 Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, February 11th, 2024. I'm Larry Rhodes, our DJ Douter 5, and as usual, we have a co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Hey, it's the Wombat. DJ Wombat and Dred Pirate Higgs is with us all the way from Western Canada. Welcome. Digital Freethought Radio Hours to talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faith, post-Affarianism, God's holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling you're the only non-believer in your town, well, I guarantee you you're not. Here in Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over 1,100 of us. We're the atheist society of Knoxville, or ASK. And we'll tell you more about us after the mid-show breaks, so be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? Did you hear about the inconvenient news? You might have heard of the good news, but have you heard about the inconvenient news? That's what I wanted to hear about. Oh, there's good news, bad news. I haven't heard about the inconvenient news. Oh, it's going to be something we'll get into. The whole show will dedicate a whole show to it. But before we get into it, that's our main course. We'll have about an appetizer or noodles led by our own Dred Pari Higgs. Our newly Lord, who art in a colander, How dente be thy boots, that blood be run by sauce, be um, 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 curbs. The dine, or the meatballs, and the noodles, and the grog, whatever it ever, grog. Oh, man. I've been doing a weird thing for the last couple of weeks, where I wake up in the morning and I track a mood. One out of ten is what I'd give myself. Ten if I'm at the highest, zero if I feel just like I'm in the complete dumps. And since I started that board, I realized something about myself in that I tend to be a monopolar because I've been at a 10 out of 10 for the last three weeks in a row. And I realized every single time I feel like, well, maybe I'm at a 9.5. No, I'm kicking butt. This is awesome. Like, life is awesome. Like, I have a lot of friends. You're in a manic phase. Yeah, I'm like, I'm not in pain. My family's healthy. I got a good job. My cat loves me. Like, this is, things are awesome. I'm just going to put another 10 here. Even when problems come, even when problems come, I have fun fixing them. And so that's why I want to talk a little bit about problems and how they show up. And it's fun fixing things, particularly in an engineering environment, because I get to use science to fix stuff. I can't just pray problems away. I have to understand how the problem. Yeah, you get that feeling of accomplishment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that got me thinking this week, I was thinking to myself, you know, sometimes when things break in our laboratory or in our building, we have people we put in a work order. But oftentimes the people at our site are good enough engineers that they can fix the problem themselves. What happens if something breaks in hell? Like, who's the who's you can't imagine everything works in hell, right? Like, the whole point about hell is being like troublesome, inconvenient, terrible, eternal punishment. But like, what if things go dull? What if heaters break down? What if the electric city cords break down? What if the Netflix subscription goes out of phase? You know, like we need to have waste to fix it or not? Would it not actually be better if certain things stay broken in hell for the benefit of everybody? Like, is one thing's break, is that a feature? And so, you know, the particularly the heater, right, right, right. So I came about to like the inconvenient news. This is what I mean by the inconvenient news. We all know about the good news, which is like Jesus Christ rise and we're all saved through the blood of God and all that stuff. What if we got an extra page in the Bible? Like that's just magically appeared in every Bible to the point where we're like, oh, man, every Bible has this extra page. Now, it's like, yes, it's directly missing. It's missing from God. It's just a inconvenient news page that says we're sorry. The heaters in hell have broken down indefinitely. We apologize for the inconvenience. And now I'm thinking to myself, wait, so the hell's not hot anymore. Like, remember all that stuff we said about burning fires? Yeah, the heaters are great. We can't seem to figure out a way to coordinate to fix it. So no, no, I deform. Yeah, we start. We apologize for the convenience. So it brings. So what would that look like? Yeah, so what would that look like? Dred, you, while you are not a Christian, what do you think a hell where the heaters are broken would look like? What kind of it would that be better and a paradise? What do you think? Compare in contrast with volcanoes that shoot up here. It would, you know, it'd be a change and, you know, people like change. So I imagine just by virtue of the fact that it's different than what they've been used to. I'd be, I'd be all right. OK, OK. I mean, you know, saying, you know, even pastafarian heaven, like, you know, it's the beer volcano. Well, it'd be nice if it was ale and then, you know, change. OK. You know, maybe need or some kind of heavy beer, you know, just just to switch it up a bit. Wouldn't be so darn monopolist or monotonous as it were. Champagne, if you will, like a little bubbly spray. So like you could be in hell and be like, oh, it's hot. Oh, it's so hot to like, oh, it's not that bad. What is this, like 70 degrees? It's only balmy. This is pretty good. I was like, is it broken? Is the heater broken? Yeah, the heater is broken. Can we keep it broken? It's like, I don't think anyone in heaven knows how to fix this because there's only Christian engineers. Excuse me, there's only Christian scientists. Well, if there were engineers in hell, it they would have had an air condition by now. I'm sorry, what did you just say, Larry? If there were engineers in hell, they would have had an air condition by now. Maybe, maybe the small, yeah, they would have to be clever and be willing to break the rules, but I'm sure they would figure something else like that. It's like, you don't have to stay outside. We figured this out like day 14,000. We got this working. But the idea is for a lot of Christian science, a lot of problems could be prayed away or you can use God as an interventionist means to like affect real world change. Whereas with secular minded, like, forms of science where you have to just understand the model and recognize when you don't know something. If something's broken, you can fix it by understanding the problem, not necessarily praying. So if you have hell and something breaks in hell, you can't pray to God to fix it so Christian science no longer can be helpful, even though God made hell. Like hell is all about being away from God. And so now you have like this realm where like if the heater breaks