 Hello and welcome to the digital free thought radio hour on W O Zio radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, March 17th. I'm Larry Rhodes or DJ doubter five. And as usual, we have a co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. Hey, it's me the Wombat. Cool. Digital free thought radio hours to talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism and the sciences and conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, God's holy books and superstition. And if you get the feeling you're the only non believer in your town, well, you're just not a guaranteed. You're in Knoxville in the middle of the Bible belt. We have a group of over 1100 of us where the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK and we'll tell you more about us after the mid show breaks and be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's your topic today? What would Mr. Rogers do? And the reason why I bring that up is I want to do a comparison of potentially better figures for Christianity than just the ones, the stock ones we get from the Bible, because I guarantee you that there are better ones. And I don't think there's a better example of representing healthy values that align with what's purported in Christianity, modern Christianity as how we should conduct ourselves in society than what Mr. Rogers has demonstrated in his lifetime in his television show, I think it's called Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, but Fred Rogers himself, great guy, advocate for education, music, learning, and also proudly Christian. And I think it's a good thing to note that even as atheists, we can recognize good Christians along with really, really terrible ones, because what we really just want is what everybody wants, a nice, healthy life where everybody can work with each other and improve everyone's standard. So that's my topic for the show. But before we jump into it, Larry, I heard you've been doing some gaming. Let's talk about some gaming. Let's Oh, yeah, I've been playing crisis recently. Crisis. Not the original crisis. No, no, this is where the memes see our Y. S. I. S. And it takes place in New York and you're fighting aliens. Okay. But that's the original. The original was also called crisis with C. R. Y. Yeah, but it was on a tropical island. So it's not the same game. So this is industrial New York crisis where the aliens are like, Hey, get off the sidewalk. I'm walking over here. I'm walking over here. Yeah, more like killing over here. I'm killing over here. Okay. And also it's Earth had just gotten some kind of super bug that killed most of the population, which was probably sent to Earth by the aliens to decimate the population before they started. But anyway, interesting shooting up game. First person shooter. Larry, you're on your third first person exploration shooting mechanic game. Is that typically your start? Yeah, because you did Starfield, which is first person run around, shoot, shoot, shoot, right? Metro run around, shoot, shoot, shoot, but scary. And then all crisis around shoot, shoot, shoot. You're forgetting. You're forgetting doom. Do you play? What is the same thing? That's first person shooter. It's yeah, so I aliens generally. So you like Wolfenstein you play Wolfenstein way, way, way back in the beginning. That was like the first first person shooter. Yeah, it was almost 2d, but it was third person. Would you say it's your cup of tea then? Yeah, it's my main thing right now. My main thing is first person shooters out in a wide open world where you can just go wherever you want and do what you want. So parents pay attention. Don't let your kids play first person shooters. They'll turn it to atheists like Larry lifelong atheists. It's going to ruin your kids. No, it's just good fun. And we were stopped talking about for the game before the show that most wives don't like their husbands playing computer games much, but that's the thing. I mean, you know where they are all the time. They're right there in the house with you and with the kids. And it's, you know, it's not out getting in trouble and not doing stuff you shouldn't be doing. Well, encourage your husband to play computer games. Maybe it's a mix of the both because my favorite games are simulation games. I like simulator games because they had to do stuff in real life, right? Yeah. And so things I'm doing right now is learning how to play fly a drone. And this controller is really interesting. So like compared to I'm holding up two different controllers for radio listeners. This is the next box controller has two joysticks. It's got buttons on both sides. A drone controller just has the joysticks, right? Because when you're flying, you don't really pushing buttons. You're just changing your pitch yaw throttle and and I've never used the very much. But it's it's a different way of holding the joysticks. And it's a radio frequency and you can do simulations on your computer with the actual joystick where you dial in the the flight dynamics of the drone that you're going to fly with and you just do virtual space, try to get as many rounds in as possible. So that instead of thinking about what you need to do, it's all muscle memory. And then the fun part is when you actually set up at a park and you try flying and in your head, you're like, I know what to do. But now I know crashes are expensive. Now I know if I if I can't pick up myself up off the ground and I don't break my drone, I still have to get up and walk 3000 feet out to this thing and pick it up and bring it back home. So like the pressure is on a different level until you just get more and more used to it and more confident with it. Though I did go out yesterday to fly at a park nearby. And what was funny was I'm flying around at a park. There's a bunch of kids, everyone's having picnics, but I'm like maybe 350 feet up in the air, right? And so you can barely hear it. It sounds like a really angry hornet, like maybe 20 yards away. But people will be like, Oh, what's going on there? And the kids will be like looking at it, staring at it. I can see with my camera, but I'm not focused on recording people. I'm just focusing on like, practicing my flips and tumbles. And then every 15 or 20 minutes or so I got to come back down the land, switch up my batteries and go back up again. Sure. When I land, there was a bunch of