 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio, 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday morning, July 18th, 2021. I am Larry Rhodes, or Doubter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Did you say it's July 18th already? It's gonna be that all day long. Wow, hey, hey, hey. I'm enjoying it. It's been a good year so far. Yeah, very good. Okay, with us today, we have George, two and a half from Brooklyn, originally from Brooklyn. Hello, George. Hi, hello, everybody. And Dread Pirate Higgs. How are you there? From Canada and John Richards from England, UK, England. I'll get it right here. One of those places has to be one of them. Hello. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, freethought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, God's holy books and superstition. Wombat, what's our topic for going to be for today? We're gonna be talking about double standards, why they're dangerous and why they're also really annoying. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, let's throw it up to our Dread Pirate Higgs for our weekly invocation. Okay, I'm gonna put it on my hat. Give me a second. Nice, nice, nice, nice. Larry, the way I think about UK and England, it's sort of like there's parts of Ireland. Our Newly Lord, who art in a colander, I'll daunte be thy noodles, thy blood be rum, thy sauce be yum, with meat as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our cussing, as we forgive those who cuss against us. And lead us not into ketoism, but deliver us some carbs, for thine are the noodles and the sauces and the grog, whenever and ever. Rawr! We're gonna wait for Dread Pirate to get his headphones back on. I'm just taking up some dead airtime. There we go, great. Hey, while we're on the subject of geography, John Richards, how you been? And do you have a preference for UK or England or is either fine? Well, it's a very confusing place, thanks to the history. We've got four countries, and we're all in one. So UK is the umbrella term. But if we don't want to include Northern Ireland, we can call it Great Britain for the remaining three. And I'm actually located in England. So there you go, pick the bones out of that. So you said four countries. Is it like Scotland, Ireland and a bit of France? Like what's the fourth country there? It's England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Oh, Wales is its own thing? Oh my gosh. Okay, okay, okay. Don't tell the whales that. That's right. They don't want you to forget that. Yeah, exactly. George Brown, how you been? I've been good. I've been good. Although, I mean, you know, I like good coffee. I'm a particular fan of a brand of coffee named Pete's that was brought to Berkeley, California by a man named Alfred Pete. His company has been bought and sold a number of times since then. It's still great coffee. It's so expensive, I can't afford it. Well, and it's become universal in a way. I bumped into the Pete's route driver yesterday in the parking lot of my supermarket. And she handed me a bag of coffee. Get out of town for free? No, no. She handed me a bag of coffee that had been roasted the day before in Alameda, California. So here I am sitting in rural Tennessee drinking my very favorite coffee from Berkeley. So I'm very happy. Yeah, very nice, very nice. That's a good day. That's a good day. Yeah, it's a good day. Dredpire Higgs, I want to see how you've been. And what's your shirt say? Well, my shirt is tribute to Douglas Adams. Okay. Life, the universe and everything. 42. That's a Venn bag. 42. And there's the babblefish there. I see it. And they're flying dolphins. Yeah, make sure of good radio, huh? Yeah, no, I've been doing pretty good. I think I might have mentioned last week, or I guess it would have been last week. We had another meeting for the International Pasifarian Captains Conclave. And so we're just working on some scripts so that we can present it to our foreign affairs ministers and see if we can get a delegation to the UN for World Truce 2021. Nice, nice, nice. Also, you got a picture that you don't have to share it on the show because there's a lot of personal information on it. But would you mind just telling us about it? Well, sure. So, you know, in struggling with the insurance corporation of BC who's responsible for official identification, government-issued identification, they wouldn't let me wear my tricorn, they wouldn't let me wear a colander, they wouldn't let me wear a bandana, which they allow as a hair accessory that depicted the symbol of the flying spaghetti monster on it. But the second time I went in with that bandana, I had concealed underneath a temporary tattoo. So when they were giving me grief, they said, well, would you be willing to, you know, turn that hair accessory around so that the symbol isn't on it? And I said, where is that in your policies? And so she started to go on and giving me grief. And so I said, look, I'm going to make this incredibly easy for you. And I took it off and her eye and her jaw just kind of dropped. Good for her. And she went, okay, let's do this. And so four weeks later. Because there was a tattoo there. That's exactly right. So yeah. So now I have my personal health services card and my driver's license depicted with a flying spaghetti monster symbol there on my head. And I have additional tattoos that I'm going to offer up to anyone who wants them. I'll mail it to wherever they need to go. If you want to try and get your driver's license with a tattoo, these things come off in two seconds with a little bit. Here's the critical question. What color is the tattoo? It's just black. Yeah. It won't work on me, but I appreciate it. It might, you know, it might actually stand out a bit. Why can't we get white ones? Where are the white tattoos? You know, I could certainly do that. The design is in the thing and they can just print them off. Okay. Okay. Okay. Hit me up. Tattoos are racist now. If they