down or if something starts electrical breaking down or like something wears out or a pitchfork gets dull. Now you have a system where it's like, oh, well, only people who can fix it are the people who are already in hell. And why would they fix it? Because it's not in their benefit to do so. In fact, if anything, there's no more unruly group of people and pirates. Forgive me, forgive me. Then people are like, where are we gonna turn the heater back on? Are you kidding me? It's just the inconvenient news. And so what I have is a list of things that have broken down in hell. And I wanna go through that list and see. Let's see, I want us to like explore user minds and have some freedom of creativity to explore the nature of this inconvenient news and the list of things that are broken on this magical page that showed up in our Bible. So we have pitchfork polishing stations. The pitchfork polishing station is no longer in service. The mess of this, sorry, Satan's polisher is on strike. Embrace the rustic charms of slightly tarnished pitchforks instead. And I say- And rusty. And rusty, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true, that's true, it's true. So, you know what? Does it mean you have to get a tetanus shot in hell or? So you're saying there's Medicare in hell now? Well, it gets me is, I mean, we don't have a body in hell. It's just their souls, theoretically. And souls don't interact with them, theoretically, with material things. So I can't imagine, imagine like trying to set a ghost on fire, you know, what's the deal, Larry? It's just not one of those things. Larry, that's such a good point. Yeah, when you're in hell, you don't even have your body. So like, what are you hoping the pitchfork to begin with? Like, that's fine, it's all good. It just goes right through the soul. Isn't the Christian thing like of a bodily resurrection, like a physical bodily resurrection? I mean, wasn't that what happened when Jesus died, that, you know, thousands of graves open up and the people got out of them and started walking around? So I am also aware of Jehovah Witness and times where bodies will come from graves and there's even planets where stewards will be in charge of them and people will be taken to those planets to be cared for by the certain, a lot of number of chosen people. It's out there, but, you know, dead bodies coming out and hanging out with people seem to be pretty common. The thing is, we know how, I don't know if we know how decay works or if they knew how decay works because, you know, a lot of these bodies that we were expecting to come out of nowhere have already gone through multiple cycles of the water cycle, have probably been fish and other animals at this point, bacteria at this point, like, you know, you bring back a body, like, how's that gonna work? Right, that's pretty weird. All right, but yeah, I like the pitchfork polishing station being completely unaffected by souls. The souls are like, we don't care either way, it was just going through us, you can't even give us tetanus. Now they're just slightly less sharp sticks that can't even hurt us, that's even less of a pain in the butt. All right, next one, screams of the agony amplifier. The missive is, apologies, the amplifier's gone mute. Enjoy the serenity and slightly quieter torments. Earplugs are available upon request. I don't think that'd be available. What would you put them into, those seven years? Well, okay, but either way, it's like, we went from, unnecessarily, what'd you say, Dredd? Well, that you just hang on to earplugs. I mean, you didn't put them in anything, you just hang on, but I got earplugs. Larry, that was the thing. So earplugs are always, so here's my inner lore. You always had earplugs, but because you were a soul, you had nowhere to stick them in. So you were just stuck with listening to people scream all the time with earplugs that are completely ineffectual. That's a perfect little island of hell torment to live on for the rest of your eternity, right? It's like, I can't handle these screams, yet I'm surrounded by earplugs, but I don't have ears, no. But now the amplifier's broken. So with the broken amplifier, now people can just sit around and gossip now. And I wonder what they'll even have conversations about, but I think that could be a nice improvement, right? Can we agree on that? Okay. Dredd, what is the quote? I know there's no such thing as a apostrophe in hell, right? But- Oh, there is, yep. Oh, there is? Talk to me. Yeah, so the bear is stale and the strippers have STDs. Okay, okay. Did you know that? No, I didn't. I mean, it comes and it goes. It comes and it goes, Dredd, it comes and it goes. So is it basically like a subsection? Is it like the, the downs, the- It's like the bizarro version. The bizarro version, yeah. Okay, okay. It's a parallel dimension of the paradise. It's not like downtown of the paradise where it's like, hey, you know, it's, this is all shit. This is where all the bad stuff goes. Yeah. Okay, okay, okay. Kind of parallel. Well, you just don't have all the benefits of a post-aparion heaven. You don't have the cold beer and all the stuff that they chill out with. Yeah, I'm gonna ask some silly questions too. Like, is there any hope for getting the strippers to be resolved with their, with their issues? Cause I'd feel bad if they were stuck there for eternity with STDs. Yeah. Yeah, you know, that's been a very serious ethical question that's been raised. And I'm not sure that there's an answer yet. Okay. But they're not like, like, essentially in beings. Got it. Got it. Got it. Stripper robots. They're just like stripper cyborgs or robots. That's right. Androids. Yeah, absolutely, non-sentient and non-conscious. Just like Petri dishes of pathogens where they're gonads should be. Yeah, we sound like Christians, you know, fulfilling details about heaven. They know absolutely nothing about, and not the Bible. But we're talking about hell. We're talking about hell. We have an authority to talk about what hell is. We're all gonna be going there soon. So I'm just talking about like what's going on here. Yeah, there's even less information about hell on the Bible. You wanna talk about that real quick before we get to the next one? Go ahead, Larry. I think I just wanted to say this hardly any information about hell at all. You know, he keeps, Jesus keeps saying, you know, I will prepare a place for you in my father's mansion. So it's a house, you know? But he says nothing about hell, you know? Yeah. You know, I always refer back to the Bart Ehrman, the New Testament scholar. And he, I mean, he's just great because, you know, he spent his entire professional career studying the New Testament. And there really is no discussion about, you know, hell or what it means. And the most that we know about hell is what Dante wrote. Yeah. That's what we get most of our imagery. Of course, that was