kids, since I'm wearing FPV goggles, a bunch of kids come up to me and they're like, Oh, can I try that? And I'm like, Oh, that's cool kid with your parents. I try not to talk to kids. But their mom was there, like nearby, nearby, like kids that just came up from like a picnic blanket and then walked up to me and they're like, Hey, can I try that? I was like, Oh, you got to be a licensed pilot to fly, which is true. In the state of America, for the drone of my weight class, you have to have a license likewise, you have to also have to take a test. You have to take a certification test and you have to be licensed, which costs money, right? So like those two things compounded. When I told that to the kids, they were a little disappointed about 11 hold the drone and they could see like how heavy it was and they could like touch it and stuff like that. That's fine with me. And one of the moms who was there was like, Oh, thanks for letting my kids like, you know, learn about this. And that was cool. The other mom though was like, so you can just record wherever whenever you want, wherever you want, you can just do you can just record anywhere. And so like, here's I took this very tactfully because I my impression was I'm not here to like argue or anything like that. But in a public space, there's no expectation of privacy. So if you go out to public and you put a blanket out in the middle of the grass, it's no different than a car drove by with a dash cam or someone took a picture on their cell phone or someone popped open a laptop to do some work, like everything has cameras, you've been recorded so many times once you left your house, there's no expectation of privacy outside. So like that I didn't bring that up. But I did say, Hey, if you'd like to take the certification yourself, it's called the trust certification. It's issued by the Federal Aviation Agency, and it'll tell you all the rules and you can get yourself certified. And it'll explain to you the different classes and drones and how what you what you're allowed to record and what not to record. And then I just went back to keep flying. But it was funny because when I told her she can take the trust certification, she pulls out a giant phone from her pocket, which I know has GPS has a microphone has multiple cameras on both sites. And probably her credit card information and her call history, and you know, whatever website browsers that she was using at the time, and maybe even a Facebook account that has which is tracking every single thing about her. Yeah, I'm just saying like, don't be worried. My problem is the problem is mine. Mine's just a cell phone with wings. And then on top of that, a lot of people love an omnipresent God, which always blows my mind because it seems like we have a natural disposition to want not want to be surveilled. But when it comes to God, we want him everywhere at all times watching everything. Yeah, recording every single thing. But ready to cast you into hell for the slightest provocation. Right. Or even your thoughts like you can get my control. Yeah, yeah, like just what is it? Coveting someone's wife is a problem like even like, oh, wow, that's a pretty lady. Like that's a problem even in your head. It's not even an action like that is the ultimate don't think about strawberries moment where you're just like, oh, no, I'm in trouble. But I didn't want to extend this to, you know, we do have role models that we could base our life on to be more godly even if we were being constantly surveilled by God, because what Christians will tell you is we'll just be like Jesus. What would Jesus do in a situation like this? And I thought to myself, why are we thinking about Jesus? Because Jesus is in my mind, sort of like the sort of like a high school student whose dad owns the school and is the principal and part-time superintendent and has a car that his parent and dad drove and like has basically nothing but privilege his entire life. Like you're talking about a human being that genetically doesn't even have a dad who's who's part spiritual, who can do magic tricks and touch things and bring them back to life, who doesn't die, who can come back to life or does come back to life again. Like he's not playing by the same rules that I'm playing by. So how could I why would I want to be like him? What I want to have a more closer to an actual human experience and still see the good values that a lot of people before Christianity has a monopoly on. And I found a great example of this. Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers from the television show Mr. Rogers Neighborhood is in my opinion, one of the best people to have existed. Religious or non-religious, like he's not going to probably get any award from any of the major bodies because I don't pay attention to like Nobel Prize laureates or like who becomes a saint or anything like that. But in my book, Mr. Rogers is a top drawer kind of guy. And I came up with a list of reasons why I believe that. And I want to compare them to a similarly composed objective list with using chat GPT to see, you know, what stands up from what would Mr. Rogers do versus what would Jesus do? And maybe we can talk about on the show. Does that sound cool to you? Works for me. All right. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I ran a question through chat GPT basically saying, hey, give me the top 10 things that Mr. Rogers was known for. Or let me see. Let me tell you the exact question. Ten remarkable things that Jesus did in his life versus ten remarkable things that Fred Rogers did in his life. And Mr. Rogers, number one, promoted kindness and empathy. And if you were to ask me what the two cornerstones of any religion should be, it should be what they say it is. Yes. The lip service. Yes. It should. Yes, dude. Absolutely. It is lip service because it should be not. This is what you got to do to avoid hell. Or this is who your your authority figures are. Or this is what you shouldn't do. Or these are the rules of our club. Or this is how much money you need to give us once a month. It's you should be kind and empathetic. And through his iconic television show, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Fred Rogers promoted kindness, empathy and understanding among children and adults alike. And if you were to ask me what's something that the current generation