let the white tattoos through and they're just like, Oh, that's fine, sir, please line up. It's totally good. Douter 5. I want to check up on you. How you been? You're on mute. My buddy just fine. I haven't had my motorcycle out lately, but playing the computer games and going to the park and conversing with people to some extent mostly online, conversing with people, going outside, side, going to parks. What is this? Like COVID over already? How pretty much, at least for the summer, it may come back in a month or so. But right now it's, it's thick. I'm striking while the iron is hot as it works. Nice. Try to enjoy some outdoor time. I've been enjoying some outdoor stuff too. I've been playing a lot of disc golf recently. And yesterday we had a tournament I got. So there are cards that break up different groups of people that show up. I got third place on my card and tied for fourth among all cards that were in my skill level, which is novice. So I was really surprised you won. You don't get prizes in disc golf. The prize is playing disc golf. That's okay. That's the key. That's the key. But yeah, really, really fun. Had a good time out there. I didn't lose a single disc, which is well, let me tell you this. Once I was taking karate for a long time. It took for about eight years. And early on I was a brown belt and I went to karate weekend where they went outside and they did exercises and tournaments and stuff. And I won first place in the brown belt division. Hey, they did not give me trophies. I stopped at a trophy shop on the way home and bought one. So there's always that option. There's always the option. But I buy my own third place trophy, though. That's the craziest part. Yeah. Okay. But that's good. I'm glad you want it. So today we're going to be talking about double standards, why they're dangerous and why they're annoying. Why I want to talk about it is because we had a really interesting conversation last week. Very nice guy who was on his name was Isaiah. But I think we had two stages of the talk that we were having with them. One where we asked them, you know, essentially how you're doing and then the other one, why do you believe? And I think when you get to the why you believe and how he came to know that his God is real. Yeah, he was a Christian. It was like us a shopping list of every single red flag that I think most atheists are familiar with. I want to believe it. That's why it's true. I was angry for why I was an atheist. So that's why Christianity works for me. It works for me. It makes me comfortable. I had a personal experience that got talked to me but I can't test it. I know it sounds crazy, but I just believe that it's true. And I in the back of my head, I was thinking, Okay, well, let's let's try to just move on because I don't want to make this a debate. So we started talking about other countries and I said, Hey, you know, Sweden, you know, has a lot of atheists in it. I was there. I lived in Sweden for like a year and a half doing research there. That's where I came out as an atheist. It was just there. It was a perfect climate for it. And I think he jumped on that. I was like, you know what, people always say Sweden is not an atheist country. Statistical proof and data here says 76% of this from this global before I'm like, man, I wish you had this much enthusiasm for statistics as you did for your one test on God, where you know you can't test and it stopped them there. And I was like, let's talk about double standards. Because I think even if it doesn't convince him to change his mind for the better, or at least ask himself some serious questions, because he left the group since then, I do think it would be important for us to discuss why double standards are both dangerous, but also really, you know, annoying from an atheist perspective when we when we've seen enough of them. And it's not to say that I'm not immune to them either. I'd like for them to be called out. But John Richards, I would say this, what's your do you have a single standard for knowing if things are true or not? And if you can share that with us, if not, let's talk about it. But we'll start with you. Do you what? How do you know if things are true or not? Shareable repeatable observations. I dig it. Yeah, shareable and repeatable observations. Okay. John Richards, I'm not putting you on the spot. But you know, in this book called the Bible, there was like 12 repeated stories that are kind of closely related to each other. Would that be enough for you to then believe that a God is real if you had 12 stories that all more or less kind of said the same thing, or at least four stories? I know the Bible calls them witnesses. But unfortunately, modern usage of the word means that we've got to have a person who we can put in a witness box and question in order to see whether their stories are consistent, whether they keep to the same account. And we can't do that to these guys who all died 2000 years ago. So I don't accept that they're witnesses. What we have here are very old reports. And unfortunately, for the believers in this particular story, the earliest surviving written accounts of those reports date from no closer to the events that they claim to report than 30 years, some of them much, much further apart. But this means that it's highly likely that the reports were not written at the time of the events. Certainly they don't survive if they were. So therefore, it's probable that these are hearsay accounts, you know, but in fact, it's another generation 30 years later. It's like you saying to me, can I prove that my grandfather carried Queen Victoria in the first car on the Isle of Wight? And I can tell you that he told me that before he died. I can't tell if this is an outrageous statement or not. Like I have so little understanding of geography. So I imagine it didn't happen. You're going to have to choose whether to believe me or not. John, before we go to someone else, I would like