a complete fiction. So, you know, like the nine levels of hell and blah, blah, blah, and the demons and all the rest of it. Actually, that's a pretty good lead in because the next missive of inconvenient news that came out in our Bible that has that page that just magically updates is hell's GPS system. Satan's GPS system is down. You're not going to get, you get lost and discover new circles of hell all on your own. So no, you don't have to worry about the seven layers and hitting them in a very specific order. You can just go wherever you want now. There goes a recalculating. Recalculating. They're like, don't you guys want to just hang out gluttony? Why are we going to every single time? I'd be into lust. I think lust would be pretty cool. Lust could be for certain people. I would definitely love, like, there's some really fun. What do you call it? Are they called the seven sins? What's the, what are the names of the layers? Do they have like a realm title? Giving some pride? Yeah. Yeah, because it was like purgatory and blah, blah, I can't remember what they were. So you can give me pride or nine levels of hell or something. Okay, nine levels of hell, pride, gut, gluttony. Those are like some of the two funnest ones. I can imagine that for sure. Rat battles and pride must be off the chain. They must be super cool. Like the rock shows and pride are going to be awesome. The food and gluttony is going to be amazing. Larry, what's your favorite circle? I'll let you're looking forward to now that hell's GPS system is down. What? My favorite circle of hell? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your favorite circle? Well, the only thing I would think of, you know, if the heater went out, the lakes of lava would solidify. So you wouldn't want to be caught in a lake of lava. You know, at that point, you'd have, you'd want to get out and maybe have a picnic on the shore. Okay. Yeah. So I have the seven, most of the circles of hell right now. You have limbo, you've got lust, dreads favorite. You got gluttony, my favorite. That's the third circle. Now we can go there directly. We got greed as the fourth circle, you know. That's where Trump will go, I guess. We've got wrath, which is the fifth circle. Where the wrathful and sullen are punished. You have hearsay, where heretics are punished. And now that's interesting. So would that be like Socrates? Would that be people who like just know logical arguments? Also, do they get worse as you go along? Or do they get better? I don't think so. They're just different. Different. Like different rooms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And on my point, I'm like, you always have to go through them in that order, though. But with the GPS system down, you can just hang out at the most funnest one, just go there directly. Like, this is great. Like, we can now just go wherever we want to go. Like, you have violence as the seventh one. The seventh circle of hell is dedicated or is divided in three wings. And they're all about violence, punishments include immersion and boiling blood, being transformed into trees and bushes and being chased and bitten by wild animals. And then finally, the extra two, eighth and ninth, are fraud and treachery. It's pretty interesting. What's your source on them? I'm sourcing it from, let's see, let's get it from the concept of hell's originates from Dante. Dante. Epic poem Inferno, which is so everybody out there, Dante never wrote a book or never lived. What would our concept of hell be? Yeah, believe it or not. Now, that's a great question, Larry. The concept of hell as we are born by it is actually by boiling sulfur pits or tar pits that have like sulfur gases. Jesus just said it was going to be eternal fire. And that's that's about all he said. So it could just be like an eternal forest on fire. We don't know. Sure, sure, sure. In the same book, there was a description of hell that was more that was pretty inclined with just like a tar pit. And I think what happened was some guy saw a tar pit was like, oh, this place stinks and it's hot and I don't like it. You know what? Hell's like that. And the description of it is like real world places that I want to suggest. It's always people saying what they don't know and claiming it to be true. Right. And hoping everybody also buy into it. Right. And if you ever smelled sulfur dioxide gas bubble, you would believe, yeah, this is pretty much how I believe I rotten eggs. Oh, yeah, like dead skunk. It's not good. Anyway, though, I would, I mean, I could see myself bouncing around violence just for like some quick boxing matches, UFC matches, get some entertainment and go back to gluttony. Have a cool time like there's if you plan a if you plan a vacation in hell accordingly, it couldn't be that bad. Actually, it might be pretty fun. That's all I'm saying. Gary, nice to have you back. We're talking about. OK, so the torture chamber massage chairs. OK, so there was a torture chamber in heaven. This is another missive. So we're sorry to let you know that our torture chambers are down. Please enjoy the massage chairs. Let's stretch out on a rack for a temporary release. So now instead of being tortured in hell on racks, you can just get a nice massage. I think that's OK, too. What do you guys think about that? Larry's still like, I'm still a soul. There's nothing I can do about this. Yeah, I mean, if it was a massage, if their hands just go right through you. What's to massage? Yeah, so you need like what if it was done by another soul, though, what are your soul rules, Larry? Like if you're if it was a soul who was doing massage to another soul, would that not allow contact? Well, who knows? I mean, we've never just had a soul to test and see what their physical properties are. And my feeling on that is because they don't exist. There are no such things as souls. This is the first time you've ever said that. No, no, you've never ever brought this. No, but I mean, you know, we we don't know anything about it. People profess that they know all about souls and what they are. But even professional ghost hunters have never shown us a ghost. All they've done is told us about the sounds they heard, which can be caused by another person. But there was a problem with a ghost show that would find that a ghost exists because they would no longer be the ghost hunters, they'd be the ghost finders and it'd be a one episode show. And the show description would be we did it and there wouldn't be a season two or four or 17. Unless they could define them. And it would be like, you know, Apollo 15 was to Apollo 11, you know, just nobody watched TV anymore or gave a gave a hack about it. No, right? It's like, can anyone name the seventh person that landed on or walked on the moon? Right. It's like, we're kind of done. We figured it out. So everyone wants to be the first and greatest. That's why there's so many