of kids, the current generation, I'm here with my whipper snapper suspenders on. We're both on our we're just like, you know, problem with kids today. It's a lack of kindness and empathy. And I can see that both in kids and adults as well. In fact, I've been on a rabbit hole of watching Uber videos, dashcams from Uber drivers, just the worst people get in their car. Just the worst people like I'm not masking or like I want to change. I'm not paying you money. It's like you signed the app. It's like I'm canceling the ride if you're going to be rude to me. It's like I want you to speed like people who walk into someone else's car and assume that they're their butler. That's just the most insane thing. And I think to myself, man, I do not want to subject myself to interaction society if I ever deal with toxic people like that. We need more kindness and empathy. What do you think, Larry? Oh, absolutely. And we do we do see it an awful lot in there in our society. We live a pretty darn good life. We have the world is full of plenty if we just realize it. But what gets me is the people, the religious people who claim to own the own morality and truth are often immoral and and and lie constantly, especially about their religion and about the opposition. I mean, how many lives have you heard told about atheists? Right. And why would they do that if they own the truth? If the ever everything that they do is all about the truth of the Bible and and morality and all that, too, it just it just hypocritical to me. Yeah. The narrative has become so tribalistic that we that most people don't care how bad their leaders are or how bad their narrative is, as long as it's their narrative. Yeah. Right. If I was if I was starting a religion, the first thing I'd do is put in claims about how my God wants you to be good to everybody. That way, after people get into the religion, you can say, see, we're good to each other because our God said to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we were never good to each other back in the days of Egypt or before Christianity, before Judaism. Right. Like the baseline, the very true baseline for society should be don't go out of your way to be mean to each other. You don't have to be good. We're not making that a obligation. It's good if you are good, but don't be mean to each other. And if you have that, you have basically a state where if everybody follows that rule, you have people who aren't necessarily contributing, but aren't holding down society. And then the rare instances where people are taking on additional work and drive to be extra good that averages towards slightly good without having to punish people who aren't being good because you shouldn't be, in my mind, obligated to do good because at that point, you're being voluntarily told to be good. You're not actually volunteering for it. Well, in a self-rewarding activity, I mean, if you do good, then the old thing about karma, people will see you as good and see you as treating people fairly and that will come back to you in many ways. Three people, mean or evil, and you reap the rewards for it from your actions. It's as simple as that. You want to live in a good world, be good. Right. Long term, if you care about your surroundings and the neighborhoods you're in, you can begin to look at different ones who are following the role of, well, I don't have to be good, but the ones who are good, the ones who are contributing, they actually make their society a lot better. They have better roles, they have better teachers. I want to live there and I'm willing to contribute to society that takes pay tax. And they have a better future, too, contributing to the next generations. I think we can objectively see, even if we didn't ask or force people to be kind and empathetic, that being kind and empathetic or promoting it is actually a really good way of moving forward. And what I love about Mr. Rogers is he's not pointing at the camera and saying, you need to be kind, you need to be empathetic, I am your God or I'm the son of your God and I'm teaching you to do this. Or it's the holy word from this book. Yeah, it was literally that. It was promoting kindness and empathy. Like I'm going to be kind and empathetic on my show. I'm going to ask questions. I'm going to be caring of people who are different than me. And I'm going to show you the benefits that I'm reaping as a reward from that. And I think that's a good practice for you to follow as well. It's an option for you to do that I am demonstrating on my show. And I found that so good. I always found Mr. Rogers is a good teacher in the true sense where he demonstrates what he was teaching rather than just literally expousing it as an authority figure to his followers, right? I never got that feeling from him. So go to the flip side when I go to Jesus Christ. His is his first thing. So if Mr. Rogers promoted kindness and empathy, the one remarkable thing, first remarkable thing from chat, you'll be as my objective source. Jesus taught love and compassion. Jesus preached messages of love, compassion and forgiveness, emphasizing the importance of treating others with kindness and empathy. So while it's similar, I have a problem with the teaching aspect because Jesus very much is not meeting you one to one like how Mr. Rogers is where he's like, here's my home. I'm going to put my shoes on. I'm going to take my card and get off. Maybe I'll make some juice. You want you. I can't give you juice because this is just a TV show. This is a set kids, but you want to talk about like sharing or divorce or something like that. Like we can look and talk some hard topics. Jesus, by the way, is like, let me stand on top of a mound. All of you sit down there. I hope you like fish's bread. And this is I'm going to explain to you like my sermon where I'm talking about like how cool my dad is. And I'm going to talk about that for a while. And now I'm going to talk about how cool I am and why you got to be my friend because the only path to heaven is through me. And and you know, while it's told that it's love and compassion, honestly, a lot of the stories that Jesus told were about how families would be separating and that he was a sword to split sons and fathers apart in their own households and and how rich people would have a hard time getting in heaven and not. And his his hidden message