to ask you then, if you said it's shareable and repeatable as your standard of evidence, is there a number of people that we can bring on the show who say they've talked to God that would make you believe that God talks to people if we can repeat that enough times with enough different people? No. I need to be able to share it myself. So you have to experience it yourself, for it to be true? Well, I have to know how I could experience it for myself. If you told me that I can see a particular star, I'd have to know where to look. I have to go to find the right telescope or something. But I need to know that it is possible for me to be able to repeat that observation. This is very interesting. So I have a standard. I don't know if it's the best one, but I do like the idea of like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? And so even if I had a billion different stories and my own personal experience of talking to a God, that's such an incredible thing that I'd probably want and even the higher standard of evidence than just people repeating the same story and sharing it with me and my own personal experience before I am convinced that God exists. Because how am I supposed to know that wasn't a demon or just an hallucination that we're all experiencing at the same time, too? If you go back a few hundred years, you would find everybody would tell you that they believed that the sun went round the earth. So what we have here is the Vox Popplis policy. There's no number of people who can prove something to be true. Now, I do like shareable and repeatable because I like science stuff, but I would say like that's a tool to get me towards the standard of evidence that I need to believe in something. But the standard is I need as much evidence to support the claim at the same standard of how incredible that claim is. And for mundane stuff, like I went to the grocery store, I don't need a lot as much proof as, say, for God exists because that's a much more extraordinary thing. Drittpire, I would love to hear from you. Do you have a standard for knowing if things are true or not? Well, it's on the same level with yours. And it's an explanation for anything that requires the least amount of assumptions. So employing Occam's razor essentially, right? Yes, perfectly stated, yes. Yeah, inside to that is Hitchens' razor, which says that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. So, you know, in certain, when we were talking to Isaiah and I agree that he was a very nice guy, but he made some pretty outrageous claims and offered absolutely no evidence to support that. And so I could have examples. He usually dismissed that. Well, when he said those shots, he heard a, you know, he knew it was Jesus Christ that spoke to him in his head. And just to take it on face value without suggesting that perhaps there is an alternate explanation, such as maybe you're tired, maybe you were hypnagogic or you were just, you know, in that transitional phase between waking and sleeping. Certainly I've heard voices and I've had, you know, odd experiences or the sense of presence in the room. But that's actually quite easily explained through psychology as, you know, that hypnagogic state. And I see John there waving his hand. But yeah, so Occam's Razor definitely and Hitchens Razor. Yeah, I just wanted to put in here that Occam is a village about 40 minutes drive to... Get out of town. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And that's where William of Occan lived and had his thoughts about razors. I didn't know it was a place. I didn't know it was a place either. He was looking for a clothes shave. There you go. Yeah. With no assumptions related. So Dreadpart, I loved your answer because Occam's Razor is typically misnomered or miscategorized as the simplest answer is the correct one. And that is not true. That's not what it even says in the rule. It's the one with the least number of assumptions. Tends to be not always, but tends to be the most true result. And when you make an assumption that, oh, well, this is God who's talking to me. It's Jesus Christ. Why? Because the voice says so. That's still an assumption, even though the voice told you it was Jesus. And I was like, when I heard that, I was like, oh, what a nice guy. It's like saying the Bible is true because it says so, right? Right. Right. Right. You know, in atheism, we have a saying called tautology, where it's like, I can say everything I write in this napkin is true because it says so on this napkin. And I can share it with you. You'll be like, that's not the case. Well, it's like, then why is it true when the Bible does it? It's like, ah, right? OK, we'll go next. George Brown, how do you know if something's true or not? Well, how do I know? Our topic is double standards. And it's on my mind. But let me digress for a moment to Occam's razor because people have been, it's been coming up to my consciousness lately, Occam's razor. And I decided to read definitions of Occam's razor. And you know, none of the definitions talk about Occam's razor. They talk about what the principle is, but not why it's called a razor. OK. And you know, so I'm always looking behind the story. And I can't find the behind in this one. Is it a Gillette? Is it a straight razor? Is it a Norelco? What kind of razor are we talking about? What is the story of the razor? So I'm going to give a serious answer or joke it. John, you want to tackle this one? Yeah. He's busy. He's doing a cricket league match. All right. How about this? Larry, would you mind giving the answer for why it's called a razor? Well, it cuts out extraneous entities, extraneous options if they're not needed. If you've got a perfectly good answer, basically, if you've got a perfectly good answer or something that explains the phenomena, you don't need to put anything else in there to try to explain it further. If it doesn't, it's not necessary. Well, you see, I always want to know why something is called what it's named. Well, now that we told you, oh, there we go. John Richards, take your time. But I didn't mention my double standards. I just want to put this out as quickly as I can. Here in Tennessee, we've been having a lot of suppression of truth on an official level going on lately. It's been in the news in a number of places that are not Tennessee. It's gotten out there that, for instance, the state, I believe it's the health condition. George, I know you want to talk about fascism, but we asked you, how do you know something's true or not true? We're going to stay out. We're going to try to be focused. I don't know whether I believe it or not. OK. I know it's true or not. I mean, in my own personal life, is whether it stands the test of whatever I test it with. But testing? Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully. Testing, verification, repeatability. I like testing. I mean, I like the scientific method if I understand what it is. And hopefully, I will be able to discern it and have doubts about myself that maybe I don't. Not bad. Science has room for I don't know. Dred Pirate, what do you got? Yeah, so in philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate or shave off unlikely explanations for a phenomena or avoid unnecessary actions. Dred, what I love about you is you just say that's from the top of your head staring right in the camera. I totally know you're reading that. John Richards, what do you have? Did you want to add to that? Well, I was just going to say that I don't think Occam's principles were described as a razor until long after he was dead. I think it may have been by Bertrand Russell or somebody quite modern who described it, gave it the name, a razor. When Occam's work was being, you know, reinvestigated. Nice. Doudafy, I didn't know. That's William, William of Occam. William of Occam, yeah. He didn't know that he was coming up with a razor. No, he was a priest or something. What was his job, I forgot. Yeah, he was a monk or a friar or something, yes. Nice, nice. His job was thinking and you can tell, right? Doudafy, I'd love to know. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you. How do you know something's true and do you use multiple standards to get there or would you like just one? Well, yeah, I do. If I'm looking at a news story or something, I will check or cross-reference it with other news sources. If the statement aligns with what I know is reality that helps. If it's something that I can personally test, I do. If it's repeatable or if somebody else has tested it and I get their verification of it, it helps. Also, I don't generally credit any supernatural claims because it's above testing. The very nature of a supernatural claim makes it above testing. And till such time as we can test them, why should I believe that they're real? Right. And they're also extraordinary claims. They're way above the ordinary. And as, I don't know who said it originally, but I believe it was Carl Sagan that most people attributed to supernatural. I mean, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And stories in a book are not extraordinary evidence. And what I'm making the point is it's not, we're all saying the same thing. We're all saying we don't just care about evidence, we care about a standard of evidence, right? And that standard of evidence needs to meet the extraordinaryness of the claim. And we can get there by testing, making sure it's shareable, repeatable, that we can actually test it, that we can actually investigate it, that it doesn't make a number of assumptions that we can't test. Like all of these go into the aspects of how we begin to know things. And if we can't hit that standard, we will fall back on the scientific approach when you don't know something and you say, I don't know, because that is a totally valid thing to say until you do know something. And what we found as an interesting component with Isaiah is that when he was faced with the, I don't know, his default position was, well, it has to be God. We're asking him why. He was like, well, and he defaulted to a bunch of other dangerous standards of knowing things are true, such as, well, it makes me comfortable while I want it to be true. Well, it just makes sense to me. And that is both potentially very dangerous as well as pretty annoying because, you know, we've seen that a number of times, but I imagine we can probably handle that in the second half of the show. We can talk about why it's annoying us, why it affects us. Doubtify, would you like to take us out? We'll come back and we'll handle that subject. Well, sure. This is the digital free thought radio hour. We're on WOZO Radio 103.9LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after the short break. 103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Hello and welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm Doubtify and we're on WOZO Radio 103.9LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday morning, July 18th, 2021. Let's talk for a moment about the atheist society of Knoxville for ASK. Founded in 2002, we're in our 19th year. ASK has over a thousand members and we're at Meekly, Meekly, not so Meekly sometimes. Zoom meetings every week during COVID, but we also meet in person at Barley's Taproom and Pizzeria in the old city in Knoxville out on the patio. You can find us online on Facebook, meetup.com or KnoxvilleAtheist.org or just Google KnoxvilleAtheist, it's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and look for a atheist group in your town. Don't find one, start one. Don't find one. Wamba, where you wanna pick up? We're gonna be talking about why double standards annoying us and we'll go around and talk about stories of double standards annoying us. John Richards, I think you have an example that you'd like to present. It's topical too, it's this very day, our Prime Minister, what's his name? I have no idea. Oh, yeah. Maybe Laura's something. Yeah, maybe we weren't mentioning for fear of being sued or something. He's a public failure, he's a politician. Yeah, yeah, okay, it's Boris, yeah, Boris Johnson. So he's recently been tested as positive for COVID. Now, he's had it before and he's double-vaxxed, so he's not gonna die or anything, but because he's tested positive, he can transmit it. And the same thing has happened, coincidentally, we've got a new health minister, the previous one had to resign in disgrace because he was fondling his girlfriend in his office. It's his girlfriend though, his girlfriend though, right? Not his wife, or what's he name? No, no. This is his girlfriend. Yes, yes. Consensual adults, what's the problem there? All right, there right. Well, the problem is that he was supposed to be socially distancing. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! This is double standard, isn't it? Anyway, to get back to today's story, the prime minister and the new health secretary who have both tested positive should be according to their own rules in isolation for 10 days, which is what happens to you and I if we're positive, if we've been tracked and traced by the app as having been in contact with somebody who is positive. Correct. That's how it works. But what they've done is said, well, this doesn't apply to us. We can go through this new system of testing ourselves every day, which is a pilot system that we have access to, but you don't. So that's a double standard. I'm different and I have a different set of rules. You follow this set of rules. Yeah, I can see that. Exactly. And he has to fondle himself now. That one's gone. George Brown, did you have a story you wanted to bring up? It sounded like you wanted to talk about some hypocrisy. Can I just finish that story? Go for it, go for it, John. They've climbed down. They said, OK, we will self-isolate. Why is it a bad thing to take a 10-day vacation? Like, that's one of the best things that's happened during COVID is just, oh, I can remote work. I can take time off and everything's cool. Yeah, yeah, take a break. So the media castigated them and they gave in. Yeah, it's the dumbest thing possible. Anyway, George Brown. Triple standard. Well, I feel like I live in a bizarro world here in a flyover state. I mean, I've been a coastal person in my life. I've lived on the East Coast. I've lived on the West Coast. Here I am in the Bible Belt in the land of the believers. And a phrase that pops up every once in a while out of Christianity is, quote, the truth will set you free. Am I wrong? Yeah. So now there is a war on truth going on in my state at the governmental level. I see politicians are trying to exterminate the truth legally. So I forget her exact title, but the secretary of health for the state was mysteriously fired. And vaccination encouragement seems to be expunged here and there officially. So if I've got it right, the state health department has been told that they cannot encourage vaccinations of any kind right now. The official in charge of health care for the state has been fired for being truthful about vaccination for COVID-19. And we have the denial of truth about black history. What's this controlled? I forget. There's a name for it. Gaslighting, how's that? Gaslighting, yeah. What's that? Gaslighting. Gaslighting spin. Rewrite history. Wagging the dog. Yeah, rewrite. Oh, much of it. Rewrite history, but really stomp on the truth. It's like when the truth doesn't play by the rules that we are familiar with and make us comfortable, we will deny it to the point of firing people, obliterating the truth, whatever it is. I would like to lay on this. There's very rarely a comfortable truth, but almost every lie is comfortable, delicious, and just the most wonderful thing possible. And so what you have to learn to deal with is a little bit of discomfort, because that's where truth is. It's not out of your way to hurt you, but it is not comfortable. It's like laying on the iron bed sometimes. You're just like, oh, I need that little bit of discomfort. Douda 5, what do you got? Oh, I was getting back to the double standard thing. I love it when I'm talking to him and I talk about like the Big Bang revolution or something age of the earth. And he says, there's no evidence for that. That's their comeback. And to me, I'm thinking. Your whole life is built around a book whose stories have no evidence to back them up. But as soon as I bring up verifiable scientific information, you claim there's no evidence for it. And that's what everyone puts on the thing. So evidence is important to you now and not then. I love that. That's double standard, it just drives me crazy. It drives me crazy too. So what happens at that point? My hair falls out. My hair turns gray. I get a gray hair. That's what happens. Douda 5, I get that a lot too. I've been in labs. I've been in chemical labs with other scientists and I'll bring up, oh, wow, you have a corgi. Those used to be wolves. Isn't that weird? And they'll be like, no, the dogs never used to be wolves. They were just always kinds of dogs. And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? It's like, yeah, evolution is a real. I'm like, we have documented breeders that can tell you what strains these dogs came from. Animal husbandry goes back hundreds of years. Like that's recent. That's very recent. Like, no, they're always corgis. I'm like, you're a scientist in my lab. It's the third pillar of biology. How do you not understand evolution? It's absolutely imperative that you do. But when you challenge their god belief with the evolution claim, that's when they pun on what? Well, you know, carbon dating isn't as comparable to like phosphorus, iso-32. And I read in this nature, man, you know, it's like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. And I read in this nature magazine, it's like, I'm glad you have all this skepticism for this. I wish you would apply it to the god belief because at