hunters. But as soon as one person does, that shows over, right? And I think they know it. I think at this point they know it and they're just riding the wave of money. I almost can guarantee you if they found an actual ghost, they'd be like, let's not let's pretend we don't broadcast this and just ride this gravy train for as long as possible. Like, I know there's a ghost. You know, there's a ghost. I don't know. I take the opposite view on that. I think that if they found one, it would give them such a sense of accomplishment that they would want to find another and another and see how they differ, you know, and bring it to the forefront. They would they would win, probably, you know, prize for actually finding one and the rewards, you know, would be a science. Then it would be a science at that point. Yes, you're right. Dredd, very good point. They call it something like phenomenology or something like that, right? Phenomenology. I love that so much. That's great. That's that's such a cool name. I wish another branch of science would use that. That's so awesome. But yeah, if they had good intentions, right? I think and I guess proper funding or or what do you call it? Good data, you know, if they could collect some good data from it, a bit of it. So maybe get it repeatable. So we come back next Saturday night and we find it again or we bring some witnesses in, you know, some scientists verify it and it happens again. Then we got something that's verifiable and can write a paper and make Nobel prizes out of it. So I can tell you that from my perspective, the order of how science comes about is oftentimes, oftentimes an complete accident that you just recorded because you're using the scientific method to document how you were doing everything. And then something unexpected happens and you're like, let's repeat this experiment again to see if this happens again. Then happen again and you're like, OK, let's stop and see if we can let our supervisors know or get funding for this because this really costs money, but we know how to get this particular result. And now once I have money in funding, like I'll I'll I'll I'll write a grant and then I'll have people who are expecting results that I have to be honest to who can fund the research, the novel research that I came up with so I can get some notoriety along with it. I can publish and now there's like a whole body of work that I can present and be a forefront of that. I have creditors that I owe to do so in like an objective and detailed manner, like that tends to be an impetus for like in a weird way, really cool science. So like if you're just some guy with a TV show and you're just interested in making more of that TV show, I don't think they'd be as genuine as someone who like may have inadvertently come up with like some way of connecting two batteries together and being like, oh, my gosh, it's Ghostbusters land. This happened. Hold on a second. Don't cross the beams. Don't cross the beams. How do we we disappear? We forgot another option that could happen. Instead of having scientists come in, the military would probably want to come in, shut the whole thing down, privatize it to them and and put it in the lab and see if they could make a weapon out of it without. Yeah. OK. So yes, that does happen. Larry, that happens to. But you know what? A lot of really cool things have come about from that process because after they figure out, OK, we really can't make a weapon out of Velcro. But it is useful to have Velcro. We're going to we're going to issue it out. So, for example, you can make a weapon out of a ghost. You could send him into places where he would not be seen, gather secrets, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, that's just so anybody. Assassinate, you know, or you can bring back like fallen soldiers and be like, hey, you get a second chance. You're back on a contract. It's like, oh, this is awesome. It can work. But like we a military is so NASA's technically military funding. It's government funding, right? And every dollar that we spent on helping figure out how to get a rocket to like Mars or the moon or even just an atmosphere making satellites has paid back dividends dramatically. And there's a lot of really cool technology that we have as a result of it. So it's not always a bad thing when the military like steps in and funds research as long as the research gets funded and the scientific method is allowed to be followed. And what I just hope is that, you know, if ghosts were real, they would have serious backing so that we can benefit from phenomenology. Anyway, Larry, I think we're close to the bottom of the first half hour. Pretty, pretty close. This is the digital free thought radio hour and W.O.Z.O. Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. And I'm ready. You are. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can jump back into it. I'm in a living camp right now. Yeah, I want to talk about that if that was possible. But yeah. OK. Three, two, one. Yeah, three, two, welcome back. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on W.O.Z.O. Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in a 22nd year now and have 1100 members. We're weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. You can find us online at facebook.com, meetup.com, or KnoxvilleAtheist.org, our website. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. But don't find one. Start one. That's right. Start one. Where do you want to pick up one bet? I got some quick. I actually had some listener comments, but I would. I do have some questions about the the the core that Dredd is enjoying. That is quite a nice little state that you're in. Would you mind talking about that? With that, sorry, you. The core. What's the core? It's just really, really pretty where he's at right now. I've never seen him in such a nice little. Yeah, yeah. So I'm in a medic shack on a. This is actually a carbon capture project. I'll show you. So right now, we've got a bunch of people so pretty building this up. Yeah, it is. This guy is very nice. But it's a carbon capture project. And and so I live on on site in a medic shack. So, you know, I got a bedroom and kitchen and all that good stuff. So and I don't have to drive to work or from work. I'm here all the time and yes, it's it's actually quite nice. I like it. I could get used to this. What do you do for entertainment there? I've got a TV and of course I've got my computer and books and computer. All that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, video games. I've been, you know, I've been learning Spanish. I've been taking a physics course. I'm working on getting into calculus. So I'm doing my pre-calculus. Yeah, you know, because I I decided to go back to university to finish my degree, right? So yeah, working on all that stuff. What's your major? What's your major? Your major? It's just general studies