was there on the reward side. I mean, you don't do good for each other just to do good and be good. Right. You do it to achieve a reward in the next life. Right. You're doing it for a carrot. Right. And that's a little disingenuous. I guess the real reason you should be good is to be good and make a better society. I mean, it's and that's something we can see in this this world, no matter which next world comes. Well put. Well put. Yeah. The the value of being good is that it improves the surroundings and the people that who will live in your environment, not so that you can get into heaven, not so that you can sit to the right side of Jesus and watch his, you know, brand new car and and hang out with his dad with his video game, his PlayStation nine or whatever. It's like, who cares about that? It's about the world that we're in right now that matters. And I feel like Mr. Rogers' emphasis is be good for the sake of good so that you can improve and improve the world that you're in. Whereas in the life you live, you know, just just day to day life. Yeah. And Jesus has no message on any of that. He's just like, this is your path. This is the scheme. This is how we're going to get the heaven, guys. Pick up some trash. It'll count for Jesus points. Trust me. That's the only reason why you need to do it. Yeah. Like what about to take care of other people? It's like, we don't care about other people. We're the chosen people. Right. Well, it gets me is, you know, Christians are always calling it unconditional love. You know, Jesus has unconditional love for you. Well, unless you until you break in some some sins or unless you do something he doesn't want you to do, then, you know, your reward is a lot of eternity of pain, torture. Yeah. It's just it is fully conditional. Yes. And what gets me is he preaches, you know, love and compassion. But it comes right down to it. And they ask him what I need to do to get into heaven. Right. Remember what he said? Follow the Ten Commandments. That has nothing to do with love and command and compassion. It has everything to do with obedience. Right. And there are other problems too, where he's like, you know, there are some terrible laws that exist. What do you think about that? Well, what Caesar's is Caesar's and what's God is God. It's like, don't separate those rules. You could just be like, hey, slavery is a bad thing. We shouldn't be doing this. You know, there's a lot of things that are going on back there that I can talk about on YouTube, but I can use it to transition to our next topic, because if we still have some time, I want to bring up that Mr. Rogers, number three on this list is he addressed important topics. He fearlessly addressed important and sometimes difficult topics on a show such as death, divorce and disability. And this helped children navigate these issues with honesty and compassion. And I remember when there was a plane crash and people died and I didn't understand why that was a bad thing. Like I understand that planes. This is when you were a Christian. This is when I was a Christian and a child, like when I was maybe like seven. And I remember and I remember there was a plane crash and it was talked about in Mr. Rogers TV show. And I thought to myself like, whoa, planes crash because they're machines, but there are people inside them. I didn't understand that. And then the concept of the show he explained like, you know, about like, like in a sense national tragedies. But he talked about in a way that I wasn't scared from how he was talking about it and that I understood the sense of loss that came with it. And then he even made a book that was like essentially about like how to like talk to your kids about like bad things that happen in the world. Just thought that was so good to have an adult willing to communicate with me in a way that like I could appreciate that didn't feel like I was being talked down to. I seen that clip again on YouTube, but it's still really good. Here's what Jesus does. Jesus will on his third on his list is heal the sick and disabled. He performed numerous miracles, including healing the sick, blind, deaf and disabled, demonstrating compassion and divine power. And my issue with this comparison is that Mr. Rogers will talk about disability and divorce and and death and normalize them with respect to those who have died, those who have gone through a divorce like my parents or those who have a disability that the cat necessarily get them healed. Whereas Jesus in his mind, it was world view and demonstrated in this book would be like, oh, you're blind. Bob, you're not blind anymore. Ha ha. What about the thousand other blind people that are behind us? What about blindness in general? And he just your clock blindness in the yeah. No, no, no. I just want to do this for the magic trick. OK. So like for people who are disabled and deaf, like the stigma that comes with them being incapable or needing to be healed sticks. Whereas with Mr. Rogers, you talk about disability, people who don't have legs or arms and demonstrate that they're still capable and that they're still people like. I feel like that is something that needs to be expressed with demonstration and through Mr. Rogers efforts compared to what Jesus did. And I just find it really what gets me about Jesus. I mean, he raises people from the dead, literally. Yeah, they were dead. They were dead for days. He brought them back. And that's the end of the story. Nobody asked them what it was like to be dead where they went. Is there a heaven or is there a hell? They never address any of that from the people that they brought back from the dead. I mean, why not? Because they've got nothing to say. Right. And the thing is people still die and even those dead people he brought back are dead again. Right. So like it's a question of what I've been better off with Mr. Rogers approach, where he talks about death and in a in a sensible way and explains what happens and why, you know, you shouldn't be afraid of it, but it is a part of life compared to imagine if Jesus did that once. He's just like, let me just talk about that for a little bit. Like it's not something to be worried about your entire life for. But it's a part of life. And, you know, it's more about celebrating your life than it is about worrying about your death your entire life. Right. And then Jesus is