this, you're taking for face value. Whereas everything else, you have the leagues of data to disclaim it, which is great because that's a scientific process. It's good to be skeptical, but apply that to your god belief and see where it'll lead you. Now, Dredpire Higgs, what do you got? Well, I was gonna say here in Canada as well, there's also a double standard. And I know what I'm about to say. It's probably not the popular thing to say, but given the recent findings in residential schools, but it has been a longstanding policy of both federal and provincial governments to treat indigenous peoples as a, almost as a distinct and separate race that have certain privileges and considerations that the rest of the population do not have. And I find that is a perfect example of a double standard. If we're supposed to be all equal and we're all equal citizens under the law, that's the way it ought to be. Not set it up as you're non-indigenous and you are indigenous and we are gonna treat you this way and we're gonna treat you the other way. Because you're not part of the system, we get to take certain advantages of you that... Yeah, well, I mean, you think about this. I mean, the idea of blood and soil, of course, is really an antiquated and outdated mode of thinking. It goes back to tribalism and it's a failed epistemology really. I am as much, every atom in my body is from the soil here. I am as indigenous as anyone alive. And it just seems like an arbitrary distinction that is not really warranted. And that's kind of my feeling about it. It's interesting. I mean, I know terrible things have happened to indigenous people by virtue of them identifying and their culture and all the rest of it. But I don't think it's the collective guilt of every non-indigenous person that has to now bear the weight of it. And if you know what I mean. I would only argue, and this is probably a much deeper topic for another time, but if there are systemic barriers inhibiting quality of life for a particular group of people and they can't get a voice because they're not claimed to be a citizen or non-indigenous or whatever, that's troublesome because now you're being put essentially in a group that you don't have consent to get out of so that you can seek the help that you need to support the group that you're in. And it puts everything at a double standard that's very strict. So it should be in a sense like, hey, sort of like, and I'll throw this out, it should be like a voluntary system of like, hey, if you wanna be considered this, you can use this label. But for the most part, we are a system that helps everybody equally. And whatever label you have, we will dish out the help. Sort of like, if I go play disc golf, I have a choice of being in the novice league or the amateur or like the pro level if I wanna go into pro, but I have the choice of picking which one and I can choose the level of competition I wanna be in and I'll get rated based on the one that I can essentially chose to whatever label I picked. But it's a very complicated issue. John. It is. Well, I've got something that segues on nicely from what Dred was telling us because you guys will know that pretty much that England was the football team was in the final of the Euros last time I watched that. What's that mean? What's that mean? Is there any American that can explain that to me? What does that mean? They're in the finals. Finals of what? Playoff of the football soccer. Something, something. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Oh, that's a good one. It's a game that's kicking the ball. Okay. Can you ask questions about this golf and you're like, well, I don't know what this is. Okay, what's soccer? Well, it's like, it's like your game, what do you call it? Not rugby. Boos ball? Okay, if you like, but you're not allowed to pick the ball up. So it's really just the feet, you see? So anyway, England was in this and we did very well. We came through all the different stages winning, winning, winning, only conceded one goal in the whole of the event. And then it got to the final and we were beaten by Italy. And unfortunately it went to a penalty shootout which is a horrible way to end a football match. But three of our players were coloured. They're British, you know, but they had ethnicity that wasn't deemed to be going back enough centuries by some people. And although they'd supported them throughout the whole of the winning stages of the event, because they missed a couple of penalties, horrible racist remarks were made on the internet. And we also have a thing over here which is called Thought for the Day, which is a little slot on Radio 4 in the mornings where we get some religious person, usually a Christian, who gives us a little homily. And so we had this person come on at the beginning of the week and she was saying how horrible it was. The racist remarks would have been expressed about some of our footballers. Everybody was agreeing with her, but she ended up saying, I as a Christian, no better than this sort of thing. So she did a little bit of propaganda for her group at the end, not realising that although she disliked racism, she didn't mind a bit of religionism. Whoa, interesting. So yeah, two examples there. Like, hey, we are good enough to be a part of your team during all the winning games that led us to the finals, but when we miss a penalty kick, now you have the standard where we're all essentially less than human. And then the remarks from a thought giver was essentially like, hey, I'm not racist, but as a member of a society that's probably more responsible for the systemic segregation of people and destruction of human lives than any other group and probably the most highest successful team in terms of division across all of humanity. I don't like these terms. This actually makes you upset. It seems weird that there's that colourful perspective on themselves. Yeah, double standards are annoying. Hypocrisy is