because I have a diploma in that. So it's very, very diverse. And I essentially just pick whatever I want to do. And you learn how to do a lot of research. That's so cool. That's cool. We're all at 10s today. This is great. We have a listener comment. This one's coming from Patty. She is a friend of mine. She's a Christian. She actually works out with me and she's been listening to the show. We appreciate it. She's she's she is a Christian, but she's very open minded and has some really we've had some thoughtful conversations. The question that she's asking is I bought this is on their show, Snowflakes, where we're talking about how basically people will look at the snowflake and say it came from God. If they don't know mechanics of like how a snowflake is created and like there's no better demonstration that we understand the mechanics of how snowflake is created by the fake that we can make snowflakes ourselves and like blow them on hills for fake snow. Like we we understand the process well enough. And so it's not like a supernatural design. It's just a manipulation of some really basic physical parameters, right? And what she had mentioned, it's a it's a bit of a long message, but here's the short of it. I've often wondered what do atheists believe is the purpose behind the ornateness of a snowflake? Is it purely a result of natural process or is there a deeper significance atheists find in their beauty? She starts it off by basically saying like it's OK. I understand what you mean by the show that we know how it was made, but do you think there's any purpose behind the ornateness? Because we could have had snowflakes look like a standard thing over and over again. Larry, I see you shaking your head, but I love to hear from Dredd. It's just a people they want to say they want to say this is my friend. I'm just talking about humanity. Humans want to see purpose and things. They look for purpose and things where it may or may not be there. And I don't believe that it's there, but that's just me. Like, I mean you think about things like like flight. The flight has happened, you know, independent at least four times in the history of life eyeballs. Same thing. You know, people often Christians often go back to this. Well, look at the eyeball or look at the trees. I mean, it's the complexity is impossible. It's like, well, that's an argument for an ignorance. It's not it's nothing more than that just because you don't know how it's how it happened doesn't make it necessarily create a creation from a divide being. Go ahead, Larry. All right. Well, just because a snowflake doesn't have a purpose doesn't mean that we don't have purpose, but we supply our own purpose. We generate, you know, we may have a certain purpose when you're in your teens or another one when you're in your twenties or thirties, another one when you're 50, you know, purpose. People can have many purposes and change them as they get older. You know, just do what your purpose is. Yeah. Remember Steve Martin, he had a special purpose. Remember in the movie The Idiot? Yeah. Mama told me of my special purpose. Let me get to the heart of her question because she's asking, as a Christian, I see the uniqueness of snowflakes as a reflection of God's creativity and design. However, I'm curious to hear from Atheist. How do you personally appreciate the delicate intricacy of snowflakes and what significance, if any, do you find in their ornate designs from a secular perspective? Like, is there anything from the secular world point of view that makes you look at a snowflake and be in any sense of awe or certainly? I mean, there's there's true. If there if it's true that none are ever alike, then there are trillions of different designs. That is awesome. That is amazing. I mean, I said in awe that I sit in awe that there are so many different variations of the six-sided hexagonal. It's just incredible. I can be in awe of us. A beautiful sunset or what I'm involved is the sea. I was in the Navy for four years. It's been two years on a destroyer. When I rise, go to the seashore. I just sit in awe of the vastness and the complexity of the life inside the sea and how it all started there. Wow, that's awesome. That's awesome. Dredd, you look like a person who spent some time on seas. Would you say the same? Yeah, or in the forests or anywhere, really. I mean, actually up here, when every morning I am, you know, witness to these beautiful sunrises and sunsets, it's like, I could never get tired of this and it always fills me with awe and wonder and all the rest of it, even though I can look at it from a different point of view, from a scientific point of view. I think understanding things is much better than just, you know, saying it's the result of something that I will never understand. I wouldn't want to be the person. Even the pursuit of understanding is more valuable than the assumption that you know the answer. Exactly. Right? I throw this out too. I remember seeing a YouTube video of a guy who got these glasses that helped correct vision for people who have color blindness and it wasn't the typical video where someone puts it on and starts crying. In fact, he was very skeptical. He used a very scientific approach of like, I actually would like to prove that these things don't work and a lot of the videos that are out are like, dramatized and like staged. That's why the camera's all set up. I bought my own pair. I have this kind of color blindness. It's been packed to me for XYZ. So I see like reds and greens, it's sort of like a brown and I am going to put them on for the first time ever and I'm going to walk outside and I'm going to give you my honest, true impressions of like, what I think about this, I'm not crying. I'm just going to put them on and put them on. Oh my goodness. Oh no. Oh, there's different greens. That's a green and that's a green. No, they're all different. I can't believe the trees and the bushes aren't the same color and grass. Oh my gosh, grass is amazing. Like he went from like a complete 180 and he tried so hard not to. He's like, oh, what's that color? Is this orange? No purple. Right. Things that I take for granted is someone who can see color on a regular basis. Like I look at like sunsets in the same way where I'll just stand outside and admire the fact that I can appreciate the variety of colors, the deep reds, deep purples as it bleed into yellows and oranges. And there's like no other vivid kind of like neon, bright kind of like cloud sky. It's not even like a color cloud. It's just the sky is purple and red and it happens every day. And it's just such a beautiful thing. I also got a drone and I can fly up to about 400 feet legally. The sunsets from 400 feet above land is completely different than when you're seeing it when it's obscured by like a skyline. So when you have completely uninterrupted curvature of the earth and you can see