like, no, don't worry about that. It doesn't. It doesn't exist. It's just a change of address when you die, you're going to hang out with me. If you're good. And if you give me a little bit of money, if you worship me, it's the only thing I'm asking for. Just listen to what I say, give me a little bit of your money and worship me. It's that simple. Yeah. Yeah. We've got to remember that for my dad before Jesus, there was no heaven or hell. I mean, he's the one who brought eternal punishment, eternal grandizement. Right. It's just why wasn't it mentioned before? Did the Jewish people not know anything about heaven or hell? Matter of fact, Jewish people today, I understand, don't really believe in heaven or hell. They just believe you kind of cease to exist. If you're a Jewish person and have a want to mention something about that, please leave a comment. Sure. Sure. Sure. OK, I think we're near the bottom of the half hour, right? We are. All right, let's do a quick break. OK, this is the digital free thought radio hour. I'm W. O. Z. O. Radio 103.9 L. P. F. M. Here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. 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 L. P. F. M. Here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take just a minute to talk about the Atheist Society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 22nd year. We have over 1100 members. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's Taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. You can find us online and Facebook meetup.com or go to our website at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville and you still need to go to meetup.com and do a search for an Atheist group in your town, don't find one. Start one. Right, one that what do you want to pick up? I really want to go back to this list of Mr. Rogers and what he's done in his life remarkably that can be used to set an example for Christians and atheists alike versus Jesus and what he's done to set examples for the same crop people. And what I'm finding more often than not is that Mr. Rogers is a better representation slash mentor slash kind demonstration of good values that I think we should really try to exemplify in our current society compared to what Jesus Christ did with his entire time here. And I will just say this as simple. One of my as a simple fact, one of my best and favorite memories from his show is that he would always start a show with that piano song, right? Mm hmm. I'll do a full intro of the little model town, you know, did it, and it's like a long intro. I want to compare and contrast how his show starts to compare to any kid show starts these days where it's just quick cuts, quick cuts. Here's here's Alexander. He's a superhero and he could turn into this. Don't say Alexander's like loud music, loud flashing lights. Show the entire plot line. You only have 30 seconds to do this, guys. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. Sell toys, sell toys. You can do this. Make it happen. And whereas Mr. Rogers is like a steady four minute like song more like extended song. And we're not doing normal things like changing your shoes. But I know. Close up on a door. You open up the door. He starts singing and it's just like there's an old man singing on TV and he's not singing fast. It's a pretty slow song. There's not a lot of accompaniment with it. And not only that, but the craziest thing is not only he takes off his jacket, puts on another jacket slowly sits in front of like everybody and starts taking off his shoes and putting on a new pair of shoes. And you're like, what's going on? He's tying shoes. We've been doing the show for like six minutes and there's an old man singing, tying his shoes. He wasn't that old. He looked like he was about 45, you know, or 40. He really wasn't gray hair or anything. How do we sell this to kids? How do we sell this to kids? We got it like G.I. Joe's next up in the next half hour block. How do we compete with Spider-Man? People don't realize that really young kids want stability. They want safety. They want they don't want you to jerk things around and stuff like that. Yeah, he he was. He had a show for very young children, you know, pre kindergarten. So he wasn't like eight, nine, 10, you know, aged kids. We want all this action and mayhem. Have you seen Paw Patrol? Have you seen like Peppa Pig like episodes that are only like five minutes long because they know kids have to like they're going to lose their attention span very quickly. You have to like keep it entertained. You have to sell toys. You got to like have them with cartoons. It's got to be colorful. Whereas Mr. Rogers like I'm tying my shoes and if the song this is the thing that blew my mind if he's still singing in the song ends, won't you be my neighbor? Won't you please? Won't you please? Won't you please be my neighbor? And he's still tying his shoes. He's going to keep tying his shoes. He doesn't rush. The entire time he's just like, oh, I didn't finish tying my shoes. Yeah, I'm just going to finish tying my shoes before he starts the show. And he wasn't. Oh, it's so relaxing. He wasn't just an actor either. He created the show. Right. He's composed the music. He was the producer and the head writer, Mr. Rogers. So it was his show and he conceived it and made it happen. Right. Just the way he wanted. And I just love that he could teach patience, you know, because one of the main things I feel like, again, here I am on my porch that, you know, we I feel are lacking as a society is patience. All the habits, all the hobbies that we have stress sort of like a yellow or a you got to do this now or times running out or this is a limited deal or everything stressing on time being a limited resource. Whereas to watch a full episode of Mr. Rogers is sort of an expectation or setting up the expectation things are going to take some time, but it's totally fine. They'll be worth it. Let's just relax and watch and you mentioned before the show that he was honest about everything he did. He talked about the puppets being puppets. You know, nothing was unexplained or left to the imagination other than just the story that he was telling. Correct. But Jesus was all about the magic. And he was a hero figure in the old traditional sense of a hero in the story. Right. You know, he did a tragedy, I guess you could call it