annoying. Dredg Pirate, what do you have? Just for marking actually on that game, I believe the captain of the Italian team, when he pulled the shirt of one of the black players there and pulled him to the ground. I mean, we were aghast that he didn't get a black card. You know what I mean? Or a red card, sorry. Or just booted right out of the game. Yes, yes. You know what I mean? Because it was such a glaring case of obvious, you know, very, very obvious foul. And I wondered, of course, I was thinking because of sort of this, you could see that there was this sort of inherent racism in there, that if it had been another player who was not black, if he would have been given a red card. You know what I mean? George Brown, these guys are talking about soccer. I'll just bring us back to America. No, I can't talk about soccer, but I want to follow up on what Dredg Pirate was talking about and preface that with saying that there have been times in my life when I have looked to Canada as an inspiration, you know, like the guys who got it right, you know, when Americans are all screwed up, we have this beacon of sanity to the north. And that's wishful thinking, I guess. This business with the Indian schools, frankly, has made me just heart sick. And that wasn't all of Canada, that was just the Catholics. Catholic residential schools, yeah. Anyway, getting on to psychology of all this, you know, I think what I hear a lot of is us versus them. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys. God is on our side, not theirs. And the minister, of course, the religious leader on that side is saying, God is on our side. Double standard. We tend to be generalizers. We have to be. Animals are generalizers. We have a survival in them. It's been very well, whatever. We try to make sense out of the world and we compartmentalize our knowledge. And so people have a tendency, many people, to have in and out, in-group, out-group. And there's a tendency to put the people who threaten our beliefs into that out-group. That's, you know, the double standards, you just watch them come, they come in waves. We're in waves now. We're in waves now. And I will want to make a point. You know, we're a room full of atheists right now. We're all most likely subject to our own special double standards and we should be aware of that. Indeed. And I want them called out when I see them. That's the main thing that I think hopefully differentiates me from someone who's grown accustomed to their double standards and are comfortable. I want them called out for me and I want to be able to change so that I have one single standard or most often possible. Dred, go for you. Yeah, so we've got a comment here from Data's Trading Room, which I really like. He says it's always like that. When the team is winning, we are winning. When the team is losing, they are losing. Yeah. It's very, very true. I like it. John, what do you have? Yeah, I want to pick up on what you said, Tai, about people having double standards even in your lab. Oh, yeah, no. It's strange, isn't it, that there's a big reluctance to admit ignorance. Yet if we don't know the answer to something, as an ex-science teacher, I get expected to be able to provide all the answers. And when I say nobody knows yet, they don't take that as acceptable. And it's weird to me because skepticism is a perfectly valid position to hold. And if you don't know, it's honorable and honest to say so. Intellectualism. Where's their hang-up? Why then they accept that? Larry. Because they have been trained to have to be right. They have been trained to have to have an answer, to have to have an answer. Yes, right. Larry, do you want to talk more on that? About having to have an answer. Having to have an answer. I feel like Christianity trains you to have to have an answer. Not to think about an answer, but to have the answer. Well, 1 Peter 3.15 says, always be prepared to defend your faith, defend your beliefs. And they take that to heart, especially the ones that are apologetic or apologists for the religion. And so many people pick up that gauntlet, as it were, whether we're thrown down or not, that they feel like they have to defend their beliefs. No matter what the answer, how outrageous or strange the answer is, they feel if they give an answer, they have an answer. Exactly. It's not the same thing as having a valid answer, having an answer that's been vetted or proven to be true. So our school systems in America, I don't know how they are in Canada or in Britain, but we have a culture where you are better off being wrong than admitting you don't know. And so it goes down to the classroom where, hey, what's the answer to this math equation? Timmy, give it to me. He's not gonna say I don't know. He's gonna be like seven. He's gonna make a guess and be wrong. When we have a standardized test, they tell you literally, just guess something on the multiple choice because it's better than leaving it blank, right? Like they encourage you to have an answer period. And so we don't really have opportunities to investigate the value of I don't know until we hit into, you know, upper graduate school where it's like, I don't know is actually the right answer until we have a better test for this. And that's mind-blowing level of discomfort to get around if you haven't raised with that idea as a concept or at least that option. John Richards. Yeah, I like to think that there's two things. There's an answer which actually addresses the question. And then there's a response, which doesn't. Okay, and I'll add a third one. If we can have a response, we can have an answer and then we can have an even better thing, an explanation. And the cool thing about an explanation is it may not even have the answer in it, but it does illuminate a lot of aspects of the question that at least helps you understand what is the nature of what we're talking about and what could be the answer down the road. So I'm a fan of explanations and