the entire broad horizon and all the variety of different colors as the sun is like bleeding into like the, it's like you're seeing it from a plane. It's just so impressive that you have access to that. So yeah, I think there's a lot of things from a secular perspective that you can still appreciate that a Christian would appreciate the same thing too. If we saw even like a snowflake we can both appreciate the beauty and the intricacy of it. It's just that from what we are attributing it to is one is being used to uphold a dogma that they were taught when they were young and the other ones being used to further appreciate the mechanics of how all things came to be in a tested and objective format that we can still learn from in order to improve our lives and quality of lives moving forward. So yeah, thank you very much, Patty. We appreciate the comment. I wanted to go into wins real quick. We often, we spend a lot of time badgering Christianity but I also wanted to talk about some positivity too. I want to say, I was telling you guys at the top of the show that I have like a board where I write down my mood from like one out of 10 or zero out of 10 when I wake up. And for the last three weeks since I started the board I've just been at a 10 out of 10 just been every single time I'm thinking like maybe out of nine or an eight or 9.5 I just think to myself like no because I can fix this problem or I'm sore now because I worked out hard and that's good that I worked out, you know or like maybe I didn't meet my goals but I'm more inspired and I can find time to resolve them and I can put that back to a 10. So like everything that's broken similar to how things can break in hell I find manageable and like fixable on my own, on my own, on my own effort. And so I feel really good about that. That's a win for me. I want to know, Dredd, if you had times where things have been going wrong and you were able to fix it like do you have to win a win this week when we're sharing it? Yeah, I had a huge win this week. Let's go. I'm going into the paramedic program. Nice. Primary care paramedic. And so there's a college or medical training facility that and one of the campuses is here so in Fort St. John. So it starts on March the 8th. Nice. So I've been rushing around trying to meet all the prerequisites. You know, there's some additional training that I didn't realize I was required to have. And so there was an outfit here and another outfit here in Dawson Creek that offered it. And so I signed up and paid for it. But then realized or was informed that the college I want to go to doesn't recognize it as a legitimate provider. So I had to rush around and I actually had to buy plane tickets to Vancouver for a two-day course. So hundreds and hundreds of dollars at my own expense just to meet this one final criteria. But there was a problem that needed fixing and I fixed it. So I felt good about it because I just got that done yesterday. I fly out in about a week and a half. But that's the last hurdle I have to get through. And I was glad that I did it. Dred, you know what? You deserve some all-dressed chips. And that is a little Canadian thing that only exists in Canada. It's the best flavor of chips possible. And a lot of people don't realize that because Americans don't have access to it. Whenever I have a friend that goes to Canada, I would bring back all-dressed ruffles. They're the best thing ever. But that's fantastic. I'm glad you went through all that trouble and worked hard to resolve that issue. Larry, what do you got as a win? Uh-oh, what do you got as a win? You're on mute. I don't understand the question. What do I? Oh, what do you mean? Larry, we're talking about wins. Tell me something that you overcome. A challenge you overcome. Something I've overcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me something with your face with the dilemma. You resolved it and you won. God said, I'm giving you this. And you said, no, thank you. You gave him a little upper cut and a little liver cut. He's like, oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And he left you alone. You're like, that's right. Don't mess with Larry Rhodes again. Well, I don't know if I could call it a win. It's definitely a win. But I don't know if I can grab credit for it because my knees, when they start going out, they start giving you pain. And the pain is chronic. It happens all the time, every day, and it keeps you from sleeping. But, of course, I got a hold of my doctors. And we worked out a solution. And we went through the operation. And it's all better now. Nice. Yeah, go ahead. What'd you do? What helped? You basically just yada-yadaed knee pain away. And I'm wondering, like, what happened? Well, no, it was an operation. But even after the operation, I still had some pain. But it was coming from my muscles and stuff then because they take a while to heal after an operation like that. But after a couple months, it was win-win. My knee is now strong again. I feel better. Of course, now my other knee is coming out. It's going out. And I'm back on crutches again because of my other knee. But I have an appointment Monday. I'm going to start handling that and probably get another operation. So another couple of three months. Larry, let me tell you this. I'll have two strong knees. You only have two knees. Isn't that great bilateral symmetry? Aren't you glad we didn't evolve to be four-legged animals? And you're like, oh, well, now it's time for my third knee. And then the fourth one after this. It'll probably end up being two years of ordeals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did not become centaurs. Evolution win. Congratulations. You only got two knees. Yeah, true. But college is another win. I mean, four years of struggle to get through college. And for your doctorate, you had it how many years? Me? Uh-huh. I had five years for my doctorate. So I got to spend a year overseas working. And that was cool. But that's not counting your undergraduate work. No, it's not counting my undergraduate work. It was like 12 years of just straight up college level courses in high school to undergrad, to graduate, then working for a year, and then writing my thesis for the very last year of my doctorate program. It was a, isn't it, ever? Yeah, that's an accomplishment quite enough. I appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. So listen, I would always said, if I ever wake up and I'm 12 years old again, and I don't have the knowledge that I have, I would be like, OK, well, one, I'm not the same person anymore. So I'll just go through it all over again. It's totally fine with me. Because I learned a lot going through that process. And I feel like it wasn't just a piece of paper that I got. I just learned how to work with other people much more effectively as a result of learning what my limitations were and improving myself through