because, you know, he did all these wondrous things. And because he did all those wondrous things, you know, they had to bring him down and kill him and hang him up as. But Jesus is also the ultimate by now, not later, marketer, because his whole idea was within your lifetime, the Kingdom of Heaven is going to come down, right? So I'm your last chance right now. Start worshiping me right now. I'm right here. You're here. Make this happen or I'm going to go, right? I'm not going to be here forever and your opportunity is going to go away, guys. And they've been saying that the end of the world is nine or two thousand years now. Yeah, get a clue. Right. It's not. It's not. He's not teaching patients. He's not teaching honesty, right? Because, like, as you said, Larry, it's like it's been two thousand years and he's still playing hide and seek, apparently. Not only that, but I also feel like one of the cool things Mr. Rogers did was he went behind the curtain like he shows you. Hey, this is the piano that's playing when I when I when I sing. There's a lady who plays it, but I can also know how to play music, too. But she of course plays some music, Linda, and she plays the music. He went to the actors who happens in his make-believe town. He went to that studio set, which is right next to his show. And he's like, these are actors, but they're also my friends. And we do this show where we pretend that we are on the stage. I'm just being honest with you like this is a puppet. This is a trolley. I can I control it with these two buttons. You can see me doing in the show. It's not like it's a magical thinking trolley. I don't want you to be concerned with the concept of magic. Like reality already is cool enough. And I'm like, that's so cool. Like I can appreciate that mindset. And remember, Mr. Rogers is a Christian, right? So like I can appreciate that mindset, that honesty from a Christian minded person that can still enable me, even with my secular mindset now, to still respect that show so genuinely, because it's not intrusive on my viewpoints of reality, because he's being honest, right? And he's keeping largely his dogma away from being force fed to me as a child. I just thought that was so good. Whereas Jesus is nothing but dogma first, you know, it's like, hey, let me tell you about my dad. It's like, dude, I know your dad's the God. It's like, yeah, my dad's God. So what are you going to do about it? That's literally his entire motif, his entire show to the point where people get so annoyed. I'm like, can we kill Jesus, please? Can we kill this guy? It's like, my dad's God. Oh, please shut up, Jesus. How do we make this guy die faster? Let's crucify. I was like, is that the fastest way we can kill people? Fine, whatever. All right, go for it. Anyway, all right. So other thing that Mr. Rogers did was as you had discussed, he had that piano music. So he promoted music and the arts. He integrated music, art and creativity into his programming, recognizing the importance of fostering imagination and emotional expression. And I thought that is cool. It would be nice to hear from Jesus. Some human, some humanity that he valued because human that humanity at that time, Mesopotamia, like had built brilliant statues, had a culture, had poetry, you know, like we they had music, but you never hear Jesus espouse on like, hey, this is like some really cool things that humans only do. And you should be really proud that you were able to create this. And this is like a joint effort came from a lot of different minds putting together and you made something really beautiful. The beauty was always about God. And the only time I've ever seen Jesus relax and have a good time was when he was making wine for his buddies or hanging out in the desert. But like it was never time to appreciate the humanity. And but about the only story that really could show compassion is the one where they were stoning this woman or were going to. And he said, you know, that the first one who has no sin cast the first stone, but that was really about obedience. It was about a sin. It was about a lot of things it should have been about compassion, you know, an empathy for the woman, but it wasn't. And that's that's an opportunity missed. Yeah, there's other missed opportunities, too. I think there's is Jesus, the one who came up with the Good Samaritan story. I don't know. I think it was terrible because I know I don't think it was. So so was that I knew was in the New Testament. I'm going to assume. All right, OK, so if that's not the case, then that's fine. But like I feel bad for Samaritans who have to be subject to that story is like, you know, Samaritans. It's like, yeah, boo, right? Yeah. Well, here's a story about a good one. It's like, whoa, isn't this story kind of generalizing and a little bit racist? No, just put it in the Bible. It's totally fine. But the other one would be like when the lady comes to Jesus to like pour oil on his feet and like all the guys around him are like, this lady doesn't deserve to be around you. She's a woman or like she's beneath us. And I'm like, whoa, these are the people that Jesus is hanging out with 24 seven. But Jesus is like, no, no, no, I will let her wash my feet. That's like, OK, hold on a second. I don't know if this is necessarily even a good thing. I'm like, oh, he's so nice. He let the lady clean his feet with the precious oils. That's that's so progressive. Like, would you like to sit down? Kind of a lesson. Yeah, like lady, would you like to? Any, any you're all equal, you can all wash my feet. He's like, any of you guys can wash my feet anytime you want to. No, it's like I feel like Jesus was always there to keep the stratification of humanity in place, right? Like God, and now there's a new layer, which is me. And then there's my followers who are immediately below me. And then there's everybody else. So if you want to upgrade, you got to follow me because I'll put you into this new cast of people who are my followers, which gets you closer to God. But like Jesus was not about respecting the diversity of people and different minds around the world. And, you know, Mr. Rogers, he had different people of different face, different colors, different genders on his show all the time. Different puppets. I mean, like different animals. That was the whole that was the whole concept of the