's a Dale's comment just reminds me of a, a Charlton Heston and Evergy Robinson and Soylent Green. One of my favorite movies. Dale, I had a quick question. I'm genuinely interested in knowing the answer. You had mentioned that it feels like a waste of time to talk to someone who's not exercising critical thought because at the end they just say, I know it in my heart. Right. And I'm wondering like, is there a distinction between that conversation where someone ends it with, you know it in my heart versus someone who says, well, I just choose to believe it because it leaves me with a sense of wonder. Well, a person, if you know it in your heart, it doesn't sound like you have that much choice over it. But, but to have a choice, I choose to believe this. I believe it's a little bit more, if not rational, more conscious. Could someone consciously know something in their heart and has it more or less the same impact? I don't know. I don't know. Could you be experiencing the same thing, just worrying it differently? J.W., I'm just going to believe this on this thought. If we don't know why claim that there was a God at all, and you don't have to come up with the answer right now, but I think that's something. I don't think he's claiming that there's a God. I think Diaz naturally claims that he believes there's a God. Why? Then why not if you, if the answer is I don't know. Yeah. Why we had the belief in the first place, but we don't have to answer that now. You got a long show and you got to wrap up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We can come back to this. Definitely. I highly recommend that you come back. Oh, we got eight minutes left in the show. Do you want to tell me where we can find your stuff at? What's going on? Well, right now this is our first streaming attempt. So it's actually on YouTube on my channel, mind pirate. M-I-N-B-P-Y-R-A-T-E. And yeah. So while I'll schedule this again for next week. Oh, very fancy Sunday at 8am. And, and we'll see what kind of audience we got. We do have one person watching. Hey, that's, that's pretty cool. And a commenter too. What was the name of the commenter, by the way? Uh, the name of the commenter was data's trading room. Very nice. Very nice. And we got a lot of feedback on last week's episode. Thank you so much for everyone commenting. Uh, J.W. Where can we find your stuff at? What are you doing? What's going on? And why are you so in the dark? Um, I work nights. And so I've put something up on my window to make it like dark when I come home, just to kind of get me ready for sleep. Um, but I hope to have a new camera here pretty soon. And I'm lighting. So I, look at your white guy. You would have been a sessions cat basically. So you can, um, um, no content yet hopefully content at least hopefully by the fall. Um, J.W. Kennedy for my standup comedy in my music. Um, speak your beautiful mind for my street epistemology. I'm going to be using the same methods as tight Tyrone does with his, um, his channel with let's chat. Um, you can find me on Twitter at, um, J.W.K hates the news. Um, and also at speak at your beautiful. Actually, I don't know that one off the top of my head. I don't know the actual tag. So speak your beautiful mind on you. Cool. Cool. Boudreau, everybody loves you. What's going on? How are you? I'm, I'm a, I keep dropping the ball, but I blame Chad. He's, I'm getting, I get comments on YouTube. It was like, isn't that the guy who wants to talk about free will? I'm like, yeah, yeah, those are my two. I will, since I don't have anything to, to share of how you can follow me, I will say, I think I'm told everyone needs to, post a picture of Obama on Trump's Twitter feed because it's his birthday. Trump's birthday. Hopefully Trump's last birthday in the White House. So put a picture of Obama on there and make his day. Uh, there are no calls to action on this radio show by him saying last birthday, Boudreau was totally not saying anything, you know, I was not. Yeah. I apologize. I forgot. I just wanted to mention, Ty, just before, yeah, yeah, yeah. Please, by all means that, and Larry was good enough just to subscribe to my empire. Once I get up to a hundred, then I can rename the channel to, you know, I can personalize the channel. So, by all means, please subscribe. I'm going to put that in the comments. Please subscribe to Gary's channel when you have the opportunity to. It's actually really good content and some of the most polite, but also introspective forms of SC possible, not only that, but like from the very beginning to the where he's at right now, you get to see the full production timeline of like improved quality, better audio, better video, and it might make you more, uh, accepting of like wherever you might be starting off with as far as putting out. Yeah. Yeah. Dale, thank you so much for joining the show. Do you have any like final, uh, you're welcome anytime. Absolutely. Uh, no, no comment. I really, really hate you mentioning Trump and, and, uh, because he doesn't deserve mentioning more than anything else. And I just said it's his birthday. Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, had a good time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Larry. Oh, so wait, I'm sorry for me. Um, I'm let's chat you if you're seeing this, you're probably already on my channel, but, um, every week we come together and have these talks and it's an open talk for anybody. So if you're interested, reach out to me and we can see if we can get your comments on the show. Um, likewise you can post videos or you can post comments here or on Reddit. Uh, just say, Hey, I like this. This was pretty cool. And you know, Hey, if we've got time, we'll give you guys a shout out. Uh, that's it for me. I'll see you guys next week. Larry, what do you got for us? Well, be sure to visit the digital free thought.com website and blog, click on the blog button to go and see our radio show archives, the atheists songs that we have listed in there and many articles on the subject of atheism. Um, you can also go to our Facebook page, digital free thought radio hour Facebook and put some comments in the chat. If you'd like, if you have any questions for the show, you can also email them to us at ask an atheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org and we'll answer them on future shows. Our podcasts are also available on iTunes, Stitcher, luminarypodcast.com, et cetera, et cetera. I heart it's well, I heart. That's weird. I heart. That's weird. And, uh, I'm going to go ahead and, uh, mention everybody at the end. I'll, I guess, um, Dred Pirate Higgs wave and say bye. J.W. Kennedy. There. Blue Drow. Blue Drow the free will. Wave and say goodbye. Wave and say goodbye. I am waving. Beautiful. Good to see you. Happy to have you on the show. Everybody's going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. We'll see you next week, seven o'clock on W.O.Z.O. Radio right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Say bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.