education. However, if I know what I know now, and I'm 12, I'm never going to school again. I'm telling my mom. Listen, mom, here's a bunch of math facts. I'm dropping out of school. I'm never going to class. I'm never doing homework. You could test your way out, too. Yeah, yeah, I'm just testing the way. It's like, give me the senior test. Give me the college test. I'm done. I don't want to do school anymore. I'm done. I'm done. I don't want to do school. I hate school. After 12 years of college level work. Oh, I hated it when I was in preschool. I remember having to do vocab exams. Oh, no. I'm just like writing the words. Damn, these crayons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was terrible. I'll tell you another quick win for me is that I'm in the process of getting a new car. I just put a deposit down. The thing that I was very much dreading was going to a car dealership and having to a workout. Financing, a trade-in, negotiations, a four squared. We got a whole bunch of different add-ons that dealerships put on the car, so inflate the cost of a car, new insurance, new warranties. I had to learn so many new terms. I was watching YouTube videos and every single one that told you, this is what to say to a dealership. And talk 40 things never to mention when you're buying a new car to dealership. I'm like, I'm overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed with all this information of do's and don'ts. I looked online to see, isn't there a way that I could just buy a car like how I would get a watch on Amazon where they just list out here are the prices and here are the cars. And we compete based on other stores that are also available online too. And you just save up money and just buy the thing and you call it you're done. And so I found a car manufacturer that offers, and I believe others do this too, so it's not the only one, a system called Click to Buy, which was simply just, and this is not endorsement, so I'm gonna keep the vague, but the idea is you simply click on the model and the trim that you want, they'll throw out every dealership that's available with online prices that they will honor. And all you have to do is say, I wanna buy that thing, you can choose how you wanna buy it, and you click send and you will get a call back that's like, we're ready, if you're ready, and I'm like, I'm ready, do you have any other questions? Like yeah, could you do a video around the car because you're like two states away from me and they give you a nice little video of like what the car looks like and tags and all that stuff, I'm like fantastic. Here's a bunch of questions that I have, they have a responder who gives it back the answers within like the next 10 minutes and I'm like, looks good, what's the delivery? How are you delivering it? They give you the answers. All the costs were thrown into the cost that was online for me to get the car. And I'm like, so easy, I wish everybody knew this because now, it used to be back in the day when you wanted to buy a car, it was like, you'd have to pack up and deal with whatever your local dealership was willing to throw at you. And now it's, no, you could just, I pick whatever, I went to a dealership that says, this car is gonna cost this much money and we have these add-ons that you can't take away, I'm like, that's fine, I'll just go to this car, I'll just go to this place. And then this guys were like, we'll give you this much money. I'm like, no, no, no, cheaper. And I said, what about this one? I was like, we'll give you the lowest possible price with no extra add-ons. And I'm like, I want the add-ons though. It's like, okay, fine, we'll still keep you the lowest price possible. I'm like, this is fantastic. No, that's awesome. That sounds painless. Sounds good. You have to tell us after you pick it up if everything went according plan. I'll show you the video, I'll put it in the messenger group and you can see what I'm talking about. But I'm just happy that we streamlined the car purchases now of all things that we streamlined. I think that's really nice. More people need to know about this. So when it comes in, I'll show you pics, but I'm excited. That's a win for me. Dred. You had your hand up a second ago. Yeah, go for it. Dred. Yeah. Yeah, you had your hand up, what's up? Oh, well, I just mentioned that my laptop has started by itself twice now. So I'm in computer hell. Nice. That means you get to go outside and touch. Very inconvenient. You can touch the snowflakes. Yeah. I have a... You know what, I don't... Go ahead. Well, I was just gonna say, I think I told you I was in a car accident and ICBC was trying to determine blame. So anyway, I got the news that the other guys at fault and either they're gonna fix my car or pay me out for it. So that's why I was also thinking about potentially buying a new car as well. Ooh, okay. I'll send you some cool tips. So thank you for that tip there because that would definitely be the way I go about it. Oh, absolutely. If I ever get another car, I'm just doing this literally again. It's the easiest way to do it. Yeah. One other thing that eluded me earlier but now I think about that was that I overcame that I'm very proud of and that's leaving religion behind. Ooh. Right. Becoming an atheist. That was years of coming up to the point of being able to change over and then changing over to non-belief. And so many of us have gone through that. Some atheists were born into an atheist family, didn't have to do that. But I would say 90% of atheists out there are post-religion. So they've been through that. They know the religions that they left behind and they're not, we're not good to proselytize too. I almost, I know it's a harder track but I almost respect and like people who've gone through the process of being born without religion, being indoctrinated into religion and then coming out again. One, because it mirrors the path that I was on. But two, because I know that path is like brick laden and level and quite strong because it's gone through the test, right? Like a person who's gone through that process knows why they're an atheist and they can articulate it and they have good reasoning. I value that more than someone who's never been exposed to religion whatsoever. And just like, no, I've always been an atheist. What are you talking about? It's like, that's like someone who was born in Hawaii and saw like sunsets and tropical rainbows every day of their life. You're like, you never really experienced weather. You don't know how it's dark. You don't know what a winter in Milwaukee would be like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You haven't tested the storm and that's why you got the crystals around your neck. And you're just like, you're still vulnerable. You don't even realize how vulnerable yet. Like, but we've been tested through the fire. Like that's, in my opinion, that's really good. I