make-believe word verse, but then you'd also go out to industries where he's like talked to men and women working in plants and be like, hey, this is how fruit cups are made. This is how milk is is gathered from cows. And it's like women, farmers, men, farmers, black people, white people all working together. You never got that you never got the expression that Jesus ever really appreciated humanity. But I only ever got that from Mr. Rogers. And I feel like because of that, I would always listen to what Mr. Rogers would tell me what to do over Jesus, which is like this alien guy. OK, I do want to give props to Jesus for confronting injustice and hypocrisy. It does say in this list that Jesus fearlessly confronted religious hypocrisy, corruption and injustice, challenging authority and speaking truth to power. That's what it got says from chat. You do you have any comments on that, Larry? Who is talking truth to power? This is a remarkable thing that Jesus did. Oh, going to chat to confronting injustice and hypocrisy. He challenged religious hypocrisy, corruption and injustice, challenged authority and spoke. Well, what he did was he challenged the old religion to set up a new religion. I mean, he has his own authority. You know, he was he was establishing a new one. He had his challenge, the old one to do it. And as far as speaking truth, the power was a truth when he was just, I mean, first of all, we need to take a step back. Sure. I don't know if Jesus actually existed or not, but we do know the stories exist. And as far as I'm concerned, that's all they are. I mean, no more than you would believe that Mohammed split the moon into and flew to heaven on a winged horse. Why do you? Not by those stories, but by the stories about Jesus. Right. I mean, they're magic hero stories. They're just stories in a book written by preachers who want you to believe so that you can they can control you, put you in the pew and get your money. Right. If I told you a story with a magical orange and a talking goat, people would be like, that's a fairy tale. But if I say a magical apple and a talking snake, people are like, no, that's real. That actually happened somewhere. It's like it's it's it's not the fact that it's an apple or an orange or a talking goat or a talking snake. It's the fact that this is fairy tales. We have nothing to compare it to in reality. Hey, red red pirate. Higgs came in. Welcome for dread. Ahoy. Ahoy. Ahoy. Hope you work contrasting Mr. Rogers and Jesus Christ, you got to throw you cold into it. Yeah, I know you're out on the cold right now. But did you did you ever have any experience with watching Mr. Rogers? A neighborhood? No, no. OK, it's not Canadian, not a Canadian. Oh, OK. So am I late? What's up? Am I late? Yeah, a little bit. Fifty minutes. It's only 50 minutes in the hour, so it's OK. Fine, you're fine. You're fine. We appreciate the spirit of it. But yeah, yeah. Just doing some real work. This is a time change. Yeah, yeah. Dread, you're doing real work. Don't worry about it. But the great thing is I feel like we have a better champion for how to behave and it can even be a Christian who does so rather than using Jesus because I feel like we have better role models already that exist. And as Jerry, I'm sorry, as Larry said, we don't know if Jesus actually existed. We know there's stories that exist. But we do know Mr. Rogers exists and we have videos of him and we have books by him. And we have music by him and we have speeches by him. And we have congressional transcripts from him. And they're all awesome. And I'm saying like, why are we wasting time with the stories from Jesus when we already have a much better in color and color version of a guy who's already espousing really good values that we should just be listening to anyway. Like no magic involved, no magic needed. Like we already got it. Like just put this book away and be like, this is a great neighborhood. If you do this and listen to this guy and do what this guy says and still call this Christianity, we would literally be better off and Christianity would be in a better light. We already have a better role model. We should do as Mr. Rogers does, not to be Rogers entity. Yeah, like there's no ambiguity behind it. There's no ambiguity to it. It's like we know that guy was the thing and he and we agree. I as an atheist agree with almost everything that was said on the show. There's no controversy. There's no cancel. There's no requirement to throw reality out the window. Yeah, like I'm totally fine. It's like if someone had on their bumper sticker, a picture of Mr. Rogers instead of like a cross or something in my mind, I'm not thinking, oh, that guy's just like inhibiting education, science, reality, teaching his kids the wrong way to be like, if it was just picture, Mr. Rogers is like, I do what Mr. Rogers did. I'd be like, oh, that's a cool parent. Nice. I love Mr. Rogers, too. I'm an atheist. I love that show. Everybody would love that show. It'd be great. Another bumper sticker would be good would be would you like to be my neighbor? Bam. Excellent. Down on a shirt, Dredd. Wonderful. All right. I'm going to do a quick break to see if we had comments. We did have a couple of comments. Oh, Dredd, would you like to plug anything? Well, I'm still continuing to do my weekly short sermons on my YouTube channel, Mind Pirate and my MPP. Sermons? Sermons? What about? Oh, about everything. Like I just did one about Ardbark Appreciation Day. Oh, cool. Sometimes I just base my sermons off of the Pastafarity calendar. So, like every day has is some kind of a day in Pastafarianism. So it turned out that last Friday was Ardbark Appreciation Day. And recently I did one on International Women's Day. That was a good one. Did you do Pi Day? I did Pi Day, but I didn't get it up. So I've got it now. It's in the can. So next year on Pi Day, I will release it. Well, that's Pi, not PiE. No, I understand. No, for the listeners. Yeah, 3-1-4. So I have two questions, two comments that I'm formatting into a question. One is from the episode, I'm calling God's Bluff. And the question is related to how to talk to your parents and essentially call their bluff if required sometimes. But this question is I'm going to give to Larry. Larry, the commenter is ElectricalCrab9286. They say that my mom's telling my siblings that dinosaurs never existed. What