I don't know. And I realized a lot of times when I was a Christian, I was getting a lot of answers for things, but I wasn't getting any explanations. And that's what made me want to think about like, okay, well, how do these things happen? We don't know yet. That's fine, but I'll at least take the best explanation until then. Doubter five. Well, some explanations are better than others for sure. I like that. You ask the question to a preacher and he gives you an answer and you ask him for an explanation. He's quite ready to give an explanation. I will listen to that. He'll go on for hours about the explanation, but it doesn't mean it has anything to do with reality. And then there's your parents' explanation. When you say why, and they say, because I told you to. That's not much of an explanation for why. So, you know, no answers and some explanations are about in the same ballpark. Yeah, someone's right up there with, this is gonna hurt me more than it's gonna hurt you. Ah, yeah, yeah. So like, what is it, the nature of being, how to be a good person, consequence and all that stuff. Like I had a high standard for wanting to know why those were the case. And I wasn't getting, for my mom, she'd just be like, I don't know, like figure it out, read the Bible or whatever, which is a good response. In the Bible, it'd say, God says, don't eat shellfish, that's how you'd be a good person. I'm like, there's an answer, but I'm not sure if that explains anything to me. And then when I started getting explanations, there were like convoluted, they were difficult, they were complex, but that doesn't mean that they were untrue. It just means I had to heighten my ability to understand different things and how my consequence has affected other people. I had to read books on ethics, morality. I had to understand like, hey, maybe I can define my own purpose in life and try to get other people's assessments so I can have a better objective understanding of how to treat people and how I wanna be treated. And maybe I don't have the final best model for how to treat people, but I at least have something very reasonable and good. And I found like, that is a good enough explanation. That's what I mean by explanation. You get kinda close. You find something more reasonable, sure. Yeah, I found a better answer, a better explanation, a better response. And I feel like that's the standard I wanna go by. I wanna go to a point where I can always improve and always have the standard of evidence that I have meet whatever the claim is that I believe or wanna stay true. And if I don't have that, I'm very annoyed. If someone sells me anything other, it's a very annoying thing because I don't wanna be a hypocrite. Dredd Pirate Higgs, where can we find you? What's going on with you? Well, I'm live streaming this right now. It started at eight o'clock a.m. on Sunday morning and specific standard time or daylight time depending on what season. And I can be found on Mind Pirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E on YouTube. That's my channel. Very, very cool. Did you get 100 subscribers? All right. Did you get 100 subscribers, my friend? I'm at 90. Let's go. He's the only 10 away, guys. Blow this thing up. All right. Well, hopefully now that we're putting the link into, Larry's putting the link into the chat room, we'll get some more viewers and more subscribers. I'll tell you how you do it. You just say that your videos are for kids when you upload on YouTube. They'll disable comments, but everybody will be able to see it. It's a question of whether you want that or not. John Richards, future self-proclaimed president, what's going on with you and where can we find you? I don't accept that description. You can find me on Freethought Productions. That's a YouTube channel where I do my global AT&T screen and my Freethought hour every week goes out on Saturday. I've got a great guest coming up next week. He's an Australian who is a lecturer in chemistry. And he has a lot of thoughts. He's got a lot of thoughts to say about evolution indeed. So that'll be cool. A chemist who has opinions on evolution. That's interesting. OK, OK, OK, OK. I'd love to hear that. George Brown, Pete's coffee. Where can I get a cup? Well, you can only in this state, the only place where I know you can get a cup is, I believe, Nashville. OK. There is an affiliate store there. But you can find Pete's coffee in many supermarkets these days. And I get mine at angles. But I don't get it very often because it's not cheap. Oh, no. This is good stuff. Now anyway, in this part of the show, I just want to say that you inspired me, a person of a Jewish heritage, to have shrimp for lunch. Nice. That's it. That'll be very, very cool. Out of five. You'll go to hell, George. That's what hell is going to do. I'm going to kill somebody else. Oh, I'm sorry to do it. Plot twist, Jews don't believe in hell. There you go. Out of five. What do you got? My own content can be found on digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show archives, atheist songs, and many articles on the subject. My book is Atheism, What's It All About? It's available on Amazon. And you can find my YouTube channel by searching for Larry Rhodes or Doubt or Fine. If you have any questions for this show, you can send them to askanatheist.noxfolatheist.org. And we'll answer them on future shows. And if you're having trouble leaving religious police behind, then it can be hard. You can find help at recoveringfromreligion.org. There you go. There's my book. Thanks, Judd. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. This has been the Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Remember, everybody, including George, is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they preach that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. And we'll see you next week. Say bye, everybody. Bye. Bye, everybody. So I heard a voice in my head that told me atheism is true.