absolutely agree. I was having this conversation with my wife yesterday because there was this thing on Facebook where they had made a post that somebody was giving away a free 2024 Tacoma. And all you had to do was click a link and put in at hitch or something like that. And I could not believe how many people were doing it. Wow. And it was clearly a scam. They even spelled the words wrong in the post. Like, as though that wasn't a good enough giveaway, just the fact that some random person's giving away a brand new Tacoma, it just astonished me. And again, for those who are indoctrinated into a religion, it is representative of a failure to think critically and the lack of a methodology to reliably evaluate evidence. That's what it comes down to. A failure to reason hurts you in more than just religious circles. Hurts you financially, mentally, and physically. Because I'll dread one quick thing before we go. I had a fun video that I'm gonna show at work tomorrow, which was 1984 when seat belts were made compulsorily or compulsorily in America, in America. And there's news guys on the road, just like videotaping people talking about, well, I never have to wear a seat belt, but I don't get why it's against the law. There's no way this keeps me from getting injured. Like, I think there's gonna be just as many traffic accidents, just as many deaths. I don't understand it. And there's like, they're smoking in front of their babies and they just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The idea that people could be so confident, get so wrong is startling. And so you have to like, at a certain point be willing to let go your confidence and listen to like a former reason that is demonstrable, testable, and provided to you by someone who can, it was not necessarily just an authority, but someone who can explain to you, hey, listen, if you're in an accident and this is around your chest, you're not gonna fly through your windshield, right? That's what makes you live, right? Can we agree that's a thing? Okay, you're not gonna get a car accident, but you never plan to get in a car accident. That's why you're wearing one. Isn't that amazing? Well, you know, it's funny that you say that because there was a conversation on our church page with respect to the Freedom Truckers in Canada. Okay. And people questioning what they were even about. And of course it was about mandated vaccinations for truckers crashing the border. You know, that was sort of the reason touted anyway. And so I said the same thing. I said, so does that mean you don't wear seat belts because those were mandated? Right. You know, it's all part and parcel of the same thing. It's in the public interest, just do it. Right. As a parent, that's gonna happen. I was just gonna say, so many people take pleasure in spreading misinformation these days. I mean, knowing it's misinformation, just go ahead and just put it out there and try to get people to believe it for fun. It could be the ruin of our society, especially with this UI. AI is coming. They can replicate all kinds of conditions and show it is true. And they're gonna do it. And it's just gonna be, it may very well be the downfall of the foundation of our society. If you, what can you believe? What can't you believe? It just started off with vaccinations in my opinion. And of course, Trump was in the White House, which added to it because he didn't push them as much as he should have. I do think there's a really good analogy between seatbelts and vaccines. And I never saw it until you just brought that up. I appreciate that. Also, you're in the interest of saving people's lives. You don't wanna go to a scene and someone's dead when they could have been saved, right? So that's a two, that's not your job, it's a group project. And so the most a potential victim can do is make your job easier, make sure that they don't die because it's in the interest of both of you guys. So vaccines, seatbelts, and good diet, good health, finding friends to talk to, finding good cultures. And if you're stuck in religion and you don't think anyone can help you, we have outlets for that. We have freedom from religion. Do you wanna bring up some more, Larry? Or you're a local atheist group. If you don't find one, start one. Well, who else can people go to? Well, no, I just, I'd like to hit. Eat some pasta. Eat some pasta. Yeah, no, I just, I'd like to hit on vaccinations. I mean, I'm fifth, I was born in 1950 and polio was the thing then. I mean, lots of people, lots of children got polio, couldn't use their legs. Some of them ended up in iron lungs. It's just, I mean, and we wiped it out through vaccines, vaccines work. And now half of the country wouldn't vaccinate. They're trying to put a chip in me, which is just stupid. Well, you know, that's the thing, like I saw Bill Gates at the last 10 talks, not the last one, the one before it. And he says, because there were protesters outside the whole time, you know, about vaccines and chips. And he says, what am I gonna do with all that information? Why do I wanna know where everyone is? They all carry these phones around. So, you know, like, why do you need a chip in your body when you're voluntarily walking around? We put an Apple logo on it. You'll carry one with you regardless. So it's, yeah, yeah, voluntarily, yeah. Well, we're up for final words. We're getting right there at the end. I wanna start closing out. It's just stupid, I love it. Oh, by the way, if anything breaks down in hell, don't worry about it, relax. It's only gonna make things better. And I like that. That's good. And it can't last forever. No one's going down to fix it. So just wait it out. Jared Pirate, do you have links you'd like to put out? Jared Pirate, do you have links you'd like to put out? Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. Mine Pirate, that's my YouTube channel, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-E-T. I've been doing just weekly Vignettes on anything and everything, pasta farion and, you know, kind of surrounding that. Yeah, come check it out. It's kind of fun and, you know. Yeah, check it out. Very good. Want that, links? I wanna just say a shout out to Patty, who's probably watching this show too. If we got a little Joe Vule, that's typical, but also thank you for your comment. We appreciate it. And we love Snowflakes too. Okay, very good. My content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for our radio show archives, atheist songs, and many articles on the subject. My YouTube channel handle is at doubterfive and you can find my book, Atheism, What's It All About on Amazon. Remember, everybody is going to somebody else's hell. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and we'll see you next Wednesday, night at seven o'clock here on WOZO Radio. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Amen. Amen. Good stuff, man. Good show everybody.