should I tell her? I thought some of my siblings that dinosaurs never existed. As soon as for a religious reason, my mom is telling my siblings. That's the only dynamic. We have all kinds of evidence. I mean, how do you explain the fossils that we have, the fossil record of dinosaurs if they never existed? And a lot of Christians will say, well, Satan put them there to confuse us and make us not believe in the Word of God in the history. But I mean, which is better to believe that it occurred naturally that these lived and there's a deep history of time or magic. So that's your options there. What people haven't been reasoned into, they cannot be reasoned out of. They can't. I disagree. Well, I like that. OK. Yeah. Because I can't remember who said that, but I thought it was Christians. I think you said it, but I mean, we all were. I was, you know, I was a believer and so was Wombat. And I believe you were one time, weren't you? So we were reasoned out of it. It takes time and it takes a long time. Yeah. And it takes a lot of good arguments, a lot of good rationale, but it happens. And what I hear from this person's perspective is that no one's invested that time in the mom, but also it's a willingness to. If I was unwilling to change my mind, I wouldn't have changed my mind. It took a deep appreciation for knowing that I cared about what was true and what was actually false for me to change. And all the reason in the world won't affect that unless I'm a willing participant in that process. And I think if you have those two, it is feasible. It is feasible. Dredd, my next question is Jonathan Swift. OK. Dredd, this is a good question for you, I think. OK. This is asked by, this is just a more extended comment, but from Driplo Callis who asks, hey, is it OK for me to privately wear a cross while I'm an atheist? I have a necklace nearly a decade old and I occasionally wear it and look in the mirror for sentimental value. I'm no longer a Christian. But after learning how toxic religion is, I am now questioning if it is inappropriate to have the sentimental trinket towards any or any any sentimental trinket towards any religious object. Is it OK to privately wear a cross while an atheist is the thing? Right. And of course, why not? Because I mean symbols are symbols. They just represent things. And Christians don't have, you know, a monopoly on the cross. You know, if it doesn't mean Christianity to you, then so what? Right. Or if it wants, if you just wanted to remind you of the time you were a Christian and how maybe you left the fold, there's a lot of reasons that you would have. I mean, you're human. You have a lot of sentimentality about the past. Now, if it bothers you that you're actually wearing a cross, you could have it melted down and turned into a ring or a piece of jewelry. I love that idea. That's kind of cool. Yeah, I kind of did that. Yeah, there's a lot of joy. I mean, you think about like symbols like the file plot cross, you know, the Nazi symbol, which is way predated to the Nazis, right? Right. It was an Indian symbol, I think. Long time ago. Exactly. Western Indian. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that's a hard sell to a political figure being like, it's not for Nazis. Like, could we agree that it's now for Nazis? Can we say they did enough to claim that? And maybe you just like don't wear that while you say, please elect me official because you're going to attract attention. There was a symbol that the Nazis war was iron cross. Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember that. The iron cross. It was very popular after the war in the fifties and sixties when a biker gang said some other people would wear it. And it used to really tear off my dad who was a World War II veteran. I had, I actually had a copy of Red Year Kipling's The Jungle Book and it was a hundred years old and embossed on the front cover was a picture of an elephant and the file plot cross. The one cross was the Nazi symbol. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And that was, you know, I think it was published in 18, you know, towards the end of the century there long before Nazis were around. Ever picked it up. Yeah. All right. Here's my last question. This one goes to the layer before we close the show. Yeah, I need to. The technical finalist asks, is there such a thing as an atheist society? Is there one? Well, yeah, I started, you know, it's just kind of a club you started here in Knoxville. We started the Atheist Society of Knoxville. And that was 22 years ago and we're doing pretty well. It's now a non-profit. So, you know, we have an Atheist Society live and well in the Bible Belt. So, yes, do that. Okay, cool. That's it for me. Thank you guys for coming to the show. Feel free to check out or leave a comment. Frank O'Counting says, looking good, tight. We appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers. Anything else? Mind pirate. Dread pirate, would you like to plug in? I'm good. I'm just so sorry I missed the largest part of the show. You're Canadian. You do not have to be sorry. It's all good. It's all good. Yeah, I was late last week, you know, but I got in in time. Yeah, we're in this weird time. We're a week before, yeah. When the time changed. All right, Larry, what do you got? What do you got for? I signed up. Oh, I think we all agree that souls were real. That's what we missed Dread. And that we're ready. Good to close the show. Is that right? Souls are real. You never read that accurate. Yeah, perfect. All right. You can find this show on podcasts everywhere. Just search for digital free thought radio hour. And if you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. My content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. And be sure to click on the blog button for the radio show archives, atheist songs and many articles on the subject. My YouTube channel handle is at doubter five. 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 W O Z O radio. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye man. All right. Let's do it real quick. Our newly lord who art in a colander I'll dente be thy noodles. Thy blood be run, 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 cuss against us. Lead us not to ketoism but deliver us some carbs. For thine are the meatballs and the sauces and the grog. Whatever and ever. Robin. All right.